I just had a post hidden and got a message that said:
Your post was flagged as inappropriate: the community feels it is offensive, abusive, to be hateful conduct or a violation of our community guidelines.
This post was hidden due to flags from the community
The post was certainly not “offensive, abusive, to be hateful conduct”. And that’s a rather upsetting and hurtful accusation. Where does that even come from? How did the community flag it as such? These are the flagging options I see:
Did they just flag as “It’s Inappropriate - A violation of our community guidelines”, and then the system added the hurtful “offensive, abusive, to be hateful conduct”?
If that’s the case, I will probably stop using that flag, which I mostly use for posts not written in English [1] and other mild posts with guidelines issues. I do not want to cause people the distress of being called “offensive, abusive, to be hateful conduct” then.
since the guidelines say “use English” and “This forum uses English to communicate. Posts in other languages will be removed”↩︎
Yes, absolutely. Like I said, most posts I flagged as “inappropriate” were not “offensive/abusive/hateful”. At the very least, I should be shown that my flags will have that effect, so I could avoid it.
But really that flag option should be split into two. “offensive/abusive/hateful” is a completely different kind/level of inappropriateness than mild violations of the guidelines. Lumping these together is just wrong, causes unnecessary distress, and is less informative.
And ideally, the “violates the guidelines” option would have some good sub-options that flaggers choose in a second step. In my current case, I don’t think my posts violated the guidelines, either, but the guidelines are long and I didn’t even get any clue which guideline I allegedly violated. So I’m left not understanding/learning anything and thus can’t really improve.
