Recent events on the psf-vote list and related Discord threads revealed that what the Steering Committee refers to as “soft moderation” takes place.
While I’m all in favour of moderation, it transpired that the recent discussions about the Board’s proposal to allow expulsion of Members on a majority vote of the Board were “moderated” by entirely removing posts for what I personally felt were specious reasons, and editing posts, with no clear indication that such edits had taken place, with resultant misrepresentation of the original posts.
It may be that such behaviour is occurring for what those concerned regard as good reason. As a former PSF chairman and director I cannot approve of such underhanded censorship, whatever the reason, and since it is clear that those in charge of the discourse disagree I will no longer be contributing to any discussions under this domain since I cannot be sure that remarks will be conveyed with fidelity. I imagine this will come as a relief to some, but if nothing changes I’ll let the goldfish bowl continue without me.
It’s a great shame that this has come to pass, but clearly dissent is no longer going to be tolerated, allegedly in the interest of harmony. Those remaining can do a little jig of happiness and continue their censorious behaviours and maintain the pretence that all is harmony and light.
I wish the PSF well, and continue to believe that the Python community is more than the sum of its parts, but this isn’t something I can personally tolerate, and it’s no longer my role to solve such problems.
I brought up exactly this point in a recent discussion with the PSC.
It was mentioned that you can always review the history of edited posts by clicking on the little pencil and navigating around. The UX isn’t very obvious, and it also isn’t obvious that a moderator edited the post as opposed to the original poster, although that information can be gleaned from the history.
As I recall there was agreement that this isn’t good enough and if DPO editors/moderators edit a post, they should always include a ED: banner or such to clearly indicate that the editing has been done by someone other than the OP.
I’m sorry to hear it, Steve. Your years of hard work on behalf of the PSF remain appreciated by some.
I think there’s some confusion over language here. Best I can tell, “soft moderation” is industry-standard language for gimmicks (whether automated or manual) that attach “warnings” to posts without actually removing then. Discourse appears to have more than one such gimmick. When it happens, Discourse collapses the post, leaving only a, e.g., “post hidden by community flags” box, which a user can click to expand the message. I don’t know of any case in the topic at issue where a post was actually deleted. I have seen it happen in the “help” topic, where the latest incoherent post about “genuine random numbers” from an apparent serial “crank” vanished without a trace. Overkill to my eyes, but hard to care much.
Mods editing posts goes clearly beyond any notion of “soft” moderation I can find in the literature, That has happened, to one person in particular. The irony there is so thick it would take an industrial jackhammer to break through it. That person is in fact radically welcoming, but not in a way that’s “in style”. They’re informed by Marxist political philosophy, drawing on academically deep theories about class struggle and revolution, not on appeasing a collection of “victim identity groups”.
In any case, the powers that be have made it abundantly clear that they think mods editing posts is A-OK. Discourse saves an edit history, but you’re never going to know what was changed (let alone why) without the material pain of digging through the history.
That’s unacceptable to my eyes too, but so it goes. We’re both old and in the way .
Hey… That radical democratic Marxist-feminist theorist sounds like it might be me :-).
But like Steve, I’m fed up with the censorious tone and attitude of Discourse, and the frankly abysmal behavior of moderators.
I prefer to actually DO SOMETHING to rectify global iniquities rather than wring hands with a conviction of self-superiority. Hence part of why I just gave a keynote at PyCon Nigeria and brought a bunch of books to attendees… And spoke about genuine equality and progressive politics.
And y’know… I spoke about gay rights, gender equality, trans inclusion, religious tolerance, etc over here… Including open criticism of the Nigerian government (and acknowledgement of how also f***ed up US society is in its own ways)
I might be hallucinating, but I have a weird impression that naming names in any context is somehow frowned on here. So I’ll neither confirm nor deny. I’ll just say that the person I have in mind earned a relevant doctorate degree. If the shoe fits … leap to your own hasty conclusion .
Congratulations on your keynote address! I’m sure it was well received (disclosure for the peanut gallery: I reviewed a preview of the talk’s slides, and it sure looked terrific to me). If it was recorded and is available online, please share a link!
See, when I replied in that thread, I was under the impression that “soft moderation” meant replying to people (in the original thread) in a way that was meant to convey “you wrote something problematic; please fix it” without overtly saying so (and certainly not in an Official Moderator Voice).
So now I have to conclude that there’s a serious issue with clear communication from the SC here. It’s already bad enough that we weren’t initially told (and technically are still only inferring, I think?) that there were already names up for consideration for delisting via this process. (Contra your apparent position in the original thread, this realization makes me extremely anxious. The last thing I want to hear from a governing body that’s seeking the power to pass judgement in secret, replacing an actually auditable procedure because it would be too difficult to enact, is an intimation that they see themselves as having “unfinished business”.)
… And yet you still use this emoji, in this environment of heightened caution. (Forgive me; I am not yet so brave.)
The actual phrase they used was “soft conduct moderation”. The only hit Google finds for that exact phrase is the very message in which it was first used in the other topic.
“Soft moderation” is, however, very well known, and all sources I checked agree on its meaning (which I already explained).
I can’t say what was intended by the original phrase. It seems most plausible to me that it was referring to several rounds of dueling edits, where a mod was changing one of David’s posts and David was trying to restore parts central to what he was trying to say.
Still technically inferring, yes - but there was no reasonable doubt remaining in my eyes.
But I still trust that the cases in question are so egregious that they believe they must act ASAP. I don’t trust the process at all (it’s entirely secret by design), but I do trust the people currently running it.
I like to live on the cutting edge. Seriously, I know full well that a human wink is considered rude in some cultures - but the language of Web emoticons is as universal as language gets. I nevertheless have been sticking to the most basic ones now - no more, e;g., (frowning_with_open_mouth).
For the record: the Steering Council was not, and should not be, involved in moderation of PSF spaces, like the PSF category this post is in (and the Bylaws thread is in). The SC only has a modicum of authority in Core Developer spaces, like other categories on this Discourse instance. The SC’s post was targeted specifically to Core Developer spaces.
The soft moderation the SC mentioned in its post is the gentle nudging, not the editing of posts. Whether the edits of the posts were warranted is a whole other discussion in which I, as a regular PSF member, have strong opinions about – having actually read the posts before editing and removal, and having reviewed the edits (which is trivial to do). It’s not something the SC was involved with, however.
At the risk of belaboring the points, the phrase “soft moderation” has a very widely used conventional meaning, which we’re being told was not the intent. The phrase “soft conduct moderation” is one Google never before heard of. So my best guess was that “therefore” it must refer to editing. Which also, it transpires, was not the intent.
I don’t know what “gentle nudging” refers to either. The only “official” actions visible to others here are hiding (collapsing and dimming, not removing) of “flagged” posts and editing posts.
So posts were wholly removed? I missed that. In that case, I apologize to Steve for poo-poo’ing his expressed concern about that.
OK … but removed how then? A power outage? Disk failure? By the original poster? I have no other guesses. Since you lumped “editing and removal” together, “moderator” was my first guess. Or, if I only get one guess per post, let me start with “by the original poster?” next .
I agree with @holdenweb and @tim.one . On the subject of moderation, I think it would be fine to attach warnings or explicit moderator edits to posts that are thought to be potentially offensive. It’s certainly not fine at all for posts to be hidden by the whim of anonymous flaggers, without any obvious reason (for example, one of @tim.one 's posts above is hidden while looking to me perfectly harmless and respectful).
This moderation problem has come up before and needs fixing.
I disagree with this: Sometimes content is actually offensive[1], or spam and then something should happen quickly to reduce further harm. Since there are no 24/7 paied moderators here, auto-hiding temporarily till a mod comes by is the only sustainable option I can see. The fact that this can also be abused to hide (not deleted) well meaning comments is IMO an unfortunate side-effect. But IMO the alternative solution (never hiding anything automatically) is going to be abused ever more.
Or do you have an actual suggest for how this can be solved?
That’s true, but too often hidden content stays hidden if it doesn’t actually fall in those categories of blatantly offensive or irrelevant content.
Well, I don’t know what the current heuristic looks like, but I would suggest to require a quota of N flaggers (with N significantly larger than 1) before a post is actually hidden.
There should also be a secondary mechanism where a hidden post can be flagged as legitimate by the people who are able to view hidden content. Currently, I can “heart” a hidden post, but I don’t have a way to flag it as legitimate.
I can’t read hidden posts here, I’m not given the option. I can see that they are hidden but their contents are unavailable to me. I’ve used the Discourse of other projects and I have been able to read hidden posts, so this may be some sort of option turned on in the software config, or maybe I need to do some gamified thing like post more often or whatever to access this capability or maybe only certain privileges allow you to do it.
It’s certainly not reassuring that not everyone sees the same thing.
I figured. It doesn’t really seem to make much sense technically, and would seem to me to feed into the alienation people feel while using this platform.
That sort of harm is almost exclusively from brand new users. Discourse already has a means of dealing with this: if someone with sufficiently high trust level flags a post from someone with sufficiently low trust level, it is automatically hidden (something that can be undone by a moderator, but it’s hidden by default).
It also is something that can be recognized pretty much immediately, and with high confidence. You wouldn’t, for example, look at a post and go “yeah, that looks fine”, but then a week later, change your mind and go “actually, that’s so offensive that we have to destroy it to reduce further harm”. [1]
That doesn’t apply to the majority of people here who have been moderated into oblivion. Posts from a significant time ago get hidden, with little to no explanation as to why it’s NOW become a problem. The moderators aren’t answerable to anyone, particularly due to anonymity.
There are a number of Discourse features that I find downright frustrating. Post editing is one of them. The moderation system is another. Both of them are problematic in part due to the way that different people see diffferent things.
There’s the edge case of link rot that results in a legit link turning into spam, but that’s much much rarer, and if it did happen, nobody would be offended at a mod editing out the link and leaving a placeholder saying “link no longer works, sorry”. ↩︎
While Discourse doesn’t tell you why it was hidden, it tells me: it was flagged as “off-topic” by someone. Nobody is missing anything here - it was just brief, friendly banter with David, inviting him to share a link (it there is one) to his keynote address.
I’m not going to waste more of my time asking a mod to resurrect it (heh - I don’t even know to contact a mod).
I actually like Discourse for discussion of Python programming questions, but for discussions with “social” aspects it appears more designed to suppress debate than to encourage it.
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(frowning_with_open_mouth).