Forums without borders...ain't no doctors here!

[Timsup2nothin]

I got pulled into a "local news source" website recently. How is a side story, but it led me to comment on one of their articles. Maintaining my position required monitoring, which led to reading other articles and commentary, which led to more responding. Now I am a regular. This isn't new ground, as I spent a good chunk of the last presidential campaign in the dirty world of news site commentary and considered it time well spent.

News site commentary is vastly different from forums, because the commenters are often unabashed jerks and there is usually almost no moderation. I really like the community aspect here, and I think this forum is extremely well moderated (all sucking up aside, and despite my frequent transgressions) but there is an interesting contrast in going there and being able to just call a pig a pig. I find being more confrontational to be a different experience, but rewarding in its own way.

Anyway, I'm curious about whether anyone else does this kind of thing, and what experiences people may have had with that sort of free for all environment. BUT...I opted not to open this question because I saw that it might lead to complexities in regards to PDMA. Then I asked a moderator, and was told that we can discuss this as long as we don't drift into citing specific examples of moderator actions. Obviously it would also be worth noting that it is our moderators (and perhaps the overall friendliness and maturity of the people we attract?) that makes this forum different from the free for all environment, so we should be respectful about that.

 

[NovaKart]

I used to go to another forum with extremely relaxed moderating. Actually there didn't really appear to be any. I stopped going after a couple weeks, maybe less. There weren't any decent discussions because it all got drowned out by flaming.

 

[warpus]

I prefer reddit's style of user moderation - comments that don't contribute to the discussion get downvoted and you don't see them (if you're in the right subreddit with enough intelligent posters and not just the lowest common denominator). Having said that, /r/worldnews seems to be full of idiots anyhow.. But even with that in mind, it's a decent place to see what's going on around the world.

 

[dgfred]

I have been on many crime forums with a couple completely moderated by persons that debate for the other side of my argument. It is almost impossible. Others are well moderated and permit heated debate... as long as no flaming or trolling.

I am on a military history forum that is well moderated as this one is.
I have only had a few problems over the years here... all in OT with an occasional heated sports one.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I hope that the PDMA rule applies only to CFC, right? My post below doesn't say one word about moderator actions here, but does about CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation).
---------

The only news site where I post is CBC.ca. Consider this: 9 out of 11 people on CBC's board are Harper-appointees. They outsourced moderation to Viafoura. In the past year or so, moderation has gone from mildly annoying to outright censorship.

Just try typing any post with the words "Margaret Atwood" or "The Handmaid's Tale" in it. Chances are, you'll get slapped with "Content Disabled" on your post - even when that post was on-topic, in response to another post that was much more graphic and pithy on the issue of Canadian women's reproductive health and access to clinics and hospitals. The first post was allowed to stay while mine was censored. I mentioned "The Handmaid's Tale" and the other person didn't.

Some articles don't allow any comments, such as the one about who should be on the American $10 bill. I would have loved to comment on that, if only to ask why this article was even there, since it's of zero interest to Canadians.

Some keywords seem to get targeted, and sometimes it seems to be specific posters. One day I saw every other post of mine had been disabled, whether they were anywhere near crossing a line or not. Other posters there have noticed the same happening to them, and concluded that there must be different moderators who have varying criteria for zapping someone's post. We just don't know, because on that site we have no idea who the moderators are and there is no way to challenge the removal of a post. CBC doesn't allow us to do this.

As a result, some people are grumbling that this in itself is sufficient reason to vote ABC in October (Anyone But Conservative). We want our freedom of expression back. It's not a matter of wanting to use profanity or sling mud (some of that does go on there and some of it gets deleted and some doesn't). It's a matter of not being censored for saying something negative about specific politicians or mentioning certain authors the Prime Minister finds troublesome.

 

[NovaKart]

Why do conservative Canadians dislike Margaret Atwood and that story in particular?

 

[Bootstoots]

I hope that the PDMA rule applies only to CFC, right? My post below doesn't say one word about moderator actions here, but does about CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation).

Yep, feel free to talk about moderator actions from elsewhere. As far as I know, the only things that are forbidden are specific actions on CFC. Specific actions on other sites that are civ-related (e.g. Apolyton) or have a large CFC diaspora (e.g. The Frontier) are probably not a good idea to bring up either, but anything else is fine. General comments about the moderation here or elsewhere are also fine.

About the thread subject, I sometimes read news comment sections but generally not for long, and I almost never post in them. Most sites' comments seem to be cesspools of trolling and flaming with a very low signal/noise ratio. Pay sites like the NYT and the Economist are generally better because the paywall filters out most of the crappier trolls, but then the latter's paywall has filtered out me. The only site of any sort I really comment on much is cracked.com, because I have to get my bad jokes out somehow.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I used to go to another forum with extremely relaxed moderating. Actually there didn't really appear to be any. I stopped going after a couple weeks, maybe less. There weren't any decent discussions because it all got drowned out by flaming.

I think there's a difference between an unmoderated forum and a larger news site. The forum has too limited a number of participants, so if there is no discussion there is nothing. On a news site there is sufficient traffic that it is mostly just hit and run, and the measure of success is pretty much how creative you are with your flaming.

 

[Rashiminos]

The biggest check on me being confrontational is a desire to not burn bridges that I may wish to travel across later, so it's more about finding creative ways to make a point that are better received, and perhaps suitable for later chewing. In a more permissive environment, open season is open season.

 

[Cutlass]

I am a moderator elsewhere. I don't even go into the political topics section there. Hell, I'm an admin there, and I could ban every f#%$ing one of them, and I still don't go into that section.

 

[Formaldehyde]

You should occasionally do so on a random basis with the comment "no soup for you". And then un-ban them a few minutes later. Next!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Why do conservative Canadians dislike Margaret Atwood and that story in particular?

The story was about a Halifax woman (in Halifax, Nova Scotia) who went public about offering accommodation in her home to women from Prince Edward Island who need a place to stay when they access reproductive health services not offered in PEI (yes, I'm talking about abortion and after-care).

Somebody made a comment about some people who want women to stay pregnant and keep having babies for infertile, elite women to raise (this was in part prompted by someone else using the "just put them up for adoption" mantra). My comment was that this had been written about in "The Handmaid's Tale" and that some politicians seem to be looking at that book as a how-to guide on denying women's rights, rather than the cautionary dystopian novel it actually is. I didn't even mention Margaret Atwood's name - just the name of the novel itself was enough to get "Content Disabled" slapped on it. I know it was the title and nothing else, since I tried several times to reword the post, paring it down to bare bones. All of them were zapped.

The thing is, Margaret Atwood is not a fan of the Conservative government or any government that goes in for censorship or trying to get around the Charter or any other shenanigans of trying to deny people their rights. She's outspoken, a best-selling author, and people either tend to respect her or hate her, depending on their political outlook and stance on feminism.

You should occasionally do so on a random basis with the comment "no soup for you". And then un-ban them a few minutes later. Next!

Applying the rules capriciously is unethical. So is deliberately breaking them when you can hide behind a moderator's badge. I've seen this happen on a few places over the years, and it usually has really nasty results.

 

[Cutlass]

Applying the rules capriciously is unethical. So is deliberately breaking them when you can hide behind a moderator's badge. I've seen this happen on a few places over the years, and it usually has really nasty results.

Yeah, I don't ban people just because I think they're jackasses. Sometimes I want to. But I don't.

 

[downtown]

Moderating the comments section of our websites is probably my second least-favorite thing about my job.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Applying the rules capriciously is unethical. So is deliberately breaking them when you can hide behind a moderator's badge. I've seen this happen on a few places over the years, and it usually has really nasty results.

Or it may have simply been a joke that apparently didn't go over very well.

I hope I don't get fired now.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Or it may have simply been a joke that apparently didn't go over very well.

I hope I don't get fired now.

It didn't go over very well because it's not funny.

 

[NovaKart]

I went to Halifax and PEI when I was a teenager. Really beautiful places. I didn't know it was that conservative but I was just there for a short time. Actually all I remember is how there was farmland that just ended abruptly with the ocean next to it with a few big rocks between. Also it was summer and rather hot for Canada and there were signs at restaurants advertising they had air conditioning. I'm from the American south where it's really hot from May to late September and they don't advertise AC because everyone just assumes you have it.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I've never been anywhere near either place. Pretty much whatever I've seen of PEI has been in a newscast, a nature documentary, or one of the Anne of Green Gables movies.

 

[Formaldehyde]

It didn't go over very well because it's not funny.

Well, you probably have to know what I was referring to first.

Either way, it was meant as a joke. Whether you thought it was funny or not really isn't important.

 

[Bootstoots]

It didn't go over very well because it's not funny.

I take it you haven't watched much Seinfeld? Here's the reference Forma was making:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soup_Nazi