I ignore you, you ignore me, we're a happy family

Everything else
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Yes, I was definitely talking about moderation. I should have just singled out the example. I feel like gman should have fallen under this moderation a lot earlier based on what many other forum goers were saying and specifically certain posters. I don’t want to speak for them but I think that they would argue that they were sounding the alarm but were ignored, and only because gman lied to you (and by transitive property, all of us) was he ever moderated out of there. I don’t think most of us want you to wield the ban hammer aggressively or without cause, but I think you guys need to listen more carefully to what we’re saying.

I think a good deal of the problem is this sort of thing. 10 people come and complain about someone. 10 people come in his defense. You might view that as a net 0, a tough call. But you should maybe look at it as 10 people are complaining about someone, and that’s that. You have 1 vs 10, not 10 vs 10. You can ban the one or lose the 10, either from the thread, subforum, or the whole forum altogether. We’re not being unreasonable here, even though I feel like the response was exactly that. “You’re being unreasonable, be adults about this, grow up, conversations in real life don’t have ban hammers so you need to learn to live with it”. But we are on this forum debating shit all the time and how many times are you being asked to ban someone? Almost never (as far as I can tell… I’m excluding spam from this, obviously that gets called out often). We are all here being reasonable having spirited debate all of the time so you shouldn’t immediately be questioning of our motives and saying that we are being unreasonable this one time. You should trust us more. I know it’s asking a lot of you to just believe folks and ban someone. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, trust me. But the alternative is alienating those of us who are calling for you to help.

Edit: To tie all of this back to the ignore discussion, many of the same people asking for moderation are also asking for ignore features. I think it’s pretty obvious why this is true.

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Yes, in that 1 v 10 case for sure.

When it is 1 v 1, though, it falls under a different classification of personal beefs, particularly if neither of those “ones” are a protected class of individual.

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And that’s a perfect situation for an ignore feature.

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Or a timeout. I mean for long-term members, these conflicts are often topic specific and even more granular than that, day specific. Hey everyone has a bad day, gets fed up.

Everyone has a bad day, gets riled, takes a skinny dip in the lizard brain pool. The reason I hate ignore functions is once you hit it, it’s so rare to go back and rethink it. And if you are on a board for like, a decade… who doesn’t change at all in ten years?

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I mean my ignore list on here is pretty great, and some folks have been on there for ages. I do occasionally unblur them, and it inevitably only confirms the block. . .

And let’s be honest, for all the folks desperate to Ignore me–I’m not going to get better with age :)

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I’m replying to this, but also basically replying to @wumpus upthread.

I’m curious how you square the circle of emotional labor with the admonition to “just not read it” (in the general case). Telling individuals to “just not read” stuff they want to ignore is telling them to adopt additional labor in order to stay engaged with the community.

It seems that @wumpus’s position is that by ignoring an individual, you’re essentially offloading that labor onto the rest of the community: if a poster is problematic enough to ignore, they’re also probably problematic enough for you to report and have them be moderated. This action of reporting is a socially-conscious action where the individual is contributing to the health of the community at large. Essentially, by unilaterally ignoring a poster (say, through a custom script), you’re abrogating your responsibility to contribute to the well-being of the forum at large.

However, from the perspective of the individual user: if the forum software is asking you to “just scroll past it” content you don’t want to see, it’s directly assigning that particular labor to the user experiencing it. You’re saying that any time X ignore-able user user posts, you need to experience the impact of that user (I’d mention micro-aggressions, but that would probably just muddy things) against your own will. I guess that’s kind of what you were referring to above when you call out that protected classes could tend to make use of such a feature more than majorities would.

You’re basically saying that the only emotional labor that’s worthwhile is that which aligns exactly with the goals of moderation. Now, you can argue that a community’s tone is set directly by its moderation, but you’re aggressively enforcing conformity to that moderation-set tone across all conceivable axes.

It’s kind of like 95% problem, where you can have 95% feature parity between 2 systems, but if the 5% is different for every user, no user will ever adopt that system, because it’s not true that 95% of users have 100% coverage, each user is missing 5% coverage. Assuming that all standards enforcement comes from moderation is reducing the community to only those users that align with moderation 100%.

I think that (and I think you agree) that there’s a middle ground in there, where ignores are scoped, or need to be refreshed periodically, so that information is being propagated to the moderation layer, and moderation can review users who are getting ignored a lot, because it could provide useful information on aggregate.

I might have talked myself out of a question, there. Just kind of exploring the topic.

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Yes, because the implied assumption is that if one person is being toxic, that hurts everyone, not just the target. And I believe this is true… 98% of the time.

However, if it is more like “this person’s posts are not actually toxic, I just have personal beef with them such that every one of this person’s posts are like nails on my personal chalkboard” then it falls under self-medication, because no harm is being done to the community.

Oh I forgot one. If two people have beef and argue constantly (just among themselves, 1 on 1 style), that is a net negative because it’s a bunch of constant fighting in public. So that’s another point in favor of self-medication.

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While I agree with this sentiment, I believe it oversimplifies interactions in forum threads. Specifically, it presupposes that a discussion thread has a singular conversation going on within it at any given time. Sometimes that is true, but far more often, especially for nuanced or divisive topics, there are multiple simultaneous conversations which wrap around one another, sometimes intersecting. Challenges come up when one strand of conversation begins to overwhelm and drown out the others. A typical example is when single conversant, or a small subset, goes all crazy-town on the post volume and sea lions the fuck out of things. You, and wumpus, are generally correct that community moderation is the primary solution for that problem. However, that moderation takes time. An ignore function provides a means for other forum goers to mute (not eliminate, as they still see pieces of that other strand) those aspects of the conversation they find discordant until moderation has time to take effect. That is, it’s an imperfect stop-gap measure to help users bide their time with their blood pressure intact until moderators can step in for a longer term fix. This, at least, is how I used the ignore feature on the old boards. I ignored very few posters, but when I did, I would almost always periodically click on the “show post” buttons to see if their habits and interactions had improved. Typically, they either did or those posters stopped interacting in the threads I was interested in. I then removed them from my ignore list and went on about my life and forum reading. At this point, I’d be hard pressed to tell you who those people were even though I’m pretty sure most of them are still active here.

Note that I’m not suggesting this is the only use case for an ignore feature. Just that it’s the one I, personally, have found most useful in the past.

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Well, firstly, remember that I’m pro-ignore feature. Generally, it seems to me more tools is a better thing, especially when there’s no issue with affecting the larger community (likes, for instance, is a tool that I feel would have impact on the community as a whole).

I’m just saying it’s not a tool I would use because it seems to me there’s a negligible difference between not reading someone’s posts and clicking on a button that doesn’t read them for me. At which point now I’ve got a bunch of “THIS REPLY HIDDEN” notices among the conversation, where the ignored person’s posts are already being quoted and are probably shaping the conversation anyway.

And if there’s emotional labor – I like that term, by the way! – involved in following a thread, it seems to me like the better choice is to not read it. That approach has always served me well.

I also think it’s a bit of a nuclear option to just nuke everything a person says, and it may not be for the best. My guess is that most people who want an ignore feature would use it less as a way to find peace of mind and more as a way to punish someone saying something they don’t like in a thread. If I were to do that, I would miss it if that person says something interesting in another thread, or more importantly if that person writes something that might humanize him or her, or that might add some additional understanding to why that person said whatever bothered me. An ignore feature would mean I would never see that.

Just to give a personal example, I get really frustrated with some of you. I get to a place where I actively think “I don’t like that person and I wish that person wasn’t posting here”. We all feel that way from time to time. We have to learn how to deal with that feeling when we have this kind of written communication. And if I were the type of guy to use an ignore feature, I might use it against that person.

But then later, in the threads where people post pictures of their pets or talk about interesting things that have happened to them, or open up about a sickness in the family, I see those people in a new light and I almost always feel foolish for being mad at this person with a cool dog, or who saw a crazy act of kindness at the supermarker, or whose mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. It puts my irritation into perspective. Almost everyone on this forum who has personally rubbed me the wrong way has more than made up for it in other posts I’ve seen them write, or things they’d said, or personal details they’ve revealed. For me, that’s an important part of getting to know you guys and interact with you.

And again, keep in mind, we’re talking about people acting within the boundaries of what we consider acceptable community behavior. Someone being a jerk and getting banned is a whole other situation. You don’t need an ignore feature if someone is running around denying the Holocaust or posting dick pics or intentionally derailing conversations. That’s a facet of moderation and not necessarily community tools!

-Tom

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A gentle reminder this discussion is here , mainly because someone who contributes nothing to the site and offends several of us (dozens!) is still a qt3 member and not yet banned…

314

I was suuuuper pissed off at this one guy on reddit recently and then I read some of his older reddit posts and found out he was a recovering addict from about 4 years ago. Then I felt real bad. 🙁

To me, what matters is if a person is a member of the longer term community with a proven track record of posting on a variety of topics, more or less reasonably, over a period of years. I can forgive a fair bit if that’s known to be the case. And I think every topic should be fairly treated as its own ecosystem; because a person is crazytown on topic Z it does not follow that they are crazytown on topics A-Y everywhere else.

But for people who show up with an agenda, and post in bad faith from day zero – pardon my french, but fuck those people.

315

Note that on Boing Boing, one of the first Discourse beta instances, I once saw a moderator permanently ban someone, a member for many many years with hundreds of posts, over a single fairly unambiguously racist thing that person said.

I was initially shocked, but having thought about it for a while, I now understand and agree with that.

316

Since this came up in another discussion (not here), where someone asked

how could there be any possible “harm” from a nice Ignore feature?

Here’s my reply from there:

Let’s say someone comes in and posts extremely sexist things, over and over. No problem! The affected people (probably women?) take the time to make a manual effort and ignore the sexist user. Now they no longer see the sexism from this particular poster.

But everyone else in the community does see the sexism which sends some rather disturbing messages:

  • Hmm, I see overtly sexist posts in this community, apparently sexism isn’t discouraged in this community, so it must be OK?
  • The women in this community don’t seem to be reacting to this sexism by fighting it or complaining about it, so they must be OK with it too?
  • I guess if sexism is OK in this community… maybe sexism is OK everywhere?

I’m surprised you can’t see the obvious harm in this scenario, and it’s very easy to get there when you start from the premise of “just ignore it!”

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Hear hear

Yeah, sure. That’s why when we first switched over and I googled for how to ignore people on Discourse I found tons of people bitching that you can’t ignore people on it.

Because it’s a crusade for him and always has been. His solution is to exile anyone who disagrees with you and has been from the beginning. His software is magical and you’re stupid for disagreeing.

Also this.

318

Yeah that’s why our business is collapsing, for lack of this essential feature that people absolutely demand to have, in fact they won’t pay for hosting without it. You’re the only person to ever figure this out, congratulations.

Meanwhile we’ve doubled revenue every year for the last 3 years.

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Is it resource allocation or are you ideologically opposed to the feature? We had someone offer to code this feature; would your team accept the patch?

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It’s just not something paying customers are asking for. If you’d like to volunteer to pay for it, be my guest. Money talks, my friends.

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Ideology going by the stuff they’ve said historically.

Yeah, don’t improve your product or give people options. Customers hate that.

LOL Wow.

“Hey can we get this common feature that everyone else has?”
“You gonna pay for it, peasant?”

Seriously, your arrogance is astonishing and always has been. Take care. I’m done with the thread you created to tell us all to go fuck ourselves. Because that’s the reason for it. You have no intention and never will of ever giving us the most basic feature ever and the only reason to make this whole thing was to talk down to us like it always is.

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LOL nope perhaps if you read the topic. But I see you can’t be troubled to do that.

I’ve bolded some words, in the hopes that they might be read. Or not. Eventually, we’ll all be dead.

323

We’ve talked about this in the welcoming topic, reasons why people would take one look at a post and see the community accept it and leave. This is also the reason I felt a little blindsided by the last… issue we had that brought this up again.