| 4 Nov 2021 |
 joepie91 🏳️🌈 | * (in fact, this exact question is the major reason why a legalistic approach to moderation - set hard-and-fast rules and exactly enforce them - doesn't work in practice; there is no deterministic upfront way to answer this question) | 15:20:09 |
 @zimbatm:numtide.com | half of the conflict is based on some of the ambiguity of the language | 15:20:21 |
 tomberek | That is a limited view of legalistic. It also means admitting the system can fail. Checks and balances. Protections from abuse. | 15:20:23 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | unfortunately social norms don't modularize as well as code does :p | 15:20:31 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | actually, maybe a good analogy is security work; security work is notoriously difficult to modularize, because it always needs to consider the whole system to be effective, because you're dealing with some sort of adversary | 15:21:17 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | outside of conflict resolution between good-faith participants, community management is shaped very similarly | 15:21:48 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | maybe what we should do is take an empirical approach to the problem. create a small moderation team, for a limited amount of time, and see how it works out | 15:21:52 |
| tomberek | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
maybe what we should do is take an empirical approach to the problem. create a small moderation team, for a limited amount of time, and see how it works out so.... 102? :) | 15:22:17 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | wasn't 102 a knee-jerk ? :p | 15:23:13 |
| tomberek | it was, but not completely unprincipled or without thought | 15:23:46 |
| tomberek | The major issue with 98 seemed to be that it was too easy to misinterpret both the language, as well as the overall intent. | 15:24:33 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | In reply to @tomberek:matrix.org
That is a limited view of legalistic. It also means admitting the system can fail. Checks and balances. Protections from abuse. you can have such protections in a non-legalistic system as well, my point here is more that a legalistic approach just fundamentally cannot work as well at this scale.
but to give an example, in PG (formerly PTIO) we have a 'community reports' room that essentially serves as a room for discussing and questioning moderation decisions. it is exempt from the community-wide ban bot, and the threshold for getting banned there is very high.
by having a dedicated separate room for this, it prevents concern trolling in the main rooms (as there's nothing to disrupt, anyone in comrep is there because they are interested in the topic), while still leaving plenty of opportunity for community members to publicly question moderation decisions
| 15:25:00 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | that is of course a safeguard that's specifically designed for the moderation structure over at PG; different systems (RFC98 is very different!) will warrant different safeguards | 15:26:00 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | nice, we're getting to concrete things to do | 15:26:01 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | having a clear place where people can report abuse is important | 15:26:22 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | we want to also reduce uncertainty of what happens to the process | 15:26:34 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | * we want to also reduce uncertainty of what happens with the process | 15:26:42 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | both for sides of the complaint | 15:26:59 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | * for both for sides of the complaint | 15:27:03 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | and if the moderation team goes out of hand, it would be sweet to have a community-wide mechanism that can disband the team | 15:28:04 |
 @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
and if the moderation team goes out of hand, it would be sweet to have a community-wide mechanism that can disband the team Something like StackOverflows "moderator election"? | 15:28:24 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
and if the moderation team goes out of hand, it would be sweet to have a community-wide mechanism that can disband the team * Something like StackOverflow's "moderator election"? | 15:28:29 |
 jonringer | In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
that is of course a safeguard that's specifically designed for the moderation structure over at PG; different systems (RFC98 is very different!) will warrant different safeguards For my second RFC, I was going to take take a lot of the moderation team content from it. As I said earlier, there are parts of it I like (motivation section, value section, having a sustainable rotating moderation team), but there's other parts that I have extreme concern about | 15:28:52 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | In reply to @piegames:matrix.org
Something like StackOverflow's "moderator election"? I think there are some group dynamic issues with elections | 15:29:11 |
 lourkeur (Nix OwO) | In reply to @piegames:matrix.org
Something like StackOverflow's "moderator election"? It's worth taking a look at what they do, but we might run into constituency issues since there's no clear voting rights criteria afaict | 15:30:18 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | we're missing a concept of "community member" | 15:30:40 |
| @zimbatm:numtide.com | it would be interesting to put that in place but that's a whole other discussion :) | 15:31:03 |
| lourkeur (Nix OwO) | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
we're missing a concept of "community member" github org membership might do but there might be pitfalls | 15:31:11 |
| lourkeur (Nix OwO) | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
it would be interesting to put that in place but that's a whole other discussion :) yes | 15:31:20 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | also, I should note that a downside of the comrep room approach is that when I became a moderator there, I have spent many, many hours of my time in there explaining moderation decisions in excruciating detail, because the community was not yet used to, well, having moderation at all really (it had devolved into an unusable room full of spam and gore and whatnot) - and that was a very exhausting process as a moderator. but as the understanding among the community grew, that stopped being an issue.
with the NixOS community still being quite healthy comparatively speaking, I doubt this will be as exhausting for moderators as it was at PTIO, but it's still a drawback worth considering
| 15:31:30 |
