Forums / Maintenance / Suggest Ideas

Following the other thread and an earlier PM from Spaghetto, I decided this might merit a full thread. The relevant parts of those conversations for this thread are as follows:
Spaghetto wrote in the previous thread:

this website completely and entirely lacks any sort of coherent or readily accessible guidelines for user conduct in comments or on the forums, with the provided "Rules and Guidelines" being solely focused on media submission. Really, this glaring issue underpins practically every problem involving mods and moderation on this site: there's no rules for users to abide by, so every decision is arbitrary, and that makes nobody happy. This is a problem going extremely far back, potentially to the very beginning of the site; even out of the most infamous users in the site's history, the few who got banned for anything "on the books" violated the content policies.

You don't need a lot of rules, in fact, I'd argue it's best to keep your amount of rules small. But if you're going to have any at all, it's in everybody's best interest for them to be public information.

Spaghetto wrote via PM:

-having some clearly-defined rules for what is and isn't acceptable in comments and on the forums would help everybody, though if they're too strict they would certainly be extremely unpopular… … this site needs some actual rules for behavior outside of content, so users know how to behave and moderator actions feel less arbitrary.

While I don't agree with the overall characterization, the main points I agree are accurate. The last massive update to the rules was close to a decade ago, back when the biggest conflict was over media uploads. Importantly as well, when it comes to images, it is easier to be comparatively objective. There still is some fuzziness, but you can generally point to one specific thing in the image and pull up the rules and match it exactly if it breaks them. Importantly as well, it is often easier to separate an uploaded image from the uploader. While some in the past have taken personal offense at an image being taken down, most are willing to accept the image broke rules. It only becomes a problem if the image starts to break other rules (hardcore gore/porn, doxxing, etc.) or if the user continues to post rule breaking images.

For lack of a better comparison, site rules are somewhat analogous to the U.S. Constitution. There is literally "exactly what it says" focused on the big picture and intent, and there is the history of how it has been interpreted. I think that this second part is more what Spaghetto is getting at.

To quote my PM response to Spaghetto in Pms

As with the US constitution, there is disagreement as to how the rules as written should be interpreted. Here, there is the benefit of having one of the people who drafted it and closely interacted with other who worked on it willing to go into depth as to what the intent is. But this relies on me actually being here and doing things. And given that the amount of time and effort I'm putting into these responses is starting to approach those of actual legal opinions without the associated legal fees to pay bills… I really can't justify doing this in every situation.

I do think most people want there to be some mod leeway or discretion. There are a lot of cases where something breaks rules, but not bad enough to mark on the user's record. Sometimes a rule breaking comment is in the context of everyone acting poorly, or a user did or said something and did not understand how it came across. We can go through someone's site history and tell if their behavior is generally constructive or antagonistic and reduce or increase the severity of punishment. Other times… the optics of actually enforcing rules as they are written are only going worse user/mod relations and only escalate the situation when everyone would agree they want it resolved, such as the UI change situation. Users were commenting in trending every entry about this. This rather clearly violates the "keep it relevant" rule. But any warnings over that were going to come across as mods being in favor of the UI change [to be clear: we were not] and opposition would lead to banning. Instead, I felt making a dedicated thread would be much more appropriate. In this case, between the action that the rules said we should take, and the actual action taken, I feel confident that everyone would agree with this decision. But that one is easy. Other cases where it's a user that everyone hates but they actually want to do good and haven't broken rules (vit, Poochyena, arguably Eypc Wynn early on). What if someone says something that is highly upvoted but clearly breaks rules but it is not the focus of the comment? I can say "judged on a case-by-case basis" but that is really going to depend on who sees the "case" and isn't a clear objective answer, which was rather the point that Spaghetto is focusing on.

Part of me is slightly annoyed with Spaghetto's suggestions. Back before I was a mod, I knew very clearly and specifically what changes I would make Spagetto's criticisms are valid, but in terms of how to tangibly fix things, there isn't a lot that is terribly specific, especially " it's best to keep your amount of rules small".

But… then I got to thinking that this was not a great mindset to have. Non-mods generally do not have the same experiences on the site as mods do. Spaghetto's suggestions are giving a general direction that the rules should be improved which, given the vote totals, many people appear to agree with. And in theory, I and most of the mods are not opposed to it.

But then comes the actual "putting it into practice part". First, there are the actual rules themselves. What the mods and the highest contributors to the website (the most valuable registered users on the website from Don's perspective) will likely have very different ideas on what should and should not be against rules if put to a poll, even if we could confidently say that all votes are from one real person.
The second is… length. You have to understand, and if you can ask RandomMan he'll back me up on this, I initially started KYM rules discussions when I first became a mod with an approximately ten page document I expected the other mods to somehow read. RandomMan lovingly told me essentially no one was going to read that.

Outside of making the rules themselves a full nearly legal document, the only thing I can think of is to add on top of the existing general rules, and the NSFW guidelines, and the Image Gallery guidelines, and the Media Metadata guidelines, is to essentially make an additional set of guidelines that are several small essays worth of breakdown of the existing basic "Keep it relevant" and the "Behave/Be Friendly" rules or arguably Misspelled Tiger's "2 rules". These would be, well, guidelines, and moderators would be given the discretion of context, the user's site history, if this was repeated behavior or a one-off, and… we've already failed the point about making things less arbitrary on top of failing to keep them brief.

Can we start punishing ableism? Maybe just add to this part of the NSFW Guidelines regarding hateful content:

Any content that is unwarrantedly racist, sexist and homophobic or transphobic in nature

@ Cold Hard Cash
Adding ableism to the list I'm not against in theory, and it is a suggestion. The problem is that the rules are already pretty vague, and this seemed to be the issue Spaghetto had which got upvoted. Outside of comments like "-ableism isn't a thing. Crippled people ARE limited and incapable of doing certain things. Get over it." there isn't going to be an easy way to define what that clearly means. This is especially true in cases where the people who would "be the target" of said terms are the ones using them.

For example, terms that are generally seen as negative slag for people with autism, ADHD, etc. are often used by people online who either have or believe they have the condition themselves also using it as an insult. In a lot of cases, mods can tell based on user history and context if this is "internet slang" as a term of almost comradery, or if it is meant as a pejorative.

Of course… how the person receiving the comment takes it can also vary significantly. Some won't take offense at even at the most vitriolic deliberately offensive insults, others become extremely upset at even a suggestion of a negative connotation. This is sort of where the "unwarrently" part comes in, but again, there's not really a clear objective definition of what that means which was sort of the impetus of the thread's creation.

Remove the comments all together

this is not a joke

The topic is changes to clarify the rules. This is a suggestion for a site change. Importantly as well, you should be trying to explain your rationale for why you think this, not just suggesting something extreme with what amounts to "this but unironically".

There is an argument to be made that the initial purpose of the comments section is rarely followed, but given that most users, mods, and staff at least on occasion make comments that are not suggestions on the entry itself or relevant updates on the topic, I really don't see forcing the comments section to only be about this to gain support from anyone, general userbase, moderators, or staff.

I am a bit late to the conversation, but personally, I feel like moderation here could be improved if mods at least sometimes consulted other mods for their opinion on a possible rule infraction before proceeding. I know this has happened for some exceptional cases before, but I believe it is not the norm. I think it should be.

As I understand it, mods right now work on a "personal" criteria for each case where any one of them can take a moderating action on their own as per indicated by Don himself. While this may be optimal for cut-and-dry cases such as blatant porn spam or those spam account posting links to shady websites, it becomes less so for day-to-day user activities such as loaded comments, gray-area NSFW images or anything involving politics. In this situation, the enforcement of rules is effectively as rigorous as the most strict active moderator that takes action each time, and every other mod's criteria is null and void after that.

Think of it like that one soccer referee always being the most trigger-happy one that soccer fans end up talking about even after the match ends, not too different from the situation with Spaghetto described here, actually. Soccer institutions fixed this by giving the players the option to call for recorded gameplay that 4 different field referees can watch and, if the evidence is strong enough, the referee's decision can be overturned entirely.

Basically, it comes down to personal bias. A moderator tag is not a guarantee of unbiased moderation, but several moderator tags can reduce said bias by quite a margin. Just think of the enforcement of NSFW guidelines alone, for example. Chances are that Juicydeath, who semi-frequently uploads NSFW images himself, would have a different view on what constitutes an image being not good for uploading compared to most other mods. The same can be said of just about every rule open to interpretation here. I do not think this site's active userbase is too big or too active to not be able to be handled like that by a team of +20 mods (though I have no idea how many of them are actually active still).

And, well, other than that, I guess the rest comes down to defining what words mean, like with the ableism part mentioned. Personally, I would judge those based on intention above all else. I know you guys currently do not ban anyone dropping the N word with the hard R just by merit of saying it, for example. Neither does Twitter, in fact. Instead, you judge the context and intent around such cases. I think this works out fine by itself, though keep in mind that there will always be people seeing ill intent on any given one of these cases, so if the idea behind this is to also reduce user complaints, you would have to do more than that at the expense of disgruntled users, and then you have to weigh which situation matters to solve most since it is unlikely that you will please everyone no matter what you do or do not do.

Just some ideas off the top of my head that I have actually thought about for a long while.

The admins totally read the forums right guys surely they'll care if its their own moderators making the post right haha I love it here :)))))

Anyways in the spirit of the thread, my one suggestion is a comment cap. 5 a day or whatever, thats it. No more endless comment wars. No more schizos creating Twitter Politik Thred #76. No more rabid hornyposting in the comments of childrens video games. No more "user above me is left/right/bbq wing". No more this comment has been hidden due to low karma. I have never in my god damn life clicked "view the rest of this conversation →" and been happy with what showed up. It would make reading all the comments on this side actually possible (thus ensuring more consistent moderation), and ensures our most prolific users actually get to touch some grass.

Nedhitis said:

As I understand it, mods right now work on a "personal" criteria for each case where any one of them can take a moderating action on their own as per indicated by Don himself.

This is usually not the case when it comes to actual user issues, believe it or not. I would say the majority (>60%, ish) of non-spam, non-bot, non-poochyena cases involve one of us posting a screenshot and polling the other mods. The issue here is that between the mods who work, the mods in cursed euroshit timezones, and the mods who literally enter the fucking forest for months at a time, it gets ignored most of the time. If it were possible to get full mod team consensus on everything we probably would, but as of now the best we've got is like the 3-4 vote micro-councils.

I know orange circle gang will not enjoy hearing this, but KYM is drastically undermoderated. The mods see issues, post our neat little screencaps in the mod chats, go "hey we should do something about this"… and then wait for someone else to do it. Forever. This is before factoring in all the "please explain why xXx_R4cism_L0v3R_xXx's 4th account was banned" and "mods please rewrite the site code" issues we have to respond to. You're not wrong in thinking the moderation is inconsistent, but that inconsistency comes from us favouring the community more than we're supposed to. It's a corporate memesite; the clickbait entries and advertisers run the show, not the shortstack enthusiasts.

I've been thinking about this for a while, so please excuse the delayed response.

So, to recap, my starting suggestions were to have rules that are 1) clearly-defined, 2) concise, and 3) completely public. Quite obviously, this isn't enough to actually make rules from, but it's a great guideline by which you can judge prospective rules. There's more to the story, however: the human element. Both the users and the moderators are humans (give or take a few bots), and with humanity comes points of failure. There'll always be the potential for someone, on either side of the equation, to exploit some blind spot or loophole within a rule for their personal benefit or amusement, so designing around this is also important, as is considering possible ways to mitigate the effects of these inevitable incidents.

With those "three C's" I outlined in the last paragraph, let's start with the easiest: making the rules fully accessible to everybody. We already have a "Site Rules" page linked at both the top and bottom of most pages, so the obvious (and best) solution would be to roll whatever new rules that are whipped up into that page.

Next, brevity. Again, this is pretty straightforward: just follow the principle of "keep it simple, stupid". Having overly complicated and wordy rules just makes it harder on everyone.

Making rules "clearly-defined" is the hard part, however. Rules that are overly strict in their definitions create ample room for people to violate the spirit, but not the letter, of the rules. Rules that are too vague have the opposite problem, and wouldn't really fix anything in our case. Further, this can conflict with keeping the rules concise; a rule such as "no hate speech", while perfectly brief, is also exceptionally ill-defined (this is why "hate speech" laws are inevitably abused). The trick, then, is to analyze prospective rules, identify the underlying behavior patterns that you wish to punish, then not only define those clearly, but also provide diagnostic criteria for what is and isn't under that umbrella; this has the fun side-effect of cutting down on blind spots, deliberate or otherwise. It's easier said than done, but it absolutely can be done.

Then, finally, you have the human element. The practice of combatting rules lawyers outside of their own element is an old one, and the most obvious response is to allow moderator discretion in cases where the spirit of the rules is what's being broken, not the letter. This is an imperfect solution, however, as it grants far too much leeway to the moderators with no counterbalance. My suggestion is better: get the community's opinion on the matter; if most people like the rules lawyer, are they really a problem? For optimal results, accept input from the comments, the forums, and the Discord, so as to represent the sum total of the community and not just one of its parts.

The other side of the coin is harder to combat: rules lawyers as moderators, or in other terms, moderators who purposefully abuse oversights within the rules, usually to punish users they don't like (or God forbid, moderators who just ban people for no discernable reason). The solution here also solves the issue we have with a lack of transparency: we make all ban records completely public to all users, both given and received, and require some form of explanation for bans of any active user. The only downside to this is that the most obvious implementation (that is to say, copying MediaWiki's homework) would require a lot of backend changes that the admins aren't likely to ever do, so a plan B would be to make it a forum thread, likely one that's sticky, featured, and locked. This could then be coupled with some sort of appeals process that exists independent of the main site and main Discord: if a mod banned someone for an obviously stupid reason, there should be avenues for appeal, just in case.

I should specify that I have limited experience as a moderator, but I do have tons of experience with bad moderation systems, so I have some good ideas as to what definitely doesn't work; by understanding why those systems don't work, I've come to understand how to design a system that, if nothing else, fares much better.

Oh yeah, missed this in my main post, but… setting a comment limit might not be a bad idea. Making it five per day, however, is quite frankly an incredibly stupid idea. Having a per-hour limit of five to ten or so, however, wouldn't impact the majority of users, and would reduce the speed of inane arguments in the comment sections.

I'm not sure if this is a point of rules or site structure, but I find it a bit silly that once an account is deactivated or banned, there is no way to view their profile to see their images, videos, comments, etc. Accounts such as Luigifan and Hypercat-Z were incredibly prolific uploaders back in their day, so it would be nice to be able to review what they've added to the site prior to their downfall.

There's actually a quick and easy workaround for this, which the mods use even when we can view the profile. You can add the uploader:(username) search operator to view everything by a user. This doesn't work for comments or entry edits, sadly, but it works fine for everything else. Here is the query for Hypercat, for example.

We mostly use it to clean up after the admins, if we're being honest. I have uploader:(Brandon) on my clipboard most days.

Thanks, that helps a lot!

By the way, is there any way to review how many upvotes and/or downvotes a user's comments have received, other than going through their activity and checking them one by one?

I'd go in the opposite direction and say that the comment cap should be raised – discussing images, videos, and memes is one of my favorite things to do on this site. The fact that the existence and extent of the comment limit isn't made clear is also a sore spot for me.

Don't get me wrong – the fact that there is a comment cap cuts down on a lot of mindless or bad-faith spamming. If there was no comment cap, we might be seeing hundreds of "ur a faget", "lol ur gay", "fuk u", "poop pee poop pee", or other inane comments literally everywhere on the site drowning out the relevant and insightful contributions that users who are actually interested in having a good time rather than causing trouble would want to make. I just find myself rather frustrated that I'm blocked from participating in discussions by the comment limit far more often than I'd like.

Add a rule that temporarily locks the comment section if the comments get controversial whenever the entry itself is either:
- created to be controversial
- or the entry itself gets updated with controversial stuff.

Put some tally marks of how many times the comments have gotten locked, the higher the number means longer the time the comments section is locked. When it "This comment section is locked" add what day has been locked and what day it will reopen.

Types of temporarily comment locks:
- Day lock (1st time)
- Week lock (2nd time)
- Month lock (3rd time)
- Indefinite lock unless a Mod or Staff reopens it (4th time, this option is very rarely used)

I'm suggesting this because we now have threads such as this and this that isn't really happy with the site in general which the only answer is 'go to the Discord' is such an odd way to say that there's no way to prevent the comment section devolve into monkey noises.

I know that mods lock the comments for some time, but that only happened on trans-related entries, and not controversial entries in general.

Removing the top comments highlights is a good idea at the start, but I feel like it won't stop the comment section from making monkey noises, I'm surprised that the top comments in the Bridget entry are still up.

I don't really care for the Image and Video gallery, keep those two the same as it was before for ppl to upload stuff.