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9:33 AM
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Pattern-matching website in body, potentially bad ns for domain in body (99): Isabelleโ€™s Luxuriance Cream by jfvsjxas on apple.SE
@MarkAmery do you mind if I clean up the transcript from last night a bit?
I don't want another tweet about how "horrible and misogynistic the tavern is" followed by another round of chat suspensions because something had to be done
@Magisch Just trash the entire past three days :D
it has been... 3 days? wow, time flies...
9:42 AM
@Magisch eh, do it. We can talk to him later if he minds ;)
He has apologized, so I don't think he'd mind...
Oh, hey. Did you already do the cleanup, @Magisch?
@MarkAmery nope
I'm okay with you deleting stuff
9:45 AM
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Manually reported question (93): Updating Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 by danica Miller on superuser.com
I can't delete stuff, only move
--> dev/null/
Move? To where? But okay, sure
:D
@MarkAmery to private rooms no one can see XD
The only things I'd object to is editing comments of mine without approval, or selective removal that makes other comments by me or others appear nonsensical
If you want to just purge my sweary ranting wholesale, I've got no issue with that
9:47 AM
hands @Magisch the not-a-flamethrower
@MarkAmery What? But editing chat messages/comments so they make no sense anymore is one of the best types of mod-abuse fun you can have! XD
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Manually reported answer (94): Fastest way to type in math formulas out of the box? by Rachel Dave on superuser.com
technically a flamethrower?
@JourneymanGeek It makes for good practical jokes? :P
@MarkAmery Ah... yeah :/
I still fondly remember the day someone edited their old chat messages to ping me, when I was complaining about chat messages not showing up... and me being confused for a solid 10 minutes because I did get the pings but not the messages. That was fun ;)
putting words in people's mouths without any visible sign that the attributed author is not real author is a power that mods have but should virtually never use, and only with the utmost care; not all of them see it quite that way, though
haha that's great
@MarkAmery I try not to edit comments
I nuke em all. XD
๐Ÿ‘
(also editing them right is too much work XD)
9:53 AM
@MarkAmery Maybe it pleases you to know that new moderators get the advise to only remove parts, but not rephrase ;)
excellent - it pleases me greatly
user194636
removing every third word works well
@PaulWhite DISENVOWEL THEM!
4
user194636
oh yeah neat
user194636
that may be the best thing you've ever said
9:55 AM
108 messages moved to Trashcan | Cleanup from last night. Feel free to rake me over the coals if that was too much.
user194636
fold up the laptop and go to sleep
Hey, it's already lunch time! :D
This is a fast friday...
user194636
11pm here!
user194636
though time of day is probably irrelevant to JG's body clock at this point
@JourneymanGeek DISEN... WHAT?
9:59 AM
DSNWHT!
@PaulWhite My body clock is a rolex watch thrown into one of those will it blend blenders.
user194636
...along with a cuckoo on a spring
yes
oh well, next week's a 4 day week
so 3 days off
and I only work 7 days november
Somehow my mind turned that into cuckoo clock on a scissor mechanism
spinning in a blender...
it's also 3d
10:07 AM
(I get reminded of that joke about my body being a temple. one of those overgrown ones in a forest somewhere full of rolling boulders...)
umm.. I don't know what to comment on that ._.
or I blame my mind...
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad pattern in url answer (70): Exchanges and security by Susan Scava on bitcoin.SE
'kay, I choose to blame
!!/blame my mind
@Somewhat It's Tinkeringbell's fault.
wait
@Tinkeringbell's @Somewhat's subconcious?
10:20 AM
¯_(ใƒ„)_/¯
10:49 AM
@JourneymanGeek I'm a good subconscious :P
11:06 AM
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Blacklisted website in answer (91): Reason for better save capability of QGIS 3 by RolandC Harcker on gis.SE
what is sealioning btw
oh:
@Magisch Ah, some old fashioned internet thing
Apparently, it's the thing where people ask for evidence repeatedly?
I thought 'singaporing'...
> Sealioning (also spelled sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment which consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility. The troll pretends ignorance and feigns politeness, so that if the target is provoked into making an angry response, the troll can then act as the aggrieved party. Sealioning can be performed by a single troll or by multiple ones acting in concert.
This is what IPS mods are accused of
oh, that's "merlion" :/
11:18 AM
@Magisch Na, we're not.
welp, time to leave office now!! tgif!
@Somewhat Enjoy your weekend! :D
aight
I didn't know what sea lioning meant so I googled it
@Magisch That's cool.
I learned that too yesterday ;)
SE could use a Twitter policy, but so could moderators ;)
user194636
I had to look it up as well.
11:23 AM
@Magisch lots of people don't
user194636
Seems like one could use that argument to dismiss any view contrary to one's own.
@JourneymanGeek Probably the ones that do, are the ones that use it 'in their defense' :P
I use my biggest words when really mad too ;)
@PaulWhite welcome to twitter
user194636
luckily twitter represents a small slice of the population
11:25 AM
if you don't agree with me, you're harassing me, see lioning me, concern trolling, misinformed, a member of <group I demonize>, not real, a troll, fake, russian or any other of the dozens of ways you can delegitimize someone
user194636
yep
user194636
all of which no doubt makes some people feel better, but doesn't do much to change anyone's mind as far as I can see
My favorite one is if you try to tell someone that their advocacy for a group you're a member of is harmful is "well you just internalized <behavior they accuse group-outsiders of>"
user194636
the internet has improved a great many things
the average quality of debate may not be one of those things
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Blacklisted username (93): Zero articles in movie and book titles by pawel maria on english.SE
11:37 AM
o_O
it's been a month @TimPost — Jeff Atwood 1 min ago
Sounds like a period...
I'm strangely honored jeff commented on my post
@Magisch See! They still like you :)
interesting perspective on the recent thing here: meta.stackexchange.com/a/317041/308386
11:47 AM
@Magisch As long as your heart is in the right place ... kinda an important thing, because... well ... I personally feel that whoever started all this ... didn't have that :(
user194636
@Magisch yikes
@PaulWhite "interesting"
user194636
well quite
@Magisch I'm going to say it's disappointing. I've left my say there though. Hope it gets heard.
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at end of body (99): Word formatting only applying to every other page by bob on superuser.com
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at end of answer (60): Samsung SSD "Wear_Leveling_Count" meaning by DamarisWWright on superuser.com
12:30 PM
Jeff <3
user194636
12:42 PM
I don't think that answer provides anything useful or helpful.
12:54 PM
It provides the truth.
@PaulWhite small slice with huge impact. E.g Trump use it to announce stuff and sting other people he dislikes.
And people use it to push SE into making changes that would never occur otherwise.
user194636
Perhaps SE needs to learn that while there may be consequences for not responding to tweets, there might be worse consequences for doing so, at least in a knee-jerk reaction sort of way.
user194636
Not getting into the merits or otherwise of politicians in other countries tweeting.
@PaulWhite What consequences are there?
We're complaining on meta, yes, but what else?
complaints on meta are a lot less public and easier to dismiss then on twitter
user194636
@Magisch I doubt the current situation is comfortable for several SE people.
1:00 PM
But does it carry any consequence for the company?
Sure the CoGro people might be hounded for a couple of weeks/months, but does the company suffer any repercussions?
They would if that story had started trending on twitter
user194636
@Magisch The people are the company, to a very large extent anyway. Do you think Tim et al are enjoying spending time on this? What do you imagine the tangible impact of trending on twitter would be? The current situation is still playing out, and not all the impacts are visible.
The result is most employees get more scornful and think the community are scum
Nobodu
there is such mutual disrespect
user194636
I don't see any evidence for that
Thatโ€™s because we only interact with the three people who care and the rest mock us in private Slack
user194636
1:05 PM
Not that I would presume to know the minds of "most employees" anyway.
user194636
I don't much care what may or may not go on in private Slack - or anywhere else I can't see.
user194636
My personal impression is that SE employees care a lot about the community, even some of the more 'difficult' members.
user194636
Fundamentally the whole thing depends a lot on general goodwill.
And, you know, it works both ways. The more we're dismissive and snarky to staff, the more they won't care what we say. Thinking back to what Joe Friend expressed at some point.
"assume good faith" has to go both ways.
Assuming that people are "mocking us in private Slack" isn't helpful to anyone... whether it's true or not. It's private. Speculating about what's happening there is a waste of time.
If your values are sufficiently unaligned good faith canโ€™t fix things.
The company doesnโ€™t care an ounce about the things the community cards about.
They want as many users, regardless of what they contribute or cost the community, so they can sell job ads
Death by overfunding
Joel picked a business mode that doomed the company
1:12 PM
You're assuming that they don't care. I'm assuming they just made some colossal mistakes.
2
There are some people who care
They are not sufficient against the mob who doesnโ€™t understand or want to understand
user194636
@Mithrandir There's no doubt that some of the lack of engagement from staff on meta is due to our (the community) treatment of them when they do engage.
Community engagement dropped off when they stopped having anything useful to say to us
Shortly after Jeff left
Could you please avoid expletives like that? Thanks.
@SomethingBadHappened you've had access to it at some point, was it like that?
user194636
1:18 PM
There was plenty of engagement after Jeff left. Some of the interactions I saw were...unpleasant. I'm pretty sure I would have disengaged for a while too.
I mean it's kind of a chicken and egg type of situation
user194636
A vicious circle is possible for sure.
the community is caustic and damning these days because they feel not listened to and not taken seriously
and staff doesn't like engaging because every time they do they're hounded to oblivion
user194636
meta.SE has special problems due, in part, to the limited number of people who moderate there
That's a largely self inflicted problem though
user194636
1:21 PM
indeed
nothing's stopping them from appointing a couple pro tem mods on meta and shunting the cleanup duty to those
Hell I can name 5 people who I'd bet would be willing and able without even thinking about it
user194636
The only reason I can think of for not doing it would be technical
user194636
e.g. moderators could see private chat rooms hosted on chat.SE
I don't know the technical debt required to be fixed for that to work could be massive
user194636
including staff-only rooms
1:23 PM
I don't think so
they fixed that a while ago iirc
user194636
idk
user194636
but I tend to assume there must be a good reason
"internal" rooms have special features, that aren't there in the MSE private room I have access to...
even so, if this is truly so much of a problem maybe a dev should spend a while cleaning up the code causing this, so the cleanup duty on mse can be offloaded. Maybe it'll bring more staff engagement with users
I think the value of that is underrated within the company atm
people are willing to put up with and assist with a lot if they feel they're taken seriously
user194636
Is there a meta request for that?
user194636
1:24 PM
heh
probably
the frustrating part is it's so easy: "Hey folks, yesterday someone pointed out $situation to us on twitter. We discussed internally and agree this is a problem. Can we have some discussion about fixing that?"
I guarantee you several highly upvoted highly sophisticated solution ideas will appear in less then a day
user194636
That would have been ideal at the time.
user194636
It is less clear what ought to be done now.
I would start with "Yea, this was a mishandling of procedure, we've reverted the change for now". Then a discussion on MSE about HNQ in general (like we have) and a seperate one to obtain community consensus to remove IPS or part of IPS from it
spitballing here, but it'd work
user194636
@Magisch The problem with reverting the change (my initial thought) is the potential for that to go really badly wrong. Especially if a genuinely problematic IPS title made its way onto HNQ in the meantime.
user194636
1:29 PM
Which, I grant you, is a low-ish risk. But would you take it.
user194636
And they've already said they would do the same thing again, even after 24-48 hrs discussion.
@PaulWhite yes, I would
user194636
I might too, but I'm not in a position to make that call.
the trust and goodwill of the community is paramount on a operation such as this
user194636
Well you were worried about the twitter impact a while ago.
1:32 PM
tbh if I was the CEO in this situation I would have never authorized this change
@PaulWhite yeah, it's bad
the community situation is markedly worse long time
then again I wouldn't be a good CEO admittedly
user194636
I fully expect to hear next to nothing for a few days while the heat dissipates.
Then a long blog post or two from Tim apologising etc. and promising to do better next time.
And next time the exact same thing will happen
user194636
Naturally.
user194636
Well, the circumstances will be slightly different, but yeah.
I just read Jeff's response to "official channel", and I really symphatize with that...
user194636
1:35 PM
I empathised with it to some extent but ultimately found it unhelpful.
I do wonder why staff response is so slow with this though
I'd at least expect faster damage control
this seems to be developing into a wholly unmitigated pr nightmare
user194636
There's very little they could say at this point that wouldn't add fuel to the fire.
@Magisch Fast isn't necessary good, it's what started all of it.
perhaps you're right
user194636
@Tinkeringbell Well put.
1:36 PM
well, didn't it start to go south after... the lay-off?
user194636
It all started when the earth cooled.
user194636
Widely regarded as a mistake.
user194636
But seriously yeah that can't have helped.
@Magisch what makes you think it's slow?
@PaulWhite In the beginning, the universe was created?
1:38 PM
Admittedly it's taken some prodding but they have responded on IPS and MSE
user194636
@Tinkeringbell yep ๐Ÿ˜ƒ
@ArtOfCode It took 40 minutes to respond to the twitter post. My admittedly naive view of PR would mean that I'd have 2-3 people on duty of doing nothing else then collating and responding to feedback for the foreseeable future
user194636
HHGttG
(I wonder what will be Norm's response to all of these recent events... I honestly miss his critical opinion, even if somewhat blunt/sarcastic)
@Magisch out of curiosity, who?
1:39 PM
@PaulWhite (It's the only part of that book that I ever read. Thank the internet)
user194636
Norm from Cheers?
NormalHuman
user194636
@Tinkeringbell Those books were a big part of my childhood and are probably responsible for much of my world view.
@Mithrandir Taken from thin air? You, Monica, Journeyman, Tink, Glorfindel, Rory
@Magisch Can I please just get used to being a normal user somewhere?
1:40 PM
just grabbed from thin air, there are more, but these are who I thought of first
Basically, existing mods who are also active on MSE...
We missed celebrating my half year mod anniversary yesterday :(
user194636
There are any number of senior network mods that could do the job well
@Tinkeringbell you should be honored!
it honestly doesn't even matter. Pick any non employee from the top 50 user board, chances are they'd do well
user194636
1:42 PM
Will/Won't could sort it out on his own.
user194636
Would be fun to watch if nothing else.
it's not like MSE would be anything but the most mundane cleanup and collation of tasks
@Mithrandir Honesty? My first IPS (and also SE) post was somewhere in July, my first chat participation sometime later, I think by September/October I was an RO and now I've been modding for half a year (so since April)... that's all ridiculously fast sometimes.
And especially on days like this week, I feel like I'm running around like a headless chicken
user194636
6 mins ago, by Tinkeringbell
@Magisch Fast isn't necessary good, it's what started all of it.
We're all headless chickens at some point.
1:43 PM
Fast food.
user194636
I'm going to think of that quote whenever I see the word "fast" for a while.
for extra bonus laziness, pick any of the current pro tem network mods. They're all already vetted, no extra work required
@PaulWhite Great. I made another inspirational twitter quote. Like I said... headless chicken.
user194636
ooo meta mod elections how about that
but nobody except Sonic nominated...
1:45 PM
As someone who used to think MSE needed non-staff mods... I'm really not sure that's a good idea any more... and that has nothing to do with technical limitations. Think about it this way:
user194636
@Tinkeringbell Yep another one for the list. Still don't understand why you hate don't like Bart tho. ๐Ÿ˜ƒ๐Ÿ˜ƒ๐Ÿ˜ƒ
@PaulWhite 'don't like'... that's not hate
@Magisch the difference is that the Twitter response was informal and unstructured. They're trying to respond properly to us now. That does take longer, but it really hasn't taken that long.
Now Bart won't like Tinker... ;p
user194636
another vicious circle!
user194636
1:46 PM
@ArtOfCode just seems like it
We have a site that's been moderated by staff for years - since the SO mods stopped having access... People are used to that. When they see moderator actions taken here, particularly invisible ones like flag handling and comment removal... there's some ambiguity to who is doing it.
Also, there are just times where we need to be more cautious about how stuff is handled... and with a mod team, that's work to set up and communicate.
user194636
@Catija The same ambiguity exists on main sites and child metas. The recourse is meta (and meta is its own meta) or /contact.
@PaulWhite It's right there!
user194636
Perhaps there would be problems. But there are already problems. Arguably more serious ones.
@PaulWhite I don't mean ambiguity between mods... It's different when you're balancing it between "did staff delete my thing" and "did a mod delete my thing"...
user194636
1:51 PM
@Catija Yes that's what I thought you meant.
user194636
I don't really think the distinction is as important as it might appear.
user194636
Meta.SE is a bit broken.
You do gain some arguably impartial people to moderate difficult discussion with the community where y'all appear to have a conflict of interest though
It is when the stuff being possibly deleted is targeted at staff. We delete very little that many mods would probably delete on site.
sight.
user194636
My opinion, and that is all it is, is that meta has become too lax as to what is allowed.
user194636
1:52 PM
Nowhere is the CoC less enforced.
Y'all don't need abuse any more than the rest of us. Non staff mods can delete that and remain impartial.
user194636
I would argue that abuse directed at staff is more harmful than the 'ordinary' kind.
user194636
(as discussed a little earlier)
But what happens if we delete it all?
We don't know the situation of SE staffs' Twitter DM...
1:55 PM
Goodwill an' all that
Think about it.
user194636
Delete all of meta?
user194636
Or delete all the abuse?
user194636
For the latter, people will need to rephrase/rethink.
@Catija meta becomes somewhere that SE people are more willing to go because they know they won't get abused.
user194636
1:56 PM
And the overall tone improves to the point where it becomes productive again. On both sides.
From what I've read, SE is becoming unwilling to use meta because of the reaction that is so common
user194636
Yes that's exactly what @Magisch and I were talking over earlier.
As someone who's been on many of the Metas over the last two months... that has nothing to do with MSE.
When people get angry about things, they want to vent at someone.
As someone who also follows meta network-wide, yeah, the messenger got bashed for delivering "new theme" announcement...
The messenger got crucified, not just bashed
user194636
1:59 PM
Some sites were noticeably worse than others. The majority, it seemed to me, managed to give productive feedback without being abusive.

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