Tavern on the Meta

12:00 AM

If that were actually true then we shouldn’t have community moderators anyway

@JourneymanGeek Perhaps the mod in question nominates candidates and SE says yes or no to each one? And . . . yeah, some sort of legalese NDA, although IANALETIULSE (I Am Not A Lawyer Even Though I Use Law Stack Exchange).

George Stocker

This process reflects the fact that SE inc does not trust moderators to impartially weigh evidence — and it doesn’t have to be moderators on their own — but it needs to be more than just SE inc in the decision process.

11

theNamesCross

To me, it seems a panel (or several) moderators should act as jury. After all, they are chosen by their communities - thats as close to representative democracy and a panel of you peers as we can get. Id fear that random users may not be aware of the challenges moderators face, and do not share in the long term, seasoned perspective moderators have gained.

George Stocker

After all, community is the DNA of this company

I haven’t seen any feedback taken changing any of the process from the private moderator view to the public view. I’m not at all sure this whole “feedback” is anything more than perfunctory.

3

Substantively changing.

Journeyman Geek

1:14 AM

@theNamesCross hm.looking at mod spaces... That would likely end up with 4 people voting 6 ways

LinkBerest

3:21 AM

@terdon Another problem here is even if we trust some of our current CMs (Jon, Tim, Shog, Catija....that's it). We don't trust one of them at all. Further, trusting them to "do their best" means little when "the best they can do" is apologize as the building burns down

LinkBerest

3:31 AM

@Catija I don't assume you or the CMs mentioned above are trying to do this. I presume nearly everyone else is and will not trust them - esp. based on this process which honestly just re-kindled the anger I was just letting go about this whole thing because it feels like a middle finger, you have no say, type of response to the community and their elected mods

Catija

@LinkBerest Just... so you know, the full list of current CMs is Shog, Jon, Robert, JNat, Cesar, Nicolas and myself.

@LinkBerest Maybe it's a matter of trust, as @GeorgeStocker says. He says many things that ring true and that I feel must be correct. I think it's more of fear. Fear that we need someone not in a moderator position and we won't be able to convince ... either because we can't share the information for privacy reasons or there's fear that the person is so respected that their actions will be ignored... or even that we expect something from users that they are unwilling to support. I don't know.

Ziv

I've got some experience on a CoC team in (entirely different context).
We had a lot of similar issues -- because the balance between "we need to be able to effectively resolve complaints" and "we need the community's trust in order to be able to operate at all" is really tricky, and really touchy on all sides.

You can't possibly open every complaint up to public examination/litigation. It'll be a firestorm every time even in the most benign of cases, and decrease trust, not increase it.

I don't know if this is helpful, but, some quick thoughts:

One thing that really helped us is a "trusted" OK on the final decision.
This is only for the cases that _really_ escalate -- @Catija, the ~%1 you actually get to the point of removing.
If there's a few "trusted" individuals who can look at the case, say "Yeah, this is a tough call but a necessary one,"
Then most community members will be willing to take their word for it (in a way that they won't from a CEO, publicist, etc., who can look a lot more like PR/damage-control than somebody applying due process).

(It has been an enormous help to me in discussions of our policy and conduct, to be able to say, "OK, but you are guaranteed that if I mess this up and make a lousy call, I can't actually pass it through without <trusted person> going over it.")

Another thing that really helps are examples.

Rob

3:47 AM

Who are these trusted individuals to be?

Surely they can't be external to the company - no sane company would agree to that

And if they're internal to the company... the closest you're going to get are the CMs, which is where we are

Catija

Well, considering what both Sklivvz and George were saying, it sounds like mods or trusted non-mod users.

Rob

I'm not sure that's a realistic request

Ziv

Another thing that really helps are *examples*.

One of the thing that can feel really threatening about a CoC, is that you get a lot of things you are Not Allowed To Do,
and some of them feel obvious and others don't feel clearly-defined, and people tend to default to worst-case scenarios ("Somebody will go around harassing people for years because we won't have perfect process to remove them" / "People will get removed for tiny infractions").

But the reality is, issues can be infinitely convoluted, and however detailed your CoC is, you're always going to get curveballs. The disparity in …

@Rob re:Trusted users: That's the company's problem to solve/define, and yeah; it's a difficult one. But, for example, if you say "The community really respects CM1 and CM2, so they're now our "Incident Response Final Committee"," I think that'll work a lot better than saying "anybody in this particular preexisting role is equally appropriate for approving a mod removal."

Rob

And what happens when they move on?

And is it really feasible to hire someone for a role only to be vetoed by the community because they're not well known yet?

Ziv

The company will need to maintain this hypothetical "Final Committee", for sure.

Catija

4:02 AM

@Ziv This has been a problem since the first version of the CoC, before I even worked here... the potential punishments seem super severe... including "expulsion"... and most of the time all that's going to happen is the content will be deleted.

Rob

@Ziv I thought you said the community did? Because if the company should maintain the committee... they already are... in the form of CMs

Ziv

CMs enjoy authority; they don't (automatically) enjoy community trust.
(Mods enjoy at least some level of community trust, because they're elected by the community)
(CMs enjoy company trust, though)

david

expulsion isn't that severe compared to having the "Director of Public Q&A" publicly accuse you of transphobia to a news organisation

8

Ziv

And that's really the big thing -- you need somebody trusted by both the company and the community.

Rob

@Ziv Okay, but then my question is again... is it really feasible to have the community vote whether or not a person is able to do the job they're hired for?

Ziv

4:05 AM

("Who" matters less than that such individuals exist)

@Rob The job of Community Manager? Or the job of Final Committee?

IMO those shouldn't (necessarily) be the same job.

Rob

Either. What if the community decides they don't trust anyone?

Ziv

Well, then you've already lost and everything's already on fire.

3

(Which, to be fair, isn't far from where we're at?)

If the community doesn't trust anyone in the world, then there's literally no process or behavior that will convince them that any decision is legitimate.

david

I see two possible options: 1) They call in Keanu Reeves, 2) They go on Judge Judy

Ziv

@david I approve of these solutions

@Catija Yup; that's exactly it. You try to list all the possible options, and instead of being thorough, you wind up both (a) still incomplete (b) terrifying.

Incident response always has a lot of judgment calls to it. Giving some clear examples as anchors helps clarify things a lot more than enumerating all the possible options and combinations.

Catija

@Ziv Yeah. But it's difficult to enumerate the actual options with examples because it makes for a... very long document.

Ziv

4:19 AM

@Catija Oh, yes. I'm definitely not saying you convert a whole CoC into examples!

Catija

Yeah. I know. We did try to include examples of what not to do and what to do instead, which is also helpful... though, it often leads to people saying "how is that bad???" :D

Ziv

But... a few?
Spread out across the spectrum of severity, intent, and clarity?

Catija

I think the CoC was intended to be a "living doc" that changed as we learned and grew... which is great... in theory. But if you go over a year without touching it, that concept gets lost.

It needs to change much more frequently than that to truly feel "living".

david

Moderator reinstatement process

Ex moderator to select one of the following:
1) Trial by the council: CM majority vote
2) Trial by the peers: Current moderator majority vote
3) Trial by the commoners: Users community vote
4) Trial by fire: 1 week test period where they have to top the charts for positive moderation actions.
5) Trial by chaos: Roll 2 6 sided dice. [6, 6] they get reinstated

5

solved

Makoto

@david It's super easy to find unfair 2 D6 dice

Or they can be totally fair die with 6 on all six sides

david

4:25 AM

good point, we will need community elected representative dice

Ziv

"Alice misgenders OP in the comments, and gets a note about it."
"Liza misgenders people 10 different times over a 90-day period; after 2 notes, she is suspended for three months."
"Kelly repeatedly posts in Meta about misgendering not being a 'thing' and this is an example of PC culture run rampant. She is (??? complete here ???)."

david

"the weakest link goodbye"

Ziv

LOL

You are never going to cover everything, and you're sure not going to make everybody happy -- but a few "representative" examples would help establish what the scale is.

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

4:41 AM

A lesson I learned when editing FAQs is that you can't have exhaustive rules that try to cover each and every individual case: at some point, you just have to let things fall to individual judgment.

LinkBerest

5:01 AM

@Catija As stated "the ones trusted" (to be fair I don't know about JNat - I have neither trust nor distrust and have not heard any comments IRL or read them). Disgust would be my other word, if I was to pick one besides anger. I don't fear that the current COC Faq would be used incorrectly - I assume it because I've already seen it happen.

I do not oppose the CoC itself but its application, design, and development surpasses the worst of the old school waterfall software projects I've ever worked on and I have zero trust in its enforcement because we've already seen the result of that. Then this process which seems to confirm the near total lack of transparency is by design, not to change, and basically deal with it or hit the bricks.

A process which seems to have been made with the assumption that we would still take SE at their word and ignores all the bad faith that is currently here. To me its just more fuel on the fire so yeah, disgust or anger. I'm good as far as using SE for work - I'll miss worldbuilding and a few people I still come on to see from Python though.

Magisch

I think the problem with the process isn't so much the fact that it's not really transparent, but the fact that people have so little faith in SE that anything else then a public trial style hearing with a neutral arbitrator would not have satisfied in the current climate

2

Piro

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Wouldn't it be better to let things fall to general principle instead of individual judgement?

user194636

retcon

Noun: Wikidata

retcon (plural retcons)
A situation, in a soap opera or similar serial fiction, in which a new storyline explains or changes a previous event or attaches a new significance to it.
2003. Glen Cadigan, The Legion Companion, p. 152:
TLC: What do you say to the Legion fans who have become disenfranchised with the series due to its various retcons and reboots?
2005. Rhonda Wilcox, Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, p. 9:
Fans talk of retcon—retroactive continuity—giving information that explains an earlier event, especially seeming...

Shadow

What's that avatar.... ?

oh

Catija

5:21 AM

@LinkBerest JNat's the best. <3 I know that it's easy to be disgusted. There's much that's been done that's unforgivable... I don't think that how we handled this was appropriate at all but I also know that rolling it back would do much harm, too. There's more to the story than we're willing to say publicly out of respect... and I understand that may be hard to believe considering the whole talking to the press thing but... anyway, I need to get some sleep.

user194636

The point is Monica should be allowed to go through the Moderator Conduct Review Process.

user194636

Instead of starting with the Reinstatement Process

user194636

SE just seem to continually miss the obvious

5

Magisch

@Catija Out of respect to whom?

I couldn't imagine from monica's perspective that anything could be more damaging then the status quo

the cat is thoroughly out of the bag on this one

If y'all serious about re-establishing trust with the userbase there is probably no way around establishing something like an arbitration comission that is independant of the company and any of it's interests, and to agree to be bound by decisions of that comission.

4

Arthur Havlicek

5:48 AM

normally being tied with the company interests should reinforce trust, not diminish it, considering what CMs have at stake vs what a mod or independent commission have at stake

I also wonder how independant you can be, if you are either a volonteer or paid by SE inc

user194636

Especially if the boss of your boss holds a strongly biased view

user194636

Without an independent tribunal the best one could do is an appeal chaired by someone from the C suite

user194636

With people uninvolved in the prior stages

Magisch

6:03 AM

@ArthurHavlicek ideally it could work like the arbitration committee on wikipedia. Site wide elections for people to handle these disputes

the reason they need to be decoupled from company interests is that the trust in the company is so low right now that any verdict from them is not going to be believed, no matter what.