I don't know if it's lost in post mod hell or if you just got distracted by other points, @seebs, but this is a really important part of the conversation that I for one would really like a response to.
I was one of those people that raised their voice pretty loudly at feeling like I was being ignored and dismissed when it came to threats with Alix. (For the record, hee threat against me was messed up cause a criminable offense, would also harm uninvolved people, she actually had the ability to do it if she acted upon it. She had the resources) Yet, something that serious I was still ignored essentially and focus went on defending Alix from the angry mob. Now, in regards to banning in general. Do I think we should have a set limit to banning? No, not at all. Main reason being, everyone is different with their recovery and symptoms and reactions. Someone might blow up big time, but if they can recognize what they did and work to make amends in some way and to try to mitigate that reaction, hell yes they deserve to be here. I LIKE the idea that this is a place where people that would normally get banned can stay, and I think most users here will agree it's a good concept and encourage it. However, there comes a point where it really is at the expense of the rest of the userbase. Alix was that example of that extreme. I don't think we'll have something that extreme again hopefully, but it can also set a standard to when it's too far. Really, I personally feel Alix should have been gone a long time ago. Not as a consequence or punishment, but because it was becoming increasingly clear that people no longer felt safe. You say that people have other places they can go, but personally I don't know any other places, and that can be the case for lots of other users here. I'm feeling like this is word ramble, but essentially I say banning shouldn't be a set boundary that if you cross this, you're done. It needs to be a case by case basis. Just, dear god don't let it get as bad as it did with Alix.
So I think what it comes down to is that, when it comes to the "are people afraid they'd get banned, or afraid of the people who haven't gotten banned", sometimes the answer is "both". I dunno what I can say in response to some of the other things, apart from "I really tried to make it clear that I was not dismissing things out of hand, or ignoring them, or saying they didn't happen, just that I wasn't gonna ban someone for them". And to be clear, none of the specific things involved are things I'd ban someone over today. Not even the death threats. On the other hand, I think a case could have been made pretty strongly starting around where Alix made it clear that she was intentionally being abusive, with the rationale that "being abusive gets results". Basically, I'm not looking at "severity of bad behavior" so much as "what if anything can be done to mitigate or change this". It used to be there were reasonably obvious paths towards improvement, and they were at least somewhat working. Looking back, one of the major turning points was a while back. I was starting to think that keeping Alix on post mod wasn't really accomplishing much, because she visibly had the ability to make her posts reasonable enough, and maybe she'd be happier with more-real-time ability to participate in RP and such. And she brought it up, and I was hesitant, and she started getting pushy and aggressive about it in a way that was a bit of a red flag. Honestly if she hadn't started pushing at it, I probably would have done it... But then, if she had been the sort of person who wouldn't push at it like that, and wouldn't make such ridiculously bad arguments for why she should be allowed to do everything she wants always, it wouldn't have been a problem. Another big turning point was camelcaseCognomen. Prior to that, to the best of my ability to verify things, she was basically honest with me about what she was or wasn't doing. I didn't always know the questions to ask, but I didn't see a ton of verifiable direct lies. That was a straight-up lie, and was a big red flag also, especially because the entire situation it was in was 100% abusive. There was no motivation to that other than a desire to make life inconvenient for anyone and everyone who ignored her, to punish them for not wanting to interact with her. This is not speculating about her motives, she said this. Then denied it later when she realized that motivation wasn't going over well. But that gets back to my underlying evaluation: If I can't talk to someone and exchange information with them, and no one else can either, I can't accommodate them or make the forum work with/for them. It's just not possible. And somewhere in there, Alix moved from "sort of a twit and definitely an asshole, but basically capable of communicating and willing to do it" to "simply cannot or will not communicate".
I think a good way to deal with this stuff would be recognition that you, Seebs, do listen when the other mods start saying "this is enough, we need to consider not doing this anymore" when it comes to extreme edge cases. People are uncomfortable with the idea of an unreasonable dictator who will prioritize their ideals over even their closest people going "hey wait." But you have all these mods here because you trust our judgement. So letting people know that you do listen to our advice, and that we're all going to be keeping a closer eye on our level of donenesss with extreme edge cases, would be good. I know it's fun to reference the dictator thing but honestly if Seebs really acted like a dictator and refused to even consider our thoughts, we wouldn't be here modding. Because fuck that. I've got way better things to do than be ignored when I'm making sense.
Yeah. I think early on I got a bunch of people saying "no, definitely, ban this person" for what I did not consider good reasons, and I sorta burned out on it, and didn't notice how much the rationale and argumentation had changed over time.
So, in an attempt to better understand what you're saying, Seebs, in much fewer words... what you're saying as I understand it is: You won't ban someone for being an abusive asshole unless: a) they're doing it specifically with intent to harm just to prove that they can AND b) mitigating their harm and communicating with them is impossible for the mod team as a whole correct?
Fake edit: a couple more posts came in in all the time it took me to write this up, so some is probably less helpful now but I think some still is so eh. Editing on mobile is a pain in the ass so I'm gonna leave it rather than try to trim. ----- I'd like to try to debug some of the A-B disconnect I'm seeing, because catching up on the two and a half pages from last night I'm seeing patterns that are sort of swirling around and almost but not quite connecting. (Also apologies in advance if typos/autocorrect/general formatting wonkiness,I am on mobile bc I'm traveling and did not bring my laptop. I will try to edit to fix stuff if I notice and I don't mind folks pinging me with "hey your quote tags are janky and I think you maybe accidentally a word") I'm seeing, broadly, two lanes of banning criteria under discussion: bad behavior, and ability to communicate/engage. Seebs is largely discussing the latter, several others the former. One of the ABs is between these two lanes. The either I'm seeing is in what kinds of bad behavior people are discussing/referring to/thinking about. I'm going to lay out what I understand people to be saying, and then try to highlight what I think the disconnect here is. I'm also limiting this to the aforementioned last two and half pages, both so I can handle the scope at all and also because I think that's what's most relevant at this point in the conversation. Starting with the communication lane bc it's narrower in scope. Can't Communicate As I understand it, in your mind the questions at play when deciding how to handle someone are Is this person behaving badly? Do they understand their behavior to be bad? Are they trying to improve? And the question of "can we meaningfully communicate with them?" comes in because the latter two cannot be determined or addressed if communication with that person isn't possible. And if it isn't possible, then no amount of accommodating can be effective because it becomes impossible to figure out what they need/what would be most useful to address their behavior/helping them improve/etc. All other considerations and mechanisms get short circuited by the communication question. While there is the possibility of communication, there is hope of improvement or at least containment, but without it there's no point in bothering. And if course if there is no communication but also no bad behavior, it doesn't matter, because in that case there is no harm to mitigate. So, to Seebs, harm+inability to communicate=the domain of potential bans. Bad Behavior This one is more complicated because what people are talking about when they say "bad behavior" seems to itself be falling into an AB disconnect. I see/think of it as a spectrum, very coarsely laid out as: 0. None bad behavior Rude and unpleasant but not abusive Occasional rage spirals involving saying some fucked up shit, otherwise fine * Consistently says wiggleable fucked up shit (stuff like racist/transphobic/etc comments, or talking about graphic abuse/rape/etc untagged in places where such isn't expected), to the point where post mod is implemented if it wasn't already. OR * Enough rage spiralling for post mod to be needed to corral the spirals Murder threats Circumvents tools like post mod/ignore to keep doing/saying fucked up shit *3 and 4 here I want to put in the same middle tier of "bad but mitigateable" but, tragically, formatting on mobile. Also I want to emphasize that this is a very coarse scale, I'm not accounting for all possibilities and permutations. I just need a tool to help highlight the disconnect I'm seeing. So, on to that. Defining Bad Behavior Disconnect The disconnect I'm seeing here is that when some people are talking about bad behavior warranting a ban consideration, they are talking about the extreme upper end, while others (principally Seebs) keep talking about the regular upper end. Vs I understand "people who would be banned basically anywhere else" here to mean folks with behavior consistently in that 3/4 range, stuff like blow ups and splitting that most places won't deal with but kintsugi uses post mod to mitigate. I think Seebs is worried about calls to ban folks in that part of the behavior spectrum, hence the reiterations of the forum philosophy, when I think folks in this conversation are really focused on how do we deal with the extremes of threats and going around mitigations. I think people are generally pretty okay with the existing post mod type handling of that middle range, and their ability to put users/threads on ignore. I also think folks are generally in agreement that circumventing those tools is grounds for considering a ban, a position I think Seebs has been brought around to in the course of this. So, to try to summarize this section, I see Agreement on the core philosophy that that 3/4 range, which most sites won't tolerate, is handled sufficiently with existing tools, and that such behavior doesn't warrant ban consideration Agreement that extremes, especially behaviors that circumvent those tools, warrant a ban consideration I think the remaining object of discussion in this vein is What do we do when someone is escalating into that range? What tools can be used, and how should they be used? Do the mods need anything new in their toolbox for handling this range? How many chances do we give a user once they're up there to change before pulling the trigger on a ban? Ban Criteria Disconnect So back to the top level thing I started with. My understanding is that Seebs is focused on not having ban consideration until things have reached a definite point of no return (inasmuch as anything with human behavior can be definite), defined mainly on the communication breakdown because without communication nothing else can work. I think that they have decided that circumventing boundaries like Alix did is sufficiently bad behavior to warrant considering a ban even in absence of a total communication breakdown. Others in this conversation, to my understanding, want that upper end of bad behavior (the exact bad behavior I think varies and doesn't just focus on the circumventing if tools and boundaries) to be weighted more in these considerations than it has been. The AB disconnect I see is thus that a lot of people are talking about "consider banning once behavior reaches XYZ level", Seebs spent a long time focused on the communication angle, so the former felt unheard/dismissed. This I think is exacerbated by a feeling that, because extreme horrible behavior isn't being used as a basis to consider a ban, that folks are feeling/continuing to feel super unsafe. Does this sound like a correct understanding of the state of the thread? If it does, then I think we are on the same page of these questions I listed earlier What do we do when someone is escalating into that range? What tools can be used, and how should they be used? Do the mods need anything new in their toolbox for handling this range? How many chances do we give a user once they're up there to change before pulling the trigger on a ban? I think that communication angle falls into both discussions.
Based on evidence so far, seebs, anyone you do decide to ban will also be a person a lot of users think should be banned, though not for the same reasons. It would be really hard for any user to get so incoherent or deliberately hostile that you can't work with them, without also being so wildly harmful that users start asking for a ban. So, all else being equal, agitation from lots of reasonable users to ban someone actually is evidence that they should be banned (though not sufficient by itself) even though their reasons have nothing to do with your standards. To come at this another way: I'm rereading Athol's huge ISM thread. One thing that jumps out at me: Beldaran made a great post on page 42 explaining why any effective communication with Athol was impossible and was going to stay impossible until Athol got medical treatment. Beldaran was backed up by professional experience, solid science, and everything that happened on pages 1-41. I bet she was saying the same things on moderator back channels and/or directly to you; if not, she certainly could have if asked. You banned Athol for, as far as I can see, the exact reasons Beldaran laid out, on page 114 - seven weeks later. It was an exhausting seven weeks. You're only going to ban in really unusual cases, so each one is going to be a tricky decision. But you have a lot of resources to help with those decisions that you're not using fully. More listening, even to people with different motives than you but especially to your trusted mods, would save a lot of harm and spoons.
Not entirely. I don't think most of Athol's behavior was "with intent to harm just to prove that they can", for instance. But it was awful, and there was a lot of it, and there was no communication at all; in the entire time she was here, we didn't get a successful round-trip criticism even once. Hmm. Okay, so. A sort of attempt at explaining this: Think of it as a little bit like a scoring system. Only I'm not building a single positive-or-negative number. I'm counting the positives and the negatives entirely separately. There's reasons to want to make sure someone can be in the community, like "they're helpful to other people" or "the community is helping them". There's reasons to want to curtail their interactions, like "they're hurting people" or "they're consuming a lot of time and attention that people would rather not spend on them". And by default, "curtail interactions" means something like "post mod" or "tell them not to do X". It's only if that's not working that we start thinking about things like bans. Specific case analysis to show how this works: I ban spammers. I don't really think this is complicated or confusing. Spammers aren't participating at all, they're just spamming, so the community loses nothing by excluding them. There's no communication happening, so even if the harm they did might be completely trivial, there's no reason to put up with it at all. cT was contributing a lot of fun RP activities that a lot of people valued and enjoyed, so we were willing to put in a lot of work to try to accommodate her and mitigate the harms. You'll note that she's not banned; if she wanted to continue RPing without addressing the complaints, I'd be inclined to say that we should put in the work to handle the post mod workload to allow her to participate while mitigating the fairly-occasional harm, because that offered a lot of value to people. On the other hand, we really couldn't communicate with her about it. But merely "can't communicate" wasn't enough for me to think a ban was appropriate, because it appeared to be pretty easy to deal with the problems that people were reporting. In Athol's case, we couldn't communicate, it was clearly hurting her, and she was causing a lot of distress for a lot of people, and a ridiculous amount of workload for the mods, and was unable to do anything to mitigate this even a tiny bit. She wouldn't even, say, stop posting while very drunk. So, what about Alix? Early on, Alix definitely did a lot of harm, but it was reasonably-avoidable harm. She had meltdowns, but you could ignore her and the problem was mostly solved, we could use post mod, stuff like that. She'd communicate well about things, and appeared to be working fairly hard on addressing issues. She contributed socially in other ways, people got benefits from interacting with her. You'll note that this is high values for both cost and benefit. And that's different from "neutral", because it means that people will have strong feelings both ways. That's why this was controversial, rather than being uninteresting; she wasn't a slightly positive or slightly negative force, she was a very-positive-and-very-negative force. She started being aggressive about boundaries after a bit. Not right away, and I think mostly in response to perceived threats, but once it started, it sort of stayed as a backdrop to everything else. She did sometimes actually make material efforts to improve this, directly or indirectly. She put real work into finding ways to avoid accidental boundary violations, for instance. That was evidence of at least some intent to address the problem. But it also meant that the problem had become somewhat more serious; this was moving from "genuinely uncontrolled shitty behavior" to "controlled and directed shitty behavior". Which is to say, it moved from "behavior which is not controlled, but which causes harm" to "abuse". Even then, there were a lot of signs of positive change for quite a while. She continued to get better at control, to demonstrate the ability to calm down and disengage, and so on... And that looked like significant progress. Unfortunately, somewhere in there, she decided that the isolation she was experiencing because people didn't want to interact with her because she was an asshole who had repeatedly hurt them was not actually the result of her behavior, but a result of Wiwaxia's campaign against her, or unspecified other people's campaigns against her. And that is where we start having a serious problem we can't fix -- because it meant that she was no longer actually working on fixing the problem "Alix is an asshole". She was now working on the problem "people think Alix is an asshole", and doing so under the false assumption that they were doing so only because of malicious third parties. And after that, it seems to me, it was consistently downhill, because no force on earth could cause her to retain the information that this wasn't the case. We had a handful of people in her Discord, and every time she started claiming this, everyone would point out that it wasn't true, and she'd recognize that... for a little while. And then gradually edit it back until she was convinced it was all third parties. So, by the time of the big Accountability Thread, I was basically about done, but I was willing to hold out some hope that Alix actually recognizing this shit, and owning up to it, meant she was going to start trying to fix it. I was wrong. Because by this time, the only problem was "people aren't acting like she's better", and she kept emphasizing the complete irrelevance of fixing behavior if it didn't make people talk to her again. Which is to say, she no longer thought it mattered whether people were getting hurt, only whether people getting hurt caused her to have fewer friends. That brings us to another bit of analysis: Alix consistently not only disregards boundaries, but actively seeks out ways to violate them. Alix on post mod is semi-contained. Alix banned is also known as Alix on occasional new accounts that she sneaks past account moderation. Yeah, we check things out, but she's persistent and it's really hard to catch every possible signup. And that gives her significant potential for doing a lot of damage without post mod. But then we got camelcaseCognomen, and verified that she was bypassing the system even when she did have access, which is to say, the risk of her doing that isn't actually increased by banning her. A year ago, she was basically willing to accept "this is the access you can have to this site". That changed, and with it, the pragmatic argument of "we can mitigate harm better this way than that way" went away. TL;DR: My goals are to minimize harm done while maximizing benefit. At one point, keeping Alix on post mod and talking to her about things seemed likely to do better at that than banning. That is no longer the case. Yeah, that went on longer than it should have. I don't think I should have banned her right that minute, but it shouldn't have been that much longer. The alcohol thing really was central. But that was also the first-ever case, and I was really, really, reluctant to set that precedent. On the other hand, I'm not sure the precedent I set was any better.
I'm addressing this only to say that I really feel like you missed my point but it feels pretty futile to keep trying, so I'm not going to. @jacktrash This is a better answer to the question you asked me last night. It wasn't something I felt like I could reasonably ask for. Thank you, Beldaran, for saying it.
I understand that part of this site's purpose is to provide a place for people who might be banned elsewhere. But my concern is this: do people, by creating an account here, consent to being abused by other members?
Obviously not. Assumption of risk is a better model than consent. Like, if you go to a hospital, you aren't consenting to catch an infectious disease. But that sure is a thing that can happen sometimes, because there's sick people there. You can certainly expect the hospital to take lots of measures to keep you safe from infection - but you can't expect them to turn all the sick people away. The analogy's not perfect, because abuse is on purpose while infection generally isn't, but that's basically my thoughts about it.
However you care to phrase it, I think it's something that should be more clear upon account creation.
i'm not arguing for any standard based in how "bad" anyone is, and you've quoted things i've said, so you are reading/responding to what i'm typing. i know that this was not directed @me specifically, but i'd appreciate you acknowledging what i'm arguing i agree with this. this is what i'm arguing for. i'm - i think the time i spent talking about compassion burnout and wanting to be able to disengage when we want to made this get lost but this is what i'm asking for being part of the decision tree. it's not about a user being "bad" and not even directly connected to "preventing community wide burnout" i think you tried helping alix and athol well beyond what you and the modteam could reasonably do for accommodations - you keep framing this as a communication issue, which i don't get and doesn't make sense to me as where to draw the line but seems an awful lot like oh hey i think i'm getting especially frustrated here because while we've taken different routes to get to this conclusion i am pretty sure that we are in agreement about this, and that the plan you are formulating is basically what i asked for on page 6, but your direct engagement with what i've said has been incredibly dismissive finally what is "average" to you here? because you have selected for a userbase where the average user here is absolutely someone worrying about being next and who doesn't have anywhere else to go.
had a doc appointment at stupid early o’clock and it fucked up my hip, slept all day, super drugged. i can’t seem to process complexity, and this discussion is one that deserves a clear head. so i just want to say, i hear you. and while seebs can be a stubborn butt, they are listening to criticism way more than it sounds like from their posts. i think seebs is pretty worn out too, from taking care of sick spouse while working a full time and a part time, and helping nick move, and being the only functional admin here while i’m out. so please be patient, ok? there’s no need for this discussion to get rancorous. we don’t have another athol running around making trouble while we talk this through, there’s no hurry. it might be three weeks before i can even get a consult with the surgeon. no clue how often i’ll be capable of joining the discussion. please don’t think i’m ignoring you if i miss stuff or take a geologic age to reply.
To make it more explicit: That was my understanding, and I was intending this to communicate my views to confirm/deny that we appeared to be at least roughly in agreement about here. I did not intend to be dismissive. I think in some cases I was aiming for something along the lines of "it seems we're in agreement about X, but usually if I say X people come along and expect that I also mean X+2, and just to be clear, X+2 is still not part of my view of things". Where I'm not actually under the impression that you said the other thing, I'm just thinking about it because it's conceptually near-by to me. So to be clearer: I'm saying that, in this case, I think you're basically right and that my approach to this had flaws in the past. I am not sure I'm communicating it well. (But note, that's not even a little bit like the kind of "communication problem" that I've been talking about.) Okay, so. Imagine that someone does a thing which I want them to stop, and I tell them this. What happens next? They might, or might not, understand what I said. They might, or might not, act on it, or respond in some way. If they consistently respond by expressing something about what they think my complaint is, and what they think my complaint is is completely wrong, then I don't think I've successfully told them about my complaint. And that means I can't tell them what I want them to change. Which is a problem, if it's important to me that they change it! For instance, I very much had that problem with cT. I simply could not describe a complaint to her and have her acknowledge what the complaint was. She'd respond to some different complaint I didn't make, instead. So if I said "I think there's a problem with how you handle criticism, you seem to be dismissing or attacking people who criticise you", she might respond with "I don't see why you're so up-in-arms about my RP being sexual sometimes". And... that's unrelated to what I said. Which is a big problem if I'm trying to address things, and that's why she ended up on post mod -- because we could not do anything that would cause her to even acknowledge what people said when they complained about an alleged problem. For contrast: You made posts, I responded, you said you felt like I was being dismissive or not understanding what you said. But here, I think, I am able to articulate back what your complaint is at least approximately correctly. You're upset because you said things about policy, and I quoted them and responded... only sort of tangentially, also drifting off into related discussions or extensions from them or more extreme positions that people might take. Which is a problem I sometimes have. But it's possible for you to describe that and me to say "oh, yeah, I did do that". And heck, even if I didn't think I was doing it, I could still at least approximately describe what you said the problem was. I wouldn't look at this and come back with "Stop mistaking people on tumblr who are mad at me about ace identity politics for my actual administrative policy." There's some kind of connection between what you say and what I'm responding to, even if it's sometimes sorta tenuous because I'm highly distractable and tend to sort of wander off topic. I actually think that's a minority of the population here. Certainly, they're much more common here than many forums, and some people who don't feel like that will feel much less welcome here than at most forums. But there's a lot of people who aren't having that much trouble fitting in on most forums, but who find some sort of value in some way in this one. For instance, they might prefer to have conversations that wouldn't be allowed on a lot of forums, but would be here. They don't have to, they aren't worried about losing their temper some day and suddenly writing about horrific childhood abuse, but also they want to be able to do that. And they can, here. I know we've had some users who were here, not because they're particularly explosive, but because they have friends who are, and they want to hang out with those friends. And so on.
Yes this. To requote because I think these are really emblematic I don't have hard stats about the composition of the forum, but observation appears to be that, if not the average user in some mathematical sense, at least a prototypical user of kintsugi has problematic brain shit going on like this. There at least seem to be lot of cluster B-ish folks who, either on their own or with help from mods, behave pretty reasonably, and even if they screw up still aren't fucking Death Threats And Boundaries What Boundaries Georg. If they feel unsafe here, if they are abused here, they may not have or feel they have any other place to go. I do not know what the balance point between ousting the Extreme Bad to protect those without another place versus sliding to ousting those very people is. I don't think there is any one and done such point. This strikes me as a "you have to live in the question" kind of deal. I feel like at this point, with the precedents set by banning Athol and Alix, there is now protocol for how to handle extreme bad actors and there is at least some sort of upper limit to behavior that still allows for kintsugijin with problems to be able to safely work on those problems. I'm not sure we're going to hit any better answer to "when do the mods decide enough is enough/that Sufficiently Egregious has been reached" than give people besides Seebs more weight in that decision making so it doesn't take months of burn out to get there. It also seems to me that harm mitigation outside of "what do we do with the bad actor themself" could still use work. I don't know what's needed there, and I'm not one of the hurt parties so I don't have any useful input beyond noting that I've seen a lot of hurt and the discussion for the first part, at I said, seems to be as well hashed out as it's gonna be.
I think "being willing to consider banning sooner" is a good adjustment especially if the major red flags for that include "intentionally ignoring boundaries/preventative measures" and "entire mod team is burned out on this". it feels like that'd also catch the Alix comes back under a different name and uses that to slowly start the same shit again scenario. Aside from the ban issue, could we also discuss how to better help the people who get attacked or hurt? bc yeah, thats a complicated case by case thing, people getting hurt and people doing the hurting are not mutually exclusive, etc etc but the track record on this is...not great. It's been brought up multiple times in the past but always seems to get lost in the banning discussion or everyone's just tired and burned out on the conversation by the time it does come up. (idk if it'd be better to make a seperate thread or keep it here) I'm talking about things other than bans and punishment btw. Things like how to make people feel like they're heard and listened to, how to help people feel like they also have a place here, how to help them feel like they can talk about the person who hurt them, how to help them feel like the community gives a shit about their hurt too.
I was wondering this too. Maybe it'd help to get away from the baggage of punishment/ban/this specific situation convo, etc? The issue is broader, and this thread is very specific to banning and Alix. Alsoi like now I think of it, I wouldn't see a thread titled "Alix is out" and think "ah yes this is where to submit my ideas for supporting kintsugijin during intracommunity abuse/toxicity".
