there are no rules in kintsugi

That strikes me as a question you perhaps should have asked before all the accusatory posts about how we definitely did the whole thing wrong? And I know Beldaran did respond with a bunch of stuff specifically related to the suicide thing, like resources and such. So, empirically, yes.

 

And this is where the problem comes in:

Sooner or later, we're going to have a person who has a highly-atypical trigger and is freaking the fuck out, and someone's gonna decide that it's better to temporarily hide/edit/something a post so they don't do something drastic than to carefully and slowly work things out, and we're going to end up with "but how on earth could anyone predict that this completely harmless post would get pear wiggled". And the answer is: You couldn't. Because this community is full of people who are mentally ill, and who can and do have triggers that are completely impossible to anticipate.

And the more we try to specify the circumstances where that might happen, the more jarring it'll be when things don't follow that anticipated path. So I'm trying to make it extra super clear that we genuinely cannot tell in advance what might someday come up.

So I think it makes sense to try to add some more explanation on how this works, with some amount of "here are examples", but at the same time... There is nothing you can do to guarantee that you will never make a completely innocuous post that has to disappear or someone will kill themselves right now and we don't have ten minutes to wait for you to respond to a PM. And in a situation like that, I'd guess that the post would return once the person had calmed down and crisis had passed, but we end up with crises sometimes and they can look really weird to people.

Huh. Okay but this gives me what might be a useful idea. Consider a user profile field which indicates, say, whether you'd rather have mods edit a post, or pear-wiggle it, or what, in a case where for some reason there is a Clear And Present Danger that needs to be addressed right away without waiting for input. We could possibly implement some stuff like that, and at least give people some choice in the matter.

This is probably not well-thought-out. But basically, I want to make it clear that the long-term outcome should always be some kind of discussion of what you want to happen with your post. Stuff happening that you didn't approve of should, in general, be a short-term thing, unless you're really really committed to something that's seriously harmful to people, in which case we might just have to say "sorry, no".

 

True. But also, just because it's frightening to step on doesn't mean it's going to blow your foot off.

I will admit that this is a scary situation, and I don't like that, but I'm not convinced I can make it better without actually making it worse. But I'll give it more thought because this is a recurring concern.

 

I disagree, somewhat. It is absolutely possible for people to think they are "being punished" and be just plain wrong. It is ultimately a fact claim; it admits false beliefs. And the fact is, while feelings are innately valid as feelings, the belief that you're being persecuted can absolutely be false. So sometimes the answer to "why are you punishing me" is "we're not".

Okay, you're right on this. I'll draft up some more words and add them to the welcome thread.

Hmm. Okay I think I see where this has been bugging me. I've been trying to make the user guidelines be about how users should behave. And that, to me, is fundamentally a completely separate question from "what kinds of things moderators might do". Because I don't have the implicit premise that if people are upset by a thing, it means you "did something wrong". If you make a perfectly reasonable post but because of circumstances people freak out about it, moderators might choose to change something about your post, or move it, or something. This doesn't mean your post was wrong; it means that in context someone thought that it was best to do a thing, at least temporarily.

I think I maybe need more words on that in there, to help clarify that mod actions aren't necessarily an assertion that your post is wrong.

 

Also, reading back over it: I didn't contact F&G much at the time, because this all happened shortly before I went to spend time doing dentistry. I also knew Beldaran was on it. If I hadn't been at work followed by dentistry followed by more work, I would probably have checked in more, but at the time I wasn't really present. (I also didn't check in with the triggered people I knew of, for much the same reason.)

 

Except for the thing where I don't think it's sane or appropriate to try to build back to general rules. Because as soon as you do that from exceptional cases, you get bullshit rules.

 

I didn't, though. I said that might happen. It also might not. People will make judgment calls based on specific circumstances.

I mean, if you want to call "if we think we can prevent someone from dying by doing a thing, we'll probably do the thing" a rule, sure, but I don't think it's coherent enough to be useful.

I'd agree that it's arguably untrue, but I think it's less untrue than "there are actually rules". Because "there are actually rules" gives the impression (at least to me) that there's actual articulated if-a-then-b type things, or defined boundaries, and I really don't think there are any particularly solid rules. There's a lot of things that are usually going to be taken into account.

 

While I think that this is a discussion worth having, you've agreed to put something about trigger warnings in the guidelines so I feel like it would be good to pencil something in soonish so that people can have an idea of what's going on.

 

There is one down in the protocols section. The guideline section is currently a level of abstraction above that; it's more at the level of "think about other people" and less about specific ways that would happen.

 

Okay cool, thank you. I'll throw a link in here so that people can see it.

 

So thinking about it, here's the problem:

"If we think we can prevent someone from dying by doing a thing, we'll probably do a thing" isn't a rule for non-moderators. It doesn't give you any useful insight into whether or not someone might suddenly edit a particular post.

So we can have some moderation guidelines up, but they won't tell users what they can or can't do. But that may be okay. It replaces "what you can or can't do" with "what moderators are up to".

In short, I can't tell you exactly what or when moderators will do, but I can tell you why they'll be doing it.

 

Actually, I'd say that putting this somewhere prominent, in pretty much those words, could be very useful. It has some real oomph, it's concise, and it gives some grounding for the reasons you don't want to lay down solid if-a-then-b rules. I don't think it will solve every argument that comes up, but if people have a general idea that this is an important driver behind some modly actions, it makes those actions seem less arbitrary and unpredictable. It doesn't apply to every mod action, and it doesn't box those actions in such that they have to be consistent or follow a set formula, just because of the amount of personal variation out there and context and all that jazz. But if there's a loaded situation and mods do a thing, if a decent proportion of people know that this explicit statement is out there and could be driving those actions, it might help.

 

Agreed.

The distinction is, instead of "we reserve the right to edit or delete posts in which Bad Persons who are Bad and Deserve Censure used Words We Prohibit", it's "we reserve the right to edit or delete posts which are currently hurting someone". And not "we will", but "we reserve the right to".

I've added an intro paragrph to the mod section in the Read This First thread:

Moderation is not really about enforcing "rules" for user behavior. It's about addressing things that hurt people. To summarize: If we think doing a thing will prevent someone from dying, we will probably do the thing. Usually we'll try to engage with people before doing things. Sometimes we won't, but we'll still be open to talking about things afterwards. Moderation doesn't necessarily imply that posts edited or moved were "wrong" or "bad".​

In the specific case of F&G's post, there were people who had suicidal-ideation type problems reading the vent thread and hitting a suicide-methodology description which fucked them up, which is why I responded with editing the thing immediately rather than doing back-and-forth conversations; because there was a clear and present danger with specific people already known to be having serious and immediate problems from that text being there.