Re: Testing Discourse for Debian - Moderation concepts
* Neil McGovern: " Re: Testing Discourse for Debian - Moderation concepts"
(Mon, 13 Apr 2020 19:56:28 +0100):
> I am going to try and split this out into two replies, so those
> following along can see the different issues. The irony of the
> difficulty on doing this within email may or may not be lost for others.
>
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 02:43:31PM -0700, Ihor Antonov wrote:
> > > You have to trust the moderators,
> >
> > So far I am not convinced that I can trust you to moderate.
> >
> > > and you have to have some mechanism to
> > > evaluate that trust and to discuss it and possibly revoke it if something
> > > goes horribly awry.
> >
> > Prevention should always be the first step. Something WILL go wrong but you
> > are too blinded by the immediate sugar candy in front of you.
> >
>
> I just want to state, I won't debate any issues around freedom of
> speech. I believe that these do not apply in this context
I think, freedom of speech *can be* an issue when you hand over moderation to
a system and random people that are not explicitely delegated to do those tasks.
> - especially with Debian being a private entity.
I tried hard to understand this part of hte sentence, but failed. Could you
please elaborate?
> Now, I do believe you have a comment on moderation, and how this is
> done. This requires me to explain two concepts in Discourse - trust
> levels and flags.
>
> Firstly, trust levels. These are the levels of "trust" that the platform
> has in any particular user. Instead of explaining it here, please have a
> read of the following:
> https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/
> The short version is that the more a particular account interacts with
> the community in a positive way, the more trust the system has about
> them, and the more privileges they are afforded to assist in
> moderation.
The trust system gives me no trust at all. It is very closely bound to
participation over the web interface, monitors the reading frequency and time
spent on reading by users. Apart from a quite unpleasant feeling of 'big brother
is watching you' I do not see at all a nearly equivalent handling of users who
want to interact over the mail interface. Reading the link above clearly states
for me that mail users are second class citizens in discourse. I completely
fail in understanding someone who states, that discourse has a good email
integration.
> Secondly, flags. Discourse has the opinion that moderation cannot be
> proactive with a small group of users - this doesn't scale.
It must not scale and it must not be proactive, moderation must be correct and
considerate.
> encourages community members to flag posts. If a post receives
> sufficient flags, it is then automatically hidden. Users may chose to
> "unhide" the post for themseleves if they wish to view it.
>
> These are then sent to the moderating team to agree, disagree or ignore
> the flag. This will unhide the post, or keep it hidden and offer an
> opportunity for the moderator to suggest the original author edits their
> post in light of the number of flags they got. If an author does so, the
> post automatically unhides.
>
> All these actions are logged, and affects the trust levels above. In
> fact, every time an admin performs any action on a user, this is
> logged.
Where is it logged? Are the logs public? Where can I see who flagged a post,
took action on it?
> I hope this explains how I believe that moderation is more powerful on
> Discourse, but also more practical, transparent and accountable.
All of the above makes me in contrary believe (together with the experience I
have so far with interaction on discourse, namely discuss.tryton.org), that
discourse is indeed *not* practical, transparent and accountable.
Mathias
--
Mathias Behrle ✧ Debian Developer
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