Kossack Chaoslillith posted a wonderful diary offering her services moderating Daily Kos for a living wage. It was an entertaining and heartfelt diary, if not necessarily a serious proposition. I've had almost the same thoughts, for almost the same reasons, as she did, and I'm kind of surprised in retrospect the idea hasn't been floated earlier.
DK4 is broken. That's the word that's getting spread. I know most Kossacks don't pay hardly any attention to the meta stuff (at least I hope; you can't all be as crazy as I am, that would be bad) but if you do you probably have read a long comment on the matter with my username at the bottom, to say the least. But whether you care about HR algorithms or not you've probably noticed the pie fights.
What to do about them? Can't we just get autoban to work? Why not just hire a bunch of people at minimum wage to read through everything and pass judgement? These questions aren't really any easier to answer than "how do you get Republicans to vote for a tax increase?" it turns out. But let's discuss it, and please forgive me but I'm going to have to let you know about some of my background and offer my unauthenticated opinion along the way.
If you do decide to click past, no worries. Thanks for your time. Hope it helps. But there's a poll.
I can be totally fair and unemotional when it comes to banning bigots, stalkers and trolls
That was the line that turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back. (That metaphor won't get me in trouble with PETA, will it?) Chaoslillith is honest and intelligent as any Kossack. I'm not calling her out, but I do want to discuss this quote from her diary. To keep this thing less than a city block long, I'm going to have to be brief but I have a lot to say, so I hope you'll forgive me for being blunt and direct, and even erratic. First the background. Mine, I mean.
My dad taught me to understand computers when I was too young to know there was such a thing as not understanding computers. I remember being delighted at an Encyclopedia Brown story (IIRC) that explained why programming a computer to do your homework is harder than doing your homework, and outraged that popular science fiction from the Jetsons to Star Trek kept propagating the myth that a computer (or Mr. Spock) can calculate something you can't quantify. When I joined the Navy, I got a rent-a-crow and Advanced Avionics training. It was the training that was advanced, not the avionics, but it taught me the transistors-and-binary guts by way of educating me in troubleshooting radio and radar navigation systems.
The Dawn of The Microcomputer was in full swing, and I jumped right in. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were popping up like dandelions in spring, but I'd already become familiar with "online" forums on gov't mainframe systems. Qlink and Compuserve as well, and then of course The Internet. Mailing lists, chat and IRC, and the crown jewel of electronic discussions: USENET, some weird hybrid descendent of those mainframe and BBS message forums, which predates TCP/IP itself. All of these things are still around, of course; each board, forum, and thread a little in-group trying to keep the disruptive posters from, well, disrupting, in various ways, for various reasons, against various opposition.
Usenet was da bomb, of course. But the thing that stands out to me through all this history was something that happened on a technical listserve in the 90s. After the Navy I eventually joined up with my over-achieving sister and was mildly successful in teaching software training courses. This lead to working for a networking reseller working with SNMP-based network management software, and because of that I read the Simple Network Management Protocol V3 listserve. SNMPv2 was a huge success in the boom years of the Internet and there was a lot of interest in an improved version. ("SNMPv3: Practice Safe Sets") Two of the primary authors of the original version were active on the list along with dozens of other software engineers to develop the new rev, which had to implement both remote configuration and security. Some of you, I'm sure, are already ahead of me.
The flame war was EPIC. Tolkienesque. Highly educated, extremely intelligent people, dealing exclusively with absolutely technical, professional issues. Remote configuration and security are opposing priorities. Any solution is going to have to balance the two, a lot like getting a teabagger and a DFH to kiss and make up. Two different methods of achieving that balance were offered, one backed by each of the two most well-respected programers on the list, and the ensuing discussion caused something of a personality clash, recognizable here on DK as a pie fight. The list was only a few dozen programmers; I was the only non-programmer, as far as I know, and was studiously lurking. Not everyone (else) participated in the heated rhetoric, but it wasn't limited to those two alone. I saw lots of software engineers try quite purposefully to calmly proceed with the technical work of designing a communication protocol, only to become part of the melee. Every possible insult and callout, ad hom and spin, meta and trolling infested even the most serious attempts to supposedly end the madness. The mess lasted for weeks, months. When the deadline for the RFC came around, the work was unfinished; a special committee had to be formed to consider what to do. Eventually they published an SNMPv2.5, believe it or not. During the conflagration, I broke my silence and tried to help a little with the meta, but I certainly wasn't going to take any tone with such well educated and well accomplished professionals on their mailing list. Afterwards, I was asked by the guy actually putting the documents together for my opinion on some of the nomenclature and terminology. The only reason I mention that is that it is the reason you can go check that I at least contributed something to SNMPv2.5, even if it doesn't say what it was. It certainly wasn't programming expertise or moderation policies.
That all happened around about the time I got involved in alt.destroy.microsoft. Usenet has both moderated and unmoderated newsgroups, and even in officially unmoderated groups, a "consensus charter" can be established to identify posting guidelines. ADM wasn't moderated, and had no charter. When I got there, it was about a dozen active contributors and about fifty active trolls. People who didn't like the idea of a discussion group dedicated to stopping the monopoly, and who made their living either using or selling Microsoft products. Exclusively, of course, meaning that we were threatening their livelihoods with our anti-trust activism. But we stuck to our guns and did what we could to confront them, intellectually, satirically, humorously, or otherwise, while trying to enjoy conversations centered around the issue of the monopolization that Microsoft has been perpetrating almost since their founding, and how to end it. But let's face it, there isn't much you can say in conversation about that, other than bitching and whining, so confrontation was really the most common activity.
There are no donuts, no "like" buttons, no way to even stop spam, in unmoderated Usenet groups. No registration, no banning. No way to beat a troll but to outlast them or wear them out. But it was nice having the certainty of who was a troll and who wasn't that the circumstances allowed; if you were defending Microsoft, you were a troll, and if you weren't, you were a contributor. Eventually, it became noticeable to the other contributors that I had something of a knack for stomping trolls. They even gave me ascii art to put in my sig to illustrate the knickname I had adopted after a troll tried to use it as an insult while I pummeled him, rhetorically: Tyrantasaurus Max. A couple years after I started posting, alt.destroy.microsoft consisted of a dozen active contributors. It was too quiet, of course, and half of them drifted away. But if anyone were to check alt.destroy.microsoft to see what it was all about, they would find a calm series of postings explaining to curious newbies precisely why and how Microsoft's illegal business tactics are a problem, and a stern collection of postings thrashing the hell out of pro-Microsoft drive-byes.
There's a gap after that while discussion forums moved onto the web. They weren't very good at first, and I didn't bother with them, mostly. Even today, the threaded commenting feature of this site pales in comparison to the performance and functionality of newsreader software, though admittedly there are benefits.
The question is, are Recs and HRs one of them? Does it improve online discussions to be able to "vote"? Does it improve them further to tie such voting to the franchise, like mojo? These are questions that I am not supposed to ask; the answers must be 'yes' because that's the way we do it here, and why else would we do it other than to improve discussions? But the answer to that gets into the thorny epistemological issues of just what "improve" means. Kos sets the goal; as long as he's happy it is working right. But I don't think he actually enjoys meta, and while he might have a goal for DK, it isn't hard-coded. So my next diary will examine more explicitly the issues of "community moderation".
I State My Case
The Proposal