Trolls are on the loose!
They are making our Daily Kos experience less than it could be. They are hijacking threads and ruining diaries. They are elevating blood pressures. Site rule breaking is rampant, and getting worse.
But so is HR abuse.
What should we do?
There is much confusion lately about how to deal with these things. Meteor Blades' recent diary reminded people to "HR the content, not the user" in HCR diares, but it was taken by some beyond its intended scope.
In this diary I propose a new system for dealing with HRs and bannable offenses. It is just my two cents.
Problems with the current system:
This could be a whole diary in itself, and I don't want to take up too much space with it, but the basic problems are that:
- There is troll behavior going unpunished and allowed to continue
- There is outright bannable behavior going unpunished and allowed to continue
- There is HR abuse where HRs are given unfairly. There is currently much ambiguity and misunderstanding about when HRs are appropriate, exacerbating problems 1 and 2.
The site admins by their own admission cannot possibly police even a fraction of all of the threads. That's why we have the "Trusted User" status where individuals can give an HR to comments or tip jars that violate the site rules. If a comment has three times as many HRs as recs, it gets hidden. This leads to the problem that a tiny fraction of viewers of a thread (often only one) can ruin the HR system by erroneously uprating. Furthermore, peoples' misinterpretation of Meteor Blades' diary the other day has made it impossible to do do diligence against known trolls. For these reasons the autoban almost never kicks in, and trolls are 'gaming' the system.
In addition - and this is important - with HRing as the only option for flagging something, all offenses are treated equally, which is ridiculous. Thus calling someone a "retard" in a heated two-way argument receives the exact same potential sanction as, for instance, advocating 9/11 conspiracies or openly calling for the assassination of a Senator. I think this needs to be corrected.
Proposed system:
The outline is this:
A) When a Trusted User would go to HR a comment, a pulldown menu would appear with a list of options for the justification of the HR, and the user would have to pick one. Then the justification from each user who issues an HR would would be listed below the comment in question.
Since the pull down list would be an exhaustive list of all of the legit reasons for an HR, this would cut down on unjustified HRs and also on the inevitable thread jacking that happens when people ask why something was HR'd. Other TUs and admins could see the reasons listed right there and act accordingly.
The justifications for HR in the pull down menu would cover all of the possible legit reasons, things like:
- One sided ad hominem attack
- Obvious Republican talking points
- Generic threats
- Racism / sexism
- Obvious thread hijacking attempt
and so on.
B) There would be a new third button, called BR or "Ban Rate". This would be for the most serious offenses - the bannable ones - and would flag the comment to be individually examined by the site admins.
The Ban button would operate the same way as the Hide button above - a pull down menu would appear with all of the possible reasons and the ET user would have to pick one.
The admins would then have the discretion to ban the offending user, warn them, take no action, or to punish the TU user who BR'd the comment, if it is determined that it was done inappropriately. In this way, the Ban button would be a serious matter, used only very rarely to deal with the worst trolls, who are currently gaming the system.
Inappropriate use of the Ban button would result in severe sanctions. In fact, we could consider allowing access to it only by a new class of "Extra Trusted User" or something like that.
The justifications for BR in the pull down menu would be limited to the bannable offenses, things like:
- Physically threatening another user
- Calling for violence against a US public official
- Engaging in 9/11 conspiracy theory or holocaust denial
- Sock Puppetry
- 'Outing' another user
and whatever else the site admins list as a bannable offense.
I offer this proposal as a way to make some progress against the twin problems of rampant trollism and HR abuse. The idea for the pull down menus for HRs was floated in a thread a long time ago by I don't remember who, so credit to that person.