Daily Kos used to be a clubhouse. With the upgrade to DK4, and the (re)absorption of sister sites like Black Kos and Swing State Project, it has changed. It is now a community center. And the group meeting in the all purpose room has some problems with those using the equipment room, and they both dislike those ruffians down in the basement. So to speak.
It used to be that protecting DK from outside intrusion was the primary task of moderation, and encouraging civil discussions was considered the result of accomplishing that task. Such a presumption works for a clubhouse, because you can figure that everyone in the club is, well, in the same club. There might be fights or personality clashes, but everyone knows everyone, so a bit of social moderation is all it takes to stop those fights from breaking out at inopportune times.
For a community center, though, the situation is different. When you're trying to create an open, inviting meeting place for diverse opinions, the task of moderation becomes much harder. And, more importantly, much less fun.
Good morning. Welcome to The Hiddens, an experimental series of diaries for (unofficial) discussion and reporting of moderation activity on Daily Kos. My name is T. Max Devlin, and I will be your facilitator. Please call me Max. Today we're going to focus on discussion. At the moment, the only additions to the hidden comments list (the hiddens, note the lower case) to discuss in The Hiddens (upper case) is the continued efforts to trip the autoban (I say that in jest, mostly) by one TU, a Kossack who's been here since 2008. It isn't a trivial case: it highlights some things I've been saying about "political correctness" and explores the line between truth telling and trolling. So maybe later we will have some 'records', but this morning I will just provide my thoughts.
In a community center, the priorities of moderation become inverted from what they are in a smaller, clubhouse environment. Encouraging (without mandating through PC demands) civil and productive conversation and well reasoned discussions become the top goal, and excluding members becomes just a (last resort, unfortunate but unavoidable) mechanism in service to that goal. Would-be contributors who would be ostracized from the clubhouse, might have very good reasons to be in and contribute to the community center, even if they disagree with most of the other people in the center on more general grounds. We can still find something to learn from them, if we can maintain civilized discourse. And we should make an effort to include those we disagree with rather than try to banish them, because it is good to have a diverse set of opinions we can interact with when developing our own opinions, and our community consensus.
There are (at least) two things that I consider required reading for every TU. One is Plato's Socratic dialogues (as much as you can stand) and the other is the novel Lord of the Flies. These are both very important in different ways for anyone who wants to try to moderate other people's discussions to be familiar with.
The Socratic dialogues are a case study in polemic, rhetoric, sophistry. (These words mean things, and they aren't the simple pejorative things that so many seem to believe they are. Neither the Socratic dialogs nor LotF illuminate why that is, though, so that is a discussion for another day.) They are text book examples, however, of how not to argue.
That might have shocked some of you. The vast majority of highly educated folks (more educated than me, I readily admit) are taught to revere the Socratic dialog (which means the style, not the content, of the Socratic dialogs, which are actually spread out over a number of works by Plato) as the epitome of civil argument and philosophical debate. But I think that idea can only be sustained if you ignore two very important things.
First, the failure of the technique in the short term. All Socrates (or Plato, if you think Socrates was a didactic fiction) ever managed to accomplish is not knowing what 'truth' or 'beauty' or 'love' or 'strength' is, or whatever concept (word) it was that was being examined. Socrates was a master at undoing his opponent's certainty of knowledge. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, it was a revolutionary, ground-breaking approach which has led, directly or not, to the modern triumph of science and technology. But that is because matter and energy can be logically reduced, they are deductive, they are arithmetic.
Words and humans and philosophical concepts (including not just 'truth' but also 'lie') can not be analyzed that way. Socrates lived in an age when that wasn't as evident as it is now. The Greeks were developing and discovering the science of mathematics at a hectic pace. It might seem to them that soon everything in the universe would be reduced to perfect categories of form that would enable people to refute the confusion inherent in such questions as "what is beauty?".
Socrates showed through rhetoric that this wouldn't be the case. That words (concepts, if you must) don't have definable dividing lines that can be empirically tested, that the debate over what is the correct political policy is not reducible to math in a way that leads to the end of the debate. So that is one way that Socrates teaches us how not to argue. It is a trivial task (trivial for us, having learned from the master) to eviscerate and discombobulate any position held by any opponent. Too easy. So easy we begin to think that that is the process of debate, and the goal of rhetoric. And end up nowhere but wallowing in ignorance.
Because the second big lesson to be learned from Plato's documentation of his mentor is that Socratic dialog failed not just in the short term but in the long term. In case any of you are unaware, the Greeks sought to banish Socrates for his gadfly act of doing nothing but constantly undermining all certainty. The FAQ guideline he violated was questioning the existence of the Gods, but that was a legalistic technicality. What they were punishing him for was being annoying, distracting, and disruptive (no matter how calmly he did so.) When Socrates refused to be ostracized by exile, they determined he had to be killed. Did Socrates commit suicide because he raised the cup of poison to his own lips, or was it capital punishment for thought crimes?
Both perspectives are true. But Socrates' bony mojo is the same no matter which one you accept as "more true". The question TUs must ask themselves, and must read at least some of the Socratic Dialogues in order to understand, is "when is a truth teller actually a troll because they are disruptive, and when is a troll actually a truth teller because their disruptions are instructive?" Simply excluding annoying personalities works fine if you are in a club house. If you are in a community center and you are trying to be taken seriously as a meeting ground for debate, then it can quickly become self-defeating.
Handling trolls used to be easy, because we didn't handle them, we toyed with them and then ejected them. If the TUs on DK are not willing to step up their game, though, and HR comments more carefully (not less, even, just more deliberately than enforcing political correctness in language and picking sides once the pastry starts flying), then Kos should go back to a personal blog, for all the open discussion and political action our efforts here might generate.
Of course I am not the only one who has described the current moderation environment as "Lord of the Flies". I've already written about this before, and I'm not going to go through how and why it is appropriate for our circumstances. The only point I would like to make (a really important one I think may be overlooked by many people) is that LotF is about children in the same way that Animal Farm is about barnyard livestock. If you haven't read the novel lately, I suggest checking it out: I guarantee it will be more instructive than you thought it would, if you bear in mind it is an analogy like Animal Farm, not a fiction like 1984.
I'm Up for Discussion, I invite your comments and suggestions, and I'll see you in The Hiddens. &&&
According to aoeu, my chief rival for the Top Moderator spot, imho, in a comment in below the "Obese?/Clown Rape" defense troll has probably been suspended by admin action due to complaints. And boy did he need it. I hope he calms down and rejoins the TU ranks with a new perspective.
One of the interesting points to my distinction between "social moderation" (rhetorical response) and "community moderation" (hiding comments) is the very real way that community moderation becomes social moderation. If you'll notice, the majority of Kossacks stay out of the hiddens because having a comment hidden can be embarrassing. It isn't unheard of to see someone posting a comment they know will be hidden, or want to be hidden. But apart from that, it seems that the social stigma of committing such a faux pas as writing a comment that gets hidden that prevents most people from doing so, not any serious threat to their mojo. Once in a while, someone "goes off", and in an effort to rebel against the social strictures that seem to bind them, decide being rude for its own sake is worth getting hidden. It makes a difference at that point whether it is a singular comment or small number of posts, or if it is a long ugly embarrassing train-wreck like this recent one.
Regardless, my point is to reaffirm and continue my crusade against mixing social moderation and community moderation. Deterring trolls with snide ridicule is fun, because it is the only time most people ever get to use snide ridicule with a clear conscience. Episodes like this one should remind us that our conscience shouldn't always be so clear. Imagining that hate is what fuels all opposition is intellectual laziness, nothing more.
So with that the 'Obese/Clown Rape' troll era is concluded, and I have to put my nose back to that grindstone.
On our return we find a more clearly controversial issue, with uprates showing some conflicting opinions:
Incident: 'Virtual douche (or: Should have just HRd the tip jar)'
Incident notes: See above (4/21/15)
Diary notes: NFTT (Netroots For The Troops) with a trolling title
User notes: successfully trolled by title and with a point to make
HR notes: Mixing 'virtual HR' with the word 'douche' doesn't seem like a good idea
Disposition: semi-funny Status: semi-embarrassing, open
If it weren't for the combination of netcopping and threats to stalk in the comment, combined with the super-innocuous nature of NFTT, this wouldn't be the priceless icon of community moderation gone-wrong that it is. I think this might be what happens when vigilante moderation like aoeu and "Trolls" group model is taken up by more inexperienced TUs.
Then it is back to BK territory. I'm going to blockquote from one of the TUs responding to one of the two comments hidden, while hiding it:
You have no right to insinuate, as you have here, that African Americans are more homophobic than any other group of people. To do so is racist, and that's why you've earned my hide rating.
Of course that isn't what the commenter said, but I'm not trying to sort that out. This particular response is well worn and smoothly practiced and really useless.
Incident: 'Blacks and Gay Marriage' (seriously)
Incident notes: See above (0/6/5, 0/3/3)
Diary notes: White Privilege Group, Meta
User notes: TU, LGBT
HR notes: "Why won't your interest group watch out for my interest group?"
Disposition: prophetic, see comments
Status: socratic, open
This is just the kind of 'cross group sensitivity' issues we have to sort out on DK, and in the USA.
And that brings us to the last in this update, a trivial troll, and by that I mean actually trivial, not pie-fight related.
Incident: 'stretch pants and lost cats'
Incident notes: serious unserious troll (0/7/10, 0/7/1)
Diary notes: Tornado victims support diary
User notes: TU
HR notes: "born to be bad" double-down
Disposition: uncouth Status: and untrue besides, open
The difference in opinion on the relative importance of finding a lost cat after a tragedy mirrors the controversy over pootie & woozle diaries, but even that wasn't an issue this hidden referenced. Just bad form, from all involved.
