Actually I asked Melvin a question after he said about the front page discussion thread…“if it really is that than I think we’re done here”. I asked if he agreed that what he was saying sounded a bit fascist… it had a question mark at the end of it. At the time I meant it in context to highlight why the mods keep getting called Nazis by the people they upset. But from that moment on it immediately became the focus of debate because it was easier to focus on that and ignore the actual arguments which clearly weigh heavily against the mod perspective here imo… I’m surprised you’d give fuel to that fire tbh whiteoutmashups. I never called anyone fascist or Nazi, I simply reacted with a little more venom than was necessary by asking a challenging and uncomfortable question when I received another dismissive and authoritarian response.
The fact that we are all still talking about that is beyond ridiculous imo. Good deflection effort by mods though… grab onto something/someone you can vilify somehow, then you can use that as an easy way to get out of the debate that you dont want to have…
He proposed not having guidelines at all. Just let mods do their work. Well, when I became a mod early 2015 we were at that point. I’m the one to blame a bit for having these guidelines because I said after some weeks of modding: “Heej folks, we don’t have any guidelines, wouldn’t it be better to have a bunch of rules on this forum?” And that’s when I wrote a little proposal and the other mods jumped on it as well. It took some days before we all agreed on what was in the guidelines and after that we all mod quite the same way to using the same rules. Way more fair for users!
So we’ve been there and we did that. When people come up with the idea to go back to that period I made critical comments, and I never used any harsh or unfriendly language at all. Just made my points.
No, I’m always open to people coming up with ideas as you’ve seen. I never hang around here in replies feeling bad and negative. Making critical notes doesn’t mean I’m a negative person. It’s the opposite actually.
I’m in Europe, and indeed these words are very strong. Not so weird though, as it’s not just a bunch of thoughts. These ideas killed a lot of people in our history here. Think of the screaming guy in Germany a few decades a go.
Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation.[8][9][10][11] Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies.[12]
But as I pointed out there was a lot more. Saying there’s no positive energy coming out of any of “us” is quite rude IMO. Especially when @happybeing made a very positive response to your ideas. Same for calling yourself the professional and others a bunch of amateurs.
On this forum we have people that are critical of moderation. That’s okay. But I’ve only see <4 people use references to these regimes when they’re in a discussion. And that’s because the other 2250 know how to have a conversation about moderation without falling back to brutal regimes from history. And here we have the ex-moderator from a poker forum that throws them around like they’re the most common terms ever?
This part of the analogy is quite wrong. Go to he forums of Ethereum, StorJ and others and try to talk SAFE or politics or off-topic. It can’t be done as far as I know. Here you can talk everything from SAFE to politics to Tesla to pay-the-producer to whatever.
The group of “complaining members” is quite small IMO. I wrote several Forum Updates and we introduced new rules, new mods and more in them. They all got a lot of likes, no one ever replied by disagreeing someone became a new mod. No one ever wrote a message to @ moderators saying they wanted to become a mod. And last week we put out a forum update and we got 2 or 3 people replying on the frontpage. And we also got topics here in meta. They are very big, but how many people are in here discussing changes to the forum? It’s <10. Out of the 2200+ members. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen and reply here, but seriously, where is everybody?
So let’s say we removed all guidelines and opened a topic on the frontpage asking people for guidelines and ideas for moderation. Would we satisfy all people? I don’t think so. We will always have a bunch of people that don’t agree with moderations and/or guidelines. And that’s okay, we can’t please everyone. Even if we changed some guidelines to the opposite, like allowing people to swear, post to nsfw, don’t jump in when people start a flame war we would have topics in meta saying: I used to like this forum, but now it’s way to messy and rude with all these swears and links to nsfw. What happened here? Why can’t we open a discussion on the front page to get these old rules back.
This is a never ending story. And that’s cool. All communities change after a while, even tennis clubs and forums. I’m always open and happy to talk different ideas and different visions. And I’m willing to adopt to changes as well. I’ve seen a lot of them in that little year I helped out as a mod! I think when we grow to say 8000 members or so we will see trust-level-4 members that are allowed to moved topics and moderate the forum as well. But moderation is teamwork, we can’t just open up the doors and let a group of different folks in as well. We take it step by step. People need to work together and learn about each other etc. It’s a great atmosphere with the news mods at this time.
So feel free to create whatever topic here in meta about moderation and this forum. I’ll be there But you know what really would help to get this discussion further?
Someone please post links to other forums where they have elected mods, where there is discussion about guidelines, where things are “community owned”.
It would be really great if someone posted several links here saying: "Hej, this forum is run this way but over there they’re doing it that way. I really would love to see some links.
This is kind of the essence of the problem… why should we have to convince you before we can even discuss it in the main forum? It seems reasonable to you, but not to us.
Obviously I would have posted links to similar discussions from my own forums a long time ago, but sadly none of it seems to have survived their site migration. Tbh, most other forums aren’t really relevant though and you won’t find many good examples. Why? Well because almost all are owned by the business or interest that operates them. You mods do effectively ‘own’ this place but you are not maidsafe and some of us think the forum might not be moving in the community or company interest, even if it might be in the interest of the forum/mods.
In this unique situation we require more innovation and more room to innovate and discuss openly. Attempts to stifle or sweep that discussion under the meta rug result in people getting very frustrated, then angry, then rude.
There are many many ways we could approach this, but as I’ve said a few times, it will depend on you guys and what you are willing to do, not us, because you have all the power. If it were up to us we’d take some radical changes. If you want ideas stick it on the front page, you’ll get lots I’m sure!
I don’t think @Team_2E16 or any of us think you are a negative person. I think what he was acknowledging is the fact that us humans tend to get tired and cranky after some time of constant true or perceived insults and attacks. I believe you have posted here the most of all the mods and I’ve seen you do the same in other Meta posts. This is emotionally exhausting stuff and we’re sure you must be tired.
Jabba did not ask to be here but was pinned by happybeing and after several days of true or perceived insults and attacks he got tired. In his own words:
Who of us have never used extreme language we don’t really mean in moments of weakness? Recall that most of the start of Jabba’s post was praising the mods.
But seriously, where are the other mods? Are you the only one listening to us few complainers right now @polpolrene? I don’t think so but it sure seems that way. Things are not always what they seem.
And if it is a community run forum that will be no problem and no extra effort on the part of the mods. I personally have no problem with continuing these discussions in the meta category.
Glad to hear you say this and I hope we can convince more mods to share your enthusiasm.
This is a great idea and something to keep in mind when we open up the discussions. Thank you.
Let’s expand that team once again to the regulars. Can I be part of your team? I like you guys.
Yea, unfortunately it may seem that way, but we are reading and because @anon40790172 perhaps has the most experience in discussing these things he ends up the most visible one.
Or how about this posted just yesterday on this forum…
"Part 2: Future Plans for Rules and Moderation System
We’ve gotten a few requests to explain what we meant when we’ve mentioned possibly having some democratically elected moderation positions in the past, so I’d like to elaborate on that now. Nothing’s certain at the moment, but the current moderation team generally agree that it would be a good idea to have board-specific moderators nominated and elected by the community for when individual boards on the forum need close attention. We expect to use board-specific moderators mainly for the Political Discussion forum, but they may be helpful elsewhere too. These board-level moderators would have minor powers within their own board and would exist to de-escalate arguments, and prevent disruption to normal, civil discussion within the board.
_As part of our planned appeals system we are planning to have moderation positions whose sole responsibility is to hear and rule on appeals they would not have normal moderating powers. We are thinking of making these appellate mods nominated and elected by the community, so that they interpret the rules in line with the needs and views of the community at large.
_The full system of how these positions would be nominated for, elected to, and possibly removed from their positions has not been worked out, but it’s important that the community maintains the ability to recall any moderators it elects, and that the main moderation staff does not have control over dismissing appellate mods (so they cannot simply dismiss appellate mods who keep overturning their actions)
_Additionally, whilst we aren’t planning to leave rules changes up to a vote, we are all agreed that we will publicly consult the forum community about any possible rules changes before they take place, so we can gather and act on their feedback (you may have noticed we’re sort of doing this already, hence this post )."
It’s not irrational and there are a lot of precedents for it. It is very fitting in these circumstances imo.
Wanna do moderation? Oef… are you sure ;-). All mods are regulars on this forum. Some of them show up in this topic that was started in May '14. Same for deciding which categories where needed here: What categories do we need?. It was an open discussion and there was great consensus by the members. There was even an open invitation for people to become an Admin: Who wants to be an admin? And notice that Iopto is our backup admin at this moment. And what about this one: The future of this forum. Francis offered help and he got a lot of likes at that time because the whole (small) community agreed it was okay for him to do so. So I dare to say that this is a community forum . Is everything democratically decided? Nope. But most of it was and still has a lot of consensus. Do we want changes in the future? I bet we do. And about moderation @Safety1st, let me know if you are really interested. I don’t know if we need extra hands at this time, but @ moderators is always open. Drop a PM and you’ll always get a reply.
Thank you for your kind consideration but hell no, I don’t want to be a moderator! I was just kidding (not the part about liking you guys though).
You know how thankless this job is and Maidsafe could never pay me enough to do it.
However, I am very willing and happy to labor in freedom and love with a big group of other happy and willing regulars with the moderators as our back end support.
I dare to second that and agree with you. All we are asking is to build on this tradition and spread the burden of moderation to more community members as our community grows. Correction: Explodes after the MVP.
Actually I think his proposal (at least the one I am supporting) was to open a topic, on the front page, to allow interested members of the community to engage in a discussion about what guidelines we should have. Perhaps his particular opinion is that we should have no guidelines (I’m not sure it is), but just as he doesn’t want to see a small group of people imposing their view on this on everyone else, I believe he would be uncomfortable imposing his on the forum, as well.
I don’t support the idea of “no guidelines”. I just want the guidelines to originate with the community (not merely a small group of people from that community) and all interested voices to be heard in the creation of those guidelines. What you guys did was to confer among yourselves, and then say “These are the new guidelines, any thoughts?”. It’s qualitatively a different thing.
As @Safety1st noted below, I was not casting aspersions upon your person. Saying I thought your attitude was negative towards @Jabba 's proposal is fundamentally different to saying you are a negative person. I’ve actually found you to be the opposite, which is why I was surprised at your responses to these ideas. By the way, thank you for continuing to engage on this topic, I and others very much appreciate that.
Agreed, and your sensitivity to words such as fascism is therefore noted. Fair enough, but do you now understand that this is not what he meant?
It perhaps wasn’t a carefully phrased point, as it can come across (or be taken) as a blanket statement, and so is a little ambiguous. However, reading the context, I think (and I could be wrong here) that he meant that on the issue of community ‘ownership’, there was no sign (to him) that any of you were prepared to positively support the idea of allowing the community to generate it’s own guidelines, aims and goals, and ensure that this effort would be successful by allowing the membership to be able to easily come across the discussion in the first place.
Personally, I think you’ve missed the point. He wasn’t drawing a parallel between the Nazi regime or Mussolini and the moderators. He was clearly making a comment on the response to proposals you don’t agree with (in PM), he made the comment to @Melvin, not to you, or the entire mod team. Perhaps it expanded after that (?) when tempers flared, but I get what he was saying. He was saying that the attitude he encountered at that time was “It’s our way or the highway, and this is not open for discussion”.
Now that’s a bit harsh. He hardly started throwing “them around like they’re the most common terms ever”. He made a substantive point about the response that he received. I understand that you feel he has been harsh also, but come on, man.
I have personally seen other members ‘pulled aside’ and advised on, not only the language they use (which would be fine for the most part), but how they might make their arguments. To me, this crosses the line.
But the more important point that I was making is that, in the analogy, that people were no longer to discuss topics relevant to the discussion in the main clubrooms and tennis courts, rather they were provided with other shacks to do so.
Frankly, I don’t care what other forums are doing. I am a member of this forum. I think we can do better than we are already doing (which I have said, in may respects, is already better).
Of what relevance are other forums to the concerns of members here? As with SAFE we want to build something better than the status quo.
But not together in the same thread/topic, even when it would be entirely relevant to do so.
Well, that’s what we are saying. Most people won’t find this topic, so don’t know it exists.
Which is why we will invite the regular members to a new topic on the subject ourselves. I am perfectly willing to concede defeat on this subject if we hear the views of the regular members and it doesn’t go our way. We just want everybody to hear our perspectives, and then move from there.
I agree. But the point is that the community would get a chance to reach a broad consensus over the general guidelines we wish to have. There would be dissenters, perhaps myself. But if everybody interested weighed in and decided that my ideas are not worth entertaining, I will tell you now that I would concede the point and leave it at that. Further, any further dissent can then be countered with:
-“The community have spoken, they chose the guidelines, this is what they chose to do, and so you will have to get people on board to challenge this”,
rather than,
“We (mods) chose the guidelines, the community have not spoken in disagreement, so they obviously agree with us, so you will have to get people on board to challenge this, but we won’t allow you to put it on the front page and actually have a chance of getting people’s opinions on it”.
I know you said you don’t want to respond to @Jabba , but he has posted these links, as per your request, and I look forward to your response.
I haven’t responded to this anymore here but it was about the entire mod team and it has been both ‘you do sound fascist’ and ‘you’re basically nazi’s’.
That was after me pushing to get more out of his proposal than ‘make a sticky post on the frontpage and let people discuss about the forum all the time’, of which I indeed don’t think it’s a good idea.
OK, I see how the second comment would upset you. The first, a bit more what I was talking about. Fair enough.
EDIT: I still think he meant something substantive, but put it a little too strongly.
I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea to have a topic that is constantly stickied on the front page. But I certainly think that we could have one for a period of time during a time when people are able to come in to the topic and weigh in, discuss, propose, agree, disagree and attempt to reach consensus on a set of guidelines that are user-driven.
I think if we went through that process, whatever the outcome, we would end up with a stronger community as a result.
This is what we did with the guidelines, has been on the frontpage for 48 hours. I will check that topic again later today but I don’t remember that there was one person that wanted to discuss certain guidelines in a normal way and that’s why I wanted to know if that sticky was what he proposed.
Well, I have to say, this is really frustrating. Let me be clear, again, about the difference.
What we are proposing is not:
The mods confer and come up with a set of guidelines, declare them, and then ask for comment
What we are proposing is:
That the community discusses what the users see as the overall direction/goals of this forum, debates, discusses etc about what guidelines best represent that direction and those goals, and come to a consensus on that community-driven list.
It’s fundamentally different, as in the first case: You (mods, collectively) are figuring out a bunch of guidelines, then stating they are the new guidelines, then asking for comment.
In the second case, the guidelines come from the community itself.
Can we at least agree that these two situations are entirely different?
Yes we can agree on that, although why can’t you see it as proposed guidelines which could have lead to people picking out guidelines and editting them for example? They were there to discuss (input is what you want right?) and nobody did that.
So he did propose to remove the guidelines and that’s fine. I don’t support the idea and I made critical comments to it.
That’s why I quit interaction. If you can’t have a normal conversation with normal comments it’s over.
Thank you for being in this discussion as well. This is our forum and I’m always open to new ideas (even when I make critical notes about them ;-)). This is your forum as much it’s mine. We’ll see a lot of new people and a lot of changes coming to this place in the coming years. We have to figure out what to do.
I couldn’t agree more Just jump in meta, open a topic with a title like: Discuss guideline: not allowed to talk politics on the frontpage. And see what people say about it. And people say there’s nobody reading meta, well look at this topic in off-topic. Not that many people around there but 7 people liked the post. Her we have 8 likes in another off-topic. And when I look at this topic, we have 539 views (way more than the 2 examples) but nobody seems to get these amount of likes. A user posts some PM’s and get’s 5 likes and a mod replies and also get’s 5 likes. Not to close down any discussion but I keep asking where everybody is. look at the Forum Update. We introduced a new set of rules, 2 new mods and get 20 likes for it. The critical replies doesn’t get that much. Even while they were in plain sight as well. Same here, we added a new mod and everybody agreed. I only spot positive comments (on the frontpage for days).
Show me the weight of user support for your power structure and guidelines?
So far all I can see is 100% of users not happy with it.
Silence cannot be taken as agreement.
Most users never stray from the front page. I’m one of them. A thread entitled forum guidelines will not be read by many (I didn’t bother). Hardly anyone looks in meta or off-topic. Most people only look on the front page and for threads that look ‘interesting’.
Why are you guys so scared of having a discussion topic on the front page? What exactly is it that you’re scared of? Until it’s there with a title that actually makes users want to click it and read it, it will not really be read or looked at.
I am quite sure that the majority of users who did hear this debate would want change… all the users who’ve spoken up in this thread want it… where’s your support? Silence does not = support. No one is saying anything because no one really knows the debate is happening.
Besides, as I said, the forum is the 2500 people, the community is the tondas, the team_, the safety1sts and the mods. The community is what is being harmed here, not the forum.
All ideological/political threads that are pro-capitalist in any way are moved to the Opposing Views forum by the Moderator(s) of it.
So it seems people are forced to think anti-capitalistic otherwise they’re moved to Opposing Views with their ideas. I don’t feel invited at all to join a discussion to be honest.
They have Basic rules and General Rules and Basic rights for members.
Basic right for members
All members of this community have the right to participate in all aspects of the community. They are allowed to post in all forums, they are allowed to join any open group, they are allowed to become Moderators and Administrators, they are allowed to vote in the Members Forum after 10 posts if they have not been barred (see: Opposing Views, article 1 and 2), they are allowed to use any function that is available to the general membership. This right is not something to be gained or granted - it is the basic right of all members. However, it is a right that can be lost (see: Basic and General Rules).
Emergency Articles
We have seen the community slowly but surely disintegrate over the past weeks. A group of members is systematically abusing their position on the forum to harass both new and old members, sowing discord whenever they can and in the process fostering a hostile, toxic environment. We believe this cannot continue, for if it will, the community will surely perish. In order to save it from this fate, we have gathered together to form a ‘free association of producers’, in accordance with the following articles:
Well, I actually love our simple guidelines. I wanna hug them now .
And that other forum, well: they are planning as far as I can see. I read their guidelines as they are now:
Each rule is set in an Infraction Tier by default, and but violations of that rule may be downgraded to the tier immediately below the default tier if mitigating factors are present, or upgraded to the tier immediately above if aggravating factors are present.
Seems like quite a study to me. But I would like to see how all their ideas with elections etc work out.
Additionally, whilst we aren’t planning to leave rules changes up to a vote, we are all agreed that we will publicly consult the forum community about any possible rules changes before they take place, so we can gather and act on their feedback (you may have noticed we’re sort of doing this already, hence this post ).
Ah, no votes but people can make their voices clear. I miss a meta category, but it seems people are allowed to reply to Temporary forum rules V3. Looks to me they posted a Forum Update and asked people reply to it ;-).
Well, they weren’t presented as proposed guidelines. They were presented as, and I quote, “New Forum Guidelines” and “check out the updated Forum Guidelines for yourself”.
They were up for 48 hours. As @polpolrene keeps pointing out, we have 2500-some users on this forum. He also pointed out that have roughly 150-250 logins per day. So at the absolute maximum, only 1/5 of the members even got to see the topic while it was open for comment.
(By the way, the main problem I have with the whole ‘guidelines’ issue is simply that they didn’t originate with the community. Aside from that, I’m mostly happy with them, although there’s one or two that are way open to interpretation, and I’ve already mentioned the issues above that I’m unhappy about.)
Well, whatever. I’m not really that interested in that, as I already said above. At least, unless that was what the community wanted.
And as I said above, ‘Fair enough’. That’s up to you. I don’t think it was necessary, as there are ways to cool that situation off, but I do support your liberty to make that choice, of course.
I looked this up.
The way Discourse works is that it accumulates views on this basis, 1 per user per ip per day. They’re not unique views, and so it very likely, in fact it certainly, isn’t the case that 539 people have viewed the thread, providing this functionality is still the same.
If you have looked at this topic every day, that’s 8 views (for 8 days). Same for me, same for every other person who’s come here to view the further postings.
So the number of users who viewed this topic could be as low as 67 (unlikely). Also, the 14 users/mod-users who have commented here, could account for a full 112 of those views.
Yes, I think that topic was highly likely to be one that people would read, like and forget, without coming back to it. So it has a much higher chance of having most of it’s 400 views be unique views. More people probably saw it. Because it was on the front page…
I went to thread and tallied all the votes in favour of your position. For the overall thread likes, the 20 likes you mentioned, close to a third of them were likes from other moderators. 6/20. So really, it’s 14 likes, right? Because of course you guys liked it, you made it!
Secondly, collectively on that thread, mods received a total of 9 likes for their comments. 4/9 of them, 44%, were from other mods.
I agree, but that’s no worse than here, besides the blatant bias against one politico-economic standpoint. It carries some stigma to be sure. The difference here is that all political speech gets moved out of topic.
I will concede that I wouldn’t feel welcome there either. But then, I feel like my views/expertise are unwelcome on 90% of the active threads here, sooooo…
to talk different ideas and different visions. And I’m willing to adopt to changes as well. I’ve seen a lot of them in that little year I helped out as a mod! I think when we grow to say 8000 members or so we will see trust-level-4 members that are allowed to moved topics and moderate the forum as well. But moderation is teamwork, we can’t just open up the doors and let a group of different folks in as well. We take it step by step. People need to work together and learn about each other etc. It’s a great atmosphere with the news mods at this time.
But you know what really would help to get this discussion further?
)."
. Is everything democratically decided? Nope. But most of it was and still has a lot of consensus. Do we want changes in the future? I bet we do. And about moderation 
.