My TypeDrawers experience would be improved by the ability to hide all posts from specific users. While I can take commonsense measures to avoid seeing these folks' content, I'd prefer to automate the process. Does Vanilla Forums offer this functionality?
2
Comments
You could easily scroll by posts in Comic Sans and Papyrus, Marc, and pariahs would be shamed into conformity.
So: http://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/40774/#Comment_40774
This remains pure gold. To me it's crucially important for people –especially moderators– to be more liberal than their particular culture has conditioned them to be; otherwise it's essentially cultural chauvinism. This is also why blocking/muting/etc. only reduce overall social health.
Although maybe moderators get the quintuple weight. Which would be disconcerting; related:
http://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/40766/#Comment_40766
But I don't find moderators getting quintuple weight disconcerting. I mean their job is to monitor threads for things like abuse.
I agree, and I found it insightful, candid and self-deprecating. But I wonder: did you perhaps add "Took me a looong time to grow out of this primitive mentality" after the Abuse flag? Because otherwise it leaves the impression that the flagger saw "homesexuality" and (perhaps after getting riled by your first two sentences) didn't read the rest carefully enough.
Oh but they do... :-)
Twitter provides people who can't handle opinions that challenge their conditioning with all kinds of tools to stay safely in their bubble.
FWIW (probably not much) I for one am generally happy with the moderation here. I do hope as a team they don't shy away from reining in the occasional failing (as seems to strongly be the case above).
Also important is to rein in users who go around abusing people with Abuse flags (often from the safety of not actually posting anything themselves) not least because it fosters the –dishonorable– temptation to retaliate.
1. Whoever starts a topic, decides on the house rules for that topic with a simple switch: “smoking is not permitted” means that all conduct within the topic must adhere to a stricter policy, and “smoking is permitted” means that the rules of conduct can be more relaxed.
2. It’s clearly visible which topics are “non-smoking” and which “can be smoking”, and every user can decide whether to see at all each group of topics, or have all topics of a given type hidden.
3. In the “smoking” topics, there is a much higher threshold of complaints required for moderators to take any action.
I think the smoking analogy works. In the population, there is a group of people who enjoys smoking and will spend time in a room with other smokers, there is a group who is actively disturbed by that, and there is a group who doesn’t mind either way. I think in a fair society, there should be space for each of these groups.
I used to post here quite a lot, but at some point my impression grew that the rules of what's acceptable here became much less inclusive.
At some point, I found myself starting to rewrite anything that was my personal view several times in fear that my words could somehow be “inappropriate” or “offensive“ (two concepts that I’ve failed to grasp).
Ultimately, this rewriting got to the point where I could no longer identify with the words I wrote — so, effectively, I pretty much stopped posting anything other than pure information, and refrain from “debating” with others, because, well, I never know.
It's quite a paradox that the fear of being offended is anathema to a truly liberal environment. There is no freedom without risk.
I agree that there is a need for a safe (and therefore, occasionally, somewhat distanced) environment for discussions, and I think TypeDrawers works well for those who prefer such modality. I respect that.
At the same time, my own limits for what’s acceptable are on the “liberal” end. Perhaps it’s the Slavic background plus my lifelong experience of living among and working with people from different cultures, and usually trying to see good intentions even in an emotionally more charged exchange. Short, my personal view of what “diversity” is.
I can adhere to more homogenized rules of conduct and engage in a “polite” manner — but I also worry that some of the diversity may get lost on the way. It’s a tough challenge — in the end, as some have said, moderated forums are usually more pleasant than fully unmoderated ones (the latter being e.g. Twitter that I tend to avoid). I know that negative emotions are strong, and that offense is real.
Hence my earlier “idea” of the smoking / non-smoking threads, akin to house parties. Maybe the prerequisite could be that whoever starts a thread automatically “owns” it, i.e. becomes a moderator of that thread (in addition to the general moderators). Similarly to the role of a host at a party.
I’m not saying “do it”, and that this is something TypeDrawers should adopt. I’m well-aware that we’re all busy people, and I’m not volunteering to implement such a system. I’m merely laying out a sketch of how discussions could be done in a way that might fulfill a wider definition of inclusivity. Have I tested it and know it’d work? No. 🙂
So, I’m not saying there is something deeply wrong with TD, I think it’s wonderful and precious that it exists, and that it works. But it certainly is a forum that is “family friendly” (I think is the polite term). Yet from real-life conferences, I know there are “family friendly parts”, and there are the “pub crawl parts”. Somehow I think we’ve lost those a bit in the virtual world. 😃
I really like many of the heated debates I have with them, I find them very inspiring, my brain gets a proper kick, so it’s both entertaining and engaging.
Exquisite tirades full of sophisticated insults mixed with actual well-made points are my favorite form of comedy. 🙂
There are diverse kinds of diversity! The communicative not least among them.
"This plugin allows users to ignore others, filtering their comments out of discussions.
Ignore allows each member of the forum to maintain a list of other users whose comments they would prefer not to read.
Comments posted by a person you have ignored will be 'buried' and must be clicked on (to expand them) in order to be read.
Administrators are able to revoke access to the ignore feature on a per-user basis in case of abuse, and ignore list length is able to be limited on the global scale. Administrators cannot be ignored."