DevonDamo wrote: ↑25 Nov 2021, 11:09pm
ncutler wrote: ↑25 Nov 2021, 7:18pm
"possible advantages of a second opinion being required"
Not going to happen. The Forum is not going to turn into a bureaucratic rule-bound collection of dollops.
Fair enough. I knew that suggesting the imposition of cross-checks or second opinions etc. on unpaid volunteers would be a lead balloon, but it served as a diplomatic way to flag up the fact that something's not right here. There's a deafening silence here from whoever flagged the post you quoted above. That same person was presumably also responsible for reporting the posts that @Vorpal deleted yesterday, however I read these before they were deleted and can confirm that there were two of them: one from @al_yrpal, and the other from @hellhound. Al's point was a technical one about gin distillation with the only personal aspect being that he prefaced it with 'no matter how good your googling skills...' And Hellhound has already defended his post in the thread about Covid booster moderation. For some reason, @Vorpal's response to Hellhound characterised these two offending posts as follows:
Vorpal wrote: ↑25 Nov 2021, 9:58amAs for the Plymouth gin thread, a number of posts (not just yours) were removed on the basis that they were confrontational or aggressive, and the thread was spiralling into sniping, etc.
Although I disagree with @al_yrpal on many things, I still see him as the archetypal English gent and find the suggestion that he may be confrontational or aggressive to be ludicrous: Whatever reason Vorpal had for deleting those two posts and making this comment, it is clear that this explains the further report that you've cited above - i.e. the person making that report was confident that @al_yrpal's post would be deleted, regardless of whether this was justified. If moderation is not being applied impartially, it will inevitably lead to more work in the end.
I did not read any of those earlier posts, but -
1. Inevitably there will a degree of personal opinion and gut feel when moderating posts which are possibly borderline. Moreover, if someone's posts are reported more frequently than most others, and if usually the moderators agree with the reports and delete the posts, then that person will probably end up being seen as one of the 'usual suspects', and moderators will give their posts less benefit of any doubt.
2. Regarding something 'not being right', I remain to be convinced of that. All of us will have our own view of what is and is not acceptable, and some may simply draw the line in a different place. What matters most is not only where moderators draw the line in order to set a general baseline for discussion that does not descend into abuse, but also that there is reasonable consistency.
3. When a discussion starts to deteriorate into petty sniping, the issue is not who is at fault (who started it, who escalated it more), but that once a thread starts to take a turn for the worse it is difficult/impossible to recover it. I can understand therefore why moderators might intervene and delete posts at what might seem an unnecessarily early point.
4. It is instructive to compare how these dynamics play out and are dealt with on CycleChat. I appreciate it is bad form to discuss another internet forum, but the differences and similarities do help to put these issues into a clearer perspective. Recently the equivalent to the Tea Shop for discussing news and current affairs on that forum was closed, as I understand because the moderators found it took up far too much of their (unpaid) time. I think that was partly because they do get a second opinion before taking action.
The forum owner has instead set up a separate forum to replace it, which is at arm's length from CycleChat proper. It is unmoderated, and CycleChat members have to register separately to post on the new forum. One of the things that is noticeable is that the sly digs and sniping which existed in the original CycleChat Tea Room equivalent are just as bad, but probably no worse, in the unmoderated forum. Although the problem has not become worse, it is neverthless not pleasant to read. A consequence of this is that it probably deters many others from registering and posting in that new forum: not everyone can give as good as they get (or wants to). That said, my reading between the lines is that the new forum has stopped a very small number of posters who were deliberately trying to get some threads closed by making posts that created spurious grounds for them to claim they were being abused, i.e. gaming the moderation.
5. Based on what I have seen on CycleChat, I think the moderators on here are probably right to intervene at at early stage when even just faintly petty digs etc. are made: once that pattern of posting becomes entrenched in a thread, it is very difficult to turn things back and more importantly it is probably likely to break out again in other threads because of the lingering antagonism between posters. I can understand therefore how something that might seem only a mildly sarcastic remark could get deleted in order to stop things getting worse.
6. I also think that cessation of moderation in the Tea Shop would, sooner or later, cause even bigger problems for the moderators. There are some extremely contentious subjects, which, if unmoderated, I think would inevitably result in a complaint by one side to CUK about the forum, and I think the likely outcome would be the closure of the Tea Shop, e.g. because the moderators decide they are not prepared to continue moderating it.