A behavioural view of toxicity & moderation on MS

[Ythan]

I agree with Nancy, the squeaky mouse gets the cheese. Those who are engaged with the problem and stand to benefit from seeing it solved, ie the other players, ought to be relied upon to complain about problems they encounter, rather than relying on a third party to now follow along with every post for no other reason than to moderate content nobody is complaining about.

[Jake The Wolfie]

Side-note: When's the last time you've actually needed to report a post?

[Ythan]

I'm a hostile person myself so I never report other users as a matter of taste.

[Gamma Emerald]

Side-note: When's the last time you've actually needed to report a post?

Do you mind if I answer?

[Sirius9121]

reports be autosent to game mods

[Jake The Wolfie]

Side-note: When's the last time you've actually needed to report a post?

Do you mind if I answer?

Not at all

[Gamma Emerald]

The last (and probably only) time I've reported a post on behavior was when I was playing with Enter in Ginn's joint upick, I felt like he was making things extremely personal, and so I decided to try and resolve things through official channels because trying to deal with it in game was killing my will to play

[Firebringer]

I have found all the times ive been banned to be the mods looking for excuses to ban me. Except for the one time i got into argument with shea and called him garbage. I think i deserved that ban. All the other ones are pretty silly.

Also i got warned not to long ago about some bad jokes and me pointing that i didn't think associating yourself strongly with a sex was good and somehow that was breaking rules

[Sirius9121]

I have found all the times ive been banned to be the mods looking for excuses to ban me. Except for the one time i got into argument with shea and called him garbage. I think i deserved that ban. All the other ones are pretty silly.

Also i got warned not to long ago about some bad jokes and me pointing that i didn't think associating yourself strongly with a sex was good and somehow that was breaking rules

The mods hate you?

[Firebringer]

The mods hate you?

i wouldn't say that. i would say that i have a tighter leash than other users. I know a lot of users i go "wow if i posted whaat they just posted I would get banned" and i don't even think they get warned.

I remember a user called me a nazi piece of trash once, and i reported a bunch of other things they said but i think the worst they got was a warning.

[Sirius9121]

And what would you consider the main reason of the ‘tighter leash’?

[Nancy Drew 39]

And what would you consider the main reason of the ‘tighter leash’?

Spoiler:

Just noting the ironic connection between Fire’s avatar and this question.

[Sirius9121]

And what would you consider the main reason of the ‘tighter leash’?

Spoiler:

Just noting the ironic connection between Fire’s avatar and this question.

I did notice it too... I don’t want as of leash on me

[Firebringer]

And what would you consider the main reason of the ‘tighter leash’?

ill never fully know. all i see is output not matching inputs.

[Sirius9121]

And what would you consider the main reason of the ‘tighter leash’?

ill never fully know. all i see is output not matching inputs.

Did you piss the mods off at some point

[Allomancer]

Pissing off the mods shouldn't be a justification for unjust punishment.

[Micc]

If making these report/ban decisions was easy I’d probably still be modding. It actually kinda sucks to have that obligation hanging over your head. As a site mod, a non-zero amount of your time spent on site is dedicated to seeing the user base at its absolute worst behavior. And you have to be the one who kindly steps in to essentially say “please stop being awful to each other”. Personally, I found it to be exhausting, even depressing.

I don’t say this to garner sympathy, I think everyone on the mod team knows that’s what they signed up for. It’s more so my way of explaining why the wheels turn slowly more often than not. Promptness is the biggest challenge the mod team faces, and they know it. I expect they’ll be at least a little more prompt without the dead weight I’ve provided for the last 3 months.

---

Fairness is a pretty hard thing to make a public statement on. This thread hasn’t gone unnoticed by the mod team, but what response is there to to give? No one on the mod team sets out to make ban decisions that are unfair, or that play favorites in some way. Every report sparks a discussion where the mod team weighs the user’s history and the context of the situation along with the severity of what was posted. No one on the mod team will claim they get everything right, but by the time a decision is made the team feels justified that their decision is fair.

It’s sometimes hard to give that justification to the general public without infringing on some amount of privacy. The whole world doesn’t need to know that you received a warning from the mod team, but when you do receive a warning it will come with justification. The warning will try to explain what rule was broken, why the rule exists, links to the offending posts, and a what the consequences of breaking the rule again will be. If you have questions, the mod team will try to answer them. At the end of the day the mod team wants to give warnings and teach, not to give bans and punish.

Bans are in almost all cases an escalation of previous warnings. The mod team tries to give justification to the public for taking away a user’s posting rights by way of the ban announcement thread. Along with this, the mod team tries to give further justification to the user by rehashing all of the previous warnings that had been given, and by pointing to the text that says the consequence for continued rule breaking is a ban.

The picture I’m trying to paint here is one that I hope gives enough clarity for public perception to trust that site mods are making fair decisions. If a series of posts makes you cringe because of its toxicity or personal attacking nature, but already has reports closed without a ban, there’s a good chance the site mods also cringed but gave a warning because of a lack of history for that user. If a series of posts are linked in a ban announcement that don’t look all that bad to you, there’s a good chance that the site mods gave a ban after evaluating the warnings documented throughout the other 17 pages of discussion history for that user.

---

The conversation about changing rules to move closer to a zero tolerance for toxicity policy is a good one. The mod team has plenty of threads backstage dedicated to drafting new sets of rules and assigning quantifiable actions and escalations to be taken each time a rule is broken.

The first question always becomes, where exactly is that zero tolerance the line? There is no getting away from mafia being a game based on rhetoric and manipulation and that those things lead to toxicity being a winning strategy. If the mod team had a more robust rule set that they thought wouldn’t create 50 pages of debate in the SGB thread, it would already be in place.

The second question always becomes, how close to the line is too close? The mod team is well aware of the weak spot that exists in current rules enforcement for users who consistently get right up to the line of receiving a warning but not quite across. If the mod team had a more robust rule set that they thought wouldn’t spell out exactly how to be as toxic as possible without being punished, it would already be in place.

I think the mod team is pretty generally aware that site rules aren’t strongly codified and the problems that presents. The challenge they have is creating something that is actually better. Feel free to draft your own ideas and throw them into the conversation. I think the mod team will appreciate any ideas the community has for making the rules governing toxicity more clear, while keeping them enforceable.

[Firebringer]

why not just let the appeal process be more public. If I appeal a ban the site can publish all the discussions of whatever was said in reference to my ban and then site itself can decide whether it was a good or bad decision.

Again the problem is the black box approach to bans.

[Ircher]

why not just let the appeal process be more public. If I appeal a ban the site can publish all the discussions of whatever was said in reference to my ban and then site itself can decide whether it was a good or bad decision.

Again the problem is the black box approach to bans.

I don't think crowdsourcing appeals is a good idea. If you look at the old ban "announcement" thread, you will notice that many of those decisions ended up being super controversial, but ultimately, I think listmods are in the position because they can make an objective an fair decision. Unlike the users, they have a lot of information and context as well as knowledge of the past warning and ban history. Even with more of that being revealed, they often take their time to evaluate each situation thoroughly. That's just something I don't think the community in general will do.

[Nancy Drew 39]

Spoiler:

If making these report/ban decisions was easy I’d probably still be modding. It actually kinda sucks to have that obligation hanging over your head. As a site mod, a non-zero amount of your time spent on site is dedicated to seeing the user base at its absolute worst behavior. And you have to be the one who kindly steps in to essentially say “please stop being awful to each other”. Personally, I found it to be exhausting, even depressing.

I don’t say this to garner sympathy, I think everyone on the mod team knows that’s what they signed up for. It’s more so my way of explaining why the wheels turn slowly more often than not. Promptness is the biggest challenge the mod team faces, and they know it. I expect they’ll be at least a little more prompt without the dead weight I’ve provided for the last 3 months.

---

Fairness is a pretty hard thing to make a public statement on. This thread hasn’t gone unnoticed by the mod team, but what response is there to to give? No one on the mod team sets out to make ban decisions that are unfair, or that play favorites in some way. Every report sparks a discussion where the mod team weighs the user’s history and the context of the situation along with the severity of what was posted. No one on the mod team will claim they get everything right, but by the time a decision is made the team feels justified that their decision is fair.

It’s sometimes hard to give that justification to the general public without infringing on some amount of privacy. The whole world doesn’t need to know that you received a warning from the mod team, but when you do receive a warning it will come with justification. The warning will try to explain what rule was broken, why the rule exists, links to the offending posts, and a what the consequences of breaking the rule again will be. If you have questions, the mod team will try to answer them. At the end of the day the mod team wants to give warnings and teach, not to give bans and punish.

Bans are in almost all cases an escalation of previous warnings. The mod team tries to give justification to the public for taking away a user’s posting rights by way of the ban announcement thread. Along with this, the mod team tries to give further justification to the user by rehashing all of the previous warnings that had been given, and by pointing to the text that says the consequence for continued rule breaking is a ban.

The picture I’m trying to paint here is one that I hope gives enough clarity for public perception to trust that site mods are making fair decisions. If a series of posts makes you cringe because of its toxicity or personal attacking nature, but already has reports closed without a ban, there’s a good chance the site mods also cringed but gave a warning because of a lack of history for that user. If a series of posts are linked in a ban announcement that don’t look all that bad to you, there’s a good chance that the site mods gave a ban after evaluating the warnings documented throughout the other 17 pages of discussion history for that user.

---

The conversation about changing rules to move closer to a zero tolerance for toxicity policy is a good one. The mod team has plenty of threads backstage dedicated to drafting new sets of rules and assigning quantifiable actions and escalations to be taken each time a rule is broken.

The first question always becomes, where exactly is that zero tolerance the line? There is no getting away from mafia being a game based on rhetoric and manipulation and that those things lead to toxicity being a winning strategy. If the mod team had a more robust rule set that they thought wouldn’t create 50 pages of debate in the SGB thread, it would already be in place.

The second question always becomes, how close to the line is too close? The mod team is well aware of the weak spot that exists in current rules enforcement for users who consistently get right up to the line of receiving a warning but not quite across. If the mod team had a more robust rule set that they thought wouldn’t spell out exactly how to be as toxic as possible without being punished, it would already be in place.

I think the mod team is pretty generally aware that site rules aren’t strongly codified and the problems that presents. The challenge they have is creating something that is actually better. Feel free to draft your own ideas and throw them into the conversation. I think the mod team will appreciate any ideas the community has for making the rules governing toxicity more clear, while keeping them enforceable.

Which is the “SBG” thread?

I guess it personally confounds me that Aura and Nor got the same punishment despite Aura actively and deliberately harassing another user. Both were guilty of transphobia but only one was specifically guilty of harassment as well.

[Firebringer]

Unlike the users, they have a lot of information and context as well as knowledge of the past warning and ban history.

thats because they hold all the cards. like god damn this is fucking circular argument.

Me: We should have more information be public so we know what mods know and can judge for ourselves.
All mod defenders: They have more info than us and that means they can make better choices than us.

like if u dont think this info should be public because it creates more drama w/e fair enough i think it leads to better modding decisions because the feedback will improve mod decisions going forward.

look at the recent stuff with panth.

he pushed for change on how moderators act, and they published more info regarding his ban. I can gurantee you, if you get banned the mods will not tell you every post that was reported. How many times you got reported. By how many different users.

Why is this information hidden? I gurantee you this influences how the moderators make decisions. But it does't come up until someone makes a big stink and mods have to back themselves up be like "we made a reasonable decision here. Look this mnay people reported you" Ohh really? That many people reported me. Why didn't you tell me to begin with?

[Ircher]

I'm not arguing against releasing more information, I am arguing against having the ultimate decision of to ban or not to ban rest with the community. I do believe that more transparency is a good thing, in part because it encourages consistency and uniformity.

To be clear: I am suspicious of the ability for the community in general to honestly evaluate each ban decision and decide whether it was appropriate or not. I question it not because I don't believe in people's good will, but rather it is a complicated thing to do, and it is hard to overcome and isolate oneself from one's preconceived notions, biases, and relationships.

(Also, I don't think and don't expect the mods to get it right every time either. Because again, it is really hard to make those ban decisions objectively. At the same time, they have processes in place to help make the issue manageable, so I do expect they would make a better decision as a result.)

[Micc]

I think if the information that the mod team uses to rule on reports is divided into:
1) stuff that isn't confidential to anyone
2) stuff that is confidential to the user being banned
3) stuff that is confidential to anyone else
...the mod team does a pretty decent job of putting section 1 into the ban announcement, section 2 into the personalized ban notification, and keeping section 3 private. That's their goal at least.

If you think the mod team is consistently mis-categorizing a certain type of information, I think its fair to call that out. But of the things mentioned,

all the discussion

fits squarely into section 3,

every post that was reported

and

previous ban/warning history

hover between sections 1 and 2, and

How many times reported, by how many users

misses the list entirely since those things don't really impact the decision. Also keep in mind that in cases where there's any amount of doubt, its safer for the mod team to lean towards more confidentiality rather than less.

At the end of the day, just like in a game of mafia, not everything that goes into a ban decision can be public. The players are left to trust that the game mod doesn't rig the role assignment and the site's users are left to trust that the mods are trying their best to be fair. You'll never really know for sure, but with a little faith in humanity I hope the community is willing to trust that no one applies to be a moderator because they want to do a bad job.

[Micc]

Which is the “SBG” thread?

SGB = Stop Getting Banned

[Gawr]

So, I'm new to the community, but as somebody with two years of experience being staff on a website, and one being forward-facing admin on a website, that has "moderation is uneven," "Moderators need accountability", "where is the transparency,", the nature of civility rules, and other things being discussed in this thread, and whose entire job is assessing and leading a division devoted to assessing the validity of moderator actions, I think it fair for me to at least weigh in a bit. Feel free to ignore me, or call me an idiot who doesn't know what she's talking about due to being new to the community, but I thought it'd be fair to give some thoughts. This post is going to be long, but I think there's a lot of angles to cover, so pardon the wall of text. I'm also not going to be commenting on specific mod actions, because I don't really have the context or desire to dig into those, and can only really discuss game-facing issues, since I don't see enough of the regular discussion stuff to really say much about it.

The first thing I think is important to discuss is the nature of how rules work; both vaguer standards and more specific standards have their problems. More specific standards have the problem that it's incredibly easy to rules-lawyer them, and go "TECHNICALLY I didn't violate Section III.VI of your ruleset, so I shouldn't have been punished!" or nitpicking over exactly how a rule is worded and whether or not a user violated the rule on those terms. We get that sort of thing ALL THE TIME with a broader ruleset. Now, aforementioned broader ruleset has its own advantages, but part of the problem is that it's going to be heavily left up to moderator interpretation exactly when a rule is broken and why, because you don't have strict guidelines that X breaks Rule Y, and you're still going to get a bit of problem with rules lawyering and it not strictly violating the rules. I still think this is the better approach, but neither is perfect.

Now, the other thing I want to discuss is that, while I wouldn't say Mafia is an inherently toxic game, it IS a game that revolves around 2 or more bad actors basically acting to fuck up everybody else, and outside clears (and sometimes even then), you can't assume other users are acting in good faith. And you don't know who is acting in bad faith and who isn't unless (and sometimes even if) you're a bad faith actor- that's the fun of the game. That is going to result in an inherent degree of tension that is going to be higher than your typical conversation about most topics or even playing most games, where it's pretty safe to assume that everybody has the same motives and is acting in good faith. Which means that blow-ups are probably going to be much more frequent, including intra-player tension over things like wagons, what they see as shit reads, and so on. As somebody that has a lot of experience with the toxic parts of the site I help run, and thinks she runs one of the far better forums in terms of civility, Mafia games can be the most frustrating because you see a lot of borderline behavior there that isn't worth reporting, but does make you think "couldn't you be a bit more chill about this?" As well as just a lot of drama that isn't really rule-beaking, but definitely stressful and causes replace-outs not infrequently. I'm going to be coming back to that, especially the first part.

So now that we've got those two things out of the way, I think that there are roughly three barriers, just off the top of my head, that games have when it comes to toxic posters.

The first is the userbase. As somebody that has dealt quite a bit with what I'd call Callout Discourse on the forum she moderates, this is a blatant failure state. Toxicity is going to beget more toxicity- toxic posters are going to lead to other players being toxic out of frustration with dealing with them, toxic players will be incentivized to be more toxic because they know they won't get in trouble for it(1), tempers are going to be higher, people aren't going to have a stable definition of what "toxic" even strictly means and that further adds to the tension, and so on. It'll become a meaningless perjorative and make the problem worse. You don't want this.

The second area of defense is Mod GMs. The Mod GMs have three main recourses here, and I'm going to go through them in order: the first is to prohibit players from joining the game at all due to a history of toxicity. Now, I think this in many ways is the best tool in their toolkit that is hardest to game or ignore, but I could easily see GMs being uncomfortable using it for a lot of reasons, especially if the user hasn't been punished by moderation thoroughly for their behavior in the past; whether that because they don't want to look like the Fun Police, the player is popular and people are explicitly joining the game to play with them (in which case you pissed off part of your player base or part of your prospective playerbase), and it just looks like a pretty hardline action. So I think that it'd be understandable if GMs didn't like using this option outside extreme circumstances, or X simply can't play with Y.

The second one is in-thread warnings that things are getting toxic, but without further enforcement and something to back up threats, those are largely going to be toothless and probably not stop the players being ACTIVELY toxic; it can help players that are accidentally blowing up and just need a bit to time to cool off from the thread for a bit, but they aren't really the kind of poster this thread is about, is it? If it is, that feels like an entirely different discussion. It's not a BAD tool, by any stretch, but it requires something else to have meat to it.

The third tool is to more judiciously use forcereplaces. To be clear, I actually think this is a pretty good solution. However, there are some things I think should be kept in mind- a lot of pressure is going to be on the GM to decide "Okay, how toxic is TOO toxic," and the boundary there is not always going to be clear (I'll go over this again when I discuss list moderator) and keep in mind that the GM is going to not want to get a bad reputation for kicking people out unfairly (otherwise even non-toxic players won't join future games by them), so a lot of pressure is going to be on them. I think this is going to result in them erring on the side of leniency, which is probably a good call, but means that at least it's probably going to not solve the problem in itself, outside the super extreme cases. Not to mention that this becomes rather easy to game when it comes to reads and can easily derail the game; is a mod more likely to force-replace somebody being toxic if they're scum or town? Do they have a history in one direction or another? Even if not, what is the general perception? You see some of this with replace-outs, and here it's just going to be so much worse. Which, again, would lead to the GM erring toward leniency as much as possible, to avoid putting a hand on the scale of the game- there were arguments about GMs being impartial arbiters, but that in itself is an issue with this being a firm solution.

Which leads to our third line of defense- line staff. I would first like to echo Micc here- being a moderator is FUCKING HARD. As somebody that has spent a good deal of her time seeing areas where she feels moderators went too far or screwed up, I typically totally get where the moderators were coming from when they made a decision. Moderators are rarely moustache-twirling villains who just hit somebody Just Cuz or because they don't like them; that is something that CAN HAPPEN in some communities, but the default if you're going to be in a community should be good faith, so we're going to be operating under that for this discussion.

So moderation is difficult, and while I can't comment on the specifics of staff decisions here, not being a member of staff (and my own staff process being different), from the fact that moderation is hard, the fact that you have to, as I was saying earlier, decide exactly "Okay, is this against the rules, or is this the typical rough-and-tumble I'd expect from a game of Mafia", "Is the person reporting frustrated because they're on the other side of the argument and perhaps not the most unbiased arbiter of the situation (which doesn't mean they're acting in bad faith! But it's something you have to keep in mind with these decisions), and the overarching context of the case in mind and how that factors in. To be clear, again, I don't want to talk about specific cases here! I'm trying to speak very generally for a reason. That means that a lot of behavior, including borderline behavior and behavior I might not even consider borderline, is probably going to get a pass. And that should be met with a degree of understanding because moderation is hard, and that isn't even inherently a bad thing, though it certainly can be.

Another thing is that moderation is INHERENTLY going to in part be a black box; it probably isn't going to be advisable to totally discuss why a report was rejected, especially since such explanations could prove rather long and result in revealing a lot of information, and you in some cases don't really want to go into depth on why punishments are different. THat just is often going to be problematic. Part of where I'm curious is the whole need to be secret about staff actions, because i'm not entirely sure why that privacy would be beneficial; it just creates this air of secrecy around what you do, makes it less clear when somebody is being talked to and being disciplined for their staff action, when exactly a report is followed through at all and when it is rejected, and so on. Having that sort of thing be a matter of public record, at least in terms of actually actioned material, seems like it'd be beneficial in many respects. At least in terms of repeat offenders where it gets more serious than "we had a brief talk with the user about perhaps not skirting the civility rules as much in the future," and I would actually be interested in Micc, or somebody from the moderation team, providing a perspective on that if they'd be kind enough to, because it is very different from my own experience, and I'm curious what precisely the thought process is there.

So that was a long WOT I'm sure no one read! But I hope I made at least one or two cogent points that make sense, and that perhaps I added to the discussion at least a little. Or maybe I just posted garbage, I guess it's up to other people to decide. xP

1. Even more than in your average mafia game, though EXACTLY how much toxicity is rewarded would require knowledge on the meta I don't have here; given the game I'm sure some toxic behavior is to scum's advantage, though.