Returning to the discussion about Besada's protection of minority groups: I think this is a good foil to discuss the broader challenge of moderating a large, responsible forum like GAF.
In the broadest abstract, I actually agree with Besada that minorities need to be protected. The tyranny of the majority is a real thing, and at the very least we need to offer some protection to disadvantaged or small groups so that they aren't simply overwhelmed. The idea, out of context, is sound, in my opinion.
But there are a couple specifics I feel most of the other moderators (not just Besada here) were missing, or at least which I think were important:
1) The most important kind of minority is not a racial minority or a religious minority, but an intellectual one. Often these go hand in hand (i.e. different religions have different intellectual bases), but they are not identical, and if I had to pick one type of diversity to defend first and foremost (I'd like to defend them all, of course) it would be intellectual diversity. It often seems that many people focus exclusively on more superficial types of diversity, and that seemed to be the case with several other moderators, to me.
2) What defines a minority is significantly context dependent. For instance, I am a white guy living in America, so at the moment I definitely do not qualify as a minority. But if I were to move to China -- as my sister has -- then I would rather quickly find myself as a minority, and the same tyranny-of-the-majority rules apply, where my sister is often ignored or overlooked because she is not naturally Chinese. As an example. Similarly, on GAF, conservatives were a minority, and I felt deserving of some protection simply because their voices were being drowned out. It didn't even have to be mean spirited drowning out -- if one person advocated a conservative position, he would often get 8 retorts back from liberals, simply because there were so many more liberals than conservatives. Even if none of those people was inherently trying to "pick" on the conservative, the end result must have been exhausting if you happened to hold political views that were not majority GAF opinion.
So I ultimately agree that protecting minority rights is important, just like Besada felt. I just think that means different things at different times. If I were moderating FoxsNews.Com forums, I would probably have found it necessary to reach and give special protections to liberals. If I were moderating MensHealth.com, I would probably feel obliged to make sure women who happened to post on that forum feel comfortable. Being a minority is context dependent, and most importantly can include being an intellectual minority. This, in essence, was a consistent sticking point between me and much of the other moderation staff.
I think you are largely right in your argument, but the way the moderation by and large manifested itself on the site over the last few years was not protecting minorities per se(as we just talked about the whole NBA-gaf fiasco that led to Slaent) but by
protecting opinion holders(not necessarily explicitly either). Often majority opinion holders. Doubly so if they came from perceived minority groups. Which is much different than just protecting minorities or giving them a bit more leeway as Besada would frame it(I think disingenuously).
I have long held this over-arching criticism that when you step back and observe the way moderation was conducted on the forum(not universally, but regularly enough to become a trend), you can almost predict it down to the letter how the outcome will go with most mods based on what opinion or position the person in question takes. Heck, this forum has made observing that a bit of a pastime.
If the position the poster takes is outside of the mod's personal viewpoints, or the accepted boundaries of the majority opinion, the TOS gets applied much more vigilantly and there is a high probability the poster will be banned in that thread(or at a minimum be put on some mods target list for future heavy scrutiny), if you are inside the bubble of acceptable positions, you get a rather long leash. Like very long, like Lime long.
Now apply that over a long period and what you inevitably get is a community that has weeded out people primarily based on wrong-think. Protecting the group-thinkers and signaling to the rest of the community that if you want to shit post, even try and get wrong-thinkers banned, just do it within these implicit bounds and most of the time you will be ok, if not rewarded.
I'll leave the rest in spoilers because I don't want to shit up the thread with serious discussion anymore:
spoiler (click to show/hide)
And we are humans and use all sorts of mental shortcuts to make decisions. One of which is that as a rule of thumb, when a person expresses a particular opinion we naturally make assumptions about their deeper beliefs. He said X and often times people who say X are Y, and Y is bad, therefore people that say X should be assumed to be Y.
So take a situation where you have a pretty in-depth thinker that by 90% of accounts is a liberal and within the bounds of the GAF-think bubble, But 10% of the time he/she deviates. Maybe they have a specific issue with a touchy field like affirmative action policy for instance, and so the mob around them, after hearing that opinion, updates their probability that the person speaking is probably an alt-right conservative. It's actually not an irrational assumption, but it is not an assumption qualified by simply having an opinion that may be shared by a detested out-group. GAF will often reign down on that person and dog pile based on that assumption though, and often even the best mods will get in on the action, falling victim to the same short-hand. One wrong step and you are gone. Meanwhile, the dogpilers 99 times out of 100 have no repercussions and more often than not are actually rewarded.
Maybe such a shorthand technique makes sense early on in a highly unregulated forum that is really getting proliferated by trolls and true shit-posters, but when you keep applying that routine to an already highly culled community you are just purging out the discussion capacity of that forum. Because after enough time we all will begin to learn what triggers the blowback and what doesn't, and so people with divergent views are going to either one, get culled out, or hesitate to voice divergent opinions due to being labeled wrong thinkers. Leaving a really poor discussion community in its wake that just amounts to circle jerking, catastrophizing, and applying that short-hand cycle in a way you are just eating your own and further ingraining the problem. A snake eating itself was a perfect analogy.
And this problem is one almost all large message boards fall victim to with their moderation. So I'm not signaling out just GAF. Nor suggesting I actually have an answer for how an unpaid community can ever hope to avoid the pitfalls.
