Constructive has semi rolled the reports issues discussion into a lot of navel-gazing about, essentially, why Era is such a shitpile of reports and hostility:
Do you have an opinion on why the community is so toxic and aggressive? Basically what I am asking is, has the staff ever talked about what might have gone wrong between the creation of the site and now that could have contributed towards this level of hostility and toxicity? Did something not go as planned or is it due to external factors? Or was the community just toxic from the very beginning?
I'd personally say that we long ago collectively decided its okay to be an absolute condescending asshole to people solong as you see yourself as morally correct. Just take the will smith threads as an example. several posters being outright hostile calling eachother sheltered or damaged making no effort to understand that people have different upbringings in different environments and all of those are valid. any insinuation about people not living "in the real world" really is some dismissive bullshit that is jsut someone trying to enforce that their expereinces are the only valid ones.
i know that to deal with this can be a bit "tone policey" like but surely there is a middle ground between not having to educate bigots and dismissing everyones life experiences to get on your high horse. theres no need for the open hostility and assholery honestly and i wish we didnt allow it.
It's probably an unpopular opinion because people seem to really dislike tone policing but I think being "in the right" kind of allows you to get away with hostility. You can get away with low level hostility and escalation of subjects as long as you are correct and in the right, and some posters have carried that posting style into pretty much all their posts covering every topic they discuss
This means that topics can start quite mundane and then escalate rapidly, which generates a ton of reports which means threads need to be locked
There is also an undercurrent of posters that can't wait to attack staff if they ever make a mistake, and you can see many examples in this thread over the last 2 years of a mod doing something people dislike and then dozens of people racing in here to demand they step down. I'm not really sure how you prevent that from happening, but if I were a mod that would have me walking on eggshells and doubting myself when I do make a call. It also means if you do action someone who is in the right over their tone there is a chance people will just attack staff over it
With regards to suggestions, I will echo a slow mode might help with massive threads that move fast. Maybe limit it to one new post a minute appearing (if that is possible) or see if a feature can be added that allows posters to only post once every 10 mins in certain threads. That would hopefully cause posters to slow down, read more, and maybe write up a longer post than they would if they needed to fire off a quick reply to someone they disagreed with. You can currently only post once per minute so if that could be extended for certain threads that might help with giving mods time to get on top of reports
I think report categories might also help (again, if possible) so that posts can be flagged as urgent or not. I think if you just had "urgent" and "not urgent" as the choices that could help. People posting material that needs to be removed urgently, or bigotry/troll accounts can be flagged as urgent, but console waring and "X is being a dick to me" posts could be flagged as not urgent
I do think it's hard for staff, who are unpaid volunteers balancing being a mod with work and family life, because there are a lot of posters here, so it's going to be hard in situations where there is a huge spike of work. Who has the time to even read 70 pages in a day, let alone read 70 pages and moderate posters?
That said, it's also not ideal when so many huge events are essentially unable to be discussed on Era because the threads are locked for hours and hours while the reports are dealt with
I see, thank you for the replies everyone. Couldn't such behavior be discouraged by penalizing it? A sort of "don't be an asshole" warning or small ban?
I personally think thats something where warnings and then threadbans could be useful. but really I just dont know if this forum at large is open to doing something like that, a lot still dont want to admit that tone is important.
If they made being a low-level or moderately hostile asshole a bannable offense, they'd have to make probably 10x the bans they currently do. And the users banned for it would openly revolt saying the mods are authoritarian cops applying double standards by not also banning [poster who provoked me] or [poster clearly posting in bad faith] or whoever they perceive as being in the wrong and while still banning them even though they were in the right, etc.
Like personally for me, even no-effort assholery like "fuck outta here" or "lmao garbage ass post" should be at the very least threadbannable or heavily discouraged as a rule, because posts that are nothing but admonitions or insults don't contribute anything at all to discussion, no matter how justified or impassioned the poster feels about making them. But in any contentious thread for anything, posts like that seem to be a solid plurality of posts because that's just how people want to engage, and any attempt to moderate on that level would be criticized as "tone policing" because, well, it is. So that's the choice: either have no tone policing and allow people to be virtually unfettered assholes if they're in the right, or have some level of it and enjoy the backlash.
Basically they've worked out that Era condones the good guys being dickbags, but nobody seems to be pointing out the elements of staff that are drivers of this sort of behavior.
Vulpix surfaces with tips on how to make reporting work better by reducing the number of reports:
Something that not a lot of people know of or do that actually helps a lot moderation wise is if a certain user in a thread makes a lot of posts, instead of reporting each and every post by that user, just report a single post and mention in the report that the user has many multiple posts in the thread that should be looked at.
Mods can, and usually automatically do look to check if the reported user has made any other posts in the given thread by default. Especially to get context as many reports tend to be single word reports saying “trolling” or “wars”. While in some cases the reported post is overt and obvious enough that no further research is needed, for many others the reported posts aren’t overt enough and it can be hard to discern the intent of the reported post without further context. Far too many times a single user would made 5-8+ contentious or disruptive posts in a single thread and all 5-8+ of those posts would be reported by various users and the report queue, instead of only increasing by 1, would now be increased by 8.
Like it has been mentioned here by staff, the amount of open reports in the queue plays a big psychological component in the moderation process. Seeing an open report queue in the single digits or even low teens is far easier mentally to get oneself engaged as well as to actually moderate and process. Compare that to a report queue that has 40-50+ open reports, which isn’t uncommon especially on days with breaking/big news threads, and the element of anxiety for many on staff causes stress and the almost automatic desire to disengage. I’ve unfortunately seen it first hand on others many times and it’s a terrible feeling to see others deal with. I’d always try and do more moderation work so that others had less to worry and stress about but that’s not good or sustainable for one’s own health either.
Some days it’ll be unavoidable that the report queue will grow fairly large, however the above and being more descriptive in reports will always be a huge help and make the moderation process easier and more efficient.
And then AuthenticM chimes in with a post I'm sure that is supposed to describe the average user but reads like the profile of the average angry Era mod:
I am reminded of a post by [USER=1944]Finale Fireworker[/USER] from a while back, about how the community of video game enthusiasts attracts, on average more than other communities, a type of person who lacks control in their personal lives. That lack of control in their personal lives drives them to often act in a hostile manner to others on the internet, such as on Resetera, as an unconscious way to get a hold of some degree of control, which is something that humans instinctively crave. For example, being hostile to staff, trying to dictate what they should or shouldn't do, or how they should do things, is a form of control.
Basically, there is a limit to what we, as a community, can do to curb this issue, because part of it comes from purely external factors that are out of our control.
Finale, I do not remember where or when that post of yours was made. I'd love to read it again, if you could link it to us here. Thank you!
