He also, again, didn't rape anybody, as far as I know. Two fairly different situations.
Just as a personal matter, what you and
RedMercury are suggesting about a forum issues discussion board sounds like it could be interesting... or insanely toxic. It'd have to be carefully done. I can talk to the rest of the team about it, but it's hard to shake the feeling sometimes that we'd have to spend an incredibly outsized amount of time and effort moderating it and it'd still be a toxic hellhole.
And you're right, I'm not referring to people taking issue with things we've done as bullying or hostility. I'm mostly referring to people twisting words to say that we're doing something we're not, or not doing something we are. Or tossing back a team members helping hand, or just telling us to go fuck ourselves, etc. etc. This is part of the fear with a forum discussion section/thread as well.
Moderation can always be better. It's gotten harder since the pandemic, though. I don't expect anybody to be fully ameliorated by that, mind. Just explaining the reality of it. Lotta days we only have 2-3 people on at a time, and if a report falls outside of their areas of expertise, well, stuff can sit. We try not to let it.
I just think a topic like that would be completely untenable for productive conversations and would routinely descend into complete toxicity. Those fears are completely founded.
We've had several of these types of threads the past couple of months, all of them based on very sensitive topics (race, sexual assault) questioning the moderation of the site that have been allowed to stay open for days/weeks and the discussion often isn't level headed despite the very sensitive nature leading to graveyards. You have a topic for questioning moderation decisions beyond specific sensitive subjects on actions and policy and it simply becomes a free for fall.
Not that mods/admins shouldn't be accountable, there should be some leeway on discussion of their actions and attitudes but opening the floodgates of accountability wouldn't achieve anything and just lead to more abuse and literally just creates a "to do list" for bad operators on other sites and forums that watch this place. As
Sophia alluded to they get targeted personally for their status on the site and people happily use their personal history against them.
The staff too aren't a monolithic presence either, they are a cast of very different people with very different experiences and attitudes. They try to work around the base of people with knowledge and experience on subjects X, Y or Z and often things have to be taken with a round table approach. I wouldn't for example want
Syder suddenly controlling PolEra or this Biden situation, but to that same token I wouldn't want
Sophia making lone decisions on BritEra or Sport communities. People in their spheres should have more influence, it isn't a perfect system but at least it leads to communities/sections of the group having representation on moderation, even if it does spread a large team thin.
I think what a lot of people don't like is that when posters become staff and essentially vanish as community members and instead of interacting they are essentially watchkeepers; which their role requires to a degree but people still want their presence as posters as well.
But I digress, if we were to have a permanent topic on moderation decisions it would constantly have to be watched and guidelines put in place; then everyone will ignore the guidelines and protest it stifles the point of the thread and it would just become a place where toxicity against staff is tolerated. I don't have faith it would become a good faith haven of progressive questioning and fruitful discussion, however good intentioned some people may be.
People want consistency too from the staff in the application of the site rules, especially when a situation like this arises there should be staff posts specifically saying what and what is not acceptable in the context of "new sensitive subject X" (e.g. Biden), which they did to an extent with the Kobe threads but probably not enough for the Biden threads.
People too need to have realistic expectations. This is an online community, likes thousands that came before and thousands that will undoubtably come after. There isn't a perfect utopian plan for these sites and there will always be issues and people should accept the realistic nature that difficult conversations don't have a clear cut answer and that the staff are acting in good faith to do as well as they possibly can together and with the community. Nor should crowd think be the defining policy.
Edit: apologies
Sophie - accidentally had you tagged at first.
