The Problem of Moderation

No, not the Excess-opposite Moderation. Moderation – as in censorship on Internet communities. My proposition is that Moderation is a necessary evil, but it is extremely easy to get wrong and it is undoubtedly evil, and thus the use of moderation should be kept in check as much as possible and only applied when the evil you are combating is greater than the evil of moderation.

So, first – why am I writing this. The impetus was a situation on the Prequel fanart booru where something I worked on was rejected as not being “Prequel related” enough. The primary focus of the image wasn’t Prequel related, and I did add QW and Katia in the background specifically  to get okay to add to the fanart page. I pulled them from a couple different Prequel pages, removed all background from them, pasted them into a layer on my image, Flipped QW horizontally, resized them appropriately, added a blur filter. How long did that take? How much effort was involved? I’d say around ½ hour. Because I’m slow. But effort was put into it. I’d argue that much less than ½ hours’ time was put on other images that are on the booru, but granted those have Katia as the central focus rather than in the background.

I got mad. But even then I knew 2 things – I was not mad at the Moderator. I was mad at the policy. I think it is a mistaken policy, and this essay is my reasoning for why I think so. But ultimately this is only my opinion. It’s not my sandbox. Before coming up with this reasoned approach, I had a couple other reactions in mind, the best one being to take 15 minutes and draw a bad Katia on blue-lined notebook paper in crayon, take a picture of it with bad lighting, and upload that to the booru. But cooler heads prevailed. (and I didn’t have any crayons)

Okay, now, on to my credentials. I’ve been a moderator before. In fact, I think you could say I was a Proto-Moderator. I was a Moderator before there was an Internet. In the 1990s I owned and ran the largest BBS in Palm Beach county, Florida in fact, with 24 lines into two PCs dedicated for its use – and this was back when PCs were pretty damn expensive. It cost the users $10 a month to login and they were happy to do so, and that more than covered my expenses for those 24 telephone lines. It was profitable month-after-month and I am still to this day in communication with many of the friends I met through it. It spawned multiple relationships and at very least 2 marriages that are still going strong to this day. (…and more that aren’t including my own at the time, but that’s life.) I guess you could say it spawned actual children for that matter!

I also run a small gaming website with my own home-written Forum software that ties to the game intimately- since I wrote both the game and the Forum software. That game has been running since 2000. A case could be made that I’ve been Moderating since the early 1990s. I’ve seen different styles and have tried them myself, both the Strict Police State model and the Laissez-faire model. As expected, the ideal lies somewhere in between. However I am going to argue here that the ideal lies much closer to that latter than the former.

As I mentioned, I do believe that Moderation is an Evil. When I first started doing this, my plan was to let the users run amok. I would set up forum topics, but leave it to the users to stay on track. When the user base was limited to a very few and not very diverse, that worked surprisingly well actually. Sure they would stray off-topic occasionally, but they would self-police or the ‘stray’ thread would simply die. However, as the users became more diverse (less a geek-fest and closer to a normal demographic with GASP actual women and girls online!) it did tend to stray more often, until moderation was required.

However, there are different ‘grades’ of moderation too. As my BBS grew, it became clear that moderating was not a 1-person job, so I had co-sysops that would keep up on specific forums and the chat room to help out. So the 1st grade of moderation would be a light warning from the co-sysop. 2nd level a serious warning, 3rd level, co-sysop would get me involved before banning. (no one was banned without consulting me since they paid $ to be there.) Even then the ban was likely only for a day or two. And then the perma-ban (which was never actually used!)

A more modern system is my game site because it is free to anybody and so are the Forums. Being free and relatively anonymous is a whole ‘nuther beast, and I took pains when setting it up to not require any personal information at all. I have the IP address, and that’s it. It’s not 4chan, but it’s pretty close. And yes, it’s more chaotic. Threads tend to stray more often – but they also seem to die sooner too. My analogy is to a rope. When the users have to pay $ to join, users are more likely to follow the rules – but when they stray, they stray hard. When free and anonymous, they stray more often, but the deviance from accepted norms are shorter-lived. So it’s like a frayed rope, but the majority still stay on track. So at most a moderator just has to trim the edges a bit. But no need to shave it!

Before I move on, I’d like to give an example of the worst situation I ever ran into. It could not have been solved by any moderation. It was back in the BBS days and two users were going at it in the real-time chat. One was a Conservative guy, probably about 17 years old, the other a Liberal woman of about 18. I wasn’t online at the time so I got the initial details from a co-sysop who was. He ended up banning the guy for ‘virtual rape’. Basically the conversation got more and more heated until the guy said something to the effect that he would rape her blah-blah-blah…

Yeah, it was pretty bad. But before I did anything else, I went back through the chat logs and read the entire conversation between these two. She was worse – by far. But the accusation of ‘rape’ can only be used by one sex. Virtual castration appears not to be a thing. Online, where no physicality is possible, whatever ‘virtual rape’ means, it can go both ways – and it did. In the end I removed the ban from the guy and applied it to the girl instead. As support, I posted their conversation publicly and specifically showed where she crossed the line. (and there was a clear notice on every login that all conversations should be considered public and that no privacy was implied or guaranteed btw.)

Again, it was not a perma-ban, she was back the next month and the incident never repeated.

A Tale of Two Discords:

Picture this. Two Discords. (If you don’t know what that is, you might just skip this bit.) One is highly policed and every attempt is made to keep it on-topic and clean. The other was created with the same fan base in mind, but allowed to run amok – cliques created, chaotic chats, unbridled lewds, everything.

A year passes. One has died. The other is still running wild, though strayed so far from the original topic that it’s discussion is so rare as to be non-existent. Which outcome is ‘better’? I would argue the latter, because any outcome is better than death. Extreme moderation is by far worse for a community than lack of moderation. IF a community is what you’re looking to build.

Now, it strikes me that one major difference between Kazerad’s booru and my own experience is that Kazerad actively discourages community formation. I am trying to promote it. And therein may well be the real crux of my disagreement with the policies on the booru. I’ll accept that.

Okay, enough history, what’s your point? My point is this. Yes, you have to have some moderation. But people tend to stay within the rules, esp. when those rules are clearly defined, with minimal intervention. If they’re overly complex or not able to be clearly defined, do not moderate the edge-cases. Let the rope have a little fray to it. Let it be a little messy. How messy is again open to interpretation, but where a post or image falls near the edge of a rule, if it’s borderline it should default to in not out in my experience. Always err on the side of liberality. You’ll know when it’s too far. It will be obvious. If it’s not obvious, it should be in. Because otherwise you:

1. Will have to define your rules better. (may not even be possible!)

2. Publicize your rules more prominently, which inherently is stifling – esp. as those rules get more detailed.

3. Do not ‘tweak’ your rules without notice, because then you have to go back through existing posts and remove those who now violate your revisions. If you don’t there will be “Well this got in and it violates your rules more than mine.”

There is a Golden Rule I’ve come up with to determine whether to moderate or not-moderate.

Is the evil of moderation greater than the evil of this post?

Paraphrased, “does the post really represent a serious problem?”

I also find the evil of moderation is pretty evil. Something’s got to really be a problem to be moderated. So ask yourself, is this really a problem? Or am I creating a problem where none exists? In an awful lot of cases, there is no problem. There’s an edge case that might be over the edge based on interpretation. But is it a problem?

It can be argued that it’s a ‘slippery slope’. “If I let this in, it is going to cause a bunch of more of these edge cases!” In my experience, that’s always untrue. It’s a single edge case and leaving it in does not cause issues. It just doesn’t happen. It’s the far outliers that you have to moderate, not the edge cases. That’s a simple truth based on years of experience. So again, in my experience, edge cases are fine. If it can be argued by a reasonable person that they are within the rules, then they are within the rules by definition.

That’s the heart of my case, but while on the topic I’d like to discuss Moderators themselves. In my case it was Unidentified BA that was my judge, jury and executioner. But here’s the thing, it doesn’t matter who the mod is. Being a mod is such a terrible, thankless job that I really don’t see why anyone would want to be one. Everything you do is open to scrutiny. If you don’t do something, that’s open to scrutiny too. You are asked to be judge, jury and executioner, but you are given a vague set of laws that are very open to interpretation to work off of. So you do your job the best you can with the best intent. And you are going to piss somebody off. It’s in the job description. “If you don’t piss anyone off this week, you’re not doing your job.”

I had the extreme good fortune in both of my Modding career endeavors to be the owner of the site. So at least I wasn’t sitting between the Owner and the Users, having to constantly look back and forth, trying to figure out what will please the Boss but still keep the masses in check. An absolutely horrible position and thankless job. So here’s some small thanks. Kudos to BA and anyone else that takes that job willingly. (Suckers!) I’m arguing against the policy, not the police here.

To summarize, it is my experience that it is better policy to allow edge-cases in rather than out. Edge cases can provide some unexpected variance and they do not cause a ‘slippery slope’. The Evil of Moderation is greater than the Evil of edge-cases. Do not try to fix a problem by moderation where no problem exists. If a reasonable argument can be made that post X is within the rules, then it is already within the rules inherently – or the rules are too fuzzy.

There is no silver-bullet to Moderation. (Ask Mr. Zuckerberg about that.) There is no easy answer to the Problem of Moderation. I can only offer my own opinion based on years of experience. The interpretation is up to the site owner ultimately on how best to moderate. This is simply asking for a reconsideration of that interpretation. Moderation is a necessary evil, but it IS AN EVIL.