The Moderator Thread

[AngryLittleAlchemist]

RolStoppable said:

CGI-Quality said:

Yor words in the posts don't reflect that he didn't do anything wrong by creating the thread (in fact, your first line says: "Do we really need a thread on every possible misconception that people may or may not have about Nintendo fans"). The rest of the post implies that it was an unnecessary topic, which is indeed Backseat Moderating (though some refining will be done in the future). However, the post, on its own, wouldn't have warranted a Warning. It was all three of them (including the mention of 'sensitive Nintendo fans') that lead to it.

If you don't feel it was worth a report, that's fine too, but complaining about a thread in a topic has always been frowned upon (whether justified or not). I actually am against that anyway, because if it is bad enough to state that it shouldn't exist (essentially derailing the thread), then it is bad enough to report. If there was nothing wrong with its existence, then it is confusing to see why a discussion about it happened at all.

Hopefully, that makes a little more sense.

I think there's a general problem with moderation when an interconnected mess leads to a moderation for someone who is reasonable; GoOnKid's thread was a response/addition to a thread that was already a response itself, so it's fine to ask how much farther that will go. It would be much more appropriate to identify the root cause(s) in a chain of events and take action against said root cause(s) (direct in-thread responses, moderations), because in the broadest sense human behavior falls into two groups:

1. People who act, initiate conflict.
2. People who react to the first group.

Group 2 is significantly bigger than group 1, but group 2 is actually easier to deal with. Because if group 1 is appropriately dealt with, group 2 does not act. Now the reason why group 1 is not appropriately addressed ties into another general problem with moderation:

People are allowed to be stupid and wrong, but the same leeway isn't given to people who are right. For example, people are free to make up their own facts and reality, but when someone calls them out for it and uses descriptive words that can be deemed offensive (such as sensitive, delusional, ignorant), the context gets commonly brushed aside and a moderation gets issued. Moderation is more dependent on the use or lack thereof of specific words than it is on context. That's why the advice to report doesn't mean much, because when stupid/wrong posts don't feature certain words, nothing will be done about them; not even an in-thread post from a moderator or a PM to the person who reported in order to explain why nothing is being done.

Back to this specific case, context-sensitive moderation would mean two things:

1. The word 'sensitive' isn't a big deal because it's used in the context of a thread that is overly sensitive.
2. Questioning the original poster isn't a big deal when the original poster isn't offended. See below:

AngryLittleAlchemist said:

(...)

I'm in a VGChartz Nintendo discord and four people commented on the thread. Not one of them could understand the reason for the moderation. One of those people was GoOnKid, the OP. So if no one was offended or felt that my comments were malicious, why should I be moderated? 

So why should it be moderated? Because someone reported it? Considering who reports what and in which way on this site, reports aren't a particularly reliable factor when it comes to more demanding situations. Productive discussion calls for naming things by their name, so it's not always sunshine and rainbows; that's just how it is. Fact is that not all threads are good. Another fact is that not every thread that isn't good is moderable (this specific case being an example). So how do you gain something positive from a questionable basis (i.e. the original post)? By being allowed to tell it how it is. It's not like every thread creator is convinced that they have the only correct answer and every differing view must be wrong. It's also not like every discussion has to be strictly about what is in the original post if the OP is only a portion of a much bigger whole.

GoOnKid actually was, in his words, "a little offended". I didn't see him write that in the Discord. He made a comment earlier in the channel that made it sound like he didn't agree with, or at least didn't understand the moderation. But he indeed took it a little personally, and we ended up talking it out. I assume he didn't report me though, because one of his comments was something along the lines of "It's my own thread and I can't even see why he was moderated". I still don't think that's worth a moderation, some people simply get offended more or less easily, but eh, maybe GoOn and the mods see something I don't. It's ok either way.