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Forums - Website Topics - Should The Political Discussion Board Remain?

 

Should The Political Discussion Board Remain?

Yes 66 53.66%
 
No 57 46.34%
 
Total:123

I voted no, just remove them altogether. It will make the mod's lives way easier.



Bet with Intrinsic:

The Switch will outsell 3DS (based on VGchartz numbers), according to me, while Intrinsic thinks the opposite will hold true. One month avatar control for the loser's avatar.

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CGI-Quality said:
Carl said:
@CGI-Quality

What are your thoughts on the problems within Political discussion? Along with your opinions on what could be done to rectify said problems? Other mods have offered some input, I'm curious on what you think regarding the entire situation.

I consider it a personal failure, to a degree. It’s an open wound we’ve allowed to bleed and, as a result, it’s taken a toll on everyone. 

Of course, people don’t need to be jerks in those topics, but with no input from us, we’ve done it a disservice. That must change one way or another.

I know I've not been around recently, so feel less entitled to give my opinion, but I voted for the Politics forum to stay. It has its problems, but if you got rid of it, political threads would just seep into General Discussion and other off-topic forums.

You'd then be faced with a decision whether or not to ban threads that started political, or lock threads that turned political, and then there'd be the the grey areas of where to draw the line as to when it's too political etc. etc. Removing the forum would just set you up for a different form of headache, I think. Not only that, it might look a bit weird to the uninitiated outsider for the site to include an array of different types of off-topic forums, but ban any form of political discussion.

I think you're beating yourselves up trying to find the perfect solution, and absolutely no way should it be considered a personal failure.

I think you just have to step back and acknowledge that it's impossible to satisfy everyone all of the time. The addition of customisable filters for the front page is as good as I think you'll ever get to solving the problem. If extra policing is what the Politics forum needs, perhaps anyone who wants to see it thrive and become an asset to the site could step up and be a dedicated mod.

Just a random thought.

Last edited by Hedra42 - on 12 March 2019

Can you make it where users need a certain amount of reputation before commenting in political forums? I've been noticing a lot of new users who are toxic.



SpokenTruth said:
HylianSwordsman said:

You mean you've never visited the forum index page? The one that just lists all the boards? You can't filter that. If you can, just make it so you can't then. It doesn't display topics, and everyone checks it out at some point and would notice a board they hadn't been to and check it out. To me, opt-in would require the least work for the most effective outcome of allowing people who want it to look for it while never bothering anyone else. And how is it a detriment to the currently existing members? Like I said, it's one or two clicks, and in return, they get more members of the site, members who will eventually discover the politics board and decide for themselves if they want to hang out there.

Wait...what are you talking about Opting-In of?  Do you just mean Hot Topics?  I'm talking about the board itself. 

I'm talking about opting into having the board appearing in Hot Topics and the front page, such that guests don't see politics topics pop up and users don't either unless they opt in or navigate to the board itself. If you have to manually navigate to the board when you feel like talking about politics, it's no big deal, as that is a form of opting in already, but the system we have now has politics popping up in the Hot Topics, which draws a lot more attention from the community to inflammatory thread titles. We're only humans, we see attention grabbing titles on the internet and we click. I mean I've learned not to when I'm not in the mood, but when the Hot Topics page is like 50% politics and it's the same handful of people arguing back and forth, it's hard not to feel like there's nothing else to talk about. More attention ends up paid to these pointless political discussions instead of actual gaming content like the site is intended for. Opting-in to having the board appear in Hot Topics and front page would make it easy for fans of political discussion to have the topics show up for quick access, while those who haven't opted in don't have to worry about it or think about it and aren't slapped in the face on the daily by the political opinions of certain members of the community. Thus new members don't get a bad impression of us and have more time to get to know us and grow attached to the place, and longtime members sensitive to the controversy don't start to feel no longer welcome. We'd all get along better this way. Anything is better than what we currently do though.

By opting out, do you mean something other than Hot Topics? How would you opt-out of a board entirely? Just make it so it doesn't appear on the site at all? That would need an opt-out, yeah, but that seems unnecessary, when simply having an auto-filter for the Hot Topics, and I guess Latest Topics, so that Politics only appears if you set it to because you want it to, would solve most of the controversy and drama. There'd still be politically active folks who'd enter the board on their own and then be upset by the presence of opinions they don't like, and a few of those types have been cool people that were fun to talk games with, but only a full ban of political discussion anywhere on the site would solve that, by forcing some sort of off-site solution like Discord to accommodate different schools of thought on how moderation should work, and some people might not even be happy with that. Those people would just have to go to a political reddit or something.



Snoopy said:
Can you make it where users need a certain amount of reputation before commenting in political forums? I've been noticing a lot of new users who are toxic.

This is actually a pretty good idea. Maybe if it was locked for anyone below a certain number of points? Combined with stepping up the moderation on the politics forum, that would mean that many of the worst offenders would be permabanned from the forums entirely for trolling the gaming forums before they could accumulate enough points to muck up the politics threads.



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padib said:
HylianSwordsman said:

This is actually a pretty good idea. Maybe if it was locked for anyone below a certain number of points? Combined with stepping up the moderation on the politics forum, that would mean that many of the worst offenders would be permabanned from the forums entirely for trolling the gaming forums before they could accumulate enough points to muck up the politics threads.

Cool concept. It would have to be a private rating system done by a neutral group (mod team or a specific group for political threads as was mentioned earlier). It can't be a public rating system because people who disagree or read from the other side of a debate may not be able to stay neutral. It would have to be a rating done by a neutral party, and then certain threads could require higher or lower reputation as configured by a mod.

But that might lead to people not just refraining from trolling or being abusive, but it could lead to people developing some kind of cleaned out rhetoric that goes against the grain of the political forum.

Still it's an interesting idea.

I mean that's certainly one way to do it, but that would be really involved to create. I just meant the gamrPoints system, under your avi. You have 41,000 points right now. I have 11,900. We've clearly both been around long enough that if we were toxic troublemakers, it would already be apparent. Moderating politics would be hard enough with everyone able to access it, but with a high bar, say 5,000 or 10,000 points, only the most committed and proven members would be able to post in political threads, making it much easier to moderate. New people that are the type to troll and be toxic to the community wouldn't be able to post for a long time, and would probably get permabanned from activity on the gaming forums first. New people that aren't the type to troll and be toxic but would be turned off by divisive conversation wouldn't be able to take part in controversial topics until much later after they'd grown attached enough to the community to be able to look past that. All we'd need is some kind of check before a post submits that blocks posts into politics if your gamrPoints are too low. That, and a rule that posting a political thread to the wrong thread gets the thread locked instead of moved to politics if you wouldn't have enough points to partake in it, otherwise people would try to get around the gate by posting in General and getting it transferred to Politics. Also, it would probably be good to pair this with keeping Politics off of Hot Topics, Latest Topics, and the front page so as not to taunt new members with something they can't participate in.



I don't like the idea of board reputation being linked to a debate about the Politics board: it seems to invite a situation where users could be “punished” for their political opinions in a way that would leak into other parts of their site use. Upvote/downvote systems are highly exploitable.



TalonMan said:

I've been thinking on a "reputation" system for quite some time - different than points for doing stuff, or vg$ for doing other stuff, etc. There are many, many, MANY ways to skin this type of cat in ways that are fair while also preventing users from intentionally bumping up others who might not necessarily deserve it. For instance:

 

 - Your reputation must be at xx before you can rate anybody else - if your reputation takes a downturn and you suddenly find yourself below the threshold, then it will encourage you to start engaging in better conversations in hopes that your reputation will build back up again

 - Moderations can affect your reputation negatively (long stretches WITHOUT moderations can affect you positively)

 - You have to give reputation ratings to xx number of unique users, before you can bump the same person again (prevents people from repeatedly hammering one particular user - good or bad)

 - You are limited to xx number of ratings in a 24hr period

 

I know there are many additional rules that can be wrapped around this concept (these are just some of the easy ones that have been floating around in my mind) - but the obvious goal is to encourage good behavior (while allowing the community as a whole to identify persistent trolls). This could also then be expanded to include whether you can (or cannot) post in certain off-topic boards (such as politics) and thereby hopefully cut down on some of the incessant chatter. 

 

Anyway - I'm certainly not saying this is the solution, nor am I suggesting this is something we should rush to implement without a fair amount of feedback from staff and community. Just some random thoughts that have been rolling around in my mind for awhile... 

On paper it sounds like a good idea, but my worries would be how it could be exploited. For instance, I could imagine a scenario where someone posts a really unpopular opinion in a thread and the rest of the thread goes after his reputation with a slew of downvotes, when he didn't say anything trollish, just unpopular. This would especially be true in the politics section. People would get enough reputation to post, post something in the politics board, and immediately lose access to the board when the strongest partisan group mass downvoted them. Sure, they can each only vote once, but have you ever been to Reddit? Because whenever even one unpopular comment is posted in a subreddit it isn't welcome in, that single comment can get bombarded to hell, even though each downvote was from a unique user. And that's with the ability to separate broad topics like politics into partisan groups. What you're describing would be like pushing The_Donald and SandersForPresident together. There would be blood. People are too tribal in their thinking nowadays, including on these forums, and not just politically, but in gaming too with the big three console makers. Just look at the up and down votes in the front page linked articles' comment sections. Someone says something unpopular, but not uncivil, and they get their comment hidden from tons of downvotes. I get that your idea wouldn't be a per comment rating, but rather a per user rating, and that therefore it's not like 5 users could give a person 25 downvotes by each downvoting 5 of his comments. However, if that person is the sort of user that doesn't comment often and slowly works his way up in reputation, then a few unpopular comments, delivered on separate days so that the 24 hour limit didn't apply and the downvoters had time to vote on other people, could wipe him out. In that sense, it would really hurt shyer users that don't comment often if they make one or two unpopular comments and get dogpiled. I guess what I'm getting at is that there's no way this reputation system would get used based on civility only, it would be exploited to be used for opinion bashing in our tribally minded world, and that would hurt people, perhaps even those it was meant to protect.

A few other things to consider:

1. What's to stop someone with a vendetta against a specific user from bashing them once a day? They could bash the user, wait a day, during which they'd upvote like-minded people to reset the unique user limit. They wouldn't need new reasons to do so, they could just keep doing it, and could do so completely undetected.

2. What's to stop a group of users from organizing through private messages or off-site entirely through a discord server or something to manipulate the system? Let's say your unique user limit is 15. So you can't rate a user again until you've rated 14 others. So then someone could invite 13 people to a private message group, pick targets that they want to silence from Politics or whatever other board they want them gone from, and just upvote each other once a day to keep their reputation up and downvote the target. Even less people would be needed for the group if they picked multiple downvote targets, or picked people that they liked hearing from but didn't trust to have in the group to upvote. A conspiracy like this would be very easy to organize if the unique user limit is too low, and also if the reputation votes are not viewable by the moderators in a way that would connect individual votes to individual users.

3. What's to stop people from going after mods? Or are mods immune? They'd have to be in order to prevent a mod from being banned from posting in certain boards, but if they weren't it might sow dissent for certain mods if that mod is known for posting opinions that border on unacceptable, or even just unpopular. It might be better if mods were immune but couldn't participate in off-topic threads except to moderate them. Honestly, that might not be a bad idea even without the reputation system at least for the Politics thread to prevent users from harboring feelings of partisan tribalism against a politically vocal mod.

4. What's to stop permabanned people from creating alts that go undetected long enough to get the necessary reputation to vote, then stop posting so as to avoid detection while using the account to go after whoever they blame for their permaban?

5. For that matter, what's to stop people from creating alts that avoid detection, growing them up to voting status, then stopping posting so as to avoid detection or loss of voting status, and just growing a bunch of such alts that they use to get multiple votes? I know you guys have tools to detect alts, but the tools aren't perfect and sometimes an alt slips by for a good while. As I said before, the mods would NEED to be able to link individual votes to individual users so as to detect suspicious voting patterns.

6. One final note on alts, what's to stop someone from creating an alt account, but never posting, resulting in your "long period without moderation=positive reputation bonus" rule automatically giving them the necessary positive reputation to vote? Anyone could just create enough alts to meet the unique user limit, and before those alts are even vote viable, the original account could just upvote them all to reset his unique user counter, and farm those alts for votes to get his original account able to do whatever he wants with minimal consequence. Another reason to have reputation votes be viewable by at least the mods.

7. If vote manipulation is suspected by a user, who thinks his reputation is falling too fast and someone has a vendetta against him, how does he report it, and how is it investigated, if at all?

8. If mods can detect suspicious voting patterns, you have to consider how far to take moderation on those voting patterns. Do you just use it as an additional way to detect alts? If people seemed to vote in groups against specific targets, do you try to punish that or is that okay (I mean it would be hard to definitively prove without direct evidence of deliberate coordination so you might just have to let it slide)? Do you punish people that seem to downvote a user right after or before responding to them in a way that disagrees with them? That could provide evidence that someone is likely using the voting system to bash opinions instead of punish uncivil behavior, but is that even wrong?

9. If it is wrong to bash other's opinions with the reputation voting system, and it really is just for policing incivility, why can't mods do that? If you want to stop misuse of the system, you could make the reputation system only usable by mods, as a way of rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior in cases where a full moderation isn't quite called for. This would solve a lot of the issues I mentioned, but would make each person's reputation much less transparent to them unless they got notifications of which mods up or down voted them and why, and whether they did or didn't get such notifications, they'd likely start to resent that much moderation action if it didn't go their way or if it was usually a particular mod or they suspected that it was usually a particular mod that downvoted them.

10. If it isn't wrong to use the voting system to downvote opinions you don't like and upvote opinions you do, then why not just expand the "agree" system below each post to have a disagree button and make it like Reddit's karma system? But is that really what we want for this community? I personally would rather only mods could use the reputation system so we could trust it was being used for its intended purpose rather than have any amount of exploitability that lets users use the system to target people they disagree with, but that's just me.

Just a final thought to add to my first paragraph: if you base the use of a reputation system on the honor system that people will only use it for downvoting persistent trolls and not to troll each other, I fear you have too much faith in us. If it's possible to go after people for their opinions, that's what people are going to do, I guarantee it. And if they do, the tribal thinking on these forums will only get worse. Politics will become an echo chamber of the site's biggest political side. Outside of Politics, fans of the most unpopular of the big 3 companies at the time would suffer the most. They'd either learn to silence their positive opinions of the unpopular company and their dissent of the popular ones or they'd learn to live with negative reputation scores. Honestly, I'd be willing to bet that more negative votes would be given out than positive ones, and you might end up with no one being able to post in Politics. Hell, you might end up with no one with a positive score. Anger motivates more than love, unfortunately, and we see it in clickbaity news headlines every day. The last thing this community needs is a mechanical way to use anger against other users to reduce their ability to participate in the forums.

My apologies that this was long, I just really got to thinking about your reputation idea and once I started I just found I had a lot of thoughts about it.



TalonMan said:

LOL!! Yeah, that was QUITE the novel!! There's a lot to take in there, and obviously since I'm not even in development or even prototype staging any of this - I'm not prepared to even take a stab at trying to address each one of your concerns. The only thing I can say with absolute confidence, is that I'm positive for each potential problem you've outlined - there is a way to resolve. You need to keep in mind - since these forums are 100% customized and hand built, we can do whatever in the world we want to do!!! While the customization of these boards is what makes enhancements and fixes so difficult at times and prone to bugs - it also gives us full flexibility to build and do whatever we want, as we're not tied to some template with strict rules and limited modification. We are free to do anything and everything... 

 

...I'll certainly look through this in greater detail at some point - perhaps if we get serious about implementing reputation, I'll use this as a guiding document to help ensure some of the scenarios are addressed from the beginning. But just to give an idea as to how I would resolve even your first issue, these are some possible ways to address (and some of these are tools I mentioned in my post, already):

 

1. What's to stop someone with a vendetta against a specific user from bashing them once a day? They could bash the user, wait a day, during which they'd upvote like-minded people to reset the unique user limit. They wouldn't need new reasons to do so, they could just keep doing it, and could do so completely undetected.

 - I mentioned that one of the throttling devices that could be deployed, would be that a user had to rate xx number of other unique users, before they could rate somebody else again (ie. I give HylianSwordsman a +1 today - I won't be able to +1 him again, until after I've rated 15 other distinct users).

 - Insert a cool-off period between ratings (ie. I give HylianSwordsman a +1 - I won't be able to +1 anyone else, for at least 10 minutes).

With just these two tools, somebody would need to be AWFULLY dedicated to trash (or inflate) a user's reputation. They would need to spend nearly 3hrs, trying to upvote 14 other users before they'd even have a chance to come back and rate the original user again. That takes a RIDICULOUS amount of patience on somebody's part!!! And if, at any point, the mods or the community in general suspect foul-play - it could be made into a simple click to reset a particular user's ratings that have been handed out (thereby, laying waste to all the effort they'd put in to screw with the system).

 

 

Again - I know you have other scenarios listed, I just don't have the stomach or attention span to go through them line-by-line right now (especially since a reputation system is still but a twinkle in my eye!!). The point of this response though, is just to make you understand that for every scenario you come up with, I'm POSITIVE rules could be in place to address it...     ...most important, there would ALWAYS be a tool readily available, to undo whatever malice may have been committed (which is the single most important feature to keep in mind, no matter how something like this ever comes together).

Again, sorry it was so long. I don't think I fully appreciated how long I'd made it until I saw what it looked like once it was posted, now I'm just embarrassed. I trust you guys to put a lot of thought into something like this, and being all custom made means you're only limited by creativity and dedication. Also, you had said that you'd thought of this years ago, so I guess I made the assumption that it was further along than it was. Sorry for wasting your time.



Nuking the political boards hardly seems like much of a solution. It won't prevent people from making politically charged posts somewhere on the site, whether they're in specifically dedicated threads or not. Especially in today's climate, where almost everything seems to spiral into politics of some kind sooner or later, do you really want the extra work of finding that fine line in every argument, and going about the business of keeping the entire site free of whatever is deemed to be crossing that line? I sincerely doubt it, and it's not a good idea in the first place.

I really think the answer here is simply a few mods who are really dedicated to focusing on the political boards, and approach it with a firm, consistent hand. Pick some people you trust are up to the job, and just empower them to deal with the issue on their terms. Maybe I'm speaking a bit out of place here, but imho, from my somewhat brief time with the mod team, I felt like things often got too bogged down in deliberation. Like, there seems to sometimes be such a hesitancy to act for fear of making a wrong decision, that either things take a bit too long, or a half measure is agreed upon. It's ok to make mistakes. They can be undone, and apologized for if/when they occur...but it's important that whatever moderators you hire are capable and willing of moderating on their own terms, without resorting to group think for every issue that comes up. Teamwork and deliberation is great, and the mod team should absolutely be accountable to each other, but again….once you hire somebody, and they know the ropes, you have to empower them to actually be independently capable doing the job. Everything doesn't always need a second, third, or fourth opinion. It's counterproductive. I won't presume to speak for anyone, but generally, people don't love being constantly micromanaged, and it leads to less than optimal productivity.