Tag Archives: meta

Well-kept gardens also die from activism

Over at lesswrong.com a posting titled Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism makes the case that “Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves”, and that moderators are necessary.

That may be true, but it’s also the case that moderation can kill communities.

Any community that really needs to question its moderators, that really seriously has abusive moderators, is probably not worth saving. But this is more accused than realized, so far as I can see.

There speaks the voice of limited experience. Or perhaps LiveJournal, Reddit, Google+ and Facebook really are not worth saving?

I’ve seen enough discussion forums killed by abusive moderators that I look carefully before signing up for anything these days. When I write a lengthy response, like this, I post it on my own site rather than face the possibility that it will be silently deleted for disagreeing with a moderator.

However, I’ve also been a moderator, and I’ve seen situations where moderation was desperately needed. In my experience on both sides of the issue, there are some basic criteria for moderation that need to be met to avoid abuse:

  • Moderation needs to be visible. Comments that are removed should be replaced with a placeholder saying so, and not simply deleted. Otherwise there will be accusations of repeated unfair deletion, and any act of moderation will quickly snowball into an argument about how much censorship is occurring, and then an argument about whether that argument is being censored, and so on until everyone leaves the site.
  • Moderation needs to be accountable. Moderators must have individual accounts, and moderation actions need to be associated with individual accounts. Without this, it’s pretty much impossible to identify an abusive moderator. I recently got banned from a subreddit for asking which rule I had broken with a previous posting, and there was no way to find out who had banned me.
  • Moderation needs to be consistent. There needs to be a description of what the criteria for moderation actually are. It doesn’t need to be legalistic and all-encompassing, and it may be subject to change, but it needs to exist. Some people feel that actually writing down the criteria encourages people to argue about them. The alternative, though, is that person A gets banned or censored for doing something that person B does all the time; that leads to much worse ill-will and ultimately is worse for the community.
  • Moderation rules need to apply to the moderators. A special case of the above, but it deserves highlighting. Few things are more infuriating than being banned by a moderator for doing something that the person doing the banning does all the time. Once this kind of moderation starts happening (e.g. Gizmodo), the atmosphere becomes extremely toxic.
  • Moderation needs an appeals process. There are abusive power-tripping assholes out there, and they love to find their way onto forums and become moderators. You need a mechanism for identifying any who find their way into your forum. Having some sort of appeals process is that mechanism. Ideally appeals should be resolved by someone who isn’t part of the moderation team. Failing that, they should be resolved by someone other than the person being complained about, obviously.

It also helps if the moderation activity can be openly discussed in a partitioned area of the site. There will be desire to discuss moderation policy, so plan ahead and have a space where people can do so without derailing other threads. That way, you can also redirect meta-discussion into the moderation discussion area to avoid thread derailment, without making the problem worse.

Media empire

A quick reminder of my media empire (as Ed put it):

  • This is the personal web site, for writing about politics, parakeets, back trouble, weird dreams, and the like.
  • Over at lpar.ATH0.com is the work web site, for writing about computers, programming, IBM, and business.
  • Random links are posted (with comments) to http://delicious.com/metamatic.
  • The day-to-day trivia of random thoughts and info about what I’m doing get posted to Twitter.
  • Blog postings that I read and think are worth sharing are shared via Google Reader.
  • Photos are posted to Flickr.

Some or all of the above also make their way into Friendfeed and Facebook. I don’t post directly to Facebook much, because its API is horrible and bits of it are walled off.

All of the above have web feeds so you can subscribe.

Zero tolerance

If you want to use Twitter, use it, but don’t re-post a copy of all your Twitter guano as journal entries. Your Twitter updates are pointless and uninteresting enough in their original context; if I wanted to read them, I’d be reading them there.

(Unsubscribing from two feeds today.)

Navel gazing

I rarely pay any attention to web stats for my personal site. I think the last time I checked was 2004. At that time, I was getting about 800 page views a day.

I just checked again, and it’s now about 10× that, with a page-to-visitor ratio of about 1:2. It seems to have leaped up since I switched to WordPress, which suggests that either typo was more unreliable than I was aware of, or that WordPress is doing a better job of pinging aggregators, or quite likely both.

Anyhow, even allowing for spambots and other crawlers, that’s a lot of people. I wonder who they all are?

A while ago I realized that if I really wanted to go for popularity (or what passes for fame on the Internet), I’m going about it the wrong way anyway. Successful sites generally pick a single area of focus and stick to it, whether it’s writing about gadgets, reviewing movies, or playing spot-the-next-big-trend.

Here, it’s a bit more random. One minute it’s physics, the next it’s cute squirrel anecdotes, then we’re back to politics by way of the latest Apple software. I’m reminded of comments Berkeley Breathed made about Bloom County: he said a lot of newspapers put it on the op-ed pages because it was political, then had people writing in asking “What is this crap?” a few weeks later when it was all about penguin nose jobs.

But that’s the thing: I find most subjects interesting. I want penguin nose jobs in my political commentary, so long as it’s interesting. I want to learn something unexpected every day. And that’s the kind of person I’m writing for.

If there’s a site out there that’s like I want this site to be, it’s probably Boing Boing. Only without the Disney obsession.

About this site

Hi, I’m mathew, and this is my web site. Jakob Nielsen believes that omitting a photo of the author is one of the top 10 mistakes in weblog usability, so who am I to argue?

I started using the Internet around 1987; I remember Jakob’s Hypercard stack, as it was one of the first cool things I downloaded. I was introduced to Unix the following year, accidentally typed rn instead of rm one day (true story), and the rest is history.

I’ve been doing my best to gather together the worthwhile content I’ve written since then. It’s an ongoing process, but the archives genuinely go back to 1988. Of course, what I consider worthwhile may look like crap to you, but it’s all categorized and searchable so hopefully you can find something of interest.

Over the years I’ve done all kinds of work, most of it involving computers in some way—telephone technical support, data recovery, system administration, a bit of sales and marketing, application development, hardware maintenance, networking, web design, and so on. I’ve written code in well over a dozen different programming languages. I’m something of a generalist, a term I borrow from Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext. His ideas inspired my choice of career—I built a primitive network hypertext system around 1985, wrote a browser in 1989, and wrote my first web page back in the days of HTML 1.0. I was rather startled when the rest of the world suddenly took an interest.

I currently live in Austin, Texas. Since being opinionated on the web hasn’t led to fame and riches, I work for IBM as a web architect.

Outside of computers, I’m interested in electronic music, photography, politics, design, video, and small fluffy animals. I also find physics and mathematics very interesting, but because my knowledge is broad rather than deep I tend to get lost soon after integrals get involved.

I alone hold the key to this savage parade

I feel like my first actual journal entry should offer some blazing insight, some dazzling new take on the nature of reality. Obviously from this point on it’s going to be the same old crap as usual, but couldn’t I at least come up with something amazing to start with?

Well, no, apparently not.

It’s rather like opening a new paper journal. You look at the clean, crisp page, and think that this time you want things to be different—you want the layout to be neat, the thoughts to be well-formed, the writing witty and erudite. And then after a few weeks, you give up and scribble down a joke which seems painfully unfunny two days later.