Choosing Moderators?

Carleas, if even you are still reading any of this;

I have to ask why that even though you don’t personally exercise biased and bigoted judgment, you hire moderators that do. Your site over the past years has been ruined by these mods lacking any sense of balance judgment and thus abuse their authority. The few mods that don’t cannot make up for even one of the now several biased and bigoted mods. This site now only appeals to trolls and bigots who know nothing nor want to know anything about philosophy. They just want to exercise their particular brand of hatred, mods included.

Why do you want that?

In my opinion, particular examples are needed here.

On what occasion has a moderator exercised biased and bigoted judgments? When [specifically] has a moderator abused his or her authority by displaying a lack of judgment?

Otherwise, some might suspect this charge revolves more around the extent to which the forum and mods merely stray from the way things would be done if you were in charge.

There are aspects of philosophy more readily given to distinctions being made between a sophisticated and an unsophisticated understanding. But philosophy also delves into things whereby the judgments of individuals may be all we will ever have.

That’s why we need particular instances in order to determine more fully what you are trying to convey here.

Carleas has not been here for two months

Official warnings issued for the following offenses:

  1. you seem to have a reading problem” - to a friend of the mod
  2. you don’t know enough about physics to be debating it on this particular forum” - to a friend of the mod
  3. you are off topic, but in my defense…” - then officially warned for being off topic.
  4. more of your lying bullshit about ME

These are things said in extremely formal public debates (with the exception of the word “bullshit”), yet bigoted moderators here ensure that intelligent debate cannot take place because they have absolutely no sense of balanced judgment at all. They choose preferred friends based on their own preferred “truth” opinions. The few good mods can’t make up for the few seriously bad ones. There isn’t a means for a good mods to counter the mindless bigotry and prejudice freely doled out by the bad ones.

True enough. According to his personal profile:

Last visited: Thu Dec 12, 2013 7:07 pm

Not sure exactly what that means though when you are an administrator. For example, ILP seems to be popping in and out again [for me]. Technical difficulties. Is there anyone around who can fix them?

Hmm. I just noticed he only lives about 30 miles from me! Him, Washington, D.C…me, Baltimore.

I should ask Carleas how much for the site so that I can buy it and shut it down.

I’ll go in with you. But we won’t have to shut it down if we can just agree on the right folks to ban. Starting with each other of course. :astonished:

Carleas, I’ll give you 2 grand to shut this site down. I’ll give you 1000 to IP ban and let me kill all the sockpupppets. I’m here all the time I know who they all are. It’s killing this place man. Do you really want to be associated with a site that’s leaning more and more toward a forum for bigotry?

He says, 16,560 posts later…

Dude there’s a handful of guys around here with way more posts than me. They just have to change their names all the time out of embarrassment or ineptitude or both. We both know this.

Let’s take a step back. Three of these four are clearly attacks on the person, right? Leaving aside who’s involved in the conversation, who warned you, and the various social dynamics at play, 1, 2, and 4 are squarely attacks on an individual, rather than on their ideas. Is that not the case?

3 is not, but then 3 isn’t the whole story. The ellipsis at the end suggests that something more was said, and the fact that whatever was said was off topic seems to be what drew the warning.

Whatever your opinion of the moderators, here your complaint is about a series of moderator actions that aren’t objectionable. If you were complaining that a moderator had issued a warning when you had replied to his or her friend, “I respectfully disagree for the following reasons…”, you’d have a stronger case. I would suggest that, whether or not moderators are biased and bigoted, locutions expressing respectful disagreement are probably your best option. If the mods are fair, you won’t get warned. If they’re biased and bigoted, it will be obvious. Note, though, that if the “following reasons” include someone having a “reading problem”, we’ll learn nothing.

You seem to have completely missed the point. I am not asking that you defend nor punish anyone. I am asking why you “hire” bigoted and imbalanced people as mods.

A bigot is someone who allows his friends to do pretty much anything while having zero tolerance for people he doesn’t like, for whatever reason. Those listed “offenses” were at best minuscule as offenses go around here. Being accused of anything and everything, called names, lied about, told to go fuck-off, are all very common on this site. And they are because of the bigotry and imbalance of judgment of the moderators.

Those “offenses” were not asked about as in, “is there some justification for you attacking the person?” They were not suggested before hand as is almost always the case for “friends”. They were instant blind condemnations without even looking to see who was doing what. What is common practice, regardless of rules, is allowed… for friends. Rules are merely the excuse for mods attacking chosen foes. Basically, “my friends can attack you all they want but if you even glance the wrong way, you are condemned.” It is “Secular Nazism”.

On many sites, if it is merely rumored that you are, for example a racist, you will get banned pretty quickly if not instantly. That is “bigotry” and “poor judgment”. If it is someones personal social site, no big deal. But this is “supposed to be about philosophy”.

The end result is that only narrow minded bigot friendly people who often enjoy ad hom attacks, known as “trolls”, are known to collect here and thus most intelligent participants don’t bother to stick around.

So, as I understand you, your argument is more that other people can get away with what you’ve done. Not that you shouldn’t have been warned, but that other should be warned too.

In that case, I would point out that you don’t know what action has been taken with regard to others, right? You don’t see how many warnings or days off others receive. So if you have an altercation with someone and you both debase yourselves by attacking each other as people rather than the ideas about which you disagree, you wouldn’t necessarily know whether you alone or both you and the person with whom you had the exchange had been punished. To you, it would look the same.

My overall position on this type of complaint is that mods are generally disliked for doing what they’re called upon to do. And in general everyone sees their own flaws as less bad than the flaws of others. So in general when a mod acts, the person on the receiving end is very likely to find the moderator action awful uncalled for, and to perceive the acts of other people in the thread as much more deserving of punishment. The odds suggest that some of them will be right, but I hope that makes clear my initial skepticism. And I may have come off as dismissive, but I really mean that a solid start at addressing this problem begins with people not telling each other that the have a “reading problem” or the like. You have no right not to be warned when you attack the person. Whatever else mods are doing, those warnings seem justified. Don’t give that justification. It is a start.

Point me to a specific case. I will look, but I’ll be upfront that I am skeptical, I tend to see things from the mod’s point of view, and I tend to give moderators the benefit of the doubt even when I disagree with what they’ve done because they are volunteers and they’re peers, and I have very little place from which to criticize them.

Let me ask you this while I’m here: in the examples you provided above, if you were the mod and not a party to the conversation, would you issue yourself and the other party a warning, or just the other party, or neither?

If they were warned in a proper way, usually just gently, I would not have a need to “attack” in my own defense. It is the fact that mods don’t care until after the trolling has already turned into a fight and then they choose who they want to warn based on their preferences, not based on “first blood” or or even actual events. In short, they are biased and wait for the opportunity to attack only their chosen “foes” with as hard of a hammer as they can muster. Often such a tactic is used in society; "instigate trouble so that one of the contestants will get condemned by the biased judge.

Wrong. I DO know. The effort to hide bigotry behind plausible deniability doesn’t work with me.

I understand that and I do the same. But there are limits and they are WAY over any reasonable limit. But for me to go dig through threads to point out specific instances is not only accusing specific mods, but also skirting the point. I am asking why you allow such people to volunteer when the volunteers will most often be prejudice or bigoted people. Based merely on volunteering, bigotry would run the world.

Very unlike the mods that I am talking about I ALWAYS ask in private what is going on. And after such a private discussion, there is hardly ever any reason to be warning or banning anyone. It is only when a hard case simply doesn’t believe that you really will act that one must go ahead and show him that you mean what you have been telling him in private.

Publicly all that is needed, and should not be left out (as one mod here often does) is a simple open warning along the lines of “okay guys, enough. Take your personal issues elsewhere.” A couple of your mods here know to do that and thus hardly ever have to officially warn anyone. Between the private “what’s going on” and the public, “settle down” moderator responses, hardly anything else ever has need to take place. The noisy trolls get quietened enough that reasonable people are not so offended as to just mark the site off. Basically being “On Topic” is about the only rule required. But it must be enforced evenly and quickly, not this “All men are equal… well as long as I like them or what they say.

And in each of those listed cases, I as a mod, would have seen that my posts were only in “defense” of obvious much more offensive aggression. But then, I actually believe in treating people with equal handed justice regardless of which might be my friends or saying what I prefer to be said.

But reading posts and ironing out fights is at best a small part of the lives of the moderators. Two people can throw a lot of words at each other before a moderator has a chance to notice. And when you’ve talked to the same person 15 times, asking “what’s going on” is both tedious and unlikely to be fruitful.

The question of moderating isn’t what an ideal moderator would look like, but what the actions of flawed human moderators should be, given their flaws, such that the net effect is to improve the site. Given that you can’t read every post, you can’t talk to everyone who’s turning a discussion into a shit-flinging contest, you can’t convince most people that are being disruptive that their actions (even in defense) are disrupting the discussion, what do you do? And the answer is you get a bunch of humans who will occasionally play favorites and occasionally act too late and occasionally make the wrong call, and the result is better than the alternative, which is something like ILO or 4chan.

So, let’s look at what can actually be done: You don’t like some mod, but you don’t want to say who. That’s understandable. What’s the best way to pick a mod. The process now is, whenever a moderator steps down, that mod suggests some people on their forum that they think would make good replacements. If they have no suggestions, the other mods suggest people. We generally go for consensus. The we ask that person if they’re interested, and sometimes we get turned down, other times we get a new mod right away. We’ve talked about trying a democratic process, but there’s a lot of risk to that, especially on a website where anyone can register; one way to do it would be to pick some arbitrary registration date or post count cut-off and only accept votes from those members. A lot of people would dislike that. And ultimately, it wouldn’t solve the problem you’re talking about, which is that the person would be a human and would play favorites and would make bad calls.

Well that certainly explains it.

“Obama, who do you want to be next?”

So what you are saying is that your answer is “Because I am extremely naive concerning even the slightest bit of social politics, so I just do what came to mind one day.” I guess filtering volunteers never occurred to you? Or at least stating that you cannot tolerate X, or Y behavior? Do you let the volunteer Nazi be your baby-sitter? What would be the difference?

It seems odd because even local pubs, who have the exact same situation as yours, seem to handle it so very much better (assuming they are not in a seriously bigoted region to begin with). I guess we can count on the non-sense and hatred of this place to continue. But at least now (BECAUSE I ASKED) I know why .

Pubs get by because in non-internet life, if you tell someone to their face that they have a reading problem, you’re likely to get punched. At best you’ll be shunned. If you think ILP is the only site where a real-life pub does a better job of policing decorum, explore the rest of the internet (probably the easiest way to obviate mods would be to require real names, i.e. do registration through Facebook or Google accounts; people behave differently when they’re accountable for their words).

That said, plenty of organizations pick leadership the way we do. Successful companies, millennia-old religions, it’s a tested method. It’s not perfect, but given that the US produced two terms of Bush followed by two terms of Obama (so that basically everyone thinks some terrible president was re-elected), I would hesitate to paint any other process as obviously better.

As for “stating that [I] cannot tolerate X, or Y behavior”, I make my position known, but as I said, “they are volunteers and they’re peers, and I have very little place from which to criticize them”. My views aren’t necessarily superior, and I don’t act as though they are.

And what do I keep telling you about your “religious” mindset. And successful companies do very strong prescreening before they ask who likes whom. And certainly don’t count all of those that did that same thing and failed miserably.

But its your site. Religious minds are kept blind for a reason and there is no reasoning afterwards.

“It’s da way dem smaht people do thangs. Or so I’m told.”

I guess you win, James. It’s all religion and we follow it blindly.

Well, you are just supporting that old wisdom of keeping the people in charge stupid so that they can’t tell when you are pulling the wool over their eyes. I’m sure the socialists with their “people aren’t smart enough to govern themselves”, love you.