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Ya'll just really driving home how bad faith you all are. No one has been accused of being transphobic for disagreeing or saying that moderation is "fine". You get accused of transphobia when you do a transphobia. Constantly trying to make your opposition about the trans aspect of the conversation is just more evidence that any accusation of transphobia probably has more truth than not.
It is kind of pathetic, actually.
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The problem would become 'what is a Bad actor', and why does 'x' get Bad Actor status but 'y' does not?
Basically. I noticed that a personal attack on me had stayed up after moderators had already rolled through a thread (and I had flagged it). I was rather annoyed, but simply replied in good faith. Woke up the next day and basically that entire exchange had been deleted in its entirety along with the parent statement that had started it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not mad about it, just seems weird to give the moderators time to weigh in, have them weigh in that it's fair play, then decide to quash it after the fact.
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So I saw a comment from the moderators within the last few days, that they like to give people "second chances."
Normally, I'm all in favor of that. Give people a second chance. If they show signs of improvement, give them a third and a fourth. They keep learning. And we've seen some examples of that, these last few weeks. A couple of people who I initially pegged as hostile have shown signs of being allies. Awesome!
But some folks clearly have no intention of learning or growing. They're not trying to make the community better. They're baiting others, and creating work for moderation, and causing mental harm. And once that becomes obvious, the only thing "extra chances" gives them is extra chances to injure others.
So speaking to the moderators here...
When someone is dishing out intentional harm, as evidenced by their ongoing track record - can we just stop giving them all these additional chances to do harm?
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This is a good point for folks to consider taking a break. Lots of personal attacks here. Pro tip: choosing not to respond to an insult does not make that person right. Just flag it and move on. Sometimes the best thing you can do is choose not to engage.
I’d give it a few hours (or a day), come back, and see if there really is something “new” that you want to say. If you are just repeating your prior points, consider the “signal to noise” ratio.
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Thank you for the peek behind the curtain to the moderation process.
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Some history and insight into the moderation of the Paizo forums may be helpful here.
Forum moderation has not always been a thing customer service (CS) did. Long long ago it was done by a person who had a Community Manager title. That person had a lot of other responsibilities though. Forum moderation/community management has never been a position all on its own. And it should be. Moderating the forums is a full time job, and is a full time job for more than one person. When that person left the company their responsibilities were divvied up to other people, mostly to one other person. That person didn't just have a lot on their plate, they had about a dozen plates. When they later left the company their position was filled, but especially in having to figure out their job description, which at that time amounted to "do everything" some of their responsibilities were divvied up. Forum moderation became a CS responsibility.
One of the more frustrating things in CS was how much we were a dumping ground. If the powers that be didn't know who should be responsible for a thing it became a CS thing, and if a manager didn't want to deal with a thing it became a CS problem (one of the ones I vent about the most is when someone accidentally canceled all of the GenCon vouchers right after GenCon and it became CS's problem tracking all of them down and reactivating them, the second time they did it we pushed back on how much of our time that had wasted and that person had to do it themselves and to my knowledge it never happened again). We had an internal jokes, "this shouldn't impact customer service", because we were often told that. But everything the company does ends up impacting CS and more often than not becomes our problem. That was the case with forum moderation. None of us had any experience with any kind of community management or moderation. And none of were really keen on doing it (one of my colleagues full on refused as it wasn't part of our job description, "If the job description had included this I wouldn't have accepted the job"). Our direct manager looked into getting us some training, even did all the heavy lifting of researching and finding consultants who could work with us to get us started. But that was shot down. So we had to learn on our own by just doing it.
There weren't really rules beyond 'don't be a jerk' and while over time some things got codified it remains mostly a 'don't be a jerk' thing. There was talk about setting out better guidelines from time to time, but those never came to anything. There was some amount of belief that if we made guidelines we would be handing the community ways to game our moderation, and for a community that is accustomed to gaming rules it was believed that would be bad for our forums. Even without clear guidelines we do get plenty of people who challenge the moderation by demanding specific rules be cited so they can point out how they didn't violate those rules. So it largely remained our judgement what should or shouldn't go. Banning forum users was a more delicate thing. That involved having lots of receipts to present as a case for a ban as well as a trail of suspensions showing the behavior wasn't changing. Really long periods of time between suspensions basically reset it. Super egregious stuff could skip straight to a ban but that was usually not the case (as an example there was a Trans Day of Visibility blog several years ago where I woke up the morning after it went up and found that someone was posting some utterly vile stuff about trans people on that thread, so I still sitting in bed I banned them without consulting anyone, and that was ok for me to do in that instance).
All of this was really time consuming and pulls CS away from their primary job, which means that in times when we really need to hunker down, like when there is a big backlog we need to work through, forum moderation tends to take a backseat. It also means that while making mod posts is something we tried to always do when a post is removed (in cases like a thread hasn't been posted to in a long while we may not because we don't want to necro the thread, but in active threads it is something we always want to do), I do acknowledge that there have been times where I answered a phone call, or got pinged by the warehouse, or any of a dozen other things and lost track of the mod post. So yeah, there are times I removed posts and didn't leave a mod post. It was never intentional and I'm sorry it happened.
I was the primary one doing the moderation for a while and it was having a pretty big impact on my mental health. The bulk of most of my days were devoted to it and in addition to being mired in all that negativity and problematic stuff all day I also felt like I wasn't contributing enough to my actual job and my teammates were having to pick up my slack. By the time my boss was given the ok to add a 4th person to our team I think it was pretty clear that I was rapidly approaching a breaking point. While interviewing for that 4th position we made forum moderation the primary thing we talked about to candidates (and it WAS part of the job description from then onward). I trained her on everything we do but we especially focused on moderation, and I think in her time with the company she was the best moderator we have had (Sara aside). I have been the one who has trained all of the CSRs on forum moderation since then, and my qualifications for doing so are just that I did it for a while. With this most recent batch of CSRs they were hired while we were dealing with a huge backlog and the goal was to get them up to speed on dealing with that. So the moderation training they got would have been by someone largely unqualified in the first place, but was pretty sparse on top of that.
So I think it is valuable to remember that when you talk about 'the forum moderators' you're talking about a group of people hired to do webstore customer service and then told to do this other, unrelated full time job that they don't have experience with and aren't really trained for. As I said earlier, forum moderation if a full time job of 2 or more people but the company leadership has traditionally been unwilling to accept that. The customer service team does the best they can to juggle that in to all their other responsibilities. It's also valuable to remember that the CSRs are all hourly and aren't able to work beyond their 40 hours without exec approval, meaning they can't legally moderate over the weekend. The customer service manager is salaried and can. While I don't think anyone should be expected to work past their 40, weekend moderation in particular is one of the most clear and upfront responsibilities of that position. So if someone collaborated to steal the CS manager's job and then fire them for no reason, well then that someone is going to have to do that job. Forum moderation over the weekend is the bed that someone made for themselves (typically we would have locked the problem threads and left a mod post saying we locked it and will moderate it and unlock it when we're back in the office, I'm not sure why that wasn't done in this instance).
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I happen to work in CS for an IT company as well, Diego speaks truth. Also...hey man, hope you are doing better, world is kind of crappy ATM, so...yeah.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Some history and insight into the moderation of the Paizo forums may be helpful here.
Forum moderation has not always been a thing customer service (CS) did. Long long ago it was done by a person who had a Community Manager title. That person had a lot of other responsibilities though. Forum moderation/community management has never been a position all on its own. And it should be. Moderating the forums is a full time job, and is a full time job for more than one person. When that person left the company their responsibilities were divvied up to other people, mostly to one other person. That person didn't just have a lot on their plate, they had about a dozen plates. When they later left the company their position was filled, but especially in having to figure out their job description, which at that time amounted to "do everything" some of their responsibilities were divvied up. Forum moderation became a CS responsibility.
One of the more frustrating things in CS was how much we were a dumping ground. If the powers that be didn't know who should be responsible for a thing it became a CS thing, and if a manager didn't want to deal with a thing it became a CS problem (one of the ones I vent about the most is when someone accidentally canceled all of the GenCon vouchers right after GenCon and it became CS's problem tracking all of them down and reactivating them, the second time they did it we pushed back on how much of our time that had wasted and that person had to do it themselves and to my knowledge it never happened again). We had an internal jokes, "this shouldn't impact customer service", because we were often told that. But everything the company does ends up impacting CS and more often than not becomes our problem. That was the case with forum moderation. None of us had any experience with any kind of community management or moderation. And none of were really keen on doing it (one of my colleagues full on refused as it wasn't part of our job description, "If the job description had included this...
We've missed you in FaWtL!
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I’ll echo Diego’s words and say that we received 0 training on forum moderation outside of generic practices. I know that many of us really, seriously suffered with regard to our mental health from the time we spent on here. And I spent relatively little time moderating. I honestly believe that moderators who aren’t provided with professional training are being put in a dangerous work environment. This needs to change ASAP.
Also want to add: There have been MANY times where Diego jumped in after hours or on weekends to moderate the forums. The hourly, underpaid senior team member did this with little complaint because otherwise the whole team would come in after a holiday or after a weekend to just an actual forum trash fire. I think I can say pretty comfortably that we all cared a lot for this community in our own ways. The love and effort we put in to moderating forums and helping our customers is not something anyone on our team ever asked for a pat on the back for (well, we may have asked for higher pay in our heads :X), and I know Diego and Sara and our other primary mod sure as hell did a great job protecting the team from many, many spiraling threads.
When the forums are an actual trash fire, please keep in mind that CS actually cares about this community A LOT. And it really sucks for people to come at them when they’re doing their best to get through a traumatic time themselves, and with a new manager who IMHO is not nearly as experienced as the previous one in honest and empathetic community management. The loss of Sara Marie left a GIANT hole in the forums I think very few people could fill, and the one who I think was most qualified (hi Diego!) is also no longer with Paizo. I hope Paizo is bringing in a community manager who is trained/has the experience to deal with this all.
Contributor
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I know how thankless a job forum management is! I once was community manager for Meetup.com's forums. My forum communication skills are hard won.
As someone who did your job at another company, I want to give all you mods hugs. I think that it is good that you step away, because otherwise you will get burned out and go insane. And none of us wants that.
Hmm
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| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
Some history and insight into the moderation of the Paizo forums may be helpful here.
Forum moderation has not always been a thing customer service (CS) did. Long long ago it was done by a person who had a Community Manager title. That person had a lot of other responsibilities though. Forum moderation/community management has never been a position all on its own. And it should be. Moderating the forums is a full time job, and is a full time job for more than one person. When that person left the company their responsibilities were divvied up to other people, mostly to one other person. That person didn't just have a lot on their plate, they had about a dozen plates. When they later left the company their position was filled, but especially in having to figure out their job description, which at that time amounted to "do everything" some of their responsibilities were divvied up. Forum moderation became a CS responsibility.
One of the more frustrating things in CS was how much we were a dumping ground. If the powers that be didn't know who should be responsible for a thing it became a CS thing, and if a manager didn't want to deal with a thing it became a CS problem (one of the ones I vent about the most is when someone accidentally canceled all of the GenCon vouchers right after GenCon and it became CS's problem tracking all of them down and reactivating them, the second time they did it we pushed back on how much of our time that had wasted and that person had to do it themselves and to my knowledge it never happened again). We had an internal jokes, "this shouldn't impact customer service", because we were often told that. But everything the company does ends up impacting CS and more often than not becomes our problem. That was the case with forum moderation. None of us had any experience with any kind of community management or moderation. And none of were really keen on doing it (one of my colleagues full on refused as it wasn't part of our job description, "If the job description had included this...
Thank you for the fascination/horrifying insight into how messed up the situation is for the hard-working CS staff, and is likely going to stay until someone realized that cleaning up the forum is an awful job, that deserved recognition and sufficient time allotted to the task.
Having to juggle which responsibilities/colleagues to abandon more or first is bad for your mental health and I am always impressed how you managed to do this while still never being anything but perfect when it comes to actually communicate with customers.
To quote Stefanie Sterling "Crunch is not a triumph of the workforce, but a failure of the management. "
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It's also valuable to remember that the CSRs are all hourly and aren't able to work beyond their 40 hours without exec approval, meaning they can't legally moderate over the weekend. The customer service manager is salaried and can. While I don't think anyone should be expected to work past their 40, weekend moderation in particular is one of the most clear and upfront responsibilities of that position. So if someone collaborated to steal the CS manager's job and then fire them for no reason, well then that someone is going to have to do that job. Forum moderation over the weekend is the bed that someone made for themselves (typically we would have locked the problem threads and left a mod post saying we locked it and will moderate it and unlock it when we're back in the office, I'm not sure why that wasn't done in this instance).
I missed some important parts here, bolded for emphasis.
Huh.
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Popper's Paradox is a very valuable concept to bring up to people. Thanks for reminding me of it!
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I do find the incredibly hostile attitude that comes with minor disagreement (or recently liking others posts) horrific.
If someone posts hate speech, is it not worth noting when other users Favorite that post? This isn't a hypothetical question, by the way; it was what precipitated this thread.
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Imo no
I don’t have the time or willingness to go back and look at each post with those who disagree with or don’t to see which person Likes or not the post.
Even then I might disagree with message or topic of the post though still believe the poster has a right to say it.
Honestly it kind of gives off a creepy stalker vibe imo.
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It's more about identifying who we're going to feel safe around in the future. It's fine if you don't check to see who Favorites what--but a lot of people do. Because when one person posts something cruel or hateful and three people Favorite it, by golly, I have to know who saw that post and went, "yup, agreed".
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Yeah, favourites are publicly visible. If you favourite hate speech or slur, you're showing yourself for who you are.
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I remember when I first learned how to see who favorite'd your posts, I discovered that Wes Schneider had favorite'd my post, which is still one of the best days of my time on here (second only to when James Jacobs stated up Tammy the Lich).
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It takes a lot less time and effort to see who is liking a post that has hate speech in it than it does to write up a post about how you don't have the time or willingness to notice it. If you're going to wade into a thorny conversation that you (by your own admission) don't have a full comprehension of, I would suggest that you not participate in it.
The only thing that Favoriting a post communicates is that you like the post. If you disagree with the message or topic of the post, but still think they have the right to say it, you have the option of making a post saying so. If you don't do that, then people are going to make judgments based on the information they have available to them (that you, by Favoriting the post, have willingly provided).
I don't get the "creepy stalker" vibe, either. It's not tracking down your social media or private information, it's a public mark of approval. It's like putting out a political candidate's yard sign out front of your house and then complaining that people think you are planning to vote for them. If you don't want people to notice it, then don't click the Favorite button.
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When it is actual hate speech and a slur I don’t favourite it
Other than that I’m going to continue fo favourite posts as I deem fit. As too many on the forum that having a disagreement with them on a topic as being the equivalent of hate speech or a slur.
So imo it’s no one business who favours or not favours a post. It’s like trying to get work done with someone constantly looking over one shoulder. This forum is for enjoyment for myself and not a work environment.
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When it is actual hate speech and a slur I don’t favourite it
Objectively false. That post may be gone, but I remember it, as do others.
Other than that I’m going to continue fo favourite posts as I deem fit. As too many on the forum that having a disagreement with them on a topic as being the equivalent of hate speech or a slur.
No one's telling you that you can't. But people are going to continue noticing what posts you choose to Favorite.
So imo it’s no one business who favours or not favours a post. It’s like trying to get work done with someone constantly looking over one shoulder. This forum is for enjoyment for myself and not a work environment.
It's very much my business to keep track of who is choosing to publicly express their approval of hateful rhetoric, particularly when it targets me and/or people I care about. Again, it's very simple: if you don't want people to notice you Favoriting a post, then don't do it.
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Unless your a Mod it really is not anyone business to keep track of which posts are favoured or not. As I said before it gives off a creepy stalker vibe. If one chooses to behave like one then don’t be offended when one is called out on acting like one.
I know full well that when I favor a post it becomes public that does not automatically mean I am at odds with those who do not. Or are we reaching a point where we no longer are allowed to favor non-offensive posts on this forum. Sorry but this forum is not George Orwell 1984.
No one and so mean no one is going to tell me what I can or cannot favor. Non-negotiable or up for any form of debate.
It’s is hard to find any common ground with many here because it seems they have to find fault with anything and everything I do. I think I might go with the others are doing on the board m. Just stop caring what others think. As no matter what I do or say I’m the enemy.
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So there it is. Transgender people worried about who else here might harbour transphobic sentiment are now 'creepy stalkers'. :(
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I very specifically didn't say you weren't allowed to Favorite whichever posts you like, even hateful ones. The only person here trying to place constraints on what someone else is allowed to do is you.
In the future, I would appreciate it if you would respond to the words I have actually written, rather than the ones you have imagined.
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If you favourite obviously transphobic posts, I'm going to think you're a transphobe.
That's it.
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It is one thing to track someone posts privately. Going public and claiming that you are doing so public does feel like stalking to me at least. I don’t think a poster should be judged only on what post they favor,
Do you prefer my method of half-remembering what you've said and disliking you that way?