3 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Previewing Upcoming Changes to Blocking
Oh ok then.
I think your comments here may be informed by the relatively specialized scenario you're drawing on, and not necessarily in touch with more conventional experiences. And given your stated goals, I think it may be worth covering the gap here -
Getting harassment countered and prevented has been my focus for the past year. Getting data into the hands of admins to metric community interference and targeted harassment of individuals has been what I've been modelling / exploring / talking to people about for this past year.
Maybe because of this campaign, your perspective has a lot more direct contact and responsiveness from admin than is typical - but most mods do not have a direct line to Admin and their experiences with Admin are not suggestive that "simply hand it to Admin" is a positive action, much less a solution, at all. My experiences with Admin are that I need to have an exhaustively thorough case for them to take action, and most of the time they "won't see a connection" or "don't see a problem" no matter what's submitted or how blatant the reported user was. That's what's drawn my response here - there's a lot of optimism as far as Admin action & responsiveness that reads more like someone talking about how things "should" be than how they are.
Asking for the tools we need to get that data into the hands of admins is what I've been doing.
Sure, but in this case we're losing one tool and you're kind of insisting that Admin will just solve that issue anyways, somehow, via reports. Now, if you have a whole bunch of back-channel contact and a solid rapport built up with them, sure - I can totally understand the feeling that you can just report everything that might be brigading and then they'll handle it for you, but that sort of A-list access isn't something the rest of us have, and we cannot rely on the same service quality that you do when we're following conventional channels of access.
Brigaders don't have to announce that they're "here from XYZ" - they just show up and harass. Then mods report them. Even if they don't understand the behaviour to be targeted harassment of an individual.
So first up, *of course* users don't announce they're brigading. That was my point. But your inference based on that is off-course. Mods are not typically "reporting" - we are responding to reports. If there is no visible reason to escalate to Admin, the user is actioned within-context and the matter is completed. Mods are not escalating every single spicy word to Admin, and should not be. Given that Admin response times, action accuracy, and intervention quality, are so frequently quite poor - placing an even larger volume of content with far lower QA is going to exacerbate their issues and mods' ability to contribute to site/community health likewise.
We aren't (yet) being asked by admin to escalate everything that's spicy or seems personal or whatever to them - but we do have this, that is risking the removal of one tool that had been used by mods in assessing whether or not an account needed to be escalated to Admin.
Shifting the burden of dealing with mafias of community interference and targeted harassment from the victims to the admins is how this has to go in the future, and reporting tools and tools that enforce personal and group boundaries for freedom of association is how this has to go in the future - for the admins to have the clear, actionable data they need.
But all of that is a left-hand pass. We are in the comments for a change to site that potentially reduces mods' available information to determine if a user/comment/post should be escalated to admin. There is no shifting of the burden. There is no "better tool" here. I don't see anything in this post, nor in your comments, that indicates how Admin is supposed to end up with more, or better, data off the back of mods now being unable to check if a user that's blocked them has a history that suggests escalation is appropriate.
I do get that you firmly believe mods shouldn't need to shoulder the burden of addressing brigading.
What I don't get is how you can acknowledge that is how the current status quo functions, now, while also believing future Admin is going to do even more with even less input, in spite of their track record - both in that space specifically and with making commitments to mods. As a result of this posts' change, mods may well have less information available to know which posts/users we ought to escalate, especially if the harassing users are savvy enough to know that New Block prevents mods from detecting patterns.
Comment by Bardfinn at 21/12/2021 at 20:57 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I don't have any back channel communication with admins. I've just been working it all out for myself from what I and other moderators report.
We know that a large amount of harassment gets passed over simply because there's no atomic metric data that constitutes direct proof of harassment.
We know that ban evasion and mute evasion and suspension evasion are atomic metric data points that demonstrate direct bad faith engagement.
"This person is talking critically about me" is not harassment. "This person is continually doing everything they can to evade access control technologies in order to harass me" is atomically metric data. "This person and their support group are continually doing everything they can to evade access control technologies to interact with individuals and communities that clearly do not want to associate with the harassers" is atomically metric data.
Those are data points that not only can be readily captured, and readily assessed by automated means, but can also be used to measure other problems and assess how significant those other problems are, and importantly *do not rely on someone reading a ten-thousand-character comment in under thirty seconds, without context, and inferring intent of the author from it*.
They'll do more because they'll have isolated, atomic, consistent and distinctive data points about the specific behaviour.
Comment by justcool393 at 22/12/2021 at 20:17 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
So first up, *of course* users don't announce they're brigading. That was my point.
You'd be surprised at how many people do announce they're brigading