krista4 said:
I'm disappointed at the way the site has regressed lately and have discussed with "Tanner" the issues we see. And I'll be even more disappointed when we lose someone like him permanently while allowing - or apparently welcoming - the kind of unproductive discussion that persists in this forum.
I also want to say something about this.
I agree that the site has regressed over the last few years. A decade ago, there was plenty of strong disagreement, but everyone could trust that the disagreements were in good faith. Lately, it seems that a lot of posts are full of hyperbolic rhetoric that substitute overstatement (at best) for careful accuracy. And I suspect that often the inaccuracies are not merely careless, but at least reckless if not intentional -- i.e., I suspect that numerous posts these days are made in bad faith.
It's a shame.
Believe me when I say that the moderators do recognize this, but do
not welcome it.
You might think we could solve the problem by simply banning the worst offenders. It's complicated, though, for two primary reasons.
First, a lot of the worst offenders don't really cross the lines too badly in terms of things like swearing, linking to porn, etc. -- the stuff that is
objectively worthy of a ban. Rather, the thrust of their annoyance is just basic carelessness with facts, responding to everything too quickly and voluminously, and elevating snark above substance. That stuff is tedious, but do we really want to start banning people for it? For one thing, that sort of folly is often unintentional, and we don't really want to ban people for stuff they don't do on purpose. For another, judgments about it are pretty subjective, which is related to my second point...
Second, while I can quickly name offenders on both sides of the political aisle, the worst offenders tend to be disproportionately on the pro-Trump side. Sorry, pro-Trump people, but in my estimation, as objective as I can be about it, it's true.
But I question exactly how objective I can be about it. I'm pretty anti-Trump myself. When an anti-Trump person makes a careless post that is more rhetorical than substantive, I notice it and am annoyed by it, but I'm probably
more annoyed by it when the same thing is done by a pro-Trump person. It's subconscious, but it's probably a real effect. So how do I penalize posters for being annoying while also ensuring impartiality -- recognizing that my annoyance-meter might be subconsciously calibrated differently for different groups?
In my mind, I think I
probably over-correct for that effect by cutting more slack to the pro-Trump people than I do to the anti-Trump people. You might agree with me about that. And if you're right, that's a demerit against me as a moderator. But I can assure you that the pro-Trump people definitely do not agree with me about that -- they tend to think just the opposite. And if they're right, that's also a demerit against me as a moderator. From my perspective, I really don't have a good way of determining who's more likely to be right.
If the moderation is slanted either way, it's not by design.
And if the moderation is too lax about suppressing certain posters on grounds of general annoyance, that is not the goal. It's because trade-offs are hard, and recognizing and appropriately controlling for my own biases is even harder. I bet the other moderators would admit the same.