Are the guidelines for the Social Section changing?

I’ve been wondering the same.

[Mod says] The guidelines for social have not changed. They state:

“Responses must:

Relate to the discussion
Be respectful; you can disagree without being disagreeable
Adhere to the writing standards
Responses must not:

Disrupt the discussion

Although a wider spectrum of activity is allowable in this section, quality responses are still required. It’s equally moderated, just with more relaxed regulations.

Try to be intelligent, creative and helpful!”

-Generally speaking, the comments that I have pulled or seen recently pulled by other mods in the social section have either been disruptive to the discussion or attacks/flame bait (not counting all the spam we pull). The rules about personal attacks and flame bait apply in all sections of Fluther. As always, specific moderation will not be discussed publicly, but if any user has a question about something that was moderated, they are always welcome to ask any of the moderators.

@Seaofclouds Is there a reason a lot of the comments removed in the question I think @Hawaii_Jake is talking about are modded with no reason given? The “response moderated” tag is a pet peeve of mine. I get that it is used when the comment that is being removed is in response to another that is removed for a reason (e.g., “Response moderated (flame-bait)” followed by “Response moderated”). But I don’t understand why the first several comments modded in that thread have no reason given.

I failed to include in the details of my question that I have the highest regard for the moderation team here on Fluther. They do a thankless job.

@glacial When we go to moderate something, we are given a preset list of reasons to choose from. When a situation doesn’t quite fit those preset options (such as off topic, unhelpful, personal attack, etc), we have an “other” option which does not display the reason.

For example:

User A says : User C is a douche. (That comment gets pulled for being a personal attack.)

User B comes along before the moderation and says: User A, I disagree, he is not a douche. (That comment gets pulled as an other because it is a response to a modded comment which would only further disrupt the conversation if other users began to wonder who User A was talking about.)

I hope that makes sense. If not, I can try explaining it again.

@Hawaii_Jake: difficult, yes, but surely not thankless. I know that they do get thanked—including right now: Thank you, mods, for all you do to keep our site clean and pleasant and functional.

@Seaofclouds Yes, your example is the same one I gave – of the thing I understand. What I don’t understand is how a comment can be modded as “other” when it’s the first comment to be modded in the thread. How can it not fit in one of the predefined options?

@glacial Sometimes, things just don’t fit. That was just one example of things that would get the other tag. Sometimes it is just a matter of how the moderator chooses to label it. Here’s another example:

User A says: OP is just a troll. Some mods will pull that as flame bait, but others will pull it as other because they don’t believe that User A was trying to cause trouble, just trying to give a heads up to other users as they join the question. All such posts are modded. We encourage users to flag the people they believe are trolls so that discussions are not disrupted.

I am sorry, @Seaofclouds, that this discussion seems to be falling on your shoulders as you seem to be the moderator on duty at the moment.

I’m having a difficult time understanding why any question—any question at all—which generates a heated argument in the Social Section is different from a question asking for something as simple as recipes. The discussion in a thread about recipes can devolve into a mere back and forth between 2 users who hijack the thread and talk about the merits of a particular type of ingredient over another.

Are we to begin flagging quips in the Social Section that stray from the topic of the OP?

If a contentious question is posted in the Social Section, are we not allowed to roam in our remarks?

Again, I’m sorry, but the line seems to be quite fuzzy, and I would like to hear from a wider array of users here.

Thank you, all.

@Seaofclouds Right. But these distinctions matter to the mods, who can see the comments. To those of us who can’t, it just looks like the mods are making arbitrary, personal decisions in these cases. I think it would make more sense to simply choose one of the existing labels (if the case falls between two of these) than to have us think that perhaps the mods just don’t like a certain person.

Essentially, what I’m saying is that the result of these vague, non-specific terms is that non-mods are likely to come to the very conclusions that the mods are trying to prevent us from coming to.

@Hawaii_Jake No, that type of back and forth is still allowed (such as your example talking about particular ingredients) in social because they are part of the natural discussion. You still have room in your remarks, but they still cannot contain personal attacks or flame bait.

Those are not the types of things that have been being removed from social. As I stated above, the most recent things I’ve seen (spam aside) have been either personal attacks/flame bait or posts that would completely disrupt the discussion.

For example, on a question posted by a new user (in social), comments speculating that the user is not “new” and who the user may be, would be pulled because they disrupt the discussion of the question that was asked.

@glacial I understand what you are saying and I wish it could be that simple. Unfortunately, pulling something as a “personal attack” or as “flame bait” that is not such a thing leads to the user or others that saw the post them commenting on the fact that what the person said was not those things. I will pass along your concern to Auggie and see what she thinks about it though and perhaps we can come up with a more concrete plan for those things that aren’t really on our list for the moderation reasons. With no new development going on, I don’t know what we’ll be able to do.

@Seaofclouds I guess the question that comes to mind when you say that the reason for modding doesn’t appear on the list of reasons to mod comments is… then should the comment really have been modded? This is precisely what I mean by arbitrary decisions. Surely you have a list of guidelines for exactly this reason, and if the reason for modding ain’t there… it ain’t there.

As @Hawaii_Jake said earlier, thanks for taking the hot seat – obviously, my comments aren’t about you, but about the process. :)

@glacial Yes, we have a list of guidelines we follow. Unfortunately, our preset options, when we choose to moderate a response, do not include all of the things we can moderate a post for. That is where the “other” option comes in to play. We only have a few options to choose from, which are the most common ones like “off topic”, “unhelpful”, “personal attack”, “flame bait”, and one or two more. The options do not line up with all of the guidelines. For example, there is no “self promotion”, “illegal content”, “attention grabbing”, or “deceitful/deceptive” options, yet all of those are things that are mentioned in the important rules as behavior that is not allowed on Fluther.

When we go to moderate a post, the process goes like this:

Review the post, determine that it needs to be moderated.
Click the “moderate” option.
Select an option from the preset list (of only about 7 things) for why we are moderating the item.
Hit the “moderate” button.
Done.

Firstly, I want to thank everyone for being so thoughtful in this discussion. I genuinely appreciate it!

The rules haven’t changed, there were just quite a few posts in a recent thread that called the OP a troll or the like. We generally take that kind of thing out because it can turn the discussion into an argument about that, ruining a chance for further discussion of the topic at hand. If a question seems troll-ish, it’s better to flag it for us than to get into it in the thread itself. When it’s not patently clear that the user is a troll, we won’t necessarily remove the question…but we’ll at least keep an eye on it (and the member who asked it.)

We try not to use “other” as a reason when moderating a first post precisely because of what you all are talking about…it’s vague. Unfortunately, as @Seaofclouds has mentioned, we only have so many options to choose from in the preset list. The actual reasons we might moderate a post far outnumber the ‘labels’ we can give them. Sometimes “other” is just the only one that works. I’m sorry it was causing confusion!

Nothing changes here anymore.

So, if I set up a brand new account and ask an inflammatory question in the Social Section, will all the jellies who choose to answer it have to walk on egg shells?

As a long-time member, if I ask an inflammatory question in the Social Section as I’ve seen a few examples of recently for which I’ll happily provide links, can the jellies who answer heap scorn on the question and get away with it?

Where really is the line? I really don’t understand. Really.

@Hawaii_Jake It’s not an easy situation to distinguish. If a user asks a question for the sole intention of making users on the site angry, whether it is their primary account or an alter, we will pull it as “not really being a question”. However, making the judgment that the user had absolutely no intention of establishing a discussion or receiving genuine responses from users (whether they agree or disagree) is not easy.

Plenty of users have alters. Plenty of users have used those alters to ask a heated question—not necessarily because they desired to incite a mob, but because they knew that the associations made to their primary account would make it difficult, if not impossible, for users to respond in a level-minded manner.

The best we can do, as moderators, is to give the question (and original poster) a chance—whether it is a wildly unpopular idea or not. If we have any reason to believe that the question constitutes trolling (based on previous or concurrent activity) or if the OP’s responses indicate that they are only trying to incite anger, then we will pull the question and give the user a warning.

I understand your concern. Responses can be removed as flame-bait, and often are, but where do we draw the line for a question that may be flame-bait itself?

It helps if users who flag the question as “flame-bait” can quote what they are particularly calling into question. Previous moderators have flagged questions and pointed out the titles, tags, or descriptions are flamey and we have pushed those questions to editing with directions to remove any inflammatory content before the question has been restored.

However, just because the question contains unpopular ideas does not mean that it is flaming. We have to read carefully and make a clear distinction between hate speech/flame-bait and unpopular opinion. Again, this is not an easy distinction to make.

Users are more than welcome to disagree with the OP, but they cannot permit their responses to devolve into personal attacks or flame-bait. There are no egg shells to walk on. The rules about personal attacks/flame-bait have always been upheld in General, Social, and Meta. If a user feels that they cannot respond to the question without resorting to personal attacks/flame-bait, then they may need to resolve to walk away from the question.

I wonder how much longer “random crap” will be allowed as a topic, in General as well as Social.