I was in the unfortunate position of having to ban someone from an online tech support forum of which I was the mod. This was after weeks of myself and other mods trying to resolve the issues with them. Issues like name calling, trying to stir up racial issues, making fun of new users for being noobs, trying to stir up other users against the mods, all that teenage BS (although the person was in their 20s or 30s).
The result was that they followed me on to Twitter and other social medias and started calling me names like Nazi and so on. I blocked them there but it was frustrating - we were just trying to run a small help forum for an open source library and I spent way too much time in good faith trying to help this person and still got publicly name called from it.
I ended up feeling totally burned out by this and stopped moderating the forum soon after.
Because of following me and other mods onto Twitter we made the temp ban permanent. I have no idea if the person is still banned.
If I had to deal with this kind of situation a lot I can totally see adding a rule that the banned person can't follow you onto social media and complain as a requirement for the ban remaining temporary.
Contrary to this being weaponized shunning, I see it as "we need space from you for a while and if you don't give it to us and come back with a better attitude we're gonna permanently remove you from the community".
That all said, it probably could be worded less severely.
I like this idea too. Also temporary bans are good for offering a cool-down period for users who generally are constructive but tend to lose their tempers from time to time.
Not a gripe but an idea: rather than ban persons from HN for bad behavior, would it possibly be better to "emprison" them, that is, disallow them from posting for awhile and then, after a few days or weeks, permit them to resume posting?
Reason I ask this is that I recently encountered an HN situation where someone who appeared to be a productive member of the HN community was banned from posting because of (truly) poor etiquette, if not outright bad behavior. However, seeing that he had for over a year been a contributing member, I felt that a total ban was heavy-handed and that simply being punished temporarily for a transgression might have served better.
Is anyone familiar with an online forum that merely temporarily punishes transgressors w/o permanently banning them? Does anyone else think banning is sometimes a bit too much punishment?
As a moderator you often know know that somebody should be removed, but for the sake of PR it's often unwise to just have an internal talk, reach an agreement that "yup, this person is an ass", and then ban them seemingly out of the blue, even if there's a bunch of excellent reasons. It's easy for drama to erupt, especially when that person has been around for a long time and is a regular.
An easy solution is to watch out like a hawk for the right incident and do it then, and sometimes to even try to intentionally push things along so that it's especially obvious to all bystanders.
And leaving some evidence to show everyone why you did it also helps.
I've been there. On a Discord I used to moderate, there were a few people like that who did not really break any rule, or not in an egregious enough manner to deserve a ban individually
A rule was made for that situation: "If the effort and/or stress associated with moderating you regarding rules or general behavior becomes too much of an issue, we will remove you from the server.".
That rule has been used a few times since its implementation.
Having read part of the threads (I know, I shouldn't have), the problem wasn't so much abuse or bad behavior. It was well intentioned people talking past each other.
I don't think you should ban people for that. @dang is right to just demote it.
I'm very glad someone is speaking up about this.
No moderator should have the possibility of permanently banning someone. A timeout (say a year at maximum) is plenty enough.
I reflected on this a bit after seeing your and tptacek's comments. It's an interesting idea but I think it would land too personally again, because it's so specific. When moderators make a specific judgment like "you can post in other threads but not this one", people feel singled out, and that's really what stings.
Also it would leave a lot of surface area for objections, and any changes we make will need to reduce the amount of argument moderators have to get into —it's both time-consuming and psychologically difficult. I think it would probably be cleaner and simpler to say "you've been breaking the site guidelines so you're temporarily banned". The innovation would be the "temporarily" part.
Well, that's fair. If someone steps majorly out of line, time them out or ban them. I'm not saying you should pander, I'm saying you should empathize. (Within reason.)
That being said, exclusion is a very powerful tool, one best used with caution. It's easy to mistake temporary anger for constant trolling. It's very easy to ban someone who falls into that sort of gray area.
Usually the problem is, that you don't want to ban the user, but the behavior. And - reddit being mostly a textual thing - it is represented by words. Banning the user is unfair, plus they can just create a new account anyway.
So you try to be alert for people who use certain phrases. Racism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, paranoia, extreme pettiness, severely abrasive attitude, choosing beggars, and so on.
And flame wars, and people jumping on others. And of course if there is a group of people showing such unwanted behavior it takes no time for the powder keg to go off.
I think having sort of simple but a big ambiguous rules are okay if there are very broad but exact rules too. (Eg. Rule1: don't be a dick, Rule2: no harrassment, no xenophobia, no posting of personal information, etc.)
Moderators and the community should be proactive. (I find that the best tool is reports, because that signals what people find problematic. Sometimes they are just annoyed that some newcomer posted that again. That's okay, but most of the time users report spammers, crazy serious racists with too much time, and the occasional lost redditors' posts.)
You can 100% mute and block people on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, most main line social media platforms. Hell you can even mute keywords on Twitter and never have to deal with seeing another tweet about Will Smith slapping someone.
Should one user be able to decide if another user should be expelled from a platform? That leads to a lot of sticky problems, so no, they shouldn't have that power. Should a user be banned if they violate the terms of the platform (roughly what mods on IRC would do when a user was banned)?
Yes. Yes they should. And they do. It's a liability for platforms to not enforce their own rules.
I've helped run a forum in the past, and holy shit is it scarily easy to make stupidly-determined enemies. Even people who joined just to spam offensive content would act like they were the one victimized when banned and would do all sorts of things to "even the score". I think these people would emotionally forget that they joined looking for a fight and earned their ban in the first place, and would then ride the high of righteous indignation.
well I think the parent sums it up best but basically there's going to be temporary meltdowns that eventually go away. jekyll and hyde type scenario. jekyll is helpful most of the time but sometimes outside factors (irl) bring out mr hyde more often. obviously no community has to tolerate mr hyde and they shouldn't, but permanently banning mr hyde also bans jekyll when the transformation (outside stress factors) wears off.
if you don't suspend mr hyde he won't take a second to look back and reflect. you have to kick him out for a bit for the sake of the site and to warn the user. a warning + ban is taken literally though.
it's like when your mom tells you that you can't go to the dance because you didn't clean your room. the dance is no longer an option. then you call her a name and she says "now you really can't go to the dance." which implies there was still a chance but you didn't understand the nuances about it. it makes no logical sense. even in the most extreme scenarios I can't see how a 1 year suspension from a site outside of doing something illegal would be worse for everyone involved than a ban. if they actually wait 1 year and come back without evading, they're probably going to be a lot more careful and whatever was going on may be resolved without forcing the user to have to disclose to online moderators that they were upset because of x at the time. the automated system takes care of it.
I think in the situations you describe it's much more effective to have some kind of authority in place to discipline people for this kind of behaviour rather than relying on abuse. Especially since it's usually done by trolls for whom the emotional response is the objective. I think a brief "This is in breach of rule X, you have been banned for Y days" combined with locking/deleting the relevant comment, is far more effective at discouraging negative behaviour than angry tirades.
Name-calling was an example of bad behaviour you want to ban. I'm sure we can think of other, worse, types of behaviour. Whatever it is, find the most egregious offenders, and ban them.
Indeed... If I had to ban a community member for bad behaviour, I would want to do it in the most professional way possible, and never to directly accuse OP of anything not backed up with a direct link to evidence of wrongdoing.
I see this a fair amount, and yeah, "just let people block others" is really terrible moderation advice.
Besides the very reasonable expectation almost everyone has that assholes will be banned, the inevitable result of not banning assholes is that you get more and more assholes, because their behavior will chase away regular users. Even some regular users may start acting more like assholes, because what do you do when someone is super combative, aside from possibly leaving? You become combative right back, to fight back.
The moderators' time and effort is valuable too. If someone reacts to a normal ban by creating new accounts and continuing their previous behaviour, what use is there in telling them that their behaviour is not acceptable if they refuse to listen?
The result was that they followed me on to Twitter and other social medias and started calling me names like Nazi and so on. I blocked them there but it was frustrating - we were just trying to run a small help forum for an open source library and I spent way too much time in good faith trying to help this person and still got publicly name called from it.
I ended up feeling totally burned out by this and stopped moderating the forum soon after.
Because of following me and other mods onto Twitter we made the temp ban permanent. I have no idea if the person is still banned.
If I had to deal with this kind of situation a lot I can totally see adding a rule that the banned person can't follow you onto social media and complain as a requirement for the ban remaining temporary.
Contrary to this being weaponized shunning, I see it as "we need space from you for a while and if you don't give it to us and come back with a better attitude we're gonna permanently remove you from the community".
That all said, it probably could be worded less severely.
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