Superconsensus in crowners discussion

This is my concern as well.

If the problem is tropers voting but not explaining themselves, the solution is to reduce whatever is getting in the way of explaining themselves, not to increase the barrier to voting or change the voting rules so that their votes don't count. (To run with the subverting-democracy analogy, this would also be true for an actual government.) There doesn't seem to be any evidence that anyone is voting in bad faith, but there is testimony that the thread discussion is hostile to newcomers and prone to groupthink, which I can say from personal experience is something that gets in the way of my willingness to participate. :P

One additional option might be to add Pre Defined Messages representing common reasons for voting for or against whatever the thread topic is and include them someplace visible, in the OP or even on the new post page (like the emoji). IP and TRS already have these built into the thread titles; something similar could be provided for the replies, making it easier and more inviting to dissent and add elaboration.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Sep 3rd 2022 at 5:16:33 PM

The problem with trying to get rid of the superconsensus rules, particularly in the "Real Life Cleanup" thread, is that many such threads tend to attract the most cut-happy individuals. Using the real life thread as an example, contributors who dislike real life examples in general are more likely to use the thread, while contributors who are more inclined to let real life examples be are more likely to focus their attention elsewhere. The superconsensus rule serves as a necessary balance to keep certain elements of the wiki from being dominated by a small but vocal group.

Now, where I can see the argument for relaxing said rule is in those rare few crowners that attract particularly large numbers of votes. Once numbers get big enough, you can be comfortable that a few people aren't dominating the discussion. I could see potentially softening the rules to being something like 2:1 for +10. 1.75:1 for +20, 1.5:1 for +40. I should stress that I'm not particularly attached to those exact numbers (seeing as I just pulled them out of my ass), but the general concept could hold some merit.

Finally, I feel like I should comment on the subject of "drive-by voters." I think concerns are overblown. Now, if everyone in the thread is arguing one way but the votes are going the other, then we might have a problem. But, if even one person is making counter-arguments, then I'm less concerned. I know I often don't bother to post if there's a crowner and someone else is doing an adequate job of arguing my position.

Uh... I missed a lot apparently. I'm not gonna touch the debate right now, but I will at least point out that yes, TRS and the NRLEP thread actually do have issues of drive-by voters voting in the complete opposite way from what the thread's posters were leaning towards, and whether it's for good reasons or not, it does get people concerned and confused when seemingly no-brainer votes end up going in the complete opposite direction for no explained reason. It does happen — this bit isn't an exaggeration of anything.

this is a fair point. allow me to provide some evidence for my position. this is a very long post.

here is a post i made in the midst of an ongoing discussion about making Anarcho-Tyranny NRLEP on the grounds of the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment. i voted for the trope to be made NRLEP. there was a user making a case that Anarcho-Tyranny should not be NRLEP. it had been suggested that the subject be dropped. my post argued against this, saying that the user in question had every right to present their case against NRLEP. i repeated this argument a few posts later, after laserviking again suggested the subject be dropped. laserviking has verged on accusing me of bad faith in this thread.

here is the post suggesting that Anti-Vehicle be added to the NRLEP crowner. the grounds for adding it were that Anti-Air had recently been made NRLEP. it was added to the Too Common index. it is possible this was not good enough justification to make the trope NRLEP and it should have been discussed further.

here is a post in which i argued that a blanket ban on troping propaganda was unnecessary and that propaganda works should be evaluated on a case by case basis.

here is a post where i advised against rushing the current-at-the-time crowner. i was discussing this in the context of trying to find some way to speed up the voting process to avoid building up a backlog in the thread. here is the post where i explained my reasoning.

here is a post where i offered a compromise to allow certain real life examples to remain on the wiki in some fashion.

here is a post where i noted that Anti-Vehicle had more negative votes than the other related tropes that were crownered at the time. i asked that anyone who was downvoting Anti-Vehicle talk to us about their reasoning. there had been no posts by anyone explaining their reason for downvoting Anti-Vehicle at this time.

here is a crosspost i made from the NRLEP Criteria Trope Talk thread in which i literally begged for anyone to come talk it out about their reasons for downvoting tropes on the crowner. the only response i may have received from that post was this one, which i am not certain of, because wolfworthsmenkey did not specify their reason for posting.

here is a post where i agreed that a cleanup effort was the appropriate action.

here is the post where Anti-Vehicle was called for KRLE. i am not sure how to access the crowner which hosted Anti-Vehicle's votes. i believe it was at a ratio between 1.6:1 and 1.8:1. at no point between the post i made requesting discussion on the reason for its downvotes and the point at which it was called for KRLE did anyone make a post to explain why they were downvoting.

this post serves two purposes: to prove that i have acted and continue to act in good faith, and to prove that there is a problem with the way that we are handling these crowners. it is true that i think the wiki would be better off if it did not host real life examples at all. that is not the policy of the wiki. i have not attempted to act as if that was the policy of the wiki. i have and will continue to evaluate each trope brought up for discussion in the real life cleanup thread on its own merits.

i am not sure what i can do to get my point across better than i have in this post. there is a problem. i believe the wiki will be better off if it is solved. i am open to suggestion as to what that solution is. the ones i proposed seem less than ideal. that's okay. i am a fallible human being. but... come on, yall. let's do something.

i am going to bed.

I sometimes "drive-by vote" because while I have an opinion on which way something should go, I can't always articulate it, or I would just be repeating something that had been said multiple times. There's also my social anxiety, and desire not to be caught up in a ridiculous argument.

Okay, as a long-time lurking voter I will give my reasons for doing so.

While the primary reason I do it is because it is a way to help the wiki with the least amount of time and effort, the secondary reason is that I do not religiously follow threads in the Wiki and Forums section, only going there from time to time out of curiosity to see what is being discussed. As such, I will normally only come across something I would want to vote on when the discussion is well advanced and anything I would want to bring up already has been and I feel that simply repeating already discussed and seconded points is pointless.

Now while I will at least skim read through TRS threads so that I get an idea of the discussion, threads such as the NRLEP thread (which I have drive-by voted on in the past, but that is more because I am in the camp of people who think the entire site should be NRLEP so typically upvote anyway) that deal with multiple issues at once disincentivise getting involved in the discussion as they are more difficult to follow for those of us who don't follow them all the time. Trying to find the beginning of a discussion in such posts is a pain in the arse and I feel that if they did one item at a time it could result in more discussion, even if it would take longer.

i just want to go on record as saying that the lurkers actually coming to talk to us would be a completely successful outcome to this thread in my book. it would solve the problem and nothing else would need to be done.

that's completely understandable. however, let me point out that literally all i am asking for is an explanation. you don't have to debate people about it, you can let it stand for itself. people may try to raise counterpoints, but you don't have to respond to them; you can leave it up to people to read both your points and the counterpoints and decide for themselves which side has more merit. hell, at the end of the day, im not even asking you to have a good reason. even if you just said "i think they're funny" or something along those lines, at least we know why.

this is something that can be addressed, i think. we can slow the pace of discussion (there's already a one-day wait period between the time a trope is brought up and the time it can be put on the crowner). also, here's a suggestion: if people in the discussion made an effort to link to the post or posts they were responding to, would that make it easier to follow the trail of conversation?

another suggestion: at present the crowner entries list the date they were added. i think adding a link there to the post that suggested crownering them would make it easier to find and read the arguments made regarding the trope. it would put extra work on the mods, but i will volunteer to assist by tracking down and providing those links so the mods don't have to look for them.

Edited by ChloeJessica on Sep 4th 2022 at 12:08:19 PM

Sounds more like a solution in search of a problem, because you still haven't shown that a) there is malfeasance occurring, and b) how exactly this is "harming" the wiki.

By the way, I was saying that you were getting far too hyperbolic and emotionally invested in this, not that you were arguing in bad faith. Every time someone states they don't see a problem, you double down, complaining that you seem to be only one who cares, without ever considering that you may be, again, way too emotionally invested in this to see anyone else's point of view.

Anti-Vehicle being voted KRLE with no reason given as to why isn't a problem. OK.

It's annoying to those who wanted it cut, but it's not a problem. It doesn't mean there is a cabal of bad actors who are maliciously choosing to sabotage the crowner because ... reasons.

i don't think there's any point in us discussing this further. you do good work on the wiki and i apologize if i mistook your statements for something you did not intend them to be. but you will not convince me that this does not need to be addressed, full stop.

Edited by ChloeJessica on Sep 4th 2022 at 1:06:07 AM

And in my opinion, it's on the person who proposes it to prove there is a problem, not on those who oppose it to prove there isn't one. People shouldn't have to prove a negative, and if someone says there's a problem, they should have to prove it to the satisfaction of the community. That's how it's worked in TRS for ages, after all.

Saying that they didn't prove there wasn't a problem seems disingenuous, especially if you couldn't prove that there was one to the satisfaction of crowner voters

Edit:

Edited by Acebrock on Sep 4th 2022 at 1:09:48 AM

okay, let's look at it a different way. i have repeatedly requested interaction on this subject in the cleanup thread and have been ignored at every turn. my concerns about why tropes are being kept are going completely unaddressed. if a similar situation happened in Trope Launch Pad or ATT i don't think anyone would deny that there is a problem. i don't know why it's suddenly controversial when it comes to the forums.

Edited by ChloeJessica on Sep 4th 2022 at 1:15:31 AM

double post: i am quite frustrated that even though, on this page, i have offered two solutions to make crowner discussion more accessible and easy to follow, which was specifically called out as a problem, and yet people still only care that i haven't proved to their satisfaction that there's an issue. that is, bluntly and frankly, fucked.

I think a lot of the issue is that nobody except the downvoters can explain why that section wasn't purged. Maybe it was mal-intent, maybe it was personal bias, maybe there's something that everyone agreed made the section keepable that nobody's addressing. We don't know why these things are happening... so all anyone can do is speculate, and that does make it hard to fix these problems — because not everyone is going to immediately agree that it is a problem, and not just democracy working as intended.

This sort of issue is one of the reasons I thought about the whole "let blatantly bad tropes skip the crowner" thing, since it does feel weird that we can let obvious rule-breaks slide by if people don't want to get rid of them. But OTOH it's also true that determining what counts as an "obvious problem" might just end up being a way to subvert the crowners or give the thread regulars way too much power.

There's just no easy solution here and we'll need some way to confirm our fears are accurate before we take any drastic action, or to find a way to encourage more engagement without accidentally chasing people away.

Yeah, that's where I'm falling on this. So far I'm not seeing evidence of a problem of democracy, just of people being upset that crowners didn't go their way. The suggestions to add links to posts on crowner options to allow people to better follow the discussions and adding a mandatory pause between a trope being proposed and it being voted on so that people other than regulars have a chance to see it are good ones and I think they should be done; I just don't see why we need to make it harder for people to vote when there's no actual evidence of bad faith. People disagreeing with you, even if they don't explain their reasoning, is not itself proof of bad faith. All it proves is that people disagree with you.

if, after everything ive said, you still think i made this because i am upset about a crowner result i didn't like, i frankly have nothing at all to say to you.

Yeah, I was trying to figure out how to phrase it, but it seems like there's a lot of assuming bad faith here. I think the idea that people are maliciously upvoting or downvoting is probably a greater barrier to discussion than anything

Eh, you brought it up as evidence of the problem, I was just explaining why it can't really be used as evidence for either side of the debate. Nobody has any idea what happened there except for the people who made it happen, so if people are looking for specific evidence then that crowner alone won't satisfy people.

To be clear, I think that people do have valid concerns about the results of these crowners since there's no obvious logical explanation for the downvotes, but I don't think we should make the jump to saying that the problem is, say, the motives of the voters since that's just too much of an unknown to say anything about. It's fair to say that you find it problematic that seemingly clear-cut decisions can be rejected based on a few people with unclear motives for disagreeing, but in that case the crowner result is the problem we're trying to fix, not evidence of a problem, if that makes sense. It's the virus, not a symptom, if it's the thing we're finding solutions for; it just can't be presented as a symptom if the virus is currently only speculative.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 4th 2022 at 6:05:51 AM

I don't really see proof of this malicious downvoting though? That feels kinda rude to assume bad faith on a bunch of people on the site?

Like I don't know. The whole point of voting is to pick a side. If one gets upvoted or downvoted. I don't see an issue. So be it.

Yeah, before we make a policy change this massive, I'd like to see evidence that these down votes are actually being done in bad faith.

Also, these accusations of bad faith voting could easily serve to create more hostility towards the idea of making tropes nrlep. If people see the advocates for such as having a big us vs them attitude (which, btw, runs counter to the part of the forum rules that says that we wish to maintain an attitude of mutual respect) then you might actually get spiteful downvoters.

i am not assuming that the voting is malicious. that is a gross misunderstanding of my position and if i have not been clear enough to avoid that, that's on me.

the fact that we don't know whether or not they were malicious is itself the problem. if i brought up an issue with a TLP, the sponsor would be expected to address it, either by countering my argument or by adjusting the draft so that the problem was no longer evident. for something a little more closely related to this, the problem of anonymity in TLP launch votes was addressed because it allowed people to rogue launch tropes with unaddressed concerns. rather than allowing those anonymous voters to enable bad behavior, their anonymity was removed.

whether Anti-Vehicle should be NRLEP isn't relevant to the discussion, but the unaddressed concerns about it are, so i will make a case for it here: it is too common. every modern military on earth has anti-vehicle tactics and materiel, and listing all of them would be impossible; standard procedure in these cases is to list none of them. Anti-Air, Anti-Cavalry, and Anti-Armor were all voted NRLEP on the same crowner that hosted Anti-Vehicle despite that the rationale for all four tropes' crownering was the same. this creates an image of inconsistency and makes the entire NRLEP process seem completely arbitrary.

if, after discussion of the issues i raised, Anti-Vehicle had been voted KRLE, i would not have become involved in this discussion. there would not be a problem. i do not throw tantrums when i do not get my way.

So we should make a major policy change because there might be bad-faith voting?

In my over a decade here, we have never changed or implemented policy based on what might be true to my knowledge, and I don't think we should start now, especially over what seems to be a minor issue in comparison (changing how consensus works site-wide, which would have major ramifications, over how votes went in one thread strikes me as a massive overreaction)

Did you have thoughts on any of the suggestions anyone made besides adjusting superconsensus rules or discounting votes, Chloe? Like me, at the top of the page and feeling a bit ignored? I'm also glad that other non-posters have come in to offer their reasoning, but I don't think you're going to be successful with personally arguing each of them into new posting habits and it doesn't really seem like you're open to alternatives. (Which contributes to the impression that your underlying complaint is the vote going against you.)

I think this is evidence of an actual issue, but it has more to do with tropes about militarised chairs needing to be taken to TRS. ^note The only anti-[unit] page that seems keepable to me is Anti-Air, due entirely to the widespread use of flight as a support mechanic in strategy games that often stands out as more finicky than the rest, and it should at least be renamed. And, hypothetically, a specific voting bloc of off-mission tankspotting hobbyists, but weakening consensus rules to handle that is overkill.