Wiki and Forum Policy - General Discussion

I'm raising a concern on this because I saw an active mod deriding criticism of a neo-nazi work and calling it "a mob." here.

If the standard is "the mods decide what is bigoted or not," then a community needs to trust them. That's a bit hard when one member of the moderation staff calls open Holocaust denial a "perceived" moral wrong.

I would think we should define exactly what "bigoted enough to violate the rules" would be here. I will give serious credit to where it's due that I've seen T Vtropes mods straight up nuke people for dog whistles or open bigotry. Nombre was very good at this when she was modding

Edited by Lightysnake on Dec 23rd 2022 at 9:22:30 AM

To repeat a question I had earlier, how many users does TV Tropes and the forums have, exactly?

While I agree with this, with all due respect this requires there to be trust that the moderation staff will not abuse their power to be retributive in reaction to hollering. Not to dredge up the previous several days of argument, but we've just seen what happens when that trust shatters in an ugly way.

I'd expect this to be the root of the ongoing discussions into clarifying moderator powers - to be able to determine what is and is not acceptable so to leave no blurred ground as to if something was a legitimate offense or mere petty revenge.

I think the admins would have to generate those numbers.

For what it's worth, I did a very, very rough and very unscientific tally of how many people posted here to say what, for census purposes. Almost 80 people showed up to discuss the issue, with roughly 60 who had negative issues, roughly 10 people who didn't personally have issues but agreed with the criticisms, and around 10 for other (mods, pushback to the critics, and people who don't have personal issues period).

It'd be interesting to compare that to stats for how many people are active on these forums in general just so we know the scope of how many people this could affect.

If nothing else, I think you pulled in like 80% of OTC.

I don't have ever seen anyone except obvious trolls, spammers or people with a lengthy record of misbehaviour in public venues - in which case the holler was a last straw sort of deal - banned for a holler.

"Perceived moral wrong" was, in fact, the correct terminology because there is no such thing as an objective moral standard, however much we might like to pretend otherwise. Morality is subjective by nature because it rests on value judgments. As George Bernard Shaw put it, the customs of our tribe are not the laws of nature.

The moderator in question should be commended, not condemned, for understanding and acknowledging this.

I believe, as a whole, TvTropes is not welcoming to the idea of holocaust denial as just a piece of moral relativity. There are ethical and moral standards in place here, so it gets very questionable to call something a perceived wrong if it's specifically crossing those red lines.

... also, website moderation is a really terrible place to have moral relativity as a keystone. <_>

I don't see how it's worse than any other place.

That doesn't even address my point, let alone refute it.

I think the problem is when you are talking about Holocaust denial in a work of fiction, as opposed to a "documentary" or someone's political statements. Or more generally, the distinction between making odious claims within a fictional context (i.e not involving real people) vs making the same claims in a way that implies you consider them true.

Yes, this is the classic academic's problem of viewing things through an abstracted, philosophical lens in situations where people have been wronged in very real, concrete ways.

The philosophical difficulties in determining objective morality kind of goes out the window when people are facing real injustice and real harm in the real world.

In this case, millions of people were murdered for entirely arbitrary and discriminatory reasons. What's more, the people doing it were using moral relativity to justify these murders, which makes your point especially galling. Part of the "justification" for killing these people was that they were morally inferior, after all.

It is important to look beyond philosophy and abstract concepts and look at what really happened, what people actually experienced and lived through. So my advice is to go and visit a concentration camp some day if you can, or at least a holocaust museum. Read some books about holocaust survivors, watch some documentaries. There is almost no end to sources documenting the horrors of these camps.

Given that the result is that the page was eventually cut, it would seem that works sympathetic to the point of being Nazi propaganda (or simply Neo-Nazi in general) are off limits. And reasonably so, given the cost of tolerating intolerance.

Which is to say that there are definitely a few areas where the subjectivity of moral judgements have no relevance to moderating. Just the more banal "is this a blatant dogwhistle or not". At least in any future situations that come up, now there's precedent.

Not that I can think of anything except maybe Sinfest's endless decline that might trigger it for a works page.

The issue with the page wasn't that. We have plenty of work pages for bigoted stuff that's troped as that. The issue is that the comic was trying to obfuscate its intent unlike that stuff so we couldn't trope it honestly. Leading to a bizzare case where we end up either downplayong the horrid views or running into ROCEJ stuff.

Edited by miraculous on Dec 24th 2022 at 4:46:42 AM

I'm not familiar with the last acronym.

Still, I think it fits the point about subjective morality not really having a place in moderating such conversations. We don't want to be seen to be tacitly encouraging neo-Nazis, so it's an entirely practical matter of whether something is trying to disguise fascist support as innocuous. Broad ethical concepts are a bit distracting from it.

& Ah, yeah, I know the rule, I just don't see it acronymised since I mostly fix grammar or something when I'm editing.

Edited by RainehDaze on Dec 24th 2022 at 12:57:51 PM

Oh uh Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment. (ROCEDJ).

And yes I do agree with you on that point for what's it's worth.

Anyway. Time to piece out. Like I can't be here for very long. Have a Christmas Eve party. So will not be able to respond for the weekend if anyone asks.

Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgement, among other things, don't editorialize on a work, don't make controversial statements about it etc. If a work is sufficiently vague about its intent, it becomes hard to distinguish between authorial intent and reader interpretation (which would go on YMMV). Also, comments would then start to look like political commentary on the work, rather than describing the work's politics itself.

Oh, and happy Christmas to the mod team!

Merry Christmas to the mods from I as well!

Septimus:

This isn't like a broader narrative, like Denial where a character expresses Holocaust denial as a wrong viewpoint. Stonetoss isn't merely a "work of fiction." As discussed in the thread, the comic is just a vehicle for the author's views and Stonetoss has straight up stated the comics are designed to be a vehicle to introduce people to that ideology.

We can debate over "perceived" moral wrong and the proper applicability but it doesn't change that I think most of us can degree neo-nazi ideology and holocaust denial are a huge problem and shouldn't be tolerated

Look, we can get philosophical about morals, but I have to draw the line when we're referring to an incident in which millions of innocent people were murdered just for existing that people are then claiming just didn't happen. I don't care about the philosophy behind the nature of morality, I think we can all agree that this is a bad thing and should be condemned, right?

Edited by STARCRUSHER99 on Dec 24th 2022 at 11:27:10 AM

Precisely this.

While I like to think all opinions are subjective and depend on circumstances, there are a few topics that I'd have to agree with most of the world that certain takes are completely unacceptable.