OTC Thread Culture

True, usually the OTC-equivalent on other forums is, ironically, the off-topic section.

It technically is for us too, the name is in reference to how things are meant to "stay on topic" (which implies that it's not the status quo for the entire rest of the forums, but I digress).

I'm not opposed to having more "forum mods", but I still think that the real change has to come from the community, not just in the moderation. However, we can't really have that conversation unless more OTC regulars join in. Right now it's a pretty small sample size.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 18th 2023 at 5:59:42 AM

One of the unique challenges of OTC is that it deals with real-life, consequential issues. That means that moderating for civility requires much more attention to content as well as tone, because opinions themselves can be deeply offensive to other posters and can promote an exclusionary culture. To use an example from quite a few years back, you can be as exquisitely polite as you like when telling gay people that you believe they're destined for eternal torment and that you pray they'll turn straight, but that'll still be a horribly unpleasant, disruptive thing to say. It's not like, say, quibbling over the mechanical design choices in the latest Gundam series, where any opinion is valid so long as it's expressed civilly.

In other words, moderators need to be much more adaptable, well-educated, and informed, because they're much more often going to be dealing with discussion of real situations that affect real people, many of which will be entirely new and unfamiliar to them, and people may well be angry and/or impolite when chatting about a topic, or hostile to alternative opinions on a topic, for very good reasons. We have the forum rules to cover some of that, but rules are generally added after they've become necessary, not before, and there'll always be some new horrible/philosophically divisive thing for people to discuss that the mods haven't foreseen and need to improvise their response to.

Edited by Iaculus on Jan 18th 2023 at 4:28:49 PM

It doesn't help that when you get into that kinda moderating, it's easy for a certain kind of person to look down on the mods for supposedly "taking out opinions they don't like" even if they're legitimately toxic.

Here's a suggestion that comes to mind after a few recent hollerin' incidents: can OTC hollers please be informative?

Some holler-ers really try to contextualize their holler. They give a rundown of the situation point, to recent posts that explain what's going on as well as prior evidence that the poster is acting out of line, and that is really appreciated.

But a holler that says something like "This opinion is toxic and accusatory" is more common than not, and it not only stresses us out (like aggghh we have to respond now) and implicitly biases us against the user being hollered, but it also doesn't actually explain anything about why said opinion is toxic and accusatory, resulting in more effort on our part to try and understand what's going on.

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 27th 2023 at 12:17:04 PM

^ Agreed.

Something different but maybe we can revive the self moderation thread on OTC or link this thread to it since it seem to be covering the same subject as this thread. We might be able to get more eyes on a stickied OTC thread from regulars than on Wiki Talk.

That would be a really good idea, linking the thread to it and stickying it.

Edited by TheWildWestPyro on Mar 1st 2023 at 11:02:02 AM

Alright slight bump.

I want to know what were going to do? We do need moderation their (but with most mods scared to go their and their only being 1-2 who moderate their and one wanting to not to) and OTC has become genuinely toxic. I don't know what to do? The last time we went totally modless on a forum part we had to nuke it. So some solution is needed before we end up wit that drastic a response.

> The last time we went totally modless on a forum part we had to nuke it

that was It just bugs me and this situation is totally different, just saying/

I'm not sure how it's toxic now, when it's much calmer than it's been at any other point in the last six years.

Having one issue with 'what defines on-topic regarding social media' doesn't scream of toxicity compared to the many, many arguments it used to have, especially in the politics threads.

Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 4th 2023 at 4:42:08 PM

It was much worse before and needed more active moderation but I have only ever been a lurker for the most part.

As stated before, while we don't actively mod OTC and aren't keen to do so, we do still respond to non complicated stuff like civility issues and off topic. The situations we find difficult to mod when certain debates go awry and figuring out what happened/how to deal with the situation requires more backreading and knowledge of certain topics:user behaviors we don't have a firm grasp on.

The only thing that becomes toxic is the constant need to bash any figure if they make poor decisions(and are idiots in some form). That's never reasonable and removes any constructive part, as well is just as uncivil. That's pretty easy to avoid in itself. Regardless of who the figure is.

The other part is how we handle the extreme off-topic nonsense. A mod note is not working. People refuse to yield and some stuff just isn't even that murky. Musk, in this context, saying something a bit dumb on Twitter does not relate to Twitter getting a new rule/guideline/change in any way. This being treated as murky even shows there's no clear way to fix this by people actually paying attention to the rules better. We also run into the issue of "just how many people are directly making it off-topic, and which people are only just popcorners at worst". If it's a small amount of people who turn the topic into a mess, that might be solvable. But there's some issues here with how long this has gone on;

• After it was said, back in the "Discussion about Moderation" topic, that people were able to handle Social Media without going off-topic(by respectively a user(Karxida) who actually doesn't go off-topic there if ever, to give credit, things changed quite massively after it was found out that any random stuff about Musk was put there just cause he happened to owned Twitter. Even Tesla. It didn't take long for the off-topic thumps to come in, for good reasons. Tesla does not directly relate to Twitter(there are some cases where statements have related to it by the employees, but that's where it becomes murky because it's more about his dealings with Tesla and how it's ran. That they find his focus on Twitter a problem. It's barely related to Twitter in that case and may be better in the Electric Cars thread instead).
  • Going off of this as well, is it just a few people who throw in actual off-topic stuff that could be easy to moderate/suspend and the topic would get better? Or is it such a volatile subject that tons of people are willing to randomly post off-topic stuff because they think it entirely fits, even when it doesn't.
  • We have popcorners too who just add to the off-topic posts after someone starts a random post or whatever. They basically are the only ones who would stop posting about it if it's not brought up. This means that it's pretty easy to keep it on-topic too, as they have no reason to post about a certain response if nothing like that comes up. So this is relatively easy to solve.

The second (double bullet) point is also a key thing to note; if we can't find the catalysts of the off-topic discussion, which has happened for months on end, how can removing them be a viable solution. There's no way for other users to easily report it cause the posts are now thumped. This means the Moderation at most would have to start from the topic to figure out who started the problem and who are constants. All we can do is provide the pages in one big ATT report at best. If this isn't even a good enough solution(mostly due to the extreme amount of work being expected), then the only other option is to ban the Twitter subject as it cannot be handled within the confines of our rules.

The last thing we should do is never try to make exceptions for Musk or any other figure. If we're applying a similar strategy of off-topic nonsense towards someone else, that should be stopped too. Trump is the prime example, but moreso, it's being used as an excuse to be off-topic other places in the "they're doing it, so why can't we do it too." problem. Albeit, that's ignoring that Trump's actions are only because of his crimes as a President, whereas Musk's random musings on Twitter where he likes to posts(...to the surprise of no one. Who wouldn't post on a platform they now own?) don't inherently relate to Twitter. Trump's crimes as a President have significant weight in comparison, and are a huge part of why people wanted him removed, due to his immunity to being arrested at the time. But basically, they aren't equal positions they are in, which is why no rule was made about Trump(though keep in mind we do have a short term project dedicated to ROCEJ about Trump, so to say we don't have some clear rules about him is pretty much incorrect. Clearly it does matter a loooot).

Edited by Irene on Apr 4th 2023 at 3:03:04 AM

The recurring problem is going to be that attempts to keep things completely and narrowly on-topic cannot work when dealing with something like Musk's handling of Twitter since the buyout and going forward. Looking into past behaviour is generally not going to be relevant, but 'man who is a social media addict and uses said social media for feedback before implementing changes on said social media' makes anything he says or does related to Twitter (or general moderation policies) more relevant than you would think.

Like, bringing up his transphobic views and how the impetus to buy this seems to be because of one right-wing site getting banned? In the normal course of things, pretty irrelevant. Except, just today, it's turned out that DM previews are being censored if they contain LGBT terms, but not the bigoted ones. It's related, and that's an issue for trying to maintain a narrow focus.

Then there's the weird blurring of how Tesla talk should go in the Electric Cars conversation, but when you're comparing the management of the two (or how the chaos of one will affect the other), then the two things can't be pulled entirely apart.

That's my point about focussing on the actual news about Twitter, and only then looking for the context of Musk's tweets. For that thread, Twitter the company should be the leading topic, not Musk the twitterer.

So, for example, only post about his transphobic tweets when he is actually implementing policy based on it, not every time a transphobic tweet pops up.

To put it another way, we don't need, nor particularly want to, document each and every bad tweet Musk makes. We just want to document what Twitter the company is doing, and Musk's tweets come secondary to that.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 5th 2023 at 10:49:55 AM

That seems like a bit of a false distinction, given that we're talking about a site run as an increasingly one-man show, because he keeps firing/refusing to pay everyone else) by a pathological narcissist addicted to it who makes Tweeting on it part of how he runs it. Kind of like how during the Trump presidency, we were forced to take his tweets (no matter how weird and inane) as official government press releases for the most powerful nation on Earth.

If the world's richest narcissists do everything in their vast power to make everything about them, then the fault does not lie with us for acknowledging that and posting accordingly.

We do not have an obligation to document all of Musk's wrongdoings (or Trump's, or anyone else's, for that matter). We have a rule against threads about individuals for a reason, and laying so much focus on everything Musk does turns the Social Media into a virtual Elon Musk thread.

And my point is that we don't have to react to everything Musk does in that thread, just to what he does in relation to Twitter. Musk shitposting about celebrities or whathaveyou does not fall under that.

The reason for trying to avoid making threads revolve around one person is generally that industries, political factions, and other topics of discussion are bigger than one person. Narcissistic billionaires devote their lives and massive resources to directly challenging that idea, turning enormous institutions into one-man shows for an audience of one. We gain nothing by refusing to acknowledge this kind of centralisation of power. Kind of like how it's hard to talk about, say, post-Soviet Turkmenistan without everything coming back to Saparmurat 'Turkmenbashi' Niyazov's bizarre whims.

To use the 'Musk shitposting about celebrities' example, it's relevant to the Twitter management thread because it's a potential early warning sign that he's about to radically change the operating procedures of an entire enormous website out of a personal grudge because he can do that and is the sort of person who has been known to do that.

Edited by Iaculus on Apr 5th 2023 at 1:09:03 PM

No one is saying we can't talk about him at all. We just want less bashing.

I'm not sure what you're really wanting, then. It's not like the number of bad things being said about him is excessive purely because people don't like him, it's because he's spent the past several years becoming a blatant right-wing troll. One that happens to, as mentioned already, constantly spout stuff on Twitter that promptly becomes Twitter policy.

"Don't be excessively negative towards man who is doing nothing but negative things" is a tall order.

Well, I don't know either, I'm just trying to offer possible solutions.

I guess the thing is that it's not really obvious that this is a problem that needs a solution. Even in a forum called On-Topic Conversations, anyone who's powerful and self-centred enough can make themselves the bridge that unites multiple topics. Sure, it's odd that, say, space exploration, the information economy, the crypto industry, international LGBT rights, and electric vehicle development can be (and are) influenced so greatly by one guy's online feuds with random B-list celebrities, but it's hardly our fault if the world we live in is so incestuous and dysfunctional that that's an actual, meaningful thing to take into account.

Nobody is saying Musk doesn't have his fingers in a lot of pies, but I really don't think it's a tall ask to request that things posted in the SM thread be contextualized to relate to Twitter. That is a line in the sand we are allowed to draw. It's like asking to explain links: why is this relevant to the conversation at hand?

• Tesla stock prices - not relevant on its own
• Tesla stock prices dragging down Twitter stock prices - ok
• Musk doing some dumb shit in public - not relevant on its own
• Musk doing some dumb shit in public causing big-name personalities to withdraw from Twitter - ok

Where does that leave 'Musk doing dumb shit that is relevant to the administration policies of a social network', though? Because that's where things always seem to start getting thumped. The more politicised statements in general have tended to foreshadow what's going to happen next or that we find out because someone went through the code dump.

Is there a specific administration policy at hand affected by the (hypothetical) stunts or is it just presented as further proof of him being a jackass? Bigotry translating to algorithms, moderation, branding, stuff like that yes. The latter, we can really do without.

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 5th 2023 at 11:04:49 AM

But we don't want to talk about foreshadowing, we want to talk about what actually happens. Endless speculation on what could happen tends to just turn into bashing and negativity, and isn't particularly relevant to social media in general.