Moderation Observations, part 1

I’ve been a moderator here at SFN for almost four years now, and an administrator for about three. (The promotion to administrator was rather ad-hoc and I’m not entirely sure when it happened in retrospect; one day blike needed help fixing something in vBulletin and he promoted me so I had access to the right bits of the admin control panel.)

Over this time I have collected various bits of wisdom about moderating and participating in discussions on Internet forums. As SFN moves ahead with new plans and new ideas for the future, I thought it best to write some of my thoughts down.

You’re not always right

Imagine: you’ve just solved a problem in physics that has gone unsolved for decades. You have a simple, comprehensible way of explaining it. You’re brilliant. You write up your explanation and post it on SFN for the masses to marvel at.

Except they don’t marvel. A swarm of members tell you that you’re wrong; they say you don’t understand quantum mechanics properly, and that there was an experiment that directly contradicts your hypothesis. But that doesn’t make sense; your explanation has nothing wrong with it. It couldn’t. These people just can’t know what they’re talking about.

This is a trap that many, many members have fallen into. Convinced their right, they choose to attack contradictory evidence rather than evaluating to try to improve their theory — there’s a difference between “hmm, that experiment is interesting, let me adjust my hypothesis” and shouting “no, that’s impossible, the universe doesn’t work that way!”

Always consider the possibility that you may not be right.

Not everybody is an expert

Imagine: someone comes on the forums saying they’ve solved a previously unsolved problem in physics. They have some simple way of explaining it, and they want everyone on SFN to hear it.

Of course, their explanation is wrong, like every one preceding it. You and other members tell them they’re wrong; you point out that they misunderstand quantum mechanics, and that an experiment contradicts their hypothesis. But they don’t get it; they claim the experiment is wrong and they’re still right.

It’s frustrating. After much arguing, you’re convinced they’re not interested in listening to you. They’re just trolling.

This is another trap that many of our best members fall into. Many of our members have little formal education and haven’t even been exposed to this fancy quantum mechanics stuff. When you’re throwing your best at them, pointing out that some obscure quantum effect makes their explanation void, realize that their confused and angry reaction saying that they’re still right is not stubbornness; they’re defensive because they have no idea what you’re blabbering about. Try to explain, not argue.

“Calm down” pisses people off

Posting a note telling angry members to calm down never works. Especially when written in a stern tone. Take a look at the Betari box; the only way to stop anger is not more anger but de-escalation. (But not to the point of being condescending; that backfires miserably.)

In short, the easiest way to avoid an angry discussion is to never allow yourself to make an angry post. (Remember that you have control over what you type. Feel free to shout at your monitor as much as you want, of course.)

Nobody is evil

Humans are great at finding patterns where none exist. We see cows in the clouds, Jesus in JIF peanut butter, and penguins in horse poop; we’re great at taking limited data and thinking it fits a pattern (“penguin!”). The thing about forums is that they present you a limited set of data points: you do not get to hear other members’ tones, see their facial expressions, or see anything except their words. Often you don’t read all of one member’s posts, either, you see some limited subset.

But based on that limited group of data points, we all end up making assumptions about what that member is doing. Often times we look at ten of their posts and assume they must be trolling, trying to elicit a reaction from other members. Or we look and think we see a consistent trend of them not answering questions and assume that means they know they’re wrong and are simply avoiding responding.

Those assumptions are almost never right. It’s more likely that the guy evading your questions simply doesn’t know how to answer them; try to think of the situation from his perspective before you try to beat him down.

Automated warnings are scary

Any system that automatically sends PMs for discipline — like our own infraction system — is inherently scary. Our infraction system worked by letting members accumulate “points”; if they got 25, they were automatically banned for 3 days.

Many times we’d issue a member an infraction for five or ten points and the system would send its automated official-sounding private message advising them that they’ve been infracted. Of course, nothing actually happens to you until you get 25 points — but the automation and official-ness of the system frightened people. They’d get their infraction and PM an administrator, panicked and demanding it be removed; they might even refuse to post until the points go away. But the points meant absolutely nothing unless they got 25! And infractions are rare events.

But because it was an automated system rather than a friendly PM from a local moderator, infractions were scary. They put people on the defensive and made them feel attacked. Very often they were counterproductive.

More to come

That’s all for this time. Some day I may write part 2, or part 3, of this series, whenever I think of something more to add. Feel free to comment with your thoughts. We all want to improve our moderation, and any comments you have can’t hurt.

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