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Moderation Philosophy - On Content Removal (docs.beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey all,

Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I'd learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it's run.

This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

A major problem I encountered on another site was pedantry.

Often, people would make a nuisance of themselves by being deliberately obtuse and fixating on minor details, while not explicitly breaking the site’s rules. Though not overtly hateful or bigoted, pedantic comments could be remarkably exhausting and annoying. It could seem like someone was trolling, or trying to bait you into an argument, while skirting the rules to stay out of trouble themselves.

How do you moderate posts like that? Should they be reported?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

In that case, why is it not enough to just ignore and avoid them?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If it was just occasional, then yeah, that would be the best way to handle the situation. Unfortunately, it became so widespread that I’d see it in virtually every popular thread. That’s why I asked for advice. Pedantry severely drags down the quality of conversations.

Most of the time, it was pretty obvious that these people didn’t actually care about the trivial point they were arguing over; they were just trolls who were good with language. I don’t want any kind of troll to feel welcome on Beehaw.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I see your point. Yes, I can see banning that once they've established a pattern.

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