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I think it's overreaction in the sense that we've had an astonishingly high number of threads designed to ease the concerns of people when what we're actually talking about is two or three people incapable of taking criticism or understanding the basics of group dynamics (one of whom was a moderator himself when he decided to start yelling about the great moderator conspiracy, which is a pretty good pointer to just how daft it all is). I mean, look around at all the P&H threads that we've had devoted to this subject ever since mod decided to mess himself and look at exactly who's posted to them. Mostly moderators. A couple of people who've had arguments with Haus in the past or those who are *always* present for a bout of "I was done wrong" complaining, regardless of the circumstances. No lurkers. No new posters.
Get that - no lurkers, no new posters. With that in mind, it seems fairly obvious to me that a lot of moderators and long-term posters are worried about nothing. Nothing of consequence, at any rate. I can understand why, but surely we've been down this path enough times in the past to have learned that we'll always get the odd person kicking up a fuss and trying to provoke a reaction that gets everyone in a panic about What's Going Wrong, purely because they like to try and cause a fuss. You've got to ask yourself why Barbelith's always so happy to oblige and why this sort of introspection is peculiar to this board - it's certainly nothing I've ever come across on any other message board, not to this extent or with this frequency.
And again I've got to say, look at who's been involved in these discussions and you come away fairly convinced that, in general, nobody cares. Nobody believes there's any moderator conspiracy, not even mod. But we keep on feeling the need to tell everyone, going around in circles, fretting when there's no need, and very probably making anybody outside the board or those who've recently joined think to hell with the place - it *does* look like an unhealthy self-obsession. The old cliche increasingly looks like it rings true: Barbelith's favourite topic of conversation = Barbelith. And yes, I realise the hypocrisy inherent in posting this and I'm fully aware that it goes against my "not getting involved with discussions about moderation" policy, but it's stuff that's been narking me for weeks (and, more importantly, I'm feeling a bit shit at having seemingly crapped all over Flower's idea, when most of what I was railing against was more to do with a lot of recent threads).
In principle a thread listing mod actions is a wonderful idea and yeah, it covers our backs for the next time somebody says "you deleted my post for no good reason" (even if I'm struggling to think of a time when that's ever been an issue). Again, though, do you honestly think anyone's going to use it? Do you honestly think that anyone other than moderators would ever open this thread to audit the moderator actions that have been carried out? All we'd be using it for is a 'just in case', and if we're gtting *that* paranoid about the way moderation is seen to be implemented on the board then we've got real, serious problems.
I'm struck that we never had this kind of runaround before the whole distributed moderation thing was introduced, and I wonder if it's always going to be an associated, inescapable consequence of it. |
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