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On User Juries...

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10:20 / 17.10.03

Even unreliable wankers could do nothing more harmful than hit "disagree" or ignore the request completely, and there should be enough even-minded people and existing mods to give balance.

It's not the unreliable wankers we need to watch out for but, as BioK9's pointed out, those who've registered multiple suits. The more one uses these multiple suits within a 24-hour period, the higher the chance that one or more might get randomly selected for the next 24-hour period - and, since we're not always aware of trollsuits until they start trolling (IP addresses being variable or fakeable), the risk of someone effectively having two or three voices on a given 24-hour jury may be relatively high.

That's my only real reservation.

Tryphena Absent

10:29 / 17.10.03

If it wasn't necessarily automated it would be easier to work it around the people who definitely aren't trolls and there are quite a few non-moderators who have never been in a moderation position who I trust entirely.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

10:30 / 17.10.03

Possibly jurors should be drawn from a cross-match of the last 24 hours and a 24 hours period one month ago?

And Sax, I can spell "permanent", but I chose not to.

[Note: I'm not posting any more until I can type straight. It's too weird.]

Less searchable M0rd4nt

11:19 / 17.10.03

Sure, wankers with multiple suits could be a problem, but not a huge lumpy insoluble one.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like this has to happen.

Matthew Fluxington

12:05 / 17.10.03

I've come around to this idea significantly since it has been made clear that it won't slow down the moderation significantly and people will have the option to not participate if they choose to.

However,

It's also overtly stating that we should be comfortable with the idea that people are completely apathetic to the way the community operates and should have absolutely no stake in its maintenance, or power to affect any kind of change or to enforce their will - I think it's also genuinely offensive to me.

Not really. I'm just suggesting that there are a good number of people (statistically, an overwhelming majority) of Barbelith users who don't have the same investment in Barbelith that say, the moderators or people involved in this discussion have. There are a lot of casual users for whom this is not an intense community situation, and just another message board among the thousands of other message boards on the internet. I understand the desire for a 100% involved membership, but it's unrealistic. I think to give people who are most likely apathetic to the politics of this message board or can't be bothered because they have other things to do so much power is misguided and impractical. People should be allowed to be indifferent. Not everyone here is for the same reasons.

I really think you're wildly overestimating just how many people really care about the moderation on this board.

14:45 / 17.10.03

People should be allowed to be indifferent.

I totally get that -- but I think this system has the potential to do that, and even to, like, make indifference *matter*, if that makes sense. Even the uninterested could have a stake... which might make the place a lot more interesting.
Or not.

Then again, I also don't think any individual mod has nearly as much power as the fabled High Profile Posters (HiPPos), the ones who *really care* about the board (at times, a little too much). I think these are two populations that don't map onto each other precisely, but have a significant enough overlap that it's easy to mistake one for the other.

Hmm.

I'm curious how this jury system will work alongside the mod system as it stands. Will this be a bicameral setup, with mods as senators and jurists as representatives? That's kinda what it sounds like to me... more adding to the system than replacing mods with user juries.

14:54 / 17.10.03

People might be indifferent to the moderation systems, but they're NOT indifferent about the quality of the board. A system like this is designed to provide easy flow from caring about the quality to being able to do something about it if they want to. And to be honest, I'm increasingly of the opinion that the people who don't have any investment in the community of this board are not its most important audience.

16:04 / 17.10.03

Correct me if i'm wrong but user juries would be an ADDITION to Moderators rather than instead of them - kind of like a couse of commons and a house of lords...

22:56 / 17.10.03

To reiterate, my reservation isn't that some guy with three different suits will veto my spelling changes, its that two of that guys suits will start approving changes to the third suit.

Maybe there should be some type of limit on the number of times you are allowed to vote on actions requested by the same person.

23:42 / 17.10.03

I'm interested in the math on this, then. For instance, on average, how many people would qualify for the straw pull (how many have posted in the last 24 hrs). How many user jurors would there be, and then how many suits would you need to have a good chance of having, say, two suits at once? I do think this is relevant, even though jurors can't initiate a moderator action, but only approve or veto one already in place. One problem that could occur is that a troll with multiple suits waits until he has a couple suits as jurors and then begins spamming the board, and vetoing every moderator action against him. If something like this were to happen, Tom would need to declare a state of emergency and take jury powers away until the troll had been appropriately dealt with. But this kind of trolling would require a persistence that would be really astounding and, at absolute worst, would create problems for the board for only one day, after which new jurors would be automatically selected.

It really is a very good system.

Goodness Gracious Meme

01:35 / 18.10.03

*offtopic*
Flux, that 'crybabies' statement is either some hilarious in-joke, or one of the dumbest things i've ever read on the board. And quite spectacularly unhelpful. And actually i find it quite unpleasant.

Anyway...

Think this sounds like a *great* idea, if the opt out thing is doable.

And this bears repeating, sa its a very good point:

"Then again, I also don't think any individual mod has nearly as much power as the fabled High Profile Posters (HiPPos), the ones who *really care* about the board (at times, a little too much). "

And regarding the troll issue, this is an experiment, as i understand it, and trying it out would enable Tom/us to see if it actually was a problem.

Also, as SMatthewStolte points out, to do it would require a potentially very long wait to get two of your suits as moderator, and huge persistence.

A troll with that much dedication doesn't need moderator power to fuck up the board to the point where Tom has to take steps/'declare a state of emergency'(like that, makes me picture as a South American despot, for some reason.) They can do it some other way.

So i don't think this is a massive objection.

10:57 / 18.10.03

With regards to numbers, who knows! I would envisage making all moderation actions require at least one extra vote to pass through, so we'd need at least enough posters in the user jury to be relatively certain that they'd be able to handle at least one of those votes without making it so that moderators didn't get to see each other's actions. So probably something like five or ten a day?

Bear in mind that this is speculative and that I'd have to persuade Cal to build it and that might take quite a while...

Morlock - groupie for hire

15:48 / 20.10.03

A good thing. Oh yes. Limited scope for abuse, and otherwise the worst that can happen is that nothing changes, all the jurists opt out. And for that low, low monthly payment, you too can feel like part of this fabulous community.

The only weakness I can see is the 24hour limit. I wonder how many lurkers/occasional posters would be happy to participate, but aren't online often enough to catch a shift.

pointless and uncalled for

17:32 / 20.10.03

I'm going to cast my vote with the nay-sayers.

I think that, at the moment, with the general social structure and climate that exists on barbelith at the moment is not conducive to administration by random acts of communism. This is one of those things were I see meritocracy and adaptable order as critical to the process.

There are many flaws to this plan and I think they exceed what could be compensated for by tweaking. Simply put there are too many situations which could arise where it could fail and too much opportunity for abuse, even within 24 hours.

17:59 / 20.10.03

Flowers said this earlier on:

As I understand it Juries won't have powers to generate new moderation requests, so we don't need to worry too much if Knodge's next suit becomes a Jurist, the worst that could happen is he turns down a few reasonable requests.

If this is the case, and jury members are given the power to approve or or veto moderation actions already in the system, but *not* the ability to propose new actions themselves (other than on their own posts/threads, natch), any problems caused by possible abuse are negligable.

The problem scenario that SMS brings up could be avoided by preventing anyone, including regular moderators, from being able to veto a proposal on one of their own posts/threads. In fact, maybe we could have that as a standard feature of the way moderation works here - I can't think of any reason not to.

ONLY NICE THINGS

20:03 / 20.10.03

"Crybabies", as far as I can tell, is Flux taking a term that Nick seems to be using a lot recently to exemplify a hypothetical insult apparently/allegedly/telepathically addressed by the mean and nasty (albeit unidentified) barberoyalty to the silent and oppressed (also unidentified) victims of bullying (either real or imagined) for reasons that remain obscure.

His point, I imagine, is that we currently seem to be discussing functionality to stop an unidentified and unnumbered amount of people from feeling (with or without justification) bullied by an unidentified clique of either actually or apparently nasties, and by extension casting aspersions on the ability and right of the current moderators to moderate. The length of time some of AmericanMagus' posts stayed around might provide some useful data on comparative times for things to go through now that more mods are needed per request; whether user juries increase or reduce that time is something we might find out.

If user juries are not able to propose moderations, then I don't see that trolling would be assisted by it much, unless the troll was chums with a moderator, except that if a single vote was enough to veto a troll could keep the deletions of his own trollsuit, presumably, for a day...and, although either of those cases would cause *some* problems, it would also flag up fairly clearly who should not be moderating and who should not be on Barbelith....

So, yes, I think this might be worth trialing. My one concern would be that right now we already have moderators who are a bit shaky on the actual mechanics of moderation - is this goignt o get progressively more of a problem the more horizontal our systems of maintenance get?

20:14 / 20.10.03

His point, I imagine...

Except that isn't why we're talking about this, or if it is then it's only coincidental. Tom was hinting at this kind of thing before the recent... whatever it was.

While we never seem to be able to reach an agreement on what Barbelith is or what its aims are, one thing that it could put on its CV is its occasional shift into an experiment in online community building. User juries - or something similar - seem to me to be a logical extension of the distributed moderation model and a valuable part of the experiment. If it fails, it fails, and we can always come back to the stage we're at now.

Nothing to lose. Something to gain.

Tryphena Absent

20:54 / 20.10.03

My one concern would be that right now we already have moderators who are a bit shaky on the actual mechanics of moderation - is this goignt o get progressively more of a problem the more horizontal our systems of maintenance get?

Well I'm not sure that it will make that much difference. If none of the everyday moderators can agree than why would the users disagreeing make any difference. In other words, I think we'll stay at the same level of horizontality.

This, I think will be a very interesting experiment that can be stopped if it's too dysfunctional (but I really hope it won't be). I've said this a million times before but I love project barbelith, it's glorious, as a construction. The construction outweighs the discourse for me but I am an old lady in Internet terms and once you're that old you've seen it all before... only the architecture is left to change around you.

I'm waving my red flag and I have my commie hat on!!! Tom, please can we do this? I'm definitely in love with it! This place just gets better and better and the best thing is that skyscraper can go too high and we can knock a couple of floors off!!

02:58 / 21.10.03

I think the best evidence that this will work is that the structure so closely resembles that of the American and British governments. So I'm waving the stars and stripes, instead. I don't see anything even socialist about this plan, let alone communist.

06:55 / 21.10.03

Again - bear in mind that it might simply be impractical to get Cal to build it in. He's terribly busy and I don't want to burden him at the moment. Anyway - that's on the back-burner and might be a helpful thing to think about medium term.

Jack The Bodiless

10:54 / 21.10.03

ROT:

Haus: "Crybabies", as far as I can tell, is Flux taking a term that Nick seems to be using a lot recently to exemplify a hypothetical insult apparently/allegedly/telepathically addressed by the mean and nasty (albeit unidentified) barberoyalty to the silent and oppressed (also unidentified) victims of bullying (either real or imagined) for reasons that remain obscure.

Read: Haus no like it when people call him bully. Haus bring up in inappropriate threads, probably to start argument with Nick for no reason than Haus want fight. Again. Poor little disingenuous Hausbully.

/ROT

Idea sounds marvellous. To be honest, although I think all the nonsense about moderation (what works, what doesn't, who's abusing who) is paranoid, deeply self-indulgent and fucking boring, it would have been a great idea whatever the reasons it was brought in. Elegant, democratic... bravo, etc.

However, since Tom's just advised that my opinion (and the opinion of whoever else has very little active investment in this message board) isn't that important to him... I'll just skip off back to work.

Matthew Fluxington

14:27 / 21.10.03

Barbelith: Where Everyone Gets A Fair Chance To Agree To Fixing Someone's Spelling Error

17:23 / 21.10.03

Heheheh! I've got nothing interesting to say, but I think that'd look great on a T-shirt.
Or maybe in small type, under the "Barbelith" banner up top.

20:32 / 21.10.03

Barbelith is fundamentally a community of people. The maintenance of that community is everyone's responsibility - or at the very least, those without any interest in maintaining it or propping it up should recognise the efforts of those that do and accept that any changes they don't like might not have happened if they'd been prepared to contribute themselves. I don't think that's an unreasonable position.

08:00 / 22.10.03

You know actually I keep thinking about that line, "People should be alllowed to be indifferent" and keep coming back to why this place was started in the first place. Wasn't it to make us less indifferent? To try and make the world less indifferent and (often) banal? Wasn't it to care and be engaged?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:23 / 22.10.03

Yeah, I think "indifference" is kind of a bad attitude to take, for so many reasons. However, people will have different levels to which they'll invest in the community- whether through time spent online, or whatever, or how much they feel they get OUT of the place. Personally, I'm all up for helping on anything, as I spend a LOT of time here and I get a lot out of it. Someone who posts occasionally, or even is busy on various other boards, or has just arrived here and is "testing the water", may not feel the same.

I think at the very least, those without any interest in maintaining it or propping it up should recognise the efforts of those that do and accept that any changes they don't like might not have happened if they'd been prepared to contribute themselves is an eminently reasonable stance to take.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:28 / 22.10.03

Sorry to post again so quickly, but I forgot the original point I was going to make when I came back to this thread...

One of the things I love about Barbelith is precisely the fact that it IS an experimental community, run along lines pretty close to my own ideas on things. As such, it's always interesting to me to watch how it evolves and changes to take on board new situations and a differing mix of people. And its (and Tom's and our) willingness to try new things to this end is part of what makes that so cool.

I'm all for trying out new things. If they don't work, then fuck it! Change 'em back! That's how experiments work! (OK, so I didn't do too well in chemistry at school, but you get my point.)

Matthew Fluxington

12:21 / 22.10.03

See, I think the difference here is that there are some of us who will think that this is an Experimental Community, and a lot of others, who perhaps more accurately, see Barbelith as a message board on an internet full up of message boards. There are a lot of things that set Barbelith apart from other message boards, this is true - but not the least among those differences in the insistence by most of the people here that it is somehow far more than just a message board. This seems either foward-thinking and inspiring, or totally ridiculous and delusional. I think people here should be able to feel that it is the latter and still be able to get along and enjoy the board on their own terms.

I'm sure that if you're thinking about Barbelith in abstract terms, this user jury idea seems like a big step for democracy and uniting the percieved social classes of the community, but in practical terms it's really just making the system of allowing people to edit what is mostly just a bunch of spelling and html errors way more complicated and bloated than it needs to be.

Am I totally off the mark here? I never realized that communities were made or broken based on the ability of everyone involved to allow the correction of spelling errors. I think you're taking a very grandiose view of this, Tom.

13:52 / 22.10.03

I'm all for trying out new things. If they don't work, then fuck it! Change 'em back!

It seems a little selfish to ask Cal to put in all that effort if there's a good chance that we won't put it to use.

I'm sure that won't happen in this case, though, because I'm sure User Juries will work out very well.

And Flux, if the only reason for moderation were spelling errors, we wouldn't have moderation. In fact, that's the way it used to be on Barbelith. If you take the more substantial instances of moving threads about, deleting threads, and dealing with trolls, then it starts to matter how we go about it. And internet communities are made or broken on the ability to deal with trolls. I realize this may not be very important. My life would not be ruined if Barbelith shut down, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't care if it happened. And I know that Barbelith isn't now under threat of dying, but that doesn't mean that I don't want it to be better if it can be.

Matthew Fluxington

14:01 / 22.10.03

internet communities are made or broken on the ability to deal with trolls

Well, what do you make of a community like Ilxor, which has virtually no moderation, and no real trolls? If some jerk pops up, they get shouted down, mocked, or ignored, and no one really cares. It can be argued that they don't have the type of trolling problems that we have because it's no fun to be a troll there - no uptight people to anger, no system to overcome, nothing but the prospect of being verbally eviscerated by people much smarter than they are. And that community is WAY larger than ours, and often has far more complicated discussion. It's Darwinian anarchy over there, and it works.

Tryphena Absent

14:47 / 22.10.03

think the difference here is that there are some of us who will think that this is an Experimental Community, and a lot of others, who perhaps more accurately, see Barbelith as a message board on an internet full up of message boards.

Now I see this as rather an interesting comment from someone who invests so much time in the Internet. You can view this in one of two ways that you have outlined quite clearly Flux... as an experimental board or as a means of communication. Personally I see it in both ways but I think that comes entirely from my experience of the 'net and the amount of time that I've been online for. After 10 years simple communication becomes boring and structure becomes equally as important if not more so.

Barbelith is a message board just like any other when you really examine its content. Sometimes people can be a little more interesting but at the end of the day it has the same old community politics without the strong and striking ideal. It doesn't exist to express ideas on one thing anymore- no one comes here to talk about the ins and outs of the Invisibles. So I think the very structure of the place takes on an interesting element and the fact that Tom tries to involve us is simply marvellous. We're allowed input in to the community, the way it works and I think that's preferable to the general come here and talk but have no control attitude that I've seen emerge online over the last ten years.

So basically I totally and completely disagree with you. Why do you engage with this particular community if you lump it in with everything else to such a vast extent?

Matthew Fluxington

15:42 / 22.10.03

Well, my personal feelings about Barbelith lie somewhere between both extremes - I think Barbelith is sorta special, and I think the people here are generally/usually a cut above the people elsewhere, but I think one of the loveable foibles of this place is that we collectively have a tendency to overestimate the importance of the place. Sometimes I think we collectively lose perspective on what is actually happening here vs. what we'd like to think is happening here.

I'm playing devil's advocate a lot in this thread, to be honest.

14:00 / 23.10.03

Am I totally off the mark here? I never realized that communities were made or broken based on the ability of everyone involved to allow the correction of spelling errors. I think you're taking a very grandiose view of this, Tom.

It's not about the correction of spelling errors, any more than having a system of laws is about punishing jay-walkers or human culture is about Neighbours. It's about trying - carefully - to create a space in which we actually operate like a community rather than as a collection of people using a board in a Thatcherite kind of 'get what you can and get out' kind of way. The technological element of it is vaguely trivial, as far as I'm concerned. I'm interested in the several hundred people from all around the world havnig a relationship with each other through a website that's lasted over four years already. That seems pretty important and interesting to me, and I'll work to try and maintain and improve it.

Or maybe I should put it another way. While you might consider the board to be - you know - just a message board, that might be because you haven't had to maintain, rebuild and work almost daily to keep it together over the last four and a half years. If you had, maybe you'd have a different point of view.

09:43 / 24.10.03

User juries yay, let's try it out- if it works well it might get adopted elsewhere (talking of which, I think Elseware would be way into this and might be able to help- I'll ask him).

Barbelith is just another message board like LotR is just another movie, or Dylan is just another pop star, or the Invisibles is just a stoopid comic book.
I fucking love it here and especially like the forward thinking (r/evolutionary) attitude to the way the place works. Barbelith is cutting edge IMHO and should continue to innovate and experiment.

So, since user juries encourage participation, transparency and equality and are a new idea, I am hitting the imaginary 'Agree' button.

(Also I may be in love with Tom, I'm sure I'm not alone)

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:07 / 24.10.03

Barbelith is just another message board like LotR is just another movie, or Dylan is just another pop star, or the Invisibles is just a stoopid comic book

Yay.

How come I didn't think of saying that?

Another imaginary agree button pushed.

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