Moderation: Too much or too little?
- Thread starter Cave Diver
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I really can't speak to specifics, since I am not sure what you meant in terms of specific posts, I didn't do the moderating, and I am not supposed to talk about it anyway. I can offer some more general observations, though.
Over the years, some of my best posts have been deleted by mods, even though there was nothing wrong with them. They were deleted because they were part of a general, overall response to a post that needed to be moderated. Once that first post went, the rest had to go--kind of a "fruit of the poisonous tree" sort of thing.
That particular thread was very challenging, and the moderation took several steps that did not occur at the same time. Note that two moderators had their posts deleted as well, and I am quite sure you would have seen nothing wrong with what they had written, either.
In general, some calls are very difficult indeed. Mods are not unanimous on all decisions. If you were a mod, you would not agree with every decision made, just as you do not agree with every decision made now.
We do our best. Sometimes we make mistakes, but we do our best.
boulderjohn - you have a background in education. What would be some effective methods to get all the Mods on the same page, so that decisions would be closer to unanimous?
The reason I ask is that it seems like often personal feelings rather than SB policies come into play. If all Mods were working with a common, clear, set of criteria, I would expect less person-to-person variation to occur.
Thoughts?
I am pretty sure I can come up with a process for getting people on the pretty much the same page. To give you an idea, Advanced Placement written examination answers are each graded by two readers who will give it a score from 1-9 with a inter-rater reliability of about 90%. I know the process well, have used it in assessments of my own, and have taught the process.
Here's the problem.
It would take many, many hours just to set that up. Then the training would take many, many hours. With an all-volunteer staff, that is simply not possible. We do a scaled down version of that process, and in the difficult cases we do discuss them. Most of us think we do well enough given the fact that we are not talking about a high stakes assessment like the AP exams, SATs, or GREs. There really aren't that many disagreements, although they do exist.
I am pretty sure we do a lot better than a lot of other similar boards do. I know one site that is exclusively for educators, people who should be pretty good at this. It has articles and discussions on those articles. The discussions are incredibly mild in comparison to ScubaBoard. Every one is very polite, and people try to back up their disagreements with data. There are never personal attacks of any kind. On that site over a space of two years, three different people disagreed with the position taken by the main administrator within a thread. In all three cases the people made what most would consider good arguments in favor of their position. In all three cases, the administrator ruled that their responses were trolls by his unique definition, and those three participants were immediately dismissed from the site. All three were senior editors on the staff when they were dismissed for violating a definition they did not understand. I was one of them.
When something goes into the back room, it is in a forum that is closed to the public. If the thread had been there, it would have been obvious to us that no one else could see it. Instead, it was in a forum that was open to the public, but the thread was not visible to the public. Since we could see it in a public forum and not realize it had been made invisible to the public, we thought everyone could see it.
Steve, generally speaking, there is consensus in moderation decisions, and in the vast majority of cases the consensus is in fact unanimous. In cases where there is a lack of unanimity it is most often seen in regard to the exact sanction to be applied rather than moderate/don't moderate. The fact that we seek consensus in difficult cases prevents us from bringing our personal bias into play. We call one another out on bias and always tend towards a more considered, conservative approach to moderation rather than a hasty, hot-headed one. Most veteran SB members find that one or another member really manages to get under their skins. Moderators are no different, but we are actually hypercritical of ourselves and one another on this point.
The Chairman
Chairman of the Board
Trolls exist and I refuse to play to their dementia. Dog pilers exist and I also refuse to pander to their demands. It's encouraging to see that these terms are viewed as pejoratives. Perhaps if we can get people to view those actions as being just as reprehensible we wouldn't have to ID them as such. It's like that seen from stripes where the guy states "If anyone calls me Francis, I'll kill you!" Sometimes you just have to lighten up.
This is, in fact, the policy of ScubaBoard. Moderators are meant to either send a PM to the member whose post was edited or removed, or in the event that a series of posts have been moderated, leave a mod post in the thread alerting members of the removals and/or edits. I can't swear that in every case this actually happens, but I do know that it's the norm. In a recent thread in the Cozumel forum that I moderated, I received a number of complaints by PM that I hadn't notified individual members that their posts had been moderated. In that instance, I had made over 100 moderation actions in a single (insanely heated) thread. That's an extreme example, but sending out individual PMs when there are multiple actions in one thread is impractical, so we leave a mod post instead. In any case, notifications are part of the SOP.
My favorite quote from that film had to do with the whole idea of volunteering, so might fit in here too:
"There's something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us"
---------- Post added April 5th, 2012 at 01:22 PM ----------
And while I am not, never have been, and pretty darned sure I never will be a moderator, I can see differences of opinion even between mods on where some lines should be drawn.
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---------- Post added April 5th, 2012 at 11:17 AM ----------
Hopefully this won't be violating any privacy principles, but if the back room is anything like it was when I was a mod, those differences of opinion sometimes result in discussions that can get heated. Mods are way harder on each other than they are on any of the members out here. I think in part that's because they do generally take what they do seriously, and genuinely want what's best for ScubaBoard's members. Differences of opinion are going to happen anytime you get more than one person involved in any task that involves judgment calls. Ease up a bit and give these folks a bit of margin for doing a generally good job. It may not always turn out the way you or I would like it to ... but it won't be for a lack of effort or integrity.
Herding this many cats is always gonna result in a few scratches ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
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