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Weaponized reporting: what we’re seeing and what we’re doing(self.ModSupport)
Hey all,
We wanted to follow up on [last week’s post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/...
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The issue is not "weaponized reporting against mods". Referring to it as this puts the blame on the users reporting the content when they wouldn't've been able to do anything if it weren't for your useless AEOperatives actioning the ridiculous reports. While it is appreciated that you are trying to fix this issue, the fact that it was one at all is a failure on your part.
I agree with this 100% and I think it's utterly insane that you're sitting in the negative for your comment.
This is an incredibly bad faith response to the OP. The vast majority of mistaken bans were overturned within days of them happening, and even valid ones were commuted as the admins figured out the kinks in their report system. Their error rate and communication over it isn’t that much worse than most mod teams.
And what exactly do you want? That AEO just won’t action mods? I would like to think most mod teams pick mods who don’t break the site rules, but the idea that users shouldn’t have any recourse from a rude or abusive mod doesn’t make much sense to me either.
This was an issue that was surfaced. Mods were erroneously banned. The admins acknowledged and corrected it, albeit belatedly, and now they’re giving us communication on next steps to avoid it. I don’t think AEO is perfect by a long shot, but being abrasive and hostile to the admins in every one of these threads where they’re trying to be transparent is not going to do a thing to help the situation.
Unlike some, no I don't. I want mods and users to receive the exact same treatment from the admins, by which I mean that I want neither group to be suspended for things like "harassment" as little as telling another user to fuck off.
If someone told another user to fuck off on one of the larger communities I help moderate, they’re running the risk of getting at least a temp ban. If someone is saying that to a user in modmail, it’s hard to see why that’s different. You’re the one as a mod who can mute them, archive their message and ban them from the sub.
And I am pretty sure the admins have done a fair amount of suspending of users who are harassing mods in modmail too. It often takes a long time, but I’ve seen them action users who say nasty things in modmail all the time.
If it's hard for you to see why getting banned by a moderator from a single subreddit is different from getting suspended by the admins from the entire website, then I can only conclude that you are being obtuse.
By contrast, just telling somebody "fuck off" is not an automatic risk of a ban in any subreddit that I moderate. It depends entirely on the context.
It’s not hard for me to see that users and mods should both have recourse over what’s being said in modmail, where the people who “mod” the conversations are sitewide administrators through their AEO team. And if your subs are comfortable with seeing someone saying “fuck off” to another user as contextual, you’ll be happy to note that the admin said the same thing earlier in the thread.
The only conclusion I can draw for why you keep trying to argue this absolute non-sequitor is that you know you completely lack any ground to stand on were you to try to argue with what is actually being said.
If this is the only level at which you are going to engage, I'm not interested.
Good for you. Exactly why admins shouldn't need to step in. If users want to participate in an aggressive community that's their choice and the admins don't need to coddle them. If they don't want that they can participate in subs like yours where people aren't allowed to say it to them.
I don't want people to be suspended for telling me to fuck off in modmail. Or for saying just about anything else to me, for that matter.
Just so we’re clear, you want it so that nothing in modmail can contribute to a sitewide suspension? So it doesn’t matter how rude, violent or disgusting the comments in modmail can get, that somehow there’s no recourse for either users or mods to get people to not say those things? I understand that this is a volunteer gig, but most of the mod teams I am on carry themselves with way more professionalism than that. If you’re looking for help on quixotic agendas for changing Reddit, I can always help connect you with a certain angry fish guy who’ll probably be popping up soon too, because the direction the site and most of social media is going is certainly not likely to take your point here.
No, I didn't say that at all. I said that I don't want people suspended for telling others to fuck off, and that I don't want people suspended for saying anything to me personally, within reason.
Cope
No, it's an on point response, because:
...as a result of screwups that were completely avoidable had greater care been taken in training and tools development.
The most effectively implemented policies will still get mistakes that weren’t entirely thought out. It’s very easy in hindsight to think that it was obvious from the start that something was going to happen, and I’m not going to say this was a perfect system either. But the admin is here communicating updates to us because they feel like we ought to have one, and they’re working to build a system that’s meant to address both moderation and user concerns across an entire site that sees hundreds of millions of users a day. We brought this issue to them and they worked to fix it. Do I think it sucks that some mods were erroneously banned? Sure I do. That doesn’t mean it’s productive to complain in every thread about the admins having this policy though.
A bug reaching production that results in the user sending in a report being suspended, rather than the reported user, is not defensible. Support agents closing suspension appeals with no response is not defensible. Suspensions being issued for months and years old comments is not defensible. All of these are the result of failures at the process level. These things went inadequately vetted to an utterly careless degree.
So no - it is perfectly productive to repeatedly point out that what caused their problems comes from a deeper level than the band-aids they keep telling us about. We are not talking about bugs and bad decisions surrounding edge cases. We are talking about screwups at a very basic and fundamental level, and it is not appropriate to handwave them by saying "nO sYsTeM iS pErFeCt".
Even when you have multiple series of checks in place, mistakes still happen. Let's also keep in mind that reddit is a social media site, not an aviation software company, and so they should very intentionally avoid many layers of checks in order to maintain speed of change (I think most people here would agree that we want changes quicker than they're happening).
I'm not saying that shipping bugs is not bad, but you're presenting things in a very black and white manner, and even when your entire job is about reliability, as mine is, the reality is that more reliability is not always a good thing and there's a lot of context and nuance to every discussion.
What you said is correct as a broad philosophy. I do not purport to write code which is free of all possible bugs. But it does not apply to these specific instances.
A software development pipeline that allows a bug of the kind and magnitude of "people who report can get banned instead of people who were reported" to reach production is fundamentally broken. That Reddit is not developing aviation software is not an appropriate hand-waving for the level of negligence it takes for that bug to be missed at every possible level. I am presenting this in a black and white manner because these specific instances are black and white. There's no nuance.
The layers of checks I described are industry standard for professional software development - Peer review, automated testing, human QA testing. This is incredibly basic, and ultimately they facilitate faster iteration by reducing the amount of developer time that has to be allocated to fixing bugs that reach production, where they have greater impact. Google does these things. Facebook does these things. Rinky dink companies with 4 person dev teams I've worked for do these things.
I’ve reported hundreds of things with the report feature and haven’t been banned accidentally before. A comod of mine did but it was reversed in very short order. You are making these issues out to be far more prevalent and damaging than they are. I do wish the admins would give us more channels of communication, but your experience with them is really not like my own. We’ve always been able to chat with them about technical issues that impeded our moderation. It hasn’t always been a very fast turnaround, but they aren’t just stonewalling on every issue or error either as you seem to intimate. It’s trivially easy to complain that something isn’t working well, especially if you didn’t like it in the first place. But whether you like it or not, it’s unproductive to think that complaining in every thread about this system and making every error an unforgivable red line is doing anything to advance that position. It’s not helpful for trying to get them to care about your concerns, and it’s definitely not helpful for the rest of the people who mod who would like the admins to communicate with us more.
I have never gotten any response at all about my 3 day suspension from May of last year despite many messages, sending relevant links to one admin or another and begging for an explanation in posts such as this. Yes, it may be an uncommon problem but the lack of any sort of response at all speaks to reddit's contempt for the people who volunteer to keep the site from turning into voat. It's disheartening.