An unspoken problem with the boards and the moderators:

HalcyonDweller·Oct 2, 2017·2 votes·327 views

Firstly, this is nobody's fault. I'm not trying to blame the moderators, or the users for this.

I've noticed a few cases where players come head to head with moderators, and the situation always gets ugly. The player makes biased and angry posts / comments about the moderators, and due to their inflamatory nature and lack of good reasoning, the moderators will delete said posts. Then the users make more posts accusing the moderators of worse dictatorship. I remember a few user got themselves completely banned due to this.

I'm curious if the moderators have discussed the idea of de-escalation much yet? It seems like a better route than the heavy handed approach, since the users tend to react even worse, seeing any post removal or punishment as confirmation bias that the moderators are dictators.

I understand that you aren't dictators, and that you're just trying to do your jobs, but I think your jobs would be easier to do if you de-escalate situations more.

5 Comments

Deep Terror NamiOct 2, 20173 votes

Deescalating a situation is the preferable first response to an argument, and removing content simply because there's a disagreement with them (the mod) isn't how we should be doing things. If you believe content is being removed unfairly because a moderator was directly involved, please come to me on the Moderation Discord and we'll get it sorted out. Getting out in the crowd and talking to you guys more and intervening in arguments early is something we're very recently trying to improve.

However, I'd also like to note that you don't see most of the actions we take; it might seem to you that we acted with a deletion or ban with little reason to, but the person may have a long history of that behavior which we've already gone out of our way to reduce and it has passed a breaking point where that no longer works.

HalcyonDwellerOct 2, 20171 votes

Oh not at all, I think that the content removed in those situations needed to be removed. I'm just thinking of all this because of a recent experience I had:

There was a poster who was upset about their in-game ban and made a post in GD. As per usual on the boards, there were a lot of comments along the lines of 'good riddance' and 'haha get rekt.' Which made things worse.

At first the OP reacted very poorly to me whenever I responded, despite the fact that for the most part I stayed rational and calm in my responses. They used all caps, and kept making intentionally inflammatory statements. But after enough discussion they dropped the all caps and we were able to discuss things in detail.

It got me thinking about other situations where players react like that (using all caps and being intentionally aggressive or inflammatory), and a lot of the times when posters get that angry while complaining about the moderators they are just reacting that way because they are tilted about being punished / having their post deleted. Obviously this is more the user's fault for overreacting, but it still makes me wonder if they would react better if somebody made them feel more understood.

See here for a really interesting video about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CNRmhleJmk

Deep Terror NamiOct 2, 20172 votes

This is the kind of interaction the Arbiters are known for, but not so much with the Wardens in general. It's absolutely something we're trying to shift out focus to (as of yesterday actually); while we don't have enough volunteers to be omnipresent, I think you'll soon be seeing more of the presence from us you're looking for.

HalcyonDwellerOct 2, 20171 votes

Oh that's exciting! Well I hope it all goes well and wish the moderators the best of luck with it then :) I'll look forwards to this whenever it starts.