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Why are the mods so quick to lock threads?

TwitchInMyPants·2/11/2019, 7:17:13 AM·2 votes·2,120 views

https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/NMEnV1gy-why-is-lucian-immune-to-nerfs

This really caught my attention because a total of 4/56 (Might have miscounted) comments mention race in any kind of regard. One of them has already been deleted.

That's 7% of the comments. Not even 1/10. That's 4 individual people that if you really feel have made an infringement should've been confronted.

I know it saves time to lock a thread, but if these people are getting off without any kind of mention and you're punishing 52 posts, several people of which go into lengthy discussion about game balance which is likely a considerable use of their time especially compared to these one line posts, I find that unreasonable. I don't even care about Lucian or his balance, I lurk the boards mostly and post a few times every other day or so. But I do read the balance threads to see what people are saying and you're shutting down conversation just to shut down what's argued to be a racially charged comment section. Why not deal with the problematic comments and actually allow the thread to breath?

I know there's not a hard line on how many comments are needed to justify a lock, but you're talking about a vast minority of the thread here and the whole thing gets nuked.

8 Comments

ModThe Djinn2/11/2019, 2:01:26 PM5 votes

So there are a few things that explain why we lock things quickly in general and in this specific case.

  1. We have a lot of experience seeing how problematic topics and conversations evolve, and so tend to be good at knowing when a thread will be problematic.
  2. We can see all comments -- both those that are visibly deleted (i.e. mid-discussion comments) and those that aren't visibly deleted (comments that are deleted but had no responses). The latter aren't visible to the community.
  3. That thread has ten deleted comments out of 65 total comments.
  4. Of the comments that aren't deleted, a quick scan shows that 6 are about race, and one is calling another comment a "0 IQ comment". That's a minimum, 'cause I didn't dig too deeply there.

That means that just over 25% of the total comments were inappropriate in some manner, and consistently inappropriate along a common theme. The thread was up for more than 12 hours, so we had a pretty good sample size of how the conversation was going.

rujitra2/11/2019, 12:42:41 PM4 votes

This is the second thread about this.

There are 12 comments on that thread that are race based. There are a spattering of other comments that are insulting or make fun of mental illness, or other inappropriate comments.

Further, the thread was allowed to go on for quite some time before it was locked down, and the behavior didn't improve.

mlm olo mlm2/11/2019, 7:54:25 AM2 votes

Because they can.

Our responsibility is to make the best judgment call for how to handle a thread. This sometimes involves locking an otherwise fine thread due to the sheer number of problematic comments, and that is a standard policy.

I like how I get down votes for quoting a herald.