On eternal and ephemeral threads, and the wisdom of permanent threadbans.

I have recently noticed something moderately disturbing about certain moderator actions, and it occurred to me that certain pertinent traits of those actions might have escaped the notice of the moderators imposing them. As such, I thought it might be worthwhile to publically discuss the issue.

Basically, on many forums, there are two types of threads. Most threads (in the numerical sense) are threads about highly-specific topics, which see a certain amount of activity and then fade when discussion is exhausted. They are, so to speak, ephemeral. However, there are also very broad, general threads, either discussing enormously-broad topics or ones with a constant influx of new subject matter, which are continuously active without any end in sight. These typically go for hundreds upon hundreds of pages and last for years; they are eternal, or at least as eternal as the forum itself. On QQ, these include the various stickied threads in Rants and certain idea threads (the one for Worm, for instance).

A threadban is, obviously, a less severe punishment than a whole-forum ban for the same length of time, and the moderators here seem to consider it as such. What some seem to have missed is that permanent threadbans differ drastically in punitive effect between "ephemeral" and "eternal" threads. A permanent threadban from an ephemeral thread is not a punishment forever; sooner or later the thread will die and the ban will become moot. A permanent threadban from an eternal thread, on the other hand, locks a certain percentage of the forum's discussion away from the poster forever. For a thread in which the poster contributes significantly (which is the usual case), this may be a good chunk of the enjoyment they receive from the forum as a whole - this is potentially more likely than even a temporary site-wide ban to result in the poster leaving the forum entirely, as if they wish to discuss that topic they must make a permanent habit of discussing it somewhere else.

The disturbing pattern I've noticed is one of QQ moderators rather casually handing out permanent threadbans for minor infractions ("next person who makes me intervene in this thread gets a permanent threadban", etc.) in eternal as well as ephemeral threads. In the latter case, this is reasonable; in the former, it might behoove them to realise that this is one of the harshest punishments available short of outright permaban, and the most likely to result in the loss of a member from the site (except for said forum-wide permaban, which obviously has a 100% rate of member loss). It's not something that should be done lightly, or without careful consideration of the circumstances.

(To anyone who thinks I have a selfish motive here: I have no current threadbans of any duration. To anyone who thinks they know a specific incident that prompted this: you might well be right, but I'm not here to throw mud. I'm trying to shed some light on something that may have been overlooked, in the interest of the board.)

 

Can you point to any permanent threadbans that don't deserve to be permanent?

 

I don't have access to the full list of who's been threadbanned from a given thread. Not all of them are explicitly announced, and those which are are buried in thousands of pages of posts among the threads in question. I've never been a mod on a XenForo forum (or any other forum, for that matter), so I don't know if moderators can call up such a list.

There were a couple of instances that prompted me to write this essay, the most recent (and the only one I can cite off the top of my head) being here. Biigoh's general policy which you cite in that post (which I can't find myself, so I'm going off your description) of "anybody who puts a foot in politics eats a permanent threadban" - an automatic invocation for potentially-minor infractions - seemed to me inflexibly draconian and cavalier about the severity of the punishment in question. I'm not going to speak to the specific case of aoirann without a great deal more context than I have at this time, and given my expressed views on rule 8 I kinda doubt we're going to see eye-to-eye on anything specifically related to it. As I said, I'm not really looking to throw mud here, just to point out some details that I thought some of you might have overlooked.

 

magic9mushroom if I understand your argument you are saying people that shit up threads should be punished less for shitting up important threads?

OK that was a bit harsh of me but not entirely untrue. You seem to be advocating for a rules/policy change so people can rules-lawyer their way out of the punishment they have earned. Did they read the site rules? Did they read the thread before posting in it? Did they read the threadmarked, brightly colored mod notices? If the answer to any of those is no then they have failed their due diligence. If the answer is yes and they posted anyway then they asked for the ban.

Plus, the staff here aren't unreasonable sadists who revel in the tears of the innocent. If someone has been threadbanned for 6 months and they have really cleaned up their act, stayed out of trouble and contributed to the site, I am should they could make a polite request to have the ban repealed. Gods help them if they are granted leniency and start shitposting though...

 

A cursory look at the threadmarks in the SSoSB thread shows a long, slow escalation of punishments for people bringing politics into it, from verbal warnings, to minor threadbans, to medium threadbans with minor temporary bans. The decision to escalate to permanent bans was one ramped up to gradually, over months of continual innabilty for that thread to obey one very simple rule, culminating here. There was nothing cavalier or rash about aoiriann's punishment. In fact, I believe that the SSoSB thread is the worst possible example of moderators making hasty, ill thought out decisions, if you look at the sheer length of the escalation ramp we slowly moved up in the search to find a way to make people shut up about politics in that thread.

You made a positive, provable claim. You need to back that up. Now, you need to provide an example of the staff issuing a permanent threadban in an innapropriate situation or I'm going to declare that there is no problem and close the subject.

 

Mine, for a few reasons.

 

What about QQ irc?

 

You were threadbanned for politics. That's not a problem, and if you want to debate it you should PM tehelgee.

 

I did no such thing and I need to do no such thing. I wrote an essay pointing out some general factors which I suspected you and other moderators might not have considered, for your future information. I did not want to make this about mud-flinging, as I explicitly stated in my essay, and I only brought up that example because you insisted I do so (and I regret that, as I had a very strong suspicion you'd start debating me over specifics).

Now, that said, you've made a statement which does relate to the general case and appears to indicate some misapprehension of what I'm getting at, and some misapprehension of punishment systems in general. So I shall respond to that and that alone:

I did not call it "hasty". I called it "rather casual" and "for minor infraction". Any "zero tolerance" policy, regardless of the time it may have taken to implement, does impose major penalties for minor offenses irrespective of prior history.

Now, you also said "ill-thought-out". I didn't actually say as much, but I will actually take you up on this one. It is ill-thought-out (as are all "zero tolerance" policies), no matter how long you took thinking about it, because your thought process is fundamentally based on a fallacy. The fallacy is that of scaling deterrence: that increasing punishments will proportionately decrease the rate at which people commit offences. Put bluntly, for any significant punishment this is not true; someone who offends despite a moderate penalty typically either is too emotional to care about the penalty or is unaware of the penalty, and therefore is incapable of being deterred by any increase in that punishment. As such, your escalation of general punishments is futile; its impact on deterrence beyond its earliest stages is negligible. You will never achieve perfect deterrence even with a threat of permanent threadban - or, indeed, permanent whole-board ban - and all you achieve is to potentially lose the board members for no benefit.

In the case of repeat offenders, there is an additional factor in play, that being the prevention motive for threadbans. If someone is a total horror in some thread, then it may be that the benefit of removing them from that thread outweighs the cost of losing their contributions to that thread and the risk of them leaving the board entire. This, however, is escalation on an individual basis, not a general one; it might justify "if poster X does Y in this thread again, they will be permabanned from this thread" but never "the next person who does Y in this thread will be permabanned from this thread". This is why I made no claim about whether the specific case of aoirann was just or unjust, but did claim that the policy which you cited in giving it was misguided.

(As an aside, public ignorance of the fallaciousness of scaling deterrence is a perennial problem in RL justice systems that has only recently and partially been fixed. You are among possibly a majority and at the least a substantial minority in believing that fallacy; while you are misinformed, you are understandably misinformed and no slight is intended by my correction.)

 

This isn't about blame. Its about achieving your goals.

Is that actual policy that all comment on rules should be PM to LG?

 

Yeah, I 100% agree with this. It is absurd and unjust to punish someone based not on their own conduct but on the conduct of other people in the past. If someone keeps breaking the rules in the thread over and over then a permanent ban is perfectly reasonable. But someone shouldn't be permabanned from a thread based on one minor mistake just because it happened to have followed a bunch of other people making the same mistake.

I also don't see how it's a matter of just "enforcing the rules". It was a moderator decision to say "the next politics post will be a permaban from the thread", there's nothing in the rules that says that has to be the case. The moderators made the choice to say that and to enforce it, so surely it is the moderators who should be justifying it.

 

More generally, I think there should be a very high threshold of having a good reason before discouraging public discussion of general policy, and I don't think this issue remotely approaches that threshold.