Cekoviu wrote:I also disagree that transparency should be avoided and there should be some sort of "central vision." A key component in healthy relationships, including user-mod relationships on Austrian book site, is trust - the system you are advocating throws any and all trust that users might still place in moderation completely out the window. This sort of policy will breed even more dysfunction and sow more discontent. Additionally, it ultimately fails to address the root of the problem with particular users' behavior; rather than attempting to consider the systems that might've generated such a thing and what kind of policies might help improve it in the future, you've elected to haphazardly board over the issue and proudly declare "there, it's fixed!" It's intellectually lazy and I'd expect better from you.
Actually this is the perfect place to start my reply. You wrote your post in inverse order.
Now I don't know if you've ever been banned, or even warned. I'm guessing you probably got warned once. Have you noticed that none of the conversations revolving around rulebreakers and rulebreaking ever ask people who routinely break the rules why they do it? I mean the last kind of investigation on that tier that I would remember would be Ostro's post about if you report people or not. This kind of conversation is obviously materially useful if you want to reduce the number of "offences". Do we want to do that? Yes? No? Do we want a transparent community? Yes? No?
Who knows? Nobody knows. When I go into work I can ask any person there, literally anyone, what is the purpose of our organisation? Like why are we here man? They can tell me. More or less every person will give an answer equal in content. Nobody knows this about this forum. What's the fuckin point of NationStates General? Why does it exist? Is it a place where we can "talk about politics while insulting each other?" How about "Serious debate about current affairs?" How about "bait Questers with shitty one-line no-content posts and get him warned when he reacts like a normal steak-eating male?" How about "thinly veiled flirtatious comments underlined by extremist political agenda?"
I don't know. We don't know. You don't know. The most important:
they don't know. If they do they haven't let on. Without an expression of purpose, no kind of plan can execute. I'm sorry but this is fundamental stuff to making an organisation. You need a purpose, you need a mission, you need a plan. Of course it's possible NS mods have those things — but usually they're public.
Cekoviu wrote:Plus, culture doesn't just change unprompted - cultural changes are downstream from material changes the majority of the time. The technological process for handling reports and warnings and the specific content of the OSRS are very important substrates for moderator actions and alterations to these cause cascading material effects within the system that will ultimately help foster the kind of cultural changes we (I) would like to see.
I didn't say anything bad about your changes man. I didn't. Swear. They're fine. They're cool. You're all technical, I get it. Like this is some kind of material systems analysis, whatever, it's not my thing. I didn't comment on your ideas being bad or good.
I'm saying without the organisational base to execute a plan then no operation succeeds. The exact specifics can be done by people who are good at those things. Maybe you. I don't care. But without that clarity about what kind of a place they want this website to be, there will never be consistency, there'll never be any clarity, there'll never be any fairness and never be any
order — quite irrespective of whatever adjustments you think they should make.