Is it time to kill Politics Café?

Fr_Dougal wrote: »

As long as this new Current Affairs forum doesn’t mean that current affairs threads will be moved from AH, all we’ll be left with then is threads about defecating by reregs.

Why is this an issue? If Current Affairs is open access, then surely the location of the thread isn't an issue. Arguing against moving threads to Current Affairs only serves to highlight that the problem with the Café may not just have been that posters have to ask for access, but that some people simply want their posts up front and centre in After Hours, and wouldn't be happy with any other setup.

Fr_Dougal wrote: »

How has creating extra fora on boards worked out in the past? From what I can see, in recent times, the sum of the posts due to segmentation is not equal to the sum of a more general forum.

I don't think that anyone disagrees that areas of the site should become more streamlined, and certain less busy forums could be merged into one (it's something that we are working towards on a case by case basis), however, that only works when the end game and general ethos of each forum of origin is more or less the same.

The issue I see with After Hours at the moment is that its purpose, in theory, is to be a place where you can have lighthearted threads, and also be a place where everyone can openly discuss (sometimes controversial) topics and content and express their views while respecting the rights of others.

The reality is somewhat different. We have a not unreasonable percentage of posters who post in the lighthearted threads, and then somehow extrapolate from the fact that AH has a more open charter than other forums, that they can post absolute vitriol, some of it genuine hate speech, and scream from the rafters about their "right" to freely express their opinion if the post is removed or the thread shut down.

And here we're getting to the crux of the problem. The issue isn't just having to request access to the Politics Cafe, or having to follow a thread to another part of the site. For a certain subset of posters, what they wanted all along was an uninhibited venue in which to potentially post bile, to as wide an audience as possible. And they see After Hours as their personal sandbox to do so.

Fr_Dougal wrote: »

The mods in AH are doing a great job, they are allowing opinions from both sides, it’s refreshing when you see how much of an echo chamber most social media has become.

They're not. And when I say that, I don't mean that as a slight on them and they aren't flat out trying, but their task is akin to pushing water up a hill. A quick look shows me that there 364 reported posts since June 1st, or 3,347 since the beginning of the year, a huge percentage of them related to blatant traveller bashing, misogyny, Islamophobia, racism, to name a few. The mods are sick to the back teeth of trying to keep their finger in the dam, and I can't say I blame them.

It gets thrown out here quite a bit that we don't listen to the userbase, but the userbase isn't just the squeakiest wheel in feedback. The sheer volume of reported posts tells me that the userbase isn't happy with the quality of posting in AH. Something needs to change.

So it's a more complicated issue than "Why don't you get more mods?", "Why don't the mods do their jobs?" (one could turn it around and ask "Why don't a large subset of posters stop being dicks?", but that's a conversation for another day). I don't think that any topic should be off-limits, and sometimes you need to let stupid people say stupid things sometimes, in the hope that other people will point out that person's stupidity. However, the difficulty here is allowing for an online dialogue that mirrors the exchange of ideas and opinions that happens throughout people’s lives offline, while eliminating the obvious trolls, and people who hide behind the anonymity of the internet.

Should AH be able to facilitate this? In the ideal world, yes. In theory, every forum here should operate by one simple guiding principle: Don't be a dick. However, it's not a perfect world, and enough people have abused the open nature of the "don't be a dick" rule to warrant charters and addendums to varying degrees in different forums, depending on the nature of the forum to begin with. And the way things stand in AH at the moment, I think it's gone beyond a one charter fits all scenario - if we allow for lighthearted anything goes threads, then we have to specifically ask for a slightly higher standard of posting when it comes to controversial topics. For me, the only way I see of doing this is by filtering more serious or controversial threads somehow, making them distinct from the lighthearted threads, and applying a slightly higher level of moderation to them, to weed out the trolls and genuine racists/homophones/Islamophobes etc. while still allowing open discussion to occur.

Kenzie Better Kangaroo wrote: »

One person's "islamophobia" is another person's "islam's teachings are bad because...", or one person's "racism" is another person's "this distinct group of people seem to have a problem with...."

Broadly speaking, I agree with you - what you describe above is by definition "points of view", and of course they are going to differ from person to person. However, the above might hold more weight for me if people were actually posting along the lines of "this distinct group of people seem to have a problem with....". But, to a concerning degree, that's not the case. One poster's recent charming viewpoint on the the travelling community was:

Surely a plausible call for ethnic cleansing. They add nothing to society, all they do is take take take. A scourge.

...and this is by no means a unique example.

This is my own personal opinion here, but as a discussion forum, we can't simply gag all racist/homophobic/misogynistic viewpoints, if for no other reason than so they can be fought. But on what planet does dehumanizing prejudiced nastiness like the above permit civil conversation? Folks who post this sort of bile should be banned.

Kenzie Better Kangaroo wrote: »

Having a non-randomly chosen group of people tasked with making those arbitrary desicions is the issue, and furthermore, having that same group not applying their interpretation of the charter in a consistent fashion. And even further, those people and people further up the hierarchy getting their heckles up when anyone makes the mistake of questioning that.

What would you propose in its stead? There are arguments for both camps of course. On one side, it can be debated that allowing such rhetoric normalizes and spreads it, no matter how much effort is put into fighting it. And that allowing it to be debated it puts it into the socially acceptable category of "things a reasonable person can debate over". On the other hand, not allowing it to be discussed pushes it underground where people become more radicalized, and we end up with points of view along the lines of "Look at these immigrants, taking over the country, stealing our jobs, breeding like rabbits, ethnic cleansing etc."

But either way, what remains is an interesting line to define as a moderator. Mods need to encourage people to post, yes. But they need to encourage people to post in the right way. However, I don't believe that the decision-making process is as arbitrary as you believe. I don't personally mod AH, but I would imagine a value judgement needs to be made in many cases. Some posts need to be tackled head-on and stamped out, others might be the sort of post that I would expect other posters can swing back at and make a difference in the minds of the readers. But by that very nature, sometimes it means different mods will fall on different sides of whatever line is drawn in terms of their immediate response. I might come across a reported post and decide that it's better to leave it and let people know their views are not acceptable and deplatform them, whereas another mod might fall slightly the other side of the line and remove it.

Do mods always fall on the right side of the line? Of course not. It's an imperfect system, and I don't believe there is a perfect system to deal with posts like this, and the direction AH has taken as of late. But I'd argue that the AH mods make the right call far more frequently than they make the wrong one.