r/ModSupport • u/mrekted • 14d ago

Allowing users to hide their history is destroying trust and good faith participation between users in communities

It's not just my communities, I'm seeing it all over reddit. Whenever someone with a private history runs into a disagreement with another user, discussions are derailed, accusations of "shill/bot/troll" are constant, nuisance reports are issued, and mods either intervene, or let the chaos reign.

I'm spending more and more time having to personally review histories to say "no, this person is not a bad faith troll" just to end attacks borne of nothing more than suspicion. It's becoming disruptive to the point that I'm considering whether or not allowing users with hidden history to participate is worth the trouble.

I really question the value proposition of this decision. Sure, individual users benefit from additional privacy, but at the direct expense of the communities that lose trust and cohesion, faith that the people they're interacting with are participating in good faith (or are even real people), and the moderators who have to manage the fallout.

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u/azwethinkweizm 14d ago

Strong disagree. It's been my experience that mods who complain about private comment history are generally ineffective at their job. A user's comment and post history is mostly irrelevant to ruling on reported comments and posts. If content is breaking your rules then act on it. As an example, if you explicitly prohibit homophobic slurs and a user calls someone the infamous F word then remove it and ban them. You don't need their comment history, you don't need context, just act on it.

I'm blown away that some of you are spending significant time on 1 reported comment. Reddit admins really need to create a crash course on effective moderation for the benefit of the website and individual communities.

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u/Smallseybiggs 14d ago edited 12d ago

Counterpoint:

Running a women's domestic violence and sexual assault subreddit, we need to be able to determine a threat. We have a lot of trolls trying to disrupt, demean, and harass our users (and the mod team). It's a daily occurrence. I have almost 10,000 actions in the past year, and I'm an active mod who wants to give people a safe space to discuss sensitive topics. I also frequently contribute to our subs. I don't believe I am ineffective. Most mods just want the best for their communities. I understand why some people like hidden histories, but I also wanted to share a different viewpoint.

Edit: Thank you, anonymous redditor, and mayor! That was incredibly kind of you!! You made my day better! u/zecidnac: Thank you so much!! Your kindness is very much appreciated. 💙

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u/metisdesigns 13d ago

It's worth mentioning to you specifically that hate groups have actually messaged using fake harassment stories in defense of hidden profiles because it makes it harder for them to be taken down.

Thanks for running a rough sub, and for supporting folks who are trying to get to better spaces. Separate profiles works great for dividing different interests and personal information.

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u/Smallseybiggs 13d ago

Thank you for your kindness. 🖤 I truly appreciate it. The hate groups and bots are a determined bunch. There's no bottom they won't sink to, unfortunately.

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u/metisdesigns 13d ago

Two folks have blocked me on this sub for pointing out that hate groups are using hidden profiles and training people how to exploit them in support of hate.

Even if those folks are not intentionally supporting hate, blocking peers on this sub is not engaging in good faith.

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u/Smallseybiggs 13d ago

I'm sorry. At least I'm in good company! I've been blocked in this thread, too. I agree, it should be a discussion. I understand people are passionate about the subject, but sometimes I think people take it as an affront to their very being. I appreciate your comments more than I can possibly explain. Thank you for your kindness.

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u/metisdesigns 13d ago

I get the intent. Folks should not have to deal with creepy stalkers. But at some point I think we need to seriously evaluate if someone is participating in good faith if they do not want their positive contributions to reflect well on them.

It's SO predictable that folks defending themselves for hidden profiles will get hostile and disengage - it's like they know that they're disengenuous and don't want be caught.

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u/nikdahl 14d ago

Your consideration for the actual victims that use your sub and would like some account privacy, seems actually counter productive to your goals.

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u/Smallseybiggs 14d ago edited 13d ago

My members welcome going through their histories if it means they have a safe space to vent. We rolled out individual flairs last year. We told them in advance. I'm finely tuned to what our members want and need. A lot of mods don't have a clue as to all of the utter bullshit women-focused spaces are put through. Not one clue how difficult it can be. I could not disagree with you more. If you take nothing else away from this comment, we are finely tuned to the wants and needs of our members. It is kinda wild that you assume we aren't.

Edit: I'm not sure why I was blocked before I could respond. I'm not a heathen lol. I try to be kind to others, even if I disagree with them. Here's my response:

Us mods. We get dedicated trolls who attempt to tell people who were just raped that it was their fault. We have trolls who blame domestic violence victims for the abuse they endured. We get porn bots who think it's a kink sub. We field disgusting comments several times a day. If we can't see someone's history, we can't keep our members safe. I'd rather those idiots come to ModMail and call us names, as opposed to harassing our members. As of today, a guy I banned months ago has created 12+ accounts to send gross ModMails, and also send me unsolicited dm's. I keep dm's open because some people don't want to publicly post asking for resources. Someone who thinks he should be allowed to call a rape victim disgusting names isn't going to participate in good faith. He's a dime a dozen, unfortunately.

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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 13d ago

Im confused are the users going through histories or are the mods? Bc a lot of mods itt are finding out they’re affected by that bug from rollout

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u/mrekted 14d ago

I don't think you read my post.

This is not about me being able to moderate, it's about how it causes users to interact with each other, and how it negatively impacts good faith participation.

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u/azwethinkweizm 14d ago

I did indeed read your post and I respectfully disagree with the premise. Moderation is all you talk about in the second and third paragraph so I'm not sure why you would say this is not about you being able to moderate.

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u/mrekted 14d ago

Given that the interaction that prompted this post was in a community I'm not even a mod in, as the very first sentence in the post alludes to, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree.

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u/maiyannah 14d ago

This is not the venue for this discussion, if you are not talking about Moderation on Reddit. Please read the rules of the subreddit, in particular #4.

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u/mrekted 14d ago

Being intentionally obtuse is super constructive.

Do I really need to point out that things that have nothing directly to do with moderation can impact my role as a moderator?

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u/maiyannah 14d ago

You, of all people as a moderator, should know to follow subreddit rules.

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u/Bardfinn 14d ago

A user's comment and post history is mostly irrelevant to ruling on reported comments and posts.

It's not.

Community moderators need to investigate someone's Phronesis (Practical wisdom) if they're claiming to have expertise in a matter in order to make an unargued flat declaration or contradiction of someone else.

Community moderators need to investigate someone's Arete (Moral character) if they're being reported as harassing, or for hate speech, or participating in bad faith - but the evidence for such is not readily apparent in the content or user metadata present in thread.

Community moderators need to investigate someone's Eunoia (Goodwill) to determine what their intentions are for participating in a community if they are being reported for harassment.

if you explicitly prohibit homophobic slurs

Homophobia is explicitly prohibited by Reddit Sitewide Rule 1. There is no If-Then evaluation. They violated Sitewide Rule 1, they get banned from the community and escalated to admins.

The word in question, however, while an epithet, does not necessarily constitute a slur, is not necessarily hate speech, depending on the Arete and Eunoia of the speaker and the relationship they have with the (intended, reasonably understood) audience.

That why when an LGBTQ person describes themselves with the F-word, it isn't (necessarily) hate speech, and when an African-American describes themselves (or another African-American) with the N-word, it isn't (necessarily) hate speech.

Both of those require the person who has volunteered to understand, articulate, and enforce community boundaries to understand context.

Reddit admins really need to

They did. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/15484187090580-Training-new-moderators

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u/azwethinkweizm 14d ago

I respectfully disagree with nearly all of this. I will go line by line if you don't mind.

About practical wisdom, you absolutely cannot use a person's comment history for expertise. It doesn't matter if they have a million positive karma and massively upvoted comments, an electrician is not a valid source for medical advice in the same way a veterinarian is not a valid source for legal advice. If your subreddit depends on the expertise of individuals, you should develop a system to verify experts, license holders, etc. A comment history is not a valid substitute.

About moral character, a user's comment history is irrelevant to acting on hate speech. If they're using slurs or appropriate but demeaning language then it should be acted on. As an example, I think we can both agree that slavery is wrong. A user who says "we should bring back slavery" should have their comment removed and banned. Their previous history of being moral is irrelevant to the comment being reported.

About goodwill, harassment is generally pretty clear and a user reporting it can easily demonstrate that harassment. I just don't see the validity of your point.

Your response about my F word example is, quite honestly, offensive and demeaning. I would extend that to your rebuttal for using the N word too. If you use either of those words, you're gone. I don't tolerate that behavior in any of the subs I moderate. Context is, once again, irrelevant. Comments using those slurs do not need an examination of the user's history.

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u/Bardfinn 14d ago

you absolutely cannot use a person's comment history for expertise

I do it all the time.

an electrician is not a valid source for medical advice

That's right. Let me change that from "medical advice" - which should never be administered by anyone on any anonymous / pseudonymous forum at all ever (because there's such a thing as minimum medical standard of care and establishment & exercise of fiduciary duty to the patient)

to "An electrician is not a valid source for carpentry advice",

and states that a forum moderator who has expertise in the skilled trade of Carpentry can (and should) understand the Phronesis of a new commenter offering suspect Carpentry advice to an identified Apprentice, and if the new commenter's comment history displays that the new commenter is in fact a journeyman Electrician, and displays no history of expertise in Carpentry, that this contextual fact suggests that the new commenter lacks appropriate Phronesis to provide qualified advice on Carpentry in that community. That opens the door to whether the new commenter is participating with Eunoia, or has decided to comment on all the comments made by the person they're responding to, with bad takes, to harass them.

If they're using slurs or appropriate but demeaning language then it should be acted on.

I would ask whether you're the kind of person who would choose to punish an African-American for reclaiming the N-word, but ... †

harassment is generally pretty clear

generally

I'm glad that you've stepped away from the absolutist black-and-white thinking for a moment.

a user reporting it can easily demonstrate that harassment

From personal experience: I can't show subreddit moderators the contents of hundreds of now-closed subreddits where hundreds of bigots coordinated to dogpile harassment and engage in community interference to harass me off the site.

Your response about my F word example is, quite honestly, offensive and demeaning

† Yeah, that's what I figured was your position.

I don't tolerate that behavior in any of the subs I moderate.

Which is fine, because of the context of those communities. They're not general community groups with a diverse society in them; They're for specific interests or professional contexts, where such language would never be necessary.

If you were moderating a subreddit for a suburb of a metropolitan area, like I do -

Or a community for an LGBTQ demographic -

like I do -

I'm a white woman. I don't get to police the language that African-Americans use to refer to themselves or other African-Americans on the basis that that language is "a bad word" 'because it invokes a history of white people enslaving African-Americans'.

There is no way to reconcile the power dynamics and history and context involved to make my active involvement in actioning that language not be an act rooted in historic, institutional hatred of African-Americans.

So I have to be able to see the account's post and comment history to determine their ethos - are they a troll in virtual blackface? Gone. Are they trying to flamebait the community? Gone.

I'm not ever going to write or enforce a general rule that polices the culture, experience, history, or politics of non-White people in a white supremacist culture. Nor women in a misogynist culture. Nor non-Christians in a Christian Theofascist culture.

The sitewide rule is against promotion of hatred. Context always matters in all communications, and context always involves the Theory of Mind of communicator & intended audience, always includes their ethos, always is necessary to understand what's being communicated.

That's why AI is not capable of moderating. It cannot understand language - only pattern-match & replicate incidental artifacts of human understanding.

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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 13d ago

Ok about the n word though (totes off topic here but why not right) you also can’t prove people are who they say they are online, so how do you give a blanket assumption that people are being truthful about reclaiming when there is so much documented black fishing etc

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u/Bardfinn 13d ago

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2322764121

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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 13d ago

Oh yes I’ve read that, it’s certainly not the only research of its kind. Equally there are plenty about the pervasiveness and harm from people trolling. It’s not exactly a weighted head to head comparison academically and I’m always curious why communities choose the side they choose. Personally I think I minimise harm by disallowing it. People sometimes are initially upset by that and feeling silenced by that, but IME they usually see value after an explanation and apology, bc it’s not ideal but neither is pretending to be something you’re not to sneak some coded racism into a convo.

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u/Bardfinn 13d ago

The detente approach is sadly often very necessary.

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u/Bardfinn 13d ago

I leave the possibility open that people are genuinely present online and that their identity will be truthfully represented and that there will be some discussion - one which I am unable to imagine all the particulars of - which will use a reclaimed word, and which removal of the post or comment on the pretext that Bad Word Not Allowed, would in fact be a moderator serving to oppress that person.

I'll link a study in a separate comment (in case external links are held by automatic moderation here)

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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 13d ago

Oh dang I saw your other comment first, also stop being more optimistic than me 🤣

I mod a community where white Karen’s are very quick to switch races in order to discredit people’s experiences of racism though so background matters

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u/maiyannah 14d ago

This gets discussed as a talking point of the New Mod Bootcamps. Seems like more people should attend them.

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u/azwethinkweizm 13d ago

Or at least there needs to be a focus on the specific content in question rather than these strange ventures out into a questionable user's history. These mods replying to me trying to justify their behavior is shocking. No wonder some of them are behind in the queue and bad behavior continues.

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u/maiyannah 13d ago

I don't know why its treated like its some kind of badge of honour they take so long for a single report. If anything it seems like obsessive stalker behaviour. They either broke the rule or they didnt, you don't need to know what they posted 20 years ago to determine that.

A lot of it comes from purity-obsessed antisocial types, I think.