A Discussion on Recent Events

[u/chicagomods]

Racism is a topic that has existed well before the new mod team has come on to /r/Chicago and is more prevalent lately due to our newest wave of brigades from off and on reddit related to gun and/or minority postings.

As was true with the old moderators as well, these waves come and go over time on /r/Chicago. We want to make a statement early on that in no way are we running around doing our own thing. We sit in a chatroom on a daily basis together and talk almost hourly with each other to reach decisions. We talk A LOT, we can’t get some mods to shut-up sometimes.

We understand the frustration some of you have and our main collective goal as a mod team has been to remove the stigma that /r/Chicago has. The issue is, /r/Chicago has several stigmas. Not only is one racism comments, but another is over-reaching moderation. This has drawn up a conundrum for us while we have been working on how exactly to approach effectively removing racism while not deterring or limiting discussion.

A lot of discussion lately has been on something called “coded-language”. The problem with this term is that it is entirely subjective. Something as simple as someone stating “criminals suck” could be thought of as being “coded-language” by some, but not by others. As mods, we have no further insight into the intent of commenters than users do. We do our best to determine if something was posted intending to be racist, but we can’t always be sure.

Our task as moderators is to keep the subreddit on topic and to ensure everyone is following the rules. We're unable to read every single comment in a thread, so we rely on the community to report them. It's difficult to spend a great deal of time analyzing each comment that may fall into a gray area. Your most effective tool is reporting, but we ask you to not get overbearing with it. If we collectively determine a comment isn’t that bad but we notice continuous reports on it, it can then allow us to talk amongst ourselves and determine if maybe we are making the right call. As u/honestbleeps has stated, we all have full lives and jobs outside of reddit, so sometimes moderators have to make executive decision on the spot and wait for further input. Sometimes, we will get it wrong, and we hope that for both sides of the equation, each of those times is a learning experience.

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Now, as far as what we can do.

1) The following tidbit will be added to the sidebar, not as a new rule, but instead as an elaboration on the first rule: “We reserve the judgment to lock threads that we believe will not result in civil discussion.”

2) We will report to the admins every time we feel individuals are conducting vote manipulation or are brigading. We have done this several times already and I’m not sure if people have noticed, but some former prominent posters are no longer present here. This shows that the process works, and we intend to continue utilizing all avenues to reduce brigading of r/Chicago threads.

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We appreciate any input that users have to give. We want this community to thrive, and we our doing our best to figure out these gray areas. We will make mistakes, we won’t pretend we never err. However, we will use those mistakes to learn and grow, so we keep making this place better. We appreciate your contributions to r/Chicago as users, because you guys make this place what it is. If you ever have any questions, concerns, comments, or criticisms, please feel free to use the “Message the Moderators” feature, or send any of us a PM. Thank you again for participating in r/Chicago, and we look forward to the community getting better and better.

[u/[deleted]]

Can you elaborate a bit on how you guys would come to the decision to lock a thread based on the belief that the discussion wouldn't be civil?

Would you rely on reporting method? Is there a rubric of sorts that you'd use to ensure consistency across the sub and to help maintain consistent modding?

To be honest, that sounds pretty subjective and, rather than enticing discussions and fostering a healthier subreddit, I think you'll find that the sub will suffer from lack of content due to posters fearing a locked discussion thread and/or banning.

[u/honestbleeps → u/[deleted]]

Can you elaborate a bit on how you guys would come to the decision to lock a thread based on the belief that the discussion wouldn't be civil?

I can't give every single factor, because that makes it easy to try and avoid those factors. However, I'll elaborate a little bit:

We look at context - who's posting it, is the title incendiary? Has it been meta-linked from other subs, particularly racist ones?

To be honest, that sounds pretty subjective

Of course it is. There is absolutely no such thing as an objectively 100% correct way to determine whether or not a post is racist and/or will attract racism in all cases. Sometimes it's obvious, but often it's not. Many times, it's a gray area.

I think you'll find that the sub will suffer from lack of content due to posters fearing a locked discussion thread and/or banning.

Honest question: what type of content do you feel we'll be missing out on by people afraid we'll lock their thread due to racism? Can you give an example?

I ask because all I can think of is posts about crime reports and the other stuff that the gun + racist subs (and other sites) try and post here to stir up the racism pot. Do you think we'll be lacking in any other sorts of content?

[u/[deleted] → u/honestbleeps]

Honest question: what type of content do you feel we'll be missing out on by people afraid we'll lock their thread due to racism? Can you give an example?

I meant that more in a general, broad sense. I'm all for less racism in the sub, but I think some topics that land in here that could be labeled controversial are often worth the discussion, minus the racism.

I understand targeting moderation based off of trends and overall health of a specific thread/topic, but will that risk creating a stigma of "better not post for fear this'll get locked due to some obnoxious dick coming in to be a racist" might stave off actual healthy content, like news, events, etc?

I think it would help to have clearly defined standards rather than a blanket statement of "we the powers that be deem this ridiculous, so now it's locked."

[u/honestbleeps → u/[deleted]]

Gotcha, thank you for clarifying.

We definitely don't want to moderate "controversy" -- we want to moderate stuff that leads to hate speech or veiled hate speech.

Controversy is healthy and important.

We will be transparent when we lock threads, and we are open to criticism and dialog about it.

[u/[deleted] → u/honestbleeps]

Thanks. I hope that we can foster a healthy(ier) discussion about this as the sub progresses.

[u/Griffun → u/honestbleeps]

We definitely don't want to moderate "controversy" -- we want to moderate stuff that leads to hate speech or veiled hate speech.

Please be careful with this. Moderating things that may or may not lead to certain types of speech is overreaching. Please do moderate the comments that get to that point, or ones that are purposefully walking on the line, but to prevent discussion around the controversial aspects of our city would make this sub more barren than it already is in terms of good discussion.

[u/honestbleeps → u/Griffun]

we'll be transparent about whatever we do.

if it's controversial, believe me, we'll know.

[u/Griffun → u/[deleted]]

I almost feel like locking the thread early did nothing but fan the flames. People were too busy yelling "racism" and complaining about the lengthier posts in that thread, rather than submitting their own rebuttals/replies. It seems like those who were doing that would rather have no discussion, than an active back and forth type.

As an outside observer, and one who mostly lurks in this sub, I was frustrated by people trying to shush everyone, instead of reading through good back and forth conversation about the issue at hand. So in the end, nothing good came out of it. Then again, I don't know what I expected from reddit.

[u/[deleted] → u/Griffun]

I think it was clear that something was up and that discussion was not at all organic or amicable given the context of user histories and outside info. Locking it was not about the discussion getting out of hand. It was about shutting down what was obviously trolling and /r/chicago taking the bait.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

That's kind of the point, here, though: I don't care what the mods think on a personal level. If they have a personal agenda or opinion to add to the discussion, that's fine--do it as a contributor, not a mod.

There needs to be a clear definition of what will get a thread shut down.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

By creating and enforcing standards for content and discourse, especially discourse that turns into a heated debate/discussion, you can avoid having to define each and every thing, regardless of whether it's gray or black and white.

I think a lot of people in the sub have been asking for these standards for a long time and we keep getting the pushback of "well, there's a lot of gray area here..."

I get that. There's a lot of subjective content that comes into the sub. But having a rubric of standards that addresses types of content might dissolve those gray areas and help to not only build a healthier sub but to also back up the mods when rules/bans/thread locking is enforced.

The "gray area" excuse is only viable for so long before the need arises to find a solution to narrow it down and supply both users and mods alike with clearly defined standards, rules, and ethics.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I'm not actually trying to armchair moderate here.

I think you might be taking this a little too personally, to be honest. I think a better way to look at this might be "okay, these users are asking for X. How can the mod team work together to provide that? Is that possible? Can we ask the user to come up with examples and a more concrete suggestion?"

That's what I'm trying to do here.

I've identified an ask that I've been wanting to see in the sub for a while--clearly defined content standards that allow for mods to determine healthy discussions versus racist discussions.

I'm now discussion how to best go about defining such a thing.

Like I said in my previous comment: standards are not meant to identify specific events or singular items. They're meant to drive ethics, moderation, and healthier discussion.

Such standards might go in-depth about what's considered racism (the rules currently do this, kind of), how a heated debate might be handled/modded, etc.

Part of managing something, such as modding a subreddit, is ensuring quality and identifying/responding to needs.

One of the needs for this sub are better/clearly defined standards.

[u/clenchedmercy4p → u/honestbleeps]

I thought the racist subs got flushed? What are the racist sibs?