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offensive or over-sensitive: how does a moderator judge? (can you help?)
I moderate a few online communities, and occasionally something gets flagged as offensive that doesn't strike me that way -- but, in a large heterogeneous community, it can be hard to know whether I don't see it because it's not there or because my own perspective blocks it. Put another way, is that my privilege speaking?
Today I decided to ask that question on the fledgling community-building site on Stack Exchange. If you have experience mediating such issues, please consider answering there. You could comment here too, of course, and I'd like to hear what y'all have to say about this, but I hope that if you can speak from actual experience you'll consider sharing your knowledge over there where it will help people other than me too.
I'm oft fascinated by how online communities work (or, sometimes, don't work) and I'd like this site to succeed. Also, I've written some good stuff for it that I'd hate to have disappear from the network if the site doesn't reach critical mass.
Today I decided to ask that question on the fledgling community-building site on Stack Exchange. If you have experience mediating such issues, please consider answering there. You could comment here too, of course, and I'd like to hear what y'all have to say about this, but I hope that if you can speak from actual experience you'll consider sharing your knowledge over there where it will help people other than me too.
I'm oft fascinated by how online communities work (or, sometimes, don't work) and I'd like this site to succeed. Also, I've written some good stuff for it that I'd hate to have disappear from the network if the site doesn't reach critical mass.
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The purpose of the moderator is to validate both requirements: is the complaint a valid one, and is the post a polite one?
You need not be perfect. You need to be fair, consistent, open in process, and open in mind.
Users may demand perfection, but they can't have it. Users that fail to recognize that "doing the best I can" is the only real standard, are starting to fail at being tolerant.
(I don't do StackExchange - I don't have time for another community.)
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I hope I'm not over-reading the text, but I would add that although "doing the best I can" is nice, there is in the end a standard on how well the moderator functions. Not perfection, certainly. The community will have some standard for what's sufficient to help it work, and that could disqualify certain moderators who mean well and try hard.
Sometimes it's not the right skills or type of personality. Probably we can think of examples.
Sometimes it's because you need a working awareness of people's different situations. This is hard, always but especially for someone who's in the majority on a given dimension, so it's only half-visible to them. That's a big hill to climb, and someone with all good intentions and hard work may still be partway up, might not be to the level where a moderator for this community needs to be.
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If a community is lucky enough to have a surplus of moderators, one can afford to set standards. That process would likely engender another half-dozen posts on Stack Exchange. :-)
I was more thinking of the individual, and not the aggregate. Every individual will fall short of perfection. (Or: if they are perfect, some people will wish for "imperfect but biased toward me".) If members can't live with "best I can do", that's a problem for themselves.
Even the best are, well, only less imperfect.
DIGRESSION OPINION: One of the things I see too much of in my life, lately, are consistently unrealistic demands for perfection. People only buy unblemished food, they demand perfection from co-workers, employers, government, products, services, entertainment. Today's fashion, not yesterdays now-undesirables. And so forth.
I really wish we could help people live with imperfection, and appropriate levels of disappointment. Life is, largely, stone soup: we make it out of whatever we can find or get. Perfection is desired, but we need to become individuals that do not require it.
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The situation that most immediately prompted that question was possible offense not tightly bound to the subject of the site. So, for example, you would expect that when choosing moderators on a religion site, you'd want to look for sensitivity to religious offense. But when choosing moderators on a site about board games, you might not think about sensitivity to gender-identification issues. (I'm making up that example to protect the real one, but imagine that it could come up in a way that's not off-topic.) So as (in this example) someone with majority privilege faced with evaluating an offensiveness claim from someone in the affected group, I'm left wondering how to do that. I shouldn't just assume the person is right because some people (in any minority, including my own) are hyper-sensitive, but on the other hand I haven't experienced his perspective. So I want to be fair to all involved.
But yes, in the end life is stone soup and we should be able to pick out the green peppers in the interests of getting along. OTOH, we want to be more careful with the poison mushrooms...
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I hate the term "majority privilege". Or "Privilege". These are relatively useless judgments made around behaviors. Bad behaviors are bad whether it is a member of a minority giving it "back" to the majority, or the majority acting poorly to a minority.
Bad behavior is the enemy. All bad behavior. It's cause is neither an excuse, nor a justification, nor a reason for determination.
(STORY: years ago before it was generally tolerable to be gay and out, I knew a woman who was a lesbian feminist separatist, and she did not like men. She was being obnoxious to me, in specific, and when I objected she said "you are being rude to me because I'm a Lesbian". To which I answered "No, I'm calling you out on rudeness, because you are being a [jerk]". She laughed and said to me that when she invoked the L-word, she often got such a guilt reaction that it shut down conversation: and she was actually pleased to be treated as an equal, and "no on calls me on my sh!t".)
So, your example's background obscures the point. In a group, behavior by Member A (that Moderator M doesn't notice), is called out for offense by Member B. Perhaps B calls it out on behalf of a group, perhaps it is personal.
Rather than resolve the matter as between A and B, B asks M to invoke the powers of the Moderator Position on the Group, or Member A.
The goal, it seems to me, is the health and preservation of the group, and a sub-goal is improved knowledge and behavior on the part of M. B's outcome is secondary to the group, although it absolutely matters.
By necessity of the statement of the problem, B's objection matters more to B (and B's ilk) than to M. M didn't even notice. Should M now take notice, should M educate the group to take notice? A lot depends upon the evaluation of B's complaint.
The question has trended, in my mind, to this: as part of the duty to the group, to what degree is M required to validate the sufficiency of offense to B, and how do you do that? Once done, how does M weigh the needs of the group vis a viz the needs of B?
(I include that it is likely that the group wants to be open and fair. Perhaps a Klansman Moderator for a KKK group is not charged with caring how non-KKK feel, for an extreme example.)
I think I've rephrased the question, a lot. If Moderator M and Member B disagree as to the degree of offense, what is M's choice, and best path?
(Let's ignore the stupid Privilege part: does it matter? If the group is by and for a small minority and moderated by the same, and a majority person claims offense - does it change things?)
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If somebody is being a jerk then the problem is that this person is being a jerk, yes. The backstory is not important there.
The goal, it seems to me, is the health and preservation of the group, and a sub-goal is improved knowledge and behavior on the part of M. B's outcome is secondary to the group, although it absolutely matters.
I agree. The community as a whole needs to take priority over any one person. We do not walk on eggshells worrying about anything that might offend somebody. On the other hand, if somebody (or the community as a whole) is consistently doing something that gives offense to another group, as a moderator I want to know that that's what's going on. I might still permit it because offense is contextual; as a user I'd be out of place on that KKK site and that would be my problem. Unless proven otherwise I choose to believe that offense, when present, is accidental, and the remedy is education.
I think I've rephrased the question, a lot. If Moderator M and Member B disagree as to the degree of offense, what is M's choice, and best path?
That's a good formulation. Thanks for all the feedback!
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In my opinion, the duty to the group is paramount, and all the other duties are subordinate and supportive of serving the group. No matter how one resolves the conflict between "Individual feels offended and partially excluded" and "Moderator does not see or understand the offense", the resolution cannot break Rule One.
This leads me, uncomfortably, toward the following thought that is not happily expressed. If the Moderator is generally being supportive of the group, and does not see offense, then the Moderator might very well be a good voice for whether the offense is "present in the groups eyes" and whether the offense is "damaging to the group", and despite our natural reluctance to say "sorry: deal with it", that might be the best thing.
That's hard enough: but if someone throws the loaded word-bomb "privilege" into it, it's even harder: whether that word is appropriate or even if it is not. You may notice that in my analysis I left out the following potential meta-goal: "Fix the World's Problems and Make Everything Better". Not your job. Even if the problem arise from massive cultural unfairness: the group exists within that culture, and a moderator can't fix the culture.
And, I wonder (but do not know): if the Moderator calls for group behaviors which are counter to the prevailing culture (in an attempt to make the world a better place), are they harming the group by making it harder for members of that culture to be a member?
Lastly on the thread: if Member A feels Member B is offending them, it's time for the members to sort it out themselves. If Member A feels that Members B-D are offending them, it's time for a moderator. If Member A feels that B-Z are offending them, it may be time for that lone voice to move along.
One last thought on "privilege".
It is a misnomer, because all it is, is a lack of full understanding of another person's point of view. All of us can TRY, as hard as we can, to see all viewpoints. (The people who won't try, make lousy moderators.)
It is possible that Majority Joe doesn't understand Minority Mike or vice versa. It doesn't matter which of them is the moderator, yes?
Privilege as a term is nothing more than an attempt to insert unwarranted emotions into what is already a thorny thicket of democracy, speech, fairness, and the morality of co-existence. "You do not understand me because you or society think you are better than I am" - is not a good way to work on fairness. It actually pre-judges/prejudices the discussion by making it harder to make a fair analysis. The speaker who uses the term privilege has already closed out much of the analysis.
It's a bad word.
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Taking this at the more abstract or philosophical level:
For example, the idea that you should tolerate imperfection, well, there's a continuum. You should probably tolerate some non-zero level of imperfection and not tolerate some higher level. And there's a lot of room for people to have systematically different judgments about what those levels mean. People may brush off criticism that's accurate, deserved, and potentially helpful.
The idea that people should take what's offered if they like it, move on if they don't, and not waste their effort trying to change it, there's a lot of wisdom in stone soup. Even where there's something questionable, it's often expedient for a person to disengage and move on. But sometimes there are a large number of 'lurkers' who are invisible, but would also appreciate the change.
The idea of "I doing best I can" covers a lot of ground, ranging from "I'm actively working to improve how I do things" down to "this is what I do, I warn you I do it, so you can't complain it was a surprise." It's human to be doing one level of this, while patting oneself on the back for the next level up.
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Maybe I feel that people are being very critical of me, repeatedly, and they are holding me to an unreasonable standard. This might be a situation where I actually am, say, a white person displaying my unawareness of a thing that many black people experience. Having people tell me this can be a harsh experience (are they saying I'm a racist?), and can feel like I can't win (yes, I'm a product of my society, I can't escape that).
Maybe I am the sole moderator of some community I founded, I do my best, but I tell people, if this doesn't work for you, please look elsewhere -- and people keep coming in and complaining about it. This might be a situation where I am part of a pattern of how most communities systematically have the same flaw (I don't know, imagine it's tolerance for rape jokes). I don't notice the pattern, but other people certainly see it, and it looks I'm being disingenuous in saying "why don't you just try somewhere else?" without thinking that's likely part of it too.
Maybe as a moderator I see a member speaking extremely emotionally to someone else in response to a fairly minor thing, so I call them on it. But I might not have a good read on whether it's actually minor. Or if it is minor as an isolated thing but it's actually part of a thing I'm not conscious of its happening every day, and the person has hit the choice "swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?"
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I hate to sound all capitalist and stuff: but if a moderator is doing their best, but is insufficient, the group will die. That's not a desirable outcome, but that's OK.
A moderator simply MUST make decisions based upon not enough data: are the complainants looking to upset the group, or have a greater agenda? Is the moderator just socially blind in an area, and one has to live with that?
Perhaps there are two questions here: what sort of humility and how much of it does a moderator owe themselves, and what sort of standard-bearing does the moderator owe the community?
To a degree, a moderator is a leader. At some point, a leader must make a decision, and live with it - despite doubts and introspection and flaws and hope for future growth.
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