I've participated in a lot of online communities, and a lot of types of online communities, over the decades -- mailing lists, Usenet, blogging platforms like Dreamwidth, web-based forums, Q&A communities... and social media. With the exception of blogging platforms, where readers opt in to specific people/blogs/journals and the platform doesn't push other stuff at us, online communities tend to end up with some level of moderation.

We had (some) content moderation even in the early days of mailing lists and Usenet. Mostly[1] this was gatekeeping -- reviewing content before it was released, because sometimes people post ill-advised things like personal attacks. Mailing lists and Usenet were inherently slow to begin with -- turnaround times were measured in hours if you were lucky and more typically days -- so adding a step where a human reviewed a post before letting it go out into the wild didn't cost much. Communities were small and moderation was mostly to stop the rare egregiously bad stuff, not to curate everything. So far as I recall, nobody then was vetting content that way, like declaring posts to be misinformation.

On the modern Internet with its speed and scale, moderation is usually after the fact. A human moderator sees (or is alerted to) content that doesn't fit the site's rules and handles it. Walking the moderation line can be tough. On Codidact[2] and (previously) Stack Exchange, I and my fellow moderators have sometimes had deep discussions of borderline cases. Is that post offensive to a reasonable person, or is it civilly expressing an unpopular idea? Is that link to the poster's book or blog spam, or is the problem that the affiliation isn't disclosed? How do we handle a case where a very small number of people say something is offensive and most people say it's not -- does it fail the reasonable-person principle, or is it a new trend that a lot of people don't yet know about? We human moderators would examine these issues, sometimes seek outside help, and take the smallest action that corrects an actual problem (often an edit, maybe a word with the user, sometimes a timed suspension).

Three things are really, really important here: (1) human decision-makers, (2) who can explain how they applied the public guidelines, with (3) a way to review and reverse decisions.

Automation isn't always bad. Most of us use automated spam filtering. Some sites have automation that flags content for moderator review. As a user I sometimes want to have automation available to me -- to inform me, but not to make irreversible decisions for me. I want my email system to route spam to a spam folder -- but I don't want it to delete it outright, like Gmail sometimes does. I want my browser to alert me that the certificate for the site I'm trying to visit isn't valid -- but I don't want it to bar me from proceeding anyway. I want a product listing for an electronic product to disclose that it is not UL-certified -- but I don't want a bot to block the sale or quietly remove that product from the seller's catalogue.

These are some of the ways that Twitter has been failing for a while. (Twitter isn't alone, of course, but it's the one everyone's paying attention to right now.) Twitter is pretty bad, Musk's Twitter is likely to be differently bad, and making it good is a hard problem.[3]

Twitter uses bots to moderate content, and those bots sometimes get it badly wrong. If the bots merely flagged content for human review, that would be ok -- but to do that at scale, Twitter would need to make fundamental changes to its model. No, the bots block the tweets and auto-suspend the users. To get unsuspended, a user has to delete the tweets, admit to wrongdoing, and promise not to do it "again" -- even if there's nothing wrong with the tweet. The people I've seen be hit by this were not able to find an appeal path. Combine this with opaque and arbitrary rules, and it's a nightmare.

Musk might shut down some of the sketchier moderation bots (it's always hard to know what's going on in Musk's head), but he's already promised his advertisers that Twitter won't be a free-for-all, so that means he's keeping some bot-based moderation, probably using different rules than last week's. He's also planning to fire most of the employees, meaning there'll be even fewer people to review issues and adjust the algorithms. And it's still a "shoot first, ask questions later" model. It's not assistive automation.

A bot that annotates content with "contrary to CDC guidelines" or "not UL-certified" or "Google sentiment score: mildly negative" or "Consumer Reports rating: 74" or "failed NPR fact-check" or "Fox News says fake"? Sure, go for it -- we've had metadata like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval and FDA nutrition information and kashrut certifications for a long time. Want to hide violent videos or porn behind a "view sensitive content" control? Also ok, at least if it's mostly not wrong. As a practical matter a platform should limit the number or let users say which assistance they want, but in principle, fine.

But that's not what Twitter does. Its bots don't inform; they judge and punish. Twitter has secret rules about what speech is allowed and what speech is not, uses bots to root out what they don't like today, takes action against the authors, and causes damage when they get it wrong. There are no humans in the loop to check their work, and there's no transparency.

It's not just Twitter, of course. Other platforms, either overwhelmed by scale or just trying to save some money, use bots to prune out content. Even with the best of intentions that can go wrong; when intentions are less pure, it's even worse.

Actual communities, and smaller platforms, can take advantage of human moderators if they want them. For large firehose-style platforms like Twitter, it seems to me, the solutions to the moderation problem lies in metadata and user preferences, not heavy-handed centralized automated deletions and suspensions. Give users information and the tools to filter -- and the responsibility to do so, or not. Take the decision away, and we're stuck with whatever the owner likes.

The alternative would be to use the Dreamwidth model: Dreamwidth performs no moderation that I'm aware of, I'm free to read (or stop reading) any author I want, and the platform won't push other content in front of me. This works for Dreamwidth, which doesn't need to push ads in front of millions of people to make money for its non-existent stockholders, but such slow growth is anathema to the big for-profit social networks.

[1]: It was possible to delete posts on Usenet, but it was spotty and delayed.

[2]: The opinions in this post are mine and I'm not speaking for Codidact, where I am the community lead.

[3]: I'd say it's more socially hard than technically hard.

A year in, I find myself thinking back to the beginnings. In January of 2020 we had early reports, increasing in February, but life went on mostly as normal anyway. There was a local SCA event on March 7, and part of me wanted to stay home but our choir was performing and a friend was coming in from out of town to attend (and crash with us), and we went and had a lovely time -- and a healthy one, fortunately.

Purim was a few days later, and at the last minute I decided not to go to a large gathering. (They advised the elderly to stay home, but they didn't cancel.) Our Shabbat minyan met on March 14, but we moved into the sanctuary, where the 25 or so of us could spread out in a room that seats over 300. We didn't know then, but it would be the last time we met in person for more than a year.

Over that weekend, or maybe Monday, the state had some early rumblings of a stay-at-home order. It must not have taken effect immediately, because I remember going into the office on the following Monday, and taking some equipment home with me so I could work from home. Our office formally closed around Wednesday, I think, but it was a formality; we'd all decided by then that staying home was the wiser move. And soon there was a stay-at-home order from the state.

My choir had cancelled that week's practice, and the director cancelled through the end of the month, with the idea that we'd look at other options (outdoors? a really large space? the home we were practicing in was clearly out of consideration). We were so optimistic back then, despite the warnings we'd gotten from other parts of the world. It wasn't that we thought we were invulnerable; rather, we thought that with a little care, one could mitigate the risk without having to completely isolate. Ha.

Working from home required some adjustment, and I made another trip to the office (on Easter Sunday, when I figured no one would be around) to get a better chair and a less-bad keyboard. I didn't pick up my company fleece (which stayed at my desk because our HVAC was unpredictable), thinking we were heading into summer and we'd be back by winter. Our company announced that offices would be closed for a few months, and then a few more, and then a few more -- basically, each quarter they moved the date out another quarter. They've recently taken a bigger leap; we're closed through July at least, and we've been told some offices won't reopen and people will switch to permanently working from home, though we don't know which locations yet. (They'd signed a five-year lease for ours in January of 2020. I wonder what that cost.)

That first Shabbat with no minyan felt very strange. So did the next one, and the one after that, and Pesach especially (Zoom seder, set up before nightfall). That spring was supposed to be marked by celebrations for our long-serving rabbi who was retiring at the end of June. Yeah, that didn't happen. By sometime in June I was feeling isolated enough from the minyan, and the Conservative movement had put out that ruling about Zoom, that I started joining the minyan in a completely passive way, setting up the Zoom connection before Shabbat and just listening and watching. It's better than nothing, but not by a lot. As the months have gone on I've felt more and more disconnected from my community.

Origins (gaming con) was first postponed and then cancelled, and Pennsic was of course cancelled. But the quarantine brought some new opportunities too; Hadar's week-long summer seminar moved online, so I used some now-reclaimed Pennsic vacation days to attend. I've done a little online board-gaming, with mixed results. Dani and I now play games every Shabbat afternoon, always including a few rounds of Pandemic because, well. It's time to look for some more games that work well for two players; we could use more variety.

I've had more time to spend on Codidact, which is good, but also have limits to how long I can sit in front of computers in my office each day, so I'm also doing more leisure reading. I seem to be preferring shorter works; I don't know if that's a change in attention span or something else. Somewhere in there I read Survivors, the novel based on a TV show I enjoyed some years back. The novel is different. Terry Nation is kind of a bastard, authorially.

Last spring I grew some of my own food, for basically the first time, because we didn't know how bad the food shortages were going to be and I figured every little bit helps, even though it's not like we were going to feed ourselves just on my tiny garden ministrations. I'll do it again this year, with some changes in what I grow (to be determined), but still in pots. I learned last year that the sunny spots in May are not necessarily sunny in August or October, but I can move pots.

Things in the US are finally trending in the right direction, though it's a fragile thing and vaccines are racing against mutant strains. We're forever changed; I marvel that even now people talk about "going back to normal", as if there aren't going to be permanent changes. I don't know what all those permanent changes will be, but surely they will exist. We're not "going back"; we'll eventually move ahead to new ways of working and dining and interacting and living.

Somebody on Twitter asked:

What did you learn in 2020 (besides how to make bread)?

I responded there:

• To grow food in pots.
• To cut men's hair.
• To cook more new things.
• That my cat loves me being home all the time.
• More about community-building.
• How to set up a nonprofit foundation.
• To cut people w/no morals or human decency out of my life.
• And yes, sourdough.

I was up against a character limit there, but I'm not here.

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, when staying at home was just starting to happen, I remember somebody asking: what will you do with this gift of time? I've had that in mind for most of the year. I miss seeing my coworkers, but I gained close to an hour back each work day in not commuting, and I gained a lot of flexibility. My team tries to work mostly normal hours for the sake of collaboration, but everybody recognizes that people have other demands on their attention too. The parents trying to work while their kids are at home attending school via Zoom gave me the opportunity to attend that mid-day (virtual) class or non-work meeting, and the flexibility to tend to things around the house while working. As one small example, sourdough -- it's a two-day process that doesn't require a lot of attention at any one time, but requires availability that wouldn't have been possible were I going to the office every day. Before this year, bread came from a store/bakery or out of a bread machine, only.

Both of us working from home is sometimes frustrating when one or the other of us has meetings, but we're also spending more time together throughout the day and that's very nice. We eat lunch together, every day, in addition to dinner. Sure, this means I'm not making things that I like but he doesn't (that I would have normally made for lunches at the office), but on the other hand, because I'm not limited to things that pack well, we're eating better, I think. Not always healthy, but less crap, more stuff made from scratch. I even grew some of it, which was new to me.

I only cut his hair the once. He held off for a long time back in the spring, thinking it would be possible to see a barber soon, but soon kept moving. He did a lot of it himself; I did the parts he couldn't see or reach. Men's hair technology sure is different from women's.

At the beginning of the year the evil deeds from people who should know better at Stack Exchange were still doing a lot of damage. It wasn't just what they did to me; they did some other nasty, bone-headed things early in 2020 and then throughout the year. A couple of the employees they drove out shared some things publicly after. (Pro tip: don't fire someone who knows about your dirty laundry without securing an NDA.) The folks there are majorly screwed up, and a couple of people I once thought decent folks in bad situations have shown themselves to be lacking in ethics and human decency. I'm well to be rid of their lies and malice.

Frustrating as it was to lose some good communities there, I've spent this year working to build the next generation at Codidact, and I'm very happy with where we are. We're building an open-source platform for Q&A and so much more, learning from those who have come before and building things that serve communities better. While our all-volunteer team is small and that limits us sometimes, we're flexible and responsive and working with our communities, and that shows. We have about a dozen communities up and running on our network now (including Judaism, yay! with some folks from Mi Yodeya), with more to come. Some of them are doing some novel things that weren't possible Somewhere Else. I'm the Community Lead, and while I had a fair bit of experience as a moderator on communities with varying characteristics, this role has allowed me to stretch and learn even more. It turns out this role makes me the most logical person to do "product management" and bug/feature prioritization and a fair bit of QA, too. Cool!

I'm now a board member; The Codidact Foundation was incorporated in November as a non-profit (I just got the confirmation letter from Companies House this week) and we'll now seek charity status. As soon as we can get a bank in pandemic times to let us open an account we'll be able to take donations and presumably get ourselves some better servers. This is all very exciting for me, and it's neat to be working with a worldwide team with quite a mix of backgrounds. Our major contributors include students and software developers and an ambulance dispatcher and a soldier and an accountant, among others.

Don't get me wrong; 2020 has been terrible in many ways. People close to me have died and I couldn't even be with or hug people, just be on Zoom. Friends and one family member are dealing with health challenges. The pandemic has greatly impeded my congregation (and so many others!). Nearly a year of not being able to socialize, go to restaurants, take in entertainment, hold conventions, attend Shabbat services, or do "normal life things" is wearing. Knowing that it's going to be at least many more months is sobering. (I'm going to call it now: I think Pennsic will be either cancelled again or severely hobbled and small.)

I'm glad to have the kind of job I can do from home; many people don't. And something I left off of that list on Twitter: I've learned how to work from home pretty effectively. I'd like some more human contact in three dimensions, but when (let's say "when", not "if") the pandemic is finally under some degree of control, I'll be able to get that from places other than work. I've learned more solidly that I could handle working for a company that's all-remote -- I suspected as much when I applied for such a position a few years back, but now I've seen it. And my employer has learned that remote works too; finally most of our engineering positions are now listed as "anywhere" instead of just the two cities in which we have engineering teams.

On the larger scale, 2020 has been a year of plague and violence and tyranny and unrest and hate and division. In the much smaller scale here at Chez Cellio, there has been good along with the bad, and I'm thankful for them.

My synagogue streamed its services, with some parts recorded in advance (like all the student torah readers) and some parts live. They assumed that people would check email and click links on Rosh Hashana (we say we're "inclusive" but we don't really mean it), and after much pushing I was able to get the stream link for Saturday morning mere moments before sundown Friday so I could set it up in advance.

During the service our (interim) rabbi said "this is live" and as proof, held up the day's New York Times. Which is how I found out the sad news of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing. (And now I fear even more for our country.)

It did not feel like a service, which didn't surprise me. I mostly prayed on my own instead, sometimes badly (there's a lot of stuff we don't say the rest of the year so I'm not fluent), but I listened to the torah reading and the sermon. The stream froze near the end, during the announcements after the sermon and before Aleinu. All of which strengthened my resolve for today.

Even if the technology were to be reliable, I just plain do not consider this an option for Yom Kippur. My choices are to pray it at home, badly, and hope to somehow connect on the holiest day of the year against those odds, or to join people who are gathering in person. Last month I contacted the Chabad rabbi, explained my situation, and asked if there were any possibility that they would have socially-distant room for anybody beyond their regulars. (I said I was perfectly willing to do the Rabbi Hillel thing and stand outside an open window. Alas, the windows in their sanctuary do not open.) He said yes, so I made reservations for Yom Kippur and also for this morning -- Rosh Hashana is two days, so I figured (in advance) that if the first day bombed, I could at least go the second day, including hearing the shofar.

They set up the space carefully, with single chairs appropriately distanced and some clusters of chairs for family groups. (They required reservations from everyone, including indicating group size, so they could plan for this.) There was a sort of "tent" around the prayer leader -- clear heavy plastic walls but open at the top, well above people's heads. This is also where they read the torah. The people who had aliyot (torah honors) said the blessings from a safe distance. Singing was restrained. The shofar blower was well distanced, and I couldn't tell for sure but there might have been a cover of some sort on the end the air comes out. Everybody wore masks, including while inside that "tent". (I couldn't see what the shofar blower did.)

Only once before have I been to a Rosh Hashana service that wasn't Reform, and that one (Conservative) was early on when I didn't know very much yet. So I either forgot or never knew some things: that Unataneh Tokef is during the musaf service not the main one, that apparently there are liturgical differences between the two days (don't know what, but the book had "RH 1" and "RH 2" versions of the Amidah), and that the shofar service doesn't require the calls.

On that last: I'm used to somebody calling each note, so the caller says "tekiah" (for instance) and then the shofar-blower blows a "tekiah". This was different. The prayer book specified what the notes were, as expected, and the blower just blew them. The book also had instructions, one-third and two-thirds of the way through the first set, to silently confess here. It didn't provide words (like Vidui), so I interpreted that as free-form. And without the verbal distraction of somebody saying the names of the shofar calls, I could do that -- I could listen to the shofar, let it inspire me, say words to God against that backdrop, and feel like I was doing something. It was a powerful experience.

If, heaven forbid, we are still streaming services a year from now, I'll ditch my Reform congregation and go to an Orthodox service instead. It's possible that I'll do that anyway. Meanwhile, I can attend services for Yom Kippur in person, and based on what I felt today, it seems likely that I will have a meaningful experience. That's important to me in any year, but especially this year on the heels of events beyond my control ruining the high holy days for me last year.

Question for anybody who's read this far: how do you fill the gap on Yom Kippur afternoon? In the Before Times my synagogue had classes and usually a dramatic presentation of the Yonah story to fill the time, so you could show up in the morning and not leave until it was over. This year I'll need to fill a stretch of several hours in some way appropriate to the day.

It's generally held among professional writers (and presumably some others) that constructs of the form "for more information click here", with "here" being a hyperlink, is not good style. It's far better, in general, to incorporate some clue about the content into the link -- "See the formatting help for more information", with "formatting help" being a link to documentation, provides more information at a glance and just reads less clunkily.

When answering questions on sites like Stack Exchange and Codidact, one sometimes wants to refer to another answer (for example to elaborate on it or disagree with a point made in it). I posted such an answer recently and used link text of "another answer" instead of "Joe's answer". If I had said "Joe's answer", somebody who's just read that answer would have context without having to go look. Someone who knows my general writing style asked me why I used the vaguer formation.

This is my general style on sites like these now, and I do actually have a reason. Two, actually, the more significant of which is caring about people's feelings.

On Stack Exchange, Codidact, TopAnswers, and presumably others with which I'm less familiar, users can change their display names. Using a name as text rather than an '@'-reference in a link can thus decay. I've seen too many posts that mention "Joe's answer" but there's no Joe evident on the page now, years after that text was written. So that's confusing and I try to be careful; some people change names frequently, leaving trails of dead references in their wakes.

But it's not just about avoiding confusion. For me this name-avoidant practice crystalized some years ago when a prominent SE user transitioned gender. I realized that old posts of mine (from before I was careful about this) now dead-named this person. Ouch! Also maybe dead-pronouned, though if you write posts in a gender-neutral way like I try to in such contexts, you can minimize that damage.

We don't know who's going to be someone different later. My desire to attribute properly is at odds with my desire to account for future changes that affect writing I might not actively maintain. For in-page references the post is right there; omitting the name in favor of a generic reference is not harmful and is more future-proof. For regular citations, I attribute by name because giving credit is important, and just do my best.

I know that people who transition -- even just names, let alone gender -- just have to deal with the fact that they had lives before and those references don't vanish. My friend Owen understands that sometimes we need to talk about Zoe. But sometimes we can do a small thing to alleviate a little bit of unnecessary frustration and not make people's lives more difficult. It seems worth doing in these cases where the cost of being mindful of these possibilities is small.

I don't do this everywhere. My blog, being more personal in nature, is more likely to refer to people by name, use gendered pronouns, and otherwise bake in current context. My blog isn't a public knowledge repository like Codidact is. We write differently for Wikipedia, Codidact, blogs, and email, and that's ok.

On Rosh Hashana morning I closed my eyes during t'kiah g'dolah, listening to the faint cry grow louder, stronger, more earnest with each passing moment. I imagined myself at the foot of Har Sinai, hearing but not seeing the divine shofar blast, taking in but not understanding the thunder and smoke as God prepared to speak. At Har Sinai and in services in my congregation both, I was in the presence of the awesome, fearsome God who could, in an instant, judge me for death or for life. Reflecting on my failings of the last year (and longer), I knew I had not truly earned the outcome I prayed for, but that somehow God might accept my teshuva anyway if I do it and mean it.

"Arise, you slumberers, from your slumber", the Rambam proclaims, "you are wasting your years in vain pursuits that neither profit nor save". I've read those words in our machzor every year, but this year they jumped out at me and then followed me home for more examination. The Rambam isn't talking about the relaxation and fun we all need in our lives, I don't think; he's talking about the pursuits that we put real effort into without gain.

Like a certain online community I've helped build over the last two years, only to see it go in a damaging direction while its custodians look on and do nothing. Perhaps I should have known that any "neutral" religion-related community would eventually be dominated by evangelical Christians who do not see their own bias. I've been trying to set the community back on its original course of respectful dialogue, but now I realize my efforts are ineffective. I could keep trying, but this year's lone shofar called me to re-evaluate this vain pursuit that neither profits nor saves. There are others who need my attention more, chief among them my own neshama, my own soul/spirit.

The Unetaneh Tokef prayer tells us that on Rosh Hashana it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die, ...who shall be troubled and who shall be tranquil. Last year it seems I was decreed to be among the troubled; this year may I merit to be among the tranquil.

-------------------------

Related thoughts, and a discussion of site direction. And yes, this was the subject of my "sunk costs" post back in March; obviously I didn't manage to stay gone after I left.

jducoeur gave me: Faith. Family. Communication. Study. Music. Language. Service.

( Read more... )