Room for verbose and BESW - 2017-02-21

last day (14 days later) »

5:31 AM

I am not trying to be flippant, and please excuse me if I come across that way. I was just curious about your declining the moderator nomination. I know almost nothing about the Bahá'í faith, but if what I understand is correct, community service is a religious obligation for adherents. You would make an excellent moderator: your faith would obligate you to work for unity, knowledge, and community harmony; your subject expertise qualifies you;

and you are valued by the group. So I was sad and perplexed at your declining the nomination.

I do believe that Emrakul, Mithrandir, Hamlet, etc. would make great mods too, but I wanted to just state that you would have gotten my vote in a nanosecond.

I guess having to choose from among lots and lots of well-qualified peeps for mods is a good problem to have, though. Augurs well for the site.

6:32 AM

@verbose That is, indeed, a problem more sites should have!

You're right that the Baha'i Faith is big on community service and the like. But my personal situation makes moderation a service I can't realistically provide.

I'm online and casually available most of the day and night because I'm a self-employed graphic designer and I'm my dad's primary caregiver. That means I can be in chat, leave comments, that kind of thing, a lot.

But moderation requires more consistency than I can promise, and demands emotional energy that I can't spare.

Ah. I'm a primary caregiver too, which explains my odd hours and behavior on the site as well.

And I understand completely. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry.

I'm a much better asset to a Stack site as a knowledgeable citizen because I get to set my own terms for interaction with the site and I can walk away from problems without betraying any trust.

That is a very mature perspective: knowing the best way you can be useful. I respect that.

Thank you for being so candid.

My interactions remain mostly positive primarily because I do just walk away when it would get ugly.

Far more than I had any right to expect.

I find that having to look after a person whose health is fragile puts petty internet disputes in marvelous perspective :)

6:38 AM

[grin] I've been asked to moderate Stacks before. I've talked with moderators, observed them closely, and been very very tempted on RPG.SE. The ego is pleased, but realistically it'd be a nightmare.

I see. I am completely ignorant of what a mod's life is like, but I can imagine it would take a lot of emotional energy just to stay calm, detached, and reasonable in the face of the chaos.

If I'd be a poor moderator on RPG.SE, where I love the material and the community is self-moderating to an astonishing degree, I'd be a HORRID moderator for a Stack with a topic that I'm cynical about and a community of citizens who are still mostly behaving like members of whatever other community they're most active in.

I have not had the opportunity to observe how any of the active participants on this site behave in their other communities, but it does seem to me that personal interactions between them are based on a lot of history I don't know.

So what you say about their behavior makes sense to me.

(Not that RPG.SE is flawless. We've had horrible spats on meta that left deep scars in the community which we're having to consciously work to overcome.)

I must respectfully disagree that you would make a horrid moderator. I think you have too much integrity for that.

6:44 AM

Heh, thanks.

I will agree with you that being a moderator would not be a good choice for you given your present circumstances, but that's where our agreement ends :-)

And it is right for the community that you make a wise choice to begin with.

All other things being perfect, I'd be willing to try moderating a Stack. But no, at best I'd burn out quickly.

I mean, we would not be well served to have you burn out and leave, which we risk if we twist your arm into modding

heh we both came up with burnout simultaneously

BTW I dropped out of a PhD program in literature for reasons sorta similar to your cynicism toward Anglo-American criticism

What got to me was not so much the arcane ivory tower nature of the discussion; what got to me was the cognitive dissonance between maintaining that hortus conclusus atmosphere while simultaneously insisting that the work being done was deeply important for social justice.

I've seen mods burn out. It's... sad. There's an ongoing debate about whether it's better to have mods elected for life-until-retirement (forcing mods to speak up when they're ready to go, which usually means they wait too long and the community suffers from their burnout) or regularly forced to run for re-election (so they make moderation choices based on popularity).

I can imagine it would be.

And that is an interesting debate.

I wonder whether there could be term limits. "You can be a mod for two years, then you have to skip at least one election cycle before running again."

That assumes regular elections, though, and AFAIK those aren't a thing

6:52 AM

re: social justice and academia, a lot of my design work is for a local university on a peri-colonial Pacific island, where the university is under the US Department of Education and most of the administration is white.

Yeah, elections are held when a moderation seat needs to be filled: usually to replace a retiring moderator, sometimes because the site's grown enough to need an extra one.

afk driving home

Drive safe.

1 hour later…

8:23 AM

@verbose I think term limits would impose some practical problems. In some sites, there just aren't enough really qualified folks to support that kind of turnover; it'd require some radical accompaniment and community development projects the likes of which the Stack has never made reliably successful.

And for most sites it'd create an inconsistent moderation experience as each period would be marked by a new set of mods learning the tools and philosophies and developing their own patterns and habits. These aren't insurmountable obstacles, but the Stack's design inertia would make it unlikely/difficult that they'd be addressed efficiently before catastrophic damage was done to community cohesion.

I believe that by hiring community managers, etc, the Stack is trying to invest in such community development projects?

But your point is well taken, that for now it is not a viable scenario.

[wry] The last time anyone I know tried to contact a CM (about an elected mod's behaviour), he emailed them to follow up three months later and they said "Oops, that got lost in the shuffle, we'll look into it now!" and then vanished again.

Really, what Stacks could use is more community education efforts. Consolidating the accumulated folk wisdom of meta.se and the overflow blog into a more accessible form; making basic Stack philosophies more visible, like the emergent folksonomy of tagging and the difference between up/down and close voting; all the stuff every Stack has to re-teach itself over and over again.

There's a really great core of philosophies and tools the Stack offers, and understanding them leads directly to more active and constructive participation. But tracking them down feels like one of those "if you don't know it's there you'll never find it" hidden picture games.

8:42 AM

I suppose that does explain something that has puzzled me heretofore. I've wondered why the same set of folks get large rep and associated privileges, such as monitoring close votes or other community-watchdog type activities, across so many different sites

I guess they just understand the system and so can work more efficiently to gain the trust of the community

The moderators on rpg.se were instrumental in showing me --and the whole community-- what Stack can really offer. But I look at the other communities and see elected moderators who didn't know Good Subjective/Bad Subjective was more than a jargon phrase, who thought rigid tagging structures should be put in place to anticipate problems rather than to solve them, who are unaware of the amazing self-analysis work done by christianity.se and how it can benefit every Stack...

Yeah, I've also seen a lot of folks who have picked up the forms of Stack Exchange dialogue but aren't familiar with its content.

haha

That chicken paper was a submission to some scam conference IIRC?

I suppose one can hope that the mods on Literature are like those on RPG, then. I hope the presence of experienced and thoughtful folks like you will also help steer the community in the most useful direction it can go.

At the end of the day, though, I hope I am philosophical enough to know that whether the very best or the very worst happens, it is all vanity anyway.

At least some of the likely candidates are thoughtful, experienced, and/or open to education and admitting they're wrong.

Some seem very young; I was quite ... surprised with Mithrandir said he needed his parents' permission to serve as a mod.

and someone else (I forget who? HDE_with_numerals perhaps) said "yeah, I had that issue too"

9:01 AM

Yeah, that can take some getting used to.

I wasn't necessarily expecting folks in their fifties, or even thirties, but, y'know, I thought maybe twenties?

Heh. I know I would've been a better mod at 19 than at 25. But nobody deserved me as a mod at 16.

(I'm in my early 30s now.)

Oh, why is that? The better at 19 than at 25, I mean.

If I may ask.

Mmm, there's a balance between fearlessness and self-awareness that makes for some good moderation material, and in my early/mid twenties I hit a tipping point into smugness that took a while to dig out of.

I see.

I'm not that smug any more, he said smugly.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

9:11 AM

Exactly.

A primary quality in a good Stack mod is the ability to say "No, that's not on fire" and step back, trusting the community to self-correct.

I see.

9:31 AM

I was searching for a message and noticed that you were talking about me o_o

@verbose yep, I'm 14 years old.

How very interesting. I had no idea that these rooms were searchable; I rather thought that if I started a chat with, say, BESW, that the room was accessible only to the two of us.

H'm, I don't think I said anything incriminating.

Only mods can create rooms that are private.

It created a bit of a problem over on Puzzling :/

Well I hope BESW knew that when we started chatting.

Aye.

Everything on the Stack is seeded to the Googles.

And for the chat-specific search on the Stack, you can search "all rooms" just by not specifying any particular one.

That's what I was doing...

9:38 AM

If 14 year olds are reading my answers, I suppose I could try and moderate my language. I'm given to salt.

Yes, please.

But y'know what, fuck it.

Whoops. Sorry about that BESW.

There's a great number of reasons to use gentle language on the Stack. A minor one is that the minimum age for membership is 13.

In any case, Mithrandir, how did you know we were talking about you and not, say, Ian McKellen?

...I was searching for my name?

9:40 AM

A major one is that the Stack network's target audience is professionals during their working hours, and getting a reputation for profanity won't do anybody any favours in making it accessible to that demographic.

but it is a name for Gandalf. We could have been discussing LoTR.

@verbose chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=Mithrandir+&user=&room=

@verbose Presumably it was a search like this one, which provides context.

Ah.

Anyway, I'll let you continue your conversation. Bye.

9:45 AM

Well I didn't mean to drive him off....

I'm just covering myself in glory I see.

wrt salt, I tend to think of my audience as my peers, and I tend not to think of my peers as being offended by salt.

But I guess I should think of the audience more like students. I don't swear in front of my students.

Thanks for the salutary reminder.

Yeah, Stacktiquette is... nebulous at best? The "Be Nice" guideline is deliberately vague because the tighter you close your fist on defining appropriate behaviour, the more escapes through your fingers. And the older/more programming-focused Stacks have a LOT of cultural inertia against changing their habits.

I came to Stack via Overflow, which of course is famously not nice.

Last year a bunch of C# chatters made their own chat room attached to RPG.SE, and never did figure out why a Mjolnir of blues told them to play nice, and why meta.se wouldn't respond to their cries of "freeze peach!"

I think my favourite part was when they tried to make the room private in order to keep elected moderators out of it.

[popcorn]

Well then I'm in good company. And I'm glad that I said only nice things about Mithrandir and the others I named.

I'd've done that in any case; better to highlight the positive.

> Not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed, nor can everything that he can disclose be regarded as timely, nor can every timely utterance be considered as suited to the capacity of those who hear it.
- Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, LXXXIX

> Therefore an enlightened man of wisdom should primarily speak with words as mild as milk, that the children of men may be nurtured and edified thereby and may attain the ultimate goal of human existence which is the station of true understanding and nobility. And likewise He saith: One word is like unto springtime causing the tender saplings of the rose-garden of knowledge to become verdant and flourishing, while another word is even as a deadly poison. It behoveth a prudent man of wisdom to speak with utmost leniency and forbearance so that the sweetness of his words may induce everyone…

9:57 AM

How odd. I was thinking of timeliness and capacity just this afternoon.

It's a fine needle to thread on the Stack.

(Not that it's ever easy but I find it's a bit easier with a smaller audience that you can look in the eyeballs.)

You raise several important points there; so many, that I'm not sure where to begin.

[grin] You may notice that I try to talk about the qualities I'd look for in a moderator, but not say which candidates I might think do or don't possess those qualities.

You may notice that I didn't ask. [grin]

The words about timeliness and capacity sadden me.

I was thinking of the wisdom of my gurus. (I mean that word in its original sense, indicating a sacred bond.)

I have been incredibly fortunate in them. Whenever I have asked for their guidance, they have been patient, loving, and generous with me. They have given freely of their knowledge; they have shared their wealth with me even unasked.

Yet I simply lack the capacity to benefit from it.

I was thinking to myself this afternoon: You ask them for some piece of knowledge, and they give it to you freely. It is as though a child, dazzled by some bright gemstones, asks to play with a necklace, and the parent lets the child do so. The child enjoys the play and then discards the necklace, completely unaware that he has just thrown away something rare, precious, and valuable.

The analogy is imperfect, in that a necklace is irreproducible (that's a word, isn't it?) and what the guru gives me to squander, the guru doesn't lose.

But I wonder why they spend their time and efforts in trying to make a silk purse out of this sow's ear, and marvel at their kindness.

10:15 AM

I've seen, many times, a kindness or mercy that seems to go unnoticed actually planted a seed that bears fruit many years later. It'd be arrogant to assume any of us knows who's worthy or unworthy--and that includes writing oneself off.

But equally, the service we do to others is also a service to ourselves. We develop our own qualities best through service to others, regardless of how it's received.

Thank you. I will take comfort in that. Perhaps by my incapacity in benefiting from their teachings, I have made them all the more glad when they do find students worthy of them.

I do in fact take very great pleasure in my fellow students' successes.

Heh. They probably also developed greater reservoirs of virtues like patience and mercy.

A bad student is after all the true test of a teacher :-)

Oh they had that to begin with. I once flat out asked one of them why she didn't just drive us out from the room.

She laughed and continued the lesson.

hee.

(Music lessons. These are my singing teachers. I've trained for some 25 years, and can't sing a note. Not their fault.)

10:23 AM

Wow. I wish I had that kind of perseverance.

Well, they only have to put up with me for an hour or so each week, and they have lots of actually gifted and conscientious students to make up for the futility I put them through.

It's not like I live with them and inflict myself on them 24/7.

I mean your perseverance.

Ah well. Thank you for this conversation. It has been very enriching for me, and I am indebted to you for your kindness and gentleness with me.

Oh.

It's more tilting at windmills, I think.

The pleasure is mine, but now I have to fry some vegan sausage. ta ta for now.

Enjoy.

last day (14 days later) »

Transcript for

Feb '1721

Room for verbose and BESW

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile