Barriers to consistent and systematic enforcement

Mitch

15:44

@DanBron You're taking this very slight mechanism way too seriously. Why aren't you screaming bloody murder about the idea of closing or deleting or locking. In comparison, protection is about as minimal as it gets? (a single upvote for rep allows a user past this)

@DanBron THat's not correct. You can protect questions whether they have an answer by a 1 rep author or not. It just comes up more easily that way.

Dan Bron

15:56

@Mitch I am screaming bloody murder about closure, too. Scroll back up or visit the original thread of comments. My position is that Tom (tchrist) has a vendetta against pejorative questions. He goes out of his way to shut them down, regardless of their other merits or demerits. He does not do this with any other types of Qs, even if they share the ostensible demerits of the pejorative questions he does shut down.

And by "shut down", I mean: first, closing them on any pretext he can find, finding a quasi-duplicate (which, to his credit, he's amazingly good at) if no other option presents itself. And second, in the cases where there is not even an ostensible reason for closure, then his backup plan is protection. He does this as a weak form of closure. It's punitive. It's intended to approximate closure to the best degree available when closure isn't a direct option.

Mitch

@DanBron Oh. OK. Then we've been all discussing and worrying about one very particular mechanism when really you have concerns about behavior (and tangentially this mechanism is involved).

@DanBron So this is the real issue

Dan Bron

And "it comes up more easily that way" because protection is meant to be reactive to actual problems the site actually experienced, not hypothetical ones.

I brought up all these substansive issues in the original thread, and elaborated on them at length.

MetaEd started this room to focus in on a smaller area, which he thinks merits closer attention.

I'd still like satisfaction on the larger issue, but if we make incremental progress by addressing punitive preemptive protection, at least it's a start.

@mitch

Mitch

@DanBron I hesitate to respond to this because I don't want to encourage more discussion on this here at this time because it's more clear that the real issue that you're concerned with is closing of pejorative related questions by tchrist. But I disagree about the difference between hypothetical and actual. Closing prevents hypothetical answers coming in. We can discuss that but probably should be done elsewhere (according to @MetaEd's desired restrictions on this room.

@DanBron Which is the larger issue? Misuse of enforcement?

Is your issue really misuse of enforcement by a particular person?

Dan Bron

Selective enforcement of site rules by elected mods in pursuit of censoring specific kinds of content against which they hold a personal prejudice

in this instance, as displayed by Tom against questions requesting pejorative language

Mitch

@DanBron OK, I think that is a reasonable discussion.

Now that we've set the stage...

Dan Bron

16:07

Wait, before we get into that.

Can I ask a favor of you?

Mitch

Snacktime?

Dan Bron

No, can you read the comment chain starting here:

-1. Don’t do that. It’s an abuse of the tools (not an abuse of mod power, to be clear, just abuse of regular 20K+ user tools). We don’t proactively protect questions; that tool is intended to be retroactive and is usually applied to questions which have gotten too much attention, instead of not enough. And doing so simply shoots ourselves in the foot: it makes it even harder to attract new users with a real interest in English, which is the remedy ColleenV (also a mod on ELL) suggests for your “how to raise quality on ELL thread”. Protection isn’t mini-closure, don’t abuse it as if it is — Dan Bron Jan 22 at 21:06

Mitch

@DanBron Dammit

Dan Bron

So we share the same background and context?

That will make further development of the conversation more effective.

Mitch

Un momentito

Dan Bron

16:09

k

Mitch

reading

more reading

OMG so much more to read

Dan Bron

haha, I know.

the reason I asked you to read it first was precisely because there's so much material

and I didn't want to put you through rehashing it all in chat

Mitch

haha just finished looking at tchrists meta question about 'mean spirited requests'

OK, now that I've read it...

gosh 'snacktime' keeps popping into my head

OK...so now what?

Dan Bron

what is snacktime? just the word? or is a song/reference/meme?

Now whatever you were going to do after you typed "Now that we've set the stage..."

Mitch

oh. no. literally. I want a snack. But I feel I should wait for lunch. Is it too late for elevenses?

Oh OK. stage set.

on to the play.

Dan Bron

16:20

Or you can just tell me your thoughts on the various positions expounded on in that comment chain

I'm easy

Mitch

So I'll start with a qualification.

Dan Bron

It's always 11 somewhere...

Mitch

It's hard to be unbiased

which can pull in many different ways.

that was vague

but I'll leave it for the moment.

Dan Bron

yes ... unbiased like "we must forgive tchrist for his personal pet peeves, everyone has them"

or "it's hard to be unbiased because you [Dan] were shrill and obnoxious in that thread..."

or something else?

ok, we can leave it.

Mitch

I agree with most of the others in that thread, to the extent that, though I see the potential for abuse in using any of the mechanisms on SE, I didn't see that with tchrist and pejoratives. What I could possibly see is that with his large interest and volume in tagging, he may have made mistakes ('myrmidon' is a pejorative? A pretty weird one in Modern English), but I don't see a hint of abuse.

@DanBron biased in that I see those comments in that thread by other long term ELUers and since I agree with what they said, when I then see their name, that just strengthens and confirms my agreement.

Dan Bron

16:25

I'm ok with that kind of bias. That's what it means to know someone, know a community, and respect them and their perspectives

I don't just see potential abuse, I see actualized abuse by tchrist

I think maybe my perspective would be easier to see if I went and collected the data and just showed everyone

Mitch

@DanBron As to this my bias is not about you yourself, but that your strength of pursuit of this topic sounds like tchrist must have acted on a particular one of your items

Dan Bron

None of my items.

I rarely ask questions.

I have nothing against tchrist as a mod or a person. As a mod, he's made great changes in being more active and closing down the kinds of questions I think are harmful to the site, to wit lazy unresearched questions.

As a person I've been a big fan of his since I was a young impressionable Perler and was a bit star struck when I had my first conversation with him here

Mitch

It could have been a question you wanted to answer got closed. Or you just disagree about the pejorative idea altogether (did you see my answer to tchrists meta-question?

Dan Bron

I still have that conversation bookmarked. That and one with Peter Shor of Shor's algorithm fame.

I am worried more generally about abuse of power. That's one of my hang ups more broadly in life and politics. And I try to divorce it drom the person who's engaged in it and my other impressions of him, lest it color my vision.

No, I promise you, it has nothing to do with any question or post I care about. None at all.

This is not revenge in any way.

What I'm trying to highlight is that I watch the site closely, and probably in more real time than almost anyone else while I'm active.

Mitch

@DanBron many of the questions he protected are ones that are potentially harmful (popular HNQ about pejoratives, well-written so they don't get closed, but in the end mean-spirited)

Dan Bron

16:30

And what I've seen again and again with tchrist is a selective enforcement of closure and protection on questions which ask for insulting language.

That's not the only questions he acts on, as I said, he's a good mod otherwise.

Mitch

@DanBron There have been much more explicit abuses of power. (a mod reopening their own question).

Dan Bron

but he does act disproportionately immediately and comprehensively on these types of question swhile he's online

disproportionate to both his other activity (more on that in a moment) as well as disproportionate to how others on the site act on such questions

he's got a vendetta, and he's using his mod powers and status to support it

@Mitch I think this is where you and I may be disconnected. I do not see "mean spirited questions" as any less worthy of our attention or our answers than any other class.

Mitch

tchrists method was (as far as I'm concerned) abuse free: tagging and protecting allows non-driveby answers, prevents Yahoo-like answers, in fact staying away from abuse.

Dan Bron

I think treating any type of question based on its topic, rather than its qualities, as second class citizens is objectionable

I understand that position, but what I am saying is he only applies those protections (in the general sense) to pejorative questions

adn leaves all the other questions which will have those exact same downsides, including drive-by answers, Yahoo! quality, and HNQ bait alone

conclusion: he's not shutting down these questions for those qualities

because he doesn't shut down any other questions with those qualities

he leaves those for the rest of us to police and janitor-ize

he's shutting down questions which tickle his own pet peeve

and we have ample evidence of it

Mitch

@DanBron a vendetta against pejoration? Sure, it's obvious he doesn't like it, but in the interests of the site, he doesn't prevent it or abuse his powers about it, and his actions are intended to make the site better (and I think he's been successful at that when he's acted).

Dan Bron

16:35

@Mitch going back to this <--, let's stop those abuses of power too (though I think Yochi is simply, well, not tracking as closely). But just because someone is out there murdering doesn't mean we permit petty larceny.

@Mitch He does prevent it, he does abuse his powers about it, and his actions are intended to make the site better .. for him and the stuff he likes. This is my point.

He's a cop that only stop&frisks people driving blue volvos

red volvos are fine, camries are fine. blue volvos are verboten

Mitch

@DanBron OK. In general that might be a bad thing (to only act on one particular set in a bad way, like hammer-closing all questions involving religious terminology). But his actions aren't abusive, they're just cleaning up, and then for a subject that is not particularly needing moral support.

Dan Bron

What I think I'm hearing from you, and correct me if I'm wrong, is you agree with tchrist's ethical framework, and you like that he shuts down pejorative questions.

Is that a fair statement?

Any use of power for one's personal purposes, to satisfy one's own prejudices, is an abuse, and should not be tolerated. I absolutely loathe slippery slope arguments, but this one is very close to my heart. I do not like to see even the first tenuous threads of this kind of poisonous fog.

Lest it become a miasma and choke all of us.

Mitch

@DanBron Sure. That's another meta-discussion about rule of law and consistency in enforcement... uh... actually I'm entirely wrong,@MetaEd made that topic explicit here.

Dan Bron

This is why I'm so worried. It's not that I have a particular love for pejorative questions, mostly they don't interest me. It's that I have a particular horror of power abuse.

Yes, you're in the right place for that discussion.

And we are having it.

Mitch

@DanBron I don't see that at all in general. And I don't see it in this small context of pejoration (though it is more likely to be a problem given his activity around it). Looking at his activity I don't see any problem. Also, in that comment thread, the other mods agree with me)

Dan Bron

16:41

As I said, I think to make any headway with people who simply do not believe me, because they don't track the site as closely as I do or in as real time, I will simply have to go through the exercise of gathering the data.

But I know exactly what it will say.

And then I wonder what excuses people will make not to act on it. (This is not an indictment, I actually am projecting people will not want to react to the actual data in a way which prohibits this abuse of power, so I'm trying to proactive defend against any likely deflections.)

If you want to see the 2 posts that came back to back which tchrist exercised editorial control over, yet again, that prompted my long shrill rant on Meta, here's one

@tchrist Please do not exercise editorial control over the site. That you don’t like questions for pejorative SWRs doesn’t give you license to unilaterally close them, and leave other questions of similar quality for the members to clean up. Reopen this. — Dan Bron Jan 21 at 19:25

Mitch

@DanBron I don't mind it. I wouldn't have gone so far as to put energy into it. I think tags are generally useless to edit. But the fact that questions that are about calling names have been given a special tag, I don't think that's a bad thing. I also agree with tchrist that those kinds of questions (with there puerile motivation) should be discouraged. I don't know what you mean by 'ethical framework' that seems a little too...thorny.

Dan Bron

and this is the other

english.stackexchange.com/questions/427384/…

but remember these were merely the final 2 straws that broke the camel's back

Mitch

I think that a lot of mod-hammer problems could be alleviated by having two people. One to hammer, and another to be forced (or really notified) that they should vote up or down). So some minimal oversight.

Dan Bron

most of the straws I didn't even bother yelling at tchrist about, because I'd done it so many times in the past, and it was like yelling at a brick wall

Mitch

@DanBron But mods are editors. Content editors. Actually everyone is an editor but some have more power (as given by the community)

Dan Bron

16:47

@Mitch I'm not at all worried about the tag. I only brought it up as evidence that tchrist has a huge hangup about these types of questions.

I'm worried about (a) the prejudiced closures and (b) the prejudiced protections where he can't get the closures to stick

and yes, 4-eyes reviews would be nice, but it also runs the risk of mod-clique-dom, as police are wont to protect other police even when they know they've done wrong, in order to sace face for the force as a unit

and also that a mini-culture of "no pejorative questions" might get inculcated among the small group fo 5-7 mods, regardless of the broader community's feelings about them

and thus remove the major benefit of having a 4-eyes review (because it dilutes the independence of the review)

@Mitch Yes, but what I'm saying is that certain mods use their editorial powers on topics of discussion, not qualities of the post, and ignore other low-quality questions when the topic doesn't tickle their hang-up. That is, they are selective about taking the mandate that "mods are human exception handlers; the community should do most moderation" seriously.

@Mitch I think all these points I'm making would seem less wooden to you, and less in need of rebuttal, if you didn't also share this idea that certain kinds of questions should be discouraged because of their topic, not their qualities.

Mitch

@DanBron You call it hangup. I think it is a reasonable thing to be pointed out and actively discouraged. I may disagree in detail about some of them, and in the judgement in particular, but for the most part these kinds of questions tend toward the poor.

Dan Bron

In other words, my instinct, which could be misguided, is that you are incentivized to defend this particular abuse of power, because it aligns with your own sensibilities, regardless of the larger issue of power abuse in general

Abuse of power is a serious problem even if we agree with the ends it is being used as a means to achieve

in fact, it's even more of a serious problem under those circumstances

Mitch

@DanBron See (mentioned again) my answer to tchrists meta-question that is where he started. It is, I think, particularly unbiased and says to judge question/answer on its merits.

Dan Bron

I feel a little surprise and a little dismay that I even have to point that out

Mitch

Of course, the point is that the poor merit has a great correlation with some content, especially here with pejoration

Dan Bron

16:54

Yes, it says that, but his actual activity on the site says otherwise. In other words, he pays lip service.

No, they are completely orthogonal topics.

Either he polices all questions with poor quality, which he doesn't, or he stops enforcing rules based on question topic, which he does.

This is a binary issue.

To treat it otherwise is precisely the problem.

To say otherwise is to make excuses.

I guess in the end I'll have to gather the data and make a big stink about this and embarrass some people.

Mitch

Yes, gather the data

Dan Bron

Because otherwise I feel I'm not being heard on a very dangerous topic.

yeah, that's where I had already landed prior to MetaEd launching this chat room.

I was hoping we could make progress here despite that.

But back to square one.

Mitch

make sure you also gather the other side, that is get a control group, questions that tchrist -hasn't- protected, and other mods and their behavior. and other types of things to compare.

but also...

Dan Bron

yes, I considered all those data points when I posted about gathering data in the original chain I pointed you to

It would be hypocritical of me to go data mining when my fundamental complaint is prejudicial reasoning

I do not intend to fall into that particular tarpit

Mitch

Here's an analogy. You're saying that tchrist is like a cop. And this cop has decided to stop and give a citation (not a ticket, a cost-free citation) to every car that leaves their turn signal on after a turn. He's really good at it. This cop often solves murder investigations and burglaries and directs traffic at stop lights that have lost power. He doesn't seem to stop people who forget to use their turn signal, at least not as often as those who forget to turn it off.

I'm not going to say "Jesus shit, tchrist, because of your turn-signal fetish, you have to stop".

Dan Bron

17:06

Let's make it simpler. There's a traffic cop. He's generally honest and good at his job. He pulls over dangerous drunk drivers. He rescues dogs who fall off the back of pickup trucks. And he makes traffic stops. The traffic stops are mostly justified, in the sense that there's a defensible reason written down in each of his stop log entries. "Broken tail light", "Obscured license plate", "Fumes from tailpipe", and so on.

What's not written down is the race of the people who he stops; that's not relevant to his police report. But it just so happens that a big chunk of them are, say, Canadian.

Mitch

I find it kinda weird that someone cares -that- much about turn-signals, but it doesn't bother me at all that he does it, and it doesn't seem like an abuse, and he does all these other things, and it doesn't seem like it could possibly lead to abuse (whereas there's all sorts of things other people could be doing that could lead that way)

Dan Bron

And what's also not written down is the number of cars he doesn't stop, including ones with broken tail lights, obscured plates, fumes.

Because overall he's not really concerned with those things. They are, in real life, not a big deal.

What is a big deal is being Canadian.

Mitch

@DanBron Those guys. Ugh. They're so ... northern

Dan Bron

But you can't suss that out from his police report.

@Mitch twitter.com/gordonlishbot/status/426739317508042752

My favorite invective lobbed at Canadians

Mitch

OK, like the other people on that thread, I think you're making way way way too big a deal out of this. You're twisting a philosophical argument into something that could be applied in many ways to arbitrary situations.

Dan Bron

17:09

(and, see, done right, pejoration can be fun!)

Mitch

@DanBron Just wait for the invasion...

Wait..._squints eyes_ which side are you on?

Literally

Dan Bron

I am making a big deal out of it. It's true. I don't deny it.

I'm making a big deal out of it, because in my ethical framework, power is dangerous, centralized power even more so, and while power can be used for good or ill, in order to justify it, to enjoy the fruits of good, we have to be ultra vigilant at the first whiffs of it being used for ill

it's not that this particular vendetta is such a big deal, it's that there's a vendetta being pursued with diamond-powers at all.

Mitch

Look I hate the possibility of corruption too. But Redirect your energies into that, not this 'pejorative' thing.

Dan Bron

For example, I would have zero issue if tchrist could case a single close vote like a regular user to express his individual opinion that the question should be closed, and others could so the same, and consensus could emerge

but he cannot do that, he's got the golden hammer now, so he has to be much more careful about where he swings it

Let's not bring [redacted] into this.

Mitch

@DanBron redacted!

Dan Bron

17:13

@Mitch Of the Canadian border? The 'Murica, Fuck Yeah side. Of the pejoration question? I could take it or leave it; that topic doesn't sway me either way. It's whether the question is interesting and reasonably researched which makes it good or bad to me.

Mitch

You know what I can't stand on ELU? It's when we get questions like what do you call a girl that some relationship thing. These questions might have an interesting linguistic issue to them, but they're almost universally just made by idiotic teenage boys.

Dan Bron

Yeah, those are boring. But I remember being similarly-motivated as an idiotic teenage boy, so I have some sympathy.

I would like to see the site skew more towards Language-Log style content.

Mitch

There. That's the power I would abuse. Hammer delete those thinly or not at all veiled juvenile misogynistic questions. Ugh

Dan Bron

And get a larger influx of novel and interesting questions.

Mitch

But I might promote fart questions. Those are great

@DanBron Sure. Just don't piss on this site with them

@DanBron Exactly.

Dan Bron

17:18

My personal outlook on that is we should be investigating emerging slang more closely. Fruitful field, interesting stuff, highly-available data (twitter, internet in general), but not yet collated and settled in reference works.

Farts are hilarious, I'm not going to lie.

Mitch

Excellent discussion...I have to get lunch now (OK to be honest I don't have to, I really really want to) and I need to hear about the upcoming Megan Markle and some royal wedding.

Also. tchrist's actions on pejoratives are pretty far away from abuse and probably should be encouraged.

Ta!

Andrew Leach

22:48

@DanBron If I might state the obvious, it is impossible to police all questions. To make an analogy, a fruitful method is akin to pulling over Citroen Saxos with teenage occupants. There is always something to find, even if it's only a broken tail-light.

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Barriers to consistent and systematic…