I don’t have exact rules or concepts because drifting off to bed but suggestion:
Either a rule that new users need to post in the introduction thread or that they are viewed with much more oversight when they don’t because this is not the first time someone has created a new account specifically to post about their pet peeve in 1 or 2 threads.
I agree that someone who has a narrow interest like that is more likely to be a bad actor.
However, I hesitate to make it a general rule that people must participate more broadly.
While there’s certainly the example of shitty bitcoin guy coming only to talk about some coin trash. I’ve seen in our Discord actually people who have come just to talk about train games without going into other channels much. I kind of want to allow that.
You know, I think that Rad’s on to something here. Mandating a post in the intro thread isn’t much, but it does at the very least prove that person read the rules, and there doesn’t have to be any further demands on participation. If they want to go ham on their pet peeve after that, they will, or they won’t. And most people here on good faith tend to post there anyway.
Thoughts after coin-guy
We had a little trolly coin guy. Let him go a little bit before banning. Perhaps I shouldn’t have let him go even that long when it was obvious from post 1 or 2 that it was going to be a ban. Either way, now they’re gone. But I want to discuss something more important.
One trolly guy shows up, and suddenly that one thread with the troll sees quite a lot of activity. I am guilty as well. Honestly, I’m probably the most guilty, but still not alone.
There have been lots of discussions about how the partisan, toxic, trolly content on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook is actually the content that sees the most engagement. When someone posts something controversial, that’s when you get a much larger amount of replying and commenting. There are also suggestions that this is perhaps why such platforms are loathe to ban the toxic users, as those are also the users who spur on the most activity.
And we see it here as well. In one thread a person can write a huge blog post breaking down the latest happenings in their geekery of choice. We read it, we give it a like, and then there are rarely replies or conversation. Someone who comes in and posts the most low quality wrong/bad/banworthy content and suddenly reply reply reply.
We can try to make the community as safe and welcoming as possible, but how do we get the kind of conversations on good content that we get on bad content? I thought, hey, maybe I’ll try to just do it myself. If I see good content, I’ll force myself to make a quality reply to maybe rev the engine a bit. The problem is that often there is nothing I can reply with that has any meaning or value. If I can’t think of something meaningful to contribute to the conversation, or at least have a question that I genuinely want to know the answer to (and Google can’t provide), what is there to say?
Lastly, I don’t know if it needs to be a violation of the code of conduct, but perhaps just a discouragement against engaging if a troll does appear? If a person does come that we know is shitty, let’s just not feed that troll. I did it the most, it was honestly kinda fun, that’s sort of the problem. Let’s have that be the last one, for old time’s sake.
Just requiring a post in the intro thread probably ok. There may be a setting I can have to enforce this automatically. I’ll look into it.
Ok, so there doesn’t seem to be a way to enforce it. I have edited the topic name to “Identify Yourself - Post Here First”.
I think what I will do is write a template for a welcome message that I can personally send directly to all new users. We’re approving all the new users by hand anyway, so that’s not difficult.
I can only speak for myself when I say that I didn’t find his trolling particularly engaging or entertaining. His argumentative style is nowhere near novel or unexpected.
I don’t have a solid answer for improving engagement on “good” posts. People have things they are interested in and that won’t always overlap with everyone else. I’ve gotten the impression most users here aren’t that interested in horror movies so I only make posts about ones that I can present a deep dive.
I believe I’ve made comments about it before that while part of the posting guidelines create an atmosphere of “write quality posts” that also creates a barrier to engagement, positive or negative. I’ve seen multiple users post that (in my understanding) they are more comfortable lurking because there is the perception that if that can’t make a substantive point they percieve that as failing the community, so they don’t post often.
I’m much more interested in not-deep dives on topics I’m only partially interested in. To me, a positive post is a few sentences and a link. A wall of text might be positive or not, but if I’m not in the mood for a deep dive, I’m not going to read it. Positive doesn’t mean deep or long.
And not everything needs to be substantive. On many topics, I’d much rather have an “interesting” or “fun” post.
I’ll be way more likely to watch a horror movie if you recommend 10 horror movies over the course of 10 weeks, each with a five sentence “why you should watch this”, and I chose to try one and then can discuss it here, rather than you rarely posting a deep dive where I don’t watch the movie and have nothing to contribute.
Even if we were to watch the movie, is there much to add after such a deep dive? I’ve always found that such posts leave very little air for any discussion.
I was just using a deep dive as an example of a good post. I was not trying to say that there is some correlation between length/depth and quality.
I think this is a tough line to draw, but I agree with the principle. I did see some initial good-faith engagement from the community (at least, I perceived it as such) in trying to suss out what that poster was really about, and some efforts to prod them into being productive. I think that was a good showing of what they community should be about - give someone a chance to integrate and respond to the feedback they’re being given.
But there’s a duration to this sort of thing, and I can’t really put a hard number on it, except that this poster overstayed their welcome.
Not egregiously, though! I think this was much more responsive and appropriate moderation than has happened in the past.
So I definitely think the goal is to be even faster in sussing out clear trolls, but I also don’t think most of the community wants us to immediately jump down someone’s throat, because learning curve is a thing, and you need time to figure out how to speak a given community’s language.
I think the introduction post push is a good one, get people acclimated and so on.
The other thing is, while that particular poster wasn’t bringing useful content, I do think there was an important community interaction there, in that I saw a reinforcement of the group’s values. That’s kind of an important part of community definition - boundaries aren’t just about keeping bad things out, they’re about defining and describing the good things you want to keep in.
We came together and sent a clear message: fuck your crypto nonsense. And these kinds of group ideals are part of what forms a community.
All in all, while I think it was probably having more fun than is ideal, I don’t think it was bad per se. Needs improvement, but IMO this situation was not allowed to fester beyond the point where addressing it was meaningful.
This is what I was trying to discuss above. How do we avoid this? We want more people to be more active and social. However, optimizing for engagement seems to necessarily result in the side effect of optimizing for “enragement” as this article says. And we can even see it in this community, not just Twitter and Facebook.
Is there no way then to safely increase engagement? Should we perhaps optimize for something else? Optimize for nothing at all and let the wildflowers grow?
How about optimizing for the opposite of enragement, and see where that takes the forum?
How about more GeekNights related book clubs or other discussion groups that aren’t related to the actual podcast so if Rym and Scott don’t want to be involved, other people can organize them?
I know a couple of forum posters have wanted to have specific book discussions that have never happened because Rym and Scott either haven’t read the books or aren’t interested in reading the books.
If there was any doubt about this, let me erase it. The members of the community are free to organize any such things they like on their own. Our blessing or permission is not required. As long as the thing you organize does not violate the code of conduct.
Just make a thread for that discussion 
In doing some light research for our upcoming PAX panel, I endeavored to actually play Tribes 2 (or at least attempt to far enough to be able to speak to it).
We have a bunch of slides and a good section of the talk about it. But something unexpected happened.
I found basically the Discord where the remaining Tribes 2 community appears to still organize. And the literal first conversation I saw was a Trumpy guy spouting fash bullshit. I told them their community was bad and quit.
Now I have one of them in my DMs trying to apologize and explain that “they’re not all like that.”
That’s what happens when you don’t have good community guidelines…
I remember a moment like that in Star trek online a while ago - some trump dudes where showing up in world chat, and you’d swear it was some sort of weird humiliation fetish thing, because no matter what they said, they’d have practically every other person on the server dunking on them and telling them that Star Trek didn’t welcome them. Motherfuckers were coming out of the woodwork everywhere, swear to god, I even saw people log on and appear at earth space dock, and never actually move or do anything, they were literally just showing up to shit talk the trump guys.
Star Trek is about as left wing as it gets. Literally space communism.
Tribes II is just war in space. IIRC you couldn’t even be a woman. You could be this one kind of alien, but not a woman. So less surprising that right wing people are there.
