About the new "guidelines"

Meta
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First off thank you for being honest about that. I’m not going to say I like the idea obviously, but I do respect you for being upfront about it and I value knowing too.

You are being waaay too hard on yourself dude. You haven’t failed at all, it’s just the same stumbling block all vibrant, cool, young, passionate communities go through. It’s growing pains, but like adolescence it could well define where the ship is headed.

When I alluded to a ‘suggestion I wanted to sleep on’, it was offering to pitch in to find a way to help. I know exactly how hard and how thankless what you guys do is, that’s why I saw sense by morning. /lazygit

However, I do love this community and I don’t want to see it fracturing, so maybe there is something that would help. But first… :wink:

RE Republic - don’t get me started. :wink: What we have here is a perfect example of extremely intelligent, wise and well-balanced moderators who have unassailable power to do good. All of your decisions seem to have been pretty fair as far as I’ve seen anyway, yet many are unhappy!? Why?

Well, in my opinion because power is just the projection of personal bias. No matter how wise or clever someone is they cannot appreciate what it is like to be someone else. When we project our bias out into the world it has consequences beyond the horizon of our perspective. Power enables good people to do harm unintentionally, simply by not being able to represent any opinion or frame of mind other than their own. We are all very limited beings and none of us should have any power over anyone else because when we do we cause harm with our black and white decisions. If we do have that power then we MUST be directly accountable to the people we impact, so there is a feedback loop to temper the negative effect of power. Elections every few years don’t work obviously… that’s not democratic, neither is mob rule. The jury system is how I see democracy. Complete freedom for everyone, no dominion, but arbitration to mitigate harm that’s achieve by informed democratic consensus. The informed bit is what separates wisdom of the crowd from mob rule imo and I don’t think it’s an insurmountable challenge :).

Ok, enough political theory lol. How about practical suggestion time.

Create a sticky thread entitled “Your forum, your rules, your say”.

I will offer to monitor and arbitrate discussion in that thread so mods don’t have to unless they want to. Once we have been able to achieve some kind of focus and consensus for what change we want to see in the rules I will bring that to you.

Is this a perfect idea? No! It requires people trusting me as if I were their legal representation or some shit. It also makes a lot of work for me. I can see janitor and many other shuddering at the thought of me being a mediator as some kind of solution.

What I can say is that I don’t want to do it and will happily pass the job to anyone else who does with even the slightest wavering of consensus in their favour.

I’m basically putting myself up for the impossible challenge of not letting my own bias interfere, but coordinating and refining the concerns of the community in an open way.

I don’t think it’s a great solution and I don’t think it scales well. However, given it will free the mods up from this kind of discussion and they’ll only have to deal with the odd focused message from us, it might work from their pov. From the pov of unhappy community members they have an avenue to effect change and be heard. And until they see me doing a crap job and decide it’s a failed experiment perhaps it’s worth a try?

Tbh I hope not. I’d rather be flamed for suggesting it. Imo the rings of power belong in mount doom, so we need direct, fluid and intelligent accountability. This is not that! But it might help or solve any specific issues by drawing attention to exactly what the problems are, instead of arguing endlessly about the theory of how we solve them.

Don’t you dare flinch from your position happybeing! The community would be MUCH worse off if you weren’t here, same for the rest of the mods and the more cynical aspect of the forum. This community dies if diversity is killed imo. Safenet will be fine and build many communities of it’s own over the coming decades, but this one IS special. It’s the first and you guys are the pioneers. Let’s keep it going and finds ways to deal with what are essentially simple and solvable problems.

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I’m personally not in favor of this sorry. Everyone is free to create a topic like that here in meta and I would of course look at it. But when I look at the new guidelines and the 3 topics about that subject, I only see a few people that want change. We take all opinion serious (even if it was just one person) and I like the fact you come up with ideas. You’ve been in our position as well on other forums so you know what to expect. But < 7 people are active in these 3 topics about moderation. The rest is mods replying. On a forum with 2250 members I would expect at least like 20 or 30 people to be active in these discussions. That would be like 1% of all forum members and that would be still very low!

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@jabba thanks for keeping at this and trying to find a workable solution, and maintaining your good humour at the same time.

Personally, I don’t think this would work, but that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to try it - so long as it doesn’t conflict with the purpose of the recent changes: to free up mod time.

FYI myself and several other moderators (about six of us) have spent several hours each just now, dealing with a single serious incident involving one forum member and one moderator who they have taken exception to. It really is surprising how much time a single person can so easily extract from us, even with these changes. So if your topic isn’t really “light” on us, it’s not going to work - and I’m a tad sceptical that it can indeed be light on us.

I agree with what you said about accountability etc BTW. Not sure juries are the answer though - sounds nice, but you end up with all the other corruptibles regardless (enforcement, punishment, prejudice…). PS Not read much of Republic, I carried a lighter book around with me that had some exceptional insights for me.

But my point about this really is this: a small number of particularly vocal folk tend to behave as if this forum: a) is SAFEnetwork, and should work in the way they want SAFEnetwork to be, or b) or a certain kind of country where they have the rights of citizens, and the particular rights they think citizens should have (rights that don’t actually exist in any country I, or they, could name).

Sure, we’re all idealists here to some degree - I hope - we want better! And in support of that want and our ideals, some of us have taken on the job of running a forum. Running a forum, not a proto SAFEnetwork, or building a utopia. Though some of us had a bit of a go at those aims too, I have to admit :smile:

In my opinion, this forum’s purpose is to provide a place for people who are interested in Project SAFE / SAFEnetwork, to meet, share and learn about, and discuss things that are relevant to SAFEnetwork and generally supportive of the project and it’s goals. I see no reason why this can’t and won’t include fun, creativity, disagreement, and lots of other human things, all of which requires a safe space for all, and so for us to be the best guardians of that space that we can be with a sustainable amount of effort.

As for me, I’m going to scale down or step down at some point, soon I hope. This is taking a ridiculous (for me) amount of my attention, time and energy, when I have other precious things I need or want to do - including things related to SAFEnetwork. Luckily, I feel I can do this now. Fingers crossed. :slight_smile:

If you want to have a go, or support any other brave souls who are willing to try your idea, I’m happy with you trying. Meta has always and remains available for this without our say so, so you don’t need our permission I think.

I suggest you first get some buy-in from those who are vocally against how we do things though. Or maybe put a public proposal out and see what the wider community think. If people think it’s needed and would engage with it, by all means try it out out, with my earlier proviso (about moderator time).

So if I may I will duck out of this and let you get together with folk who are interested in that. Thanks again. If you feel you need my input, just ask as always and I’ll do what I can.

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Dude, I had no idea this convo was happening until i was @'d in it. This is not an open discussion. It might as well be in PM. If you put this on the front page and let everyone discuss it you would get dozens of posters obviously.

I’m not sure it’s possible to get lighter than no mod having to ever post in it? I’m not suggesting a place to democratise moderation or open up the whole process, I’m suggesting somewhere to have discussion about the letter and spirit of rules in case/because some people feel disenfranchised by not having any ownership or say in them. A voice that’s heard is not an unreasonable thing to want.

But that was kind of my point. That’s your opinion. To some others it might be a place to come and let off steam with friends, or pick up info for trading, or troll for sensitive people to upset. The point isn’t moralising about what the right reasons for coming here are. The point is that many people come here for many reasons. What you think it should be is probably not exactly the same as what other people think it should be. By you guys making rules you might be impacting other people’s lives in ways you can’t appreciate?! There needs to be order, but it doesn’t need to reflect the bias of a few individuals, it can be molded/tempered by the bias of the community as a whole where everyone is given a voice (being shoved into meta is no different to being silenced imho).

It’s your forum and you guys have to do what you think is best. I’m just playing devil’s advocate, sitting on the fence and trying to make sure everyone is really hearing what others are saying.

I don’t really care about rules and I definitely don’t want to make work for myself or anyone else. So, I’m not going to create a whole thing that annoys everyone. Mods don’t seem to want it and I doubt the cynical members of the community who are unhappy will be satisfied by it.

But… as long as we are arguing about the theory and not resolving/addressing the problems themselves (what issues people actually have with the rules) we will get nowhere.

/drops mic and exits

:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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It was on the front page for over 2 days and even took quite some time to fade away there while it was closed (and 2 others where already open in meta). It received 20 likes, 370 views and triggered 2 new topics here in meta. Still though, after almost a week of discussions and ideas we have < 7 active members debating over it and a few mods replying. This was very clear IMO:

756×182 13.7 KB

Where are all the others? We’ve had 165 user log on’s today. 214 yesterday. This topic has 291 views so far. And still, < 7 people and a couple of mods join this debate? Again, I think we’re really open to proposals and ideas. But if we change moderation in the way some here want, we probably might find 7 to 10 other members that don’t agree with these changes. It’s a never ending story IMO. But no worries, I’ll keep joining these discussions here in meta.

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@polpolrene
I think you’ve kind of unwittingly made @Jabba 's point. I agree with you that not many are actually taking part in the conversation; the question is why? I’ll get to that in a minute.

I think @Jabba 's point is made more apparent with the numbers you’ve provided. We’re not talking about the same post topic.

The original topic “Forum update forum mods and new forum guidelines” was up for 2 days on the front page and received 370 views; 165 views per day, taking an average of your log on numbers, viewed by 87% of the logged on users.
This forum topic has been up for 5 days in meta and has received only 291 views; 58 views per day, by your log on numbers, viewed by roughly 30% of the logged on users.
If people can’t see it, they don’t know it. If people don’t know it, they can’t comment on it.
(This is not a scientific study: there are other aspects, such as the fact that the original topic’s numbers might be skewed because it may have been posted on a weekend (higher logons then, so my calculations would not be correct, as the % of views would fall), while this one may have not. Also, you could argue that everyone browses meta, and so they all saw this topic, but weren’t interested in it, and that’s why the % is so low. Still, 30% of people took the time to view this topic. Of those numbers we can be sure, and that’s actually quite a significant number to me.)

On people becoming engaged/involved:
I don’t think anyone can know for sure why so few are getting involved in the discussion. I’m sure there will be a silent minority who agree with the issues raised, while there will be another who disagree, and yet another that simply don’t care (voted for government lately?). The point is that, on the one hand (and as mods have made clear) we can’t assume that they agree with the ‘dissenters’, but on the other hand, we also can’t assume they disagree, either. By the very same logic. Having approximately 30% of the logged on people check out this topic (which I admit may not be accurate statistics) would be reason enough to assume that people are at the least interested in the conversation, IMO.

I think @happybeing touched on an important issue: that of the tone of the conversation. Many who view this and other topics may agree with the issues raised, but when they see some taking those issues and essentially inflating them to imply the mods are tyrannical, untrustworthy, power-hungry etc etc, they may then think “What?”, and disengage. This could have the effect of polarising the membership to some extent, which is the mechanism by which we reach that aforementioned ‘us vs them’ situation. It’s not usually the message that bites you, but the delivery of that message.

Internet forums are hardly a place where people excel in providing well-thought-out views that are measured in tone and considered in content. But on that score, I think this forum for the most part is doing very well, mods and most users included. Given my feelings when I started my ‘environment’ topic a while back, I was pleasantly surprised at the reception by the mods to my ideas and concerns.

On that point, and the ‘mediator’ issue raised by @happybeing above, yes I didn’t come back with a write-up. First, I fell ill, badly (my health is, well, cyclical), and then, upon getting better, I reviewed the situation and thought “Well, if people aren’t going to see it, then why bother?” (it was decided that it would be in meta, so most would probably not be aware of it anyway). Also, the goal was to have a trusted member of the community perform the role; I don’t believe most here even know I exist, and so I didn’t really feel like I had the right to simply step into the role.

Also, although I think if enough people got involved, we could make something like @Jabba 's above (excellent) suggestion work (some kind of ‘Constitutional Conference’, so to speak), frankly, I don’t see it happening at this point. I think the moderators tend to be open to suggestions, but when they become more solidified, they are the judges of whether the idea is

and often the answer is

And

As it was with my idea.

To be perfectly clear, I do not believe that moderators here are particularly terrible, or evil, or tyrannical, or inconsiderate, or heavily biased. I realise that they are overworked, underpaid(!), harangued, cajoled, criticised, and feel under fire. I do not envy them.

But I do think that while there does exist an openness to ideas here, moderators are not willing to put their money where their mouths are and allow the proposals a fair hearing for a couple of weeks, or heck, a month or two (for a guidelines rewrite), on the front page*, where everybody can see it without hunting through the backwoods of this forum. And I think this kills the potential of the ideas themselves.
(EDIT: By ‘on the front page’, I mean discussion topics for consideration, not votes. People need the discussion before the voting.)

  • (I understand the issue of not ‘clogging’ the front page with stale administrative content, which would push the network itself into a subordinate position. I think the design of the front page is the weakness for the purpose of putting ‘sticky’ posts about meta discussions. A sidebar for stickied posts would help, although that would, of course, change the design, perhaps to the overall detriment of the site. Then you could leave the main subjects untouched. I’m not sure if it’s Discourse itself, or the design of the front page that is the real issue.)

(As a further note to participation levels in the discussions and taking votes on issues, the assertion has been made in the past that if most don’t vote, then the vote is not worth doing. Should we follow that logic with government also? Surely not, right? By definition, those with an opinion on the topic either way will participate in the process. Those who don’t care are seemingly unaffected by the current issues, and so of course they wouldn’t bother voting; they would leave that to the ‘politically involved’. So I don’t accept that argument. Just because most people in certain cultures accept, say, female (or male) genital mutilation, doesn’t mean it’s the right way to go. Those affected by the practise may see things differently. Jim Crow affected the minority in the USA. During slavery, not many slaves felt like they could stand up and add their voices to the conversation, and so the majority ‘will’ accepted slavery, even among slaves, according to this logic. Western liberal principles attempt to recognise that the protection of the minority sometimes necessarily supersedes the will (or lack thereof) of the majority, lest that minority suffer. A balance must be struck, of course. Recent events in Europe are a great example of this.)

And finally, while I am appreciative of mods’ contribution to this forum, and sympathetic to the challenges they deal with on a daily basis, I find myself asking, “What did you expect?”. The reality is plain to see that moderators of any forum will be criticised, fairly and unfairly. That is the price of taking an authority position. So while I think it is entirely reasonable for moderators to ask for people to show respect for them as fellow human beings, I also think it’s just part of the job, sadly enough. That doesn’t mean that mods have to, or should, accept being treated like garbage.
On that note:

Reality isn’t the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are. Either you acknowledge reality and use it to your benefit, or it will automatically work against you.
Robert Ringer

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Like I said, quite some views on the frontpage but <7 users joined the discussion. I think you are nr. 8 :grin:. But when we have a topic started on “Pay the producer before paying the uploader” (just made that one up) we have a fired up topic that takes so much more views and replies in a day. If people were really concerned with this forum not being democratic, or us being to strict, I’ll bet more would speak out. But as I asked before:

Go to a Linux forum and try to talk SAFE. You can’t. Go to the Ethereum Reddit and just post about SAFE without any link to their project. You can’t. Go to a Bitcoin forum and call the moderation “anal” and start talking about North Korea. They would kick you off immediately. Same for price talk or an off-topic rant about Hillary being awful. You can’t. Go to the Battle Field 4 forum I linked in the Forum Update and start arguing with a mod. You can’t. I mean, these folks use virtual weapons to get into heavy fights and you’re not allowed to swear nor to argue with a mod. Also try to go to the Bitcoin Reddit and propose a way to make mods more accountable. They’ll probably laugh at you.

Now look at our forum: You can talk about other projects, we gave them their own category. You can start a topic about puppet media or Hillary being great in off-topic. You can talk price in the right topics. You can argue with mods. You can say about moderation: “This IS a political issue and the incumbent unelected regime, have descended into authoritarianism at an alarming rate” without receiving any warning of ban for it. So my whole point is:

We might be strict on swears and keeping this forum family friendly, but overall we are very open to all discussions and ideas. The fact that <8 joined 3 discussions about moderation and new guidelines shows that most people are fine with how this forum is doing.

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That’s why none of those forums have the passion, love and philial bonds that we share here though. As evidence by the passion with which people here do argue about this. If it were any of those forums none of us would bother ;).

A forum being run as and for a business works much more efficiently, it’s easier for mods and the conversation stays focused on the corporate agenda, and everything is clear for everyone.

On the other side of the coin, a messier, closer, stronger community can be built by empowering the community and helping it to feel more ‘communal’, equal, shared and fun. That atmosphere is not possible in a paternal relationship, even if your dad is the nicest guy in the world and very wise and fair, he’s still your dad and not the guy you go out to have fun with.

I think empowering the community would swing this whole thing the opposite way and would encourage the growth of the underlying things that make a strong community. I think you guys do underestimate how powerful it could be to make people feel a part of it and give them that sense of ownership.

Too many long posts though… it’s not like we’re trying to save safenet here, it’s just a forum and one of many. It’s not going to die or anything, it just might become too neat and tidy, too void of cheekiness, mirth and whatever else. Why?! Not because you’ll edit that stuff out. Because people won’t post it because they won’t come here feeling like it’s their forum, it’ll feel just like BattleField4, Reddit etc. Clinical, functional, efficient, controlled… meh, I think you can do much better personally. That is not the recipe for community bond creation, even if large organisations (not what I’d call communities) use them to manage their forums.

But hey, if you get a million users this year you won’t have any choice, the community will change beyond recognition anyway, even if an ‘originals’ clique survives somehow.

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I think you missed a bunch of my points here.
IMO, your implied argument is:
“Most do x. We do y. We’re better. So you should be thankful. Therefore, what are you complaining about? Things could be worse.”
(My drug addict mother’s version of this was, in reply to my complaints of hunger, “Kids in Africa have it worse, you know”. So I guess I don’t really relate to this line of… “logic”.)

My argument is:
“I am absolutely thankful. But better is not the best we can do. And that’s no argument against trying to improve things.”

Oh well. Reluctantly, I’m going to abstain from participating. I may restrict myself to reading nothing but the project updates; I’m a debater by nature and believe I have viewpoints to offer that could really help certain conversations, but the structure here (particularly OT issues) has become too restrictive. This is essentially now the Linux forums for me. So I find it hard to read some topics and stay silent, and also to help offer alternative perspectives on issues. Unfortunately, about 80% of what I have to say (I’m a coder, but I’m formally educated in true free-market economics and logic, and am highly versed in political economy and political theory, as well as history) would be regarded as off-topic by the moderation team, and so I will have to stay silent, or I will be forever clashing with moderators.

It is what it is. Liberty, peace and joy to all on this forum. Good luck, and our best foot forward for the success of the network.

Seconded, wholeheartedly.

Seconded, wholeheartedly.

This is what I have been mourning, having been here (under another name) since the domain was registered. It started well, but it didn’t take long (some months) before that feeling was lost for me.

Precisely!

Peace out, everyone!

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I think there’s a lot of passion in the Ethereum community, same for other cryptoprojects and I definitely see that when I check their forums. Even though I’m not allowed to talk other projects and price and to call for more democracy when it comes to moderation. I think we have a great group of people here that are family like for a big part. Especially when you see topics like the pre-devupdate.

You need to make this very concrete IMO. We have about 11 active members out of the community volunteer to keep this forum up and running, spam free, organised and what more. What should we do different? Make a topic on the frontpage and debate what the forum guidelines should be? As I said before, we have <8 people joining this discussion. 1 started with stating that we “have descended into authoritarianism at an alarming rate.” At the same time he called us “hypocrites” and claimed we did a “coup” on this forum and that’s why he questions “every single mods integrity”. Another one replied by making a new topic and posted a load of PM’s between him and moderation without us asking if we were okay with that (imagine if we made a PM with a user public without their permission). At the same time he said that one mod has “fallen” and talked about it being “Seriously hypocritical” that we as mods shaped this forum to our “personal ideas”. And we still replied on-topic to them even though I think they’re both not improving any discussion that way. Another one made a new topic for people to vote on extra guidelines but put it on the front page without permission. We can’t allow person A to do that and move it to meta when it’s another person. So we moved it to meta and I asked personally to make that proposal to @ moderators. To my surprise the users didn’t do that. Why not? Another user just replied here saying he doesn’t see the problem with swears. Well okay, point taken. So what should mods take out of these discussions? To be honest I don’t feel the need any longer to listen to people that start their communication by saying we’re hypocrites, dictatorial and more mud smashing. So what do we have if we filter that out? Probably <5 active members that want some change here and are discussing it in a nice and decent way. I’m fine with that, I would love to see a proposal in meta as a new topic so we can discuss. I also wrote one with @Team_2E16 and it got some good debate as well. It’s not implemented but we just had 2 new mods out of the community that joined moderation. So we’re now at 9 mods that are all active community members. I’ll bet some of them would blow the whistle if we were really unfair to users.

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It feels like you aren’t listening to me :(. You’re still defending yourselves when you are not actually accused of any specific malpractice or corruption, You are only accused of supporting a divisive hierarchy instead of being open and receptive to finding ways to share that power. That’s the only thing that’s wrong here, not corruption or malpractice.

I’ve never been moderated or censored, I’ve never had crossed word with any mod and only had a couple of crossed words with other members. I have nothing but respect for each and every mod and I think they are all great people who I would be fortunate to be friends with in the real world.

Yet, despite the quality and caliber of users and mods alike, this place suddenly feels like a business, being run professionally/insensitively.

There is another way. It works much better. When you give some ownership away you create community, when you take ownership away you get an easier to manage, more efficient, clinical model.

I really wish you would listen to me without getting defensive as if I’m accusing you of doing anything wrong apart from not hearing the point we’re trying to make. I’m not talking out of my ar$e for fun here. I have been through all this before.

It’s very much like David said. You guys were just members like us. That’s what made this special and feel/equal and that’s where the spark came from that made this community what it is today. Now that you are no longer open to discussing any kind of shared ownership and you have developed your own rules without involving the community it no longer feels that way. It has nothing to do with you guys personally, the rules themselves or your prosecution of them.

I’m going to go ahead and blow my own trumpet here even though this is a very different situation with different circumstances, the lessons I learned still apply. I spent the first two years as community manager moderating a much larger forum than this with just one other guy (Jabba & Danski). We would end up in epic posts and threads just like this one. It was exhausting and I’m having flashbacks now like a war veteran ;)) People would chat rubbish about free-speech in a privately owned forum, they would accuse us of rigging the games and censoring the debate etc. Consequently, we had to be brutal and efficient with taking everything down and banning users as soon as they became troublesome. This didn’t seem to lighten the load because now we were just banning and deleting rather than getting into long arguments, we even considered closing the forum altogether because it seemed more trouble than it was worth.

I decided to try off-loading that burden onto the players themselves as a last ditch attempt to save it. I made 6 player-mods and made them directly accountable to the community by a poll of no-confidence (and to us behind the scenes obvs). If you are not popular that means you are upsetting people, simples. The response/change was drastic and immediate. Players went from ‘us vs them’ to a community overnight. Everyone wanted to be a mod, so behaviour improved, those who were mods wanted to keep their prestige, so they were always light-of-touch and worked hard not to upset anyone. Other users were especially helpful and did a lot of mod work for them instead of fighting ‘the man’ and we did debate the rules, their spirit and potential exceptions - so we had a central resource new mods could read through to see where consensus lay and encourage consistency. But most importantly of all, because they now owned their own community it quickly became a family. Our live events became like friends meet-up groups and everyone started organising their own home games etc. Suddenly PKR wasn’t about the fancy gfx any more, it was about the community and that was where it’s magic was. By 2009 we were the third biggest poker community behind poket5s and 2+2, yet we were a large family, where they were more like reddit etc (even though we were run by and for a private business).

Friendship, love, respect etc. These are VERY powerful things! You don’t have to have them, it isn’t necessary for running a forum, but it makes life a lot easier and it empowers us all to make SAFEnet greater faster.

I do sympathise with your position. I have been there and I know you are good guys doing a good job. Share the work and the ownership and you’ll quickly find we are all working together instead of being at odds with each other.

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Please forgive me if I’m totally wrong because I must admit that I didn’t read very much in this topic (that should stop me from commenting but just want to check something :smiley: )

Does it feel as if it is being run as a business because of the new guidelines or because of your experience on the forum lately? Feel free to ignore me if I’ve been really ignorant :smiley:

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No, not because of what the rules say or the way they are enforced. It feels like a business because there’s such obvious resistance and dismissive tone when talking about finding ways to share ownership.

That’s fine, if you don’t want to share it with everyone you don’t have to, it is yours after all. It just might end up becoming little more than an info resource for safenet is all, that would be a shame imo.

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Ok thanks for getting back at me :slight_smile: !

Don’t have the time to go and read back all those long posts but could you give me a shorter version of the proposal?

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My proposal is to find any way to share ownership (sure everyone is sick of reading those two words in my posts by now). I’ve suggested a few different things above, but all were met by fairly dismissive responses (even though I’ve seen them work in practice) so I gave up. Really, there are a million ways to do it. I’m sure you guys can think of more or better ways to do it, most of you are much smarter than I am. The point is none of you seem to want to try. That’s where the turn off is. That’s what’ll result in people like myself, tonda, team_2e16, whiteoutmashups, blindsite2k etc not wanting to post as much. The other names you’ll never know because they may never get drawn in in the first place. Good communities are magnetic. Functional, consistent and efficient forums are not. :frowning:

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I did read most of the posts a few minutes ago and I saw your proposal that said:

How is this different than what we did by posting the ‘new guidelines’ topic on the frontpage and gave room to discuss them :slight_smile: ?

Really appreciate your attempts although you might feel unheard or misunderstood :slight_smile: keep them coming! Also please tell me if I really need to go reread your posts better :smiley:

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New guidelines does not give ownership. You guys are thinking too much like rational machines and not appreciating the psychology here. This is not about practical changes to the rules or slapping some mods for being too trigger happy. This is about making people feel they own something.

I think if you give it some thought you will see the drastic difference between a temporary thread no one really noticed called ‘New Guidelines’ and a permanent sticky called ‘Your forum, your rules, your say’. The practical reality looks the same, but the former reads as your way of telling us what the rules are, the latter sounds like asking us if they are correct and telling us they belong to us.

The difference would also have to come in your attitude to any changes that were proposed… if anything was. It would not surprise me at all if nothing was. The point is to give the sense of community, family, equality… you don’t get that feeling in top down structures.

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the ownership was in the part of discussing the new guidelines, which could have lead to ownership by coming with good suggestions.

My answer here will probably repeat something that others have said as well and that is that this forum is not about the forum itself but still about the SAFE Network. In my opinion we’re already focussing to much on improving how the forum works and how to keep everyone happy instead of discussing the subjects that should be on this forum :). so I wont be keen on having a permanent sticky on the frontpage which is a constant place for forum discussion.

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I’ve read all your posts and saw each and every point you made. In my last reply reply I literally said that if we filter out we’re left with some people discussing in a nice and decent way. So no worries, I get the points you make. At the same time I’ve pointed out that it’s just a very small group having this conversation.

The only new things that were added to the forum guidelines were that we are now family friendly forum and that we will be a little more strict because it’s taking us quite some time due to the growth of this forum. Still though, people can discuss way more here than on most other forums. If you focus on what is allowed here instead of what the rules forbid you’ll see we are very open community.

I’m listening all the time. I know you’re not the one accusing me/moderation of any wrong doing. No different views here.

This is a very concrete plan. But I don’t know if Discourse has an option of doing so. It’s like a karma thing isn’t it?

We have this option as a Flag. Some people became mods here because they were really active and Flagged post. Not that different.

I see this forum as a family and a lot of people do here as well. So if you can explain to me what it would be like if we were even more a family that would be great. I seriously wonder how many people see this forum as being run as a business, or being to clinical or whatever. Like I said, we have a nice debate here but out of the 2250 members only 7 or so jumped in. And if I filter out the people that really add to a nice debate it’s only 3 or 4 people that come up with ideas. Where are all the other people that want change? Where are all the proposals for more ownership by the community?

That’s really great. Especially from where you seem to came from with that comunity.

I agree I made great friends here. I have some of them on Facebook, some of them on my phone.

The forum is run by all community members. Like 11 of the active members. How could we make this more community owned? By using a karma-plugin? And allow people with the highest karma to be mods as well? I don’t know about the community you worked for, but here we use Discourse and I don’t know if we have a tool for that.

I don’t agree with this one. Next to all the other examples I said before, like all the other crypto- and Linux forums we do allow topics about other projects as well. We also allow almost all topics in off-topic. And we also have debates about pay-the-producer and all the other models people come up with. Why do you think this will become a little more than a resource for info on SAFE? What topics, discussions, links, replies do you miss here? [quote=“Jabba, post:75, topic:8253”]
My proposal is to find any way to share ownership (sure everyone is sick of reading those two words in my posts by now).
[/quote]

I have no problem with that term. But how? That’s my questions. What I get from your proposals and experience you shared is a karma system like Reddit has. And people with karma above a certain level can mod? Let me know if I miss something.

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Yes, but then we have the next thing to solve. Help me out on how to fix that. Say we open that topic. And we have a few that don’t want any moderation, and others only want to handle spam, and some others only want something deleted if 4 people Flag it. And some others want meta on the frontpage and some others want off-topic back on the frontpage. Who’s gonna decide what changes are gonna be made? Who decides which ideas to implement and which not?

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