Meta category has now been taken off front page

Just so I can get things clear in my head and get on the same page of reasoning as others, could somebody please confirm my understanding of the following.

  1. Meta category is hardly used however it has been considered for some time to be “blotting out” talk about the Network. Why?
  2. The moving of the Meta category had nothing to do with the discussions being had.
  3. Had the discussion been going on in say Community, where it would have been equally relevant, the discussion would have continued and would not be “blotting out” anything. Meta Category would have been moved at that exact point anyway?
    4.After a very long time of not being moved, after careful consideration by the mods about possible blowback and raised eyebrows (given the nature of people attracted to the Network), it was decided that the optimum time to effect this change was during a discussion raising issues about the structure and modding of the forum.

Am I on the right page here?

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You’re right on all counts. They’ve re-created the Supreme Court, but with a possible improvement that their deliberations seems to be even more private. You know they have meta policy as well for instance, they will readily admit fallibility but never fault. They self select based on compatible ideology. Also, when challenged policy is to claim its an insufficient minority and refer back to the supreme guild lines which cannot be changed by the charged insufficient minority. Also refer to the apparently agreed upon prime informational function for new people. Its a PR operation and the nature of propaganda is it resists the change you’d like to see and make the change in you that you don’t want. Moderation implies a constant state of conflict.

But there are glimmerings of hope. One mod has proposed a flat system. Others have considered criticism about whether Discourse is the right system. Discourse says its flat, calls more flexible systems hierarchical, very clever PR.

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I made all the points I wanted in the different topics about moderation. Feel free to read them again. I have nothing new to add.

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Yes, totally agreed and well said. No community given legitimacy to have the authority to hold their positions of power over the Community. If as you say I am correct in the above points, then it smacks of incompetence at a bare minimum. I for one have no confidence in them and will just take Janitor’s attitude towards government - just ignore them as best you can and try to effect change through reasoned discourse…

So why jump in the conversation?

Meta category was hardly ever used and then it started being used more thus blotting out SAFE network discussions and warranting hiding it from front page.

It had nothing to do with the content of discussions, simply the fact that there were an increasing amount of them in a technically non-SAFE network related category.

If the discussion was about the forum, moderators, etc. it belongs in meta and if it was taking place in community, it should at least also be tagged with meta.

Taking a stab at this one since I wasn’t on the forum at the particular instance but let’s say this is the case… again, since these discussions are not SAFE network related this would have increased the blotting out even more and increased the need for hiding the category.

And now we’re just doing this more in an uncategorized topic. This thread should be moved to meta and a notification that meta + off-topic categories are hidden should be listed in the welcome post.

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I fully agree, thanx for the reply :+1:

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For the sake of hopefully a more conjoined and singular perspective by all concerned allow me to explain how I saw the infamous and controversial ‘meta muting’ incident.

I saw multilink threads being updated very frequently. They all seemed to be similarly heated discussions around internal politics of this forum.

For a few days it felt like otherwise interesting and relevant discussions were not being heard due to the the ‘noise’ coming from this debate. At the time I think taking those discussions away from front and centre of our collective voice was the correct thing to do.

Question is though, has the meta category been yellow carded (it did function for a long time without incident/abuse), or has it been red carded for good?

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So it was on-topic until the particular discussion we were having, or off-topic all along? Obviously nothing was enacted during previous discussions.

I see, so those particular discussions that popped up were just the straw that broke the camel’s back? The meta catagory appears to have had quite a consistent amount of posts going back a few months, there didn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary or containing more posts than previously There were just 13 posts in one thread, 2 other threads started by the mods themselve (lol) and the contentious “Let the users decide” thread. So I think we can discount the first 3 being an issue…which leaves us with one thread remaining with 55 posts. So where is this sudden deluge that was “blotting out” talk - there appears to be no evidence to substantiate the claim. If these are the threads being referred to then 50% of them were started by mods - so where does that leave us?"

I see, so quite straightforword for enticing new userd then? :smile:

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“Meta category was hardly ever used and then it started being used more thus blotting out SAFE network discussions and warranting hiding it from front page.”

How much can such utter nonsense be parroted?

Ironically the mods seem to need a damn supervisor. You can go get someone with the obvious ethical qualifications or get someone like @alkafir. Even tech people with the best and most sincere impulses still are sometimes too distracted by tech to more completely develop their perspectives and reflexes. This is sad because the ethical line is the only one that we can really be said to mature and develop along. In the end its the only one that counts and its directly tied to our capacity to love. SAFE should be a means to help keep that avenue of development open, but instead its getting caught up in the hypocrisy of control in its original forum line.

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Always technically off-topic, never an issue until it started filling front page.

It doesn’t matter who started them. The fact of the matter is that folks started to notice them in the front more so a discussion was raised.

Not sure what this means… straightforward so we can standardise what gets put into what category.

I’m sorry this decision by the moderators is against what you think is right and debate is generally healthy but IMO you’re dragging this out far beyond necessary. I’ll be stepping away from this conversation as well since I made my points which I hoped would help clarify and put in my request to move this topic to meta.

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Lol…what do you mean “OR”… :smiley:

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All right run with it.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Proposal: Simplify Moderation, Accept it or Vote on it

I agree that this should be mentioned in the welcome post.

I just added a section that explains what the different categories are. Let me quote the part that explains the meta + off-topic categories:

I am open to any suggestions from anyone so just let me know if there is anything in the welcome post that could be improved, fixed, added or removed :smile:

And now that I’ve updated the welcome post, I will assign the meta category to this topic.

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:smile: :smile: :smile: oh liberty! I guess I know who this “good philosopher king” is.

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I very much like the updated welcome post overall. Thanks!!

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