For users with episodic unwellness: Post Approval by "future self" or "trusted friends"?

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Hi all!

Ever since I got involved in emotional well-being and mental health efforts (ERGs) in BigTech some years ago, I’ve been interested in what might be pretty niche (inter)personal challenges. And more recently, as a moderator in a Discourse forum, I’ve also come across similar questions/thoughts. Let’s call it “episodic unwellness for whatever reason”.

If some John Doe has good days and bad days, and has a habit of embarrassing themselves on bad days and then regretting it on good days, what could a good-day-John do to reduce the embarrassment they might need to suffer at the hands of bad-day-John’s actions?

A moderation team willing to deal with this can go a long way, and might be sufficient for the majority of Discourse’s users… but a moderation team might also say “we just don’t have the resources for this”.

Suppose good-day-John would like to carry as much responsibility as possible for bad-day-John’s actions, he might be interested in setting up a rule like “all posts by John should be (re)approved by John at least 24 hours later”. This, for example, could avoid problems with bad episodes that last less than a day – sampling John’s decisions on two different days could ensure a more grounded or sober good-day-John always has a say before bad-day-John gets to post anything. The cost: all of good-day-John’s postings would be delayed by a day (in this example). Good for first posts in new threads, but for replies to existing threads, badly hindering timely participation in discussions that are lively.

A related idea: giving John the option to designate some friends who are willing to approve his posts. This adds more ACL complexity, but potentially reduces the time-delay problem. (“Friends or moderators or future John could approve posts by John.”) Friends getting involved might be necessary for episodic problems that could last days or weeks.

It could be self-imposed; it could be moderation-team-imposed on users with repeated episodes. How niche would this be? I currently know of only one person who would be interested in self-imposing this kind of thing, but I’m on the lookout for more… :slight_smile:

I’m consequently not sure this is worth the effort, but I nevertheless wanted to put it out there (e.g. in case it’s much easier to implement than I think).

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That’s a very interesting topic. This kind of “write and regret” thing also happens in real life to pretty much anyone after all I guess (and can sometimes have dramatic outcomes!), and knowing how and when to put safeguards can be challenging.

A quick example of how I deal with this kind of thing in real life: I know that I might sometimes overshare or write overly (and unwanted) emotional things, whether it’s in public or private spaces.
Since I know it happens, when I want to write something that leans into this area, I (most of the time, nobody’s perfect) forbid myself to send those messages/posts from the evening to night, because I know the accumulated fatigue of the day can influence in the wrong direction what I want to communicate.

So, I write it somewhere (Google Doc, notepad…), but I don’t publish it. I wait until the next day and read it in the morning/afternoon. Then, I can decide if I post, or if I edit and then post, or if I don’t post at all.

I’d be interested in seeing a feature as you described, and believe it can be interesting to imagine how it could work, especially in health-related community spaces.

Sorry that my post doesn’t add anything tangible to what you’re asking. Take it mostly as an emphasized “like” :face_with_tongue:

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Time for some more thoughts: what we already have in Discourse, for post-hoc self-serve cleanup of regrettable comments, is the ability to edit comments and posts.

Replies can be deleted too, not just edited. Initial posts are trickier than replies: can initial posts in a thread be deleted? If so, the replies to a thread would be lost. Hence benefit in being able to edit the initial post, to not delete a thread others have participated in.

Time limits on delete & edit

I think the default time limit is 30 days? That should usually be adequate for more common sources of episodic disinhibitions: someone got drunk and posted bad stuff… There are different kinds of alcoholism, I don’t know how many of them end up having several days in a row of drunken disinhibition.

Then, manic episodes: they can be short, they can be long… even as long as a month or two. And a manic episode could be followed by a depressive episode, for people leaning in the bipolar direction. I could imagine that depressive episodes might also be debilitating, delaying how long it takes for someone to be able to face the consequences of a manic episode, and go clean up any mess.

My guess is, 30 days is enough for “almost everyone”; whereas significantly long manic episodes are hopefully rare enough that moderators could get involved and help out with any cleanup, if it’s also only happening once or twice (whereas they may tire of it if it keeps on happening again and again.)

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I have certainly seen people lean on friends or closer connections as sounding boards about things they are considering posting first.

Within the context of Discourse, this might look like sending a draft of the post in a personal message or in a direct message on chat.

Another idea coming to mind based on your ideation here is some kind of LLM based just-in-time feedback system – “you sure you want to post this?”

I don’t know how I really feel about that, but it’s hard to avoid thinking about where AI might fit into the picture these days. Perhaps if it were opt-in, it’d address this need though?

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Two things that a conventional email system might offer, which I think Discourse doesn’t presently, are

  • an undo, to un-send a thing, which in reality means the thing is scheduled to go after some short time interval
  • a scheduled send, which means the poster decides the thing will be posted say at noon tomorrow, and that gives them time to revisit the content or the decision to send at all

Neither of these is quite the same as the idea of having a trusted party to approve things in future.

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I do like the “undo send” idea. Here’s another recent conversation that made me think of that one: The awkward mishap of premature posting - #14 by NateDhaliwal

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Appreciate this discussion; long reply but maybe useful to someone, or I can get challenged and see other ways for when we reopen.

Experiment: We ended up shortening the editing window to something ridiculous like 60 seconds (mainly for typos),

and actively reinforced that you should not post till you’re confident you want that message to go to all readers instantly.

Need to edit after the fact? Now forced to openly (maybe quote your original in a) comment to clarify or amend, which can notify followers so everyone who invested has a chance to be on the same page about changes.

Because some of our members tend to read and reply quickly, this ensured existing replies reflected what they read in the moment, not disconnected because of an edited OP version that showed up hours after the replies.

Silly example: John originally posted that people who put mustard on hamburgers are [insert inflamed opinion], and people replied to THAT… later John has remorse and edits that he simply doesn’t like mustard… so then the replies are all out of context… later readers get confused, and moderators are picking through edited versions to figure out what’s going on which felt like work for the sake of work. Leave the replies? Comment to clarify community intention/policy? Ugh it just never went well for anyone and ultimately eroded mutual trust

We don’t want John to stop posting; we just want to create a container where there are gentle natural consequences for posting impulsively that may help John override impulse over time

But like you said sometimes John can’t, and one version of John actually asked for help

So we also set low enough flag/hide threshold so Johns supporters could simply tag team to hide his post for moderator approval.

Not perfect, and I’m making an imaginary case here mixing from some real ones

but in practice, shortening the editing window did a lot to clarify discussion and reduce impulsive posting. It slowed the roll and forced folks to notice they had to make a comment to rephrase or clarify, which is “work” and naturally most people want to avoid work and calling attention to their mistakes. (They also got to see that everyone makes mistakes and there’s no actual shame in correcting them openly since we all had to do it)

they started to take a little more time with the original posts, and John now feels a lot better about his approach and results, sometimes even messages mods privately before posting, to help sort his thoughts a little (support we are happy to offer), and then he posts something really powerful to the group. Confidence up, regret down, real connections growing.

Remaining impulsive writing that’s potentially embarrassing, disruptive etc: we still moderate that and check in w OP or let members hide it, but it’s far less work now than discovering and reviewing all those edited messages to make sense of replies and sentiment

We can be forgiving, understanding, annd accommodating while still having boundaries on behalf of the community as a whole.

When approaches are adjusted like that to meet the needs of your real community and the individuals who enliven it, boundaries and consistency build trust and clarity, not resentment.

We try to take every new instance as a learning opportunity rather than a disciplinary issue, unless the poster is blatantly resistant or ignoring or otherwise not at least attempting to find mutually workable solutions.

Every community might have a different sense of what’s our lane and what’s the poster’s lane. So we simply adjust policies and mod strategy based on real world and reasonable workload for moderators and admins. What we allow or encourage, members will come to expect…

They’re looking to us to set the stage they can play in. Some 80-90% lurkers watch and only start posting after they see how we handle uncomfortable scenarios.

We also try to get feedback after incidents and allow the culture to shift a bit based on the current body of members and their needs, vs “what we’ve always done”

Will leave it here. Best wishes finding your own sweet spot with this :musical_notes:

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Catching up on replies — we don’t let people delete their OP for exactly this reason: it wipes out all the emotional labor in the replies

also another way to force some accountability :+1:

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With all due respect, but I think you might be underestimating the kind of challenges and issues that John needs to deal with. This is not a matter of “forcing accountability” or training someone to “override impulses”.

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Fair and I’m talking about the folks we’ve dealt with, adding options in case it’s helpful for any readers.

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I can see how this could be useful in a handful of other cases, e.g. drunk posting, getting rage baited, etc.

But I’m speaking as an outsider. Ultimately I think one would need to work closely with “John”, who’s struggling with this problem, in order to verify it’s something that can be addressed by the system and what that might look like.

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