Use of Flags

Community
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People use the Flat / Report button as a substitute for an eyeroll emoji :roll_eyes: , to indicate ;TL/DR;, or to otherwise express irritation with formatting or grammar or some other off-topic reason.

The result is “Your post was flagged by the community.”

A user who goes to a moderation category to ask about what happened might have the same people coming back to flag that inquiry!

I’ve seen this in my groups and just had it happen to me in another. I feel the pain and insult of helpless suppression that’s completely unrelated to the topic, coming from community rather than by official moderators.

If mods/admins trust that flags are community guardrails they might not check logs or argue with the community … even if such judgements of content are made by maybe two people of hundreds.

This leaves me looking at the Discourse platform wondering “what can I do about this as a manager and as a user/member?”

Some people are generous and flag content for us. But that privilege can be abused by the few people who discover abusive power in the tool they wield. Do we have an option to suspend the right of individuals to flag content, or to help users to appeal such a flag?

Thanks.

(And yeah, I feel like I’m whining because it just happened to me, but it did spark the chain of thought… :wink: )

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If people are abusing the content flagging system, they shouldn’t be permitted to use that system, period. It is not a feature to play with as it wastes time and deters other community members from posting, even if what they posted was in accordance with the site guidelines. An official warning should be sent to the individuals who use the flagging system inappropriately, and if they continue their behavior even after moderator intervention of a warning, then restricting their accounts to trust level one (which disables flagging) would be appropriate, or an account suspension.

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I completely agree and was going to add this into the OP. A problem there is that when there are thousands of members and daily flagging, this becomes just one more load on management to monitor.

I’m surfacing the challenge and wondering if there is a better way.

This isn’t unique to Discourse, of course. I’ve seen it in every forum platform that allows community down-voting with automated content removal. People abuse the thumbs-down feature in social media so much that some platforms get rid of it.

Over time respected content monitors start to include their personal sense of elegance into their judgements of OT or harmful content. They might be trusted community leaders for their contributions to the content, but that’s completely unrelated to their personality and judgement as community managers. Some people are very helpful in discussing topics of common interest but that doesn’t translate to a right to censorship of others.

As site owners we need to manage the managers - herd the cats. In larger sites that’s just another time-consuming task that few of us ever spend much time on.

Summary: I/we can watch for Flags, read flagged posts, check the reason for flagging, and ask managers to be a little less heavy-handed. But the ability to flag seems to be locked to TL1. We don’t want to change a user’s trust level, although by-definition if we can’t trust the user to make better judgements then we kinda need to. This leads to more flexible Group permissons rather than TLs.
For the user/member though, there doesn’t seem to be a way for people to appeal community TL1 moderation if the community TL1 moderators have the ability to suppress appeals. Again, the burden is on the owner/admins (everyone here) to monitor activity and enforce policy. How many owner/admins are actually aware of this?

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If you are part of that mod tea.. A site wide announcement reinforcing the purpose and rules for flagging a post. People who consistently break this rule face being silenced.

Otherwise you need to contact the mod team of the site and see if they would look into it.

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I see in a subreddit - perhaps in all - the downvote action comes with a tooltip “Don’t downvote because you disagree!” Perhaps the flag dialog can have a similar note, and perhaps the tooltip too.

I agree that persistent abuse of flags is an offence, and in my view demotion, temporary ban, permanent ban would be the series of responses.

Never feel that your community needs to retain all its users at all costs.

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I just visited the thread where this situation was developing.

Recap:

  1. I posted a long inquiry, lots of question, required thought for anyone interested, wasn’t looking for a specific single answer.
  2. That was flagged then auto-closed for inactivity following a single long and well-considered response, the kind I was hoping for.
  3. I asked about it in the general “About this Forum” category.
  4. That inquiry was flagged/hidden.
  5. Someone else posted a response, I believe to object to the censorship.
  6. That note was flagged/hidden.

I’ve seen this kind of thing a lot, more-so in recent years. I stopped using StackOverflow, in part because of this kind of gross abuse by mods there - modifying content into something different and then flagging it as being OT.

It’s interesting to see this play out live - but we’re using tools that allow this to happen without conscious recognition. That’s all I’m bringing up here.

For my immediate purposes I’ll see if I can find a way to contact the site owner of this large Discourse installation, but that in itself is a challenge. I don’t object to the shelter that we’re given with no “Contact the Admin” button. :wink: I’m guessing they appreciate it too.

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I can see that other members have given you some great suggestions already! :tada:

it seems that you are not the admin / moderator of the site in question? [1] However, I will post some ideas for everyone to read.

Its not healthy for discussion if people are using flags as a ‘weapon’ for personal disputes/disagreements. Users should be criticising ideas, not people.

Something that hasn’t been mentioned is changing the hide post sensitivity of flags so that it takes more flags to reach a threshold and be hidden. However, that does not address the fact that the post can still be flagged unjustly by others.

Really, the best options are what has already been suggested which is reaching out directly and issue an official warning explaining they will be trust level locked or suspended if they continue.

You could maybe use this as an example?

Other options are to turn down max flags per day in your site settings.

I’m not quite sure what you mean here by “appeal community TL1 moderation”.

I’ll reiterate this :100:
Even if the user has been a long time active member, if they cause a detriment to others they shouldn’t be there. Your community, your rules.

  1. Please correct me if I’m wrong ↩︎

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Was it censorship? It sounds more like moderation. I think it’s an important distinction.

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That tooltip is there on subreddits because nobody pays attention to the written rule, because the rule conflicts with how the UI and software work.

I suggest you start a PM to the moderators instead of posting in public next time, unless the forum culture explicitly encourages public discussion of moderation actions (even though this was not actually a human moderation action, suggesting a human moderator action falls in the same rules).

You can either start a new PM to @moderators or flag your own post with “Something else.”

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Is it possible that the site convention is to post a single question in a topic? Or some other norm which your post didn’t conform to?

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Agree - any public discussion of moderation is the sort of thing which might be forbidden. It’s a challenge to deal with, it might provoke an unwelcome discussion of how the forum is run. Some forums will be set up to have everything done by community consensus, and some forums will be set up to be run by an individual or a committee. In every case, moderation is hard work, difficult decisions are made, and a public challenge can be seen as a threat to peace and calm.

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Agreed while moderation is indeed censorship. It is censorship with a real purpose to keep things organized and hopefully in doing so creates a positive environment for the forum:d given purpose.

Op if your post is hidden by flagging you need to wait or contact a mod privately to ask for clarity. It is possible that maybe your topic(s) were not within the forum’s rules/concept. Moderators may not have reviewed the flag yet.

However in any event it is a good idea to pm/DM the mod team to understand why it was flagged. It could be that a rule is maybe not clear enough.

Not long ago a post if mine was flagged. A mod reached out and asked some questions. They were satisfied with my answers as to why I had posted comment I had. And agreed my comment as a result was not off topic. Sometimes something clear to the author is not clear to others reading.

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No, it isn’t. Words has its meaning and we should stay in that meaning. Cencorship happen in government level, a state against public.

And forums etc. aren’t among free speech either.

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Censorship is a part of moderation. Otherwise it would be a free for all.

Moderation is part censorship and part mediator and a couple of other things.

Just because a post was removed for good & understandabke reasons due to rules. It is still censorship. Censorship can be good or bad or even a bit of both.

If course forums are not free speech Nd us why according to their own rules censor things accordingly. Though most often more uncivilized behavioural censorship.

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If I write ”there is more genders than sexes”, and a government forces erase it, that is cencorship.

If here it is deleted because that claim is off topic and/or against rules, it is moderation.

Big difference.

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They are the same. In both cases the post is removed. They are both censorship.

In your first example it is against the rules set by the government and in the 2nd it was set by an independent group/place.

The result is the same. It is deleted because it violates rules.

It doesn’t matter if a government bans a book or the community bans a book. The result is the book in question gets removed.

  • The line between censorship and content moderation can be blurry, especially when platforms wield significant power over online communication.
  • Balancing free speech concerns with the need for content moderation to address harmful content is a complex and ongoing challenge.

So if a company sets up a forum and deketes any overtly negative reviews of their product or service. Is it content moderation or censorship?

We look be to redefine things so we can try and made it look better. Simple truth Censorship)Content Moderation is good or bad depending on a variety of factors. Both on the surface is to protect and foster a positive social order.

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This article does a good job of explaining the difference.

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As much as I love passionate discussions, let’s try to keep this focused for our current purposes.

Please note again that we’re talking about community downvoting, not mod decisions, which are completely different.

As a long-time professional and community manager I’m very aware of site policies for focus, OT discussions, language, etc. Let’s put that aside for now.
For the recent example there was no issue with the content. To the best of my understanding as noted by someone who flagged, it was reader impatience with a long, in-depth discussion (like this? :flushed_face: ) that resulted in flags.

To be fair, @Ed_S asked about non-conformance with norms. True, communities can have a culture with unwritten preferences and expectations. In a community with many thousands of members, tens of categories, and lots of tags for each, there’s no place for group discussion on such things to form enough consensus for that kind of understanding.

I didn’t notice before but I see that my account has been put on hold pending admin review of the content and flags. In a way this is good, the Discourse flow is in progress. Unfortunately for a site with many thousands of users, it will take a while for admins to process this - and as some of us know this might never happen.
OK, I’ll find a way to escalate/ask if required.

However, about the suggestions here to PM a mod/admin: We also know that by itself can have consequences. We often don’t know if the admin policy is “don’t bother me” unless we try. There are sometimes “Please don’t PM the admins” notes, which if not respected only looks bad for the person looking for a resolution.

I hope I’ve clarified all points but I’ll be happy to come back to anything I’ve missed.

My point in this exercise is to shed light on a situation that has been with us for as long as online forums have existed (for me that goes back to late 1970s). It’s a hole in this tooling that we can all fall into, given similar circumstances, as admin, moderator, commenting member, or helpful community member flagging what we believe to be undesirable content.

I’m not asking for any specific changes, just surfacing the situation and wondering if anyone thinks this is worth some initiative(s) to remedy some of the possible undesirable outcomes described here.

And I especially hope this can help other admins like myself to recognize how our tooling allows these situations to manifest. We can improve our own Discourse (and other) forums with better monitoring of notifications (um, turning them on), delegating, documenting policy and preferences, etc.

Thanks for patience and time… (and please don’t flag this! :rofl: )

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Perhaps one way to look at this predicament is as a kind of meta-moderation. We allow users to flag posts, such that moderators can review the flags. Inevitably the mods will see how many flags, and may have some sense of who the flaggers are. Users who overuse flags or misuse flags need to be detected so that their behaviour can be brought to moderator attention.

Perhaps some sort of reputation could be maintained, hidden of course, which relates to

  • how many flags a user issues
  • how many distinct accounts make posts they are flagging
  • whether their flags are accepted or rejected
  • whether their own posts are flagged

A user with poor flagging reputation needs some kind of attention, some of which could perhaps be automated.

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The system does score the flagger according to iirc agreed upon flags %

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