‘Chav’ is British slang for a particular social group: broadly speaking, white lower-class youths, associated with particular styles of dress and behavior. The term is contemptuous and pejorative.

What’s interesting with any website is that a core group of people come to care deeply about its community and wish to maintain whatever elements they like about it. They may find the compensation acceptable (placement on a high-score list, knowing they are blocking porn or racism or other things). The trick for site owners is to expand and evolve in ways that keep loyal users happy while welcoming new users. That’s a tough act to manage. Facebook is interested in upsetting as few consumers as possible, which is very difficult for a site that size.

You offer them worthless points and the esteem of their nothing better to do peers.

After a while they realize there’s no point to volunteer work unless you get to meet people you want to have sex with, which never happens online.

It’s the basis of all charitable institutions.

I’m glad I didn’t bore you.

But, yeah, more of the secret police coming around and me getting more “You’ve been reported for harassment” notices because I said “fuck” or that you’re an idiot if you don’t believe in evolution, that’s totally awesome, too.

One more good reason to get the hell off Facebook. This will not end well. Imagine Livejournal with three hundred and fifty million users, and…close enough.

–Robert N. Lee

God bless you, intarwebs!

Facebook sounds to me like one of those forums where the management claims to embrace “community moderation” (which usually takes the form of a low-res tagging system) because they perceive it as the cheapest and easiest option.

How can you tell the difference between forums that use community moderation as a cheap cop-out, and forums where they genuinely believe in it? The latter take the time and trouble to educate their users before leaving moderation in their hands. They also provide reliable backup for problems community moderation can’t address, like the occasional need to ban serious troublemakers.

The list of Facebook tags doesn’t reassure me. It’s not a thoughtful system.

Generally speaking, if there are only eight tags to cover all possible content, they should be carefully chosen, and they shouldn’t generate further problems. A single tag for “offensive, illegal, or threatening content” would replace half the tags on that list while covering a lot more ground and inviting a lot less trouble. Leave the precise determination of why and how something is offensive, illegal, or threatening to the people who assess the flagged content.

It looks to me like Facebook needs a separate FAQ that explains what is and isn’t acceptable. It would be much clearer, and it would keep them from having to shoehorn that information into the tagging system. That’s a desirable state of affairs. It lowers the tone of the joint to make users read about “visible mutilation of humans or … sadistic violence against animals” or “images of urine, feces, vomit, and semen” when they’re just trying to tag some spam.

More specific quibbles:

Since “acceptable” is the default state of untagged content, it’s a wasted tag. Having an “acceptable” tag is also subtly dispiriting: of the possible responses the system offers you, the best you can say of something is that it fails to offend? That’s a great way to lower everyone’s expectations.

You don’t need a tag to signify diffuse general approval. That judgement is implicit in the fact that readers have come to the site and are reading the material there. If you must have a general approval tag, “valuable” is a more useful and descriptive term, especially when combined with other descriptors: viz., “excessively abrasive, yet valuable.”

It makes me uncomfortable to see “Not English” in what’s otherwise a list of offenses against public order. I suspect it’s there to tell Facebook they need to have that content looked at by someone who speaks that language, but if so, I wish they’d found a better way to say it.

“Nudity” is not “visible pubic hair or genitalia, the display of sex toys, and solicitation of cybersex.” What they’re reaching for is “offensive sexual content.” Nudity is just bare skin. Equating the two is asking for trouble.

“Drugs” is another ill-considered tag. General discussions of drugs, drug use, and drug laws are not illegal. In fact, they’re protected under the First Amendment. Privately owned sites can take them down on their own say-so, but they can’t defend that action to their users by claiming that the law made them do it. In the meantime, people who use illegal drugs can generate encoded language to talk about it in nothing flat.

“Attacking (‘direct attacks on non public figures’)” is the tag that bothers me the most. Distinguishing between public and non-public figures has nothing to do with “keeping Facebook a trusted and vibrant community.” That distinction is purely about U.S. libel laws, which are much stricter if the person in question isn’t a public figure. (Note: it’s easy to become a public figure, even if you didn’t volunteer for it.)

What a prohibition on attacking non-public but not public figures says to me is “Facebook doesn’t actually care how barbarically you behave, as long as they can’t get sued over it.”

Moderation and site rulesets are always systems.

I shall henceforth refer to the toilet as the “violence room”.

Possession of marijuana is technically illegal according to the federal government, but some states have chosen to legalize it for medicinal purposes, in contradiction of federal laws that ban its use. It is still considered a federal crime to possess it, but the “crime” is not being prosecuted in those states that allow medicinal marijuana use because there’s a whole “States’ Rights” power struggle currently under way.

hilarious. sad. hilarious again.

(It is kind of amusing that it’s “just the Internet” if a user is being singled out, censored or abused, but VERY SERIOUS when it comes to copyright and threats.. make up your minds, people)

As a SP fan, I feel this deserves clarification. The episode (“Ginger Kids”) was about Cartman bullying the red-haired kids by comparing ‘ginger kids’ to vampires. Eventually all red-haired children in school are regarded as social outcasts. Cartman’s friends, disgusted by his (and other townspeoples’) bigotry, bleach his skin and dye his hair red while he is asleep. Cartman awakes to find himself afflicted with “gingervitis” and gets bullied by the other kids at school. Then he organizes the other ‘ginger kids’ and starts a campaign against the non-gingers, which eventually leads to a plan to kill everyone WITHOUT red hair, as gingers are the “chosen race.” Just as Cartman is ordering non-gingers to be thrown into a pit of lava, his friends reveal their trick and he has a sudden epiphany, telling his followers that we all have to get along.

But I guess the media picked up on the idea that SP had a ‘kick-a-ginger-day’ episode and that’s where it came from, because they’ve been consistently blamed for the idea. It’s probably easier for the bullies and their parents to point a finger at a controversial TV show than to take responsibility for acting like Cartman, who is a little nazi shit.

Lame. Censorship is not “moderation”.

Lame. Moderation is not censorship.

The guidelines FB have set out seem to be primarily geared at protecting the company legally, which shouldn’t be the concern of community members.

The company has a right to protect itself legally. I object to that being the only thing they care about.

However, I do credit them for not including copyright infringement on the list of guidelines.

People have a right to their own work. If someone’s reposted someone else’s story or essay or illustration as if it were their own, the writers and artists have a right to complain. I’ve seen sites that entirely consisted of fraudulently relabeled content. I didn’t think they were a good thing.

True moderation allows offensive or otherwise substandard content to be exposed as such by community members, but does not completely remove it.

No. What you’re saying is that you prefer sites that preserve such content. Moderation takes many forms. It would be a tad provincial to declare any of them the One True Moderation System.

As I said earlier, site rulesets and moderation styles are always systems. There are reasons to remove content, reasons to deprecate it, and reasons to preserve it, and all of them function differently in varying contexts.

Do you actually want to talk about this in detail?

BB has the crude but somewhat effective technique of disemvoweling.

Disemvowelling has its own effects, some of which aren’t all that intuitive. Most of them vary with the site and the way it’s used. It’s not intended to duplicate the effects of other moderation techniques, which is good, because it doesn’t.

However, Slashdot has had a sterling –

That is, it’s your preferred system, and you’re used to it.

– community moderation system for nearly 10 years and I’ve been disappointed how few sites have been able to copy it.

In most cases, that’s because they weren’t trying.

Haven’t you noticed? Different sites have different purposes, different rulesets, different moderation techniques, and different conversations. Slashdot isn’t Boing Boing. It also isn’t 4chan, Ars Technica, Daily Kos, the WELL, Flickr, Making Light, Firedoglake, Instructables, or the Cleveland Plain Dealer. All those sites have their own functional moderation systems, and their own distinctive sitegeists. Many of them, and quite possibly all of them if I looked hard enough, manifest interesting emergent properties.

Moderation isn’t a single way of doing things. It’s a complex interdependent body of hacks, techniques, and rules of thumb, and it’s constantly evolving.

In my experience, it’s much more gratifying to see troll posts modded down to the cellar by the community than to have them removed by some invisible overlords. The justice has kind of a “March of the Penguins” quality to it.

I’m familiar with the effect. What you don’t understand is that there are conversations that won’t happen on Slashdot, and people who won’t hang out there, because the style of the place doesn’t suit them. All sitegeists exclude some users and conversations, and enable others.