Complaint: Disappointment with moderators in forums

@anonmod said in #11:
It is quite frankly very frustrating, and I am still not certain that the result of this process will not be the complete removal of the forums.

This is very worrying to me , to hear this as the forums are a massive part of my life and support network, and coping mechanism for my mental health I really hope this is not something Lichess ,Thibault and the team would ever consider xxx

@SimonBirch

I believe that the "on-topic" forums such as General Chess Discussion, Lichess Feedback, and Game Analysis are all a lot better than the off-topic forum.

That said, I think the off-topic forum has been great - when I first started posting in forums everyone here was really respectful and the amount of trolls was a lot less. (I also have not been on Lichess that long so I don't know if this says much.)

Maybe all we need is just different moderation? And better humans?

Well chat etiquette in tos does say avoid political and religious subjects so maybe Lichess should enforce that, no one ever wants to get into chats about politics or religion , only ever lead to flame wars xxx

Just an FYI, the moderator on clean-up duty for the incident which prompted this thread may have gone a bit overboard-- they deleted a joke about koans that wasn't particularly confrontational. Perhaps it was the fact that the wordplay involved the word pwn? Not going to appeal or anything (I think he or she is blanket deleting posts related to the encounter to save time, and I don't want to waste theirs by fighting the system over a pun I made*). Only reason I bring it up is that it's a case where I wasn't aware of breaking any rules; if I really did do something wrong, I'd like to see some document discouraging it (I've said this on a number of occasions).

I propose that lichess, being a community driven site, write a more codified set of rules with the help of the community. I've seen zero opposition to the idea of more thorough rules pages, and the rules wouldn't necessitate getting rid of mod discretion. I've had experience as a parliamentarian; I'm sure others on this site have more experience in rules than I do (lawyers, moderators of other sites, etc.) that would be able to help creating a better system of rules. This would allow both sides to behave more in line with the expectation of the other.

By the way, if the mods want me to delete any recent posts I made which could be considered offensive, I will happily oblige. I tend not to do that because I don't want people to think others are misquoting me (which has happened in the past, and is oddly well handled by the mods, all things considered), but I'd be more than glad to save the staff some time. Lord knows I post too much.

*Self growth!

The solution is simple: write your text as you want, with whatever language you feel like, then go to ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite it for modern American sensibilities and you're golden. You can post it. It will have no real emotion, no personal touch, no directness of meaning and make your message boring AF (As the French defense), but totally acceptable for topics having nothing to do with chess, but with dozens of replies.

Example:
The solution is simple: write your text in your preferred style and language, then use ChatGPT to adjust it for modern American sensibilities. This way, your message will be suitable for posting. While it may lose some personal touch and directness, it will be appropriate for a wide range of topics and likely to generate numerous replies.

I guess the lack of codified rules were not even a problem if reports from sincere people like me had been taken more seriously ... (bigotry, unmindful agitation, hounding and other sorts of harassment)

Many cases of "bigotry, unmindful agitation, hounding and other sorts of harassment" are clear and unquestionable. There are people around who have bad intentions, no question.

But at what point does a series of postings in a lively debate become, say, hounding?

The problem is that different people will give different answers to that question. And if a moderator has to step in and take action, some people will see that action as unjust. If the moderator judges things just inside the boundaries of acceptability and does nothing, that inaction will also be seen by some as wrong. Moderating really is the most thankless task.

@Cedur216 said in #26:

Subjective though. It's very hard for humans not to pick sides, and those sides might not be yours.

Lichess off-topic is supposed to be a place where everyone's opinions are heard (within bounds), no matter how stupid their opinions may seem. After all, to them, your opinion might be the stupid one!

Of course, that would raise the question of why harassment often goes unchecked in political forums. I guess we've gotten used to it now and think it's just a part of the debate. (At least, I have.)

If we've gotten partly used to it, what about the mods? If they start deleting things, they will get accused of taking a side by those that got their posts deleted. On the other hand, if they don't do anything, and the harassment is one-sided - they're still taking a side.

I am not aware of the exact context. Given what I read here, I can see a possibliity, that I offer fear for my own writings on many topics not strictly about chess, that also pull my moral fibers and empathic how can i say mind traits? I try not to look at news more than once a week. And I prefer reviews and analytical perpectives than the latest horrible crap or slogan to manipulate the news with funding dependent news commentatry on the spectacular hot news channel bundles, with some editorial policy. I find language written to be a horrible way to communicvate, but as a critical thinking tool, it does slow down things, if we cooperate on seeing a common understanding, not replay the reflexes. So, please do not paint me either in some corner of certainty from below. I am going full dissertation (but since I am horrible at being concise and expressive, and given the fog, it would be ill-advise to rely on common sense, I might not succedd in my dissertation attempts.

I just wrote the paragraph above, after a bunch below.

It might be very difficult to have a calm discussion with self-primed sensistivities, on polarizing topics, and not having the full information, the tendency is to rely on the little information we get, and our lie detectors, and we will be tempted to use the little we know but the lot we might have already set in stone view of thing to fill the gaps.

Like we learn to recognize when words get overused as a gimmick to initiate previously connected moral reflexes. There is one coming in our global face dangerously, with an orange hat or something. So, in the very self primed raw sensitive topic that seems to be the pivot of the op struggle with how language is being policed or moderated. In lack of information that one can trust (I am not saying that it might not be trustworthy, but we have been aware of how words can be pulled to mean almost anything one might want, with slogans and stuff (I think chess culture itself might be a more universal microscosm, to look at how news vs rumors cross each other and can spead as (damn not the time to be missing the most accurate term that will not send waltzing all the sensitivities of the readers that are actively wondering on which side of the moral perception divdie I might be, I can tell you that I hate supremacism from anywhere, and the talk of others being animals, and that some people ought to be pushed out or bulldozed, and that for months, well the ball is in one camp of the continued not unseeable anymore systematic applicatoin of such stances across cultural groups that live somewhere on some land. That one can find the same kind of reasoning, or previous actions also in that directions, is no excuse to shield our eyes to the ensuing continued same spirit but somehow it is heavily relayed by using buzzwords that seem to shut down our people in power in the first world where I live ability to speak to us as if we were stupid.

The extremist are not among us, they are on top of us. And we might be finding it simpler to go with the existing moral paths that some keywords, like "anti-semitism" or "genocide" would have as both possible morally hurtful. The thing is if a word even exagerated converges to the sustained flow of information that is finally also getting to us from many sources but it started uncontrolled, and internet is not known for its lack of bubbles (like the stockmarket, but with human ideas or moral sudden awareness of something that has been disseminated and self-censored for too long, well that might be the good of the bad.

I think we could blame the satellites for not playing the fog of information game. They don,t have the moral prerequisite to try to make us stay in our previous moral grooves in light of limited information.

For me genocide or not. I look at the morals directly. And I see on any side actually (but again, quantitiy matters! if pussing the victim too hard while bulldozing concrete as if there were not fellow humans in the past there... (and other not forgettable seeng things, and analysed with many heads later, to not be an internet bubble zoom in on some limited horrible thing out of context but amplified by the rumor hubs (humans apparently, some have a taste for outlier looking news/rumors, and it stimulates propagations, and some highways seen to culturally form.. by this under-dog pioneering credential there you get bubbles, sorry, I read about that recenlty, and wanted to be a bit discerning about what comes from the internet, and it is not all of the rumor thing.

While there has been a noticeabl gut wrenching act of genocidal mindset, and dehumanization requiring desecration of life by extermists from the land been cleaned (Cf. sattelite image, and some geometric surface area reasoning, and renewed land flatenning expansion, I don't really need to see blood to understand that cramming people in an area, to bomb them more effectively, will conflate making room for new concrete later, with some human bag of bloods spilling.. it will seep into the ground, but apparently not in the future settlers memory. I wanted to say this. And not be considered anti-semitic. I am not talking about jew around the world, and not even about those in Israel proper. Although I am saddened by the willingness to go blind. To keep moral illusions for the sake of feeling in the right because there is no going back to what was not tenable, at least in the narrative so far. But there is a principle of people still living where they live. I don't see how the active colonisation of occupied (and that is in the present, that people are being shrinked into smaller patches of territory where the news are not looking, and have been accelerated, while the people are in their sustained turpor of insecurity. I guess Hamas hostage "strategy" and Israel moral point of no return having been chose, is not going to unlock this sad morality superiority nightmare, that is quantitatively tipping the moral scales for those who value any human life, not just those of own culture, and own predicament.

Long dissertation. I want to be balance in all such issues, I try to look as much as I can from both sides. I do have my own personal trajectory in this a priori one life of brain time to digest it. So, one could sue me from that being my subsconscious hidden bias.

But I think, as in chess fog, that self-diagnostic hygien is a must do, in the open. Share your implicit with yourself. and then with others. It will help and show the example that you are willing to understand furhter than you less mindconflict threads that can't handle the continued horror and the previous one traumatic (group traumatic, culture traumatic, beyond the loss of lives), and the memory of generational group associated, retold for not forgetting sustained land related physical survival or living with peace.

I suspect you might have been trying too to be critical of certain existing moral reflexes, and not wanting to go the normal social media (social but we are not really seeing the full persons we talk to, and I don,t just mean geographic or physical). Written chat, is a poor approximation of real conversation. So, some internet chat veterans may have more adapted behavior to such meeting in ascci places, and like me might be rambling others without any simple converging clear moral mob shouting rightfullness tones.

and expecting a simple thing in ones polarized groove, not seeing it, then it must be the other groove..

hard to stick ones head out of those groove. This might be like the first world way, selection pressure on people height distribution, even it that is a myth.. The idea is the point.. And with all the effort to be rational and critical and weighing 2 difficult and moral fiver or social justice human animal instinct (from where moral develops and get culturally herded I wonder).

So I feel you, if you are trying to keep too many virtuous stances of communcaition, thinking, and discussion. And what you get is a areodynamically unstable or bistable receptionj like you mentioned. I do not want to be sucked in over there.

But I wanted to give an example of how difficult it is with twitter format most effective disembodied digital chat, to have a real discussion, that those not do the maxima XOR of the minds.. All the gaps of that poor medium and sorry approximation of real social communication, how do you think they are run of the mill filled. With the priors. ok thatnks you for having read this.

also sorry. not concise. and tired of trying to explain. my writing has some hard toread. I hope filling those missing chunks will not repeat what I just deplore of this medium. . of communcaion. I hope it is just the form, and that it is more of the mechanical human language intuition like AI of the verbal kind, that does not have meaning knowledge, that will let my meaning to survive. And I don't mind being seen as lunatic from my verbiage. At least I am being my full self and trying to inject some constructive point of view. I am going really exasperated at many things, now, and I don't think it is only a certain chess culture that is overepresented daily on lichess (in the verbal lichess).