TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Ohio, United States
People's opinions have been interesting reading.
Here are thoughts on everything as the petitioner from my point of view. I don't really want to get engaged in any arguments here, but I do want to contribute my take on things to aid in any further discussion and clarify some things about my stance and motivations. I leave this in the hope that it will do that.
First, I don't actually care about the ban itself. I have no desire to be in or force myself upon a social space where I am not wanted. The idea viscerally disgusts me. I think most people understood this, but I just in case anyone didn't I wanted to emphasize it.
What I did find upsetting was that a false allegation of misconduct was made and then given an imprimatur of legitimacy by staff action in the form of the ban post. Being falsely accused of something, in this case something that can be paraphrased as 'I know that your comment about humans all being slower than computers is secretly a personal attack against me, and you are a manipulative person who is lying when you deny it!', is an upsetting experience. I hold myself to a high standard of honorable conduct, not engaging in personal attacks or tolerating them in others. Life is made pointlessly worse for everyone when people are deliberately toxic with one another. To be accused of being some sort of malignant problem poster constantly attacking others was deeply personally offensive to me and my values.
I suspect that Vecht's idea of the problem poster thing actually came from a situation in another thread when I upset several people by having the temerity to politely tell them that they should not engage in further personal attacks. To make this out as me being the problem is...twisted, to say the least. A form of blaming the victim for creating a 'problem' by objecting to being attacked rather than blaming the attackers for their improper conduct. (I learned from that interaction that to point out personal attacks and request an apology is pointless and in the future I should just report them and move on.) But I digress.
My goal was to be vindicated in that there was simply no evidence to support the allegations, that they were motivated by unjustified paranoia or personal animus.
To put it another way, if Vecht wanted to remove me from his thread for no good reason, I do not mind. I just wanted it to be clear to everyone that the threadban was done merely at his request and not because there was any evidence to support an allegation of misconduct. That if necessary it was on him to justify his decision to the people in the thread who questioned its necessity.
My ideal resolution would have been changing staff posts for QM threadbans to reading something along the lines of: "X user has been banned from the thread at the request of Y. Staff provide threadbans on demand and do not investigate whether any accusations made are accurate or deny bans unless they appear to be made for a discriminatory reason." I hope that staff will institute something like this in the future; several counselors discussed it.
I believe I've gotten something close to this for my particular case by the public exposure of what Vecht claimed and what evidence actually existed. That's vindication of a sort, enough for people to make their own judgments instead of just seeing a staff post about a ban and assuming there must have been good cause. If positive changes to rules and procedure occur as a result that will also be a net benefit I can be pleased with.
Moving on to those rule and procedural issues, I encountered one major concern during the tribunal. The rules regarding threadbans were apparently secret rules only one member of the staff knew. They are nowhere in the rules section of the site for people to look up and be aware of. I cite the actual rules around threadbans, apparently aimed at staff initiated action, and they require rather more than the extremely low standard of 'all threadban requests by QMs granted unless they are clearly discriminatory given by the secret rules.' The tribunal judged this case by the secret rule rather than the only published one.
If that secret rule is the rule that SV wants to institute, that is the administration's call. I do firmly believe however that whatever the rules are they need to be publicly posted in the rules section. Anyone who has studied law knows that there are good reasons we do not allow secret laws. There are huge problems with them. Among these are the limitless potential for abuse, the issue that people cannot abide by rules that they are not aware of, and the point that people cannot provide justified criticism of any potential bad rules if they are kept secret.
SV should not have any secret rules. Everything should be in the open so that people can be aware of what rules they need to follow, talk about them, and bring apparent violations of rules to staff attention.
I was pleased that there appeared to be agreement among the counselors who mentioned the topic. I hope that there will be follow through on this, and that any other internal rules that might be hanging around will be added to the public list as well so that people can be aware of it. This is as good an opportunity as any to go through and do that.
I also encountered two minor concerns. One, the problems of people gravedancing on the banned post with 'funny' replies and Vecht's factually false characterization of events were never really seriously addressed. I believe these things are quite possibly rules violations, and they deserved to be attended to if the rules apply to everyone at all times, as they should.
Two, my attempts to introduce evidence to answer factual questions, particularly the persistent assumption that there had to be something more to Vecht's claims to justify them that the counselors just were not seeing, were basically ignored. I've read the justifications for why, that evidence was only available from one side so no evidence should be considered, but I do not feel that simply ignoring it and making assumptions about what must be true is a good answer. Particularly when the assumption is that the party making the complaint must have had a good reason. That amounts to assuming the result of the inquiry.
In truth sometimes people do make false complaints out of mistake or personal enmity. If a tribunal is a trial attempting to ascertain questions of fact then it is necessary that evidence be allowed to be introduced in order to achieve a just outcome. Trials cannot function without that process, and I hope that the staff will address the question when they consider the process of future tribunals.
At the very least, tribunals should not assume that there is evidence of guilt that they have not seen. That is effectively the same thing as assuming guilt. If tribunals were to do that then there would be no point in having tribunals, so it is best avoided.
For those that have gotten through all of this, thank you for reading.
Here are thoughts on everything as the petitioner from my point of view. I don't really want to get engaged in any arguments here, but I do want to contribute my take on things to aid in any further discussion and clarify some things about my stance and motivations. I leave this in the hope that it will do that.
First, I don't actually care about the ban itself. I have no desire to be in or force myself upon a social space where I am not wanted. The idea viscerally disgusts me. I think most people understood this, but I just in case anyone didn't I wanted to emphasize it.
What I did find upsetting was that a false allegation of misconduct was made and then given an imprimatur of legitimacy by staff action in the form of the ban post. Being falsely accused of something, in this case something that can be paraphrased as 'I know that your comment about humans all being slower than computers is secretly a personal attack against me, and you are a manipulative person who is lying when you deny it!', is an upsetting experience. I hold myself to a high standard of honorable conduct, not engaging in personal attacks or tolerating them in others. Life is made pointlessly worse for everyone when people are deliberately toxic with one another. To be accused of being some sort of malignant problem poster constantly attacking others was deeply personally offensive to me and my values.
I suspect that Vecht's idea of the problem poster thing actually came from a situation in another thread when I upset several people by having the temerity to politely tell them that they should not engage in further personal attacks. To make this out as me being the problem is...twisted, to say the least. A form of blaming the victim for creating a 'problem' by objecting to being attacked rather than blaming the attackers for their improper conduct. (I learned from that interaction that to point out personal attacks and request an apology is pointless and in the future I should just report them and move on.) But I digress.
My goal was to be vindicated in that there was simply no evidence to support the allegations, that they were motivated by unjustified paranoia or personal animus.
To put it another way, if Vecht wanted to remove me from his thread for no good reason, I do not mind. I just wanted it to be clear to everyone that the threadban was done merely at his request and not because there was any evidence to support an allegation of misconduct. That if necessary it was on him to justify his decision to the people in the thread who questioned its necessity.
My ideal resolution would have been changing staff posts for QM threadbans to reading something along the lines of: "X user has been banned from the thread at the request of Y. Staff provide threadbans on demand and do not investigate whether any accusations made are accurate or deny bans unless they appear to be made for a discriminatory reason." I hope that staff will institute something like this in the future; several counselors discussed it.
I believe I've gotten something close to this for my particular case by the public exposure of what Vecht claimed and what evidence actually existed. That's vindication of a sort, enough for people to make their own judgments instead of just seeing a staff post about a ban and assuming there must have been good cause. If positive changes to rules and procedure occur as a result that will also be a net benefit I can be pleased with.
Moving on to those rule and procedural issues, I encountered one major concern during the tribunal. The rules regarding threadbans were apparently secret rules only one member of the staff knew. They are nowhere in the rules section of the site for people to look up and be aware of. I cite the actual rules around threadbans, apparently aimed at staff initiated action, and they require rather more than the extremely low standard of 'all threadban requests by QMs granted unless they are clearly discriminatory given by the secret rules.' The tribunal judged this case by the secret rule rather than the only published one.
If that secret rule is the rule that SV wants to institute, that is the administration's call. I do firmly believe however that whatever the rules are they need to be publicly posted in the rules section. Anyone who has studied law knows that there are good reasons we do not allow secret laws. There are huge problems with them. Among these are the limitless potential for abuse, the issue that people cannot abide by rules that they are not aware of, and the point that people cannot provide justified criticism of any potential bad rules if they are kept secret.
SV should not have any secret rules. Everything should be in the open so that people can be aware of what rules they need to follow, talk about them, and bring apparent violations of rules to staff attention.
I was pleased that there appeared to be agreement among the counselors who mentioned the topic. I hope that there will be follow through on this, and that any other internal rules that might be hanging around will be added to the public list as well so that people can be aware of it. This is as good an opportunity as any to go through and do that.
I also encountered two minor concerns. One, the problems of people gravedancing on the banned post with 'funny' replies and Vecht's factually false characterization of events were never really seriously addressed. I believe these things are quite possibly rules violations, and they deserved to be attended to if the rules apply to everyone at all times, as they should.
Two, my attempts to introduce evidence to answer factual questions, particularly the persistent assumption that there had to be something more to Vecht's claims to justify them that the counselors just were not seeing, were basically ignored. I've read the justifications for why, that evidence was only available from one side so no evidence should be considered, but I do not feel that simply ignoring it and making assumptions about what must be true is a good answer. Particularly when the assumption is that the party making the complaint must have had a good reason. That amounts to assuming the result of the inquiry.
In truth sometimes people do make false complaints out of mistake or personal enmity. If a tribunal is a trial attempting to ascertain questions of fact then it is necessary that evidence be allowed to be introduced in order to achieve a just outcome. Trials cannot function without that process, and I hope that the staff will address the question when they consider the process of future tribunals.
At the very least, tribunals should not assume that there is evidence of guilt that they have not seen. That is effectively the same thing as assuming guilt. If tribunals were to do that then there would be no point in having tribunals, so it is best avoided.
For those that have gotten through all of this, thank you for reading.
