On the current tribunal: thank you to all the Councillors who remarked on this appeal, and to Forteplus, for not requesting this be private.
ok now to the thing I have waited patiently to post for the last month and a half
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Yeah, but that's always been a problem with forums. You could potentially move to improve it, so the question becomes how to change user behavior. Users perpetuate these kinds downwards spirals in threads both on the side of the person getting pissed who can't stop posting and the people egging them on. Staff will then come in and make some kind of somewhat post-facto attempt to weave things back together again and it doesn't seem to always work effectively. But without a change in the way people even approach arguments in N&P (which is where I see most of this) you'd be fighting uphill just like Squishy was back when he made PoliLaw. The best way is to figure out how the rules can change that behavior.
You had some decent ideas on this back during the council elections, but they're of varying power.
#1 seems more relevant for some tabletop threads than any N&P argument as I rarely ever see discord stuff quoted, #2 is a good idea and should be under rule 4 as probably a fineprint edit, and #3 is powerful but also hard because it's just about changing overall mod culture. It's better over time but as mods get more professional some feel like they're losing their individual expression. It clashes heavily with the idea of mods as just another user and some mods want to be more personalized than others.
They want to speak morally and have the chance to be more than just an internet cop while the directors get the actual rhetoric. And I find that the necessity to keep staff happy and interested in volunteering is easily undervalued, despite the fact that SV is already incredibly serious for an internet forum in how it governs itself. There is a point where it can cross over into making mods feel like cogs, which is basically how a proper bureaucracy should be run, but is somewhat antithetical to a volunteer organization of ostensible users-turned-community-watchers. At least bureaucrats are paid and get nice benefits in some countries.
I'm not on many forums, so you're likely right, but it's always troubled me as a pattern regardless.
Re my earlier specific suggestions:
I'd like staff to be happy, less overworked, and interested in continuing to volunteer, but I don't think it should come at the cost of the forum culture. In fact, I think that the more #3 goes unaddressed, the more burnout and unhappiness staff will experience in their roles, because when users regard mods as policing them morally instead of logistically, it raises resentment on all sides. This, in turn, gives rise to siege mentality, which is an inherently exhausting place to be in.
It's possible for an organization to present a calm and even public face while giving people who work within it basic respect, a say in what they do, and the ability to either enact or voice their opinions regarding changes. It's the internal, not the external, which should allow for individual expression and agency of the people who work for it, and organizations that achieve that are often in fact often not labeled bureaucratic. However, I am not against individual expression in mod posts about infractions, so long as pragmatic and logistical language is used instead of moralistic where that is relevant.
I've only seen #1 a few times myself, but it bugged me enough that I remembered it. I probably should have ordered it last, but I put it first because it was the easiest to articulate haha.
Oh, they absolutely have. But those kinds of detailed rule-specific complaints are obviously less common. Hence why I said 'most'. It is absolutely less common to have people talk about specific rules issues than complain about lawyer roleplay or issues with specific content. You are one of the most prolific advocates of re-interpreting these rules and raising these issues, even, but there aren't that many people who do that.
And even when there are, the staff isn't obligated to take up the complaint. They can read it, and just be like, okay, but no, we simply don't agree. There is really no obligation for the staff to change the rules on the basis of a specific complaint if they honestly don't agree with that interpretation. Sometimes the complaint is not feasible or the staff don't think it's an issue. Now maybe that's a problem that the staff don't see it an issue, but it's also not really a moral failing that they disagree with specific rules interpretations that differ from their own.
And IMO the real reason why the staff don't take this stuff on is that no one owns it. Most public services nowadays are developing dedicated reform or 'innovation' units because otherwise they're constantly stuck in inertia. Why? Not just because they're set in their ways but people are too busy. Back when I was staff I could make suggestions or proposals live or die just by bothering to care enough about it to push it through. It's a tyranny of effort. And so often users will see their proposals shut down or not looked at and wonder why the hell the staff aren't listening to them, and it's probably because after years of volunteering you develop a limit to patience and a limit to the horizons of what you're interested in changing.
I remember a few times I would try to set up some reform or proposal as a staff member and it would just die straight up because I forgot. I was busy or had some other shit going on or there was something that interrupted me in doing it like a tribunal I had to manage. In general admin staff are way too general-purpose in their role to be good policy/rule change developers, and arbis and mods are too absorbed in their front-line work. Directors meanwhile have to deal with the business and technical end. So there's no real changemakers unless someone designates themselves as such and does the work to convince people in staff. And quite frankly that privileges those with a foot in the door. Because you have the power to do it yourself, and user proposals are often suggesting the staff do something rather than making a ready-made package for the staff to use. The user tends to underestimate the effort required to do something, and the staff will overestimate, and so a proposal is dismissed.
I definitely understand, having been in volunteer organizations, how people can be exhausted from the grind or simply too busy to pay attention to longer trends or to reform things. Moreover, I know that criticism is best given and feedback is best taken when it is expressed at a time/place where everyone understands that it is meant constructively, and mental and emotional space has been made for it. This means that many times posts in random threads will not be regarded also because actual space for addressing feedback has not been carved out operationally. I'm not mad that staff hasn't run with my suggestions, and have, I think, since maybe the first few months where I might have come out a little strong, been careful to clarify that I may not know all the context. I'm sorry if my wording implied that I was mad! I simply meant to address the sentiment that users do not raise issues on a systemic level, which I knew to be false, since I myself raise them at times and have, I think, at times been regarded as a problematic poster.
I think it's likely, in fact, that both users and staff underestimate the effort required to do anything, haha! Doing things is hard, especially when large numbers of people or institutional inertia is involved. However, I do think that even though SV could limp on into eternity, some of the issues that require work would greatly benefit many people who post here, and hope that the current Council finds a way to work with staff to implement some reforms, including perhaps forming a 'reform unit', as you outline above.
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