2023-AT-01: Staff and BoSPaladin

[Fey'lya]

-snip-

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Did you just quote the post where I listed several more of the nigh-infinite options available to slam me for only posting about libraries? That's.. impressive.

E: Look, it's clear my message is getting a bit lost here. Here's what I'm trying to say:

1) If you get all of your socialization and posting-needs from a single source, you should broaden your horizons.
1b) For the majority of posters there are other sites just as good as SV out there. If you haven't found one then either your needs are truly esoteric or you should keep looking. That's just flat true and I ain't gonna argue about it, it doesn't matter, the internet is infinite if you don't agree then please just skip this point it is the least important.
1c) Not however included: castigation for having not, implication you're dumb for not having done so, whatever implied judgment you might be feeling here.
1d) As an aside, the offer to help find other good places to post via PM is open to anyone, not just Anchises

2) If for whatever reason, you still have SV as your sole source, it is not then incumbent on the staff to take your needs into account. This is a website, not a therapy clinic. They try to be welcoming, they don't have to be supportive. To ask for a higher burden of care is distinctly unfair to internet randos. If you insist on using a single not for profit anything as your sole source of emotional stability you are probably making a mistake and definitely putting more strain on said thing than it's intended for. It's not that I don't care why so much as it doesn't matter why.

3) In accordance with creating a welcoming community, they try to be fair to anyone in a Tribunal. This does not make it a matter of life or death, nor one that has to be free of any form of fun. This is why ascii-posting is a good thing, it's a reminder of this. The community compact isn't a suicide pact, and the fact that a Councilor got elected on a platform of shitposting is a good indicator that not everyone takes these affairs as seriously as some of our appellants wish they would.

tl;dr we don't have to take SV as seriously as you do, please stop asking us to

 

[Terrabrand]

Did you just quote the post where I listed several more of the nigh-infinite options available to slam me for only posting about libraries? That's.. impressive.

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What's impressive is your continued insistence that Everyone Always Has Options La La La The Truly Desperate Do Not Exist.

Like. I slammed you about libraries because, like every other suggestion you make, your suggestion people visit the local library as a be all end all solution is coming from the clearly privileged perspective that the library Exists, Does Not Hate You, And Is Not Otherwise Unusable.

That you then try to twist this into 'lol man nice dunk attempt what a twisting of facts' instead of acknowledging the point that, like every single suggestion you have made, it quite literally takes it as a given that people have other perfectly good options and are just being lazy whiners if they want to advocate for the site that works best for them to work better for them.

Which has been the seeming underlying stance to you pushing for 'if you don't like it, leave, look at the infinite options you'd already know about if you'd Just Look'. If that's not your intent, perhaps you could clarify what your intent was when you for example blanket dismissed everyone who thinks there's no better option than SV with 'have you even looked?' rather than engaging with the possibility that one might, shock and horror, consider this specific website the single best website for their needs? Like what is even wrong with that, anyways?

I'm not saying the site can or should accommodate the individual needs of every poster. Ultimately, that's not really going to be feasible, or even desired to the extent that taken to the maximum extreme that would technically mean accommodating any nazi posters or whatever rather than actually upholding the site's values.

But when your response to people hoping the site can accommodate them is not to argue that this may not be feasible or that it conflicts with accommodating you, but rather is, literally, to start with...

Honestly in a case like yours I'd recommend less internet in general. I know it's something of a heterodox opinion these days, but you don't actually have to post anywhere! If there's no good websites, don't use.. any...?

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'touch grass'

"Condescending", "berating", all words people like to use when they don't like what they hear but can't refute it. I'm not hearing "you're wrong" here. But fine, if you're hung up on a lack of specifics, here's a whole bunch:

Many web serials these days have associated communities, usually very friendly to whatever stripe of person the story attracts. Many, many of them are far more LGBTQ+ friendly than SV is these days. Much less shy about banning Nazis, too.

If you want largely-unrestricted political debates but with a chilling effect on outright mudslinging or personal attacks, there's always the NationStates forums - they make a point of not banning Nazis though, so caveat emptor.

If you want long form, high content posting there's also older places like SA or QQ or hell, newgrounds(?) though those tend to be pretty set in their ways (read: extremely idiosyncratic). SV would also fit here imo, it's an excellent long form, high-content hangout joint, I'm not gonna tell people to leave either.

This is an extremely partial list just based on what I happen to know of offhand, for the internet is truly vast - for those who say there's nothing as good as SV, have you looked?

Nobody would argue that finding a sense of community on SV isn't a great thing, nor that that seems to be what they're going for -- what I'm saying is that if you only get what you need in one place, it's incumbent on you to either make arrangements not to rock that boat too hard or make arrangements for your eventual ban. Don't make the staff do your emotional labor for you, it's not fair to either party.

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and then argue 'go to the literal infinite internet where I will in fact literally say it is literally infinite, it definitely must automagically have a better website for you which must be feasible for you to find and also btw this is just refluffed touch grass, instead of Get Off Of My Internet it's only get off of my website'

Edit: quick citation: 'internet is literally infinite;

1b) For the majority of posters there are other sites just as good as SV out there. If you haven't found one then either your needs are truly esoteric or you should keep looking. That's just flat true and I ain't gonna argue about it, it doesn't matter, the internet is infinite if you don't agree then please just skip this point it is the least important.

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then uh yeah people seem justified in calling you out for a lack of empathy.

You've hardly evidenced against my initial point that you seem to want people to cease to exist for your convenience; your solution is not for them to comport themselves differently, but just Leave The Website.

Why haven't you left the website and found the Better One That Definitely Exists if this is actually an always true, always best answer? You're sure insistent it's the best answer for everyone else, and yet strangely the firm advocate for that fact... hasn't... taken his own advice...

Leaving one to wonder why, and the most obvious possible answer is that you just want people who are currently inconvenient to you to conveniently cease to exist, and so by claiming it's for their own good to go to other websites hoping you can get them all to leave...

to get the site to better accommodate you personally, because they had the gall to hope the site could better accommodate them personally. Hmm.

There seems to be a hole in your world view somewhere.

 

[Datcord]

let's remember what this thread is for, please.
Perhaps we should remember that this thread is for the discussion of the Tribunal. If this is difficult, I can assist people's memories with threadbans.

 

[sdwood]

I understand where you are coming from, but I specifically ran on making these proceedings less serious via antics.

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You know, I haven't bothered to vote in the last few elections. You have just ensured will. And it will be against anyone who supported you -- and I'll go looking.

When you receive a Staff Notice you have not been infracted. That's the reason they can't be appealed, and why they don't do anything to your posting privileges

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This is a lie.

I have gotten at least one infraction because of my history, which makes your claim bullshit. Staff Notices cannot be appealed; if they could, I'd have at least one less Staff Notice, I believe.

 

[The_Letter_K]

You know, I haven't bothered to vote in the last few elections. You have just ensured will. And it will be against anyone who supported you -- and I'll go looking.

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If all I accomplish is making more people involved in voting and more considerate of who they vote onto council, I will have been as successful as I could have dreamed of.

 

[stratigo]

I understand where you are coming from, but I specifically ran on making these proceedings less serious via antics. ASCII anime girls even actually featured specifically in my platform. I did consider the effect on mobile, but ultimately, it was a campaign promise and I intend to deliver. You could argue that I was elected for solely the other parts of my platform, but I was not the only "joke candidate" that got in, so I am not sure that holds up. I won't do it every time, or even frequently, if only for the chaos factor, but it also will likely not be the last time.

If it's any comfort I don't intend to run again, so there will probably be just the one term of this. If all I accomplish with my mess is getting people to read the platforms and seriously consider who they vote for next time, great. If I manage to bring the temperature down by making a joke of it, as was my stated intent, all the better.

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But you're the best joke candidate.

Meanwhile I have the exact opposite reaction. That shit is gauche as fuck.

Like, obviously tribunals, especially uh... open and shut ones like this, don't have the same 'gravitas' as a actual court but I don't feel like it's too much to ask councillors to at least take them seriously, and that ASCII thing is... not that. Can we expect to see it in perma's, or actually contentious stuff ? I hope not. I mean ideally we'd never have but... you get my meaning.

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Tribunals on SV don't have gravitas, and the majority of people interested in them (the supermajority I'd say) are just looking for good dunks. A joking ASCII is a better dunk IMHO then a 5 paragraph effort post of insinuation that you are evil and should suffer, which is not utterly uncommon.

Fool that you are, you proposed things on a platform. I, enlightened being that I am, promised nothing and am now required to deliver nothing. Let that be a lesson to you all

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You deliver more than some serious councilors.

Gotta try harder to try less Jem.

 

[shinaobi]

This is a lie.

I have gotten at least one infraction because of my history, which makes your claim bullshit. Staff Notices cannot be appealed; if they could, I'd have at least one less Staff Notice, I believe.

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It is not. A staff notice is not an infraction, and I already said in my last post that a staff notice can't be appealed. You can't appeal not-infractions.

 

[Prime 2.0]

It is not. A staff notice is not an infraction, and I already said in my last post that a staff notice can't be appealed. You can't appeal not-infractions.

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Two things. One, what he is actually saying is that the staff notice is still a punishment, and still something that has negative consequences and can be held against the poster. That is why he is referring to an infraction he was given due to a history that he was unable to appeal.

Two, I have successfully appealed a staff notice myself. In my own case, I argued that the staff notice negatively recontextualized my post, and that in practice it would remove me from good standard as sdwood experienced - but I was told it was against policy to overturn staff notices. So, I then reached out to the moderator who had not actually received any reports, but had issued the staff notice and passing. After explaining my actual intent in the post, the moderator said they were mistaken, and the staff notice was repealed within the appeals thread.

Staff notices are punishments, regardless of what label sufficient velocity gives it. They are held against the user, and they publicly embarrass the user. It is extraordinary for one to be overturned, but not impossible.

That said, I find the existence of a punishment that cannot be appealed in normal circumstances concerning. Getting back to the original point though: as a factual matter, you are at best mistaken. Policy and reality are separate things, and it is disrespectful to users presenting a grievance to refer to the former as though it were the latter. Or to just sidestep the grievance completely, for that matter.

 

[Pidl]

Two things. One, what he is actually saying is that the staff notice is still a punishment, and still something that has negative consequences and can be held against the poster. That is why he is referring to an infraction he was given due to a history that he was unable to appeal.

Two, I have successfully appealed a staff notice myself. In my own case, I argued that the staff notice negatively recontextualized my post, and that in practice it would remove me from good standard as sdwood experienced - but I was told it was against policy to overturn staff notices. So, I then reached out to the moderator who had not actually received any reports, but had issued the staff notice and passing. After explaining my actual intent in the post, the moderator said they were mistaken, and the staff notice was repealed within the appeals thread.

Staff notices are punishments, regardless of what label sufficient velocity gives it. They are held against the user, and they publicly embarrass the user. It is extraordinary for one to be overturned, but not impossible.

That said, I find the existence of a punishment that cannot be appealed in normal circumstances concerning. Getting back to the original point though: as a factual matter, you are at best mistaken. Policy and reality are separate things, and it is disrespectful to users presenting a grievance to refer to the former as though it were the latter. Or to just sidestep the grievance completely, for that matter.

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Yes, obviously a staff notice will be held against a poster when deciding whether to infract them in the future, that's their entire purpose.

Besides the fact that nobody actually cares about someone getting a staff notice, in 99.9% of the cases, it's not the staff notice that's a public embarrassment.

 

[Fey'lya]

Staff notices are punishments, regardless of what label sufficient velocity gives it. They are held against the user, and they publicly embarrass the user. It is extraordinary for one to be overturned, but not impossible.

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That depends on how broadly you want to define the term "punishment", doesn't it?

If you do something, and someone says "hey don't do that", have you been punished?

If you do it again and they get mad at you because they asked you not to do it, is that a punishment? Does it make the first one a punishment retroactively?

E: Heck yeah, same time poster pals.

 

[Prime 2.0]

That depends on how broadly you want to define the term "punishment", doesn't it?

If you do something, and someone says "hey don't do that", have you been punished?

If you do it again and they get mad at you because they asked you not to do it, is that a punishment? Does it make the first one a punishment retroactively?

E: Heck yeah, same time poster pals.

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I've laid out quite clearly what makes it a punishment - it removes a person from good standing, it publicly embarrasses them, and the notice itself can negatively warp the meaning of the original post (as it did in my case). Staff notices have even been suggested as an explicit step of escalating punishment, a "strike", for the since cancelled art attribution policy. It is treated as a punishment by staff in every respect save for that it cannot ordinarily be repealed and that some staff members refuse to call it one.

Incidentally, removal from good standing is not some deferred, retroactive effect. The staff notice is on the person's record immediately. The Infractions tab of that person's personal view of their profile page appears immediately. Higher staff scrutiny of any events the user is in or reports made about the user begins immediately. Claiming that this is somehow an act that only exists retroactively after it is considered in some hypothetical future staff action is ridiculous.

Moreover, let's talk about that - because the issue at hand is, of course, the inability to appeal the staff notice, what exactly has the user been "told not to do"? Do they actually have a real example of the behavior to steer away from, if the staff notice was mistaken? If another case arises where a moderator is considering whether or not to issue an infraction, does the staff notice just disappear from their minds, scrubbed of any impact on their intuition, if the issue being considered is completely unrelated to the original staff notice so as not to bias towards overenforcement? If a future infraction is issued, is the user afforded more than the usual 1,000 words for their their appeal to contest or otherwise address the relevant staff notice?

The answer to these respective questions is "probably something incoherent", and three resounding No's. I say this again as someone who has been the recipient of an erroneous staff notice and who actually beat the odds in having it stricken: staff notices are a punishment with immediate consequences, and concerns about reputation and whether or not somebody remains in good standing are not frivolous.

Setting aside that, for some reason, the hypotheticals you posed never touched the issue of erroneous staff notices at all, despite that being the subject of the discussion up to this point. "But what if you actually did do it" isn't really a response to "it's bad that policy says having proof you didn't do it doesn't matter".

Yes, obviously a staff notice will be held against a poster when deciding whether to infract them in the future, that's their entire purpose.

Besides the fact that nobody actually cares about someone getting a staff notice, in 99.9% of the cases, it's not the staff notice that's a public embarrassment.

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I think I covered most of what could be said in response to this already - but I will just note that the only person who should be deciding whether or not a staff action taken against them is worth arguing against is the user themselves. They decide if their time is worth clearing their name - and indeed, your own claim that "in 99.9% of the cases, it's not the staff notice that's a public embarrassment" provides ample reason to conclude that it is! People would tend to take what the notice says at face value with numbers like that, yes?

Bit of a problem if the statement is completely false. Per rule 5, you don't even get to clarify yourself to the thread, it'd be arguing against staff action.

 

[Pidl]

You must have led a really blessed life if you consider a staff notice a punishment or a public embarrassment...
Also, this is a forum for nerds to talk and debate about fanfiction/games/power levels. Any good standing you had got removed on signing up.

Staff notices exist as a warning. You posted something that was toeing the line and instead of just letting you carry on and probably get infracted in the next two posts, they decided to be nice and warn you that you were about to cross the line. So in that point of view it's the opposite of a punishment.

Staff are also not robots, they can consider things not posted in the appeals forum. You managed to get your erroneous staff notice stricken without officially appealing, I managed to get an erroneous 18-month infraction duration reduced to six months without officially appealing and I'm sure there are plenty of other users who managed to do something similar.

While the user can certainly decide whether it's worth the users time to clear their name, they can't decide it's worth the staffs time.
They are all a bunch of volunteers who have better things to do than to listen to every user whine about how this staff notice has ruined their life forever.

And why would you need to clarify yourself to the thread?
Do you really think we care about someone getting a staff notice, that we're all quietly laughing behind your back and going 'look at that him, he got himself a staff notice, how pathetic'?
Besides, you can totally clarify what you meant. Just say: "Hmm, I apparently worded that badly because I actually meant X" and unless that's you doubling down everybody will nod and accept that.