A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 13:03 UTC (Wed) by nirbheek (subscriber, #54111)
In reply to: A pair of Rust kernel modules by mathstuf
Parent article: A pair of Rust kernel modules

That's useful, thanks! It's a bit sad to me that the editors are allowing the comment section to become toxic enough to require adding such a feature. As a former reddit community moderator, it's frustrating to me when I see people allow this to happen.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 13:17 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

For the most part, it doesn't happen here. I suspect the majority of readers are subscribers, which means it's only "old" articles that get the attention of trolls.

The difficulty is when you get articles that by their very nature are contentious, and debate can easily get heated. That, sadly, then attracts trolls like moths to a flame.

Which then encourages subscribers to subscribe to a level that permits them to apply their own moderation.

It's like democracy - "the worst form of government, apart from all the others we've tried". Moderation is a bad thing. Just is it better than the alternatives? For the most part, for this site at least, it clearly is not.

Cheers,
Wol

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 13:21 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (6 responses)

Out of curiosity, what would you propose that "the editors" do to make things better? Assuming we had the time and stomach to go deleting/blocking posts, what are the criteria we should use? Most of the time, asking LWN readers to behave like adults works; I'm not sure what to do in cases where it doesn't.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 19:21 UTC (Wed) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link] (2 responses)

> Assuming we had the time and stomach to go deleting/blocking posts, what are the criteria we should use?

My opinion is that a large part of the problem is that those two, very blunt weapons are the only ones available. It means that as long as one nominally follows the rules[1], one is completely free to (deliberately or accidentally) abuse LWNs perverse feedback loops to derail discussions: Write the most incendiary thing you think you can get away with, get it as far up the page as possible by being early, fight with every reply and watch your discussion take up vertical space on the page until nobody has the patience to scroll past it to read anything more substantive anymore. At that point you have won by being the loudest and stop replying to avoid getting chastized by Your Editor.

With no mechanism to counteract this, it's unsurprising it keeps happening. Softer measures like hiding, collapsing or locking a thread, sending it to the bottom of the sort order, showing limited reply depth or rate limiting back and forth replies are probably more effective there than hardline moderation.

> Most of the time, asking LWN readers to behave like adults works; I'm not sure what to do in cases where it doesn't.

I think it's remarkable how well this works, all things considered.

[1] https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 15, 2022 18:03 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> Softer measures like hiding, collapsing or locking a thread, sending it to the bottom of the sort order, showing limited reply depth or rate limiting back and forth replies are probably more effective there than hardline moderation.

This.

Surprise, surprise, "analog" problems rarely ever have binary solutions (unless of course you read social media).

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 16, 2022 3:32 UTC (Fri) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894) [Link]

> With no mechanism to counteract this, it's unsurprising it keeps happening. Softer measures like hiding, collapsing or locking a thread, sending it to the bottom of the sort order, showing limited reply depth or rate limiting back and forth replies are probably more effective there than hardline moderation.

And what would be the grounds for doing this? Is this JUST for criticism of Rust? Or does it include a broader category of messages than that?

In my opinion there is no issue. The discussion isn't even heated. I made a SINGLE comment and was immediately accused of trolling. It seems to me that ANY criticism of Rust immediately gets labelled as trolling. Yet lots of topics covered here are contentious and prompt back-and-forth discussions that often are not particularly productive. Only criticism of Rust seems to get immediately labelled as trolling, as far as I can see.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 15, 2022 7:05 UTC (Thu) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Just throwing ideas out: if you ask someone to be an adult more than X times in window Y + random episilon, put them in a cooling off queue - not necessarily a ban, just slow the rate of posts, to a stop, and then ramp back up (assuming no more adult warnings)

It could be automated - other than ticking an "adult warning" on your post. The randomness is to prevent gaming - keeps you wondering if this time is the one.

I know, a bit naive, just thinking what would help me when I get too troll-y. Particularly in my younger years - I'd like to think I'm older and wiser then when I joined. Because I'm definitely older ;)

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 15, 2022 13:24 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

Two concrete proposals:

Have the editors able to "flag" a post and all its children as problematic, which results in the thread content being hidden by default, and require readers to click through to read each flagged post in turn. This is a weaker form of deletion.
Support delayed posting, with the minimum required delay set by the editors for replies to any post or its children, and also something that can be set on an individual account - the delay applicable at any point in the thread is the maximum delay of all of its parent posts. This means that when I hit "Post comment", instead of it actually posting, it enters a "quarantine" state, and I have to come back to the thread to release the comment from quarantine at a later time. This is a weaker form of blocking.

The idea behind the first option is to reduce the visibility of overheated threads, allowing you to indicate that you think that a given thread is non-productive (and discouraging people from either reading it or replying to it). The idea behind the second is to let you use time to cool off a thread that's become heated, or to increase the effort trolls and abusers have to put into actually being seen.

Finally, when I killfile a user, I should have the option to not only killfile that user, but also all immediate replies to them; that way, if I killfile a user who's good at trolling, I don't see the replies that they successfully troll for (but I do see the replies to replies, which may be interesting tangents from the troll).

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 16, 2022 5:04 UTC (Fri) by edomaur (subscriber, #14520) [Link]

Also, an idea would be to add a "cooling down" timer to subtrees selection of discussions, with a visual marker to signal that there is delayed posting enforced in that part of the comments. This can be also linked with a moderator message (typically one "please refrain..." from our favorite editor in chief)

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 16, 2022 12:01 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The system here isn't perfect, or modern, and people often criticise it when there's an angry mob thread like this, but to date I haven't yet witnessed an angry mob directed *at* the moderation. That's a better success rate than nearly every web forum I've used in the past 20-odd years.

Incidentally a major subreddit became Main Character Of The Day on other social media this week for grotesque moderator overreach. I would say the reddit/voat/8chan/urbit model of expendable community and digital royalty built atop it has produced some of the worst results. That website has trench lines by the hundred and the tools are designed to only escalate.