Admin Accountability
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Oh yeah, I don’t think it’s a GOOD idea. It’s just a solution for the specific trouble spot to start from.
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@IoleRae said in Admin Accountability:
I am also of the VERY firm opinion that the HISTORY of this place (and other places) is less important than the COMMUNITY. We’ve lost WORA and Electric Soup and the imagination named one and bad descs – a lot of them, and the loss is nothing, now.
At one point someone found Electric Soup on the Way Back Machine but LIKE A FOOL I didn’t bookmark it, so when I wanted to show someone a thread from there last night I couldn’t find it again. It does suck, especially as users get older and busier and institutional knowledge drops off.
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I honestly think a lot of this is worrying about edge cases. Yeah, sometimes wild shit will happen out of left field, in which case people will leave and go somewhere else but trying to plan for it isn’t practical or possible tbh. Otherwise, like, have some community agreement of what admin does and does not do, which should include listening to the community, and require a unanimous vote of current admin when it comes to adding a new one. The voting is, again, people staying or leaving.
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@Arkandel said in Admin Accountability:
The model I liked to use was to not rely on authority at all. Being an admin meant only stepping in when shit really hit the fan (‘a troll is making openly racist comments’) or for general boring tasks like moving or merging threads to their appropriate categories. You can’t overuse power you don’t allow yourself to have.
I largely prefer your approach: keeping a very light hand on active moderation. Because everyone who is saying it is absolutely right, that it is the community’s board, more than anyone one person’s or any group of people’s board
That’s part of why I wish there was better continuity plans.
@IoleRae said in Admin Accountability:
Loudly promise yourself and us that you will make backups (HERE), and X, Y, and Z have access to them. Do it once a month and use github or something?
That’s worth investigating. I will look into that.
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@Tez said in Admin Accountability:
That’s part of why I wish there was better continuity plans.
It’s a forum, not a nuclear arsenal. If it goes down in flames it goes down in flames. Then someone will build a new one. Or they won’t. It doesn’t matter.
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@Pavel lmao. I have a problem with over-engineering for things.
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I had like a whole post typed up and then decided: The fact that you’re even concerned about this probably means it won’t be an issue for a long time.
You guys seem to get it: You’re traffic cops, not federal agents.
On Dragon Wings · https://pern.gaslightswitch.com · pern.gaslightswitch.com port 4201
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@KarmaBum said in Admin Accountability:
I had like a whole post typed up and then decided: The fact that you’re even concerned about this probably means it won’t be an issue for a long time.
You guys seem to get it: You’re traffic cops, not federal agents.
You are in MY courtroom! GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.
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@Tez said in Admin Accountability:
this situation happened very specifically because of power invested in one person.
Pulling this thread out bc I was thinking about it last night, you know, in that ‘lie in bed and think about things as you fall asleep’ kind of way. I wonder if there are good ways to build checks for that kind of thing, have some kind of accountability baked in. Right now, I own the server. Glitch handles the subdomain stuff. Pyre and Pavel are admin. But if I suddenly fired everyone, like – in the end, that’s where it stops. With the person who has the keys to the server account. How do you build in checks?
As the USA is finding out right now, with the best will in the world, the checks and balances don’t always work as intended.
Be transparent. Be accountable. Be open to discussion. And if the people you think have integrity are looking dubious, stop and ask why rather than warming up the banhammer.
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Going to go with ‘This is engineering a solution for an outlier situation’. If you totally go nutso bananas, the control is Roz yells at you to tell you this? Idek. Like, if the admin here separately or jointly I guess we build a new board again. Rather proven it can be done!
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Sounding like a broken record, but I think it all rolls back around to trust, a precious resource not to be ignored or squandered. Unpopular decisions and actions are going to happen, and in some cases will absolutely need to, but if the community you’ve fostered trusts your judgment - and can trust that questioning that judgment, so long as they’re not rolling off the rage deep end without cause, is both allowed and heard - then they can trust you’re doing your best and that you are willing to shift course if the situation requires, whether or not you actually do so in that particular situation.
Ultimately, this is what happened on MSB. An extremely questionable decision was made that a large number of posters didn’t agree with, it was doubled down on, and then another action was taken that a large number of posters not only didn’t agree with, but felt was incredibly unfair. Response to this resulted in greater and greater breaches of trust as folks were first told to shut up about it (temporarily or not), and then bans started coming down, often solely because someone posted at all.
The decisions themselves were bad calls, but the ultimate cause was that a majority of the board very abruptly lost all trust in the administration to 1. make wise decisions, 2. listen to feedback, and 3. not start banning anyone giving said feedback unless they were being very egregious about it. It’s worse when there was a whole lot of prior trust invested, because then it feels like a betrayal.
In my view, any organization or attempts at checks and balances should serve that end, so what shape they take (on an internet message board, anyway), is pretty secondary if they’re effective at doing so.
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So it’s an interesting question and I’d probably echo everyone else mostly, but I like the question because it reminds me of things we run into an awful lot in running MUs, and not just in punishing problematic behavior but guiding or incentivizing behavior in general.
We’re a hobby all about making games so I mean of course people are going to make really overengineered solutions, like coming up with like a 30 step approach to remove incentives of having someone help their character with their own alts rather than… just saying it’s against the rules and banning someone for doing it.
Pretty much any behavior you can think of you can create a structure around it that makes a behavior impossible or conversely necessary, but usually they are some cumbersome and massive that it completely strangles out what you wanna foster in the first place. My experience has led me to believe that futureproofing something, whether a board or code on a MU, to be generally a bad idea.
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@Evilgrayson Without delving into the actual politics, more and more people are being shown what others have known for ages ages: plenty of things work if you do not actively undermine them. If you take a fire department and instead of giving them water truck, you give them a fuel tank, and they spray that on a fire… you cannot say firefighters are the problem.
Like… I had another better analogy at one point, but words hard and I don’t remember.
But back to your point, for sure, people found out ‘huh… the only reason people followed the rules was because they agreed to… what if we stopped?’ is incredibly easy, especially given stuff you can get from Renegade Cut on the YouTubes, since we’re trying to keep PoliticTalk to a minimum.
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@Apos I am of the opinion that it is better to squash people who break the reasonable rules than to try and write rules so convoluted that it blocks people from doing reasonable things because of the mere /potential/ for something bad to happen if someone abuses it.
Something like: Abuse won’t be tolerated.
Clear cut ‘Don’t do this’ rather than a bunch of nebulous coded things that are put in place because someone ‘might’ be a trouble maker. Let people have fun as long as it’s within theme and setting and rules rather than remove something for everyone just cuz someone might try and abuse it.
Rule that abuse won’t be tolerated.
Ah well.
This is why I don’t run a game I suspect.
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Thinking about it, a rule such as “don’t be a fucking asshole” is broad and clearly up to the judgment of the person enforcing the rule, but it generally works fine enough because most folks have a pretty good idea of what ‘fucking asshole’ entails, their lines are just drawn in different places. A firm nudge is generally enough to course correct provided the person isn’t actually intending to be in ‘fucking asshole’ territory, and for people egregiously over the line, everyone can basically look and go ‘yep, they were being a fucking asshole’.
But, this again goes back to trust, otherwise it doesn’t work at all. If the people in the community trust that, even if you draw your lines somewhere differently than they do, you will be reasonable and open about where they are and what you do when someone crosses them, and - very importantly - that this standard will be applied evenly to everyone, it works. Even for people who start out distrustful because they don’t know you or your community well enough to know how fairly the rules are applied, their concerns are often settled with time and seeing the rules in action.
If you’ve broken everyone’s trust, especially if you did it via uneven, unfair, and heavy-handed application of punishment, especially especially if you then insist that your rulings were justified, then suddenly that rule doesn’t work at all. People want to know, really want to know, exactly where your lines are. They don’t trust your judgment and they certainly don’t trust that you’ll be fair about it, so they want to make absolutely sure that they don’t accidentally cross said line. It’s no longer seen as a boundary, but a cliff, and the result is fear, defensiveness, and resentment. At that point, though, writing a novel about all the ins and outs of exactly what ‘being a fucking asshole’ means isn’t likely to work either.
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@KarmaBum said in Admin Accountability:
I had like a whole post typed up and then decided: The fact that you’re even concerned about this probably means it won’t be an issue for a long time.
You guys seem to get it: You’re traffic cops, not federal agents.
I’m a librarian. I make sure that stuff is in the right spot, there’s no running in the building, and I’m woefully underpaid for my job.
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@eye8urcake Oh man, now I have to watch those films again.
