Admin Accountability
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@Tez said in Admin Accountability:
I mean right now your only guarantee is that if I go mad with power then Roz will gently smother me in my sleep.
You break the implicit trust we’ve vested in you and I will find you.
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In this particular case, I consider the ‘mad with power’ failure mode to be fairly low stakes. Honestly, the system operated about as well as we could possibly hope: the people ‘in charge’ did something which a large portion of the community didn’t agree with, and so that community found/made another place that better aligned with their desires.
That’s not a bad thing. It’s not even really a failure - it’s about the best you can hope for from a community operating entirely on volunteer time and interest. In fact, there are strong parallels to MU*s themselves - when someone builds a game, they’re in charge of that game. You can’t depose them or ‘vote them out’, generally speaking. But if their behavior is such that you no longer feel welcome or interested in engaging there, it’s not hard to find another game. It’s inconvenient, and there’s a cost to it, but no one is trapped.
And, in the end, that’s the best thing that we can hope for, I think - a community will exist as long as people wish to be associated with it. When they no longer desire that, the community will move, change, or disband.
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I feel like there has to be a better answer than this. I really regret the way things went down for a lot of reasons, but I hate that – we haven’t LOST IT, exactly, but all of the history that is within MSB is now farther removed for some people. And after a lot of effort to try and keep it, too!!
Like, Amazon has to have a better answer to this. No one can just delete Amazon. (But if you can, I support you.) Amazon has backups, and no one can just delete them all, everywhere. (But if you can, I support you.) And OBVIOUSLY this tiny hobby board isn’t really the same as massive commercial force of evil (Again, if you can delete Amazon, I support you.) but there must be some safeguards that they use that we can adapt? Maybe?
she/they
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I mean personally, I’m completely comfortable with the “checks” being no more than ‘Roz smothers in sleep for misbehavior’ to be frank. It’s possible your life could change and you could get so stressed you lose your shit and melt down–it can happen to the best of us, clearly.
If we’re looking to troubleshoot the specific issue that has caused a downfall in recent memory, do a vote of confidence with the userbase on potential hires. The problem was the team got tired, bone deep tired, and couldn’t do it any more. So they brought on people who could without consulting anyone they should have, and one of those choices was somebody a lot of people couldn’t trust. That’s where the breakdown started.
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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?
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.
If you’re really super concerned about repeating history…
Make plans NOW as to what you will do when you get too tired to mod. Because THAT is the killer.
the entity previously known as Sunny
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Although administrating a forum and running a game are completely different things there is some commonality in the fact you sometimes have to pick your poison and live with what that means.
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.
However there were side effects. Some users felt singled out, for example, targeted by bandwagons, and unless the level of moderation itself was changed - which would alter the dynamic - there really wasn’t much I could do. Stepping in to correct this sort of behavior is inherently subjective; I would be using my judgment on who is going too far, or what remark is too mean or personal.
Now, as it was pointed out in this thread’s original message when it comes down to it, someone has power over the server. That person ultimately controls the forum.
However forums - as you are seeing - are easy to spawn. It’s the community around it, voting with its feet, that’s much harder to control.
In my humble opinion that’s who ultimately holds admins accountable. It’s y’all. Take responsibility, don’t tolerate bullshit, respect the thankless work admins are doing and that’s about all you can expect.
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@IoleRae said in Admin Accountability:
I mean personally, I’m completely comfortable with the “checks” being no more than ‘Roz smothers in sleep for misbehavior’ to be frank. It’s possible your life could change and you could get so stressed you lose your shit and melt down–it can happen to the best of us, clearly.
If we’re looking to troubleshoot the specific issue that has caused a downfall in recent memory, do a vote of confidence with the userbase on potential hires. The problem was the team got tired, bone deep tired, and couldn’t do it any more. So they brought on people who could without consulting anyone they should have, and one of those choices was somebody a lot of people couldn’t trust. That’s where the breakdown started.
Note that the failure mode of THAT is a board being shut down because the community can’t agree on anyone who a) wants to take on the burden and b) wants to put their trustworthiness up to a majority vote of a community where people can and have held grudges for decades. It’s, again, sort of like a game staffing issue - there’s not exactly a large body of people eager to take on that responsibility, and I suspect that saying ‘in order to do this extra work, you also have to be voted in by people’ would winnow that down fairly significantly.
Just to be frank, I agreed to be an admin because Tez said hey, would you? And I said sure. If there was a ‘hey, would you stand for an election to become an admin’ I would say ‘ohhhhhh nope nope nope nope’.
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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.
