Alexander Schmidt wrote:Graham Banks wrote:You are a do nothing mod. Others are not. That's just life.
As mod it's better to do nothing than to act because of your personal preferences.
As mod you should not try to discern good and evil, you should try to enable factual discussion.
As mod you shouldn't take part in discussions like this, you should prevent discussions like this.
I don't think "You are a lousy mod" is worse than "You are a do nothing mod". I think you should not determine deletions of annoying posts. If you delete posts like this, you have to delete tons of your own posts.
Personally I like it when a moderator removes inflammatory posts and errors on the side of removing instead of keeping them. I think I have made posts that should have been removed. I would not have been upset if they had been (a couple I even removed myself.)
You guys take a simple action like removing a post as evil and sinister and equate the action to something worth of making the 10 most evil dictator lists. I think you WAY over-react to that.
The problem of course is that if you remove a post, the response is usually going to be the accusations of a dictatorship. Believe me this is not like an evil government situation where people are driven out their homes and assisnated or the moderators are getting financial incentives from the evil corporations. Instead it's just people being babies because they happened to overact to some situation and get their posts removed.
I think the moderators can remove a post and it's their job to do so at their discretion. They will NEVER do a perfect job by everyones estimation because there is a huge amount of variation of opinion about what they should do. But it seems to me that we should all just be respecting their decisions and if we don't like it then we should vote them out on the next turn. Why is it any more complicated than that?
I know I'm going to get a lecture from someone about going down the "slippery slope" and communism and all of that, but if you want to play government you can find forums that deal with that explicitly and there is no need to express paranoid fantasies of evil dictatorships here.
I have discovered that most peoples reaction to "offensive" posts has more to do with their points of view than how offensive the post actually was to someone. It's also related to whether they do not like the person who was insulted - regardless of how much hurt was caused. For this reason I cut the moderators a lot of slack, I know that none of them are going to be perfect judges because they are humans.
When I was moderator many years ago, the people who cried "evil dictatorship" the loudest often were the most demanding that someone else's posts should be removed. Of course each case is different, but it illustrated to me that this is extremely subjective. You can be sure that if someone calls you a "jerk" and you call them an "idiot" then they are going to see "idiot" is a much harsher term than "jerk".
