Could it be useful for moderators to take into account the amount of karma / votes a statement receives?
I’m no expert here, and I just took a bunch of minutes to get an idea of the whole discussion—but I guess that’s more than most people who will have contact with it. So it’s not the best assessment of the situation, but maybe you should take it as evidence of what it’d look like for an outsider or the average reader. In Halstead’s case, the warning sounds even positive:
However, when I discussed the negative claims with Halstead, he provided me with evidence that they were broadly correct — the warning only concerns the way the claims were presented. While it’s still important to back up negative claims about other people when you post them, it does matter whether or not those claims can be reasonably backed up.
I think Aaron was painstakingly trying to follow moderation norms in this case; otherwise, moderators would risk having people accuse them of taking sides. I contrast it with Sean’s comments, which were more targeted and catalysed Phil’s replies, and ultimately led to the latter being banned; but Sean disclosed evidence for his statements, and consequently was not warned.
One could reasonably interpret karma as demonstrating that many people thought a comment was valuable for public discussion.
However, I am exceedingly wary of changing the way moderation works based on a comment’s karma score [...] while some users contribute more value to Forum discussion than others, and karma can be a signal of this, I associate the pattern of “giving ‘valued’ users more leeway to bend rules/norms” with many bad consequences in many different settings.
Even if we make a point to acknowledge how useful a contribution might have been, or how much we respect the contributor, I don’t want that to affect whether we interpret it as having violated the rules. We can moderate kindly, but we should still moderate.
Could it be useful for moderators to take into account the amount of karma / votes a statement receives?
I’m no expert here, and I just took a bunch of minutes to get an idea of the whole discussion—but I guess that’s more than most people who will have contact with it. So it’s not the best assessment of the situation, but maybe you should take it as evidence of what it’d look like for an outsider or the average reader.
In Halstead’s case, the warning sounds even positive:
I think Aaron was painstakingly trying to follow moderation norms in this case; otherwise, moderators would risk having people accuse them of taking sides. I contrast it with Sean’s comments, which were more targeted and catalysed Phil’s replies, and ultimately led to the latter being banned; but Sean disclosed evidence for his statements, and consequently was not warned.
(Sharing my personal views as a moderator, not speaking for the whole team.)
See my response to Larks on this:
Even if we make a point to acknowledge how useful a contribution might have been, or how much we respect the contributor, I don’t want that to affect whether we interpret it as having violated the rules. We can moderate kindly, but we should still moderate.