Just because something is true doesn’t mean you forfeit your rights to not have that information be made public.
I agree that not all true things should be made public, but I think when it specifically pertains to wrongdoing and someone’s trustworthiness, the public interest can override the right to privacy. If you look into your neighbour’s window and you see them printing counterfeit currency, you go to the police first, rather than giving them an opportunity to simply hide their fraud better.
Maybe the crux is: I think forum users upvoting their own comments is more akin to them Facetuning dating app photos than printing counterfeit currency. Like, this is pretty innocuous behavior and if you just tell people not to do it, they’ll stop.
It seems like we disagree on how bad it is to self-vote (I don’t think it’s anywhere near the level of “actual crime”, but I do think it’s pretty clearly dishonest and unfair, and for such a petty benefit it’s hard for me to feel sympathetic to the temptation).
But I don’t think it’s the central point for me. If you’re simultaneously holding that:
this information isn’t actually a big deal, but
releasing this publically would cause a lot of harm through reputational damage,
then there’s a paternalistic subtext where people can’t be trusted to come to the “right” conclusions from the facts. If this stuff really wasn’t a big deal, then talking about it publically wouldn’t be a big deal either. I don’t think people should be shunned forever and excluded from any future employment because they misused multiple accounts on the forum. I do think they should be a little embarrassed, and I don’t think that moving to protect them from that embarrassment is actually a kindness from a community-wide perspective.
I feel like this is getting really complicated and ultimately my point is very simple: prevent harmful behavior via the least harmful means. If you can get people to not vote for themselves by telling them not to, then just… do that. I have a really hard time imagining that someone who was warned about this would continue to do it; if they did, it would be reasonable to escalate. But if they’re warned and then change their behavior, why do I need to know this happened? I just don’t buy that it reflects some fundamental lack of integrity that we all need to know about (or something like this).
I think that posting that someone is banned and why they were banned is not mainly about punishing them. It’s about helping people understand what the moderation team is doing, how rule-breaking is handled, and why someone no longer has access to the forum. For example, it helps us to understand if the moderation team are acting on inadequate information, or inconsistently between different people. The fact that publishing this information harms people is an unfortunate side effect, after the main effect of improving transparency and keeping people informed.
It doesn’t even really feel right to call them harmed by the publication. If people are harmed by other people knowing they misuse the voting system, I’d say they were mainly harmed by their own misuse of the system, not by someone reporting on it.
I just don’t buy that it reflects some fundamental lack of integrity that we all need to know about
Then you needn’t object to the moderation team talking about what they did!
It’s about helping people understand what the moderation team is doing, how rule-breaking is handled, and why someone no longer has access to the forum.
It’s unclear to me that naming names materially advances the first two goals. As to the third, the suspended user could have the option of having their name disclosed. Otherwise, I don’t think we’re entitled to an explanation of why a particular poster isn’t active anymore.
There’s also the interest in deterring everyone else from doing it (general deterrence), not just in getting these specific people to stop doing it (specific deterrence). While I have mixed feelings about publicly naming offenders, the penalty does need to sting enough to make the benefits of the offense not worth the risk of getting caught. A private warning with no real consequences might persuade the person violating the rules not to do it again, but double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.
“double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.”
I just don’t see this happening?
Separately, one objection I have to cracking down hard on self-voting is that I think this is not very harmful relative to other ways in which people don’t vote how they’re “supposed to.” E.g., we know the correlation between upvotes and agree votes is incredibly high, and downvoting something solely because you disagree with it strikes me as more harmful to discourse on the forum than self-voting. I think the reason self-voting gets highlighted isn’t because it’s especially harmful, it’s just because it’s especially catchable.
If the mods want to improve people’s voting behavior on the forum, I both wish they’d target different voting behavior (ie, the agree/upvoting correlation) and use different means to do it (ie, generating reports for people of their own voting correlations, whether they tend to upvote/downvote certain people, etc), rather than naming/shaming people for self-voting.
I think it’s more that upvoting your own posts from an alt is (1) willful, intentional behavior (2) aimed at deceiving the community about the level of support of a comment (3) for the person’s own benefit. Presumably, most people who are doing it are employing some sort of means to evade detection, which adds another layer of deceptiveness. While I don’t like downvoting-for-disagreement and the like either, that kind of behavior presumptively reflects a natural cognitive bias rather than any of the three characteristics listed above. It is for those reasons that—in my view—downvoting-for-disagreement is generally not the proper subject of a sanctioning system,[1] while self-upvoting is.
I’ve suggested to the mods before that sanctions should sometimes be more carefully tailored to the offense, so I’d be open to the view that consequences like permanently denying the violator’s ability to vote and their ability to use alts might be more tailored to the offense than public disclosure. Those are the specific functions which they have demonstrated an inability to handle responsibly. Neither function is so fundamental to the ability to use the Forum that the mods should feel obliged to expend their time deciding if the violator has rehabilitated themselves enough to restore those privileges.
There could be circumstances in which soft-norm violative behavior was so extreme that sanctions should be considered. However, unlike “don’t multi-vote” (which is a bright-line rule for which the violator should be perfectly aware that they are violating the rules), these norms are less clearcut—so privately reaching out to the person would be the appropriate first action in a case like that.
I agree that not all true things should be made public, but I think when it specifically pertains to wrongdoing and someone’s trustworthiness, the public interest can override the right to privacy. If you look into your neighbour’s window and you see them printing counterfeit currency, you go to the police first, rather than giving them an opportunity to simply hide their fraud better.
Maybe the crux is: I think forum users upvoting their own comments is more akin to them Facetuning dating app photos than printing counterfeit currency. Like, this is pretty innocuous behavior and if you just tell people not to do it, they’ll stop.
It seems like we disagree on how bad it is to self-vote (I don’t think it’s anywhere near the level of “actual crime”, but I do think it’s pretty clearly dishonest and unfair, and for such a petty benefit it’s hard for me to feel sympathetic to the temptation).
But I don’t think it’s the central point for me. If you’re simultaneously holding that:
this information isn’t actually a big deal, but
releasing this publically would cause a lot of harm through reputational damage,
then there’s a paternalistic subtext where people can’t be trusted to come to the “right” conclusions from the facts. If this stuff really wasn’t a big deal, then talking about it publically wouldn’t be a big deal either. I don’t think people should be shunned forever and excluded from any future employment because they misused multiple accounts on the forum. I do think they should be a little embarrassed, and I don’t think that moving to protect them from that embarrassment is actually a kindness from a community-wide perspective.
I feel like this is getting really complicated and ultimately my point is very simple: prevent harmful behavior via the least harmful means. If you can get people to not vote for themselves by telling them not to, then just… do that. I have a really hard time imagining that someone who was warned about this would continue to do it; if they did, it would be reasonable to escalate. But if they’re warned and then change their behavior, why do I need to know this happened? I just don’t buy that it reflects some fundamental lack of integrity that we all need to know about (or something like this).
I think that posting that someone is banned and why they were banned is not mainly about punishing them. It’s about helping people understand what the moderation team is doing, how rule-breaking is handled, and why someone no longer has access to the forum. For example, it helps us to understand if the moderation team are acting on inadequate information, or inconsistently between different people. The fact that publishing this information harms people is an unfortunate side effect, after the main effect of improving transparency and keeping people informed.
It doesn’t even really feel right to call them harmed by the publication. If people are harmed by other people knowing they misuse the voting system, I’d say they were mainly harmed by their own misuse of the system, not by someone reporting on it.
Then you needn’t object to the moderation team talking about what they did!
It’s unclear to me that naming names materially advances the first two goals. As to the third, the suspended user could have the option of having their name disclosed. Otherwise, I don’t think we’re entitled to an explanation of why a particular poster isn’t active anymore.
There’s also the interest in deterring everyone else from doing it (general deterrence), not just in getting these specific people to stop doing it (specific deterrence). While I have mixed feelings about publicly naming offenders, the penalty does need to sting enough to make the benefits of the offense not worth the risk of getting caught. A private warning with no real consequences might persuade the person violating the rules not to do it again, but double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.
“double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.”
I just don’t see this happening?
Separately, one objection I have to cracking down hard on self-voting is that I think this is not very harmful relative to other ways in which people don’t vote how they’re “supposed to.” E.g., we know the correlation between upvotes and agree votes is incredibly high, and downvoting something solely because you disagree with it strikes me as more harmful to discourse on the forum than self-voting. I think the reason self-voting gets highlighted isn’t because it’s especially harmful, it’s just because it’s especially catchable.
If the mods want to improve people’s voting behavior on the forum, I both wish they’d target different voting behavior (ie, the agree/upvoting correlation) and use different means to do it (ie, generating reports for people of their own voting correlations, whether they tend to upvote/downvote certain people, etc), rather than naming/shaming people for self-voting.
I think it’s more that upvoting your own posts from an alt is (1) willful, intentional behavior (2) aimed at deceiving the community about the level of support of a comment (3) for the person’s own benefit. Presumably, most people who are doing it are employing some sort of means to evade detection, which adds another layer of deceptiveness. While I don’t like downvoting-for-disagreement and the like either, that kind of behavior presumptively reflects a natural cognitive bias rather than any of the three characteristics listed above. It is for those reasons that—in my view—downvoting-for-disagreement is generally not the proper subject of a sanctioning system,[1] while self-upvoting is.
I’ve suggested to the mods before that sanctions should sometimes be more carefully tailored to the offense, so I’d be open to the view that consequences like permanently denying the violator’s ability to vote and their ability to use alts might be more tailored to the offense than public disclosure. Those are the specific functions which they have demonstrated an inability to handle responsibly. Neither function is so fundamental to the ability to use the Forum that the mods should feel obliged to expend their time deciding if the violator has rehabilitated themselves enough to restore those privileges.
There could be circumstances in which soft-norm violative behavior was so extreme that sanctions should be considered. However, unlike “don’t multi-vote” (which is a bright-line rule for which the violator should be perfectly aware that they are violating the rules), these norms are less clearcut—so privately reaching out to the person would be the appropriate first action in a case like that.