Writing in a personal capacity; I haven’t run this by other mods.
Hi, just responding to these parts of your comment:
I think people might reasonably (though wrongly) assume that forum mods are not monitoring accounts at this level of granularity, and thus believe that their voting behavior is private.
...
Frankly, I don’t love that mods are monitoring accounts at this level of granularity. (For instance, knowing this would make me less inclined to put remotely sensitive info in a forum dm.)
We include some detail on what would lead moderators to look into a user’s voting activity, and what information we have access to, on our “Guide to norms on the Forum” page:
Voting activity is generally private (even admins don’t know who voted on what), but if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting (e.g. by mass-downvoting many of a different user’s comments and posts), we reserve the right to check what account is doing this. If we suspect that someone is using multiple accounts to vote on the same post, we also reserve the right to check whether the accounts are related, and check their voting history.
...
The following information is accessible to moderators but will only be used to identify behavior such as “sockpuppet” accounts and mass downvoting, in situations where we have strong reason to believe that an account is used to get around a ban (or other restriction), or in the case of severe safety concerns. The moderators will not view or use this information for any other purpose.
The IP address a post/comment came from
The voting history of users
The identity of voters on any given post/comment
(In addition, note that moderators can’t just go into a user’s account and check their voting history even when we do have reason to look into that user. We require one of the Forum engineers to run some queries on the back end to yield this information.)
Finally, to address your concern about direct messages on the Forum: like a regular user, a moderator cannot see into anyone else’s messages.
Thanks for writing this! To clarify a few points even more:
moderators can’t just go into a user’s account and check their voting history even when we do have reason to look into that user. We require one of the Forum engineers to run some queries on the back end to yield this information.
I confirm this, and just want to highlight that
this is pretty rare; we have a high bar before asking developers to look into patterns
usually, one developer looks into things, and shares anonymized data with moderators, who then decide whether it needs to be investigated more deeply
If so, a subset of moderators gets access to deanonymized data to make a decision and contact/warn/ban the user(s)
On
like a regular user, a moderator cannot see into anyone else’s direct messages.
I confirm this, but I want to highlight that messages on the forum are not end-to-end encrypted and are, by default, sent via email as well (i.e. when you get a message on the forum you also get an email with the message). So forum developers and people who have or will have access to the recipient’s email inbox, or the forum’s email delivery service, can see the messages.
For very private communications, I would recommend using privacy-first end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal.
Thanks; this is helpful and reassuring, especially re: the DMs. I had read this section of the norms page, and it struck me that the “if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting” clause was doing a lot of work. I would appreciate more clarification about what would lead mods to believe something like this (and maybe some examples of how you’ve come to have such beliefs). But this is not urgent, and thanks for the clarification you’ve already provided.
Yeah, this is a reasonable thing to ask. So, the “if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting” clause is intentionally vague, I believe, because if we gave more detail on the kinds of checks/algorithms we have in place for flagging potential violations, then this could help would-be miscreants commit violations that slip past our checks.
(I’m a bit sad that the framing here is adversarial, and that we can’t give users like you more clarification, but I think this state of play is the reality of running an online forum.)
If it helps, though, the bar for looking into a user’s voting history is high. Like, on average I don’t think we do this more than once or twice per month.
Thanks, this is also helpful! One thing to think about (and no need to tell me), is whether making the checks public could effectively disincentivize the bad behavior (like how warnings about speed cameras may as effectively disincentivize speeding as the cameras do themselves). But if there are easy workarounds, I can see why this wouldn’t be viable.
Writing in a personal capacity; I haven’t run this by other mods.
Hi, just responding to these parts of your comment:
We include some detail on what would lead moderators to look into a user’s voting activity, and what information we have access to, on our “Guide to norms on the Forum” page:
(In addition, note that moderators can’t just go into a user’s account and check their voting history even when we do have reason to look into that user. We require one of the Forum engineers to run some queries on the back end to yield this information.)
Finally, to address your concern about direct messages on the Forum: like a regular user, a moderator cannot see into anyone else’s messages.
Hope this is helpful :)
Also writing in a personal capacity.
Thanks for writing this! To clarify a few points even more:
I confirm this, and just want to highlight that
this is pretty rare; we have a high bar before asking developers to look into patterns
usually, one developer looks into things, and shares anonymized data with moderators, who then decide whether it needs to be investigated more deeply
If so, a subset of moderators gets access to deanonymized data to make a decision and contact/warn/ban the user(s)
On
I confirm this, but I want to highlight that messages on the forum are not end-to-end encrypted and are, by default, sent via email as well (i.e. when you get a message on the forum you also get an email with the message). So forum developers and people who have or will have access to the recipient’s email inbox, or the forum’s email delivery service, can see the messages.
For very private communications, I would recommend using privacy-first end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal.
Thanks; this is helpful and reassuring, especially re: the DMs. I had read this section of the norms page, and it struck me that the “if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting” clause was doing a lot of work. I would appreciate more clarification about what would lead mods to believe something like this (and maybe some examples of how you’ve come to have such beliefs). But this is not urgent, and thanks for the clarification you’ve already provided.
Yeah, this is a reasonable thing to ask. So, the “if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting” clause is intentionally vague, I believe, because if we gave more detail on the kinds of checks/algorithms we have in place for flagging potential violations, then this could help would-be miscreants commit violations that slip past our checks.
(I’m a bit sad that the framing here is adversarial, and that we can’t give users like you more clarification, but I think this state of play is the reality of running an online forum.)
If it helps, though, the bar for looking into a user’s voting history is high. Like, on average I don’t think we do this more than once or twice per month.
Thanks, this is also helpful! One thing to think about (and no need to tell me), is whether making the checks public could effectively disincentivize the bad behavior (like how warnings about speed cameras may as effectively disincentivize speeding as the cameras do themselves). But if there are easy workarounds, I can see why this wouldn’t be viable.