No shade to the mods, but I’m just kind of bearish on mods’ ability to fairly determine what issues are “difficult to discuss rationally,” just because I think this is really hard and inevitably going to be subject to bias. (The lack of moderation around the Nonlinear posts, Manifest posts, Time article on sexual harassment, and so on makes me think this standard is hard to enforce consistently.) Accordingly, I would favor relying on community voting to determine what posts/comments are valuable and constructive, except in rare cases. (Obviously, this isn’t a perfect solution either, but it at least moves away from the arbitrariness of the “difficult to discuss rationally” standard.)
This seems a question of what the policy is, not of judgement re how to apply it, in my opinion.
The three examples you gave obviously are in the category of “controversial community drama that will draw a lot of attention and strong feelings”, and I trust the mod’s ability to notice this. The question is whether the default policy is to make such things personal blog posts. I personally think this would be a good policy, and that anything in this category is difficult to discuss rationally. I do also consider the community pane a weaker form of low visibility, so there’s something here already, but I would advocate for a stronger policy.
Another category is “anything about partisan US politics”, which I don’t think is that hard to identify, is clearly hard to discuss rationally, and in my opinion is reasonable to have a policy of lowering the visibility of.
I don’t trust karma as a mechanism, because if the post is something that people have strong feelings about, and many of those feelings are positive (or at least, righteous anger style feelings), then posts often get high karma. Eg I think the Nonlinear posts got a ton of attention, in my opinion were quite unproductive and distracting, got very high karma, and if they had been less visible I think this would have been good
No shade to the mods, but I’m just kind of bearish on mods’ ability to fairly determine what issues are “difficult to discuss rationally,” just because I think this is really hard and inevitably going to be subject to bias. (The lack of moderation around the Nonlinear posts, Manifest posts, Time article on sexual harassment, and so on makes me think this standard is hard to enforce consistently.) Accordingly, I would favor relying on community voting to determine what posts/comments are valuable and constructive, except in rare cases. (Obviously, this isn’t a perfect solution either, but it at least moves away from the arbitrariness of the “difficult to discuss rationally” standard.)
This seems a question of what the policy is, not of judgement re how to apply it, in my opinion.
The three examples you gave obviously are in the category of “controversial community drama that will draw a lot of attention and strong feelings”, and I trust the mod’s ability to notice this. The question is whether the default policy is to make such things personal blog posts. I personally think this would be a good policy, and that anything in this category is difficult to discuss rationally. I do also consider the community pane a weaker form of low visibility, so there’s something here already, but I would advocate for a stronger policy.
Another category is “anything about partisan US politics”, which I don’t think is that hard to identify, is clearly hard to discuss rationally, and in my opinion is reasonable to have a policy of lowering the visibility of.
I don’t trust karma as a mechanism, because if the post is something that people have strong feelings about, and many of those feelings are positive (or at least, righteous anger style feelings), then posts often get high karma. Eg I think the Nonlinear posts got a ton of attention, in my opinion were quite unproductive and distracting, got very high karma, and if they had been less visible I think this would have been good