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For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
Coin Return Values & Code of Conduct - Proposal - Open for Feedback until Dec. 13th
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Empathy, because you should be able to read from context why someone posted an innocent link, and/or you should be able to understand that not everyone is as serious as you, and doesn't want to engage in discussion with such tension at all times.
Accountability, because any mod that punishes an innocent link is doing something wrong, no matter what the rules are.
Fairness, because you get your preference but nobody else gets theirs. (You will get the ability to define the terms in a thread, including "no drive by linking", I imagine most politics subforum thread will get this. But everyone else has to do that too? That's deeply unfair.)
Safety, because people will be wary of posting any links at all.
Self-expression, because shit posting is a legitimate way of communicating with others.
Connectedness, because people will feel they have to have a standoffish amount of "seriousness" to any communication, a casual link is not allowed, which interferes with closeness.
It also breaks this principle:
* We provide a venue for discussions at all levels, from rigid, serious topics to light hearted off-topic fare. We hope to accommodate all communication styles allowing all of our users to be able to participate in topics freely at will, as they desire.
It breaks this Code of conduct:
* Engage in all discussions in good faith and endeavor to assume others are acting in good faith as well. (This is a two way code, assuming all links are bad faith is, itself, a bad faith reading.)
And it directly contravenes the very last part of the Code about On Reading the Room. You cannot get less reading the room than trying to litigate the that the entire site can't shit post, even the proposed explicitly off topic forums.
So, that's out. If you have these values, these principles, these codes, a site wide rule is out. A thread specific rule, which threads will be allowed to do, is perfectly in line with preventing the harms of drive by linking in serious discussion without forcing a significant amount of other people with different personalities, interests and motivations for using the forum, to align with your own desires.
A thing many people seem to be missing is these values, principles and codes are a two way street.
Here's the opposite, all links do not have to have any context, site wide.
The values this breaks:
Empathy, because there are discussion wheres drive by linking is inappropriate and rude, and disruptive to others. An example is people who cannot view a link: this is critical in a serious discussion, in a casual one, I think its fine to ask if you think its important (and they should provide that context). Another example is posting an hour long video and expecting people to watch the entire thing. We are here to poast, and not all of us have time to watch an hour long thing.
Accountability, because mods who allow disruptive linking despite it causing harm are doing something wrong. And people who use it in bad faith and get away with it are also doing something wrong.
Fairness, because they get to shitpost but you never get any serious discussion (which is why threads will get to state the terms of the thread).
Safety, becuase links, especially blind links, can be malicious, have trauma triggering content, or be NSFW, which can drive people away from threads and make them feel unsafe.
Self-expression, because wanting serious discussion without distractions is a valid way of communicating with others, and there should be a space to do that.
Connectedness, because people who value such discussion will be able to interact with and get to know others who enjoy like in kind.
It also breaks these principles:
* We provide a venue for discussions at all levels, from rigid, serious topics to light hearted off-topic fare. We hope to accommodate all communication styles allowing all of our users to be able to participate in topics freely at will, as they desire.
* We provide a safe and welcoming environment for marginalized members of our community, where their voices will be heard and their lived experiences respected. (In the case of traumatic, triggering or otherwise problematic links)
And these codes of conduct:
* Not engage in deliberate trolling or “baiting” other members.
* Engage in all discussions in good faith and endeavor to assume others are acting in good faith as well.
And of course, reading the room. If a thread is clearly marked "serious discussion" or some such, and in the thread links without context are not allowed, and you come in and dump ya blind links or one liner and leave, its you, the poster, who is wrong.
Both extremes are out. This isn't a competition either: "oh that breaks less, it must be better" no they both break a ton. Both are a flat nope.
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To be clear, I wasn't saying "everyone is going to be at least a little unhappy, but suck it up buttercup" or anything. I think that most people are going to feel a little bit weird at first, because the culture is fundamentally going to change in many ways. But I think that as people acclimate, they will realize the new forums are better than the old forums, and they'll be happier in the long run.
Right now, though, everyone is a little nervous, because change is scary, and I think a lot of people are kind of scrabbling to hold onto the old way of doing things because it's comfortable.
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1. Not how it works, and
2. Exactly the kind of motivation that leads to over-engineering every single aspect of the conversation, in a desperate attempt to stave off The Fear or whatever.
All of that to say, I know I've been on the side of the conversation pushing for a rule around external link context, and I can see the concern that's causing among some of the folks who've spent more time in SE than I have. So I'm definitely backing off on how strongly I feel about that sort of rule, even though I think it's been an unmitigated good in D&D and I would love to see it continue as an expectation in serious threads. It clearly doesn't work on a sitewide level -- if for no other reason than that it makes folks uncomfortable.
This was my thought as well. Tags might be the solution here, especially if the expectation is that they are going to be used to set context for threads, such as spoiler policy. (Spoilers being a good analogue for this particular case, where different threads will have different expectations.)
Also, I want to throw out there that there is value in allowing people to engage with the Values/CoC/Rules hierarchy as best works for them. Some people don't deal well with or don't like discussing these kinds of topics at an abstract or conceptual level. Most people, cognitively speaking, fundamentally only engage with these ideas at a local or pragmatic level, particularly in terms of how it impacts their day-to-day lives.
If you want feedback on values you invariably talking about rules and moderation. Much like if you want to talk about ethics you are ultimately talking about applied scenarios.
While you definitely want guardrails on discussion, the engagement and discussion you will find on a thread like this may not preclude or provide a straightforward resolution to a situation where the rules themselves are in question. Morninglord gave a good example when presenting how both sides of this discussion could be interpreted. Ultimately this stuff typically ends with folks (mostly moderators) having to do work at ground level.
Forgive me a moment while I digress by using the linking rule we're all talking about as an example, but the topic I'm trying to highlight is more about how we derive rules from the CoC/values. This will probably definitely have overlap with a rules thread, but I'm drawing a line here across the borders of both topics.
To me, personally, I think the below is a perfectly reasonable exchange even in supposed on-topic context-preferred thread (inverting usual quote format standard for legibility on Vanilla):
This is a slightly editorialised example of an exchange I've seen multiple times on these boards. Someone makes a throwaway comment, and someone comes in with the literal link that is the perfect solution. It's not a big thing, not a sustained off topic sidetrack that needs to be moved to another thread, just a natural flow of conversation between peers.
To me, this is perfectly fine and innocuous. The context is clear and inferred, the posters are helping each other out, everyone's happy. No one other than the intended recipient is even expected to follow the link.
Based on my own interpretation of the CoC, I would consider this to be within bounds. The conversation has flowed naturally, it has nuance and has wandered, even on topic, but there's not really a violation of treating people with empathy, respect, and fairness (or rather, there's reasons both ways).
If you have a firm rule about on-topicness and context links then this might be a violation, but I think then you're doing a disservice to discourse (although I allow that this may not be your opinion).
But further to this, if you're deriving the rules from the CoC, then I think you shouldn't have such a firm and absolute rule to begin with. You should, in fact, make the rules in such a way that allow for such variation within human interaction, so that it's just never a violation in the first place.
My stance is that a rule isn't merely good because it applies in all the scenarios you want it to apply in. It also has to not apply in all scenarios you don't want to apply it in. My preference is that when rules are derived from the CoC/values that they're not written in such a way that you write an absolute rule for one set of scenarios that mods then regularly override or ignore because it's inoffensive, not against the CoC, and no one particularly cares. To me, that's only half a rule.
The other half is building in the exceptions, so you have a set of scenarios where one set of expectations hold sway, and another set of scenarios where it might not.
This pushes a lot of responsibility back on moderation, setting expectations, and cultural norms. But I also think it handles it in a fairer matter, where the role of moderators is to be adjudicators of nuance in determining which set of expectations hold sway, rather than being explicitly set the task to ignore or apply a rule based on discretion (with the spectre of favouritism and uneven enforcement). I mean, I know it's a subtle and arbitrary distinction, but one still feels better to me than the other.
I guess what I don't understand is, even if we had a hard and fast rule that says that any link posted without other content will be deleted by a bot (which of course is much more extreme than anyone is suggesting) the example you gave could follow that rule by taking 5 seconds to add "I found these boots!" Which would make the reply clearer and more helpful anyway. I really don't see where asking people for a few words stating what's on the other end of the link (which I do believe is an accessibility aid in addition to a polite and orderly thing to do) is, like, oppressing people's forum culture or their ability to shitpost.
Because it's a text-based medium and you're never as clear to other people as you are to yourself in your head. It's a trivial thing to do to prevent miscommunication.
And also generally on the internet a lot of folks just breeze past naked links because it's often spam or unrelated, so you'll help ensure more people read it too.
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Like what's next, pre-emptively explaining every time whatever you said is just a reference to an episode of the Simpsons? That's how it feels to me. And like there are a lot of times that could directly benefit me, I don't know all those references, but it would fuck with the flow of the conversation.
Or a very good joke, maybe.
But in either case a quick glance at the URL covers what I'd probably need to know.
Obviously this is all very different from dropping a link to a multi-page article in the middle of a current events discussion -- obviously something like that warrants a little explanation for clarify. I feel like the context is pretty important and it's not that hard to get a handle on when it's needed/helpful/unnecessary.
In general, I basically consider that any "blanket" rule without context is inevitably flawed, because life happens.
And "we should never attempt to frame the terms of an interaction" is also a blanket rule. There's absolutely situations where it's appropriate to situationally institute conversational rules. That's completely normal and happens in real life all the time.
Plus, that's what *waves at op* is all about.
I say thread specific based on tone and nature of conversation minimises the harms of this, lets be honest, not at all critical problem.
Obviously you'd need to flag down a mod or similar for this sort of thing, but it seems like it could be helpful for when people get bad about it in specific threads without having to institute it as a rule
Maybe we can just make this a tag and call it a day. If you can tag a thread as "No Spoilers" vs. "Spoilers Welcome", then you should be able to tag a thread as "No Blind Links" vs. "Blind Links Allowed" or something.
For efficiency we might want to denote one as the "default" and then make the tag the alternate, just so folks don't have to tag literally every single thread with one or the other, but I don't see this approach being such a big deal since people are going to want to tag their threads for a variety of reasons.
This? Ehhhhh.
I'm content with making this a tag-based option for OPs to choose rather than a sitewide or even a subforum-specific thing.
Now, is it loadbearing? Almost nothing is loadbearing because it's so easy to reverse decisions in the context of an internet forum.
But I disagree with the idea that it isn't important. The rule exists in D&D and it hasn't always existed. The reason it exists now is because things got super annoying back when it didn't exist. The rule was created to address an actual problem and I don't dig the vibe/implication that people are being unreasonable or uptight by caring about it. It very much feels like the sort of thing where we'll move forward without the rule and then at some point in the next 18 months people will be like, "Ohhhhhh, that's why we had that rule."
I, in turn, feel that much of the wording for the rule has implied that those who don't want a blanket version it are being impolite, disorderly, and basically irresponsible.
I, also, don't dig this.
But you mistake load bearing for important. I didn't say it wasn't important. I said the forum wont shatter at the seams without it, which absolutely can happen if we get other issues wrong, as people who leave over a serious issue are generally unlikely to come back when things change. If your population drops low enough, its basically over. More people leave. The place bleeds in months, weeks, days. It's gone. Yes this will happen anyway, but it's important to try not to make it happen faster. This is why we aren't just dropping information on you before we've had a good go at making something that seems pretty decent, because a half assed draft is going to be seen as "final" and people may very well glance at it and go "I'm out". Even though the TT have been incredibly clear that nothing is final, that's just, how it all gets read by a lot of people.
Even if all of us who don't want the blanket rule are wrong, however, do you think a substantial amount of people will leave over not having a site wide proscription against contextless links? It seems to me like its something that even if we do realise later we need a strict rule for the entire site, that's, fine? We can point it out in a few months and make the change. Especially given for the exact discussions it was originally implemented for, DnD, it will be available? I've advocated for that repeatedly. I even personally want this option for threads. I don't want to have to wonder what someone actually posted in such threads. I don't have a twitter account (or most social media tbh), I can't follow x threads, so currently, if something seems important, I have to ask. Back when twitter didn't even show up most of the time it annoyed the hell out of me when people would just post them when I conscientiously would screenshot one if I posted it even in SE. (Fortunately I doubt that will be an issue in the new forum.) I just balk at the idea that it be everywhere, always.
As for the implication I'm not taking these concerns seriously.
I assure you, I am.
In this example, if Quetzi quote replies to MI, is there not then textual context that a reasonable poster should be able to assume explains what the link most likely is?
And guess what, it simply doesn't happen elsewhere either
Rickroll isn't funny anymore so nobody does it, same reason nobody links to goatse or any other bullshit. We're not edgelord teens anymore who think that shit is funny. The forums aren't the same place they were fifteen years ago.
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But that's not what you're asking for. You're not asking for a rule "don't rickroll people", you're asking for a rule about explaining the contents of every single link and embedded piece of external media that you post. Which is something that people may find time consuming, disruptive to the flow of conversation, and generally a factor that discourages them from posting.
That seems like poor form. But if I quote them with that link, it's safe to assume my link is a reply to their question. Or, if I make a post that looks like
Or
Both of those have provided context. It's not some sort of arbitrary minimum word count or a mandate for quality posts. In fact, I'm coming down on the side of saying we don't actually need a rule. I just think it's bad etiquette, even in a chat thread, to drop links with no context at all. We don't have to mandate courtesy, per se. But I don't think it's controversial to say it's kind of rude to drive by with a link with no indication of what's on the other side.