The Skeptical Zone and Peaceful Science

The forum that I am seeing as works well, is “dslreports.com”.

They do have an appeal process and a forum to discuss moderation. But that is all private. Other members do not see it.

Posts that comment on moderation in regular discussion forums are delete as soon as they are noticed. Members who persistently attempt to comment on moderation are banned. And, honestly, it works pretty well.

I remember another forum which allowed comments on moderation. Actually, it was partly set up as a rogue forum to comment on moderation at “dslreports.com”. And things got so out of hand that the owners of this rogue forum shut it down very abuptly (perhaps worried about potential law suits).

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When I check out some online forum and I find a lot of bickering about moderation and about who said what on some post and somehow people have time to argue about that, I just say “no” and click away and make a mental note not to go there again.

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Thanks @davecarlson. I hope you and @evograd and @T.j_Runyon, and some of our other grad students, can help this along by posting articles you can explain to everyone. You can really raise the game here.

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Right now our balance is to allow private appeals to the moderators. I’ve seen too much grandstanding with public appeals, so we are no longer allowing it. Besides, it is off putting to visitors. The conversations here, in my view will be most valuable when the public facing content:

  1. Includes people of note, such as academics and authors, who are thought leaders.

  2. Threads are substantive, well titled, and well organized.

  3. New information is uncovered in dialogue that cannot be discovered elsewhere.

  4. A common community forms around protecting and growing the best of us, and actually changing viewpoints outside the forum.

I think we are succeeding in this for now, partly because I’ve had the benefit of seeing the deficiencies in other forums.

One strange thing under the sun. More than one time, a poster has behaived poorly, was moderated, and then complained loudly leaving, declaring that we were not worth those presence. Then, a week or month later, they are back posting or trying to join the forum, usually more chaste than the first time. This makes me think a couple things.

  1. It seems we have something here that even those that hate the moderation find valuable. That is what we need to protect grow and value.

  2. Perhaps we should have a second chance available to people who were banned. If they apologize for their past behaivior, and are willing to play by the rules, we will try again with them. Then the other side of my brain reminds me I’m generally in error for being to forgiving in things like this. Perhaps this is a bad idea.

  3. Moderating by poster, not post, is the right strategy. It is far more effective at reducing noise, as it reduces the need for moderation.

A few more thoughts rolling in my head. In general this thread is very helpful. I want to rely on you all to help me keep this moving in the right direction. We are just 6 months old, but I see an opportunity here to build a more lasting and healthy community. Others have done so elsewhere. There is no reason we can’t do it here.

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Different formats have their own strengths and weaknesses. Forums are good for diverse discussion, but the good content tends to be scattered. Visitors need to become involved in a forum before they can appreciate its full value. Blog form essay/comments are more easily shared, and probably draws more short-term traffic, but relatively few of those visitors stay and contribute.

Facebook excels at friends and family, but this can be limiting for that same reason. I often feel the need to self-censor because the views I express are visible to everyone I know (this changed relatively recently, with features first seen in Google Plus). Facebook groups tend to be very polarised echo chambers of identical views, and groups deliberately fostering argument are common.

Google Plus is (or was) interest based, bringing people together for what you know rather than who you know, which led to a dynamic far different than Facebook. G+ also allowed much better control over how content is shared (Circles), making it easy to include/exclude friends and family as needed. The greatest failure of G+ is that many people never learned how to use Circles to full advantage, and the concept was downplayed.

Whatever the format, there is a sort of life cycle to them. In 2005 there was thriving interest and argument. Other than the generally fading interest in ID, the biggest difference from that time is the entry of OEC/TE believers into the discussion. 13 years ago OEC/TE rarely appeared in on the discussion boards and blogs, at least from my perspective. Now they are active participants, taking a stand in support of science with “reasonable faith” (my words for it). As a new player, I think PS is in a good position to draw interest from OEC/TE.

Moderation is a two edged sword. Too much kills discussion and/or creates an echo chamber; not enough leads to argument for argument sake (Brockian Ultracricket). The thing is, arguments are extremely popular, and the single best way of attracting people is to encourage argument (as evidence, the very popular argument groups on FB). PS has been successful at having a series of good high-level arguments, which I think is the key to our success, but a trick path to walk.

Our goal is exploit this in a specific way, caring more about

  1. Substance over insults or cheerleading
  2. Academics and real players in the larger conversation, over anonymous contributors.
  3. Technical depth over rhetorical exchanges.
  4. Long term exchanges over one-and-done short term bursts.

In a way, I am trying elevate the form of a “forum” without loosing its invitation to the public to engage alongside everyone else.

I want to solve this problem. I think we need to start creating “guides” to give the timeline and overview of some of the multi-topic discussion. For example, the exchange between Alter and Torley would be on excellent candidate to clarify. So would the exchange with Eric Holloway.

@dga471, once I get the nub of this, could you help me with a guide to the exchange with Torley and Alter? Should not take too much effort.

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I can try, although as I remember it the argument quickly multiplied all over the place (as is common when addressing Gish-gallop style arguments), including methodological issues, our expectations of what apologetics should be, and Bayesian probability, not to mention individual discussion of the 17 claims themselves.

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Great. This will be our first experiment. I will make it as a wiki post, that you can edit directly. Do not make your own post. Just edit mine.

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