The Conversation - on moderation and my being banned.

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Michael Wilbur-Ham
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Posts: 45

The Conversation - on moderation and my being banned. May 20, 2016 15:13:54 GMT 10

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Post by Michael Wilbur-Ham on May 20, 2016 15:13:54 GMT 10

The Conversation (TC) is a collaboration between editors and academics to provide informed news analysis and commentary that’s free to read and republish. It has published many useful articles on the environment and these articles are an excellent resource .

TC is particularly useful as the the mainstream media (MSM) does a very poor job of informing the public of the facts on most issues. TC also publishes opinion pieces by academics, and as opinions are based on personal values, I tend to agree or disagree with these articles depending on how they match my values. But when talking about an area of professional expertise, TC is a good source of factual information in a form easily digestible to the public.

The Conversation has this name partly because after each article those who register can engage in a conversation. Most good articles get very very few comments, and so the system and moderation work fairly well. The two main exceptions are some articles on politics (which with an election happening naturally generate debate) and climate change.

For many years I've been saying that the way the conversations at TC are moderated is so bad that it would have been better if the climate change articles had disabled comments.

The conversations at TC could have been a place where the genuinely unsure could have asked questions and it could have been a place where we could have debated the most important thing - that is for those who accept the science and accept the need to act quickly to significantly reduce emissions, what are the best ways to get this to happen.

But none of this happened - and this is because, IMHO, the vested interests have successfully derailed every conversation. And, IMHO, this is all due to the failure of how TC has gone about moderating and designing their comments.

This forum was created as a response to the failure of The Conversation:

Years ago I was lobbying Cory Zanoni the Community Manager (which includes moderation) to not allow discussions on the truth or otherwise of AGW (human caused (anthropogenic) global warming) to dominate the discussion associated with every article on climate change. He said several times that if I didn't like the way TC was run then I should set up my own forum. And that is how this forum came into existence. Setting up a place to discuss things the way I would like was easy - the difficult part was getting others to come. And with that, so far, I've failed. But now I'm banned from TC I might give it another good go.

I'm only writing this because I've been banned.

It's very likely that Cory's first response to this is that I'm only writing this because I was banned - thus I can be ignored.

For years, and even in the days just before I was banned, I've been politely lobbying Cory to fix a very broken system. Of course I never called Cory incompetent before because that's not the way to get him to listen to me and to act on some of what I've said.

Cory is wrong to think that this can be ignored because he knows that I've been politely saying most of the points below for years at TC.

Being banned now gives me the freedom to say what I really think.

Is this going a bit too far - probably. After all being banned does increase passion. But this passion doesn't negate that most of what I write is right.

MORE TO COME - ALL OF THIS THREAD IS A WORK IN PROGRESS.

There is a lot of information to gather and a lot more things to write - so I'll be editing all the posts in this thread until I finish what is now only a draft.

Last Edit: May 22, 2016 18:58:43 GMT 10 by Michael Wilbur-Ham

Michael Wilbur-Ham
Administrator

Posts: 45

The Conversation - on moderation and my being banned. May 20, 2016 15:48:35 GMT 10

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Post by Michael Wilbur-Ham on May 20, 2016 15:48:35 GMT 10

How and why I got banned:

This post is to gather together the info of what happened before it is all lost.

Over the weekend I spent lots of time engaging with the deniers, and part of this was pointing out their techniques and how there was evidence of this happening at TC. One such post, which Cory much later deleted, was:

It’s now 10pm. 7 hours ago I wrote:

In the days at TC where most of the debate was about whether or not the science was true there was clear evidence of such organised postings. There was always at least one active denier. When that person stopped posting someone else would take over. If there were two active topics one denier would be doing one topic and another the other.

What we have seen tonight (when things are quiet) is that in this thread Brad Keyes has been active all evening, and in the article by Clive Hamilton, John Phillip has been active all evening.

Thus my contention that there is always an active denier in any active thread has proven true, as has my contention that one is assigned one thread, the other thread to someone else, and each denier just posts in their thread.

It is also interesting to compare the technique of John and Brad. Both have a mocking style where they are trying to make those respond annoyed. Both demand answers from those who accept the science, yet dismiss any answers given with a flippant remark.

I can’t prove that there is an organised campaign, but I think I have made the case that the vested interests would be negligent if they didn’t do it.

I can’t prove that either Brad or John are part of any organised campaign if there is such a campaign. But their behaviour tonight (and John’s in the past) is consistent with them being a part of it.

It would make a fascinating research project to go through the climate change comments at TC over the years and look at the timing and the techniques of those deny the science.

The techniques are sometimes fairly sophisticated. Look at the baiting, the way they change the subject, the way they avoid answering bigger questions. And the most obvious is the way that regular deniers will start commenting on each article as if no discussion had ever happened in the past (they get away with it).

I don’t think either Brad or John are as ignorant or stupid as they appear. I think we are all being played.

The discussion turned to what was and wasn't trolling, and so I posted:

From wikipedia:

In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion, often for their own amusement.

And Cory deleted this (again well after the conversation was dead and the topic to old to be read by anyone).

Another of my posts (much later deleted by Cory):

The comments from the ‘deniers’ is not aimed at those who respond to them, but at the many who read some of the comments without posting.

Some of the denier posts are written by highly skilled people expert at sounding reasonable and creating doubt.

One of the reasons I think they egg on those who respond is to try to get the responses to sound unreasonable.

This is like what happened in Abu Ghraib - not just something that some small town USA soldiers came up with themselves - but highly sophisticated techniques designed especially for those who were tortured.

Look at the techniques of some of the denial posts and they are very sophisticated and well done.

This is the post I made that I think Cory is most likely to hold up to justify my banning:

It was me going one step too far after a very long back and forth with John Phillip:

Further proof that John doesn’t read the comments.

As I wrote earlier, the scorecards are based on the responses by those being judged.

For example, RIght to Life asks candidates whether or not they support abortion. They then publish the results. The environmental scorecards are the same (you don’t hear the parties say they are misrepresented on the scorecards).

At times I genuinely wonder whether John is not a troll but just very stupid. Overall some of his techniques are clever trolling, so on the whole I side on the John is clever and knows very well that his posts don’t make sense. But perhaps I overestimate him.

John will probably report this post as personal abuse. It’s not. It’s questioning why John keeps posting and posting the same old.

On Tue, May 17, 2016 I posted at TC for Cory to read (see here at TC):

I spent far too much time debating climate change last weekend under two articles on that topic.

I note that today someone is wasting time removing comments. I say wasting time because these are old topics that I think very few people will visit in the future. So all that is being done is deleting the record of what took place.

I really really wish that some moderation had taken place early on which would have prevented what become the majority of the discussion from ever taking place.

As proven time and time again, nothing is achieved debating climate change deniers. But leaving lots of comments from these people unchallenged turns a pro-action article on climate change into one that, once the comments are looked at, supports non-action. Thus I and a few others do bother to respond.

So please don’t think of this as a newspaper where the record gets corrected.

Think of TC as a conversation where some gently moderation early on will not only prevent hundreds of useless back and forth taking place, but would leave space for some real conversations.

The way most forums handle this is to appoint volunteer moderators. Perhaps a comment is only removed if two volunteers flag it for removal.

As a sometime too passionate and sometime too active participant I would not be a suitable volunteer moderator. But I’m sure there are plenty of TC regulars who would do a fairly balanced and fair job.

In response to some discussion about this I added:

As I’m sure TC’s stats will show, the vast majority of readers read then move on without posting. What they think when they move on depends not only on the article, but for those who at the least glance at them, the comments.

Unfortunately the deniers here (and only here) write pseudo scientific posts and to a non-expert it these can look more informed than the article (where the aim is write clearly for the general audience).

That’s why, unfortunately, I think it is necessary to have their nonsense and non-science rebutted.

And when Susan Nolan wrote:

some of these deniers are clearly trolling.

I replied:

I wish TC could get better at spotting these and kill more conversations.

You are right that it is sensible to try to not respond whenever possible. I must try to do better with that.

The email telling me I had been banned:

From: Cory Zanoni <cory.zanoni@theconversation.edu.au>
To: Me
Date: Wed, May 18, 2016 at 3:19 PM
Subject: Your account on The Conversation has been locked

Hi Michael,

Your account on The Conversation has been locked following repeated violations of our community standards, as warned about on November 30, 2015.

Regards,

Cory

I checked, and though I could use TC as myself, when I posted nothing went up.

I'm pretty certain that my last warning was also for something I wrote in frustration after a long back and forth with John Phillip.

At 7pm I replied:

Hi Cory,

I had thought that most of my removed posts were due to bickering with those I feel are at TC to disrupt.

I had posted to the' moderation during the election campaign' topic on I think Monday saying that I had wished that some moderation had been done during the weekend so that most of these conversations had been stopped before they got going. And I had posted in the topic that I was pleased that finally the topic was being culled.

So before this warning I'm on record just a few days ago pleading for some more active moderation.

I head your warnings, as when Arni and I went off topic today. (It would have been off-topic to post a "you are right Cory, sorry" so I just left it).
I don't always agree with Ari, so I think it was a genuine conversation - but yes, it had turned very off-topic.

I think most would feel that just a warning would be appropriate as being warned so many months ago didn't give me a chance to post differently now.

And as I've posted often since that warning without getting another email from you I think this shows that I've behaved.

So can you make this another warning?

Otherwise I will feel that bad behaviour is an excuse to remove my posts (which I think are valuable) from TC.

Please reply so that I know when this email has been considered.

Cory never replied.

Then on Friday afternoon my profile was deleted and as well as my account (my old posts were still up).

What is very sad is that rather than tackling any of the issues I raise, Cory ignores them, deletes some of the posts raising the issues, and then bans me.

It is worth noting that Cory did not tell me which post, or posts, violated the community standards. So this isn't just being convicted without any trial or appeal process, but being sentenced without being told what it was that I have been accused of. So I looked up the warning from Cory of 30 Nov. 2015, and it just said:

Hi Michael,
Following your recent posts on The Conversation, this is a warning that your account will be locked if you continue violating our community standards.

So even for that warning I had to guess what I had done wrong. And though John Phillip denies it, he must be reporting messages he doesn't like as it's only reported messages that can get deleted quickly, and it wasn't unusual to have message in response to him deleted.

As someone who has been an active contributor for years, the vast majority of which has been fully in the spirit of intelligent conversation, it is sad that there wasn't even the pretence of doing things fairly.

For years I have run a forum on my other interest - Devotional Sex - and even though I'm not paid, I take fairness seriously. Of course I delete the blatant spam instantly as well as the account of the person who posted it. But any genuine person is treated fairly.

Robert Molyneux wrote in Off-Topic 92:

Multi-disciplinary co-operation does not result in a scientific consensus.
Funnily enough there was one post and response that started to address the real issues: [1] an impassioned plea for scientists to reach a consensus about the joys of nuclear energy, and [2] MWH pointing out that this is not a scientific debate, but one of politics, engineering and finance.

Dan Eyer (“denier”, geddit?) posted a very amusing link claiming that China is proposing to build a long distance (and therefore very high voltage) network to Europe, so that when Europe runs out of wind, China will be ready with a gazillion coal and nuclear fired reactors to fill in the gap. Apart from the article saying no such thing, it was actually a report about plans for fossil fuel reactors in Asia that would make CO2 pollution even worse.

Ross Barrell, Aikido student, replied:

Thank you Rob. That was you was it? I remember Sunday (can’t remember what time it was) hitting the “Report” button on some comment and getting a 404 Page not found. Thought, “Huh???” and returned to the “Discussion” and found a whole string of Comment Removed…. Felt much better after that.

It looked to me like a whole team of trolls decided to swarm the discussion and therefore overwhelm debate. MWH looked like he was having fun trolling the trolls. The whole thing was just out of hand.

And in the end, they still didn’t give up.

Is there any way to shorten the time it takes to have you guys take the razor to discussion threads like this? Keyes in particular was using particular toxic and nasty strategies to undermine other contributors. But others joined in as well. Geoff Chambers, That’s Physics, um “myrg”. Where does TC stand on the use of actual names?

As you can see there’s a number of issues here and it would be good to have some simple methods to put an end to the nonsense before it gets out of hand.

Robert Molyneux replied:

Cory has kicked off a discussion among Councillors re how to work better during the election “debates”.

During out of office-hours, you could alert me in OTC, and I could then do my bit or alert other Councillors.

I have notified Cory about That’s Physics and DanEyer - TC asks for actual names, but a “properly-formed name” is easy to fake - just like an email address needs to follow some simple rules, but can be non-existent.

We are discussing trolls and how to handle them. Also how to encourage positive contributions. No silver bullets so far.

Cory’s blog about this is at theconversation.com/comment-moderation-during-the-election-59071

Various people have made comments so far.

It seems that with Robert pointing out that Dan Eyer was a false name (denier) that even Cory could see that his posts were inappropriate and that account has been deleted. What Cory can't see, which is one of the things I pointed out, is that the techniques used in the posts by Dan Eyer and John Phillip are pretty much the same - making claims that make no sense - refusing to provide evidence to justify their claims, but repeatedly demanding that the other side answer their questions (and then ignoring the answers when they are given).

It seems that if things were left to Cory the trolls are fine (it increases page hits and the number of comments) and so it is suggesting that someone might be stupid that gets you banned.

Mon, May 23, 2016 at 5:10 PM Email from Cory:

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the email and sorry it’s taken me so long to reply – it wasn’t due to a lack of consideration.

I’m sympathetic to your argument. However, I feel that your comments often violated our community standards on their own accord and not just in the context of your bickering with those you felt were disrupting TC.

As you had been warned about your comments (and those warnings don’t reset) I won’t be unlocking your account at this stage.

I note that Cory has not said how my comments have violated community standards. But he uses the word often and it is was extremely rare for me to loose my cool over a troll and suggest someone is stupid. But I have often called people trolls, and talked about why I think that there is an organised (and probably funded) campaign by the vested interests to post anti-action posts in the conversations about climate change. Cory has often deleted these discussions (ie not just my posts).

So I'm not thinking I've been banned for accusing people of being trolls, etc (and not for suggestion that John Phillip may be stupid). I remain shocked that Cory does this to a long term poster without ever actually telling me which posts and what community standard I have broken.

Last Edit: May 23, 2016 17:31:31 GMT 10 by Michael Wilbur-Ham

Michael Wilbur-Ham
Administrator

Posts: 45

The Conversation - on moderation and my being banned. May 20, 2016 18:20:45 GMT 10

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Post by Michael Wilbur-Ham on May 20, 2016 18:20:45 GMT 10

Why was I banned?

Being told twice that I had 'violated community standards' does not tell me why. As Cory doesn't provide the common courtesy of telling me which post has broken the community standards I can only guess.

I ran my own forum, and even though I am God and can delete posts and kill accounts, I give feel I have a moral responsibility to be fair - which means that I will let peope know why posts are deleted. Of course I just delete the accounts of those who post spam without explanation. But to not explain my reasons if I were to kill the account of a regular forum users would be, for me, unthinkable.

There might be other reasons why Cory wanted me gone, and the John Phillips email, or whatever it was, was just the excuse.

If he had thought I had been posting too often then an email such as the following would have done the trick:

(This is a made up email of what I think Cory could have said):

Hi Michael. I've noticed that you are posting very often and feel that you are now dominating the conversation. Could you please take it a bit more easy and give others a go. Otherwise I may need to impose a limit on the number of posts each person can do per day. Regards ...

Last Edit: May 22, 2016 11:21:03 GMT 10 by Michael Wilbur-Ham

Michael Wilbur-Ham
Administrator

Posts: 45

The Conversation - on moderation and my being banned. May 22, 2016 10:43:16 GMT 10

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Post by Michael Wilbur-Ham on May 22, 2016 10:43:16 GMT 10

Technology and website design:

A major part of making public input work online is the technology and web design that supports this.

The Conversation is a great example of doing things badly because I can't think of anything that is done well!

So this post looks at what is wrong with what little technology is used, and what works for most other websites.

Note that as I've been banned I have to reply on memory for features as seen by those logged in. So please let me know if there are any mistakes. (What I can see now is what those who are not logged in see.)

1 - Hard for readers to follow any conversation:

If a reader looks at an article and then reads the say 40 comments, what happens if they are interested in the conversation and wish to follow progress

With TC if the reader comes back to the article and sees that there are now 80 comments then the only way they can read the new comments is to read through all the comments again. And if they come back 6 later and there are now 120 comments again the only way to find out what is new is to go through from the top yet again.

Well designed systems enable the reader to view the new comments and/or change the order of the comments from oldest to newest and newest first, etc. (eg The Guardian, Amazon reviews).

2 - Need to post a comment to get email updates

The only way to follow a conversation as it happens is for registered users to make a post and then they can get an email every time a new comment is posted.

I've often made a post (even though I didn't actually want to make a comment) just so that I could get the emails so that I could follow any future conversation.

So there should be a way to subscribe to the emails without having to make a comment (this is what usually happens in forum software - that is registered users can subscribe to comment notification without have to have made a post).

3 - Not enough information in the emails of comments

The emails tell you the name of the article and the name of the poster. But (unless it is a reply to you) there is no indication of who they are replying to or what was said. Thus I often found myself clicking on the link which opened a browser page with the whole article and all the comments - just so that I could put a post into context.

This is probably regarded as a good thing by Cory as each time this is done it counts as another page view of the article.

4 - What are the key comments?

Most readers are not going to read 120 comments, but many (perhaps most) would be interested to read the most insightful comments. These comments can be flagged by those running the system (eg The Guardian has (used to have?) and editors pick) which would put featured posts at the top).

But the interactive nature of the internet enables the readers to decide which posts are good and bad (I'll say more about bad later).

TC enables those who have registered to Recommend a post by clicking a button. Posts that get a set number of recommendations have the recommend button change colour to show they have reached the number of clicks. There is no way to find these recommended posts other than scroll down the full list of comments. The recommend system is hardly ever used (I'll say why soon) so it is hard to check, but it looks like the recommended posts are only visible to those who have logged in - so the vast majority of readers of the comments don't even see which posts have been recommended.

Amazon reviews and Guardian comments can all be ordered (by ANY user) so that the reader selected best comments appear at the top (The Guardian allows ordering by oldest, newest, recommendations).

As a sometimes heavy user of TC (before I was banned) I ignored the recommend buttons as did most people. One reason is that there is no user feedback. Click the up arrow (recommend button) at the Guardian and you see the number of recommendations go up by one - you see your vote being counted. You can also support posts that are already recommended by many - 40 recommends becomes 41. But at TC once a post is recommended there is no indication if this is supported by just 5 (or whatever the number is) or 50.

Note that a recommend feature that works aids the flow of the conversation because readers can just click the recommend and don't feel the need to make a post saying "I agree" or "Well said". And it is worth noting that such supportive posts at TC are often done by one troll supporting another. This gives the impression of community support to the denier when the actual case is that the majority of readers do not agree. And when a denier post is comprehensively rebutted, a recommend feature enables community support for that rebuttal to be shown.

The current system is designed (by incompetence) to make it easy for just one or two deniers to give casual readers the impression that their views have just as much community support as those defending the science or the need for action. Giving this impression is one of the main reasons that the deniers post at TC.

5 - What are the bad comments?

Because most moderation happens long after posts are made (and read) the technology should be used to try to minimise bickering, repeated back and forth, and posters getting hot under the collar. Note that I posted at TC just a few days before I was banned that a deliberate tactic of some trolls is trying to annoy those who respond - which enables their posts to look reasonable and the other side to look like unreasonable hot-heads.

Being able to vote a comment down is a great way for people to be able to respond to a post without having to write a comment. Posts by deniers cannot go unchallenged or some readers not expert in the science may think they are correct. Being able to down vote a posts with misinformation is a way of showing that the comment is disagreed with by the majority of readers without having to say yet again why, for example, there has been no pause in global warming.

It is also a great way to be able to automate moderation by trolls. For example when most votes on a review or a comment to a review say that it is not useful Amazon hide that comment (but those interested can click a link to open the comment).

The success of Reddit is based on readers being able to vote up or down comments. Those comments that get the most up votes move to the top of the page, and those comments that get lots of down votes are hidden (unless the reader clicks a link to see them).

Imagine how different the conversations at TC would be if the posts by the deniers could have been hidden by the readers!

6 - Keeping on topic

A major problem is that as Cory appears to be scientifically illiterate and he is politically naive, many conversations related to climate change have gone very off-topic. The failure of moderation is written about in another post. The other way this problem could have been fixed is by having some forums or always open conversations where key issues are discussed (making it very easy to have these topics be off-topic in the conversation for most other articles).

For years I've been suggesting this, and I did yet again just a few days before I was banned. Cory replied, as he has for years, that this is being considered but there is an off-topic section.

7 - Volunteer moderators:

Another solution to moderation is to have a system were volunteers have the ability to hide posts. The system could be set up so that a post is only hidden if 2 or 3 of the volunteer moderators flag a post.

Most systems on the internet have either a full time paid staff (eg The Guardian) or have volunteer moderators. TC is very unusual in that posts which should not go up can sometimes stay up for days. Where the current system fails spectacularly is when a back-and-forth with trolls generates maybe 100 posts (that Cory then goes through and deletes long after the conversation has ended) when 99 of the posts would never have happened if the original troll post had been deleted, or people where able to down-vote the comment, etc.

Last Edit: May 23, 2016 18:10:08 GMT 10 by Michael Wilbur-Ham