I am going to try and split this out into two replies, so those following along can see the different issues. The irony of the difficulty on doing this within email may or may not be lost for others.
On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 02:43:31PM -0700, Ihor Antonov wrote: > > You have to trust the moderators, > > So far I am not convinced that I can trust you to moderate. > > > and you have to have some mechanism to > > evaluate that trust and to discuss it and possibly revoke it if something > > goes horribly awry. > > Prevention should always be the first step. Something WILL go wrong but you > are > too blinded by the immediate sugar candy in front of you. > I just want to state, I won't debate any issues around freedom of speech. I believe that these do not apply in this context - especially with Debian being a private entity. Now, I do believe you have a comment on moderation, and how this is done. This requires me to explain two concepts in Discourse - trust levels and flags. Firstly, trust levels. These are the levels of "trust" that the platform has in any particular user. Instead of explaining it here, please have a read of the following: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/ The short version is that the more a particular account interacts with the community in a positive way, the more trust the system has about them, and the more privileges they are afforded to assist in moderation. Secondly, flags. Discourse has the opinion that moderation cannot be proactive with a small group of users - this doesn't scale. Instead, it encourages community members to flag posts. If a post receives sufficient flags, it is then automatically hidden. Users may chose to "unhide" the post for themseleves if they wish to view it. These are then sent to the moderating team to agree, disagree or ignore the flag. This will unhide the post, or keep it hidden and offer an opportunity for the moderator to suggest the original author edits their post in light of the number of flags they got. If an author does so, the post automatically unhides. All these actions are logged, and affects the trust levels above. In fact, every time an admin performs any action on a user, this is logged. I hope this explains how I believe that moderation is more powerful on Discourse, but also more practical, transparent and accountable. Neil