Conversation

I wanna share one of my frustrations as a #mastodon #moderator. When a person from another server reports someone on infosec.exchange, we get a copy of the report, but we can't see WHO. We might know that SOMEONE at mastodon.social reported this person, but we don't know who. So the person reports it to us. We might make notes. We might have a conversation amongst the moderators like "That's pretty close to the line, but we're not gonna take action on a first offence". We have the ability to make notes and actually follow through on decisions like that. But we literally lack a mechanism to reveal any of that to the reporting person.

When an infosec.exchange person reports something (whether here on i.e. or elsewhere), we get a copy telling us which user reported. If I'm the mod handling it, I literally always send a DM to that person and explain what decision we reached and why. (when you have 10 moderators handling 3-4 cases a day, you can afford the luxury of artisanal, hand-crafted responses).

I'm especially keen to send that DM when the visible action we are taking is nothing. If we're not going to take action I want to explain why. At least one person pushed back on my explanation and changed my mind. I didn't follow what was so bad about the reported post and I changed my mind and I took action.

When someone off-instance reports one of our users, they get a sub-optimal experience. I literally can't tell who it is and I can't send a message to them to explain. All they can tell is that nobody took action. They don't know whether 6 mods had a deep, soul-searching debate about it, or whether a single mod just closed it and nobody else got involved. they can't tell that we made notes or maybe even changed how we plan to handle similar things in the future. All they know is that they reported something and nothing happened.

Everyone's expectations on moderation are calibrated to big tech: Facebook, Twitter, etc. Giant faceless corporations who don't care. We are here. We read EVERY report. We think about EVERY action. But when we end up taking no action, it can be hard to see whether that was thoughtless inaction, or thoughtful inaction. It is hard to prove, but I swear we think long and hard about the controversial and difficult moderation decisions.