Wow... a manifesto, huh? Sounds political!
Well, it is for a reason. There's an ongoing development of policies at TASVideos—both internal and public-oriented ones. We've been giving a lot of thought this year to handling moderation and community management as a whole, and given the amount of sweeping changes in what we do and how we do it, I'd like to summarize our current views, beliefs, and operating principles as well as recent changes, and run all of that by the community at large to gather feedback.
This, I hope, can give us pointers to what we might be doing wrong lately, or not doing right
yet, or not doing at all when we should. This is your opportunity to tell the staff if there's anything about community management that makes you uncomfortable and whether it's something that came as the result of our action, inaction, poor timing, or lack of consideration.
Moderation team
These wonderful individuals plus the no less wonderful Memory, Samsara, and fsvgm777. No, they don't have the role, even though they (most notably Memory) do engage in moderation activities in various capacity. Yes, I'm aware this isn't exactly well communicated on the site.
Anyway, on the administrative side, Bigbass recently joined as a new moderator and I was promoted to a senior moderator to take charge of the team and all this political stuff. Samsara and dwangoAC, on the other hand, have taken a step back from active moderation to focus on the more important things. You get some, you lose some.
We always welcome further additions to the moderation team, of course, and I hope this post will give you a further insight into how we operate.
Policies and values
Ultimately, the moderation team serves the goal to maintain TASVideos—both the forums and Discord—as a place of mutual respect and constructive, improvement-oriented communication. In 1998, Warp Records issued a compilation album titled
We Are Reasonable People, and I think there's a certain kind of warm beauty in the simplicity of that phrase. I take being a reasonable person as a compliment because, above all else, it emphasizes openness and flexibility. This translates to our moderation policies.
Most of what we think and believe in with regards to moderation processes is laid out in
Moderator Guidelines which had an entire new section
added to it just today as the result of a recent internal discussion. The article itself is intended to codify how we approach and react to any given situation right now—or at least how
we think we should. Moderators are also people, and we don't always perform to our self-imposed standards—which is exactly why having more people on board is helpful in staving off operational fatigue.
To further summarize what is said in the article as briefly as possible, the moderator team strives to find the right balance in their actions to ensure they handle inappropriate behavior in a way that both
effectively disincentivizes it and
doesn't overreach in a way that creates any collateral damage that could've been avoided. Finding that balance isn't easy, and it's an ongoing, iterative effort. So expect these community outreaches to happen somewhat regularly, perhaps once or twice a year, as policy changes accumulate.
Operating principles
I've referred to moderators as a team and mentioned internal discussions multiple times in this post. This shouldn't come as a surprise because virtually any decision we make is a result of having the team members chime in to provide their opinion on the matter until some form of consensus is reached. We don't discuss
every technical detail—usually because it would stall the operations beyond what is necessary—but overall we almost never see situations where one of the members is acting in disagreement with the group. If we do have such disagreements, we bring them up first, and this is a cornerstone of our operations.
You might've noticed that both the guidelines article and
site rules are left somewhat vague on purpose in terms of matching transgressions with specific punishments: this is both to respect the phenomenology and context of each particular case and to give more room for discussion within the team and any given moderator's personal good judgment to decide the punitive measures instead of applying them as a knee-jerk reaction. We currently believe this is the best approach overall, although we do recognize it's not always the quickest or most efficient.
Recent changes to discuss
Here's the important part. Everyone on staff who's involved in community management, and the moderation team in particular, make policy decisions in the interest of the entire community—effectively, a group of dozen or so people decides things for thousands of you out there. But due to the nature of these discussions and the fact that they're usually connected to specific moderation cases, we can't do so publicly.
It should be noted that this is entirely common and almost every community of our size or bigger does the same. But keeping decision-making entirely under wraps risks creating a disconnect between
our perception of what the community would want, and what the community
actually wants us to do, and we're liable not to notice this disconnect until it starts creating problems—which is, unfortunately, just as common, and happened to TASVideos in the past. Considering what I wrote earlier about openness, respect, and being reasonable, I and the others would like to minimize that risk proactively by communicating some of the changes to internal policies as they happen. Today, I have two subjects for us to discuss.
1. Whether to allow submissions coauthored by banned users.
The recent round of discussion on this subject hasn't been very conclusive, so, for now, we're maintaining the status quo:
submissions coauthored by banned users are allowed (regardless of whether it's a courtesy coauthorship or an active collaboration).
2. Whether to synchronize bans and other such punitive actions across both the site/forums and Discord.
We had no prior stance on the matter and agreed to
synchronize bans moving forward, but also to
rely less on long-duration and indefinite bans if the situation doesn't call for the most drastic measures. This mainly concerns isolated (i.e. non-systematic) incidents of unacceptable behavior.
If you disagree with any of these decisions, please provide your reasoning so that we could work your viewpoints and arguments into our internal discussions. This would also be a good place to discuss the content of the
current revision of moderator guidelines if you find any of it lacking or disagreeable, or if you feel moderators haven't been adhering to it recently (but please be civil and respectful; alternatively, you can complain to me personally in DMs).
Thank you for the time.
