-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to bbs.geminispace.org:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini; charset=utf-8
This is a small feature update that adds a couple of moderation tools and fixes a few bugs.
A flair is a free-form text label that appears next to the user's name and provides some additional contextual information about the user. You may be familiar with this concept from sites like Reddit.
A flair can only be bestowed on a user by the administator of the Bubble instance. Users themselves, even if they are moderators, cannot assign flairs.
Flairs can be used for various purposes:
A flair can signal the user's role or status.
The flair can be used as a "soft" moderation tool to assign permanent labels on users, for instance if they have been warned of improper behavior.
The flair can help manage expectations about communicating with a user, for example if they prefer to speak a particular language, or if they have a communication style that is easy for others to misunderstand.
It remains to be seen how well this works in practice. My main objective here is to help improve the quality of discussions by having some way of keeping track of behavioral patterns. I firmly believe that the vast majority of people here are acting in good faith, but the nature of textual internet communication is that it is easy to misread or misunderstand what others are saying, due to differences in cultural backgrounds, social norms, and personal characteristics. A well-chosen flair should help level the playing field, so one can interact with people in a manner that doesn't spin out of control unnecessarily.
Ideally, a flair is something that you can identify in yourself as well and perhaps even consider a strength. The idea is not to name-call or judge people, but to make apparent attributes that emerge from one's posting history.
You can request a specific flair by mentioning @admin, perhaps in a post in your user feed, or contacting me via some other way. I'm not promising you'll get the flair, but we can discuss it at least. Likewise, if you feel the flair assigned to you is inappropriate, please contact me:
When a discussion thread gets heated, goes too much off-topic, or otherwise becomes unproductive, it may be warranted for a moderator to cool things down a bit. Previously, the only tools at one's disposal were deleting posts or reporting them to the administrator. These are a bit too blunt to be used in many cases. Therefore, I'm adding a way for the author of a post, and any user with moderator rights over the post, to lock and unlock its comment thread.
The lock/unlock action can be found on the post's More actions page.
When viewing posts in a muted subspace, you can now see the comments normally. Previously they were not visible at all. Muting a subspace is supposed to only affect the home feed.
The home feed is titled "Subspace Posts" or "User Posts" when you select a feed mode other than All Posts.
Jan 10 · 4 months ago · 👍 gritty, michaelnordmeyer, mozz, Addison, stack, wasolili
lock posts: yes. flair: this starts to be overengineered, not what gemini was supposed to be? compare to IRC.
@karel You could argue that many things in Bubble are over-engineered. Do we really need issue trackers and Emoji reactions and dynamically editable polls?
When it comes to flairs, I think there needs to be some granularity in the available moderation actions between asking nicely and booting an account. Flairs may help here, although I'm sure I'll still tweak the implementation a little.
While Gemini itself is simple, applications built on it need not be that. I'm generally trying to address specific use cases and problem areas with these features. A particular Bubble instance does not need to use every feature.
However here on BBS, the "flagship" instance, we should generally dogfood these things to find out what works and what doesn't.
editable posts: yes. maybe i am a dreamer, but i had enough of moderated spaces on the internet. i was so happy to meet nice people here, and have a civilized exchange... but no, it's moderated. what's illegal should be of course reported, but let the rest to us users. we are social and can build something nice by consense... if not, the space is already too big and attracts the usual culprits: spammers, trolls and advertisments... and it's dead, we move on.
analogy: would you like to join a club... say, an in-person chess or dancing or whatever club where communication is moderated?
if you moderate, you start the fight against wind mills that happens on facebook or so. let's say, you don't like this comment and "moderate" me out. then what? i'll rejoin as someone else and you'll never know. than you'll introduce email requirements when creating accounts. the circumventers will start using mailinator. then you'll blacklist mailinator... and so on and so on, everyone loses time and the place degrades.
please-please, don't go this route. freezing a runaway thread and removing/reporting illegal stuff would be, in my humble opinion, enough.
On the internet, where people are interacting behind pseudonyms and feel free to behave in ways they wouldn't behave in the real world, civilized discussion requires some form of moderation. However, it is an entirely different question what form that moderation should take.
I have no intention of building elaborate mechanisms such as you bring up, but on the other hand, I am not comfortable with creating a free-for-all flamewar arena hosted on my private server. That is why there is the Code of Conduct and I will be enforcing it.
The goal is never to silence disagreeing voices, but rather to disincentivize harmful and negative behavior. In other words, it's not so much about what one says, but more about the way one conducts themselves.
first of all, please consider that i appreciate a lot the place you built here. i fully aggree that contents must be controlled, and you have already enough tools for it: remove comments, freeze threads, even (less effective) ban/remove users.
where i beg to disaggree is that you are wrong that you have any control at all over the people in an anonymous environment. you only control the messages they post here. what you can also control is the social knitting which promotes people being constructive and does not feed the trolls.
but hey, it's your house and your rules. who am i to disagree on how you run the house?
seems like your flair worked itself out over on my locked post about supertxt.
Thank you for continuing to improve this thing you've built, skyjake! It's good to see these updates.
can i have a "flaired user" flair? i dont really have a reason other than it would be a little funny
I would just respectfully like to say that I don’t find flares as a type of punishment to be healthy as a moderation tool, for reasons others have said.
I just can’t really think of any good use cases for this specific type of moderation.
@satch I would say moderation via flair is quite an extreme measure, based on a longer pattern of behavior, something of a final warning before actual account deletion by the admin.
I don't expect it will be needed to be used this way very often.
@wasolili 🙂 We'll see if I come up with a reasonable solution for user-selected flairs in future releases. There are both UI issues and social nuances to consider with these.
please flair me appropriately https://youtu.be/21zgV8_PBM0?si=KZJ18f3lvB4l1qUw
The only “punishment” flair that works IMO is a little note saying ‘disruptive guest’ or something.
I have concerns regarding the flairs part, as other people said. I don’t think they will enhance moderation in any way, especially considering the ease of just creating a new account (i.e. a new identity).
@skyjake I see where you are coming from but I am not sure this is gonna work out the way you expect.
Eventually labeling people is always a bad thing not matter what.
Anyway you got my trust! 👍
-- Response ended
-- Page fetched on Sun May 19 19:50:33 2024