Thank you for the thoughtful feedback Josh.
I’m glad that this subject of what is considered a “personal attack” and how it should be moderated is coming to light again. The last time this happened I felt it was left somewhat unresolved due to my leaving the forums immediately afterwards. The solution at the time was to ask the parties to take the accusations to a different venue.
Now that I’m back I have a little different perspective than I had then. So, in the interest of honesty and transparency I’ll walk you (and everyone else reading) through my thought processes when moderating these kinds of issues.
This is going to be a long post so please bear with me.
First of all I feel it’s important to point out that the three posts in question (1,2,3) were not censored in any way. The system gives several options when resolving a flag including ignore, edit, hide, delete, ban, or ask the author to edit the post. If the intent was to censor then I could have done so by choosing one of the edit, hide or delete options, but as you can see the original posts and their original content is still fully visible and unaltered.
What I believe you are referring to when stating that “this action is censorship” is the warning that I posted and what it means with regards to future posts that have not been written yet.
The primary intent of the warning when I was writing it was for the two parties to tone it down, keep on topic, and treat each other with respect. As Zerodartz said so eloquently:
But I acknowledge the fact that in that warning I used terms like keep it “non-personal" and to avoid “personal attacks” which can be interpreted differently, more on that later.
I am saddened to hear this but honestly it’s completely out of scope for moderators to be a judge or jury of those offline arguments, behind the scene texts, phone calls, screenshots, Twitter feuds, etc… that occur between the Zcash forums varied membership. Moderators can only fairly weigh and take action regarding things that occur here on this forum.
We need to look at this “calling out” from an outsider’s perspective. Bearing in mind that one user’s “calling out” (depending on how it is done) is what the person being targeted could consider “defamation”. This is an extremely important point because this is an open public forum and there are users here who go by their full real names or commonly known pseudonyms that are tied to their real-world names. Everything posted here will show up in Google and could potentially have a damaging impact on that person in the future.
If you or others want to use this forum in this way then we need to have a serious conversation about what is considered a “personal attack” because of the knock-on effects I mentioned above.
This forums CoC (which is in part verbatim based off of the Zcash GitHub CoC, written by @daira and Sean Bowe) are both unclear on what precisely constitutes a “personal attack” and from a moderation perspective this can be an issue because it leaves room for interpretation. Without clear direction then the moderator gets stuck in an impossible (and frankly, quite stressful) position where both keeping an accusation up, editing it, or taking it down will offend one, the other, or both parties.
I’m going to use a boxing analogy to help illustrate a few examples of how I have been interpreting CoC with regards to personal attacks. In traditional boxing “above the belt” is fair game, “below the belt” is not and then we have the “grey area” which I have been interpreting as a moderator to also be “below the belt”.
In this illustration I think we would agree the items on the left side are unambiguous. The right side is the grey area I was referring to because it’s not specifically defined in the CoC but I believe are the kinds of things that would be viewed by the targeted individual and by the public as an attack on, or defamation of, their personal character.
This also begs the question: Is this forum is the best place to host these kinds of “call outs” or should users be directed to take the accusations to another platform? Would these kinds of discussions be acceptable in the Zcash GitHub repo where the similar CoC applies? I’m not sure that potential upsides of having such a back and forth “run its course” (with moderators turning a blind eye) outweigh the downsides. It’s a terrible look for new users who are excited to sign up, learn about, and get involved with Zcash, to then see the representatives from the core institutions in Zcash slinging mud at each other. In my opinion there needs to be far more effort on bridging the gaps between the edges of our community rather than focusing on the gaps themselves.
I hope this post helps you understand the factors, considerations, and challenges I and other moderators face when reviewing flags or issues raised by members of our community. I am not perfect and I don’t claim to have the perfect solution for every situation that occurs, I am fully aware that I can make a mistake and am willing to correct that mistake.
As I stated when I came back to moderating:
Please feel free to call me out here, in private, or contact the Zcash Foundation directly if you feel my moderation is lacking.
Thank you - Shawn