Lots of people are making pithy, non constructive comments back and forth about this issue. Are those really the comments that are worthy of shunning? By that logic, I think I'd have most people muted here, which wouldn't really allow for much discussion. I believe you should be allowed to block whoever you want from commenting on your content, like this thread here, but as an outside observer reading the discussion about this topic, how am I supposed to interpret the fact that you're muting people who have a different opinion about mute?
Absolutely, 100%, no discussion needed. By filtering them out, the signal-to-noise ratio goes way up. By permitting them, the actual discussion becomes completely derailed. I'm not muting people who have a different opinion about mute. You'll see plenty of dissent with even a cursory glance. I'm muting people who are dicks about it. Do you see the difference?Are those really the comments that are worthy of shunning?
I believe you should be allowed to block whoever you want from commenting on your content, like this thread here, but as an outside observer reading the discussion about this topic, how am I supposed to interpret the fact that you're muting people who have a different opinion about mute?
I think this comment is pretty nonconstructive and dickish, are you going to mute flagamuffin to improve the signal-to-noise ratio? Of course not. You appear to be muting people who dissent and are dicks. Dicks who you agree with, are okay I guess, which seems like a double standard, but it's your post, your rules. CashewGuy made a comment in another post after your discussion broke down around the definition of an apology. Are ideological factions just going to mute each other and talk past one another?
It's non-constructive and dickish. Thing is, flag and I have a long history, get each other, and have had many spirited discussions founded on mutual respect. He's earned my forbearance. So am I going to mute him? No. We have community. You also seem to think that I have some sort of obligation to the universe to permit (even encourage!) people who refuse to have an honest discussion with me to continue to have dishonest discussions with others in posts I made. Why on earth should I put up with that? There's nothing whatsoever preventing CashewGuy from saying "hey, man - I got a little hot under the collar. Let me try again because I actually want to have this discussion." But he's not. He's saying "I did nothing wrong, and an apology is an admission of guilt." He won't even have a discussion about that. So what is he adding to a discussion about reaching out/apologizing? And why am I not absolutely, positively, 100% entitled to be the arbiter of that decision?
I get that this is a small insular community and the mute tool, as it is currently implemented is important for maintaining that and you're "100% entitled to be the arbiter of that decision." You are, after all, the most popular guy here. Nevertheless, I don't think he needs to apologize for being a little hot under the collar. I'm sure you've been hot under the collar as well and nobody expects you to apologize to some plebe who mutes you. I think he makes a valid point: I don't see his discussion as being inherently "dishonest," and perhaps that is the heart of our disagreement; he may make flippant remarks, but who doesn't do that from time to time?Keep in mind, Klein is a major user, and this will thus remove a decently sized portion of the site from my ability to communicate. Was this likely a place I'd communicate with anyway? Perhaps not, as I did not follow Klein. However, the effects are unequal, as being a small user, Klein will likely never see any content I push anyway, and thus can mute me without fear of losing the ability to discuss openly.
And here is where the whole thing comes to splinters: What you think he needs to do is 100% irrelevant to the discussion. It's my content. It's my choice. It's my option to let him say his peace or shut him the hell up. If you want to hear what he has to say, you are 100% within your rights to post "Everyone muted by kleinbl00 - here's your chance to expound on what a douchebag he is" and shout out everybody you want to hear from just to make sure they get the message. In response, I'm 100% in my rights to mute you as well. And then you can all form your own insular, self-reinforcing kleinbl00-hating community and there's fuckall I can do about it. The discussion is abut the value and importance of apology and community building and his viewpoint is that apologies are only ever called for if you're guilty of a crime. I went three rounds with him to discuss that point and the answer was "This is why I stopped trying to have a conversation with you. " So. One of us is trying to see the other's viewpoint. The other is stirring up shit. And since it's my post, I'm the one that gets to use the STFU button. He didn't just make "flippant remarks" he rejected any opportunity for conversation not once, not twice, but three times. If I had a blog, I wouldn't have to put up with that. And since Hubski is built around following people, not subjects, that option is mine here, too.Nevertheless, I don't think he needs to apologize for being a little hot under the collar.
I don't see his discussion as being inherently "dishonest,"
Well, fair enough. I think you make a valid point. I will probably go back to lurking, as this community doesn't seem very welcoming for new participants. Clearly my opinions about anything and everything are 100% irrelevant to your fine community, as you put it. Thanks for letting me respond before muting me.
I agree, I feel like we're having a valuable civil discussion here as well, which is why I felt like your descent into hyperbole seemed hostile and out of place: If you want to hear what he has to say, you are 100% within your rights to post "Everyone muted by kleinbl00 - here's your chance to expound on what a douchebag he is" ... In response, I'm 100% in my rights to mute you as well. ... then you can all form your own insular, self-reinforcing kleinbl00-hating community and there's fuckall I can do about it. I understand I may have misinterpreted your comments, and I certainly don't want to put words in your mouth. I largely agree with you, but I think the whole point is to avoid insular self-reinforcing communities. It's a little disingenuous to frame everyone who thinks that the mute functionality may need to be adjusted are all just trying to stir up shit against you. I like you, I like your comments, and the things you post, but from the get go, you made this post framing it as an us-versus-them mentality, complete with hyperbolic names for each side. I understand the value of using mute to shun community members you don't like, but I question how it could be abused after watching Reddit's decline and manipulation. I've seen accusations of abuse, with varying degrees of merit, in my opinion. Groups certainly have the right to shut out people they don't like, but right now Hubski is really only one group it seems like. To be honest, I've given my opinions, you can read them in my other comments. As someone who obviously isn't intimately familiar with the Hubski community, I've gotten as far down into the weeds of this debate as I feel comfortable going. I'm still undecided as to whether I will increase my contributions here. What you think he needs to do is 100% irrelevant to the discussion. ...
Sure. But a hostile community is worse than an insular community. And here we are: you disagreed, I disagreed, you expressed scorn for my hyperbole, I questioned your scorn and reinforced that the discussion is valuable, and thus we have a useful dialog. It's a back-and-forth thing that people who respect each other do. None of the people I have muted have shown the slightest bit of respect. Without respect, there's no community. I thought you weren't going to put words in my mouth? Here we are disagreeing, and here you are, not muted. Lots of people disagree with me about mute functionality - as I said before, the ones that are muted are the ones that are also dicks about it. We're now two rounds deep in which I make this point, yet you bring it back up again as if you didn't hear me. Go ahead and question. What solid, evidence-based arguments do you care to make? Because then we're having a discussion, not slinging mud. List them and explain why you think they merit. It then becomes a debate rather than slander. "I want you to acknowledge the validity of my opinion without my having to state it." Naw, dawg. If you want to have this discussion with me, you need to have this discussion with me. I'm open to it. I'm patient with it. But you don't get to say "I said this thing to someone else somewhere else, look it up." That's disrespectful. I'm committing the energy to furthering your understanding. I type fast but I can't just empty my head onto the screen. The respectful thing would be to commit your energy to either acknowledging my statements or questioning my arguments. And if I'm not worth my time, ask yourself why you should be worth mine? And there we are, back again, as to why I get to mute people on my own posts.I largely agree with you, but I think the whole point is to avoid insular self-reinforcing communities.
It's a little disingenuous to frame everyone who thinks that the mute functionality may need to be adjusted are all just trying to stir up shit against you.
I question how it could be abused after watching Reddit's decline and manipulation.
I've seen accusations of abuse, with varying degrees of merit, in my opinion.
To be honest, I've given my opinions, you can read them in my other comments.
I'm still undecided as to whether I will increase my contributions here.
Having seen the post by b_b, I suppose this is a moot mute discussion, but I did want to offer you my response to a few of your points, which I hope is okay. I don't wish to be disrespectful to you or anyone else in this community. Go ahead and question. What solid, evidence-based arguments do you care to make? Because then we're having a discussion, not slinging mud. It was a poor choice on my part to bring that up without qualifying where I was coming from. I've been increasingly frustrated seeing comments and submissions (particularly related to news and politics) deleted, pigeonholed or marginalized by vague rules or nontransparent moderators. It feels like many Reddit participants are not interested in discussion, but rather, manipulating, distracting, or otherwise preventing discussion. I suppose the quality of the discussion is as much a result of the individual participants as it is the framework of the site that it takes place in. A news story posted to Reddit is filtered through different subreddits to reflect different community's interests and proffer their group's opinions. Obviously Hubski simply hasn't grown large or diverse enough to mirror the same effects with users as subreddits. I'm growing to like the idea of following individuals whose contributions I value; there is some inherent transparency that comes from developing a personal rapport with other users. I suppose the more time I spend here, the better feeling I will get for individual Hubskian's world views and can feel more confident in offering my opinions while not unduly offending or stepping on a person's toes. I wouldn't really consider myself as either one of your polar factions (literally Hitler or cocktail party), although I get the sardonicism in your use of the "literally Hitler" meme to represent the outsiders. I do understand your point that a "mute as global comment ignore" or whatever that side was pushing for (I think I unfortunately made a comment in tepid support of it), neuters mute too much. I like the idea that the creator of the post is the moderator of that post, and anyone can post whatever they want. Perhaps the biggest point of disagreement that I would have with you is that an apology is always necessary, or would work in every circumstance. For example, I think it was minimum_wage (please forgive me if I'm wrong!) who mentioned that even if someone apologized to him/her, it wouldn't make a difference, which is fine. If some libertarian (or any other ideological label) is distracting, attacking or trolling my posts without adding any value, I would be within my right, and perhaps expected, to mute him, regardless of an apology. I suppose my considerations of the mute feature are borne from imagining how it would look in 2016 when Hubski has grown (10x, 100x, maybe even 1000x?) and popular users are submitting pro-Hillary for president content with rampant astroturfing while muting users who are offering critical discussion. How will regular users be able to navigate that type of thing? I suppose the Hubski model makes astroturfing more difficult, and the lack of global moderation would allow the real discussion to spill elsewhere. In the end, I guess it's pie in the sky to wonder about these things; it's better to go along for the ride rather than to knock over the apple cart out of some perceived threat. List them and explain why you think they merit. It then becomes a debate rather than slander. Honestly, I'm not friends with any of the people involved, nor was I part of the discussion, so I wouldn't really hold my opinion in high regard. I came to this, and other threads, to discuss the mute feature specifically, not some past disagreement between people I don't know. I regret even mentioning that I have an opinion on that. At any rate, I appreciate the time you spent discussing this with me. As someone who is relatively new to Hubski, it feels daunting to become a member of the community; there is no tutorial for getting to know people."I question how it could be abused after watching Reddit's decline and manipulation."
"I've seen accusations of abuse, with varying degrees of merit, in my opinion."
So this is a direct illustration of the problem at hand: Reddit has become a shit community and prompts occasional diasporas to Hubski. Most of those refugees frame their Hubski experience in terms of "how is it like Reddit." The fact that there are no moderators on Hubski is visible if you're looking for it, but if you're not it's just another link aggregator with comments, except you can't downvote. I moderate /r/movies and moderated /r/politics for about 10 days (that mess where they banned Mother Jones) and I know exactly the frustration you're speaking of. However, I also know that Hubski doesn't function anything like that... and that most of the problems new users to Hubski experience are a direct consequence of coming at it with a Reddit mindset. For example, I created a firestorm by suggesting I wanted the ability to ignore new users until they were no longer new. From a Hubski standpoint, this makes perfect sense - "ignoring" is something that lots of people do, because they aren't interested in reading articles from Buzzfeed or Gawker or that spammer that always posts links to their click farm. From my perspective, I didn't want to ignore "reddit" because I'm a damn default mod with like 30 trophies and a couple hundred comments in /r/bestof that's been to the offices a couple times and has the cell phone numbers of three admins. BUT i didn't want to have to wade through eighteen duplicate posts about how much reddit sucks. "Ignore new users" solves this problem without censoring anybody - yet all the new Redditors were looking for censorship, so they shaped everything they saw in terms of censorship and jimmies were rustled. Once jimmies were rustled, all the Redditors adopted a "jimmies always rustled" war footing and here we are. Meanwhile, an attempt to understand the dynamics of the site they're adopting would have resolved the problem immediately... and the feature I asked for, if implemented, would have prevented any conflict at all. I personally talk about Hubski and growth all the time. This is why I think the mute function is vital, as is ignore. Let's say I'm a pro-Hillary astroturfer. I can mute everyone that is anti-Hillary. But anybody paying any attention will quickly notice that the commentary is one-sided and shallow... and that any dissent tends to be short-lived and highly voted. At that point the onus falls on the reader to judge the quality of the content - and there's nothing stopping him from posting something lambasting Hillary and getting an entirely different set of comments. Mute and Ignore allow disparate factions to exist on the same website without the raiding exemplified by SRS and 4chan. "Ignore users newer than 24 hours" would even shove new shill accounts to the bottom of the comments without the reader having to do a thing... and if implemented correctly, would re-configure things the next time the reader viewed the page (assuming it had been 24 hours). It looks like censorship, when in fact it's simply vote ranking. Mute users newer than 24 hours (which I did not, have not, and probably will not ask for, ever) would solve the raid problem entirely. Right there, there are two aspects of Hubski's architecture that solve dire problems with Reddit's structure without any human moderation whatsoever. I suggest you re-read my post. nowhere did I say that an apology is always necessary, and nowhere did I say that an apology would work in every circumstance. What I said was that apologies increase human contact and on a site that values community over conflict, could be a feature that benefits everyone. I did not intend it as a panacea nor do I think it will solve every problem. Honestly, I posted it as a talking point amongst a crowd of butt-hurt Redditors that steadfastly refuses to understand the purpose of "mute" because they want to gripe about their freedoms being trampled wherever they go. The whole discussion quickly became tiresome, but not as quickly as the posts where they weren't muted. Which, to me, is the entire point of the function. Perhaps the biggest point of disagreement that I would have with you is that an apology is always necessary, or would work in every circumstance.
As someone who is relatively new to Hubski, it feels daunting to become a member of the community; there is no tutorial for getting to know people.
Thanks. That makes a lot of sense. I remember that little ignore shitstorm; I thought you had a good point from the start and I figured as a new user myself, I probably didn't have the perspective to contribute an opinion worth anyone's time. Perhaps I should have maintained that on this issue as well, but I guess ultimately, talking about things is the way to get to know people. It's easy to get trapped on one side or the other of a polarized debate, like I did, spending energy framing the other's argument as opposition to my own. I see the nuance of your point. Apology (and openness, I think) isn't really a clear-cut solution, but a good general approach. I appreciate the welcome; in my time spent lurking, you came across as prickly, insightful, and yet now, friendly.
Blocking anyone's content so you can't see it is fine. Blocking anyone's content so others can't see it is not. With your ideal muting function, you've got to rationalize that you're taking discussional surrogacy over people who view your posts. You're making a decision for them. Why would you do that? I've thought up some, but I'm not going to be a jackass and assume what your motivations are. I'd like to know though. You keep saying "my content" in regards to your posts. Your posts are yours. Categorically, objectively, blah blah. They're yours. But the discussions people can have on your posts are entirely comprised, owned, and made by contributors. This comment is "my content". Not yours. You don't own this comment because it's your thread. You don't own this comment because your comment's the parent comment. This is mine; the post and your comments are yours. Being a post originator shouldn't let you silence contributors from other contributors. By doing so, you're saying their content is yours. "I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!" So two things really. Why do you think you can make content-viewing decisions for people who view your posts? And do you think you own the comments from contributors when they write on your posts? There's got to be a better word than "own" by the way. I'm saying own because it seems a best fit, but if you'd like to use a different word, that's fine.
This would be "ignore." This would be literally no site functionality on Hubski. Mute doesn't censor. Mute prevents you from saying anything in the first place. Say whatever you want on the street; I'm not required to suffer it in my own house. Because it's divisive, off-topic, inflammatory, antagonistic, obscene, or otherwise offensive. Next? Sure. But the blanket of words you choose to spread out are on my lawn. I can't do shit about your words. But I can sure as hell keep you off my lawn. Blogger, Myspace, Facebook, Tumblr, Wordpress and pretty much everything but 4chan, Reddit, Digg and Slashdot work like this. And you are posting it with my tacit approval because it's my post. If it were on some other post owned by some other person, I'd have no ability to do anything about it. It's their lawn, not mine. And that's the metaphor to wrap your head around: Hubski exists to follow users, not subjects. In other words, you aren't going to a party at 2nd and Blanchard, you're going to a party at Run's House. If you say something offensive to Run, he's well within his rights to show you the door - your offensive comment hangs in the air; everyone heard it. Run, meanwhile, doesn't have to suffer you at his parties anymore. You can look in through the windows, but you can't mix it up. It's been that way as long as I've been here, and I shall be here so long as it continues to be so. Then maybe you should find another site to play on. Because on here, it does. By doing so, they're making their comments with my permission. "You've had too much to drink. Go home." Because the site deliberately, tacitly gives me permission to do so. If it didn't, I wouldn't participate. I think Hubski owns everything any of us writes, but I'm not a lawyer. I know that there's built-in site functionality whose explicit purpose is to give me moderation power over who can and can't post on my content, and I find it advantageous to use it. Yeah, you didn't try very hard. Give "permit" a shot and see how much better the analogy works.Blocking anyone's content so you can't see it is fine.
Blocking anyone's content so others can't see it is not.
With your ideal muting function, you've got to rationalize that you're taking discussional surrogacy over people who view your posts. You're making a decision for them. Why would you do that?
But the discussions people can have on your posts are entirely comprised, owned, and made by contributors. This comment is "my content". Not yours.
This is mine; the post and your comments are yours.
Being a post originator shouldn't let you silence contributors from other contributors.
By doing so, you're saying their content is yours.
"I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!"
So two things really. Why do you think you can make content-viewing decisions for people who view your posts?
And do you think you own the comments from contributors when they write on your posts?
There's got to be a better word than "own" by the way.
This is the hinge of your argument: that you own the ground people comment on when they choose to write on your posts. But thank fucking Jesus there's a choice. So, at the risk of ruining your dinner party, I'm going to get the hell out myself. Because you're big on respect, I'll say you've changed my opinion. Not begrudgingly, but in the way you seem to usually do. Where you leave whoever you're talking to feeling like they've talked to a real asshole, but they can't say anything about it because you get your point across. Keep your lawn shit free...the blanket of words you choose to spread out are on my lawn.
Yes. Precisely. As is entirely your right. I certainly find that solution preferable to the drive to change the rules. That uncomfortable feeling you're experiencing is called cognitive dissonance. It's caused by holding conflicting ideas concurrently as they fight for primacy in your cortex. One idea will win out eventually; for most people, the old idea is at the top of the hill and generally wins out. Either way, it's an experience that does cause an experience of physical pain in some people. Here's a great reference. For what it's worth, I'd like to point out that you called me an asshole and you're still unmuted. Which I might point out (so long as I'm giving you a headache anyway) could possibly indicate that the reasons and motivations for muting aren't as simple or as arbitrary as you think.This is the hinge of your argument: that you own the ground people comment on when they choose to write on your posts.
But thank fucking Jesus there's a choice. So, at the risk of ruining your dinner party, I'm going to get the hell out myself.
ecause you're big on respect, I'll say you've changed my opinion. Not begrudgingly, but in the way you seem to usually do. Where you leave whoever you're talking to feeling like they've talked to a real asshole, but they can't say anything about it because you get your point across.
Understanding the analogy doesn't change that muting someone is exclusionary - whether good or bad. As such, it makes new users uncomfortable rustling established users' jimmies. That might be how the site's constructed, how it's going to be, and how you like it, but it makes the community harder to approach. It's not cognitive dissonance. My opinions weren't idealized so there wasn't a hill to be king of. You just have an abrasive way of talking about things that's not the most helpful. This time it was though. It was a good talk, klein. Maybe we'll have more.