FYI an aspect of my experience is briefly thinking “Huh, I wonder what are norms around user-to-user-banning?”, and then not trying to find anything about that, and instead just assuming that it’s kinda like a twitter block (in particular, mostly it’s up to the banner’s discretion in order to make their experience work for them), and doing the ban. It sounds like user-bans are considered much more weighty than twitter blocks. This makes some sense, since the structures of the forums are pretty different; not saying I was justified in not processing the difference; I’m just noting descriptively that my (angry) awareness didn’t include much awareness of this difference. I’d suggest having a link to some description of the meaning / intended use of a user-ban near the interface element for that; possibly even with a confirmation warning dialogue thing like “are you sure? have you read the thing?”.
Definitely makes sense to put clearer guidance on how to use various mod powers as an author.
There’s an issue where people might treat them differently.
Part of my model here, which probably wouldn’t make sense as part of the mod-guidance, is that Wei Dai has been around awhile and has a good track record of generally thoughtful contribution. Also, he’s like one of ~20 people who probably will be able to meaningfully contribute to (some of) the topics I think you want to talk about. So, I think it would have made more sense to put more effort into back-and-forth in that case.
FYI an aspect of my experience is briefly thinking “Huh, I wonder what are norms around user-to-user-banning?”, and then not trying to find anything about that, and instead just assuming that it’s kinda like a twitter block (in particular, mostly it’s up to the banner’s discretion in order to make their experience work for them), and doing the ban. It sounds like user-bans are considered much more weighty than twitter blocks. This makes some sense, since the structures of the forums are pretty different; not saying I was justified in not processing the difference; I’m just noting descriptively that my (angry) awareness didn’t include much awareness of this difference. I’d suggest having a link to some description of the meaning / intended use of a user-ban near the interface element for that; possibly even with a confirmation warning dialogue thing like “are you sure? have you read the thing?”.
Definitely makes sense to put clearer guidance on how to use various mod powers as an author.
There’s an issue where people might treat them differently.
Part of my model here, which probably wouldn’t make sense as part of the mod-guidance, is that Wei Dai has been around awhile and has a good track record of generally thoughtful contribution. Also, he’s like one of ~20 people who probably will be able to meaningfully contribute to (some of) the topics I think you want to talk about. So, I think it would have made more sense to put more effort into back-and-forth in that case.