Quote:
Originally Posted by Riboge /img/forum/go_quote.gif
If only there were adequate rules that WERE consistently enforced and if only it were made clear who moderates what. The enforcement is intermittent and and unrelated to feedback and thus corrupts any idea of fairness or appropriateness. Certain people are allowed to go on posting in ways destructive to open discourse about legitimate audiophile interests versus pseudo-scientific debunking. Though to a petty extent, the exercise of power without responsibility to a constituency is corrupting, e.g., "we don't really want to hear..."
Yes, apparently, you don't "get it."
|
Who moderates what. That's easy, we all moderate whatever needs to be moderated when we happen to be online. Nobody has any assigned duties. None of us need to be here at any particular time. None of us are assigned to any particular forums. It's more or less whatever we might bump into while we happen to be online otherwise, plus looking into any posts that have been reported by other members.
Our rules might not be adequate, but if we had more rules you would complain about that too. No matter how they were enforced, you would say they were inconsistently enforced. If for no other reason, when they are enforced against you, you will disagree. When they're not enforced against someone else, you will also disagree. If the world is anything less than perfect in your eyes, it will be smugly deemed to be "intermittent" to this and "unrelated" to that and will "corrupt" this and so on.
Yes, I get it. You're the kind of person who can't be satisfied no matter how we might try. You know everything and can sit behind a keyboard and tell us what a poor job we do. Well, we do it for free, buster, and some of us spend plenty of time doing it for free. Why? Because we want to make Head-Fi a better place. Perfect? Nah. It could never be, especially with impossible to please people like yourself who apparently never have a good thing to say about those who have tried to make a difference around here.
So, no, "we really don't want to hear" if this is the kind of thing we're going to hear each and every time someone wants to nit pick a decision that one of us has made without any known bias, but simply to deal with whatever situation was at hand the best that he knew how.
Exercise of power without responsibility to a constituency? About the only thing I agree with in that sentence is the "petty" part. Everything we do is aimed to make Head-Fi a better place. None of us gets off on the "power"... what power, exactly? We just clean up little messes and try to ensure that people are being decent to each other. There isn't a whole lot more to it than that, most days. Honestly, all we are really trying to do is to keep the peace so that everyone can enjoy the site.
99% of the people I've ever banned are spammers who register an account to sell 158 different cell phones. They start 2 or 3 threads, a bunch of folks report those posts, and boom, they're gone. Other than that, we try to work with anyone who seems to be causing problems by making offending posts or violating the rules in one way or another.
If you make a stray post now and then that gets deleted, but then you don't hear anything from one of the moderators about it, then it couldn't have been that bad! It was deleted for one reason or another in terms of policy, but if you didn't get a PM about it, then it wasn't such a big issue. Of course if you do the same thing over and over, you'll then hear about it.
So really, what's the big deal? You simply think to yourself, "Ok, I see. That must have been deleted because my comment was political, which I know is not allowed..." (or whatever the case may be, but it isn't generally hard to figure out). In fact, sometimes people intentionally push the envelope and thus know exactly why something was deleted.
Anyway, I'll stop now. Speaking only for myself (directly), there is no big power rush about being a moderator on some silly internet forum about headphones (of all things). But indirectly, I'm confident that I speak for all other moderators as well. We do our best. We're not perfect or anywhere near perfect. We can't possibly see all posts on all threads. We rely on our members to guide us by reporting posts that they think are offensive or in some way violate the few, basic, rules that we ask people to follow.
We don't mind (and actually benefit directly from) feedback, even when that involves constructive criticism of what we do or fail to do. But not every decision by every moderator needs to be criticized every day by whomever didn't like it. That's why, generally speaking, we tend to close threads such as this one. I only left it open because I've always respected hciman77 for his outstanding, insightful and mature posts, and would personally miss his contributions here should he decide to leave us for good. I hope he doesn't, but that's not my call.
But maybe I don't "get it"... that's entirely possible.
