Mercedex
Banhammer OverkillI’ve been seeing a lot of threads about hasty userbans that are the results of troll reports OR apparently possible mod application report quotas. I have even seen users threaten to mass report people that were annoying them, which is an incredible tool of forced censorship for immature and particularly cruel users.
There are dozens of quotes in likely dozens of threads that share what seems to be common knowledge information among your most loyal userbase. All of this is in my own words in order to protect the users who shared this information, I have no desire to encourage unnecessary censorship.
If the reports came in the span of an hour, sounds like someone went through her post history since they work on reports in order.
If they all for different things then someone dug through her post history.
Let me remind myself of ToS, just in case, oh wait--.
ToS does't matter, it's just what the given mod chooses to do.
Says a lot about the mod community and values.
In order to be hired as a mod you must reach quotas similar to corrupt law enforcement. Similar to a cop setting a speed trap, mod applicants will dig through dead posts and stretch truths to be considered.
This knowledge makes me incredibly uncomfortable to say the least, as I am a shy and withdrawn neurodivergent code monkey who desires to invest in this community, but it doesn’t feel like a safe environment for me to learn in.
I’ve had many good solo interactions with people, and I wish to continue to grow my presence and understanding of this Whole New Gaian World, but I need to know the MODs are, in the words of one user, as bad as the trolls.
We deserve a community wide apology, and the hundreds of ban overturn request tickets that are clogging your que more than deserve to be address with a second glance.
I got a raise at work recently, and I was very excited to buy the year account subscriptions at the start of the month, but I am no longer so sure, as this event has proven to me perhaps this is not a safe environment for women and children, despite your claim of PG13 friendliness.
"Hi there,
Accounts are not typically banned from one report unless the offense is sufficient to warrant it, typically an account will have to have had repeated offenses, warnings, and then temp bans before we even consider a permanent ban. And every report is looked into to see if there is a real violation or not. Just reporting someone will not result in a ban or warning if the account doesn't merit it. So rest assured that the rumors you have heard are just that, rumors.
Part of why there is a quota is to make sure that YOU understand the rules before becoming a Moderator. We check your judgement to see if what you are reporting really is a violation. We have turned down plenty of people who report for the reasons you listed, and only let those whose reports are valid move forward.
Even then, just making the reports doesn't guarantee that you will be put into Mod training. We then have a panel of Moderators look at not only the reports that you have done as part of signing up, but your overall account history. If you've made the required amount of reports, but go on trolling sprees, well, you can expect not to be made a Moderator.
Quite often people don't believe they should have been banned for the reason they were, despite their having broke the rules, which is why you hear many complaining of unfair bans. While there are some who have valid concerns about their bans we are always glad to talk to a user about why they got a ban and direct them to file a Ban Appeal if they believe that they were unfairly banned. At that time, a separate team from our Moderators review the bans and make the final decision to leave the ban as is or return the account to the user."
V (Gaia Staff): "Whether there's one report against a topic, or 1,000 reports against a topic, our moderators are going to be manually reviewing the reported content and handling it based on the results of the investigation. If it's a violation, it's going to be addressed as is deemed appropriate based on the severity of the violation in combination with other user-specific factors, including, but not limited to, did we just talk to this person in the last month or so about this type of behavior, and how extensive is this behavior from this user?
If what was flagged up to us is not an issue, it's marked as such and the moderator moves on to the next case.
If it is a matter of 1,000 reports being filed against a user, and we're able to see that another user is maliciously targeting that person by filing blatantly invalid reports hoping it'll result in trouble for the reported user, the reporter in that case is held accountable for their actions and can be warned, and even banned, for Report System Abuse.
There may be an uptick in reports/mod activity around the time that people are preparing to apply or when we have expanded our team, however that has nothing to do with meeting quotas. I can't speak for police quotas, but we have no expectation to issue warnings or bans. If we could resolve all of the site's reports by kindly asking the person to stop (violation) going forward, we'd handle things that way, instead. The uptick in activity that you describe may instead be a combination of content that may not otherwise be flagged up to us within specific spaces being reported by those preparing to apply, or having the additional people once those in training have become moderators that are able to work through these reports.
Mods aren't trained to look for situations that they can warn or ban for. Our primary goal when stepping in to deal with violations is, and has always been, education; informal warnings and warnings are a form of education as these simply inform you of which rule was violated and how, however some situations or circumstances are more severe and unfortunately result in consequences in addition to these warnings, such as temporary or permanent bans."
