Where would you put the threshold for a ban on retrospring? Are insults already too much or should only stuff like death threats lead to a ban?
I would put the threshold at "ban everyone rn"
I think encountering people who rub you the wrong way online is to be expected and shouldn't be made a huge deal of if it's a one-off. It's only when the interactions border on harassment that the line is crossed imo.
as an ex-mod, a big part of it was how people would respond to insults etc. I'm personally someone with a "hostile" manner of interaction with certain close friends, so I understand that kind of communication to an extent, but if someone clearly got uncomfortable in the situation, that's where I'd draw the line.
If anyone told me that they wanted to kill me, I'd probably say: "Me too! Let's kill me."
I don't care about insults. I can easily ignore them. I can joke about online death threats but I think it'd be better if users are discouraged to use them in a serious conversation. [You think?! Wow Arman! You must be a genius!]
What can we do here but try and hurt with words? Not that it is lame to hurt with words. And it can be done by accident or misunderstanding or inapt knowledge of language? So, I would implement a high threshold. And deaththreats are very common these days. And they almost always come from your next of kin.
Retrospring in it's main years and up to now doesn't really have a ban threshold. We thoroughly evaluate(d) context.
Death threats and straight insults are not up anyone's alley and are just forbidden. Delayed actions from our side at some point just came from the fact that people are really persisting and we had sometimes up to months worth of banning new accounts because they wouldn't give up. Telling people affected to ignore these people worked better.
Comes from blocking also not being a thing. But even if you blocked them, and you were on their hitlist, they'd just make some new accounts. They wouldn't stop until you gave them the silent treatment.
Aside of anything obvious, when the team noticed an obvious tone of a non-offensive joke that was reported to us, we generally denied the report. Our internal reporting system worked with votes, so it was obvious for people with enough power to ban people, when a report received a majority vote, basically.
Nowadays it's not of much use because we don't have any moderators anymore. And in the last 3 years we only had 2 cases of people having broken their funny bones.
There's a difference between "insults" and "harrassment with intent in escalating it" to where you start seeing death threats. Were you getting death threats?
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