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[Morrokain]

If we are talking about here, what about the rules is restrictive, arbitrary and unclear? Just so I understand. I don't find it to be this way.

Trust me I understand that its annoying to have to analyze responses. As far as banning is concerned, ideally that should never really be necessary. It probably will be - because some people are just destructive - but the way it works here, well... works.

I appreciate that there are other things (cheaters, hackers, bots, etc) that are important to deal with and I empathize with feeling that moderation is sometimes a waste of resources when confronting those things. Luckily for this game it is single player and so a lot of those don't apply.

The general point, however, is that as much as I'd like to believe that self moderation is possible I've never seen it work. Not once. The flaw of "be respectful and you won't get made fun of" is that there are going to be people who will make fun of you no matter how respectful you are simply because they find it fun. Or they disagree with you and are weaponizing that tactic to shut you out or wear you down. And while I do understand that its a part of life to take grief and thick skin is important, the simple fact is that those sorts of things aren't healthy for actual meaningful discussion.

It's also important, in my mind at least, to remember what the purpose of these forums actually is. It is not a place to come hang out with your friends and goof around. It is a place to have meaningful discussion about the game, report bugs, and make suggestions.

So, morality completely aside, the way I see it is keeping discussions healthy and on track is extremely important to fulfill that goal. Sure, someone who really wants to will subvert moderation to take a shot at you and that honestly can't be helped. But, its at least a bit harder to do so with good moderation. And the chances that it will turn into full-on tribal warfare on the computer screen is much, much lower. It's really easy to type meaningless insults in an attempt to shut people out. It's harder to do that while also keeping things civil because you have to do the work to have a good counterpoint and, if you don't, simply saying "I disagree" isn't inflammatory enough to start an argument that distracts from the discussion. That bar of entry is useful and also results in less inflammatory speech. So retaliation is less likely.

(A bit outside the point, but FWIW I also agree that people should try and view responses as well-meaning and not immediately get triggered by what could be a misunderstanding. People who are trying to be toxic generally won't let up even when you respond kindly so they will generally reveal themselves.)

[Grievous69]

If we are talking about here, what about the rules is restrictive, arbitrary and unclear? Just so I understand. I don't find it to be this way.

I know this question wasn't directed at me but I'll chime in. Alright so there are some rules which don't make a lot of sense to me but nevermind, at least they're clear and I know exactly what I shouldn't do / say. But there's one thing that's so flippin vague that anything, literally anything you write can subject to it. And it's "no toxicity", yeah this one was obvious. Just ask 10 random people what do they define as "toxic" and you'll get 10 different responses. Or ask them to say an example of the least toxic thing to say that still counts as toxicity, again you'll get a plethora of different answers. Then further down it also says overly negative posts count as toxic, like negative for whom??? That's such a subjective thing I can't believe it's on the official rules. A simple disagreement can be seen as overly negative, talking down on someone can be seen as overly negative and so on. I've already talked about this but apparently nobody cares and guess we just have to have full 100% trust in mods to interpret every single message on this forum "properly". EDIT: This actually gives more work to moderators.

I'm going to make an extreme example which isn't even that extreme just to show how dumb it is. Say you have a discord or a subreddit (something that usually has fewer rules), and your one and only rule is "Don't do bad things". You essentially listed everything, and can moderate that place no problem as most of the bannable stuff falls under it. We can all guess what those bad things might be, but at the end of the day it's just a guess. You can still get a warning for something you'd never think was "bad".

(I've already seen that behaviour here when a thread got lots of constructive criticisms but zero insults or any hateful things. It was seriously just people telling the OP that x thing is a bad idea / won't work and so. And of course came mods, deleted everything and issued warnings for people because apparently we were "overly negative". I can list countless examples of this...)

***. Vague. Rules.

[GenericGoose]

If we are talking about here, what about the rules is restrictive, arbitrary and unclear? Just so I understand.

any post that is overly negative... is toxic

Comments and content amounting to hate speech

Do not discuss moderator decisions (such as the locking of topics or the banning of accounts) publicly on the forums. If you have any complaints or questions please send a PM to a moderator.

Granted, in case of abuse users can contact Alex, but I still hate 'admin is always right' rules, they are just bad. Is me saying that negative enough to be considered toxic? Is it hate speech, because I said 'hate'? Maybe it wasn't the intention of the rule, but it rubs me the wrong way. That is another reason intricate rules are bad - wording will always be vague.

[David]

I find McDonalds to be a useful analogy. Pretend you're in the seating area of a McDonald's - a semi-public forum attached to a commercial business. You enjoy your food and have a conversation. There are limits to your behaviour, and you're fine with that.

Start a shouting match, even if it's with your best friend? The manager is going to ask you to leave. Start cussing a bunch? Same. Even if grandma and the grandkids aren't there right now, there is a certain expectation attached to the place that's different from Joe's Biker Bar or the strip club.

Calmly explain your racist conspiracy theory to people trying to enjoy their meal? You're kicked out. Try to convert people to your religion, even if you're being really nice about it? "Sir, you're going to have to leave."

Say you want to post in the window, maybe a charity bake sale, Sure. Free kittens, great. Try to post nudie pics or an invite to a Klan rally? No, those are going to get taken down.

Explain to someone that their meal choice is inferior and they're a tasteless moron for choosing it? Well, the manager is going to say "Hey, quit being a jerk." And if you persist, you get kicked out because you're harassing other customers. Say "Hey, love the cheeseburger, you should try the McWhatever." That's fine. Take your Subway meal in from next door? Well, that's pushing it.

Few of these rules are explicitly written out. But we all know how to follow the spirit of them in good faith without every detail being covered, and if we cross a line, the manager gives you a chance to sort yourself out unless you do something really egregious.

Here's the thing: this is the public-facing forum of a commercial business and it gets to say what the lines are because it's paying the bills. That's the ultimate reality of it, and it sets the limits on what is acceptable. If a person really doesn't want to eat their burger in the McDonald's public seating area because they just gotta cuss and shout a bunch, they're free to take their burger home and eat it in their living room - somewhere where they're paying the bills and get to make the rules. Or maybe you're part of a club where everyone pays some dues and gets a vote and you all vote to make it a rule that it's fine to swear and shout; that's cool. That's your club, or your home, and it isn't McDonalds.

[Goumindong]

If you don't want to be made fun of, be respectful to others, it's that simple. Have respect for others, have respect for yourself and don't take things too seriously.

How does one tolerate the intolerant? Truly the paradox of our time.

Well it would be, except that tolerance isn’t a tenet of morality, it’s a peace treaty. If you do not attack me, I will not attack you. People who do not respect the peace do not get the protection of tolerance.

This is how things would be in the absence of moderation. And because consequences are low, the peace would quickly be broken. And then there would be war, if everyone who was respectful was respectful then it would be clear who would win.

But this is not an unstructured environment where there is no institutional capacity to respond. We can enforce the peace so that being respectful can work.

[Grievous69]

@David
Wow that's such a bad analogy I can't even tell if it's satire or not. I get where you're coming from but equating behaviour in a public place that you can't ignore (someone shouting so much that they get asked to leave) versus reading text on a forum is just plain silly. If someone is talking such nonsense or is just plain annoying, guess what, you can ignore the rest of the post from that person, report if you want, and move on. You know what you can do in real life? *** all, sit there and take it or leave yourself. Seriously, it's such a horrible analogy.

I don't think I've ever seen someone get thrown out because they were cussing in a public place (unless it's a super quiet place like a library or church where there's no background noise like music). You can cuss all you want in a restaurant as long as you're not shouting. Just going to another table and talking about anything is an intrusion of privacy, you'd get weird looks either way, again I don't get what you're trying to describe with that.

The part you forgot is that people come on forums to discuss things, they're actively engaged with each other and share the topics. I don't get how is that equal to bothering other people calmly eating in a restaurant.

Only correct thing you wrote is that at the end, businesses decide for themselves what rules they want, of course they have the rights. But just because you have the right to make up rules, doesn't mean they're good rules. And the reason why forum rules have to be explicit is because it's all in text. Obviously we don't have a rule for everything in everyday life, but most of the stuff is pretty straight forward and you can tell true intentions 99% of the time. Here there's no emotion, no tone, no facial expressions, nothing, so anyone can twist the sentences however they want and make themselves the victim or whatnot.

Btw if you really wanted a McDonald's analogy, a better one would be someone eating their food the way you don't like (you see, something that's subjective and which you can ignore simply by looking the other way). That person is not directly harming you or harassing you, but it does make you feel uncomfortable. And maybe there's someone else there that's also irritated by it, but also there could be some that simply have no problems with it. Then a business can make a rule like "don't eat with your hands" so that it's explicitly said and problem solved.

P.S. Why do people in favour of strict rules always give such extreme example as behaviour without said rules. I mean it's always something along the lines of throwing feces at one another, shouting like idiots, using racist slurs. Come on you can give more grounded and sane examples than that. Using your logic I'd be the worst *** human being in real life judging by my "public forum behaviour". While I'm in fact the second worst hahaha /s

[GenericGoose]

I find McDonalds to be a useful analogy. Pretend you're in the seating area of a McDonald's - a semi-public forum attached to a commercial business. You enjoy your food and have a conversation. There are limits to your behaviour, and you're fine with that.

Internet and real life are completely different. This used to be common sense back in the day, but now people seem to think they're the same. On the Internet, the worst thing that can happen to you is someone upsets you. You can leave, block, ignore, report, mute whoever did that. You can't do that in real life, so rules should be different.
Mcdonalds and a forum are also completely different things. You come to a forum to talk and discuss. There are rules on how you do that. You come to mcdonalds to eat food. Do they stick a list of rules in the face of everyone that walks in, on how exactly they should be eating their food? There are rules, and they are enforced, however, the customers are a sort of their own 'community', with it's own unspoken norms. Few people shout or throw their food at each other, not because of the establishment rules, which they have never seen or read, but because of these social norms - they would be ostracized for their abnormal behavior. And this is exactly what I think is the ideal situation - your community forms it's own boundaries, follows them and regulates itself, while you only deal with the most outrageous cases of nude klan rallies.

How does one tolerate the intolerant? Truly the paradox of our time.

I fail to see how this applies on the Internet. Sure, in real life the intolerant could try to stab you, vandalize or bomb your house, but on a forum or in a chat, all they can do is try to upset you, which is only as effective as your reaction. Maybe expecting people to ignore insults is too much, but for me the bottom line always was that it's inevitable you'll get into fights and arguments (if you talk to people at all), so it's kind of mandatory.

But this is not an unstructured environment where there is no institutional capacity to respond. We can enforce the peace so that being respectful can work.

Sure, but see what I said above about a self-regulating community. I prefer a voluntary, agreed upon peace, to a resentful 'admin can put a gun to my account's head at any second' peace.
Finally, I want to reiterate that I'm not here to ask anyone to change anything, what exists here works, and it is good. Every community is different and it's proper development is in the best interests of everyone. I'm simply talking about what my ideal would be.

[SCC]

hahaha /s

You have my vote for being the worst.

[Grievous69]

Well being the worst still counts as being the best at something  , I'll take it.

And GenericGoose explained it pretty well also, please don't try to compare real life interactions with typing words online. Likewise, I'm not here to start a revolution or say "do this or else", I'm just saying what I think about the subject and how can it be better and hopefully easier to manage for everyone.

[Goumindong]

@David
Wow that's such a bad analogy I can't even tell if it's satire or not. I get where you're coming from but equating behaviour in a public place that you can't ignore (someone shouting so much that they get asked to leave) versus reading text on a forum is just plain silly. If someone is talking such nonsense or is just plain annoying, guess what, you can ignore the rest of the post from that person, report if you want, and move on. You know what you can do in real life? *** all, sit there and take it or leave yourself. Seriously, it's such a horrible analogy.

But you really cannot. You cannot participate in discussions without seeing those posts and reading them. If someone is behaving badly the option you have, absent moderation, is to leave the discussion.

Why should you be forced to leave a discussion if i am being an ass to you? Would you being an ass back to me make the discussion better? Would that be better for the bystanders trying to glean information from that discussion, trying to get your nuggets of wisdom? If you ignore me should everyone else be forced to wade through my spat in order to get to the gold?

This is why toxicity, unmoderated, pushes out non-toxic behavior. No one wants to deal with the people being an ass. And either the entire community goes to another forum or they have to deal with it. And they will, but kind words and logic will not persuade someone who is not interested in having a good faith discussion. Its true that at the end of the day the damage is minimal, its only a forum, after all. But its still damage, and i would still like to have forums in which i can have good faith discussions about my spaceship games.

And almost more importantly, what do you think "reporting a post" does in an unmoderated forum?

[Harmful Mechanic]

@David
Wow that's such a bad analogy I can't even tell if it's satire or not.

Just going to chime into this nightmare of thread to say; it's only barely an analogy. It's closer to a literal description of the dynamics at play here. The internet is, in fact, a part of real life.

This forum is first and foremost an adjunct to a commercial enterprise. It's crowdsourced market research and QA testing; that's the utility function it serves. If it did not serve that utility function (just like seating at a McDonald's serves to keep you there long enough to maybe order something else), it wouldn't exist. So, if you f*** with the owner's bread and butter, you get removed. As long as you don't f*** with it too much, you get to stay.

Toxicity, however you choose to define that (and I think loosely defining it to keep people from trying to rules-lawyer around the edges of it is a good move), is not something you remove as a matter of principle; you remove it because it f***s with your bread and butter.

[Grievous69]

I think you mixed things up a bit, I wasn't the one advocating for zero moderation. I merely said it CAN work in smaller communities. I've always been in favour of lax moderation that takes care of spam and severe problems, not the "offensive word detection unit". So reporting in that case is fair.

Now why do think you should engage with every single person in each thread? If someone is behaving like a total nutjob, you're not losing a lot from it (as you said "gold"). I don't get the need of giving attention to everyone, this actually makes trolls and other lunatics even more prone to future incidents since you give them attention. Just ignore the silly ones and you'll be fine.

There was an example before where someone said you could just make fun of the trouble makers so they stop doing it, you can do pretty much the same with just ignoring. 90% of the time why those people act like that is to get a reaction, give them no reaction and voila, mission accomplished, world peace forever and ever and ever...

EDIT: Seems like today's the National day of bad analogies.

@Harmful Mechanic
Stop comparing apples to oranges people, please. You're acting like someone can't have a positive impact on a discussion WHILE being toxic. It's not mutually exclusive mate, you're not "*** with bread and butter" if you let's say throw a random insult that's a part of one sentence out of dozens of them. Yes that is bad behaviour but it serves the function as you say.

Another reason why it's bad because the devs don't make money out of forums, I'll eat my own balls if at least 2% people bought Starsector purely because they came on this forum and went "ahh they seem to be having a neat little discussion, guess I'll grab the game and chime in". On the other side, you making a scene and harassing customers in a restaurant literally loses money for that place and makes people want to go home.

I think we had enough McDonald's analogies please no more.

And since you're so stuck on real life, you'd know that loose rules without explicitly defined parameters bring more trouble than the opposite since loop holes are very common. I seriously doubt people want to play lawyers online, they just want to know why exactly were they punished, and not just have a mod message them "well it seemed bad"

[Morrokain]

Community norms are established as an eventual reaction to structured rules combined with common courtesy. If you think that abolishing structured rules would make your online experience better or somehow the norms would stand up on common courtesy alone then I'd recommend some reading on historical times where there weren't structured rules. Those times are generally awful.

I think that both Goumindong and Harmful Mechanic are correct here. Keeping discussion healthy so that actual knowledge can be learned without wading through argument after argument will mean that more people are likely to give feedback or discuss something and that brings value.

It doesn't always have to directly be about the monetary bottom line to have value for the business. Information is the value here because that can lead to a better game from a better understanding of the people playing the game - which then does improve the bottom line eventually. If you're toxic while giving out your opinion, people are less likely to bother giving theirs - at best - and at worst they will stop giving much information at all and resort to defending. The net information that could have been gained is reduced not only for that discussion but from toxicity as a trend generally making any form of discussion practically impossible. It snowballs.

If someone comes to the forums wanting to discuss things and just sees a wall of arguments and toxic behavior then they are going to be less willing to contribute because they are going to assume that their opinion won't even be seen - let alone discussed.

Ignoring bad behavior doesn't always work either. Sometimes that actually has the opposite effect. You can't always assume the motive for bad behavior is peacocking.

[GenericGoose]

This forum is first and foremost an adjunct to a commercial enterprise. It's crowdsourced market research and QA testing; that's the utility function it serves. If it did not serve that utility function (just like seating at a McDonald's serves to keep you there long enough to maybe order something else), it wouldn't exist. So, if you f*** with the owner's bread and butter, you get removed. As long as you don't f*** with it too much, you get to stay.

Are you speaking for Alex here? I'm really hoping this isn't what he actually thinks.
This dehumanizing way of putting things is another reason I'd rather see unfiltered Humanity at all of its highs and lows, as opposed to a perfectly sterile environment created for optimal consumption of content/product by the human cattle (henceforth called 'consumer')™. If creating such an environment is your goal, then strict rules are a perfectly pragmatic way of achieving that. But that isn't what I look for in communities, this forum isn't like that (I hope). I don't want to try to have a conversation using a 5 words vocabulary, because all other words would offend the lowest common denominator demographic and lower sales. I want to have real discussions, with real people, not because we 'consume' the same 'product', and make money for the developer, but because we enjoy the same video game and the developer is passionate about it and generous enough to create accommodations for the community.
My idea of lax rules (which, again, I'm not trying to force onto anyone) is, among other things, in opposition to that - it makes sterility impossible. Yes, it is harder to maintain and you are required to cultivate a community with a respectful, open-minded mindset, but I believe the result will be better. I also do not advocate complete lack of moderation, there is always at least the illegal stuff that must be regulated.
I'm mostly happy with the forum so far and glad it exists, I enjoy forums. It could be better, but then again, anything could be better. Hopefully, we can all improve.

Community norms are established as an eventual reaction to structured rules combined with common courtesy. If you think that abolishing structured rules would make your online experience better or somehow the norms would stand up on common courtesy alone then I'd recommend some reading on historical times where there weren't structured rules. Those times are generally awful.

Community norms can be established by example, as it grows. They are then propagated to each new member. Once you have a core of dedicated users, who are there because they want to be, rather than to grief, who learn and accept the customs, it is very easy to make new members compliant, because you are a significant majority. It worked for me so far.
Those were ancient times, things were different back then. Today, it is possible that we are, or can become, open-minded, patient, empathetic enough to get over each other's differences, and personal biases, to form stronger communities with fewer rules. Besides, what's the potential harm? Back then it would be bloody wars between tribes, or centuries long blood feuds. But today, on the Internet? Someone makes you sad by insulting you or a thread gets a little cluttered, worst case - derailed. All I'm saying is, it could be worth a try. Elsewhere.

[Morrokain]

Community norms can be established by example, as it grows. They are then propagated to each new member. Once you have a core of dedicated users, who are there because they want to be, rather than to grief, who learn and accept the customs, it is very easy to make new members compliant, because you are a significant majority.

How though? How are new members made compliant? That's where my problem with this concept ultimately stems from. It never seems to be through useful discussion... if it was, then there wouldn't be any need for rules to enforce it, I agree. It just never seems to actually be the reality when there isn't a rule.