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The Agora @sh.itjust.works Difficult_Bit_1339 @sh.itjust.works

[Announcement] [Discussion] Changes for The Agora

First, on behalf of @imaqtpie, @Seraph089 and myself, thank you all for choosing us to help run the community. We're all really excited about the possibilities of both this instance and of The Agora community. We're look forward to working with everyone to make this a great community. Feel free to reach out with any concerns or comments!

Ok, on to the announcement:

Today, I'm excited to share with you some pivotal updates set to streamline our interaction and decision-making processes within The Agora.

The first of these updates is about enhancing transparency. We have established a new and convenient way to track the outcomes of our community decisions. Simply visit this link: https://rentry.co/the_agora. This site will serve as the hub for all voting results, updated at the conclusion of each vote.

Next, let's discuss the changes regarding the use of our existing [Discussion] and [Vote] tags. To foster clarity and improved interaction, all new posts should now carry the [Discussion] tag.

Regarding the [Vote] tags, we're introducing a more structured approach here. Going forward, the [Vote]s will be initiated by the moderation team based on the week's [Discussion] posts and will be posted each Friday and run to the following Friday. This gives ample time for each of us to participate in the decision-making process. Once a vote concludes, the corresponding thread will be locked and the results promptly updated on our new voting results webpage.

For [Vote] posts, your vote should only be cast as a top-level comment. To streamline the process, we ask that you refrain from responding to other votes in the same thread or making non-voting comments. Each [Vote] post will contain details on how to format your comments, and our moderation team will be available to ensure all comments are formatted correctly before the final vote count is tallied.

This is by no means the final process and we're depending on your feedback and discussion to keep improving things going forward.

We understand the concerns about vote manipulation and the discussions around alternate voting methods (like ranked choice). Use this thread to discuss the changes and any concerns or suggestions that you have.

As of now, the tentative plan is to run with this for the first week, see how many issues exist that require voting, generate the vote threads, complete a round of votes and then iterate on the process once we can all see what works and what doesn't work so well.

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3 comments

  • Since this post was linked from another thread, @Difficult_Bit_1339, you've unfairly characterized @socialjusticewizard as a beehaw.org user coming here "trying to stir up shit" as you've phrased it. Their sh.itjust.works account predates their beehaw.org account by two weeks. This post, the one we're commenting on right now, is NOT clearly labeled as being the rules for vote posts. It's just named "changes." You should consider putting the rules for vote posts in the sidebar and in the vote posts themselves.

    If you want to label me as a beehaw.org user coming here "trying to stir up shit," too, so be it. At least my first account was from beehaw.org, and I came here looking to see sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world posts. At this point, I'm entirely done with this instance based on the overall handling of this situation and will be using my @Quill7513@slrpnk.net account for the purposes this account was originally meant to serve. Here is some advice I have, as a sort of exit interview.

    1. Be nicer. Come on. The way you moderate this community will influence the way this entire instance operates. Your rudeness and dismissiveness sets the tone for the entire instance and how people will perceive users with @sh.itjust.works as part of their identity
    2. Define an executive process for defederation, just as you already have an executive process for moderation. Defederation is part of moderation and 1 month is not a fast turn around for this sort of situation
    3. Increase the transparency of the audit scripts you're using to tally votes by linking a link to a git repo containing the script. I think it's fair to say that your automated script for what the vote talley is and what someone reading through the vote sees as being the vote results are quite different

    • I referred to them as a Beehaw user because their posts and profile both indicate that they've moved to Beehaw as their primary instance.

      Be nicer. Come on. The way you moderate this community will influence the way this entire instance operates. Your rudeness and dismissiveness sets the tone for the entire instance and how people will perceive users with @sh.itjust.works as part of their identity

      That's fair.

      However, I don't believe I was being rude or dismissive.

      • The user's question, asked in the title, was answered in the stickied announcement post.
      • They changed their display name to 'Leave This Instance'
      • They announced in their profile that they were leaving the instance and accused the admin team of not acting in good faith.
      • The body of the post is simply discussing the voting system. We already have a post announcing and discussing changes to the new vote system... creating multiple posts about the same topic only fracture the discussion.

      The fact that the user was leaving the instance, encouraging others to leave and also accusing the admins of acting in bad faith doesn't really mesh with the idea that they're just a user attempting to have a good faith discussion about the voting system. Instead it reads like a concern troll by a user who wanted to get one last jab in before they left.

      The thread is up and available for anyone to read, it's just locked so that conversation about voting changes will be placed into the correct discussion thread.

      Define an executive process for defederation, just as you already have an executive process for moderation. Defederation is part of moderation and 1 month is not a fast turn around for this sort of situation

      I think a discussion about defining a policy for de-federation is a great idea and is probably more sustainable than having to have votes on every individual instance. In this case, the issue was fairly contested and had already been submitted for a vote so we used it as the topic of our first week's voting. That doesn't mean that all de-federations require a vote. There was another instance that was allowing content that, under Canadian law, is consider child pornography and it was de-federated immediately.

      Increase the transparency of the audit scripts you’re using to tally votes by linking a link to a git repo containing the script. I think it’s fair to say that your automated script for what the vote talley is and what someone reading through the vote sees as being the vote results are quite different

      It isn't my script to share and the final count will be done by hand with the script acting as a check. If it is accurate to the hand count then we may depend on it going forward but currently it's just a way to check the progress.

      We didn't want to have the thread full of comments that only say 'Remove by moderators' as that could be construed as vote manipulation since nobody can see the content of the removed messages so we decided to leave the comments and instead wrote a script to check to see if a user is flagged as 'local' or not.