4

For example, how-to on reddit features.

I know this devolves into asking a lot of SE questions, as this is an SE site, but there's going to be plenty of times where some well-known community has specific features that people will want to discuss.

What's the feel for how we target specific networks/platforms?

5 Answers 5

9

I feel that we are going to have specific platform questions. Moderation isn't only people and psychology. It also involves some technical work and each platform is going to handle tasks differently. That is part of moderation and should not be discouraged.

Not every question can be a broad question covering every aspect of every platform. Sometimes you need help that can be applied to a specific platform - yet is still generic enough to be helpful to all users on that platform.

6

Note that if you're going to ask a system-specific question, make sure it can still relate to moderators in general; make sure that your question isn't just a question about how {insert system here (Reddit, etc.)} works.

Bad:

  • What privilege do Stack Exchange users unlock at 2000 reputation?
  • How does a Stack Exchange moderator send a "mod message"?
  • Can a user of Stack Exchange close a question, even without being a moderator?

Good Better:

  • How can I prevent Stack Exchange users with 2000 reputation from abusing the edit privilege?
  • How should I write this official message to a user of the site that I moderate?
  • Can community moderation be an appropriate substitute for moderators, in the specific sense of determining whether a post should be allowed?

In short, avoid turning the site into a {Stack Exchange / Reddit / etc.} support forum; questions about a specific feature of a specific site that just so happen to be related to moderation should go on that site's "discussion zone" (meta, or whatever they call it), not here.

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  • 1
    As-is, I am concerned that this concept would invite non-users of the target platform to vote to close if the question is missing a handful of magic words for readers outside of the platform's userbase to understand how their question relates to moderation in-general. Ramifications that would be immediately obvious to platform users could be missed by general Moderators.SE users, perhaps leading to "false positives" for these types of closures. Should we expect system-specific questions to spell it out every time, for every level of user? Jul 30, 2014 at 3:10
  • I agree with Hyper here.
    – jcolebrand
    Jul 30, 2014 at 3:34
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It's already obvious that we're going to get tons of Stack Exchange related questions and answers. Banning these will be ridiculous, since this is the moderation experience of most people here. And even though we plan to expand to other moderators, I don't think we'll lose the SE mods core, I even think that we are likely to remain in majority.

So, we can't get rid of Stack Exchange community specific questions and answers. From here, we have three paths: discourage all other targeted ones, or enable all others, or segregate networks in "allowed" and "forbidden" ones.

The first and third option will trigger an "unfair elitist douches" reaction in many people coming from outside Stack Exchange, and quite possibly from many from the inside too. So, if we really want to make a general site on moderating and not just an internal Stack Exchange moderating one, we don't have much choice but to allow targeted questions about other networks too.

2

I don't think it is something we should specifically encourage, but I also don't think it should be discouraged at all. The priority should be clear, concise, useful questions that are as broad as possible without sacrificing clarity.

In many situations, questions may, by necessity, require site specific details to be clear. In those cases, we should encourage a well written question that has the necessary information to be clear, which may very well include site or community specific information.

For example, lets take Wikipedia as an example. Someone may have a question about how to best tell if a user should be granted rollback privileges. This is by nature a site specific question. It is moderation related but is not able to be generalized further. Including that it is specifically for Wikipedia brings with it a whole lot of additional information that is helpful for answering the question.

0

I wouldn't say encourage, and I'd rather say discourage because general questions and answers will be of more use to broader audience - but definitely not forbid, nor discourage "too actively".

What I mean - if there's a question which asks for a solution for some specific platform, while the accepted solution applies to a broad range of platforms, the question should be edited and stripped of its platform-specificity. But if the solution is tailored for that specific platform, the question should stay as-is.

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