Parity's position on forum moderation

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Parity’s position on forum moderation

Author: Pierre / Erin Review: Georgie

This post clarifies Parity’s position on forum moderation and addresses recent concerns

TL;DR We have drama on the forum moderation that went out of proportion. I want to set the record straight such that we can all go back to work. I also want to remind people that there is a fine line between censorship and moderation. It is also true for constructive criticism and harassment.

Context

The Polkadot forum has been run by Parity for many years and has a few moderators that have been working for years to keep it in a good state. The nature of a forum is that the signal to noise ratio decreases with the length of the thread. Anonymity also creates a false sense of security that people sometimes use to voice their opinions too strongly or in a disrespectful way.

I have been a mod for a long time, at BB, irc or nntp time. Moderation is required to keep the forum on track. Mods do make mistakes but most of the time they make the right call. When they don’t, users ask for explanations. They are never really happy but they also do not want to invest time to make the forum a better place. We have to acknowledge that there is room for errors when you are a mod. Going for the big words “conspiracy", “censorship”, etc is unlikely to help. It would need to be true for it to ring a bell and it is not.

What Happened

What I have seen so far is people blowing a small issue into a drama and publicly accusing mods of “censorship” and I am really unhappy about it. It does not make sense if you know them, they are very much against any form of censorship and that’s why they work at Parity.

Speaking of Parity, we have nothing to do with the threads which have been locked. The community could have reflected, “hey the mods have a bad day, let’s regroup, and restart a thread if it is worth it and move on”. But no, it had to be a show.

Forum Philosophy

Public forums are a great place to discuss many aspects of the network, ecosystem and protocol. However, this does not mean it should be a free-for-all - after all, we want the forum to remain high signal and low noise.

The original spirit the forum was founded in was meant to be somewhat akin to Ethereum Magicians, which retains a high standard of quality of discourse. We should all strive to set good examples for others and do right by our ecosystem’s community in public discussions.

Public spats and unnecessary drama can be damaging to the reputation of the ecosystem. When disagreements escalate publicly, it creates confusion, discourages participation, and can give outsiders the wrong impression of how our community operates. Maintaining respectful, high-quality discourse is essential not just for the forum, but for the credibility and growth of the entire ecosystem.

So what now?

  1. We will not reopen the threads. Why? Mods did their work, they reacted to feedback around forum toxicity. See rationale below. These threads would benefit from a summary and be restarted anew as proposed.
  2. We will introduce more moderators ideally from the bounty but people that want to improve the quality of the moderation are free to reach out and contribute their time and expertise.
  3. I want to remind people that being right does not mean you can be a jerk.
  4. We will start a reform of the forum policies that you are of course welcome to help refine. See Hacker News Guidelines for inspiration.

Lastly I will thank Erin and Remy for years of thankless work, being a mod is not fun every day and they do merit your respect.

Pierre

References to the threads under discussion:

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Marketing Bounty Deep Dive (Revived)
Anti-Scam Bounty Deep Dive (Revived)
Code of Conduct
Marketing Bounty Deep Dive (Revived)
Marketing Bounty Deep Dive (Revived)
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My informed comment for DAP, which included checked mathematical formulas and a strong background criticism of the economic model, was censored without a clear explanation—simply flagged as spam. That is a fact.

This makes me wonder: What do you expect for an open forum on “permissionless” technology? Is the goal to make it less permissionless, or to raise the cost of participation as has been happening over the last few years?

If the aim is to position Polkadot as a global-reach payment system, then instead of treating drama as a problem to be silenced, you should introduce natural empathy and reduce the cost of participation. That would be a straightforward, biological way of pursuing this purpose within the highly entropic community you want to reach.

What I see behind this moderation and censorship guidance is a cultural clash. The problem arises, for example, when enforcing one language with the argument that “everybody has to understand everything,” or moderators attempting to interpret all threads through a single lens. I don’t see valid reasons for this. Another issue is censoring by “interpreting the use of AI,” which seems to be just another excuse to bypass the argument and censor content.

I’ve been very straightforward in trying to address these methods of censorship. The overall problem is still wealth concentration and collusion, indicated by a very high Gini coefficient. A global payment system shouldn’t care that much about how people are saying things or in which language, because there is no centralized way to interpret “global reach.” There is no global culture; there is a symbiosis of cultural influences and individual approaches to communication.

I recommend reading Niklas Luhmann’s approach to communication, specifically how the idea of binarization is key to understanding how language evolves over time. I also recommend stepping aside from any “chosen ones by a higher architect” attitude, whether in private conversations or technical committees.

I am not a lawyer, but if you want to coordinate yourselves as a corporation with clear hierarchical status for every individual, then the most reasonable business approach would be to open a public offering of stocks for Parity and the Web3 Foundation. Otherwise, this cultural contradiction will remain forever. If Polkadot doesn’t reach the level of optimization it needs to outperform all other forms of payments, it will derail into a niche, small-community business relative to its potential market.

I have nothing else to say about this right now. Keep well.

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Absolutely. I’m not only completely okay with the thread being closed, I’m genuinely grateful to the mods for how carefully they handled such a delicate situation and for everything they had to endure with along the way.

Huge thanks to you, @erin and @Remy_Parity! :folded_hands:

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Hi there,

Flags/hiding of posts can either be applied automatically by Discourse (the forum software we use, which has a robust spam detection mechanism, but sometimes has false positives, which after review we restore the posts), or posts can be flagged individually by community members. Mods can also sometimes flag posts for further review by the mod team, but this is (as far as I know) not a frequent occurrence.

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Sending some love to the mods ! :face_blowing_a_kiss:

I’m on the mod side too.
Pierre perfectly summed up the difficult task about moding.

Maybe the mods should have proactively to cool down some threads sometimes, especially when people or bounties are pointed specifically.

Somehow, the requester and the actors should be the only ones to be able to exchange at the beginning, to let time to the offenders to reply in order to have a discussion with data, facts and arguments.

Once all parties have replied, then why not opening the thread to everyone.
It will avoid people to throw accusations without having the explanations from the parties themselves.

Anyway, there won’t be any perfect solution.

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I don’t know where you had read this….
No one ever said this.

So it makes the readability of your post a bit hard to understand in the end.

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wow… this is a masterclass in how not to handle a very real governance concern.

instead of addressing any of the documented issues raised by dv guardians and w3f backed community members with receipts, this response reframes everything as “drama” and doubles down on thread closures and supports censorship.

imagine looking at the large amount of on chain evidence and transparency requests and deciding the real problem was “tone.” that is how out of touch this comes across.

the issue was never mods having a bad day or noise in the threads.

the real issue was specific questions backed by treasury data, transaction history, and clear conflicts of interest being shut down without any explanation.

calling those contributions “nitpicking” or “dogpiling” dismisses the people doing accountability work and avoids the substance of what they shared. if there is nothing to hide, why deflect instead of answer.

for weeks the parties being questioned continue to avoid answering the community, despite many reasonable requests.

so one must ask, why are pierre, a few rogue moderators, and a couple treasury funded orgs that were exposed for questionable spending choosing to defend silence while attacking the people scrutinizing the transactions?

and then there is this…

referring to community members asking valid questions as “jerks” crosses a line.

these are people taking time to investigate treasury use, highlight potential conflicts, and push for transparency. reducing that effort to a character attack is wrong on every level. that language should never come from leadership.

if a governance forum cannot host governance discussions then something has gone very wrong.

the community needs a visible and open space to question treasury decisions and moderation actions. that is the baseline for any transparent system.

accountability matters. silence and censorship cannot be the fallback when people ask tough questions.

polkadot will not mature if we normalize friends protecting friends and burying uncomfortable truths.

many of us did not dedicate years to polkadot just to be met with web2 level censorship.

this is how you lose the people who actually care.

stop silencing discussions.

do better.

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I don’t usually like to engage in moderation drama but I do think this post crosses a line.

Having a bad day does not give you rights to call others as “jerk”. This is totally disrespectful and you are breaking your own Code of Conduct.

We might have had disagreements on technical stuff but at least I thought Parity was still a respectful company. I can’t believe that the “official” Parity position comes to this low. For this specific thing I would like to public call for an apology to @flez.

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I’m generally not a fan of strict censorship or heavy-handed moderation, but if the code of conduct already clearly covers the issue in points 4 and 5, and those rules were clearly broken, then firm moderation might be the only fair option.

Back many years ago, I moderated a large forum that used a warning system. Something similar could work well here: for example, three warnings could lead to a temporary suspension (say, for X days). If the behavior continues after the suspension ends, then a permanent ban would follow.

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I am doing a free interpretations about the ecosystem and it is my personal interest to think and build towards this direction.

On the other side, I’ll say it again, I don’t think everybody has to understand everything. If I get along with other people that you don’t understand or develop a line of argument which would lead us to a positive conclusion or constructive outcome then it will not be your business if you don’t reach to the language usage which btw could have different meanings depending on culture even within English. This is a dynamic scenario of ever evolving culture and language, and if it is on a public forum of course you are pretty welcome to say you don’t understand the argument all the times you want, hopefully participating on the development of a better one.

If I step on the other side of the world than from where you stand on with my argument, I would like to suppose nobody will try to censor my participation. Why ? I think this gets related with the global reach I was referring to. I understand the idea of freedom of speech, even in a noisy context of multiple people with multiple backgrounds sharing their own personal views, is to bring universality over the table. This is difficult to achieve, I agree, but I think claiming how hard is to moderate a forum and tag it as “not fun” shows weakness on the approach of moderation.

I’ve been participating on online chats since i was a teenager, this is 30 years already. BBS was my favorite platform at that time, before using the internet. Letting the noise and entropy naturally flow is challenging but society benefits when people feel they can express whatever they want under the guides of law, not necessarily a moderation for an specific direction or objective defined by a bunch of people within this sea of interactions.

In the actual state, the forum has very low participation. Being censored as I was in the PBA forum, just being expelled without mediated reason and with a direct message of “participate less” shows the weakness in the approach to culture that I’m mentioning because I was the one pushing the discussion around learning materials, openly inviting people to participate, sharing coding exercises and math problems, doing technical questions (and philosophical too). Maybe they didn’t like the content I was sharing in the “out of topic” channel they opened.

I insist, @ThomasR , I do see a cultural clash here.
Am I sounding too post-modern here ? :slight_smile:
It is not my intention, I don’t feel myself as a post-marxist in any sense but it is interesting to read very different languages if that’s a sign of cultural adoption.

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Warnings could be something i agree. At least it’s a cool down system.

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Eppur si muove

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Why does the forum keep introducing new rules?

And why is there no explanation regarding the financial evidence?

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For everyone reacting strongly to this sentence, I’m 99% sure that @pierreaubert was referring to situations like this one, not randomly attacking people.

If you can’t point to a concrete example where his comment clearly applies to you, maybe take a step back before feeling offended on someone else’s behalf. In fact, what he said applies to me 100%, and I’m not offended. First, because he’s basically right; second, because I’d rather treat it as actionable feedback than as an insult.

My point is: he’s not insulting anyone or crossing a line; he’s stating something that is painfully true.

I struggle with this myself. When I get frustrated (which is more often than I’d like to admit), I can come across as “a jerk”. And yes, being a jerk while being right can feel satisfying if what you want is to cash in a bunch of “I told you so” chips in the future. But if your actual goal is to change someone’s mind or improve things, it’s not very effective.

I’ve collected plenty of those “I told you so” chips in the past. They don’t convert into anything valuable, they mostly generate resentment and anger. That’s why I’m going to try my best to stop collecting them going forward.

Polkadot is at a critical point. We need to find ways to work together and keep everyone who adds value in the same room, even when we disagree.

So let’s all take a breath and focus less on being offended by a sentence that, in my view, is just stating the obvious, and more on how we can move things forward constructively.

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The context matters, and from the context we know clearly who @pierreaubert was referring to.

In politics, what @pierreaubert did has a technical term called “dog whistle”. You clearly know the individuals he’s referring to. I clearly know the individuals he’s referring to. You just won’t admit it. They are those individuals in the locked threads or in public Twitter discussions, who @pierreaubert believed being right and being a “jerk”. In my last post, I already gave you a specific individual that I think @pierreaubert should apologize to.

Let me, only for the seek of argument, to illustrate the point, change the sentence slightly and without actually using the vulgar remarks so as to not actually break the Code of Conduct:

Having a bad day does not mean you can be a ****.

Do you know those individuals (who admitted themselves) were “having a bad day”?

In addition, this post, although by @pierreaubert, is “Parity’s position”. As an official position post, and with close ties to the moderators, it ought to hold itself higher than everyone else for the standard of Code of Conduct.

@pierreaubert even wanted to reform the forum policies:

However, how can we trust an entity to reform the Code of Conduct who casually breaks Code of Conduct themselves, calling others “jerks”?

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I don’t think getting hung up on a single sentence like “being right does not mean you can be a jerk” is helping anyone here.

My personal view is that Parity isn’t seeing things from the community’s eyes. It feels like Parity is defending a small group of people who are using “tone” as an excuse to not be held accountable.

Everyone here is just trying to do what is best in their mind, but this is exactly why tone policing is so bad—it is so easily exploitable.

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If someone steals a $5 product from the supermarket, the police cannot just look pass that because the amount is small, can they? Especially considering the fact that:

  • The person who did the stealing is rich, and they did not do it because they run out of food – this post is “Parity’s position”, representing something official, and in it calls others “jerks”. It’s not some random individual who got frustrated with Polkadot.
  • We’re in the court room discussing the stealing – this is “Parity’s position on forum moderation”, which has Code of Conduct as its focus.

You can think it in the reverse way – no one would hang up on this single sentence if @pierreaubert agreed to apologize. But we’ll see what happens.

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Hi Wei,

i didn’t name @flez (or anyone) in my post, and I find it funny that you are making a connection between @flez and a jerk which i didn’t do. I don’t know @flez enough ( we talked once or twice, and we had a few text messages) to have an opinion.

if you want to have constructive discussions, don’t put things in my mouth and don’t point fingers when you don’t know

what you are talking about.

should I excuse myself to @flez no, but you should.

Pierre

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  • DV and Parity are disjoints. That’s not my area. Ask the w3f. Personal opinion is yes of course.
  • The answers to “Cranes maneuvers” need to come from him/her. I don’t even know who he/she is. Personally I would also ask ChaosDAO if they are investigating and if they are happy with the result and what they plan to do.
  • Keeping a civil tone is important too for different reasons. And yes sometimes it is hard to keep it cool. I am doing my best to explain the current situation in a pragmatic way. It would remove some pressure from me if I would “yell” at some people which are not trying to find solutions or to work for our success but what would be the point? that would only degenerate into more useless discussions.
  • I don’t understand the questions on the last bullet point.
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