Reply
https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/guideline-dealing-with-spam-conspiracy-thread/2049/
As I mentioned, this is a staff policy, so it is in the Staff forum section, which — according to its description — is visible only to “admins, moderators, and category moderators.”
Perhaps this episode demonstrates the value of having such policies visible to the general public. (Something to consider, @deeplow.)
That page doesn’t explain how exactly the “Regular user” badge gets awarded, but it sounds like too much weight is placed on merely being active on the forum for a long enough time. There’s not necessarily any correlation between the quantity and the quality of posting activity. Someone who simply posts a lot of stuff over a long period of time does not necessarily contribute to high-quality discussion. It may be worth rethinking how such badges get awarded.
In any case, whether a thread is spam or spreading conspiracy theories depends on the content of that thread, not the person who posts it. The thread in question was particularly egregious in making baseless, inflammatory claims. For example:
Where to begin? First of all, nothing in Joanna’s post indicates that dom0 will ever have “its own IP address” or be hosted on some server unknown to the user, so this can’t be “obvious” because in order to be obvious, something first has to be true. Second, the poster provided zero evidence to support this claim. No links. No quotations. Nothing. Just a bald assertion. Finally, there’s a link to the poster’s own comment in a thread about Intel ME, insinuating that, in the future, the evil Qubes devs will turn dom0 into something nefarious like Intel ME. This, of course, makes no sense, as the Qubes devs have been working for their entire careers to do the exact opposite: to secure users from security threats similar to Intel ME. (This is another example of what I was talking about above. You can work your whole life for a good cause, and ignorant people will still accuse you of working against it. It’s almost like they want to drive away everyone working for that cause.)
Feeling offended doesn’t change whether a thread violates a rule or not. Either it does, or it doesn’t. (Any individual mod can be wrong about whether it does, which is why multiple mods have to agree before a thread is closed.) It’s not surprising that some users feel offended when the rules are enforced against their threads and try to get “revenge” by lashing out against the mods with passive-aggressive ad hominem remarks. (Such behavior is as old as discussion forums themselves.) But that doesn’t mean we should never enforce the rules just to avoid offending people.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
I’m not sure why this cognitive bias regarding freedom of speech and censorship as applied to the forum seems to be so pervasive and persistent. Let me be very clear: Censorship is extremely bad when the government does it, and freedom of speech is extremely important as a legal right. However, neither of these things are applicable to private spaces like this discussion forum. It is not possible for us to censor anyone’s free speech, because we are not their government.
The reason it’s bad when a government censors its citizens is because that means the citizens aren’t allowed to speak about the censored topic anywhere in public without risking fines or imprisonment (or worse), but this doesn’t apply to a single-project internet discussion forum that no one is forced to use and to which everyone has nearly-limitless alternatives (in terms of places to “speak”). No one has a right to say whatever they want here. This is not the public square. This is the Qubes OS Forum. If we never “censored” anything here, the forum would be overrun with low-quality posts that contribute little-to-nothing to the project. (Some might say we’re already approaching that point.) Having no intention to “censor” the discussion simply means having no intention to moderate the forum.