Changes GB could make to curtail harassment

Given the shit that went down yesterday, I thought it might be an idea to collect some suggestions for changes the GB crew could make to try and avoid similar situations in the future. I'll kick it off with a few of my own below. Some of them might be overly draconian, but I figure it's worth putting everything on the table.

1. Get rid of comments. Although the forums aren't without their fair share of bad behaviour, I think it's clear that the nastiest shit crops up in comments. I don't think it would be a huge loss to replace the comments section with a link to the relevant forum thread and keep all discussion there.
2. Don't let new accounts post for a week. Not only would this hinder those who create an account just to post inflammatory comments, it would also dramatically cut down on the amount of spam that appears on the forums. I'm kind of the on the fence with this one because there are cases when you absolutely want new users to contribute — a good example would be a developer who shows up to chat about their game. Maybe they could implement a system where developers can be verified by contacting the mods and have the cooldown period lifted?
3. Heavily moderate the use of embedded tweets. I'm sure that 90% of the time this is unintentional, but it seems that when folks embed tweets that are critical of Giant Bomb it usually only serves to fuel the fire. I honestly don't know how mods would police this, but I think it's worth bringing up anyway.
4. Add more moderators. It seems like Rorie and the mods are stretched at the best of times, and I can't imagine the pressure they're under on a day like yesterday. I also think that if they do decide to add more moderators, they should at least try to enlist a woman or minority, because it's possible that someone from a marginalised group might be better equipped to nip some of the more insidious stuff in the bud. That's not to say that the mods don't already do a good job at this already, but there's no harm in bringing in a fresh perspective.

Patrick already said that getting rid of comments is a bad idea, and besides that, all articles are considered a forum thread anyway.

So, what "went down" yesterday?

With you apart from point 1. maybe we could compromise and say premium members only can comment on stuff?

I don't think there is a technical fix for a social problem. The good guys need to speak out and keep things in perspective.

I don't think any curtailing of speech is necessary, regardless of what was said on an isolated occasion. It is easy to avoid anything you don't have a stomach for, as I proved by having no idea what prompted this whole thing.

@veektarius: It is easy when it is not directed at you. I don't think any of the people that got harrassed over what happened yesterday could just look away and be done with it.

1 and 2 are not good ideas. They'll harm the site much more than help it.

Comments are fairly tame most of the time on the site. If anything, comments on Youtube videos are a bit of a problem.

New accounts not posting for a week is a great way to get new users to not want to be a part of the community.

Embedded tweets should be regulated as much as a post.

Moderators do a fine job. Maybe they should just be more strict? eh, who knows. BTW, there is already a female moderator. No clue what race all of them are, it doesn't really matter anyway.

@fear_the_booboo said:

I'm not insensitive, but yeah, they absolutely could have. It's not hard to close a browser page, disable notifications, or anything else for awhile. In fact, that's what most people recommend when shit on the Internet is bugging you.

And before anyone tries to twist my words: I'm not saying that people should accept abuse or harassment or that they're bad people for not ignoring it; I'm saying that the clearest, most concise and rational response to an avalanche of shit is to step out of the way.

Putting being able to comment on something you just saw behind a paywall is a bad idea. The reason why some comments are so fierce in the first place is because people are speaking more aggressively when their voice isn't heard. How many of you guys know my stance on some of the stuff that happens? Maybe three of you at best. If I were on GB staff, probably 80% of you would hear what I have to say. I'm not giving excuses for people who decide to be an ass, but it's not crazy to start speaking up louder when people don't respond or ignore you.

If anything, they should make comments more visible. Maybe not everyone of them, but pick out random ones that become part of the article or content in question. This way, when you comment, you know that if you make an interesting one, more people might see yours.

Most of the 'solutions' posted here are going to have the opposite effect of what you want to achieve. This problem is more complex than a solution of just making it harder for people to speak up is going to solve. Yes, there are assholes on the internet. There will always be. You're not going to get rid of them ever. But I'm not a bad person. But I do want to contribute. If I ever spoke out fiercely against something that, hypothetically, Patrick wrote, it would go down a whole lot more civil if he would respond to me, instead of ignoring it or publicly shaming what I had said. Not saying he or anyone else should; they have their own life and can't respond to everyone. But there are smarter ways to go about this stuff than just shutting everyone up.

And a number of them aren't even American, or North American, for that matter.

I'm sure that anyone who was unfairly targeted had the recourse available to contact the mods and have the offending remarks deleted and the threads locked off.

! & 2 sound like bad ideas. Getting rid of comments would be silly and I wouldn't use a site that was so pretentious and self-important that I had to wait a week to post.

I like number 2. It could definitely kill troll comments and spam bots.

It's probably enough to just moderate more severely? Commenting on a website isn't a right, you should just be banned if you step over the line, and it has nothing to do with if you're a subscriber or not. It seems to work out pretty nicely for some sites(where you can comment without registering), but I guess a lot of it has to do with the way the site approaches its subject matter and the size. It's easier to police a blog with an update a day than one of the largest gaming websites. Rorie's got a lot on his plate.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=23543

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=19709

No to all of this

@hailinel said:

Apologies, I worded that part poorly. What I meant to say was that if the moderation team isn't already made up of many different perspectives, that should be something they look into.

I'm not sure if it's still in effect or not, but at least for a while, the forums operated by restricting new users to five posts per day until they had accumulated fifteen posts. But that wasn't done to curtail any sort of harassment. That was a measure to curtail the proliferation of spam accounts.

Wasn't the harassment on twitter and other sites, Giant Bomb seemed fine, or atleast it was moderated before I saw it.

I'm all in for #2, especially if it extends to chatting during live shows. At times, the chat during E3 wrap-up nights was toxic. I wouldn't even mind if a new user can bypass this rule by purchasing a subscription first. Like you said, the paywall should deter most wannabe trolls, and anyone left who actually goes through with it will have their message quickly deleted and their accounts banned from messaging/posting on forums. They become forgotten, and generously make Giant Bomb $5 richer.

I would take that criticism any day in favor of a healthier chat environment.

I don't agree with #1 but I like #2 and #4. I'm not sure about #3.

I find the idea that the GB guys would want to avoid harassment somewhat silly, if you mean them wanting to change how the site works to avoid people saying mean shit about them specifically. There are already systems in place to deal with anything that happens on the site, whether directed towards them or the users. If you're a dick you lose your access to the forums. Bam. Done. It's less simple in practice, sure, but I don't think there's much else to do. Sure, more mods maybe? During times of huge ruckus such as these, I imagine the small mod team plus Rorie are a bit swamped. But seems in calmer times they do fine.

The problem is people on the internet at large saying horrible shit to others in their name. Nothing we do here will stop that, unfortunately. Even if we could track them down and they have an account on the site, banning them and saying "we don't want you here" won't stop them from enjoying the bombcast or other content the site offers, and still thinking they're part of the team. Which they aren't.

So I missed out on the last couple days at Giant Bomb, what happen?

I'm pretty such it has to deal with the new hiring and everything.

Censorship is not the answer to this. This will make people not want to visit the site, I guarantee it.

I think only letting people who pay for a subscription to comment is a bad idea and would only further exclude others from joining. I do however like the idea of giving new users some sort of trial period before commenting, would prevent a lot of spam and new users who just want to start trouble. The mods in themselves do a good job on the forums, the only time it gets really rowdy to be honest is the chat during the huge event evening live stream (pst). If you were going to fix anything it'd probably be remove chat during these sessions because usually it's overloaded with people and half the time it's moving too fast you can barely read what anybody is commenting on. I know during GDC the chat was barely working for me and during e3 the discussion in the chat was getting bad with offensive comments so I made the choice to ignore it for that week.

I haven't visited youtube in awhile but giant bomb should probably just remove the comment section from their videos. I think in no way anything informal can come away leaving that up and would force viewership to come to giant bomb to discuss.

I'm not on the forums too much to know about 3 and 4, but for 1, I think comments are necessary. This community has some pretty interesting discussions sometimes in the comments. 2, I fully agree with, if not an even longer period than a week.

Yeah I had to deal with that when I signed up not to long ago.

An important argument that supporters of minority groups in games make is any point they try and put forth is ignored and suppressed by where they are posting. Using the same tactic in turn to try and solve the problem seems silly and unproductive. Censorship is not the solution. Certainly banning someone who is toxic is fine on an individual level, but trying to take away everyone's ability to talk does not now suddenly create a fantastic community. I mean, it creates a silent one, but that's not really a community at all. I mean, why not just get rid of games? They seem to be at the epicenter of all of this. Why not just shut down GB and all other sites, burn our games and be done with it? Perhaps an extreme level to take this to, but its all using the proposed model of thinking.

I visit Giant Bomb several times a day and I have no idea what happened so we need to change how Giant Bomb works to make sure it never happens again because it's clearly crucial.

Seriously, what happened? Did people get mad that there are new hires?

You know how you can get rid of all of the problems of people's personalities clashing, interpersonal drama and so on? Stop using salty language on camera or in public, don't allow any salty language anywhere on the forum, don't post anything on Twitter that could possibly offend or demean anyone even if you think it's just a mild joke between friends, don't post anything that could possibly influence others to offend or demean, reduce the amount of opinion pieces since opinions are how harassment begins, and install a restrictive code of conduct similar to every other major corporation that doesn't allow employees to offend or express opinions that may lead to others engaging in possibly offensive behavior.

@zevvion: Ok, fair enough.

Comments for everyone!

Hmm. Well, let's go through these one by one.

1. Get rid of comments. Although the forums aren't without their fair share of bad behaviour, I think it's clear that the nastiest shit crops up in comments. I don't think it would be a huge loss to replace the comments section with a link to the relevant forum thread and keep all discussion there.

Never going to happen. Articles and videos are driving the site hits, to remove comment functionality would alienate most of the audience. Remember, 90% of the people who use this site don't visit the forums and have no idea that any drama even existed yesterday.

1. Don't let new accounts post for a week. Not only would this hinder those who create an account just to post inflammatory comments, it would also dramatically cut down on the amount of spam that appears on the forums. I'm kind of the on the fence with this one because there are cases when you absolutely want new users to contribute — a good example would be a developer who shows up to chat about their game. Maybe they could implement a system where developers can be verified by contacting the mods and have the cooldown period lifted?

New accounts are already limited to 5 posts a day for the first 5 days. I think removing the ability to create threads until these 5 days are over might help, but the staff have always been strongly opposed to limiting the accessibility of the site to new users.

1. Heavily moderate the use of embedded tweets. I'm sure that 90% of the time this is unintentional, but it seems that when folks embed tweets that are critical of Giant Bomb it usually only serves to fuel the fire. I honestly don't know how mods would police this, but I think it's worth bringing up anyway.

I don't know how that would help at all, other than to fuel random speculation due to lack of direct information. Embedding tweets is super useful for everything other than a cluster-fuck, and making us review every one is ultimately counter productive.

1. Add more moderators. It seems like Rorie and the mods are stretched at the best of times, and I can't imagine the pressure they're under on a day like yesterday. I also think that if they do decide to add more moderators, they should at least try to enlist a woman or minority, because it's possible that someone from a marginalised group might be better equipped to nip some of the more insidious stuff in the bud. That's not to say that the mods don't already do a good job at this already, but there's no harm in bringing in a fresh perspective.

The mod team already contains women, minorities of both ethnic and religious beliefs, and peoples from all over the world. I'm going to repeat my point from a previous thread; while these other perspectives are valuable, you shouldn't need woman to know when something is sexist, or a black guy to point out racism. Each moderator was picked based purely on merit, not as some representative of a social minority - and I think we manage just fine.

Last night/yesterday was awkward because there was a lot of shit going down in a very short space of time, and most of the drama happened when half the team (the EU mods) were asleep. This is an exception. It might seem like we're spread thin but we actually have more moderators now than we ever have done before, and the isn't enough stuff to moderate most of the time to justify any further increase.

Obviously a lot of these answers are subjective. However I believe that we handled the events of the past 24 hours as effectively as was in our power to do so, given the circumstances. A lot of what happened was being fuelled by events taking place on twitter and other message boards, which is beyond our control.

Hope that helps. x

The internet should always remain a place of free discourse. The price we pay for being able to communicate our ideas is hearing everyone else's. You can either bury your head in the sand or put up with an endless tide of ugliness.

Personally, I hardly even look at the forums or the comments section. I just don't have the patience for it. But that doesn't mean I think they're valueless, and I think what you're suggesting is tantamount to willful ignorance.

@sweep: Thanks for your efforts, burger boy. You guys do great work.

@sweep: Thanks for responding!

Well then we definitely need to change the way that things work on Giantbomb.com if it's possible for people to engage in negative behavior against one other on Twitter.com.

I was following those threads for most of the day yesterday and I didn't see much of anything bad that would require them to shut down the comments sections or anything. Those women were harassed on twitter and that seemed to be mostly because their tweets complaining about GB hiring males were linked on a mens rights subreddit and was on the first page.

Just because these women and their followers on twitter have now been saying, "Nuh uh! It was your community and you need to moderate better" doesn't make it true.

It should be noted that there is no way to know if the comments were from the giantbomb community, since the tweets were posted all over 4chan and reddit. Honestly, I feel like we've been selling ourselves short in all this when the source of a lot of this behaviour might be off site.

1. The same happens on other sites. Comments are always way worse than the forums, but getting rid of them doesn't help. It usually just drives it elsewhere, either into the forums or worse, onto other sites were it cant be controlled at all.

2. If we stopped people being able to post for the first week of creating an account we'd never get to see that image of Drew anymore.

3. I don't think this would make much of a difference.

4. The mod team already do a pretty great job, last night was the first time I've ever seen a thread get temp locked and I think it was a good call by Rorie.

I think we should instate a curfew.

I'm on the fence about #2. On one hand I can maybe see that turning people away from the site/forums, I know it's just one week but still. On the other hand I think that would cut down on the spam and random 1 post accounts that only show up during the drama and just add the fire/troll.

I usually watch HD archives, but occasionally I'll be around for a stream and I get a headache looking at the chat. People probably like it, but I can't follow what everyone is saying.

I don't know what would help, but a trial period sounds reasonable. I believe the mods are doing their best; they seem to get rid of the belligerent assholes fine. Outright banning everyone who says something ignorant is not the best idea. I've disagreed with people here in the past about certain issues, but I never think they are monsters who need to disappear.

I sent pms to people that were asking what happened to avoid a derail. Others should do the same. Not what this thread is about.

Giant Bomb does not have a harassment problem. There was one day of very bad behavior from people I'm not even convinced are associated with this site. In general I find this site to very positive, the mods proactive and able to use their own discretion well, and the community to be supportive of all of the diverse members of this site and this hobby. Let's not overreact.

I like 2. I think heavy moderation is important. Heavy moderation is unfortunately what is needed. The Escapist is heavily moderated and although people are still asshats on the forums, it's still at least a bit easier to wade through the shit.

I said this last night but I'll repeat it here. The number 1 thing to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen again is the Giant Bomb staff speaking out. It's bigger than simply beefing up the moderation team. Change has to come from the top.

I think what happened is unavoidable given an open forum such as this mixed with the anonymity inherent in the internet. The Staff/Moderators did a great job cleaning up the mess and that's all you can expect. What happened yesterday shows that the system works and doesn't really need all these changes.

@milkman: 100% agree.