In the 90s, MIT's Athena system devised a system to handle online harrassment. One feature of the system was that the notice of reported abusive behaviour sent to the accused user began with the phrase "Someone using your account…". Users were advised to re-password their accounts, as they may have been hacked. Password resets by UYA recipients were taken in good faith by staff, but the most astonishing thing was that the offending behaviour nearly always stopped there.
https://www.metafilter.com/173881/UYA-notices-and-face-saving-in-moderation-systems#inline-7389802
I need to remember this technique in the event of anyone doing stuff that merits a warning.
@anthracite
I feel like the stopit philosophy could be combined with other kinds of moderation, in order to prevent its major flaw (i.e., being ineffective against the completely shameless).
For instance, combine it with tempbans: "Someone using your account has [...] We have locked the account and will send your new password within X days." (X might start at 7 and double with each offense.)
Shadowbanning goes even further, since the user doesn't even know they're banned.
@anthracite I love this. “Gosh, you must be so embarrassed to have said something like that!” seems like an in-person equivalent.
@nein09 I need to start doing this on Reddit and whatnot, too.
@anthracite I can't help but wonder if this is the cause of much of the culture wars? Not this action by MIT, but their point about face saving. Many of the points pushed by the culture wars would require some people, or many many people, to admit they were wrong (if only to themselves). This is something they refuse to do, so instead they have to dig in their heels and double down, which only makes things worse, until now we have Trump for president. :/
@Angle This is certainly what happened with the whole "deplorables" thing!
I think there's a lot of deeper underlying causes of the "culture wars", the biggest one being that getting people to argue over abortion/gun control/queerness/racism/etc is a good way to distract them from the endless fucking they're getting from corporations. The human tendency to say "if you accuse me of being a shit then I'll dig my heels in and be even MORE of a shit!" is just one of the many things that can be exploited by people who value financial profit over all other things.
@Angle @anthracite
"When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard."
Ancient community management wisdom *giggle*
@Irick @anthracite @Angle to be fair, collapsing a pocket tends to go a lot better than letting a salient safely fall back at least in the long term?
@anthracite This and the MeFi discussion are interesting, but a lot of people seem to be treating MIT's stopit as if it were the only tool in the moderator's kit when stopit makes more sense as a gentle nudge for first offenders or people who are ordinarily well-behaved but might be having a bad day and lashing out online rather than taking it out on family and friends at home.
@starbreaker I'm definitely seeing this as a useful strategy for first offenses rather than an only tool. It's a mid-sized mallet to hang on the same wall as my +16 Flaming Banhammer, not the Banhammer's replacement.
@anthracite Next time someone annoys me in meatspace I'm going to say, "Someone using your face ..."
@anthracite I have really mixed feelings about this.
It's great that it cuts down on harassment and abusive behaviour, for sure.
But it allows the perpetrators to not take personal responsibility for the consequences of their words. It was "someone using your account" not "you".
But these are people for whom "treat others the way you want to be treated" probably wouldn't work in the first place.
But it's not the job of a sysadmin to teach that lesson.
Good to know there's a way, though!
@anthracite there's a lot of good stuff in that entire thread. I liked the comments from wires
@anthracite I initially learned the wrong lesson from this article, because I failed to read all the way to the bottom.
They're saying this is just a "quick fix" that doesn't really change anything & coddles the privileged. Helping people work through their defensiveness is strictly better, but OTOH cognitive assonance is still a way to achieve long term behavioral change.
@anthracite Ooooh... that is good subterfuge!!