Open justice v secret police

Question

I'd like to raise a point for discussion. It concerns moderation, and I think the best way I can summarise it succinctly is open justice v secret police. It came up on this post, where DavidZ said "the moderators do not discuss individual suspensions in public".

I think there's a degree of secrecy to the moderation at Stack Exchange, and that such is the wrong approach. If in the real world somebody is convicted of a crime, the public are aware of the facts. It's what underlies open justice. Without open justice there tends to be in justice. Check out family courts secret justice. Here in the UK we've had some grim stories of people jailed in secret for virtually nothing. See for example this report:

"The latest case has elements of all these others. It again centres on a septuagenarian grandmother, who was last month sentenced to six months in jail for reasons which beggar belief. Her only offence was to have refused to sign a letter she regarded as 'quite improper', authorising British social workers to remove an 81-year-old man from Portugal, his native country, to bring him back to England against his wishes".

Of course, you might say that this can't be relevant to a mere website like stack exchange, but I think it is. Because I'm sorry to say, power corrupts. No offence to the moderators who give up their time here, but people are very good at confirmation bias and conviction. They have an amazing ability to persuade themselves that some groupthink or "official" action they're taking is right and proper, even when it isn't. Particularly when self-interest is whispering in their ear. I'd say it's only public scrutiny that keeps them in check. Open justice. Without that, it's a slippery slope.

When moderators do not discuss suspensions at all, and there's no evidence of why a person has been suspended, you don't know if they've been suspended fairly or unfairly. So you don't know if you're getting into a first they came for the socialists situation. You don't know whether your moderators are turning into thought police. And the crucial point is this: nor do they. I think that needs to change, because it could be bad for Stack Exchange. I don't think it needs to change totally. But I do think all warnings and suspensions should be listed with a reason and an example. On rare occasions I'd say it's OK not to give the example because it absolutely had to be deleted, but IMHO this should be the exception rather than the rule.

Discuss!

Answer 1

I volunteer at the county jail on Saturday mornings. In the jurisdiction I live in, trials are generally open to the public, there are detailed records of the proceedings and, critically, it's easy to find out if a prospective employee has a criminal past. More than false or sketchy convictions, the bigger problem inmates face is finding work after serving their time. Although it is illegal to discriminate against people with criminal convictions, it's hard to get a job with one on your record. Some jobs, particularly those that require a license, are prohibited from hiring ex-felons. "Open justice" on its own is no protection against discriminatory practices.

So how does that apply to Stack Exchange? Well, one of the primary goals of the penalty box system is rehabilitation:

At the end of this timed suspension period, your reputation will be recalculated, and your account will resume as normal. We don't hold grudges. The point of all this is to address the behavior. If the behavior improves, you are welcome back.

In California, ~65% of former prisoners return to prison. That's pretty appalling but not surprising since rehabilitation is not a politically safe goal. On Physics at this moment, just under a quarter of previously suspended users have received a second suspension. Some of those users have, perhaps, moved on to other parts of the internet, but many have gone on to be productive members of the site. The evidence suggests we are doing something right when it comes to rehabilitation. I think one factor is that we don't have public listings of previous suspensions.

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I think the bigger question you are trying to get at is whether a secret system of justice can be fair. So let me explain our process a bit:

1. The system encourages moderators to warn users before suspending them. Warnings carry no penalties and there is no public record of them. Users have the opportunity to respond to the warning with an explanation of their side of the story. Many users who get warnings are never suspended, so this step goes a long way toward preventing suspensions in the first place.

2. Every message and every suspension is sent to the community team for review. On occasion, we've stepped in to reverse suspensions. Usually the problem is a simple misunderstanding or poor guidance from the system. The community team also has the power to remove a moderator in cases of abuse of power. (This action, thankfully, is very rare.)

3. The system encourages moderators to follow an escalating scale of suspensions: 7 days, 30 days and a year. Volunteer moderators are not able to suspend longer than a year. Again, the goal is rehabilitation. Believe it or not, many people have come back from a year-long-suspension to resume their productive participation on the site.

I've investigated many, many complaints about moderator abuse, including complaints of unfair suspensions. Overwhelmingly, it's clear our moderators are very careful about suspending users. Obviously, you'll need to take my word for that. But you can see the results of wise moderation when using Stack Exchange sites. The network tends to be free of rudeness as compared to other, similar networks on the internet. A good deal of the credit belongs to the cadre of volunteer moderators who have the power to suspend users.

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I notice there's been some concern that moderators on Physics have suspended more users than on other sites. I looked at the statistics on all Stack Exchange sites and found that 150 currently have at least one user serving a suspension. By total suspensions, Physics is tied for 7^th most. The top site, as you might imagine, is Stack Overflow. But it has an order of magnitude more users than Physics. So it makes more sense to compare the rate of suspensions per users active on the site in the last year. By that metric, Stack Overflow among the least frequent suspension site. Physics is ranked 81^st or about average. Note, however, this includes network-wide suspensions, which are enforced by employees.

Answer 2

I wonder whether I've been a moderator here for long enough (four months now) that I can talk about our decision-making process in aggregate, without revealing anything untoward about any particular suspension.

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How big is the Physics Stack Exchange community?

Well, there are several answers to that question. I'm not a database person and you're probably not either, so here are some answers based on public information.

We're one of the most active Stack Exchange sites: my count is about 4100 new questions since the start of 2017, a little under a hundred per day. If you assume we're maintaining our long-term average of about 1.5 answers per question, that's about ten thousand posts to the site over the first six weeks of the year. It's a lot. There is not any one user that has read every contribution, and determining overall quality is a group effort.

The quality of a post is estimated by the voting and reputation systems. My experience is that most votes occur on posts that are relatively fresh, so we can use the list of users with reputation changes to estimate the population of the site over a time interval. I count about 4700 users whose reputations went up and about 650 whose reputations went down over the past six weeks, so I estimate a population of five or six thousand logged-in users visiting in a typical quarter. Most of them must make one or two posts and not come back, to get to our ten thousand questions and answers over that period.

We can also look at voters (current rough count: 450) and editors (rough count: 65) since the start of the year. And what we see is the unsurprising result that, as a participation task gets more complicated, the number of folks who participate in it is smaller. About 10% of our visiting population is actually voting on questions or answers. About 1% of our visiting population is involved in making edits, and a slightly different 1% has enough reputation to access the "10k user" moderation tools. Close queue reviewers? This month, there are about thirty.

So as far as monitoring the site, making good things appear and bad things disappear, we have somewhere at or around a hundred people. If you're reading this answer, you're probably one of them, and you'll probably recognize most of the names of the others. That's a small group, which matters for what I want to discuss next.

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That was the size of the "community", for a few definitions of the term. How big is the role played by the diamond moderators?

The moderator activity log lets me summarize activity over a quarter --- which we saw above corresponds to about 8,000 questions and 12,000 answers. During that interval, the six diamond mods

• processed 1200 flags. Another 1200 flags were apparently handled by the community in the low-quality queue.

• removed 3000 comments (mostly to chat, in batches)

• closed 1300 posts, and deleted 500 posts

• edited 2500 posts (of which probably 2000 tag-only edits --- Qmechanic is an amazing retagging machine)

• cast 4000 votes on questions and answers

• created 250 posts and 2200 comments

• sent 28 private moderator messages, including 10 account suspensions, of which 6 were for a week or less.

This is a lot of activity to see in aggregate! (It works out to typically handling two or three flags per mod per day, which doesn't feel like much.) Hopefully two things leap out at you. First, a solid majority of the twenty thousand question and answer contributions to Physics Stack Exchange from its user community over the past three months didn't get any diamond moderator intervention at all. That's a good thing.

And second: reaching out to a user privately, and especially suspending a user, is quite rare for us --- about three times a month. About half of these suspensions have been for voting irregularities or misusing sockpuppet accounts; those problems we typically identify on our own. The other five-ish suspensions (one or two a month, if you're counting) were shared among other suspension reasons: continued low-quality contributions, vandalism or deletion of upvoted contributions, self-promotion, making other users get fighty with each other, and so on. Those are things that happen in public, that are usually pointed out to us in flags or in chat by our 3k and 10k users. And the 10k users can continue to see material even after it's been deleted, if they feel like going hunting for it.

Now, what's the point of issuing a suspension? Suspensions are about behavior, not about people. In particular,

At the end of this timed suspension period, your reputation will be recalculated, and your account will resume as normal. We don't hold grudges. The point of all this is to address the behavior. If the behavior improves, you are welcome back.

An important part of making people feel welcomed back is allowing the community to forget about their punishment. But this is a website: literally the only we have to interact with each other here is by making entries in a searchable database. Once a thing is said, it's hard to un-say.

We do not issue suspensions without substantial agreement among the diamond moderators, and the suspension messages are clear about the (mostly public) activities that led to the suspensions. But keeping the details private --- or at least, keeping our concise statement of these details private --- is an important part of making the user feel welcome to return after the suspension. What we'd like is to encourage our suspended users to return, make quality contributions, and eventually join the relatively small cadre of users who help to curate the site. And part of the clean slate that's needed to become active in that community is for the community to forget about old problems --- something that's harder if a concise description of those old problems is just a mouse click away.

So the answer to my first question is no: I can't say much more about suspensions in aggregate than I could individually. There have been so few suspensions that essentially any remark I made would permit you, an alert reader, to figure out who I was talking about.

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A commenter asks whether prior suspensions are "expunged" somehow for purposes of escalating duration (usually a week, then a month, then a year).

The records of private communications and suspensions are not deleted from the servers or hidden from the moderators; we exercise our judgement. For a hypothetical example, suppose a user had a temper tantrum, collected a bunch of rude/abusive flags, and needed a time-out. If their history showed a previous suspension for the same reason in the last year, we'd almost certainly escalate. But if their history showed a brief previous suspension for the same reason from five years ago, followed by a positive contribution record, I don't think we would hold that ancient history against them.

Where exactly is the boundary? That I can't say. It's a judgement call, which we'd try to make using all the information that's available to us. If a user is active in the community, makes good contributions, and is encouraging to and respected by other users, we would probably tend to be lenient. If a user spends a lot of time testing the boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable, we would tend to be more harsh. But I won't pigeonhole myself in the future by inventing some algorithm here.

Answer 3

Note that the current 6 Phys.SE moderators are democratically elected. All moderators have (electronically) signed a moderator agreement, which de facto implies that moderators cannot discuss specific users & suspensions publicly, and which in turn means that this meta discussion belongs on the mother meta (rather than on Phys.SE meta).

If you have evidence that one or more Phys.SE moderators misuse their positions or the community's trust in any way, then you can report it to the SE team.