Suppose you feel another user is stalking or harassing you in comments. These are of course subjective feelings, and need to be judged as per the objective facts of the matter. In this hypothetical, the objective facts you can ascertain are that:

• The behavior is from a single user
• You have significant activity on the site and the user is commenting on the majority of your posts (it's not just "I made 3 posts total, they commented on 2 of them, waah that's 66%")
• The comments seem consistently unhelpful, unfriendly and overall result in a very negative experience for you
  • Note that I'm assuming here that "giving feedback" or someone making a mistake in their post is not an excuse to be mean, unfriendly or impolite
• The comments are not obviously positive and constructive, they do not point out major issues. They may or may not be pointing out a minor issue, but it's hard to tell if they are actually interested in fixing the issue or if the nitpick is just an excuse to harass you
  • Note that it is an age old and well worn trolling tactic to camouflage the trolling as nitpicking and then use that to sabotage moderation
• This applies to one user only, you do not have the same reaction to many other users who interact with you. In other words, it seems like you're probably not just a sensitive snowflake that can't handle any criticism.

Sadly, personal vendettas are a thing on QA sites. Some people just like to develop personal grudges against some other user, and they even go as far as trying to subvert the rules to sneak their harassment under the radar, all in the name of "teaching that guy a lesson". Having to harass covertly does take some sting out of it, but it still annoying and doesn't seem like it should be a part of the desired experience. Stack sites for example even developed specific detectors for this, such as when you revenge-mass-downvote a user, and I don't think they built these for fun; they did so because it was necessary.

I noticed that on Codidact, it seems quite possible and easy to troll someone by constantly posting nitpicking comments with a condescending tone on every post they make. If the moderators try to take action against your account, you can always claim you were just trying to help and the nitpicks were intended as genuine criticism. Your comment might get flagged, but if you tune the condescension just right, there will be enough ambiguity to stall things a little. Even if your comment gets deleted, in the time it takes to delete it, you'll make 10 more just like it, and you can continue to troll the victim with impunity. The solution to this IMO is for a moderator to look at the whole behavior of the alleged to troll to handle the issue at the source (if warranted) rather than playing this silly game of whack a mole (or, I suppose, delete a comment?).

Question 1: How do you tell the moderators if you think someone is engaging in this behavior? Do you just flag the comment, but in the "reason", say something like "this is just one instance, they're making many bad comments"?

I personally believe that it's very important that moderation be done in, well, moderation. Instead of immediately reaching for the report button, I'd rather communicate with the person and see if perhaps they weren't intentionally trying to troll, but it just inadvertently came across that way. An outcome where I can tell a person I don't like their behavior towards me and I'd rather they stop, and they agree to stop, to me is preferable than bothering a moderator. If they refuse to stop, then I would say it's worth poking the moderator for it.

Question 2: Is there a way to tell another user that you find their behavior towards you on the whole objectionable? It seems like there is a feeling that comment replies should be about that specific comment, not the general behavior of the user. But where do you discuss the general behavior of the user? And if you're not supposed to by design, does that mean there is no effective way for to users to work out their issues voluntarily, and this (also by design) something where at least one of them always has to escalate to the moderators?

Note: I feel like in the current incarnation of the site, there is not enough transparency on mod activity. Stack was already kind of secretive about this, which evidently has inspired much of Codidact's design. But Codidact being in development, it has even fewer features than Stack sites. My own impression is that the moderators/admins of CD on the whole aren't trying to hide anything and aren't acting in bad faith, but it's just a lot of work to develop the UX for providing transparency on this, and it hasn't been completed yet. This is the reason for my interest in letting users resolve issues on their own without moderator actions.

posted 3 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3mo ago

matthewsnyder‭

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