An Update About Soylent News, With Jan Rinok "Back in the Saddle"
Burnout or "near burnout" a possibility when having to curate abuse*
Jan Rinok, the person who leads the editorial side of Soylent News, is back after "near burnout" [1, 2, 3] (the same trolls who targeted us and committed crimes against my family also targeted him). He is originally from Manchester, too, not that it matters all that much.
Anyway, Mr. Rinok writes (a few hours ago): "Many of you will recall that I had to step back from many of my site duties to begin a period of medical treatment. That has now been completed and, although it was not 100% successful, I am feeling better than when it started. During that time I was asked, where possible, to continue to help manage the site until replacements could be found for various roles."
This is what he wrote regarding moderation (some people joke about this in the comments):
Some of you will be unaware of 'flagging'. Staff with a specific seclev have had the ability to delete comments from the database since the site was created . This is necessary because legally we are required to remove certain material. Initially the deletion was a 'hard' delete and although the database remained in a stable condition, the linking of comments below a deletion was broken so that while they existed in the database but could not be seen. kolie corrected this to a soft delete - 'deleted' comments would not display but subsequent comments still displayed as they should. It is a far better system. However, it is a system that is still under development although the basic system is fully functional. It is a continuation of the community discussions that kolie held in his journal over the last year or two.With the relatively small (but slowly growing) community the number of journals being used has also fallen. Furthermore, they have been targeted by ACs who in a small number of cases have abused the journals and made them unusable for the owners purpose. Flagging such abuses removes the abuse from view but of course others rightly complained that there was no community visibility of flagged material. Thus it is necessary to develop a management system which allows a flagged comment to be reviewed, returned to view if it has been incorrectly flagged, edited if the offending material can be removed, or blocked entirely in the event of CSAM, doxxing, banned users, or unacceptable material being found.
Journal owners complained that their journals were being spoiled by the antics of the few ACs and as a trial we have given the journal owners the ability to flag material that they believe is intended to disrupt their discussions or to abuse the journal owner directly. That trial is running at the moment. Several journal owners have used it, but there is no obligation on any journal owner to do so if they do not wish to. It is in addition to the current moderation system and it is not intended to replace it - indeed argument and moderation should be used if it is simply a difference of opinion. The alternative would be to make journals accessible only to logged-in users in the same way that front page stories are currently published.
"ACs" means anonymous cowards or "trolls". We no longer have such issues because we don't facilitate comments in articles. We use IRC for discussions. We also don't do social control media - another vector of extreme provocation.
A relative of mine, who manages a very large newspaper, recently commented that opening up to random comments had become a nightmare. She said she had to disable them all.
The above, from Mr. Rinok, speaks of "CSAM, doxxing, banned users, or unacceptable material being found..."
In the past, when comments were possible on articles, we'd get to witness serious threats being made (not only against us, also other commenters). We had to pass a new policy to handle threats. It was partly a legal matter.
Anyway, we don't have this issue anymore; abuse, harassment and hate crimes can be handled differently [1, 2]. █
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* Look at the sort of things they need to deal with. As per Mr. Rinok:
We have had a couple of Tier 1 posts (CSAM) but none recently. The legal requirements were followed and the offending material reported and deleted. We have also had several posts that gave links to CSAM material but did not contain imagery themselves. They were also reported. More frequently we have had fake accounts created with content written in foreign languages. Various translation sites indicated material that some were linked to prostitution, including boys. We therefore stress that the language of this site is English - we don't care which dialect.Tier 2 material tends to be attempts to intimidate us into accepting someone else's rights when they are not deserved - in other words scams! I can only recall 1 request to take down a post - which we did. We have not used that source again so I'm not certain that they can consider it a 'win'. We reject material that is taken (sometimes verbatim) from Slashdot stories. I can never be sure whether these submission are a genuine mistake regarding our rules or someone trying to stir up trouble. Regardless they are not used.
The major problem that we have is that, even if we are innocent, if somebody is intent on threatening us with legal action we could not even raise enough to pay for a lawyers letter challenging the threat! We therefore try to stay on the 'safe' side wherever possible.
We intentionally have a fairly constant layout for our site's stories. We include the link for the source to ensure that we attribute the work to the appropriate publications. We do not claim the material is ours but we rely on fair-use to initiate a discussion. We also include links at the end of science topics whenever possible linking to the relevant papers and journals. Increasingly such links are being paywalled even for publicly funded research.