How should RPGWatch handle emote reactions going forward?

[HellRazor]

My takeaway from your post is that you don't like the emoji feature because it does not align with your ideas of what is good for the climate of the site. Fair enough.

But according to the poll, you are in the minority. 80% of the forum's users who answered the poll want to keep the emoji feature.

If the feature is kept, then it has to be allowed to fulfill its purpose.

Also, some are making this a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

The site doesn't need any special "emoji rules". If someone is acting like an asshole, that isn't a problem with the forum's features. It's a problem with the behavior of one or more users. The forum already has rules to help moderators address those types of situations and behaviors (if they choose to do so).

Personally, I wouldn't waste too much time trying to chase down who is posting "negative" emojis on who's threads - it's just such an insignificant issue and would be a huge waste of time and effort. Rather, if two users are acting in a way that is detrimental to the forum, I'd tell them both to knock it the hell off or be banned. Most of us are adults here, who has time to babysit people who want to act like children?

Here's another idea. If someone wants to make himself look like an asshole by posting the dreaded "rolls eyes" emoji on someone else's posts... who really cares? Just ignore it. Trolls tend to go away when they know their goal of pissing you off isn't working. Or complain to a moderator (which you can already do without special "emoji rules") and let them decide how they want to handle it.

The best way to ensure a positive climate is to enforce the rules of the forum. The mods here do a good job of that, so the climate here is actually really good, and I don't see that changing. I don't think the emoji feature is going to impact the overall climate here at all, either bad or good.

It's about nuance. It's not about negative opinions as much as it's about a negative mindset

The negativity police used to be, ultimately, Myrthos, just as whatever rules Taluntain wishes to enforce, if any, would make taluntain the whatever that is police.

The codex has an overriding 'mindset' to it's site that "That game you like, it's shit", and that bleeds into the site itself, so that most threads are, essentially, just bitch threads and rabid fans, with most of the general talk bored by the noise.

So threads there are very difficult to keep track of as the majority of them regularly break down into just plain insult-fests and people competing to see who can shit on something the hardest.

It's not that 'negativity' is to be warned against, it's more about watching out for people who use the negativity as trolling tool, lest threads become useless flame wars between the usual trolls and their targets, the rabid fans.

Myrthos kept quite a tight reign on this kind of thing, and as a result barely any moderating needed to occur, as everyone had a pretty good idea of where to draw the line - everything is a line drawing exercise - there's no such thing as a binary no negativity or all negativity (even on the codex, people who are just 'too much' get removed eventually).

As for negative emojis, of course a little negative emoji here or there doesn't matter. The point is that the site has functioned for 20 odd years without them, and the reason it did so was because it didn't match the 'vision' for the site. The mindset. And, exactly as predicted, the second they were implemented, someone started trolling with them.

 

[Redglyph]

To the argument that 'we didn't have reactions before [negative or not], it was fine, problems came once they were added', I'll simply answer this.

We lived years without Internet and were perfectly happy. Then it came to be, and new problems appeared (or old ones were amplified); for example, social websites without parent supervision could distress some children because they were bullied online, or anyone could make a website spreading erroneous information. But the benefits outweighed those inconveniences, so we simply learned how to deal with the problems instead of shutting the whole thing down. Note that by dealing, I don't necessarily mean in a punitive way but by looking what prompted kids to misbehave, or by being more critical.

The scale is not the same, but hopefully this can give some perspective and illustrate why the argument above is so wrong.

 

[SirJames]

Look, accepting that the whole is a sum of the parts, I wouldn't be too quick to call any feature irrelevant. Especially when you're aware of where these features originate and their greater purpose, as I mentioned.

Was the internet actually better in the good-old-days? Definitely subjective, but am I really the only one who feels this way?

The big problem is it's all about engagement and quality means nothing.

You can make things more quick and easy to engage to infinity. Let's just set up an auto-reaction system where you can flag all the users you'd like to instantly Like any posts from and flag the people you don't like with a rolls-eyes and we can just let the bots take over. I mean it's 2024 and we're still writing our own posts?! Isn't there AI to do that? Let's train an AI on everyone and see what things look like when there's no humans left and we hit maximum quick and easy user engagement - user not required!

 

[booboo]

I think the 'social media' age is very different - the Internet was a paradigm shift in terms of how we lived to - akin to printing press etc in impact. Social media, in my view, is a crass attempt by companies to monetize people's desire for affirmation. Facebook/Meta, YT/TikTok, Influencers...all wind me up hugely. The corpos behind these are not there to "help" people - they are there to make money off people. Personally, even though I use reactions, I could do without them - I think they are a bleedover from (anti)social media, which I would happily do without. At best, a thumbs up showing I appreciate someones insight/good work, humour etc is all I need.

 

[SveNitoR]

Look, accepting that the whole is a sum of the parts, I wouldn't be too quick to call any feature irrelevant. Especially when you're aware of where these features originate and their greater purpose, as I mentioned.

Was the internet actually better in the good-old-days? Definitely subjective, but am I really the only one who feels this way?

The big problem is it's all about engagement and quality means nothing.

You can make things more quick and easy to engage to infinity. Let's just set up an auto-reaction system where you can flag all the users you'd like to instantly Like any posts from and flag the people you don't like with a rolls-eyes and we can just let the bots take over. I mean it's 2024 and we're still writing our own posts?! Isn't there AI to do that? Let's train an AI on everyone and see what things look like when there's no humans left and we hit maximum quick and easy user engagement - user not required!

Isn't this argument the very definition of a slippery slope fallacy?

Likes emoticons sloppy engagement autoresponses AI taking over.

It misses one important thing: the people who communicate here, want the social experience.

And: No, likes are not like heroin. Sure, people like to have others agree with them, and an internet like gives dopamine, but it's a tiny thing compared to almost every positive thing in the world, like someone saying hi or smiling at you, or agreeing in person.

 

[Taluntain]

I believe that the poll results with 41 votes are clear enough at this point to make a final decision.

The relative majority of those who voted (nearly 44%) feel that the recipients of too many negative reactions from a single user should have the option to request moderator action.

Close second are the 39% of those who believe that any user should be able use any reaction with no restrictions whatsoever.

Only 17% of those who voted are in favour of removing the "rolleyes" and "unamused" reactions.

--

As such, from this point onward, any user bugged by receiving too many negative reactions from another user can start a PRIVATE conversation with me and register their complaint for me and the rest of the staff to investigate.

If we determine that the complaint is valid, the user dishing out too many negative reactions will be asked to stop negatively reacting to posts made by the affected user.

Failure to comply will result in temporary or permanent suspension of the ability to use post reactions, so it is not recommended.

Naturally, if we also determine that a certain user is repeatedly negatively reacting to multiple users and not just one, we are likely to instruct them to stop using negative reactions altogether or risk having their reaction privileges disabled.

The gist of this rule (eventually to be added to the "official" forum rules) is that negative reactions, when used in moderation, aren't an issue, as evident by the poll results. However, we are trying to make this community friendly enough that even those users that we don't see eye to eye with, can continue posting without being beset by what more or less amounts to serial reaction trolling.

In short -- rolling eyes at a post that you find particularly "out there" --> OK. Reacting with roll eyes to 10 posts in a row by the same user because you don't like them --> NOT OK. Note that different people have different tolerances towards negative reactions, so some users might just brush it off, but others are not likely to do so for very long.

If a user gets on your nerves to the extent that you feel that you constantly need to negatively rate their posts, USE THE IGNORE FEATURE. That's why it's there. On the left side of every post text, click on the username of the user that bugs you, then in the overlay card that opens, click on the "Ignore" button.

 

[SirJames]

Isn't this argument the very definition of a slippery slope fallacy?

Likes emoticons sloppy engagement autoresponses AI taking over.

It misses one important thing: the people who communicate here, want the social experience.

And: No, likes are not like heroin. Sure, people like to have others agree with them, and an internet like gives dopamine, but it's a tiny thing compared to almost every positive thing in the world, like someone saying hi or smiling at you, or agreeing in person.

Slippery slope, yes... Fallacy?

Well, I don't expect RPGwatch to change that much but I'm sure you can look at the internet as a whole and see the chain-reaction.

You have to agree with points like engagement being more important than anything else. 5 reasons why clickbait is king. 1 hour of being online having a bad time sells more ads than 5 minutes of a good time.

Why did Tiktok become so big?

 

[SveNitoR]

Slippery slope, yes... Fallacy?

Well, I don't expect RPGwatch to change that much but I'm sure you can look at the internet as a whole and see the chain-reaction.

You have to agree with points like engagement being more important than anything else. 5 reasons why clickbait is king. 1 hour of being online having a bad time sells more ads than 5 minutes of a good time.

Why did Tiktok become so big?

Yes, a lot of the internet is click-baity drivel. Rpgwatch is not, though. And emoticons don't make it so.

 

[SirJames]

Yes, a lot of the internet is click-baity drivel. Rpgwatch is not, though. And emoticons don't make it so.

Maybe that's a problem?

 

[HellRazor]

I think this is a good decision. Hopefully everyone will just play nice and not waste the mods' time.

I believe that the poll results with 41 votes are clear enough at this point to make a final decision.

The relative majority of those who voted (nearly 44%) feel that the recipients of too many negative reactions from a single user should have the option to request moderator action.

Close second are the 39% of those who believe that any user should be able use any reaction with no restrictions whatsoever.

Only 17% of those who voted are in favour of removing the "rolleyes" and "unamused" reactions.

--

As such, from this point onward, any user bugged by receiving too many negative reactions from another user can start a PRIVATE conversation with me and register their complaint for me and the rest of the staff to investigate.

If we determine that the complaint is valid, the user dishing out too many negative reactions will be asked to stop negatively reacting to posts made by the affected user.

Failure to comply will result in temporary or permanent suspension of the ability to use post reactions, so it is not recommended.

Naturally, if we also determine that a certain user is repeatedly negatively reacting to multiple users and not just one, we are likely to instruct them to stop using negative reactions altogether or risk having their reaction privileges disabled.

The gist of this rule (eventually to be added to the "official" forum rules) is that negative reactions, when used in moderation, aren't an issue, as evident by the poll results. However, we are trying to make this community friendly enough that even those users that we don't see eye to eye with, can continue posting without being beset by what more or less amounts to serial reaction trolling.

In short -- rolling eyes at a post that you find particularly "out there" --> OK. Reacting with roll eyes to 10 posts in a row by the same user because you don't like them --> NOT OK. Note that different people have different tolerances towards negative reactions, so some users might just brush it off, but others are not likely to do so for very long.

If a user gets on your nerves to the extent that you feel that you constantly need to negatively rate their posts, USE THE IGNORE FEATURE. That's why it's there. On the left side of every post text, click on the username of the user that bugs you, then in the overlay card that opens, click on the "Ignore" button.