Some of these Mods have to go
There is nothing more infuriating with spending the time to write a post and for it to get deleted by a mod. You don't even get a notice of why it was deleted. Especially when it doesn't violate the TOS at all. Why mods - why?
First, I've said it before and sadly it seems I have to repeat it again: I completely agree about the new found mod situation.
Second, unfortunately the attorneys literally wrote a "get out of jail free card" in the ToS: "The Company, in its sole discretion, reserves the right to remove any postings, or deny access by any individuals, for any reason or no reason. If you see something that you feel is a violation of the these Terms and Conditions, please notify us by emailing WallStreetOasis.com>[email protected]. We reserve the right to change the Terms and Conditions at any time. Changes will be posted on the applicable web page."
AKA, "after we conjure up the rules, we can change them to whatever we want whenever we want to dodge any legal liability, real or not.. BTW, we'll tell you somewhere at some point we change whatever rule to again shirk any potential legal issues. Oh, and we're going to play the lack of any actual documented and binding legal decision of Section 230, all the way through appeals or not. Because places like Youtube and Facebook said that law doesn't matter, so fuck you, that's why."
Edit: I was going to post some more pieces from the ToS, but it's a schmorgasbord of "and we hereby legalese ourselves out of this....and legalese away that..."
All I can think of is "hate the player, not the game." Legally WSO has done everything in their capacity and power to protect themselves, which professionally I can't and wouldn't argue with. As for the mods and all that behavior, that's something else on the moral/ethical/political spectrum of the discussion.
Lawyers be lawyering. As much as I hate the new moderation tendencies, I can't begrudge them for wanting to cover their asses in every legally conceivable way.
I'll begrudge them. And I do it as a former attorney myself. This is the art of pissing on the client's head and telling them it's raining so you can sell them an umbrella. WSO and about a million other message boards in the world have operated for decades without problems. And all of a sudden because of one inquiry from Buzzfeed there's a hysterical response.
No, the issue is that WSO had a shitload of problems that weren't being addressed, not that there weren't any problems to begin with. You may personally be fine with bigotry and prejudice clouding out useful discussions, but that isn't the purpose of the site as a whole or even the Off Topic forum in particular - it's not called the Neo Nazi Forum, so I'm not sure why anyone expects that anti-semitic or sexist or "racist" commentary is going to be encouraged or even tolerated.
Personally, I think the entire site functions much better. My opinion isn't any more valuable than yours, but the people who run the site seem to agree with me more than you. As with everything in life, no one is forcing you to be here if you don't want to be, so I'm not sure what the problem is. If you miss the banned content so much, there are many dark corners of the internet where you'll find plenty of people willing to engage with you in some ill-lettered ranting about whatever culture war issue is prominent on any given day.
You know what time it is boys and girls! This post's "theAudiophile's agree to disagree segment"!
We already have the ability to self-moderate on here with MS at the low-end and flat out flagging and reporting on the high end. So why not embrace and encourage that instead of installing phantom moderators who can, and have, whacked someone's post with no notice or reason given? Not to mention the ToS that as mentioned has more holes than Hunter Biden's teeth. The inbox messages you do get are so boilerplate and dry I'd rather use sandpaper to wipe my ass with than them. At least the packaging by 3M tells me what 200 grit vs 400 grit will mean. Unlike the "well, you may not have actually violated anything, and obviously even if you did, we won't explain it. But we still yeeted your post regardless. Just because..."
Also, kudos for the strong mental gymnastics on automatically jumping straight to the Godwin law.
Now to the agree part. As you know, I'm not about to promote, accept, or try to simply brush off and ignore real hate speech in any form. I just think that, for the most part, the members of this website are smart enough, wise enough, mature enough to be capable of throwing out the blatantly sexist, racist, xenophobic, whatever-it-happens-to-be-this-time-isms (since lord knows we have way more than enough now thanks to actual fucktards unfortunately), ourselves.
And you're right. No one says you have to be here against any kind of your own volition. We both agree we want people to come here for career insights, advice for up-and-comers, interesting reactions to new regulations and what they mean for your particular piece of our world, or even simple Excel tricks that're helpful. And in OT, hopefully simple humorous banter and some memes and not the topics you mentioned.
Instert the "everything I disagree with is hitler meme here".
Second this. I'm starting to suspect they've brought on new 13 year-old girls as mods
How many mods are industry professionals i.e. probably don’t have a ton of time to moderate vs. geeky prospective sophomore year interns with a power trip?
WallStreetOasis.com and AndyLouis should make me a mod. I would be a good mod.
Easy enough to claim this when the post is already gone.
They restored the post after I posted this thread.
Problem solved!
Of course there are issues with content moderation - the entire concept of moderating posts is like... less than two months old, on this website? Your post was taken down, you complained/asked why, and because there was no underlying issue it was restored. Seems like the system is working about as well as one could possibly hope, all things considered.
Also why do I have -1524 WSO credits?
Yeah I noticed this too. I went from like +100 to -43
Yeah I went from like 73K bananas to 38K - I guess I’ll have to hit 69,420 one more time……..
Awwwww damnit. Someone beat my -854 already! Well I'd SB you for props, but obviously neither of us can do that right now unfortunately.
lol who is #5 on here - is that Goldie?
That was memberberries I think his account was called...
As far as the drop in userpoints + silver bananas and credits, I'll make an announcement soon, but it's all related to some rebalancing to deemphasize SBs rewarded in the Off Topic forum so that members that are getting more of their SBs outside that forum are properly recognized and there is more balance in the ratios. In other words, people who argue and get into a lot of debates on controversial topics can still get SBs in the off topic forum, they are just worth a lot less now than a SB in an industry or job forum (for example).
I'll give more details in update post.
Thanks,
Patrick
Oh ok makes sense. Thanks Patrick.
This is such a shit policy. At least grandfather in the bananas already earned.
Also, half the point of a forum is that people with similar interests (in this case Wall Street) can shoot the shit about other stuff that they may be interested in.
This honestly kills my interest in the site. Answering the same 5 questions for interns gets rote and boring even though I know “breaking into the industry” courses are the cash cow and focusing on that is more important to the bottom line.
Just because it’s a better business decision doesn’t mean it’s a good community/forum decision. I've greatly enjoyed the off topic posts as much as some of the insights in my few months here and honestly after this change it will incentivize me to participate less.
It’s disappointed because I was looking forward to continuing to contribute to this site as I progressed through my career, but disincentivizing casual participation is a killer. If you don't make the experience enjoyable for the people who have already broken into the industry and don't need to ask "how do I do a superday," then there will be nobody to answer the interns' routine questions. The established players certainly aren't sitting in the IB forum asking about networking, they're sitting in OFF talking about Porsches, private schools, and Fairfield county towns.
To answer your question (why the mods) the answer is basically that on that Buzzfeed thread from a couple months back, just about everyone said that heavy mods would be a bad idea and that the Buzzfeed article would be a flop it ever even publishes.
But then something happened. The Mount Rushmore of WSO - i.e. 2-3 OGs from the Analyst Class of 1995 whose voices count for 1,000x anyone else's because apparently without these guys there'd be no finance message board and we'd all be communicating with postcards - said that moderation would be good. And so now we have some more serious moderation, and with it all the problems that OP and others have pointed out.
yeah, it's not perfect and it never will be.
I don't think your classification of the mod / buzzfeed discussion from a few months ago is accurate, but we already agreed to disagree there. Just about everyone did not agree that heavy mods would be a bad idea. In fact, most people agreed that there needed to be at least some more moderation...the debate was more about how much.
We actually don't mod much more than we did before. The difference is there is now a small minority of very vocal members that are upset they can't say as much as they had previously without there being a risk of it coming down (understandably so). It didn't help that the implementation of Hive was bumpy...BUT we adjusted and honestly, I think the current level of discussion happening on the boards is...
I'll ask you this Dr... are there specific comments or posts that you haven't been able to post now that you were able to post before? Do you think those posts would have added to WSO's mission?
Thanks,
Patrick
Sincerely appreciate your patience with me Patrick as my last post was written on little sleep; not saying it's not how I felt (do still feel that a tiny number of HOFers were given an extreme voice), but my post was more rough around the edges than I'd like and for that I must apologize.
To answer your question, I haven't been moderated much. But I have seen comments taken down that seemed innocuous, as others like OP have said. As for whether a given post adds to the mission; I'd submit that all but the most purely obnoxious posts are adding to the mission in some way or another. An ideal career site needs to offer the experienced side (the givers of career advice) something more than just a place to give the advice.
Ultimately I guess what I don't understand is why you wouldn't require some critical mass of MS before reviewing a comment.
Absolutely shocking that the users who spend the time and effort to spread useful knowledge and experience are accorded more respect, and their opinions more weight, than the people who spend most of their time complaining about diversity hiring and how the woke agenda is ruining America.
You forgot the /s or /facetious tag at the end, but that was Flawless Victory.
Test
Fuck the mods and fuck admin for listening to a BUZZFEED journalist. Just LOL
I am so so so so so so Happy that the “WASPY broads” poster is gone forever. The guy was in every thread spouting some of the most heinously racist and sexist stuff I’ve ever read or heard. And bc of this new system he’s gone forever.
Do you all not remember that guy? He was just non stop spamming. He would get banned, make a new account and have 40 racist comments in an hour
Actually they’ve been helpful - they deleted a duplicative comment I no longer wanted to keep (so instead of commenting “-“, I added in 125 hyperlinks to DB Cooper—and they deleted…
So maybe I can use this strategy to delete more comments…
This new system is terrible. I have been banned from the off topic forum (topics) for creating too much controversy. I am going to have resort to creating topics against affirmative action.
Cannot even call someone a c-u-c-k anymore, unironically fuck this garbage safe space I'm so close to just leaving
fihaunce as a career gets less and less appealing to people each year in any case
I appreciated the off topic area because this site has some really intelligent people who I respect sharing their opinions on some serious or even fun topics. I can’t help but feel anecdotally like the former has disappeared a bit since the changes began. Perhaps it’s all in my head. I’ll delay my full judgment.
Personally, I wish the site would add a tech area/forum. I understand this is WSO, but there are a lot of former finance guys who left to tech like myself and I appreciate this site much more than any of the other tech career based places out there on the web
I'm surprised how much people care about their banana point rankings. who gives a shit of off topic SBs are only worth 1/4 now?
Test comment. May be I am no longer banned, haha
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