Anonymous Personal Statements

Off-Topic Moderator Secret Clubhouse Tree Fort
1

I am

  • In favor
  • Generally in favor, but with reservations
  • Generally opposed, but open to the thought
  • Strongly against
0 voters

I. THE ISSUE
Wormfather asked if we could have anonymous personal statements, which sparked discussion here. Aschup cogently outlined the downside here. I agree with aschup that simply applying anonymous rules to another forum is not worthwhile. But I can’t shake a sense of real opportunity in the idea, and that exploring it might positively influence TLS in a lot of ways. So what about this:

II. THE IDEA
We test run an anonymous personal statement forum for a limited time (from now to Halloween sounds decent). We also temporarily promote a small number of “personal statement forum only” moderators - similar to Wiki moderators, an idea we have favored in the past - to limit any growth in our workload. Forum moderators would have very limited capabilities (no IPs; can see who posts anonymously; can ban users from that forum only). This would give us a window to see if anonymous essay help is a significant improvement to TLS, while mitigating any additional workload on us.

The additional benefit is that this can also be a test-run for people we think might be decent real mods. A few months of limited authority will show a lot about a person’s dedication, judgment, consideration, and propensity to use or abuse power. I have a few names in mind, but I’ll save that for later - no need to get two carts ahead of the horse.

After the test run, we determine whether it was worthwhile, and decide to (a) keep the idea permanently, (b) try some new version of it, or (c) bury it wherever we hid the body of “TLS Weight.”

III. THE RATIONALE
The users seem to want it. And they don’t seem to want it in any groupthink, bullshit sense, either. In the Mod Q&A thread, I count a dozen separate users supporting, and only two dissenting - and those two dissent to the necessity, not to the potential (the cost-benefit of necessity is dramatically shifted if we farm out the gruntwork). I can’t remember the last time an idea in that thread garnered support that lopsided, and from such a disconnected group of users. TLS, like every website, should at least consider what the users seem to want. I believe that this could grow the number of people who come to TLS, and their involvement level. Both of those things are always, always, always more good than bad.

The worst-case scenario is that something more than a few tiny hiccups occurs, creating some more work for us. If so, we kill the idea and things return to normal. That’s not a costly worst-case scenario, and it has no permanent downside. Compare that to the upside of more people doing more helpful (and on-topic) things on TLS - which is the reason this site exists at all.

Separately, I suspect that we’re going to find that a tryout/farm system for moderators will make the promotion of mods a faster and more successful process. I bet that even if we were to decide to bury the experiment, we would still end up implementing some comparable “Moderator SA” variant in the future. I truly believe it would be that helpful. Additionally, it is possible that in exploring new ways to police anonymous posting here, we might discover some improved methods of policing anonymous posting in the legal employment forum, reducing a common headache.

Basic public opinion poll above; all opinions, suggestions, and critiques welcomed.

2

In case you were thinking that far ahead: I bet that we’d end up creating a “forum-mod” forum that we could see, but not giving them access to the mod forum.

In case you do want to get two carts ahead of the horse: my shortlist would be four 0Ls (tfleming, chemteacher, Mal Reynolds, Wormfather) and an optional assortment of popular-but-not-quite moderator nominees from the past (e.g., soj, Romo, crumps). It is also worth noting that thederangedwang and rinkrat are active contributors to that forum, and actively proposing anonymous posting.

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5

Why are we electing new people just for this? If we want to create more work for ourselves, we should shoulder it. And if we want/need new mods, we should take new mods.

6

For all the reasons stated above: because hybridizing the two ideas lowers the cost of trying them; because a limited authority “tryout” of some potential new mods can only add to our knowledge about whether they would be good mods; because letting people who are excited about the idea and active in the forum manage the anonymity issue makes WAY more sense than leaving it to people who (a) aren’t online or (b) aren’t in the personal statements forum; etc.

Unless you’re asking a different question, which is possible. I’m not sure if your question (which, on its face, really was answered before you asked it) is (a) something I am misunderstanding, (b) your being incredulous at my stupid idea, and how I haven’t seen the ways in which it is stupid, or (c) that knee-jerk “who moved my cheese” reaction that comes with suggestions of change.

7

Neither, actually. We’ve never run trials of mods before, so it seems odd that we would implement a system like that for the express purpose of trying this scheme out. I also don’t see how it makes that much sense given that if we do decide to implement it permanently, we’re not going to keep a bevy of quasi-mods on hand to do the work for us. I’m sure users will love having more anon options; the question for us isn’t so much user receptiveness or benefit but rather if the additional work of policing anon usage in yet another subforum is really worth it. If we want to add work and then judge if it’s worth it, we shouldn’t be outsourcing the work from the get-go.

This isn’t so much “who moved my cheese?” as “go ahead and move it if you want, but what the fuck is the point of doing cartwheels and a rain dance around the cheese?”

8

I like the “anon OPs but no anon responses” approach if that can be done. This would require way less moderation since the OPs are where the personal information are, and people wouldn’t be able to try to use anon to just be overly critical jackasses.

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10

I just looked at the “open reports” page.

7 reports.
5 in the Employment Forum.
4 authored by Anonymous User.

11

That was the first thing I looked into. I haven’t found a way to make that work yet, and I’m not sure it exists.

OK, now I see what you mean more clearly. Here’s the thing: it is obvious that anonymous posting creates significant work. And it is intuitively obvious that that particular headache might be mitigated by having forum-only moderators. The theory is that our best-case scenario would be to give the users what they want (more anonymous posting of sensitive info) without actually increasing our workload at all. If the idea went away, so would forum-only moderation.

I’ve often thought of implementing forum-only moderators in legal employment (don’t even act like that forum would be the same amount of trouble if we had people like Sealocust, who is always in that goddamn forum, cleaning up the anon abuse reports for us). But trying so there is a weird idea, because if it doesn’t work, then we have to dump that idea while keeping anon posting in there. This gives us an opportunity to try both ideas together, knowing that we have an easy excuse to dump forum-only moderation if we don’t like it.

I guess the tl;dr is that I think having a few forum-only mods with limited authority would make TLS work better, and would clean up our anon problems for us, and trying it on a specifically limited run here seems like our best opportunity to find out whether that is true.

12

Actually I just gave thesealocust a week for his employment forum vigilante trolling

13

Not to get all uberliberal judge on you, but imagine if he could actually put that energy, interest, and dedication to good use.

14

Thought of this analogy in the shower: Detroit is a shithole. And now we’re talking about changing some law in Philly that might make Philly’s crime rate go up, too. And I’m like, “Hey, let’s get more beat cops in Philly, and if that works, maybe we’ll get more beat cops in Detroit, too.” And you’re like, “Nah, what we need is more U.S. Marshals, or nothing at all” And then I scratch my head.

15

I think you need a longer shower.

16

I swear that makes sense.

17

Except that if we’re implementing it temporarily to gauge how much of a royal pain in the ass it is to moderate/monitor, it makes absolutely no sense to immediately assign responsibility for enforcement to a bunch of provisional newcomers who have no sense of the average workload and how much the new anon ability adds to that. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if we have a tough time selling potential moderators on the idea (again, since we’ve never had anything like this independently). If you guys had told me “hey you might be a moderator if you do our bitchwork for a couple months,” I would have told you to go suck eggs.

Additional points: like I said in the other thread when this was first brought up, I don’t think the plagiarism concerns are completely insignificant. There is a deterrent effect of having people’s accounts linked to the PS they post. Furthermore, having people provide comments and insight on your personal statement is a goddamn privilege; I don’t really think that requiring people to put a name to the work being critiqued is so burdensome that it justifies any of this. And for that infinitesimally small collection of theoretical posters who a) make the decision to write a personal statement about something deeply personal and/or humiliating and share it with adcoms attached to their full name and personal information, but concurrently b) don’t want it linked to an account on the internets where they post pictures of their tits in a pushup bra or make off-color jokes, they can do what legions of TLSers before them have done with absolutely no difficulty or extra work on behalf of the mods: PM the many TLS posters willing to suggest edits via PM.

18

I hear you on your last point. I believe your concerns are valid. But I also believe that a legitimate groundswell of user support merits experimentation. Getting feedback on your employment situation is “a goddamn privilege,” too. Turns out it works better anonymously.

But there’s one thing you keep misstating: we’d be implementing PS anonymity to see how well it worked, not how much it cost. You keep saying we’d be doing it to see how much trouble it is. That’s not right. We’d be seeing how much value is added to that forum, and to TLS in general. Cost is a secondary consideration. The idea of combining forum moderators in is a method to reduce that cost, and if we’d rather kill that plan and absorb that cost ourselves, then I guess we can. I’m not sure it makes sense to do so, but whatever.

And we wouldn’t say “come be part of our moderator training program.” We’d just say “this is a limited term promotion in responsibility and authority. Do you want it?” Maybe one guy would tell us to suck eggs, but in general, I sincerely doubt we’ll have even the smallest trouble filling the slots.

19

Plagiarism worry is a complete nonstarter for me as an argument, to the point where is someone tries to bring it up I just glaze over.

20

Have you talked to Grant, Pear, or anyone else? This is like far and away the most elegant solution, and I’d love to do it this way rather than creating a new set of deputies, etc. Not that there aren’t benefits to deputizing new people, but there’s more downside risk as well.