Well that sucks... Assuming the person who threatened you was also a member of the that forum, would he/she have behaved differently had their real identity been known?
Possibly. Anonymity does allow people to act in ways that they wouldn't normally do in a social setting. In the case of a stalker or someone making a death threat I think there's enough wrong there that they could potentially be dangerous in real life as well.
Given the size of this particular community I think it's clear (at least it is to me) that it works a bit like a medium sized city. Most people are model citizens but there are people participating here who you would probably avoid in real life. Online you interact with them anyway and that can lead to behaviours that can't be tolerated. That's why we have a report button and a moderating team. I don't know if you've ever participated in an un-moderated internet forum but it is NOT FUN. The curse of having moderators, however, is that it's like a referee in a game of hockey. You probably don't want to play the game without them but they make calls that get under your skin.
As moderators we see reports involving certain users on a very regular basis so we know who they are but many people who just casually participate here don't. The mod team does try to weed out the worst cases and we have a process and some guiding principles to lead us through that. We could, theoretically, raise the bar to the point that all of the "toxicity", as the OP called it, is eliminated but the consequences of doing that would amount -- we believe -- to a sort of thought control. Most of us are used to have the right to free speech so we've made a choice in principle to allow that and not moderate what people say as much as how they address each other. (ie, you can say pretty much everything you want, but you need to say it respectfully).
While I'm on the topic I'll just point out a few things that the moderating team does and doesn't do.
- We normally
react to things that are reported. If someone is having a go at you and you don't report it then there is a good chance that (a) we may not see it at all -- after all the board is big and we literally can't review every post being made and (b) you could get sucked down the rabbit hole of responding in kind and get reported yourself. Nothing makes a user more irate that being censored for something they said when the guy just above them in the thread got away with it. The moral of this story is USE THE REPORT BUTTON instead of engaging aggressive behaviour in the open forum. I should also point out that if you do make a report then we don't tell anyone WHO made the report, just that it has been reported. In the past we made some mistakes with this and regretted it deeply so the rule is that reports are anonymous.
- We do follow certain users because they are "problem cases" from a behavioural stand point. This means that some users are moderated to a higher bar than others. We do this because some people simply need more external .... motivation ... to treat others with respect. If we moderated everything to the bar we apply to problem users then we would drive people crazy and if we moderated problem users to a "normal" bar then they would just run roughshod over other people. We need to do this and I suspect that every moderated forum on the internet uses some variation of this principle.
- Moderators do not correct the factual content of posts. We see a lot of posts that we know are inaccurate but we firmly believe that the community is self correcting and that users are better and faster at correcting each other than we could ever be. Moreover the discussion about inaccurate posts can lead to very valuable discussions that teach people something, which, I think, is why most of us are here.
- Moderators do not mediate in personal conflicts. If we see one playing out on the open forums we may delete it and ask the participants to take it off line (to take it to PM's) if they must but we never try to make people "get along". If you are having a personal conflict with someone then your best bet is to "ignore" them. There is a function for this if you look through the menus". There is an exception to this. If a user is being stalked by another user (it does happen) then we intervene. We still do not mediate but we make sure the person being stalked is protected.
- We usually decide what action to take by discussion and/or consensus where possible. Pete has the last word if we can't figure out what to do. This is why there can be a delay between making a report and seeing any action. The mod team is spread around the world and the reality is that unless something is very clear cut we often take a day (or more) to decide what to do. In addition, we do not act on every report. Sometimes we decide that doing nothing is the right way to go.
- Moderators are not above being moderated. I think the running joke in the mod team is still that Pete is probably the most moderated user on the board. Personally I was recently modded to the point that all of my posts in a certain thread were removed, which is the moderator's version of being thread banned. The point here is that moderators are ALSO users and ALSO human and we ALSO say the occasional stupid thing that gets us moderated. Some people have the expectation that moderators' behaviour should always be above reproach but in reality, that expectation can't always be met by people who are, first and foremost, human. The lesson here is that if you are being addressed aggressively by a moderator then reporting it DOES make sense!
This is a quick grab of the ideas that we use to guide us. Obviously the TOS is our main assessment framework but you would be amazed at how many thing we have to deal with that are in a grey area and require judgement calls. Pete forms his mod team specifically to be able to make those calls and while it's not perfect I'm willing to say that, in my perhaps biased opinion, it functions pretty well on the whole.
R..
