u/jackl24000

SSIA.

I’m directing this to this sub rather than the IDF sub as it seems more active, and unlike that sub is not almost entirely concerned with drafting, medical scores, gibbush, etc.

I’ve had the privilege of living on IDF bases as a Sar-El volunteer and working with soldiers for six weeks in the last few years and have learned a lot about how the Army operates, in many ways different than the U.S. armed forces. Our madricot minders told us about this in evening “lectures”, a lot of it was just my seeing stuff.

(Like, in the U.S., volunteers from abroad, grandmothers and high school students do NOT do mission critical logistics work as volunteers on us military bases. They would think the idea was ludicrous. That “slightly behind the scenes” field trip aspect to Sar-El was what attracted me in the first place.)

So every military has roots traditions and myths. George Washington’s organization of a militia using a manual and drill instructors as trainers at a 1:x ratio (recommended by a consultant Prussian general) intended to teach militia fighting skills to a mob is still essentially the model used in the U.S. to this day, and its doctrine clearly acknowledges that.

So I’m wondering about the long march with packs and sometimes (always?) carrying a “wounded” soldier in a litter the entire way (?) and typically (?) ends up at Masada and maybe a graduation ceremony there?

Now, long marches with heavy rucksacks are the essence of infantry training anywhere, but it seems to me this IDF custom (?) might be a conscious nod to the lore of the Palmach, and in particular the kind of “disguised as scout troops” overnight hikes Rabin and other commanders would have been leading “too young to enlist” teen fighters during the war? Kind of like those reenactment theatre tableaus in the Palmach Museum in Tel Aviv.

Can anyone share their experiences? Is there always a long march in infantry basic training right before graduation? Is it always or usually ending in Masada? Is it just infantry kravi that do this? Is a conscious connection made to Palmach and IDF military history?

Welcome to the “July” version of the monthly pinned meta thread, where sub Rule 7 banning “meta” discussion is waived and you can generally discuss “the sub”, its rules and moderation, and make suggestions for rules changes or improvements.

First, some top line information about the sub and recent activity in the last month:

The sub now has 110,000 subscribers, gaining 447 in the past month (about normal gain for “peacetime”). We had 1.5 Million visits, down 177k. Daily visits ranged from 59.4k unique visitors on the top day and averaged 11.3k. We had 176 top posts, down 42, and 286 others were removed by mods or automated filters. We had 32,200 comments, down 4.7k. We had 17 active mods with u/TheTrollerOfTrolls leading with 1,800 mod actions and u/FerdinandTheGiant runner up with 989 actions.

This month, we mods also want to talk about what this meta thread is not for, based on some of the questions recently being asked on the April meta thread and the internal discussions that mods have had about how to respond to these comments, which is the main reason for delay of refresh for this pinned meta thread (the other being “summer” in a place with short summer/long winter).

To cut to the chase, concerning moderation actions, the new rule for “meta” threads is that users are free to ask why a particular comment was moderated, whether they were a participant in that conversation or otherwise. However, they can not ask “whatabout” questions and compare to comments or users who were not moderated and ask why they were not moderated, or use the meta thread to report other users for moderation (whether or not the underlying complaint is “sub/mod” bias and suggestions that the refs favor one “team”). If you want to report or complain about someone, in addition to the report flag tool on their every comment, you would have to use modmail (Reddit DM chat) to raise the issue discreetly with the mod team, not ambush someone in the metathread with a broadside of public accusations.

When asked this “why this, not that” questions in the past, mods have typically responded that the post/comment in question was still in the moderation queue to be worked on, or not even reported yet. While this is a somewhat truthful explanation of sorts, it is not the “whole truth” which is, that basically, big picture, our moderation is on a “per user” basis, not a “per comment” basis. We try as best we can to ignore the user’s viewpoint or “team” in order to treat everyone as equally as possible. But how this works in actual practice requires a broader understanding of why we moderate and practically how it works, including using mod tools Reddit provides to assist in our work -- metadata screens only mods can see about a particular user or comment.

So we need to back up a bit here and talk about the overall purpose and philosophy of the sub rules and moderation. Our current Moderation Policy wiki explains (sensibly) that there’s no way with a limited number of 21 volunteer part-time mods that we can “police” and evaluate all 35,000 posts and comments each month and determine whether they comply with the rules. The wiki refers to our “sampling technique”. The way this works in practice is that to be most effective, we want to publicly correct and discipline the users who violate the rules most frequently and/or the most flagrantly, and not untypically, both of those together.

We use a law enforcement strategy familiar to everyone who drives on a superhighway: we want to pull over the fastest guys going 88 mph on a 65 speed limit highway and make an example of them, so that the stream of traffic will slow down to average 72. Even though cops could make a lot more money giving tickets to everyone going 66 if profit maximizing or draconian enforcement was the goal and the courts allowed the speed limits to be strictly enforced in that way (hint: they don’t, “66 mph speed traps” are illegal, because convictions require establishing a defendant’s knowledge and intent).

So, in terms of our efficiency, publicly warning particular major “problem users” to nudge them into compliance or ban them if they don’t/can’t is the best way to sheepdog the whole sub community into compliance. That’s why we most often don’t remove offending comments entirely like most subs but leave them up with a rules violation notice: it’s educating everyone, not just the warned user.

And there is thankfully roughly a Pareto principle operating in moderation here, 80% of the moderation (or more!) involves 20% (or less!) of users. Of those, roughly half are sincere about trying to comply with rules and can be “coached” and cease to be a problem, and the other roughly half pile up violation after violation on just about every rule until they are permabanned. So the bottom line is that given our limited numbers of mods and the volume of comments, we really do depend on the good conduct of the users themselves and avoiding the kinds of disruptive shitposting or food fights that violate rules and create a general environment of ruckus and disorder. We could not do this job if most people weren’t inclined to abide by the rules.

We also depend on the rules and their application to be as clearcut as possible to everyone, because when someone gets a rules warning or ban, they get to appeal the decision to another mod or mods. So I want to make sure that my colleagues are going to agree with me on the ruling: it can’t be a weak case or ambiguous, the violation should be clear as night and day. (We’re having problems applying some minor rules, particularly Rules 3 and 4 that we feel are too fuzzy in practice that we want to take a look at in this regard).

Mods can perform moderation by actions whether a comment is reported by users or not. Some moderation is done via queue reports from users. Others are just mods reading the current threads (user reported comments are flagged in our normal viewing mode with a one line summary of their complaint visible as we scroll through the sub).

How this works in practice is that a mod whether working the report queue or reading along looks for a reported comment or another “sore thumb” violation that’s so blatant that it must be addressed or people will complain about lack of moderation and flagrant misbehavers. The first thing a mod will do after reading the possibly violating comment (and the context of the discussion surrounding it) is to look at the speaker and determine the guy’s moderation history with a mods-only tool we have called mod log. The mod log will show, by user, every previous I/P sub comment that’s been reported for moderation by users or bot automod filters in white, and brightly colored notes by mods of any comments determined to be “abuse” or “spam” and what rules were violated (we also have color note templates for “good contributor” or “helpful”). We also see how long a users been participating on Reddit with that account (anywhere from 15 years to less than 60 minutes), what other subs he’s posting in, and I/P sub participation karma, either negative or positive.

Thus we almost instantly have a feel for whether a violation was probably an unintentional mistake by a newbie with little or no mod log, or conscious trolling and rules-breaking by an outspoken user with edgelord tendencies and a mod log hundreds of entries long. We also can see how a problem user is responding to moderation and, of course, to keep track of strikes for the “four strikes/rule you’re permanently banned” purposes of the Moderation Policy.

What I’ve described is a “per user” moderation policy for practical purposes, not a “per comment” policy, as it will help to understand our new meta rule about us mods not discussing unmoderated comments (and deleting the related requests on meta thread with warnings). I sincerely we believe we apply these rules in practice to both “sides” evenly as a result of this “cull the worst offenders first” enforcement policy. (For the record there are violators on both teams and we try to enforce rules on a viewpoint blind basis with the other built in safeguards, like right to appeal. But like sub/mod bias, it’s hard to prove or disprove this, but it’s what mods strive for no matter which team they root for).

We’ve also had some negative experiences in the recent past with “per comment” moderation with an experiment we did last year in response to concerns about mod bias: “zero tolerance for insults”. Against the better judgment of many mods, any comment which could possibly be construed as an Rule 1 attack or insult, or was put in the “form” of an insult (e.g.,“You are [any statement possibly seen as perjorative]”) had to be actioned so that the sub could be “unbiased”, whether the comment seemed deliberate or innocent, or was a clearly huge insult or a head scratcher. Let’s just say this experiment did not address any issues of perceived mod bias in a logical way. It just made participation in the sub a minefield, and moderation a hassle for mods and users alike. Until finally after months of nonsense sanity prevailed and the strict Rule 1 enforcement was scrapped.

Similarly, many or even most recent questions to the meta thread seem to be asking about “negative moderation”, why something wasn’t moderated. Not understanding the process I’ve described that moderation is not an end in itself but an overall enforcement tool to guard-rail community conversations. And like any enforcement needs to be applied selectively and minimized to keep the discussion about substance, not tangents of meta stuff about rules lawyering and moderation. We don’t like to interrupt conversations and if users think violations are trivial they aren’t happy either with interventions. Some users however seem to be keen on to calling for moderation as a kind of harassment (violating Reddit site Rule 2) of other users and mods by essentially calling for every users’ comment scrolling back many months to be scrutinized for rules compliance. “Weaponizing moderation” might be a fair way to describe it.

Examples: Recent meta questions like this (fictional u/usernames, paraphrased questions):

Why does this site allow user u/fabulous_pebble9865 to make comments like [link], [link] and [link]? (deep-mined oppo research into unblocked user profile, some comments six months old, hundreds of comments deep; we don’t want to create incentives for users to hide their profiles by default).

How can this site have mods like u/zzyzk9777 who say bigoted stuff like “blah” and violate rules like [link], [link], [link], [link], [link] (all Rule 3 complaints that humorous responses ridiculing parent comment “consist solely of sarcasm or nihilism”).

I reported this comment of u/flat-cloudy2001 [link] three days/weeks ago and it hasn’t been moderated. Why?

So the TL;dr of this discussion is we will allow meta questions about stuff or users that were moderated, but no lists or reports of stuff that wasn’t moderated in an effort to suggest bias or “just asking questions”. We won’t allow users and mods to be harassed with tenuous profile-mined complaints of rules violations by activist opponents of their viewpoint. We want people to freely discuss things without walking on eggshells or that somehow anything can be twisted months later into a rules violation if you don’t like the speaker.

Lastly, as mentioned above, we’re looking for guidance on redrafting or deprecating Rules 3 and 4. Rule 4 in particular is problematic because people often interpret misunderstandings or failure to agree with an opponent’s argument as “lying” or “dishonesty”. Outside of stuff like Holocaust revisionism, Khazar theory or Neutrei Karta etc. disagreement isn’t dishonesty. Mods aren’t debate judges or argument referees. Someone contradicting themselves or not agreeing with the conclusion of your argument doesn’t in its essence violate Rule 4.

We also get complaints about the automod informal warnings about swear words, Rule 2 which is usually a “soft” non-violation that doesn’t get formal warnings/bans. I think it’s usefulness and innocuousness in reminding no cussing outweighs its annoyingness. Your mileage may vary. Thoughts?

Understand that Reddit has implemented a new user interface for adding links and text effects like bolding, italics and so forth. Typical fill in dialog box to insert at cursor or highlighted text.

However (ahem) the former common markdown language like [this is a link](https://google.com) or *italicized words* was disabled.

I’m a mod on a heavily moderated sub. Our canned warning and ban texts have embedded links to the rules and moderation policy. All of these are now broken!! No way are we going to cut and paste canned stuff into dialog boxes to replicate a link!!

I’ve got to suppose this “improvement” of adding dialog boxes and manually highlighting text effects is a boon to the clueless who haven’t figured out that simple markup works quite fine.

I can’t imagine you’re really trying to hobble more sophisticated users by removing markdown functionality or that any significant system resources are being realized if the idea is “simplification” of the UI or drain on system overhead (markdown seems quite simple and almost native to process).

Please fix ASAP!!