I haven’t read through it with a fine toothed comb lately, but the ToS agreement used to have harrassment pretty clearly defined. Looking at their Code of Conduct and ToS website pages, it’s still pretty solidly explained. https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/000256989/
This one, lol, they’re clearly not enforcing:
Creating Duplicate Threads
This category includes:
Creating threads about existing topics
Creating a separate thread about an existing topic for further discussion in more than one forum
If a player is found to have participated in such actions, they will:
Be given a temporary ban from the forums, depending upon severity
Doxxing has been a source of harm on the internet, ever since the publicly accessible internet existed. But as for general back and forth bickering/insulting you get on forums - I agree with you. You just have to pick a new shiny internet page to read or ignore the user and let the drama llama out to pasture.
Our society has declined remarkably in the last 7 years. This is evident in a lot more places than just these forums, but they are an example of it. Some blame Russian troll farms, others blame the media’s increasing politicization, some blame a generation raised with less social values. I, personally, don’t know what to blame, but the result is plain to see.
We don’t know what the moderators are doing, but it is not enough and not handled fairly. I’m not sure we can blame the moderators themselves, they may be hamstrung by management. We don’t know what their working conditions or workload looks like.
It’s just Wow forums, I could get perma banned from here and it wouldn’t affect my life at all. It’s not like I stole mattresses from St. Jude’s Children hospital I have no reason to hide it
Well, that little devil in the details has existed for awhile. Moderators would definitely remove posts they didn’t like in the past. I’ve had a couple, “The moderator has deleted your post” experiences. Sometimes it was because I’d forgotten to switch forums and posted a general question in a raiding or PvP space or something equally air brained. Other times it was because they thought the topic would be a flame post and just cause unnecessary arguments. But the difference was, at least way back when you got an explanation. Actual interaction. And also not insta forum silences handed out by an auto bot.
Not really. Cyberbullying isn’t real and it trivialises actual physical bullying because you can always, like Tyler says, block, mute and log off. You don’t have to live your life on social media.
I posted in response to the phrase “dangerous people” and “harm” . On the WoW forums? Really?
No, this take trivializes the fact that people’s real lives are often inextricably tied to their social media presence, or how many people’s main community is online rather than IRL, not to mention that cyberbullying can just as often come from the people you know IRL. How many articles do you see about teenagers committing suicide because of cyberbullying campaigns led by kids who go to their middle/high school?
And that’s the part I was agreeing with lol, that it’s still irrelevant as far as these silly forums go. (Which is why I didn’t really want to get into why Tyler’s take is simply bad, especially coming from someone with so much power and clout that he’s removed from the danger of it anyway.)
Well, that’s their choice and by no means inextricable. People delete their social media accounts (and start new ones) all the time for all kinds of reasons.
Barring rare exceptions, that’s their choice. And I’d argue that it’s not a healthy one. And in any case, no actual physical harm can be transmitted over the Internet and people can mute, block and create identities. In actual bullying (which is a real problem that is de-emphasised and attention taken away by “cyberbullying”) you don’t have the ability to block someone hitting you with a click of a button.
which should be dealt with just like IRL bullying, not by policing the entire Internet when the vast majority of people disagreeing with each other are total anonymous strangers.
Unhealthier by far is the unchallenged premise that kids have to live their life online.
I’d contest that. Society itself hasn’t changed much. The social norms have. The idea that everyone needs to be a TikTok star has really accentuated and publicized some of our worst human flaws. But, those flaws always existed. We just developed tools to mass publish them for all to see, 24 hours a day. Now we can’t get away from them, they’re always blaring into our awareness unless we get out of the internet world and unplug for a few days. It makes it feel like society has declined. In reality it’s just that they publish more sillyness more often.
I wasn’t looking to blame anyone, or even fix anything. Things are just really different and I was hoping to understand why. Most of the responses have shown that there’s not been any clear progression, explanation, or consistent execution of moderation on the forums. That it seems at some point to have changed from interactive discussion with moderators, to automated systems. It disappoints some, doesn’t bother others. Like everything, it the level of importance you give something will influence how much you’re affected by it.
The forums stand alone and don’t affect game play. It’s an interesting platform to have around for audience discussion. Whether it’s doing what Blizz intends would be an interesting question to explore. Maybe one of these days we’ll go down that rabbit hole as a player base and have another conversation to hash out
People’s actual livelihoods and careers are often tied to these things. You can wish we all still walked uphill to school both ways or whatever, but that’s not the reality anymore.
Not sure how this is relevant.
And not sure where anyone said this or gave the opportunity to challenge it either lol.
I don’t think I’m gonna continue down this course of conversation with you though. I’m not sure we’ll ever see eye to eye on things that involve empathy.
Fair enough, I can agree with that. I do think, however, that seeing all this published DOES have an effect on one’s attitudes and perceptions as they grow up. A lot of us grew up without being constantly subjected to said sillyness. I believe it makes a big difference. There is a cause and effect here…social norms have changed, as you said…this will lead to a change in society itself.
Agreed. I think moderation here is the leading factor. I’m just saying that from the outside it is hard to put a finger on exactly what is going wrong with the moderation. Personally, I would like to see a lot more discussions about the game itself, what we like, what we want for the future, cool things to explore, etc. The politics, belly aching, and trolling can get out of the way.
It’s relevant because this faux-“empathy” stance spreads and even here, it squelches speech amongst anonymous, consenting adults on forums where people have every ability to block and mute the speech they don’t like, just because of some people who might be harmed in some nebulous way.
It’s my understanding that mods don’t interact with the forums as much anymore because they were frequently baited into arguments by people desperate for their attention. THough you should know that mods have responded to threads like these as recently as a couple of weeks ago.
It’s also my understanding that current moderator policy takes an extremely charitable approach to identifying trolls (See: Very high bar of proof) and current policy is, unfortunately, to ignore obviously disingenuous trolls and treat them as if they weren’t discussing in bad faith for the sake of a discussion.
There’s a good chance that individual moderators don’t get to set these policies. I assume that policies on how the forums should be moderated are handed down from higher up. So even if a mod did enter the thread to clarify, I don’t know that arguing with them on the effectiveness of these policies would accomplish anything.
The whole “pretend people aren’t discussing in bad faith/trolling and treat them as if they’re genuine for the sake of discussion” angle has been historically popular with tech companies. It’s a bad idea that has the opposite of the intended effect though, which you can find proof of by looking at any obvious troll thread and how they inevitably get derailed by people who refuse to ignore that someone is trying to manipulate them like a puppet, so I’m assuming that eventually something is going to give. I just hope it’s the ‘tolerating bad actors’ thing.
Oh man, do you have a link to that post by chance? I’d love to read it. I dug back as far as I could, but there’s sooooo much stuff here I may have missed it, or just not gotten through enough.
Funny you say that considering there was someone a couple weeks ago telling people to off themselves yet they are still posting. I suppose being part of the alphabet club lets you get away with literally anything.
I’m not talking hidden posts either. Those are automatic. No they cherry pick and are inconsistant in their forum judgment. It’s not new. And I’d be the 1st to admit it is hardly the pressing issue of our time. It’s just very noticeable and unfortunate. I can’t believe I’m defending post that I disagree with
