I do want a way to hide harassment and sockpuppetry without revealing who flagged it, the sockpuppetry is really getting out of control now. But I don’t think every personal attack that is hidden needs to obscure the hider
So I support some sort of separate flag to remove harassment that hides the hider, its getting to the point that I am concerned it could become unsafe to connect my work on iNat to my increasing nature related work off iNat that has my real name, so I am becoming hesitant to intervene in sockpuppetry cases
I think if the trolls are scaring the curators off something does need to change
I’m also not sure if spam flagging really hides comments? I’m still seeing these while logged out @tiwane
We just released an update: non-curators should now not be able to see who hid content. I wish we didn’t have to lose that bit of transparency, but I think the tradeoff is worth it.
Thanks, this will make me feel much safer dealing with sockpuppets
I think this is a good emergency measure, but in the long run I don’t know if that tradeoff needs to exist, I think consideration should be given to an account age/number of RG obs requirement, rather than curatorship, as the criteria to view who hid comments. There are a lot of people who have shown themselves to be legitimate iNat users over months or years who we know are not trolls, but who aren’t curators either, and I’m not sure stopping these people from seeing who hid something is needed to deal with the sockpuppet harassment problem, but I can think of 3 problems that doing so causes:
1: I have had productive conversations with established users who ask me why I hid a comment of theirs, I don’t know if we have to lose this to deal with the harassment problem
2: If a curator abuses power it is harder to notice and report, but this is rare
3: if an experienced non-curator gets in an argument with a curator (this is common with taxonomic disputes) and the non-curator’s comment is hidden, they may falsely believe the curator they were arguing with did it, rather than a third party, causing them to see the hiding as an abuse of power rather than 3rd party intervention
In short I think an account age/number of obs requirement to view the hider, rather than curatorship, could solve both the harassment problem and the transparency one, rather than having to choose (I’m thinking of like 6 months or something long, not just days) I know staff are busy and don’t mean to ask them to rush a bunch of changes rapidly, but I think it is something that should be considered going forward
i disagree with this action being taken before there’s more differentiation between taxonomic curation and moderation. I suspect it may be used in bad faith, and don’t think the additional loss of transparency is justified especially given the problematic behavior of certain taxonomic curators on this site.
the taxonomy mention is just linked to an ongoing issue where site moderation is mixed into the same curator account type as those who are doing taxonomic curation.
I no longer support experienced users being able to see who hid their comment, I have become aware of sockpuppet harassment from users with many hundreds of observations
so flaggers won’t face consequences from non curators (deserved or undeserved ones) for flagging things.
I stopped being a curator because i disagreed with a moderation decision that was taken, but i now regret it because functionality is being taken away from non-curators. The moderation issues haven’t been fixed either.
My personal two cents- in the past I have almost never flagged copyright violations, inappropriate content, bullying, etc., when I’ve seen it, specifically because I don’t want the violator to come after me when they see I’ve flagged their content. There have been several cases brought up on the forum recently of the people trying to flag inappropriate content subsequently getting targeted themselves by sockpuppet accounts (I believe the topic was removed to prevent the trolls from getting attention). I’m not aware of any social media platform that gives an offender a list of the people who reported them for inappropriate content so they know who to target and harass. I work at a school, and it’s pretty much common knowledge that if you want bullying to be reported, you have to provide ways to report it anonymously, because if the bully knows who reported them, they’ll become the next target. I’m not about to go reporting some kid on iNat for copyright violation when they’re uploading photos from Google for a school project if I know they can see my name on the flag and start trolling me. That’s a trade-off that’s not worth it IMO.
I would be open to preventing very new users from seeing the flagger given the amount of sockpuppet harassment I have seen, but I still think widely preventing non-curators from seeing the flagger would be extremely problematic
You are spot on. You know what you’re talking about. If the suckpuppet dude harasses you, why can’t he just be banned?? What’s the biggie is he does anyways. You can mute him or something. Or just ignore him.