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Forum moderation and white supremacists/neo nazi/etc

I think your second point is a bit lacking. This isn't discussing the case of "unintended encounters" but rather the case of a user of your forums specifically and explicitly targeting other users in order to skirt your forum rules. In such a case does their attacking other posters not prove their comments on the forum are in bad faith? Again this isn't asking mods to police other areas, but to keep the forums operating on the ideas of a welcoming community and good faith discussion. If a user of this forum tracks down another to attack them for their //posts in this forum// then how is that not under your purview? Because the end result of that is that one of those people will most likely leave the forum, and do you want it to be the one chasing others away or the one simply trying to avoid being harassed for speaking here?

What it is about, though, is identifying toxic individuals. Like I said earlier in this thread, a white supremacist is inherently toxic to this community, is an individual motivated by hatred, and no matter what sort of rules you have in place, they will push up against them. If you learn that someone is a white supremacist, then banning them right away will save you the time and effort of instead banning them later after they've used their xth racist dogwhistle, and will make the community better.

There's an important distinction TastySub.....if someone is bothering or even just annoying you or me or anyone else on a platform like twitter, a mute or a block is a few clicks away. With a message forum like this one that ability rarely if ever exists for the user, hence the need for strong moderation.

Though if there were evidence of a literal harassment campaign orchestrated by a member vs another, that'd be something to act on in my view. Hopefully that scenario will never come up.

The reason I'm here is to make ensure that these forums are a place where the discussion is high quality, proceeds smoothly, and is on-topic.

I do not think it is, or should be, our responsibility to make a judgment about who is or is not a 'toxic individual' as a general statement. The reason I'm here is to make ensure that these forums are a place where the discussion is high quality, proceeds smoothly, and is on-topic. Thus, I am going to enforce standards of behavior for the posting actions of the people on here. I really do not want to be the morality police, and I certainly don't want to engage in what is essentially trying to change what people's opinions are and what views they feel comfortable expressing by making people feel social costs for having them. That's a really bad way to change the general consensus, and I really don't like the rising trend of using it, so I do not want to be a part of that.

Galap wrote:

The reason I'm here is to make ensure that these forums are a place where the discussion is high quality, proceeds smoothly, and is on-topic.

When there are multiple ANN writers reporting that they modify or avoid expressing certain views in their articles out of fear of reprisal by the members of this forum, I feel pretty safe in arguing that in your role as a moderator, you have failed in 'The reason you're here'.

Now you expect us to monitor every twitter account for every staff member here for attacks and personal insults? Not only that you expect us to play Sherlock Holmes and deduce who there on shitter MIGHT be someone here? Are you freaking nuts? Tell you what, when you pay my mortgage and car payment so I can waste hours a day doing that then I'll consider it. The other big caveat to that whole idea is how do you expect us to PROVE who might be tweeting is a particular poster here without them either saying the identical thing word for word, or flat out admitting it?

And yeah, maybe you SHOULD get paid? The moderator's are in a current in a situation where you've agreed to perform work for a corporation entirely for free. You don't see the writers falling for that 'Do it for free, because you love anime!' scam. However that is neither here nor there for this thread.

Unless they are paid staff in some other capacity in my experiences elsewhere moderators on web forums are more often than not volunteers. Most online web forums that require them are not even companies that generate revenue to begin with. It's not some "scam" we were somehow tricked into like you're suggesting. There is also a huge difference between what we do and the reviewers or columnists who create a product to be used by ANN as a company. We are not creating a product that will used to generate revenue and further the brand of this company.

Across the board, the advertising landscape has become much more challenging for small-medium sized publishers like ANN. Companies are getting much more demanding, their budgets are getting much more constrained, and cut-throat competition and networks are bringing prices down. The result is that publishers need to look for revenue from different places, and one of those places is from our readers. It's not just ANN, you're seeing it everywhere in media. This is the way things are in 2018, the 100%-ad-supported model just doesn't work like it used to.

As for ANN's exact financial situation, I can't divulge it. What I can say is that our cashflow was quite negative in 2017. We finished the year with a lot less money in the bank than we started with. To be fair, this was actually planned and expected. Our plans were to spend a lot of money of development in 2017, and we did that. Unfortunately, we also earned much less revenue from advertising than we expected, so the deficit at the end of the year was more significant than expected.

ANN isn't going to go bankrupt in 2018. But if we have another year like 2017, we'll have no choice but to make unfortunate changes at ANN. Maybe that means more invasive advertising, maybe it means paywalls, maybe it means cutting expenses, or god forbid, maybe it means cutting payroll.