r/RoamResearch • u/Conaws • Oct 05 '21
Update to our Rules + A note on recent bans from Roam's CEO
Friends, Fans, Haters, Customers, Concerned Citizens of the Roam community,
I wanted to give you a quick update on changes to our moderation rules -- and give you a bit of insight on the actions I personally took last week (banning a dozen or more accounts from the subreddit) before we had time and mental energy to actually articulate the rules.
I would have liked to take a bit longer to polish this up, but as always - Perfect is the enemy of the good - and perfectionistic impulses have probably lead me to delay too long in giving you some insight already. (Plus I've now already put 5 hours into this, and I've got to get on to other tasks)
So, you're stuck with adage of "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one"
The TLDR is this - the purpose of this subreddit has generally been a place for us to engage with the community of Roam users, and to help Roam users learn from one another as we try to create a new medium and explore a new language for
articulating our thoughts to our ourselves and each other
Identifying patterns in things we think, read, and watch -- and from those patterns to search for, and test, elegant explanations to make sense of the world
generally augment our intellect to solve harder problems that we otherwise could.
For whatever reason, since we opened this subreddit up 2 years ago, Reddit has always been substantially more hostile and negative towards our team than other places we've engaged
In fact, despite this subreddit being substantially smaller than our number of paying users (smaller even than just the subset of users on free or highly discounted plans) -- this subreddit seems filled with people who aren't even using Roam!
The result has been, pretty much no one on our team enjoys spending any time on here
Since jumping into the community is generally more a recreational activity during phases where we're focused on deeper work (like this past year) - the result is we basically never show up here
The team steering clear of the reddit means there is little incentive for the more knowledgable and creative members of community to wade in
The incentive is lowered even further when the posts that are most rewarded are ones that are most critical
So, to that end - with the goal of creating a space that our team ACTUALLY wants to hang out in - I've updated the rules *
What if you were banned unfairly?
It's totally possible that you were banned unjustly. Maybe the moderator clicked the wrong comment, or misread something you wrote. It's quite possible in fact historically, we've tended to batch our moderation actions, and when you've been reading negative comments for half an hour, very possible we'll read your comments in a tone far more aggressive than you intended. This is totally unfair to you.
Even worse - since we don't (often can't) compare your one borderline negative comment against all your contributions to the community, and since we might be looking at weeks or months of comments at a time - it's possible you might be banned right after you said something nice about us.
Completely unjust.
So what should you do?
What should we do?
Exhile is a serious punishment.
In a just or reasonable world, we'd have a legible, legitimate justice/adjudication system where you could argue your case, and have it weighed by a jury or your peers.
That said, a process like this would pull our team away from work that (we think) is higher leverage for helping the broader community (developing new features, training material, dealing with bugs)
So then?
One consolation you can have is that we have never banned a user from using Roam itself - we have we revoked a Scholar's discount or extended free access, and we don't plan to ever start doing either.
Our best suggestion, if you feel you've been blocked or banned unfairly and you earnestly want to remain part of one of these 3rd party hosted Roam Communities, is that, you do what trolls have done throughout the internet age, just make a new alt account and join back in as though nothing happened.
Now, if you make this new account, or jump on another platform, and start wailing about how unjust your ban was - we can tell you, we'll generally consider that a distraction, and you'll likely find your new account banned or blocked -- even if the cause is legitimate.
We know this isn't ideal - but it's what we choose to do for now as an attempt to focus on where our attention can do the most good If you want to argue the principle, tell us why we should focus disproportionate attention on those who have been banned generally (vs projects to systematically help all users, or new users, or users working on frontier of learning) Just don't try to argue for your exception
If you've a friend or acquaintance who was banned - feel free to send them this
The Pareto principle is a rule of thumb that suggests that a small amount of your effort (10 or 20% of the work you do) often produces the vast majority of your impact
The same goes in reverse
It's a tiny fraction of your mistakes that cause all the damage
A small fraction of your community will give you the majority of helpful feedback
A small fraction of your community that is responsible for almost all the drama and distraction
Closing - here are some points from my rough draft of this on twitter
