Can we enable an option in discourse to be able to see hidden comments? I (and I’m sure many others) perceive inability do see what is being hidden as straight-up censorship. Hidden comments on Github allow this. Similarly on Twitter. Why can’t we do this on nix discourse?
When a post is hidden, it’s a sign “you might not want to see it”; it’s a sign primarily for more sensitive people, or generally a warning that the content might be sensitive. I personally still do want to know what is being hidden. Especially in a community like Nix where politics often get into dicussions. I want to know if a post was hidden because Moderation Team / community (by flagging) is disagreeing on political basis or it’s just harassment/abuse. It’s an important distinction!
It’s been a couple of times that I’ve seen a flagged post that has many (>20) hearts, but being hidden. Or a hidden comment by a known community members (leaders), I don’t believe they made an abusive post, why would they risk getting banned? Let people form opinion on what leaders say, especially if these are bad things.
Even more so, comments have been notoriously hidden by accumulating enough flags from the community. Mods have been mentioning couple times that flags feature being abused, and until a mod manually unflags it, there’s no way to see it, even if it was hidden based on people disagreeing on just politics.
My experience from the time when our Discourse would only fold and not actually hide flagged comments, is that the discussions would carry on as if the flags were not there at all, devolving the conversation into name calling and personal attacks. I support the current configuration
Hidden posts are viewable for people with a sufficient Discourse trust level. The reason for this setting is that too many people were replying to hidden posts, defeating the purpose of the feature.
Does that answer mean anything to anyone who doesn’t have that ability? Meaning, is there a Discourse page that describes these levels, etc? I can’t seem to even see my own “level” (at least on mobile)?
What trust level is that, and what are the criteria for receiving it?
You’ve probably ignored it since it’s integrated into the gamification stuff, which y’know, fair. It’s definitely a strange UI choice.
I think this discourse just uses the defaults, but you can check your “badges” for details.
I think I dropped to TL2 for a while and didn’t notice unhiding disappearing (just the lounge which is empty anyway), but I don’t know for sure if that’s the threshold.
Appreciate the answer. However, that page doesn’t seem to contain information about what level “viewing hidden posts” is at. From further looking, it seems it maybe defaults to TL4, but is also somewhat configurable.
Anyway, I simply know that I was able to view them for … years, and now cannot. Maybe it is/was at TL3 and I slipped back down to <TL3.
Anyway, we don’t need to belabor this, it is what it is. Thanks all.
I was once able to see them. I’m not sure if I ever got to TL3 and then dropped (which would make seeing the posts be a TL3 ability), or if it was because at the time any member could see them (or at least TL2, I definitely did not see them when I started).
I think it is a problem if they got moved to TL4 (which very few can access, effectively censoring the post). I might misunderstand who can get to TL4 though.
If I understand things correctly, there’s also an automation deletion of hidden posts, so even saving the thread to read it later when trust level is increased might not work. By then, the content has been deleted.
Maybe we should also focus on reducing the need to hide posts?
This is a less careful reply than I’d like to post, but I want to close this tab in the browser:)
Evidently, because “we” do not trust “ourselves”.
Not without cause. However I think this is still wrong.
Sorry, the reality is way more prosaic:)
Well they call it “Discourse”.
Yes, unfortunately. Now we’re hiding the ugliness from the frontpage. Glad to hear this made you feel better. I’m not sure, however, this did anything at all as to help with the feelings and the disagreements that drove the others into these cycles of unhealthy behaviour in the first place. I’m also quite confident, that this feature has been a source of at least some new negative emotions.
May be good to remember that “we”, as a “community”, have never made any decisions about this. We simply rolled on with an upstream update. IIRC Martin briefly considered this change and decided to keep the feature “on”, which he could because he’s the one doing the maintenance work. We didn’t have better tools anyway, and flagging is some way to signal people when it’s time to disengage.
I wouldn’t know if the Moderation team had any internal discussions about the “feature”, but even then it would have been a decision of the specific people working in the team at the time, and thus only relevant for as long as they stay in the team.
@rszyma For the meantime, the way to “keep the receipts” is to use the ML mode. As to preventing verbal fights, maybe "New users" are restricted on discourse could do a better job than the current solution
This post got moved to the moderation category (which doesn’t show it when looking for unread ones), but there’s already a similar post: Cannot view flagged content anymore
