What's the askville 16 fiasco?

I am not sure – but ask @daloon i think he was the one who mentioned it here?

sigh

Askville is another Q&A site. It has moderators in name only. After over year of no real moderation, the team decided to step in and stop the continually escalating flame wars. It was basically 16 against 1 or 2, but the 1 kept instigating things. Anyway, because everyone had behaved poorly, people on both sides were suspended. However, the mechanism for choosing who to suspend was beyond bizarre and to this day some people have no idea why they were chosen. It was a fantastic example of very poorly implemented moderation.

The number 16 is meant to be a slight against the 1 person who tended to stir stuff up.

This was approximately a year ago and prompted a rather large migration of Askville users to Fluther. However once users come to Fluther, we generally try to blend in with the crowd and it is considered distasteful to continually talk about other (inferior) Q&A sites.

And before you ask, wis.dm is a Q&A site that shut down operations. Many of the members chose to migrate here for their Q&A needs after it did so.

@boredascanbe21 – sorry for the sigh.

However, if you like your site unmoderated, you can always move to Askville.

The red curtain of anonymity is gone. Yay!

@Darwin, it isn’t referred to ASSVILLE sarcastically for no apparent reason.

And for what it’s worth, some of us didn’t leave because of AV16, that was just one piece of the puzzle. I gave them a chance to learn from their mistakes, they did not. The moderation was basically, if you complained about someone, and they found out and complained about you, even though you were just trying to get the mods off their asses and do something about a troll, when they were forced to act, they basically cast a wide net and punished everyone. Those of us who were adults decided we didn’t need to be back in 3rd grade.

A link that appears to the right, on my screen, is sort of an unedited documentary of the incident.

http://www.fluther.com/disc/19670/have-you-or-your-friends-been-suspended-from-askville/

Two of Askville’s management team have recently left – under circumstances as yet undetermined. Things may improve now, but an awful lot of damage has occurred in the last year, and it won’t be easily undone. You could think of Askville as the Love Canal of Q&A sites…

@IchtheosaurusRex does that mean the Askville River is going to catch on fire?

@evelyns_pet_zebra , you are thinking of the Cuyahoga. That’s in my home state of Ohio, although I can say that I’m not from Cleveland.

@evelyns_pet_zebra I don’t know if the river will catch fire, but from the constant voodoo I’ve been doing the team members might be losing a few minor appendages. Maybe the reason “the mayor” bailed was because it worked. >:D

The AV16, or technically 17, was the scandal last August where many people, me included, were suspended for one week for incurring the ire of the 17th person. The number 16 is used because those were the people standing up against or otherwise coming into conflict with the 17th who generally instigated and made people feel the need to stand up to her. However, if they had suspended everyone that she had come into conflict with, there would have been about 14 regular users, a bunch of new users, and people who signed in once or twice and never came back on the site and everyone else would have taken a week off because that user was so heinous, cruel, vindictive, bitter, and just a mean old witch who had a problem with everything and everyone. Suspensions were, in some cases, arbitrary and unfair (though some people figured they’d earned them and some people were surprised they weren’t on “the list”). Those two words can pretty much describe the entire moderation system at Askville, including different punishments for different people for the same behavior or coming down hard on one for less when another gets away with much, much more. Absent is the other description that fits well. The “moderators” wait until something blows up or over and then comes in and removes comments and sometimes sends out stern notes. It took two days for an anonymous question asking about if the picture showed a need for a nose job posted with a link to my myspace page was taken down, despite an astronomical number of reports about the invasion of my privacy. The user who posted that was also removed from the site at the same time as well as other of her comments that showed her to be another horrendous person intent on spreading misery and engendering conflict.

Its a really screwed up site, but there are (used to be more) a lot of good and fun people on there. Its been pretty much abandoned of late, people mostly seem to be going back out of habit. As for me, I’m not allowed back (that 17th user and I came into conflict too many times and I got kicked off when she started a rampage with calling me a drug addict because I take prescription pain pills in the correct way) but I find my way back from time to time. It entertains me to sneak in and I’m waiting on my award for the most reincarnated user to come in the form of a broken coffee mug or something similar. ;)

Fiasco was a good word for it though. It changed the site for the worse, speeding up things that were going downhill like they greased ‘em.

@avvooooooo – you go, girl!

Yeah, “the mayor” went to run a Bible group. Wonder if he went to be protected by prayer power… >;D

I was booted off Askville within 10min saying I violated community rules. I had been on it before and had no problem than in one day they deleted 9 of my answers and could never find out why. Since I also have other accounts on other sites that are similar I just filed a complaint with Amazon.com that someone was going over board. Imagine getting 9 answers were deleted in a row within 10mins of each. Being a social worker I used resources in my answers that I refer to everyday so I do not have any clue on what I did wrong. I do know it was a moderator for Askville so I know Someone there has a power trip that is they don’t like someone they just delete as much of their answers so they will be booted off.

I not only imagine having multiple answers being deleted, I can one-up you….

My first four answers were deleted in the middle of the night in a single minute, and I was “indefinitely suspended” for advertising. ONE minute! Middle of the night.

So, the next morning I woke up to a totally suspended account, and not even the possibility of appeal. I suppose I could attempt to make a new account just to ask about this one-minute indefinite ban of a ‘newbie’—but, from what I read there, that too is a violation of their rules.

Askville says there cannot be ‘unsolicited advertising.’ Well, how do you answer a question about your favorite website and post a link without it being advertising? And if you do, wouldn’t that be ‘solicited’? Does it matter that you are answering a question? Advertising or not, the relevant answer to a question is not unsolicited. Askville is full of advertisements. Most of it is exactly that.

Askville says “Askville’s business model is tied to generating revenues based on the content that is created on this site.” So, the entire site is ONE BIG ADVERTISEMENT! The links I posted actually linked-back to amazon products too (in addition to having unique and relevant content to answer questions). The site is one big ad for amazon, but links that include amazon products are not allowed. Strange.

Askville also says they want to “Make newbies feel more welcomed to Askville.” I DON’T FEEL WELCOME! I am banned!

From what I’ve read here, long-time users were suddenly banned. Well, they are banning ‘newbies’ too. Who’s not banned?

I might consider linking to the above quoted askville pages, but that would undermine askville’s own ‘no unsolicited advertising’ policy. So, you can find the quotes at google. Far be it from me to advertise askville when its own policy says no!

I was summarily cut off, without appeal, in a one-minute review, in the middle of the night.