well said!
Fair play: Reporting insults proper?
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:) I wonder if any chess.com staff people reads this, I'd love to hear what they think about it. Or Is there another place to post it? I guess they do since it has to be with benefit for all comunity.
I dislike censorship in all its forms. Just putting that out there.
I don't insult my opponents and I rarely get insulted myself, but if you are insulted the proper action is simply to block the user. Asking a third party to censor and punish them for their speech is abhorrent.
Remember, the only speech that NEEDS protection is speech that offends someone - completely inoffensive speech needs no protection because no one will try to censor it. So if free speech means anything at all, it means protecting offensive speech. You do not have a right not to be offended. If someone says something you don't like, just don't listen.
This is a swamp. Phrases get easy dangerous. I would agree that the only speech that NEEDS protection is speech that dissents, that thwarts the interests of someone else. Completely non-dissenting speech needs no protection because no one will try to censor it. Offending is something that has no need of being protected, dissension yes, I would say. Is it possible to dissent without offending? Ideally, yes. Double negated sentences get more clear when translated to affirmative aspect: "you do not have a right not to be offended" could be translated to "We, I and the others, have the right to offend you". The practical question of protecting against offenses is another thing: chess.com hasn't the practical means to protect anyone. To write commandments must have been a hard task."Thou shalt not kill" has not been followed as practical guidance, but "Thou art not entitled to the right of not being killed" would have been worse, I suppose. In an ideal civilized world there would be no killings, no offenses. In an ideal savage world there's no need of social protection, courts, mediators, laws, rights, everyone is strong, resilient and has all brave marks. The difficulties arise when we discover that we aren't savages anymore, even not being civilized yet. Direct confrontations, fight, struggles, have been successfully substituted by courts, mediation and the like. Asking a third party to at least consider the facts, leaving such party free to condone, absolve, praise, condemn, punish, reward, according rules, is an advance, to my mind, not automatically abhorrent. But I agree that the best practical trick to face offenders is really to block them.
Wow, I disagreed with almost everything you said. Your words in italics:
Phrases get easy dangerous
Phrases are NOT dangerous by themselves, it is actions people take that are dangerous. Without free speech you have no free thought, no free society.
Offending is something that has no need of being protected, dissension yes, I would say. Is it possible to dissent without offending? Ideally, yes.
Hell no! If offensive speech is censored, all it takes is for some political or religious or business entity to claim your dissent offends them, giving them free license to censor you until all dissent is impossible. In truth most dissent DOES offend someone, as it should be.
Double negated sentences get more clear when translated to affirmative aspect: "you do not have a right not to be offended" could be translated to "We, I and the others, have the right to offend you".
Which we absolutely do, because we have the right to free speech. If you don't like being offended, no one is forcing you to listen.
Berder you have no such right. This is no state in your Union.
You have a sacred cow. A wise man would get rid of it.
Ha!
Better head for the high hills, Berder.
We don't like your kind.
Free speech doesn't exist, least of all on a private forum.
johnyoudell wrote:
Berder you have no such right. This is no state in your Union.
You have a sacred cow. A wise man would get rid of it.
Everyone, universally, has an inherent right to free speech and free thought. In some societies this right is infringed, but you still have it by virtue of being a thinking, concious human being, just like you have a right not to be murdered or raped even if you live in a lawless society. It's a damn shame that in some places powerful interests have managed to deny the exercise of these rights to the people.
Berder wrote:
Everyone, universally, has an inherent right to free speech and free thought. In some societies this right is infringed, but you still have it by virtue of being a thinking, concious human being, just like you have a right not to be murdered or raped even if you live in a lawless society. It's a damn shame that in some places powerful interests have managed to deny the exercise of these rights to the people.
Every as far as I know, as it should be.
Name one where it isn't?
And even if it was, why should it be mandatory on a private forum?
Fire!
Scottrf wrote:
Berder wrote:
Everyone, universally, has an inherent right to free speech and free thought. In some societies this right is infringed, but you still have it by virtue of being a thinking, concious human being, just like you have a right not to be murdered or raped even if you live in a lawless society. It's a damn shame that in some places powerful interests have managed to deny the exercise of these rights to the people.
Name one where it isn't?
First you name a society where murder and rape don't happen.
And even if it was, why should it be mandatory on a private forum?
There is a reasonable argument to be made here that private entities have the right to regulate the speech of individuals made through those entities, however it is still censorship. Private entities such as ISPs and phone companies control most of the internet, where a vast amount of human communication goes on. If you censor people everywhere on the internet, you are censoring human communication in general.
I believe the solution is that private entities should be able to regulate any speech that THEY THEMSELVES make and sign off on, such as a newspaper that regulates its articles or a TV network that decides what shows to broadcast, but if the entity is being used as a public forum then free speech should apply, for the same reasons free speech applies on public property. It's a shame this is not in practice done.
Your arguments make no sense. None. Whatsoever.
Controlled speech is fine in a sensible society. Chess.com are trying to make the website appropriate for children and pleasant for people that don't want to read offensive writing.
Sentences that don't contain both nouns and verbs offend me.
I'm off to file an abuse report.
Berder wrote:
I dislike censorship in all its forms. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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yeah dude
I find interesting that people get offended when a random person on internet insults them.
I support (even celebrate) the idea of free speech. I note that both Berder and I fly the same flag next to our names.
But note that the legal principle of free speech does not apply to a private internet website. This leaves the idea of whether the site owner and management wish to have such a value for their site.
I believe that more data is good data. I believe that there is wisdom in crowds. So I support the idea of enabling users to report other users for perceived abusive behavior. (1)
I also believe that abuse is in the eye of the receiver. There are so many variables: space, time, mood, the game just played (and how it went), whether anybody else is watching. It's a very difficult problem do detect programatically, which is why the best attempts seem to be around black lists of words or phrases (more generically, strings). I haven't heard of a site utilizing regular expressions but it makes sense in this regard. Also, it would make sense for a site which employed these technologies to maintain a count of how often their users hit the black list. One way for the site to have settings around this is for every user to have a filter setting, so that someone writing some insult gets translated to something like "you are a !@#$@". It is of course possible to set your filter to 0, so that you would see all content unfiltered. The default setting would be somewhere in the middle.
I also believe that the site should have consistent standards for censorship, regardless of the site area, and regardless of which moderator, if any, is applying the standards. Inconsistency is extremely difficult and frustrating for users.
For me, I consider endpoints before I consider where to draw the line in the middle. So if there is a completely abusive user, one who insults opponents mercilessly (but only when they lose of course), then this is someone who does not contribute a net positive to the site. I think that such an individual has a potential to turn off many other users to the site. So a system of sanctions makes sense to me. What remains is a question of degree.
So in conclusion, I support automated data-gathering to maintain consistency, I support crowdsourced thumbs up/thumbs down style (2) to improve the site black lists and to sketch out an "abuse graph". I support behind-the-scenes abuse scoring invisible to the users. Lastly, I support a moderator-accessible tool which centralizes the sanctioning of users.
-- Ozzie
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1: One interesting side effect of such a reporting system occurs when the site simply is in "accumulating data" mode. If such a mode lasts for a long time, then users may get jaded, thinking that they can report, but nothing ever gets done about it.
2: But it has to be SIMPLE! It has to be on the same page you're on (sort of like "track this forum topic"), it can't be oh well you want to report abuse, then click here, okay now what was the name of the user, okay cut & paste the text that transpired, okay now cut & paste the URL, etc etc etc. The site can (should be able to) do all of the behind-the-scenes data gathering.
ozzie_c_cobblepot wrote:
One way for the site to have settings around this is for every user to have a filter setting, so that someone writing some insult gets translated to something like "you are a !@#$@". It is of course possible to set your filter to 0, so that you would see all content unfiltered. The default setting would be somewhere in the middle.
If you get offended by "you are a (actual word here)" you will get offended by "you are a !@#$@". It is the same thing, is like I'm insulting you in a different language and you know that I'm insulting you.
I think chess.com is a nice place for people interested in chess, unfortunatelly a considerable amount of players, are unnecessarily rude or agressive, insulting opponent in chat window, what's a real pitty. Since I understand chess.com is interested in fair play policy, is there a way to report players with such a behaviour?
I already know you can disable chat, but that's not the point. I belive a person that insults his/her opponent should be penalized to make sure chess.com be a nice place to fair play players.
Thank you.