qwertyytrewq Wrote:The above is a potentially endless debate. Which is why I prefer to simplify it: I am a supporter of equality. Either everyone/all groups of people is a target of offense, or we offend no-one. We can't pick and choose the same way Christians pick and choose which parts they like or dislike from the Bible.

How about tagging stories by which groups of people they offend, and let people choose which kinds of offensive stories they don't want to see?

yudantaiteki Wrote:That would be the judgment of the administrator; it's not as impossible an issue as you seem to think.

Then my question is for the administrator:

qwertyytrewq Wrote:For example: women and fat people. Would you argue that offending women is not okay but offending fat people is acceptable and how would you justify your answer? I use these two examples because the former cannot usually be changed while the latter can (by exercising).

Vempele Wrote:How about tagging stories by which groups of people they offend, and let people choose which kinds of offensive stories they don't want to see?

So basically, in this case, the site would allow people to customize their own prejudice settings?

EG. "As a black man learning Japanese using the Heisig method, I find stories about my fellow niggers offensive. But man, those stories about crackers are a hoot! And they make the Kanji very memorable to boot!"
*Black people offense settings: OFF*
*White people offense settings: ON*

Based on past posts on this forum, some people want this site to be more mainstream and family friendly. How exactly would this feature promote equality? I can see it already...

COMING NEXT ON FOX NEWS. CUSTOMIZING YOUR RACISM. THE RACIST JAPANESE KANJI LEARNING WEBSITE THAT PROMOTES RACISM AND SEGREGATION.

qwertyytrewq Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:That would be the judgment of the administrator; it's not as impossible an issue as you seem to think.

Then my question is for the administrator:

qwertyytrewq Wrote:For example: women and fat people. Would you argue that offending women is not okay but offending fat people is acceptable and how would you justify your answer? I use these two examples because the former cannot usually be changed while the latter can (by exercising).

Vempele Wrote:How about tagging stories by which groups of people they offend, and let people choose which kinds of offensive stories they don't want to see?

So basically, in this case, the site would allow people to customize their own prejudice settings?

EG. "As a black man learning Japanese using the Heisig method, I find stories about my fellow niggers offensive. But man, those stories about crackers are a hoot! And they make the Kanji very memorable to boot!"
*Black people offense settings: OFF*
*White people offense settings: ON*

Based on past posts on this forum, some people want this site to be more mainstream and family friendly. How exactly would this feature promote equality? I can see it already...

COMING NEXT ON FOX NEWS. CUSTOMIZING YOUR RACISM. THE RACIST JAPANESE KANJI LEARNING WEBSITE THAT PROMOTES RACISM AND SEGREGATION.

With the kind of agenda Faux News has, I doubt the headline would look like that. It'd be much more believable if the the headline went like this:
USERS OF A LEARNING SITE ATTEMPT TO DEFEND THEIR RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH
Not to make them look good, but Fox is much more likely to ignore what the issue actually is and make it something to do with the Bill of Rights and the poor people who just want to say what they want without people getting butthurt.

The problem with 'offensive' stories is that everyone has a different threshold where content becomes offensive. Some of us, like myself, really don't get offended at this kind of thing; someone came up with that story because it helped the kanji stick in their memory, why should I care about what makes it that way? If I don't like it, I only have to look at it once to know and then ignore it.

If it helps form your opinion of me, I'm white and am one of those people that, in real life, finds discrimination (including 'reverse-racism') a disgusting side of human behavior that I just can't understand (everyone has prejudiced thoughts, but you don't have to act on them). However, I don't consider jokes to be discrimination, even if they have prejudiced or stereotypical content; there is no action taken against the target of the joke that harms or prevents them from having particular social ability. Some jokes are in really bad taste, but I can just ignore them instead of bringing a thread back from the dead to complain that my feelings are hurt by people on the internet.
If there were a story that was based around the idea that people that don't go to church are all *something bad*, I'd just ignore it, unless it was particularly funny, in which case I'd use it.

If any action needs to be taken, I find the option to automatically hide stories with too many reports, but allow people to view them if they want, to be the most agreeable; nobody here needs to be babied, we can decide what we do and don't want to see without the admin breaking his back to censor every potentially offensive story.

Flamerokz Wrote:Maybe just default to a forum "spoiler"-behavior sort of thing for any stories which surpass a certain report threshold (i.e. default to having them hidden, but allow a user to reveal - a little like reddit comments?). Allow this setting to be enabled/disabled via user settings. This seems to be somewhat of a reasonable compromise.

I like this idea the best. I was thinking of like 5 reports or ~30% of the favorite count, whichever results in a larger number, and after that point, it would auto-hide the story (but in a reversible way, so people can still see it if they really want). Also, it should give a message like "story hidden from too many reports".

I'd also support the use of a NSFW filter, and it could be a settings thing whether to show those or not. That would be something the user could set while making the post, but to deal with all the old ones, we'd probably need another feature, since those people are probably long gone.. It could be like a NSFW request button on other people's stories, and if there's a large number of them, some moderator could come in and manually put the filter on the old story.

I'm not saying this all needs to happen, just thinking out loud... It seems to me that the story section could be as minimally-offensive as possible with just a few extra tweaks.

Does anyone really care?

I agree with whoever said that it is fine to use grossly offensive stories but that we shouldn't post them on a public site. That said I have come across nothing particularly scary except the infamous magnet story and that only because the previous thread on this subject told me about it.

Although I didn't keep track of those I encountered, I did stumble upon stories that were in clear violation of Heisig's copyright, as the stories came almost directly from the text. While not inappropriate in the offensive sense of the word, they are still inappropriate for the site, and there should be a way to identify and remove them from public view.

I finished RTK long ago, but it would have been nice if I had some sort of way to filter out the more indecent stories for me only. I don't mind keeping them on the site, but it would have been nice to hide them, so I didn't need to sort through all the R-rated posts just to find a story idea, doing that made me feel really unwelcome, like if I didn't appreciate that kind of humor maybe I should just leave. Some of the friends I told about the site were kind of turned off by them too.

Some people should tell (order???) the Japanese to delete 奥尻島 or even 近畿地方 - they both sound somewhat kinky.

Haych Wrote:

ktcgx Wrote:

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:Well...yes and no. I doubt there are many Puritans on this site. Some of us, however, are concerned with ensuring that this site remains open and friendly to people of all genders, races, religions, and sexual preferences. I would hope any story that left users feeling marginalized (racist jokes, overly violent stories, sexist content) would be removed. This is a forum for learning, not a boy's locker room.

Totally agree with you there.

However, I don't think that auto hiding stories is a good idea. It's too easy for stories to be wrongly hidden, or wrongly remain visible. I feel like this is something that mods should look at on a case by case basis.

Well if they are gonna do it on a case by case basis, a good place to start would be right here:

http://kanji.koohii.com/study/kanji/magnet

Totally agree about no auto-censorship. I'm also wary of mods arbitrarily deciding what's acceptable and what's not. Let people decide for themselves whether a story works for them or doesn't. We don't have to like the mindset that goes into any given story in order to find it useful. These aren't policy prescriptions. They are tools. Lets look at this example:

Character: 如 Story: "a *woman*'s *mouth* has the likeness of a vaccum cleaner, it's noisy and all it's good for is sucking. Do not confuse with {114}. Likeness is purely conceptual, whereas resemblance refers to actual physical similarities.

Clearly an offensive mindset, if one assumes the person is sincere, which of course we can never know. If the latter is the case, I would certainly never hang out with this person, who ever s/he is. That said, I actually found the vacuum imagery pretty effective and I haven't forgotten the kanji since reading this story. That, is the whole point. Not how it makes me feel inside. Reading about nazi atrocities doesn't make anyone feel warm and fuzzy either. Does that mean we should remove WWII details from our history curriculum? The story above, not surprisingly, has a high number of flags, but also many stars. If we used the proposed ratio-method and automatically removed it, we would be denying its utility to all the users for whom it worked-- in other words, defeating the very purpose of this website.

[ファブリス]

Guys

I havent' had time to read everything yet.

I do care about this issue. I just never came up with an elegant, simple solution.

As you can see in this old mockup I made in 2009, I think a "helpfulness" ratio and sorting of stories based on vote/reports is the less complicated way to address this in the short term.

(that mockup as you can see was brainstorming other complex feature such as multi lingual support, and improving quality of stories where people do not format anything)

--edit old screenshot deleted--

I guess it's just that whenever motivation is there, I could always think of something more interesting or fun to work on. So it never really got the attention it requires.

But... I do think it's time to address it. So we'll see maybe I can work on this after the flashcard update.

So one approach

* add a new "bookmark" icon (which is what "star" does atm)

* replace "star" with "yes" and "report" with "no", and add the label somewhere "Was this story helpful?"

This basically avoid the issue of judging the content of a story entirely and of having to draw lines and simply vote whether the story is helpful or not. It is subjective, as it should be. There is no objective "worth" for any mnemonic, other than simple criteria based on formatting, presence of typos, naming of exact primitives and such.

With a "helpfulness" ratio it is up to each user to decide what criteria matters to them.

The next part which I'm not very good at, is figuring the proper formula to compute a ratio of helpful/unhelpful votes and sort stories so that unvoted stories are in the middle, helpful ones on top (despite having some downvotes), and unhelpful ones at the bottom.

Once we add paging then unhelpful stories are for the most part out of sight. They're there. We avoid the moderation issue entirely.

Gotchas

One thing I'm not convinced about is to show stories in collapsed view. Everytime I see this on YouTube or Reddit I can't help it but I like to unhide them, because I know sometimes people are downvoted for no good reason. Other times I Just have fun reading the raging posts.

But my point is, I feel it uncomfortable to have something shown to me that teases me "hey this is probably bad but you don't have to look at it!".

In terms of user experience I think it's bad. I'd much rather have these stories off view entirely so my attention remains focused.

Perhaps if you rate a story "unhelpful", despite it being only one vote (let's say it's a new shared story).. perhaps I can make it so that your own votes have a ton of weight so they will always drop to the end of the list. They are still there should you want to review some of them or undo an unintended vote.


Further thoughts

I'd like to say also I think self-moderation, flagging stories as "mature" as in the mockup, is not a good idea at all. First of all it is almost certainly not going to work because a lot of users simply don't care.

Secondly, it creates a sense that creating "mature" stories is somewhat cool or some kind of valuable criteria, when it is not. The idea that suggestive stories work well is frankly moot to me, seeing as it is mostly a matter of being able to connect to the content of the story, and that's what the community sharing of stories is for. You want "MrT" or "Superman" instead of the bland "person"? You got it. "Mr Penis" can live a long life way at the bottom of the shared stories, because for every so called "mature" story (funny that?) we could come up with a million ones that will work just as well without bothering anybody.

tehfriendlyghost Wrote:How come stories that are reported for inappropriate content are not removed?

http://kanji.koohii.com/study/kanji/%E9%9A%BB
The top story for "Vessels" has been reported 77 times, but it's still there. Shouldn't it be deleted?

If it takes too much time to manually delete them, why not have them hidden once there are more than x reports?

Have you tried not reading such stories?

qwertyytrewq Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:stories that are offensive towards particular groups.

Which groups in particular? IE. which groups are okay to offend, and which groups are not okay to offend?

It's not OK to offend anyone. Except gingers, but that's because they're not real people.

ファブリス Wrote:The next part which I'm not very good at, is figuring the proper formula to compute a ratio of helpful/unhelpful votes and sort stories so that unvoted stories are in the middle, helpful ones on top (despite having some downvotes), and unhelpful ones at the bottom.

I think I see what you're saying: keep positive feedback as the driving criteria (after all, that's the main purpose of the voting system: to identify the good stories, not to tell us what is and what isn't offensive), except if negative feedback is overwhelming. In that case something IS wrong, it's not just the usual Negative Nellies hating everything that doesn't fit their view of the world perfectly, and it's a good idea to also consider negative feedback.

I would suggest this:
if ((down>5)&&(down/up>1.5)) do("send to the bottom and sort by up/down ratio")
else do("sort by up votes and ignore the down votes, just like before");

Hope you'll consider it. Obviously, the two numbers (5 and 1.5) are an estimation of what might work, I'm not suggesting that's the exact correct cutoff point.

But it would be a shame to allow some of the stories that have huge numbers of up votes go to the bottom (or even be lost in the middle) simply because they had something politically incorrect in them and all the PC/religious drones decided to vote them down. If the down votes really are overwhelming (let's say 1.5 times more than the up votes) then sure, that story deserves to go to the bottom, the few up votes from idiots shouldn't keep it near the top.

If you look at the votes truly offensive and unhelpful (contain cheap vulgarity or ugly racism i.e. "niggers are dirty", "Hitler is my hero") stories get, you'll find that this would be enough to sink them. But it wouldn't affect the good stories that might use a mild, funny racial/ethnic stereotype (i.e. some Chinese eat dog meat - which they do) or dare mention something sexual. There's no reason to bury a story with hundreds of up votes in the middle, just because half the people didn't like it. Those people who hated it can still ignore it, even while allowing those of us who like it to find it easily.

qwertyytrewq Wrote:For example: women and fat people. Would you argue that offending women is not okay but offending fat people is acceptable and how would you justify your answer? I use these two examples because the former cannot usually be changed while the latter can (by exercising).

I've known many people who have struggled with losing weight for years. (Margaret Cho is a famous, public example.) It's not as simple as telling someone "go running, fatass."

To me, it's simple: don't say anything that's intended to malign or stereotype an entire class of people. Or, as Wil Wheaton would say, "Don't be a dick."

[ファブリス]

Stansfield123 Wrote:I think I see what you're saying: keep positive feedback as the driving criteria (after all, that's the main purpose of the voting system: to identify the good stories, not to tell us what is and what isn't offensive), except if negative feedback is overwhelming.

EXACTLY.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:

qwertyytrewq Wrote:For example: women and fat people. Would you argue that offending women is not okay but offending fat people is acceptable and how would you justify your answer? I use these two examples because the former cannot usually be changed while the latter can (by exercising).

I've known many people who have struggled with losing weight for years. (Margaret Cho is a famous, public example.) It's not as simple as telling someone "go running, fatass."

To me, it's simple: don't say anything that's intended to malign or stereotype an entire class of people. Or, as Wil Wheaton would say, "Don't be a dick."

Actually, a lot of research suggests it really is borderline impossible to lose a lot of weight if you've been fat for years. It's a bit easier for men because they can put on a lot of muscle easier. That way not only is their metabolism faster, but because the body can also use muscle as emergency food, their brain doesn't freak out and think that they're dying. When women lose a lot of fat (especially through dieting) their brain usually stays convinced that they're dying of starvation, so their body takes measures to try to regain lost weight (by reducing metabolism, raising hunger, etc.). People more often fail than not when they try to lose weight, and when they do succeed they usually fail to keep the weight off.

Not getting fat is pretty easy, losing fat and keeping it off is suuuuper hard (without gaining a lot of muscle).

At least, that's my very vague understanding of it. I'm not expert though so take it with a grain of salt. There was a TED talk I saw the other day that kind of covered this:

[ファブリス]

Can we please focus on feedback/suggestions in the Feedback forum, thanks.

Tzadeck Wrote:Actually, a lot of research suggests it really is borderline impossible to lose a lot of weight if you've been fat for years.

They should try eating less. Trust me, it'll work.

So what your hypothesis boils down to is that it's borderline impossible to eat less. Demonstrably false. It may be unlikely that people will choose to eat less, but the word "impossible", be it borderline or not, does not belong in this discussion. On a scale from possible to impossible, the only accurate way to characterize the ability to eat less is with "possible". No shade of impossible will do.

P.S. I know I'm reaching, ファブリス, but my point is kinda relevant. We're getting to the bottom of what some people might want to use the ban on offending people for: to prevent dissent against believes that, when put under a microscope, are in fact wrong or debatable. The PC police makes a lot of questionable assumptions that their definition of what's offensive rests on, and if we stop offending them, we are de facto treating those assumptions as facts in our everyday lives. Since, for most people, our everyday lives are all we have (we're not philosophers, doctors, political activists or other relevant professionals concerned with these issues beyond talking about them on the Internet), they are de facto imposing those questionable beliefs on public opinion.

So it's important to have a very discriminating standard of what's truly offensive and monstrous, and what's just mildly mean spirited, overly blunt, unpopular at the moment, somewhat dumb, etc.

The main question you need to ask is who you want to feel welcome when using the site. It is true that if you block inappropriate stories, you will lose the extreme anti-PC crowd who think that a private site blocking racist things is equivalent to Hitler or 1984. But at the same time you may gain other people who will appreciate that the site is taken care of in a way that means they can study Japanese here without being bombarded with that kind of garbage. It's up to you.

One thing I wonder is if these people who feel like blocking the stories is equivalent to Nazi book burning, do you also disagree with the forum rules that prevent that kind of stuff on the message board?

[ファブリス]

Stansfield123 Wrote:We're getting to the bottom of what some people might want to use the ban on offending

Ugh.... I will implement something based on helpfulness ratio like I said.

The Study pages aren't a place to discuss anybody's beliefs. At the end of the day there are practical limitations.

There is no truth as to what criteria make a truly offensive story that ought to be removed from the Shared Stories. Therefore truth is something organic, constantly evolvingn based on customs, cultural values, and generally concensual reality... UGH.

Can we just focus on practical solutions here.

ファブリス Wrote:The next part which I'm not very good at, is figuring the proper formula to compute a ratio of helpful/unhelpful votes and sort stories so that unvoted stories are in the middle, helpful ones on top (despite having some downvotes), and unhelpful ones at the bottom.

Well it seems to me that we already have a solution for keeping unvoted stories at the top, and that's in the 'new stories' section.

If you just want to jack reddit's comment sorting, the formula is a sort of weird statistics thing that supposedly 'gives a lower bound within 95% confidence on the fraction of positive ratings' in the presence of low sample size. The formula's here:

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sor...ating.html

Note that it doesn't take time into account. Their submission ranking system does, however.

That's why I was thinking we wouldn't need to take time into account either, since stories are more of a permanent thing. What we need to take into account is the uncertainty with low numbers of voters.

If you want something that just keeps all unranked stuff in the middle, and has a bit of inertia in moving away from that point, you could use something like this:

(pos-neg)/n*(1-exp(-n/n_avg))

n would be the number of votes in total, and n_avg would be the average number of votes a story on here gets. Could make it like 5 or something. So with a perfect ratio, after 5 votes you'd be like 81% of the way to the top.

But like I say, that's just inertial. The reddit one jumps comments around more, even if they have low vote counts, and relies on the increased attention to sort things out.

[ファブリス]

Thanks Haych that's very helpful.

I personally don't have any issue with the offensive stories.
They are often the easiest to remember.

But maybe there could be an additional option for self-approved censorship.
It would do something like filter out any stories reported more than a certain number of times (maybe 10, 20, or a user specified number).

It would only apply to your account and you would have to activate it yourself.
I don't think it should be mandatory for everyone.

ファブリス Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:We're getting to the bottom of what some people might want to use the ban on offending

Ugh.... I will implement something based on helpfulness ratio like I said.

The Study pages aren't a place to discuss anybody's beliefs. At the end of the day there are practical limitations.

There is no truth as to what criteria make a truly offensive story that ought to be removed from the Shared Stories. Therefore truth is something organic, constantly evolvingn based on customs, cultural values, and generally concensual reality... UGH.

It's odd that the laws of physics never "evolve" with people's customs or values. It's always the poorly researched, difficult to test stuff that "evolves".

Or could it be that no truth ever evolves, just people's biases and prejudices do? In which case, censorship only serves to enforce those biases (by banning non-conformists) and make truth harder to discover.

ファブリス Wrote:Before (reports >= 10) : 1198 stories flagged (many of these can have 0 votes and you wouldn't see them as they are down or on the next pages).
After today's change (stars/reports < 10) : 849

Would it be considered impractical of me to suggest that you please get rid of this? People put in some effort to create these stories and share them with everyone. I don't know about others, but if I knew this would happen, I wouldn't have bothered to share a single story.

In fact if this system was in place when I started studying, I would've never used your site. You are allowing 90% of users to be at the mercy of an "offended" 10%. Why would you hide stories that have more fans than haters?

Here's a random sample of the stories being hidden. I'm not picking out bad examples, I started out at a random Kanji and these are the first few hidden stories I've found.

Most are comments you might hear in the average grandparents' living room on a Sunday afternoon. Some people might not agree with them, but how exactly is this offensive:

Humanity began with two people, adam and eve.

Mr T at the fiesta fell over blind drunk.

Our nation FELL into socialism as OBAMA was inaugurated at the FIESTA.

OBAMA'S policies will WOUND our economy as the (piggy)BANKS RECLINE on taxpayer money.

Praise be to Jesus, who was once thought of as PATHETIC, but actually PROTECTED us (from death/sin, etc), and is worthy of praise.

DESIGN makes me think of 'intelligent design', the third class alternative to evolution for the hard-of-thinking. You'd have to have solid wood between your ears to believe it!

This is the top story under this Kanji, with 260 likes. It's hidden because of 115 dislikes:

Mr. T gave a girl some change to lean over and give him head. !!!

This is an exact quote from AN OSCAR WINNING SCREENPLAY. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences thought this was the best piece of movie writing in 1993. Koohii thinks it's not good enough to be displayed, lest it offends somebody with a sensitive disposition. It also has more likes than dislikes:

"What country you from?" "W-what?" "'What' ain't no country I ever heard of, they speak English in 'What'?" "W-w-what?" "ENGLISH, MOTHERFUCKER, CAN YOU SPEAK IT?" "Yes!" "Now describe what this person Marsellus Wallace looks like!" "W-w-w-what?" "Say 'what' again! SAY 'WHAT' AGAIN! I dare you! I double-dare you, motherfucker! Say 'what' one more god-damn time!"

And this was all voted down before the PC police figured out that they have some power. Now that they know, all it will take is 10 people to go through the whole deck and get rid of every single story they dislike. And trust me, there will be ten such people. If you keep this system, it will make your site entirely unusable.