/meta/ - Ruthless criticism of all that exists (in leftypol.org)

This is a long post, but it's important we do this properly in order to prevent the same bullshit happening again. All constructive feedback is helpful. Feedback from people who don't use Matrix or /meta/ often is especially useful.

It's clear the previous site was screwed up in many ways. While there are obvious surface issues such as moderation tensions, there were underlying design flaws in the moderation system that both compounded these issues and made the user experience worse than it should have been. Some results of this flawed system is how many policy changes were a surprise to most users despite being discussed for days or over week, even users who regularly visited the /meta/ board had no visibility over these discussions.

It is the view of the entire moderation team that this is unacceptable.

From what I know, the previous leftypol.org's (supposed) transparency effort was as follows:
>general moderation discussion takes place in the Matrix Congress chat
(in reality, it became normalized for many mods to default to the private Matrix Staff Room, even for non-sensitive matters)
>mod voting on changes takes place on a locked, unlisted, public board, /assembly/
(this is the same board that was made public and open by leftychan, previous weeks' votes were moved to the archive board every Monday. it was extremely badly advertised)
>votes would be declared in the /meta/ voting thread, along with their outcomes
(as evident, this almost never happened in practice, with no-one doing this after the first month except for a short-lived revival attempt by Discomrade)

While technically the design was public, none of it was easily noticable to most users and became effectively (by both design and then culture) private-by-default. When a crisis happens and priorites take over, all the extra tasks can easily get forgotten. That's why open-by-default is a design quality we should aim for in the new moderation framework. We should have to go out of our way to talk about site changes in private (for special cases concerning things like IP bans or server technical details, since it is inappropriate to show that sensitive information publicly).


Here are some possible solution we've proposed so far, please tell us what you like, what you don't like, what you would like, or any other suggestions you have.
>Announcing all site/policy decisions in the red Global Announcements section when discussion begins, with a link to a /meta/ thread for that issue.
>Announcing discussion of major changes to a board with a new sticky thread on that board.
>Renaming the staff room to make it clear it should be used for confidential matters.
>Removing shitposting and off-topic tangents from the Congress Matrix room that should be in the regular /leftypol/ Chat room, so it can appropriately be more easily used to openly discuss minor, temporary, time-critical site matters like potential deletions, sages, bans and appeals