Honestly, if a little more work for moderators is what it takes to be accessible for the great many people who cannot or do not wish to write in English, then the anti-imperialist stance is to prioritize accessibility for the users over the convenience of the moderators. If the mods are monolingual anglophones then that alone is a failing of this site.
It’s also important to not exaggerate how difficult it is to moderate multilingual websites in this day and age.
I think it’s also important not to understate how difficult it is to moderate multilingual websites. Translation software is not perfect in even very closely related languages, and even the latest translation AI misses a lot of subtext. So without being a fluent speaker in a language, along with knowledge of relevant cultural context, you’ll never accurately read the tones and full message in a piece of text. Certainly not to the point of being an effective moderator.
It would be super duper cool if hexbear supported other languages, but unless we have enough speakers of <x> language for it to be a functioning community with its own fluent moderators, I don’t see it being practical (maybe we do?? that would be a neat surprise).
Alright, so first of all, you’re honestly probably way more likely to wrongly dismiss a report or wrongly remove a post due to not understanding the subtext and cultural nuances of a post in English than you are a post in a language you don’t speak, just because of the proportions between English-language content and content in other languages — and it’s not like people are just using machine translation blindly, or like the reports themselves can’t provide context, too. Second of all, if you do wrongly dismiss a report or wrongly remove a post, then users are able to complain, and if you’re proven to have made the wrong decision you should be able to undo that decision. That might be a little inconvenient, but that’s just how moderation is sometimes.
I think it is in any case profoundly silly to believe that this very specific and frankly broadly inconsequential problem should be treated as more important than making the website more accessible to speakers of different languages. The facts of the matter are that there are many ways to be a multilingual website, and the worst moderation that we could do with non-English languages is still way better than the content moderation on the social media platforms that speakers of these languages already readily use.
Having not moderated in spaces outside my own language, I can’t speak with significant authority on the matter. We just seem to differ on how difficult, and consequentially effective, we each think that would be.
If we can find, or attempted, a way to effectively do it, then I’m all for it, I totally agree that being accessible to speakers of other languages is an important goal and would be a huge boon!
Honestly, if a little more work for moderators is what it takes to be accessible for the great many people who cannot or do not wish to write in English, then the anti-imperialist stance is to prioritize accessibility for the users over the convenience of the moderators. If the mods are monolingual anglophones then that alone is a failing of this site.
It’s also important to not exaggerate how difficult it is to moderate multilingual websites in this day and age.
I think it’s also important not to understate how difficult it is to moderate multilingual websites. Translation software is not perfect in even very closely related languages, and even the latest translation AI misses a lot of subtext. So without being a fluent speaker in a language, along with knowledge of relevant cultural context, you’ll never accurately read the tones and full message in a piece of text. Certainly not to the point of being an effective moderator.
It would be super duper cool if hexbear supported other languages, but unless we have enough speakers of <x> language for it to be a functioning community with its own fluent moderators, I don’t see it being practical (maybe we do?? that would be a neat surprise).
Alright, so first of all, you’re honestly probably way more likely to wrongly dismiss a report or wrongly remove a post due to not understanding the subtext and cultural nuances of a post in English than you are a post in a language you don’t speak, just because of the proportions between English-language content and content in other languages — and it’s not like people are just using machine translation blindly, or like the reports themselves can’t provide context, too. Second of all, if you do wrongly dismiss a report or wrongly remove a post, then users are able to complain, and if you’re proven to have made the wrong decision you should be able to undo that decision. That might be a little inconvenient, but that’s just how moderation is sometimes.
I think it is in any case profoundly silly to believe that this very specific and frankly broadly inconsequential problem should be treated as more important than making the website more accessible to speakers of different languages. The facts of the matter are that there are many ways to be a multilingual website, and the worst moderation that we could do with non-English languages is still way better than the content moderation on the social media platforms that speakers of these languages already readily use.
Having not moderated in spaces outside my own language, I can’t speak with significant authority on the matter. We just seem to differ on how difficult, and consequentially effective, we each think that would be.
If we can find, or attempted, a way to effectively do it, then I’m all for it, I totally agree that being accessible to speakers of other languages is an important goal and would be a huge boon!