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Comment by jayzee | Hacker News Reader

I got annoyed when I got into a disagreement with a moderator and was kicked out of a room repeatedly.

I am not sure how many others had a similar experience but I just left the site after that. It made the site feel unwelcoming.

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TT developer here. Sorry you had a bad experience. This is a difficult problem for us - each room is it's own community with it's own rules, and it's really hard to determine how much "policing" is appropriate on a global level. Personally, I'm of the opinion that we should intervene as little as possible. There are some cases in which people are obviously being malicious towards other rooms, eg. invading Christian rooms to play death metal, etc., and we do our best to respond and ban those involved. However, in cases of disagreements within communities, I prefer to let communities sort out their issues themselves - especially since it's so easy to create a new room/community, if you have others who agree with you. In fact, some of our best rooms have come from exactly this type of community splintering. We try to encourage small communities of like-minded people, rather than huge rooms in which everyone must play by rules that not everyone agrees with. As a user, I much prefer this to sites run by a "benevolent dictator" who has final say over what is and is not appropriate.

That said, there's an excellent chance we aren't doing it exactly right. We're constantly refining the ways we moderate the community, and we love getting input on the best ways to approach it. Feel free to contact info@turntable.fm or me personally at dan@turntable.fm if you have any more specific feedback or questions.

This. I recently sent a screenshot to them after 2-3 people were booted for disagreeing with the way a mod was handling the room. I'd been visiting that room on and off for nearly a year, and had never seen this person before.

They sent me a really nice response (thanks Jessica), but ultimately their inability to control what becomes an ego-based platform is going to kill them faster than the complete lack of redesigning their product since launch.

I'd even initially thought about applying for a designer role when they first launched, and had done a mock-up of the landing page that did a better job of promoting rooms and users, but they don't seem interested in hiring remotely.

Glad to find plug.dj, but I'm not finding the type of room I want and being at work, I don't have time to dink around the interface and figure it out. My main complaint with services like these is the cartoon trend. I'd much prefer a text-only view, especially at work.

I have similar observations. Turntable started out very democratic. People would happily take turns playing music. Now it has IRC style drama and politics. Ops kick people out for disagreeing with them, kick people off stage for songs they don't like and generally abuse their position.

I had the exact same experience. Moderators would boot/ban you if you downvote songs, or if you criticize anything ever. I havent touched turntable in months.

Simple solution. Moderators should be able to mute users. But not kick them from the channel. What's the point of kicking if we're just here to listen to music?

If they fix this, I think I'd go back.

TT developer here. Any user can "mute" any other user - just go to Settings > Ignored Users and add their username to your ignored list. Hope to see you back on the site soon!

No, what he's saying is that mods need to only be able to mute users, not kick them. Kicking someone out of the room they want to be in only hurts your service -- not the room -- because they won't have any interest in visiting the other rooms and they're not going to bother going back into a room they've been kicked out of. There is truly no reason anyone should be kicked. It leaves a sour taste in the user's mouth, especially if -- like those of us posting here -- it was for no other reason than the mod's ability to do so.

Anyone in the room to troll or flood (by the way, your 'flood' methodology sucks - I type fast, I shouldn't be reprimanded for it) will be put off of the room and move on to the next, at which point, a certain amount of mutes in a certain amount of time should set a flag that puts a global mute on that person for a set amount of time.

mnicole nailed exactly what i was trying to say. Thanks!

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