Request for Comment
CEO.CA announces the opening of our benchmark moderation policy comment period on proposed changes. The comment period will be open from December 8, through 5:00 p.m. ET on December 22, 2022. We invite views from all CEO.CA users on the proposed policy changes for 2023.
Comments received will be considered as we finalize the changes. We expect to announce the final benchmark policy changes in or around the last week of December 2022. The revised policies will be applied after January 1, 2023, except where otherwise noted for later implementation.
To submit comments, post below this article or feel free to continue the discussion on #modpolicies. Please respect the other channels and keep all discussion to these mediums.
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Hey Everyone,
I first want to start by thanking the users who took time to fill out our form with your feedback. This comes at an opportune time as I have just begun to start my role at this company. CEO.CA strives to be the top stock discussion community globally, and that aspiration comes with incredible responsibility. Incredible reverence. Incredible obsession.
That’s why today, as a precursor to Phase 1 of our new site redesign rolling out next year, we have overhauled our moderation system based on the feedback you have all collectively submitted over the past few weeks. I will summarize this overhaul by three pillars: (1) personnel, (2) policy, and (3) product changes.
Personnel
We will be expanding our moderation team to include multiple public moderators, with identifiable usernames for everyone to see. This moderation team will grow over time as we seek trustworthy individuals. This moderation team will feature members who have equivalent powers, and no mod has the ability to “undo” a suspension/ban from another mod. If ANY of the moderators from the team deems an action of yours worthy of a suspension, that’s on you. You might have a personal relationship with one mod, maybe two. But if you say something that flagrantly violates our rules, one of the mods WILL penalize you. Since moderation is an incredible responsibility, we will be bringing on mods slowly after an extensive vetting process, which you can read more about at the end of this post.
Additionally, we will be hosting training sessions to ensure our moderators approach scenarios in a similar way and provide a uniform approach to moderation to ensure consistency. The first of those training sessions start next week. For users, know that these new rules will ideally be applied immediately on launch date, but may take a bit to become uniformly adopted.
Note - we have investigated all claims against current moderators and none have yielded any clear form of using the moderation role for self-gain. We understand that users can hold (understandable) interpretations and beliefs around moderators based on their activities, which is why our moderation team will decentralize authority to mitigate those risks in the future.
To give clarification on today’s moderating system, we have historically selected moderators from among our userbase to provide support on the site. These moderators are overwhelmingly anonymous as they are users themselves and do not wish to be subject to the harassment or interpersonal dynamics associated with being a moderator in their conversations. Selecting moderators from among our userbase also results in moderators who have a good feel for the cultural norms and subject matter to provide thoughtful moderation. These “anonymous” moderators roll up to @ham, who is publicly known and oversees their moderating actions. With that said, we now recognize that the perception of anonymous community moderators might be one of bias or nefarious intent. This “ladder of inference” has become problematic, which is why, moving forward, we will be selecting future moderators from a wider pool of people outside CEO.ca and who will be public-facing via username.
We will NOT be suspending any CEO.ca user as a result of this investigation. While I’m sure many here expected dozens of users to be suspended/banned (and I’m mentally preparing for people to throw threats my way and call out my integrity), after reading the responses on the feedback form I harbor a certain level of understanding for each individual’s perspectives. Some of our internal moderation shifts over the years have not been adequately communicated, and what is deemed as acceptable user behavior has been ambiguous as a result. Additionally, some of our mechanisms (like the escalating punishment scale) can be confusing and look like arbitrary suspension periods that favor certain users, when in reality it’s based on historical behavior. That’s on us. And we’re sorry.
HOWEVER…I have a very, very clear understanding of who the “controversial” members on CEO.ca are now. And I will say, to ALL sides of these tensions… https://giphy.com/gifs/breaking-bad-threaten-walter-white-4dAqzSvxV15Is
Policy changes
We have heavily revised the moderation policies. You can read our new proposed moderation policies in this link HERE.
Just touching on a few highlights from our new proposed moderation policies:
We’re moving our moderation from a generalized “first/second/third offender” policy to a suspension system based on categories of offense. This way, it’s clear why a user received a suspension for a certain period of time. We’ve gathered from feedback that there is a perception of unfair suspension lengths, but when analyzing suspension data it appears that these incidents were more a function of the progressive suspension policy, which is hard to keep tab of among the user base.
Think of our new moderation system as moving from a “policemen” role to a sports “referee” role. While the moderation team might step in for overt deception they observe on any given channel, the CEO moderation team is not obligated to determine the veracity of all statements given on the site. It is up to each individual to determine whether the statements made from members hold credibility and weight into their own investment decisions. The CEO moderation team mainly focuses on creating a culture of positive, thoughtful idea exchange between members.
Of course, for repeat offenders there will be longer suspensions, which will be abundantly clear in those circumstances (30+ days) as well as full site bans.
New: Immediate Insider/IR/Promotional Disclosure Requirements
Additionally, we will now immediately require all users who either (1) hold any occupational positions (full or part time) in this industry or (2) have been paid by a company (or competitor company) for any form of promotional activity to disclose all their positions in their bio pages. We will be codifying this change next year with new site enhancements, but until then this is a remedy. Any failure to do so will result in a 30 day suspension and/or a permanent ban.
With our new update, verified insiders will receive an insider tag next to their username in the chat identifying their position in the company. We may expand this to identify other types of users as well as we recognize not everyone looks at profiles when chatting.
New: Escalation Policy
Finally, we’ve expanded categories for suspensions. Beyond this expanded list, many of these categories include a clause of “escalation” in the chat. That means that any pattern of behavior a user commits to constantly create escalation will be valid grounds for a suspension. What we’ve seen is incredibly articulate, intelligent users bait many other users into violating policies, and only having the ability to ban the upset users rather than the instigators. That ends now. This is also one of our longer-serving suspensions if a member is caught with these actions.
Think of it as someone going to a celebration event of another political party and trying to debate perspectives. While they might have valid points, there are appropriate times to discuss those topics, there is a level of common sense and courtesy that needs to be applied. CEO has always been a home for both bulls and bears to debate. These changes do NOT mean that every stock channel is going to become an echo chamber of positivity for each given ticker. There will always be a home for open debates of ideas here, but if a user makes a pattern of going to a specific stock channel on a regular basis to repeat the same negative points without any new information, or is providing excessive negative spam on the same day as a major company milestone, those would be clear grounds for suspension.
“Escalation” is determined by the users of that specific channel, which shifts the burden on the users to become well respected within that given community. A well respected member can provide critical feedback and not receive the same reception as an outsider who just joined. Reputation matters, and in the new moderating system, it’s up to the users to build “reputations” within various local communities.
New: Brigading Policy
Another point that’s brought up from this is “brigading.” If we notice a pattern of activity from multiple users who join various stock channels for a short period of time to simply upvote/echo positive/negative commentary in a coordinated fashion, we will implement lengthy mass bans for those users (even if all they do is upvote certain messages). This is part of a new anti “pump and dump” mechanism.
Finally, we will attempt to provide much more “forward guidance” to various groups when escalation occurs. These messages might range from “Things are getting too hot here, please calm down everyone” to “hey @user123, stop spamming or you’ll receive a channel suspension”, to “I’m implementing a zero tolerance policy on this channel for the next 2 weeks. Read slide 16, paragraph 2 of the moderation policies. Please be courteous.”
Forward guidance will hopefully help direct the conversation away from its current course without having to resort to suspensions but they will occur if necessary. The “public shaming” element will also help serve as a deterrent to members. Finally, it will help clarify the interpretations the mods have on a situation rather than being hit with a suspension and feeling blind-sided.
Request for Comment: Channel Boxing vs. Sitewide Boxing
Our current practice is to penalty box a user sitewide and restrict their posting access to a specific channel on the site when they breach a house rule. We are interested in the community’s opinion of whether this should be changed to channel penalty boxing ONLY and not a sitewide penalty box which would allow the user to continue to post on other channels. For now, channel penalty boxing or banning only occurs if the user commits multiple infractions in that specific channel which may result in a permanent channel ban. We find in most case studies that users who have been channel boxed or banned from one channel typically have cordial experiences on most other channels. Of course, any users found to breach our most serious rules would be placed in a sitewide penalty box irrespective of the above and/or banned from the site. That will not change.
Product changes
In the coming months, you will see various product features implemented to help engage the community.
While not directly related to moderating, we have other product improvements that will lead to stronger community discussions and incentives for due diligence communication. This includes Technical Charts through our partnership with Trading View (photo below), thousands of customizable Commodities/ETFs/FX/Energy/Crypto’s to add to your own homepage, our new SEDAR research portal with millions of text-searchable filings, polls/pinned comments in channels and much more. Contributors will also begin to have a seamless way to monetize their content and organize their research so it doesn’t get lost in a message stream. Ultimately, we want to see CEO.ca grow to a community of thoughtful, respectable discussion rooted in data and camaraderie. Unfortunately, at times we can be far off that point with ulterior motives. I take that burden on as a personal challenge.
We will also be implementing back-end tools to help our moderation team, such as a dashboard showing which users flag the most, which users are the subject of flags the most, flagging activity trends on various channels, and flag clusters (do certain users tend to flag everything together).
Open Office Hours
As a way to increase transparency and iterative feedback, I will personally host office hours every Friday @ 4pm PST at this link here -
https://meet.google.com/dqr-hmdt-ici
Or dial: (US) +1 669-234-8795 PIN: 453 599 037#
Anyone can drop by and talk to me directly there about whatever is on your mind. If this goes well, I might move these sessions to Twitter Spaces in the future until CEO develops its own voice tools. My first session starts tomorrow, so you can take all your immediate, visceral feedback to me there. This should be fun.
Conclusion
We appreciate everyones’ feedback, it actually accelerated this review of our moderation policies which has always been on our roadmap. We will always be looking to iterate on our moderation policies surrounding the site.
Again, a lot of people here should take the lack of immediate bans as a blessing and a final warning. Based on the feedback received, there was potentially a route where we could have permanently banned a lot of users today. You know who you are. Just because we didn’t permanently ban you today does not mean you will be here in a month from now.
We are choosing this route because we believe we can all grow together as a community. There’s a lot of exciting initiatives on the horizon for CEO.ca. In fact, one of those initiatives will be publicly announced next Thursday on the Index and Editors channel! This announcement will also provide details on how future moderators can be potentially onboarded to our team, along with other ways we’re expanding our CEO.ca family.
Sincerely,
Ronald AngSiy, COO @ CEO.ca
