Indeed. What I was trying to awkwardly say is that this community must organize for every single such suggestion and make a petition, to show how serious we are about this suggestion/issue.
We are disorganised, so all the good suggestions (important ones where most of the community agrees) are drowned in all the less important ones which concern a smaller part of the community.
Petitions are not enough, as we had the chance to see with the same system implemented by Viki at support.viki.com. For one, most people are not at that website every day. For another, Viki suffers no consequences if these suggestions are not even considered.
Our suggestions DESERVE to be considered and we deserve FEEDBACK on Viki’s estimation. So, not only should they do their job with our suggestions, but also they should communicate with us what their decision was and the grounds on which they made such a decision.
Finally, The Community must have representatives who will drive these matters forward. People with good communication skills and enough time on their hands to follow through every single suggestion and hold Viki accountable to them until they are resolved.
There should first and foremost be a warning: This-and-this is against our company policy (not Community Guidelines). Or We prefer you don’t do this due to [insert reason here].
Oh yeah! There should be. The only time they somehow listened to concerns and made some improvements, was when there was a call. So the Staffs should probably organize a call every now and then with whom they considered fit to act as representatives. At least once a year, a real vocal discussion should be held. Written and vocal interactions are very different.
No, I think the Viki Staff has no saying in who The Community representatives should be. Not anymore, at least. We should choose our own representatives.
On the upside, the thread https://discussions.viki.com/t/should-vikis-paid-subbers-be-overwriting-volunteers/44219/129 did last for 19 days and it didn’t disappear, it just got locked!
At the time of the original posting, because I know viki’s penchant for squelching complaints, I predicted this would happen:
“I hope those of you who are volunteer subbers at viki have an opportunity to read this. I believe that this post will disappear very rapidly! Anyone care to guess how long this thread will exist?”
This is symptomatic of treatment of volunteers versus the solution for viewer complaining of speed of subtitles:
Viewer complaints of speed of subbing ==> Solution, hire paid subbers who overwrite volunteers still working on the subtitles
Volunteers complains about being overwritten ==> Solution, close thread from further comments by other volunteers
Volunteer complains about viki staff closing the thread ==> Solution, close thread from further comments by other volunteers. Does anyone believe this will NOT happen? It’s not “if”, it is a matter of “when”
I doubt that petititions have any effect unless they are combined with strikes.
And for strikes a large number of volunteers must be involved to show it’s a serious matter for the majority of the volunteers.
Some (who knows how many that are in the end) might not join the strikes because they are more worried about not being chosen again as CM or in another position they’d like to have.
Another aspect is that the volunteers will continue to work unpaid. It’s not a paid job with an organisation for workers in the background that organizes strikes and discussions for better work environments and more money.
Because of that the final outcome is very unclear. Even some years ago when many volunteers went on a strike, other were afraid of being exchanged by auto-translation software and now volunteers might be afraid of being exchanged for paid professionals.
We do not wish to censor or silence the vibrant community that exists here on Viki. Since Viki’s inception over 15 years ago, our mission has always been and remains to bring people together and bridge cultures through the joys of Asian entertainment. It is also important for us to ensure a safe, respectful and inclusive environment for all. In order to do that, we need to have moderation and community guidelines in place. This helps ensure we focus on constructive criticism as well as criticizing ideas and not individuals.
The post that was closed went against those guidelines when name-calling and ad hominem attacks were made. Everyone in this community should feel free and safe to speak their minds in a respectful manner. This space is meant to foster a spirit of positivity and collaboration, and moderation is an important tool in keeping it so. We are always trying to improve our moderation efforts and it takes time to thoroughly investigate reports, but the guidelines are there to serve and protect the larger community, and posts that violate them require moderation.
We understand there are still many opportunities to address improvements in communication with all of you as well as the tools and resources used by QCs. We are actively working to find solutions that include speedier ticket replies and a better and more direct connection to our community members. Please know that your voice does matter to us and we are listening and that we appreciate your patience.
We’ve seen many friendships formed in the community through the shared love of Asian dramas, and we want Viki to continue to foster these types of connections for many more years to come. Please continue to share your suggestions and feedback. We are listening even if we can’t always reply to you as quickly as we would like.
May I ask why that thread was not closed immediately?
Clearly just closing the thread will not resolve the issues we continue to brush up on with paid subtitlers. I feel exasperated because I feel I’m competing against them.
Viki’s application of justice isn’t as swift when actual violations occur in the forums or when trolls and spammers have a field day.
@vikicommunity
I’d like to hear your input regarding the following problem:
Whenever a user obstructs my Viki experience in some way (messages, trolling, spamming, intervening to my volunteer work, overwriting my subs/segs), whenever my Tickets go unanswered or are marked as solved following a generic copy-paste text from the CSR scripts database, what is my next move?
I obviously can’t notify and warn other users via the forums, because you will lock the thread.
I obviously can’t keep it to myself and forget about it because a) it won’t solve my problem and b) other users may come to harm because of my silence and negligence.
My only solution is to take matters to the social media and create some buzz around my problem, which will harm Viki much more than a heated thread in a Viki-curated forum.
I would like to correct you on something. Not only did Discussion Moderator delete the post made by @justine_desmoulins - but she closed down the whole thread. Which is why I opened this thread.
You don’t do that. You don’t close a whole thread for just one post. So, there must have been an issue with the entire thread, no? What was the issue? Tell us so we know for the future.
This is what I’m referring to by open communication, @vikicommunity.
Are you talking about the post I created regarding abusers added as moderator by the staff? The thread was closed because my post was the starting point. What annoys me, is that it was closed down a second time after I removed the link to the channel (I was trying to make them react by clearly pointing out to a channel and that actually worked. Once. But the long PM I sent them after with what was wrong in their doing never got a reply… Funny right?)
@vikicommunity “The post that was closed went against those guidelines when name-calling and ad hominem attacks were made.”
“ad hominem” and “name-calling” Is this redundant and an incorrect use of the term?
" Ad hominem means “against the man,” and this type of fallacy is sometimes called name calling or the personal attack fallacy. This type of fallacy occurs when someone attacks the person instead of attacking his or her argument." https://owl.excelsior.edu/argument-and-critical-thinking/logical-fallacies/logical-fallacies-ad-hominem/
There was never any personal attack in the thread – the thread questioned the viki policy to “complete” an episode at a pre-set time, not shared with the volunteers, no matter even if volunteers are actively working on a part to the point of ignoring the TD post, the chatter and the avatar of the volunteer on the lower left of the subeditor screen.
So that we can avoid closing of threads in the future for ad hominem attacks could you quote the specific offending words which were said?
If I remember right, there were multiple posts saying things against a paid subber whose username was revealed. I guess that counts as “ad hominem”, especially since the person cannot fight back, correct assumptions, or tell his/her side of the story. And I definitely saw assumptions that couldn’t be verified, of course, because Viki still won’t engage properly in the community discussions.
(In case this gets misunderstood, I am not defending what the subber did.)
Closing of the thread was initiated after another user (not cgwm) claimed that Viki’s handling of abuser tickets was so slow, that it actually facilitated that abuser to collect enough contributions to be at some point added as a Moderator by the staff itself. @justine_desmoulins, correct me if I’m wrong here. If I understood this correctly, then we can safely say that the staff doesn’t check abuser reports before adding people as Mods.
The issue mentioned is very important. In a nutshell, because abuser reports are down prioritised by Viki, abusers get an edge over the legitimate contributors and gain high functions on projects, such as Moderator positions, faster. This falsely establishes them within a community.
The mistake was to name the channel, where, if one clicked the link, you would easily find out who both the abuser and the staff were. The Discussions Moderator correctly flagged the comment and the user removed the link. This is quite a usual way of dealing with Community Guideline breaches.
Now, the real reason behind closing the entire thread is somewhat of a mystery. Are we to believe that the entire thread went against Community Guidelines and needed to be shut down? I think not. Do we know who that paid subber was? Still no, and don’t like to find out either. Are assumptions we regularly throw out there a reason to close a thread? Definitely not.
I think there are two separate issues (thread) linked to this discussion.
The first being the discussion about the paid subbers which was closed and the second which was the case I brought up about an abuser added as French moderator by the staff itself, who also got closed.
That is correct.
Although this never happened to me personnally, I think it might have happened for relatively new moderators who might have less in terms of numbers, but would have provided a better quality.
There are so many channels where I’m saddened because of the ridiculous french translations created by French moderators (or their team who always consist of the same abusers…) (For exemple how divine! was translated as What a Godess!) But that’s for another thread…
I actually named the staff in question along with the channel. (In my first post, NOT in my second post with the edited version. Second post which was also removed for the same reason @cgwm808 mentionned “ad hominem”. If I follow correctly, we could say I was not attacking the person who was added by the staff (I didn’t even mentionned her) I was questionning the matter of how a staff can add an abuser.
5 days, still no reply… But I figured it out, If I want a reply, I have to do something to annoy them… That’s how it apparently works. They also mentionned in the first reply I got after my post tiggered them that answering such concerns was a waste of time, cause you know, they could investigate reports instead of answering. (At least, that’s how it felt to me.)
re: ad hominem
Just naming someone is not name-calling/ad hominem attack. According to the definition, for example, if one were discussing something which was ethically wrong and you say your opponent is an ugly slob, that’s an ad hominem attack.
