Reviews reporting thread

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 Kati wrote:

Do you understand what you are actually implying here now? To me it seems that what you are saying is that PA is a private site thus the public members should have no view in this respect? PA is thus aka biased? 
Eh? Surely by now you know how this site works.

The Admin team comprises of seven people - three of them play no active part in the day to day operation of the site - they consist of the owner and two others and their only concern is the mechanics of the site. The remaining four deal with site content, membership, discipline and all the interpersonal crap, so let's call them "Mods" for the purposes of this post just to avoid confusion. Those two halves hardly ever talk to each other, (In four years as a "Mod" I conversed with Max maybe three times, Rony once and once with Philippe). The "Mods" are responsible for the "management" of the collaborators, especially those on the subgenre teams, they have no "power" to affect the decisions of those collab teams, and similarly the collab teams have no say in how the "Mods" do their job.

As Madan said, this is no different to how any large company works - you have a board of directors who delegate day-to-day authority and responsibility to a non-elected senior management team and they in turn delegate down to subordinate management teams for the management of specific tasks and/or operational areas. Each level works autonomously and usually without hindrance and interference from above (or below).

I don't know how the four "Mods" currently work but in the past we seldom worked on a democratic majority vote basis, it was simply too impractical to do that - we worked on trust, delegated-authority and joint-responsibility. Essentially each "Mod" was given the authority to act on behalf of the whole Admin Team, and once that action had been taken then the other "Mods" had an obligated responsibility to support that decision in public. Basically I trusted my colleagues to make the right decision and backed them up if and when required, and I knew I could rely on them to do the same for me.

This may appear to be a strange concept for a so-called "collaborative" website, and to the outside world will look very democratic, but for example when I deleted 1,000s of "bogus" reviews and ratings it would have been impossible for us to have taken a democratic vote on each and every one beforehand. What this meant was my actions were taken on behalf of the team, and to do that my decisions had to be balanced and carefully considered - devoid of personal emotion, predilections, prejudices and therefore completely unbiased. Yup - that was (and still is) my special superpower - I could separate the personal feelings that I post here as an ordinary person from the decisions I had to make on behalf of the Admin Team and the site. Not everyone can do that, this is why not everyone has what it takes to be a "Mod".

HOWEVER, if an issue was raised in the AZ (such as Keishiro said here), it was discussed and if there were no objections from other "Mods" then an action was taken. Sure we would gauge public opinion, but that would have to be balanced with our responsibility for the site as a whole. There would not be a vote, but each "Mod" had a kinda soft-veto in that if they objected then the action would not be taken and a different solution would be sort. 

PS: In this case, the matter was taken to the AZ and the review subsequently got deleted, all very "lawful", correct and aboveboard, ... and most of all unbiased.

Edited by Dean - October 02 2015 at 04:11