I am going to contribute my two sense to this discussion as I have advocated for a regulation aganist intentional misinformation, or deception, for multiple months now. We ask ourselves if minimodding should be allowed? Minimodding from a literal definition, being “when a person acts as if they have moderator permissions or power to punish someone”, should be punishable in my opinion, but not for the reason argued in this thread. As many have mentioned, helping players is an essential part of every community. Volunteers do not have the time to answer every single question, especially on a server such as the Hive where the ratio between staff to concurrent players is nearly 1 to 250. I support the idea that player assistance is necessary. yet we often fail to consider how the gain of knowledge becomes obstructed.
I fully agree with @OnlyOrbixx in that helping others provides a necessary learning curve for yourself, however, what happens when there fails to be an assessment of the knowledge you are sharing? Knowledge relies on reasoning, intuition, and ultimately faith. Many children follow a blind faith, unfortunately, not stepping back and questioning the information they are provided. This is a danger is that knowledge they are being given goes unchecked, even if that misinformation comes from a reputable player people trust. I have witnessed players get two seperate answers from two seperate players, which causes the dilenma for the player of which to trust. The other week, the situation of two support staff saying two seperate answers, occurred, showing that sometimes even the staff make mistakes simply because we are all human, and we can all make mistakes. I do not believe that this should punishable however, as it usually is only an accident. I am more concerned about the intentional misinformation and deception, rather than misinformation itself.
I believe that should a rule aganist misinformation be implemented, it should be along the lines of “Do not intentionally mislead someone into believing an idea that is not factually supported or accurate”, with an emphasize on the “intentionally” wording. If someone is sharing misinformation that they believe is accurate, I do not think that should be punished and instead is room for a learning curve. When someone is purposely sharing misinformation, however, is when I believe it has gone too far.
Image 1. Players tricking a new user into believing Ultimate is Admin on discord.
Image 2. Continuation of the joke despite being clear the other does not know.
The example I mention in relation to this discussion is an event that occured on the discord several months ago. On 22 June 2020, multiple players were able to convince a new user that ultimate was admin, and the new user openly believed that ultimate was admin for several minutes. Several staff members participated in the joke, not realizing that KileyBelade was not aware it was a joke. I would like to state that I did contact Matt about this incidient in correlation to other details. Likely this has been discussed on the staff side, yet it failed to solve the issue of what caused it: intentional spread of misinformation. As far as I am aware, these players were never punished, although they were punished for other rule violations later. This is one example, and there have likely been more, however, I have drifted away from the Hive Discord and have not seen any.
At the end of the day, this is a decision for the administration to make and I assume they have discussed this idea before. What that exact decision was, we may never know.
