So there are a few topics that came up lately that I think would be nice to discuss with members of this community.
Basically this is part of writing a Code of Conduct for our instance and I think we need to talk about some specific type of posts:
Doomers
Naturally the themes discussed in our communities are attracting a lot of climate doomer comments and I would say we also have a significant number of “recovering doomers” here as community members.
Earlier this week I considered closing the /c/collapse community on SRLPNK, because it is not actively moderated and attracts a lot of these types, even though ex_06 (who asked me to have their account re-activated, but not as an admin) originally intended it to be more of a psychological self-help group for people trying to get to terms with the likely loss of many things that defined their life so far.
While the typical doomer could probably need some psychological support, they are usually still in a stage of grief that makes them lash out and not engage in a constructive exchange how to make the best of the current difficult situation we sadly find ourselves in.
Mostly I have been doing temporary bans for such doomers to cool down and not spread their doom and gloom endlessly in our communities, but I think we need to come up with a common idea how to deal with this better.
Discussing civil disobedience
aka Direct Action or the other man’s “Eco Terrorist” (yeah right…).
Obviously this is a topic many climate activists find themselves more and more confronted with and you might already be involved with a group engaged in such actions of civil disobedience. And lets not forget about the punk in Solarpunk either :)
However, obviously this is a public web-site and thus easily monitored by law-enforcement and other people that might be interested in reporting such discussions to the local authorities. Thus to protect this service and also our users from themselves we can’t really allow planning discussions with specific targets or generally calls for action against specific persons to happen here out in the open (or in the semi-public direct messages).
Obviously, we can never condone violence against persons, but aside from that please be careful with discussing climate activism on the clear-web and rather use fully end to end encrypted means with people you can trust!
However this has obviously a large grey area and people might have stronger views on what should and should not be discussed here.
Absolute Vegans
Vegans are obviously welcome on SLRPNK and I think we can all agree that strongly reducing the consumption of animal products is a worthy goal.
However, there are some very opinionated (online) Vegans / animal rights activists that (intentionally or not) are indistinguishable from trolls and generally very toxic to deal with. Please don’t feel personally attacked by this, but I think we need to come up with something regarding this in our code of conduct.
So these were the three topics I had in my mind lately, but feel free to discuss others as well.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on this!
So it seems you’re automatically defensive about wanting to moderate vegan speech (preempting with "don’t feel personally attacked) and deep down I think you know why.
I understand you’re just trying to make a space where everyone feels welcome. But harrassment policy and other conduct policy should cover people getting out of bounds and requires no vegan specific clause. Making a vegan specific clause is a little hostile.
Unless you are truly aiming to ban people for having the opinion that it’s not ok to not be vegan. That would be tone policey and censorious, in my opinion. If a vegan is actually harassing someone that calls for moderation, but its already a rule to refrain from harassing. If you want to make a rule on harassment and include several examples, and one of them is a vegan example, that would be fine.
It just reminds me of other contentious issues like racial justice or gender issues. Sometimes people didn’t like getting called racist, but do you censor a racial minority because their message is intense and makes someone a little uncomfortable? People have the right to decline interactions that arent going well but they shouldnt expect to always be perfectly comfortable when writing in the public square.
Ok fair enough, but I think calling animal husbandry “slavery” is intentionally going for the shock value of it and just deeply offends people that otherwise strive for the same values and are usually very much aware of the of how badly animals are treated in industrial farming.
I also get your examples with racial and gender issues, and while you are right that there are some parallels, I think it is not right to attack people who very much have similar concerns about animal rights, but just came to somewhat different conclusions what to do about that.
And while I agree that it should in theory just fall under the general no-harrassement etc. rules, I am near certain that if I would actually start moderating such posts I would have to explain why anyway, so I would rather pre-empt such discussions now and not do them in the heat of the moment when someone likely feels wronged about a moderation decision.
Forbidding the comparison of animal captivity, forced reproduction and child stealing, and economic exploitation to slavery would be a clear example of indulging a censorious impulse.
I rarely use this comparison personally because it’s subject to this kind of confusion (thinking comparison to human slavery is equating to human slavery). Nevertheless it’s my personal opinion that when you account for the massive scale of the suffering, billions of animals yearly, a comparison of severity can still be drawn, even with any inspecies prejudices about the richness of human lives and experience potential compared to animals.
Context matters… if you say “slavery” in the context of massive industrial animal farming people are unlikely to be offended.
Using it in the context of someone having some backyard chicken or a video about a small scale sheep herder that produces wool (both actual examples from the last couple of weeks) is IMHO a different matter.
I understand you’re just trying to make a space where everyone feels welcome. But harrassment policy and other conduct policy should cover people getting out of bounds and requires no vegan specific clause. Making a vegan specific clause is a little hostile.
This. I don’t think it needs anything vegan-specific, but general rules that cover harassment and/or obviously trolling.
