Hey all,
Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I’d learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it’s run.
This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.
Thank you very much for clarifying your intent! I appreciate it.
Fully aware of the harsh reality of the world, was just hoping I could find a lovely online escape and was disappointed to find what I thought was an escape is more 3/4 of one. At least the bigotry is gone (not even bigots getting dunked on by the general population but still existing on far too many posts, they’re just not there at all which is very nice), the bigotry-free but still not-nice comments consisting purely of “KYS” are gone, the “HAHAHAHAHA you actually believe that” condescension is gone, which is a lot better than I can say for most spaces and I thank you for that.
I’m a strong proponent of punching Nazis, and I hadn’t thought about it until now, but I’m also supportive of any and all positive responses to a Nazi being punched, including “lol”.
Glad to peacefully coexist with you on this platform though. Not trying to fire up that debate, but glad to lend perspective if it’s of any interest or use.
Hello! I assume that because you replied so far down here, you’ve read the entire exchange between the mod and I.
I usually do a decent job of curating my online experience to avoid seeing upsetting things, but at least at that time Beehaw was doing something where, once you login, your feed still shows the exact same thing as before login, regardless of whether you set your default view to Subscribed and regardless of what you have blocked. So I ended up seeing content that made me mad and I typed out a reply on it. I had this in mind when I commented on this Moderation Philosophy post, and was pretty sure the commenter who started this specific thread was also referring to that same post.
I fully understand there’s a decent chance people have had to face more than just seeing nasty things online from Nazis, and have personally seen them try to do harm in real life. You may live in an area where they may no longer be outnumbered and unpopular. Depending on your demographics, they might pose an existential threat to you. And of course if you have any interest in living, you must deal with the threat.
I’m curious about your perspective, but I also worry that I’m just going to set myself off when I read your reply. I am very much thinking of the lyric “you’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just… nice” from Into the Woods and it’s probably an appropriate prediction of what I’ll have an honest emotional reaction to and what I’ll just coldly process. Both homophobic slurs and “lol [person doing hatecrimes] died good riddance” comments make me upset. I know I’m probably supposed to allow for space for the latter, but I frankly can’t handle it too well. I don’t think, in an ideal world, I should have to be able to handle that well, but I live in the real world and not an ideal world. Fact is, I have a hard time with not-nice behavior, from what I gather the good thing may be to let it fly sometimes so people can vent justified anger, and I am not good at doing that at all. So I try to cordon it off from my view so people can do that in peace and I don’t have to see it. So when I want to learn about your perspective… I think you can see the conflict of interest here. I want to learn about your perspective, I also want to not set myself off with something I know I don’t handle well.
I think I was drawn to comment because your preferences are an extreme version of what most people prefer (basically avoiding conflict?). You also seem to know yourself better and explain where you’re coming from better than most people.
So there’s a practical question that has value, of how you’re doing the work to help win these ideological wars, or if you’re strictly trying to be a bystander. Your answers probably have a lot more relevance to strict bystanders than mine.
On Nazi punching, I was just raised working class, where punching is one of the ways we communicate. Celebrating the misfortune of someone that deserves it is also completely normal. So I’d chalk a lot of the mismatch up to culture rather than right or wrong.
A little bit more confounding, a lot of the habits and culture of the professional class, managerial class, owning class, ruling class, etc. are offensive to me. You’ve probably seen how that goes. But particularly silence in the face of unjust violence can often be extremely violent.
