A code of conduct does not need to explicitly list everything that is yes or no. Looking at the comment you shared, it was determined that this person is probably not the person that is wanted...
Exemplary
A code of conduct does not need to explicitly list everything that is yes or no. Looking at the comment you shared, it was determined that this person is probably not the person that is wanted here and removed.
It's been made quite clear that Tildes is not a democracy or a "free speech haven" and doesn't intend to be. We are here because we are permitted to be here and we are contributing here. If we aren't we won't be welcome. If you read "don't be an asshole" and can't figure that out. Then I would prefer that you be gone.
No need for further clarifications on that if you ask me.
This so much. I own a small discord channel and after some drama went down someone recommended that I add a list of dos and don't to help avoid this, but I also came to the conclusion of leaving...
If you read "don't be an asshole" and can't figure that out. Then I would prefer that you be gone.
This so much. I own a small discord channel and after some drama went down someone recommended that I add a list of dos and don't to help avoid this, but I also came to the conclusion of leaving it at "don't be an asshole" because if you are an asshole I would much rather you "slip up" and get banned immediately rather than deal with you toeing the line for 6 months before I figured out how to "fairly" ban you.
On a technicality talks about that; Why keeping rules broad and unspecific is the best approach. It gets posted here a lot, including by Deimos who originally posted it (IIRC), since it's what...
Exemplary
On a technicality talks about that; Why keeping rules broad and unspecific is the best approach. It gets posted here a lot, including by Deimos who originally posted it (IIRC), since it's what inspired the Tildes Code of Conduct.
So I highly, highly recommend everyone here read it, including OP (@BeanBurrito), so they can understand why the Tildes CoC is written the way it is. It explains why getting specific only leads to a rules arms race of sorts, due to rule lawyering, and jerks avoiding bans on technicalities, which then have to get addressed with even more specific rules... which gradually leads to all the nice people quietly leaving the community since they get tired of putting up with said jerks, the people defending them, and debating over the specific application of every rule, and whether or not someone violated them.
Anyone who's ever modded a large subreddit (or other forum) has encountered the rules lawyer - "You have a rule against X, but it doesn't say I can't do X+1!" and then the inevitable "If you don't...
Anyone who's ever modded a large subreddit (or other forum) has encountered the rules lawyer - "You have a rule against X, but it doesn't say I can't do X+1!" and then the inevitable "If you don't want to allow X+1, you should say that in the rules!"
It's such a frustrating experience and if you go down that path, as you said, it's a never ending arms race of adding, editing, and expanding the rules to try and fit every niche situation. The tildes coc is, imo, all that should be needed for any reasonable adult to know how to conduct themselves on this site - not being able to adhere to it and claiming it's too vague is likely (not always, but often) looking for ways to skirt the edges of those rules so they can point to a specific subsection to justify poor behaviour.
I have a personal theory that the world is such a shit state simply because of people like that. Rules Lawyers contribute nothing, they force others to expend energy in pointless, argumentative...
I have a personal theory that the world is such a shit state simply because of people like that.
Rules Lawyers contribute nothing, they force others to expend energy in pointless, argumentative and very public rule slap fights that does nothing for wider communities.
Even if you give in and ensure they follow the rule to the letter... You end up with rules that are written at different times, by different people, for different reasons. These are impossibly hard to keep perfectly aligned and so things fall down the cracks.
Those cracks are what are exploited by toe rags to get one over on the wider population.
I read a post elsewhere where someone claims they were banned from Tildes without any good reason, possibly for just disagreeing with someone who was acting much more like an asshole than they...
I read a post elsewhere where someone claims they were banned from Tildes without any good reason, possibly for just disagreeing with someone who was acting much more like an asshole than they were.
Obviously this is a one sided story so I won't comment on its veracity or their innocence. However, the post made two good points which I do think are potential failings not specifically with the code of conduct but with its environment.
First, you don't get told why you are banned. Second, there's no formal appeal process. The author in the post I mentioned (I wish I could remember where I read it), basically said they had no way of defending themselves because they had no explanation of why their ban happened and no way to easily appeal their case or even to ask about the details of their ban.
In that regard, I think there's a valid failure of the system. Thankfully bans don't seem to happen frequently, but having a process that is more like a black hole could erode the trust of users in those that hold the power to silence individuals.
As far as I understand, a person could simply request another invite under a different username or through email. There is no need to appeal. Also, this isn’t a public forum - it’s one random...
As far as I understand, a person could simply request another invite under a different username or through email. There is no need to appeal.
Also, this isn’t a public forum - it’s one random guy’s little virtual playpen, and he’s invited us in, and that’s his prerogative. We are here at his discretion. So, if a user feels they are being silenced, they actually should just leave the site. And I say this as someone who seemingly barely has anything in common with a good majority of tildes users, judging by what I have read here, as well as someone who tends to come off as quite abrasive of speech and personality.
So, personally, if I get banned, so be it; that’s just a sign for me to look for belonging elsewhere. Not everywhere needs to be comfortable for everyone.
While I agree that not everyone needs to be comfortable everywhere, if you invest time into growing, or becoming part of, a community then getting kicked from that community with no explanation...
While I agree that not everyone needs to be comfortable everywhere, if you invest time into growing, or becoming part of, a community then getting kicked from that community with no explanation will signal to others that the community is not safe nor welcoming. I find that to be a failure of any social site. But I do agree that ultimately we are all just guests here, so it doesn't really matter what any of us think about the issue, we just either agree to the situation or we leave. I still find it regrettable if someone gets the boot without being told, even just in broad terms, why.
Deimos isn't perfect and I understand your concern. As I weigh the costs and benefits, I still think this is a pretty nifty site. I have read about leadership and seen authoritarian government...
Deimos isn't perfect and I understand your concern. As I weigh the costs and benefits, I still think this is a pretty nifty site.
I have read about leadership and seen authoritarian government differentiated depending on how close or far the leader stays from the opinions and experiences of the community. I have also seen Deimos consult the community before making changes and incorporate that input into his decisions.
If a person does all of this, as in, truly cultivates a good relationship with others on the site and still suddenly finds themself kicked to the proverbial curb, then the site wasn’t welcoming....
if you invest time into growing, or becoming part of, a community then getting kicked from that community with no explanation will signal to others that the community is not safe nor welcoming.
If a person does all of this, as in, truly cultivates a good relationship with others on the site and still suddenly finds themself kicked to the proverbial curb, then the site wasn’t welcoming. Nor was it apparently safe. That would simply be the truth of it, and again, that’s just the nature of stepping onto someone else’s property.
Also, I would be hard-pressed to believe that such a person who would spread their roots over a good period of time on a site such as this one would be that blindsided by their being banned. If they were, that would either signify their own tone-deafness to the atmosphere fostered here, or a drastic change in direction of leadership.
I find that to be a failure of any social site.
I don’t find this to be a failure on each and every social site. They aren’t all built for the same purpose.
Plus if they wanted to van you, they would just change the rules. Like how I signed up for Facebook with the promise of never selling my personal data and then they started selling it as much as...
Plus if they wanted to van you, they would just change the rules. Like how I signed up for Facebook with the promise of never selling my personal data and then they started selling it as much as they possibly could. If you're in someone else's playground, and decide to build a beautiful sandcastle, it's still in someone else's yard.
I have had cases where I had a dialogue with a banned user, they apologized, etc. and were unbanned. So it’s not unheard of. But yes a large percentage do not comprehend what they did wrong, won’t...
I have had cases where I had a dialogue with a banned user, they apologized, etc. and were unbanned. So it’s not unheard of. But yes a large percentage do not comprehend what they did wrong, won’t change it, and some even find an opportunity to redirect their bad behavior towards the moderators
I do like the details you provide, and the only thing I will say is that keeping a paper trail, so to speak, can help retain user trust. If people get banned but it's easy to look back and say "oh...
I do like the details you provide, and the only thing I will say is that keeping a paper trail, so to speak, can help retain user trust. If people get banned but it's easy to look back and say "oh yeah they were banned for X" then the site can retain some degree of trust among their users. If people aren't being told "you got banned for X" then it can be perceived as a system based on whims alone.
Which, to be fair, is any non-automated banning system. It's all ultimately down to the admin when and why to ban someone. So I don't disagree with the end result of things, and I'm very willing to say no appeal process should be formalized. I just still would find it regrettable if people were just disappearing without any explicit reasoning. But it is ultimately not a community in which each user has equal stake, and so I get that we basically agree to whatever happens as the terms of us using this platform.
I've been moderating online communities for 28 years and have also been banned here and there. I'm going to have to strongly disagree with your position in its entirety. As you've already been...
I've been moderating online communities for 28 years and have also been banned here and there. I'm going to have to strongly disagree with your position in its entirety.
At no point in any ban, be it here or reddit, have I ever not known, requiring just a modicum of introspection, why I was banned.
As you've already been told, this is specific to your circumstances. It's absolutely possible to not know why bans take place, for all kinds of reasons. All moderation actions - banning, locking, deleting - should be explained, even if by a simple quick note. Otherwise, what exactly are you trying to accomplish? Excising people from a community on the judgement of one fallible human is a terrible idea that leads to severe injustice against a few people. We have learned this over centuries of doing exactly that in meatspace. The thing is, those few people are not acceptable sacrifices. They're human beings. Explain what's wrong, so people can learn and improve.
In all my years of moderation, no appeal to any ban has resulted in the user being unbanned
Explaining the ban has never modified the user's behavior.
If the user wasn't unbanned, what opportunity did they have to change their behavior?
It's always a fruitless endeavor to either attempt to explain the ban to someone that is either incapable of viewing their behavior from a different lens (...)
Certainly a lot of people were justly banned and will not change their behavior. That's the whole point of well designed justice systems, though. Justly accused people can cause a little more trouble, for the sake of those who weren't.
I don't recommend engaging in a debate with people who were banned. A justification should be enough, as well as tracking their moderation history. Which, by the way, is easier if you don't back them into a corner without giving them a chance. As said elsewhere, this can make people create new accounts that you aren't tracking and lose all respect by the rules, if they genuinely do not understand why they were banned. It can lead to worse behavior.
A user defending themselves does not undo the actions that caused the ban. It's an internet board for conversation, it's not a fight where you need to defend your life, no heated argument will convince the other to your points, no ban-able behavior is going to make them come around to your "side". The only person that hands out the bans can see all that led to the ban and there is no defending the actions that lead to it.
This is a bad thing. You'd think Tildes would be the kind of community where people are actually capable of changing their minds when presented with rational arguments, which I admit is perhaps a dying virtue. Sure, it's not the death penalty, but excluding or unjustly punishing people can have negative consequences for the quality and mood of the discussion in the community and for the victim's own mental health.
To be clear: I'm OK with the code of conduct as it is. I would like moderation actions to be justified by a short explanatory sentence that the target has access to.
I'm going to disagree here just a bit. While true, I was banned from from a subreddit about a certain stock because I implied it was trading at unrealistic values. This was not against any rules...
I'm going to disagree here just a bit.
At no point in any ban, be it here or reddit, have I ever not known, requiring just a modicum of introspection, why I was banned.
While true, I was banned from from a subreddit about a certain stock because I implied it was trading at unrealistic values. This was not against any rules (I was not mean about it, and I provided evidence), but the unwritten "rule" was that you basically can't say anything negative, ever.
So yes, on reflection I suppose I "knew" why I was banned, but obviously knowing doesn't help the fact that it's a terrible reason.
In all my years of moderation, no appeal to any ban has resulted in the user being unbanned or led to useful conversation about their ban. It's always a fruitless endeavor to either attempt to explain the ban to someone that is either incapable of viewing their behavior from a different lens or is playing willfully ignorant to waste time.
As a mod on a particular big sub (>2M members), we do sometimes unban users who send a mod message to us about the mistake they made (usually involving accident rule breaking), or at a minimum convert it to a temporary ban. So there is some action sometimes from the discourse, at least for our mod team.
This sort of toxic positivity reminds me a TON of how crypto communities were described in the "A Self-Organizing High Control Group" section of Line Goes Up? So, it sounds to me like you were...
the unwritten "rule" was that you basically can't say anything negative, ever.
So, it sounds to me like you were being a good faith actor in a community full of folks acting in bad faith. In that case, I'd wear a ban like that like as a badge of honor, and move on without really trying to make much sense of their moderation tactics. ;)
I was recently banned from /r/classicwow for failing to comply with a rule because it was vague, confusing, badly written, and erratically enforced. On appeal, the lifetime ban was converted to a...
I was recently banned from /r/classicwow for failing to comply with a rule because it was vague, confusing, badly written, and erratically enforced.
On appeal, the lifetime ban was converted to a still absurd 30 day ban. Now I can post again, but I don't feel like it anymore. Unjustified bans can do that.
So yeah, mods can and do make mistakes, and decisions can be overturned.
How frequently that happens, I really can't tell. That was the first and only time I was banned from a subreddit.
I make no claims on how that would apply to Tildes, I just wanted to present a differing story. In any platform, it is conceivable for a banned user to be in the right. That must be acknowledged.
TL;DR in last paragraph. This list is hyper-specific to your experience. Reasons I was banned from subreddits: Referencing an eight-year-old meme that apparently was racist in origin but was used...
TL;DR in last paragraph.
This list is hyper-specific to your experience. Reasons I was banned from subreddits:
Referencing an eight-year-old meme that apparently was racist in origin but was used so commonly that I thought it was just a reference to something. I had no idea it was racist. If they'd just told me it was racist and removed it, I would have been totally fine with it. But they decided to just ban me while calling me racist.
Saying something supportive of the mods' position on a topic. They then reported me to the admins for harassment for responding that they were goofs because they didn't actually read my comment, that they just decided to stifle discussion instead of reading, and then saying I was glad they didn't have real world power because modding a subreddit had obviously gone to their heads. I wasn't a subscriber of that subreddit so I felt no desire to get unbanned there.
Making fun of rapists (Baylor football team during that scandal) or the people who enabled them (x2) (these were just short "warning" bans for supposedly making rape jokes)
Permabanned from AskReddit for making a joke comment, getting a three-day ban, then editing my removed comment to ask why it merited a ban.
Anyone who thought my behavior needed modifying (beyond just needing to be informed that something was originally racist and to be informed of a rule buried in a subreddit's long rules) for these things was being ignorant. When I had questions or comments pointing out the absurdity of what got me banned, I was muted/permabanned, reported to the admins for harassment (I sent one message where the worst thing I said was that they were "goofs"), and I was just told that I was a racist and the mod initially refused to even tell me which of my comments got me banned.
In each of these cases, I would say the mods lacked self-awareness but basically made the same claims about me that you are making about every single ban you ever made.
While I have often criticized the power tripping mods of a lot of subreddits, I have actually much more often been one of their defenders because I know how much utter crap they put up with. I'm sure the vast majority of what you banned was trolling, Nazi-type comments, general assholery, etc. But I've always rolled my eyes when mods made comments like yours because everybody knows about how many reddit mods let the "power" go to their heads and many of them lacked the self-awareness to realize when they were being hypocritical.
The site only has one moderator, who is also the site admininstrator. My understanding is that this has been the case since its inception 5 years ago. If ever we thought they were abusing their...
but to prevent people with moderation power from abusing their power.
The site only has one moderator, who is also the site admininstrator. My understanding is that this has been the case since its inception 5 years ago.
If ever we thought they were abusing their power, our recourse would be to stop using the site.
I'm pretty happy so far with the community that's been maintained here, but I also wouldn't hesitate to leave if that changed.
Wow. I feel like that must be getting to be a lot of work for one person as Tildes grows. Are there any plans of scaling up moderating this online community to ensure the one site administrator is...
The site only has one moderator, who is also the site admininstrator. My understanding is that this has been the case since its inception 5 years ago.
Wow. I feel like that must be getting to be a lot of work for one person as Tildes grows. Are there any plans of scaling up moderating this online community to ensure the one site administrator is not overloaded?
To be fair, Tildes stagnated for the three years up to May 2023. After an initial burst of interest and growth, Tildes grew at a rate of about 1 user per day over that period. The moderation...
To be fair, Tildes stagnated for the three years up to May 2023. After an initial burst of interest and growth, Tildes grew at a rate of about 1 user per day over that period. The moderation workload was absolutely minimal.
While he did have plans for growing the moderation team on this website (as @cfabbro has shared with you), those plans didn't need to be implemented, because there was no need for them.
All that changed on 1st June, just 6 weeks ago. In the past 6 weeks, Tildes has added about 10,000 users, off a base of only 13,000 users (most of whom weren't even active).
So, yes, there's an increase in workload, but it's only recent and sudden. Deimos has been caught by surprise by Reddit's implosion, as have many other people.
I don’t know the specifics of this case but I’m always wary of people attempting to use public sentiment to overturn their bans. In my experience, omissions and misrepresentation are far more...
I don’t know the specifics of this case but I’m always wary of people attempting to use public sentiment to overturn their bans. In my experience, omissions and misrepresentation are far more common than someone genuinely looking for answers
yeah...unless the user has links or screenshots of the actual conversation and ban message, more often than not they're misrepresenting the situation to appear sympathetic. Or glossing over the...
yeah...unless the user has links or screenshots of the actual conversation and ban message, more often than not they're misrepresenting the situation to appear sympathetic. Or glossing over the number of slurs they used in casual conversation.
I want to add (and I realise the irony) that maybe people who have just joined the site should be acclimating to the site's culture before asking for sweeping changes to it. There's no rule around...
I want to add (and I realise the irony) that maybe people who have just joined the site should be acclimating to the site's culture before asking for sweeping changes to it. There's no rule around that naturally, but we're guests here, not citizens. We don't have rights, we have privileges.
My two cents haveing been here for somewhere between four and six weeks. (I honestly don't remember and can't be bothered to look it up.) These spots on the internet are watering holes. Voat,...
My two cents haveing been here for somewhere between four and six weeks. (I honestly don't remember and can't be bothered to look it up.)
These spots on the internet are watering holes. Voat, Saidit, Tildes, Mainchan, Squabbles, Lemmy, Kbin etc, I see them as being like a series of pubs in a city. Voat is more like a nazi biker bar. Tildes maintains atmosphere of quiet conversation. In both cases, the wrong behavior will get you banned. You have to decide which you prefer and read the room. It is fucking fine to swear here as long as you don't swear at someone in a way that makes their or other people's life worse. I would imagine that our Aussie friends might be able to get away with the word cunt as long as it was clearly not about hate or derogation of women. In the end Deimos is our host. (I say this as an American woman who would never use that word aside from the way I just did) Deimos built this site. He made it open source. He has fostered a particular type of community. And at the end of the day, if I get banned here, I will shrug my shoulders and move on.
And much like a physical bar, it’s right of admission reserved, ie the owner can choose not to serve you at any time for any reason. It’s interesting to me how some of these comments about tildes...
And much like a physical bar, it’s right of admission reserved, ie the owner can choose not to serve you at any time for any reason. It’s interesting to me how some of these comments about tildes and reddit have an undertone of the right to be there because it’s online. We mostly don’t have rights to go wherever we want in real life, so it’s interesting when people feel that way about the internet.
I'll give my two cents as a long time tildes user. Yes, you can use swear words. It's probably best in moderation, and it shouldn't be directed AT people, even a group of people outside tildes....
I'll give my two cents as a long time tildes user.
Yes, you can use swear words. It's probably best in moderation, and it shouldn't be directed AT people, even a group of people outside tildes. This falls under the "Don't be an asshole" doctrine. Cursing has it's place at times, but generally the format of tildes is about high quality discussion. Cursing can be hit or miss in that capacity. I personally will occasionally drop a "fuck" or "ass" and here I still stand. The crux of it is context and if it's someone being an asshole.
I don't think we need everything to be spelled out for us. Don't be an asshole is an umbrella of behavior; don't curse at people, don't be malicious, don't act in bad faith, etc. Ultimately it is up to Deimos what behavior falls into this category and I'm sure there have been people who have fallen into a gray zone, but overall it's pretty clear to me.
I came across a thread discussing a Reddit thread where it seems someone was banned from Tildes.net for using swear words - not directed at anyone personally, but referring to a group of people in general beyond Tildes.net.
This example might be in the gray zone, but it could arguably still be under the umbrella of asshole behavior. It doesn't matter if a group is on or off tildes, if you're being malicious, which swearing at them could be construed as such, then it's likely asshole behavior. You can swear, just don't do it at people.
Actually... the OP is being selective in their description of the banned user's story, who was, themself, also a bit selective in their telling of the story. The "swear word" in question was...
This example might be in the gray zone
Actually... the OP is being selective in their description of the banned user's story, who was, themself, also a bit selective in their telling of the story. The "swear word" in question was "fucktard".
A couple of us have explained why this word is not just an ordinary swear word:
I do know the context, and was more addressing it as a hypothetical than the actual situation, and should've mentioned as much because the real situation was pretty clear cut. The person was being...
I do know the context, and was more addressing it as a hypothetical than the actual situation, and should've mentioned as much because the real situation was pretty clear cut. The person was being an asshole lol.
I'm going to play the pedant and point out that the "Don't act like an asshole..." bit doesn't stand on its own. If it's meant to stand on its own then it should be separated from the rest of the...
I'm going to play the pedant and point out that the "Don't act like an asshole..." bit doesn't stand on its own. If it's meant to stand on its own then it should be separated from the rest of the sentence.
As currently written it means "Don't act like an asshole by routinely making things worse for others." This is a much more specific, weaker guideline for conduct than the much broader "Don't be an asshole."
I think that honestly gets into a personal level of interpretation that depends on the individual. I personally think it can be read "Don't act like an asshole", as that is the highest priority....
I think that honestly gets into a personal level of interpretation that depends on the individual. I personally think it can be read "Don't act like an asshole", as that is the highest priority. The addition of "routinely make other people's experiences—or lives—worse." is a further explanation of what acting like an asshole does (making people's experience and lives worse).
I will say though, there's been a lot of posts on the website when talking about the general conduct that it has been informally summed up as "Don't be an asshole". And at the end of the day that's still Deimos's call.
some previous threads discussing this sort of transparency: August 2018, September 2018, April 2019, and December 2020. I'll repeat what I said in the latter thread, because I think it applies here:
Exemplary
The problem content should have been displayed so people could make their own judgements.
I'll repeat what I said in the latter thread, because I think it applies here:
On paper, I like the idea of more transparency into admin actions...but in practice I think it would probably create more problems than it solves.
User A does X, and gets banned for it.
When that's publicly available, it's likely to generate a lot of meta-discussion and commentary on "why shouldn't X be allowed?", "so if X1 is over the line and results in a ban, what about X2?", and so on.
The goal of the ban was to reduce the amount of X and related discussion on the site. Having the ban be public, and particularly the post/comment history that led up to the ban, would have the opposite effect.
I believe this is covered with 'Don't act like an asshole and routinely make other people's experiences—or lives—worse' If you join a community and spend your first moments name calling and...
I believe this is covered with 'Don't act like an asshole and routinely make other people's experiences—or lives—worse'
If you join a community and spend your first moments name calling and harassing others, this is you acting like an asshole. Avoid that.
I do. Tildes is a small community, and in my experience it really is a community in the literal, almost old fashioned sense of the word - not in the branded, packaged, corporate social media...
Exemplary
The person who made them claimed he wasn't name calling anyone on Tildes, nor harassing anyone. In the Tildes thread about that a copy of his comments was not made available so I don't think it is fair to make that judgement.
I do.
Tildes is a small community, and in my experience it really is a community in the literal, almost old fashioned sense of the word - not in the branded, packaged, corporate social media sense. One of the things that comes with community is trust and familiarity: I've been here long enough to know it's well managed, and now to take that on good faith until and unless I see evidence of it changing.
That doesn't mean I'll offer blind agreement or unquestioning approval - frankly, even people I've been close friends with for 20 years don't get that - but it does mean I'm happy to judge actions like this in the context of Deimos' personal track record. It's genuinely an unusual attitude for me to be taking in the online world; we're all so used to abstracting away the personal in favour of the objective, because we're all used to operating in spaces populated by millions or billions and run by faceless corporate automata, but the personal matters when you let it.
I get it. If I were in your shoes, I might be asking the same question. If I were on a different platform I might be asking the same question. If issues become systematic as the platform grows I might start asking the same question. But as someone who has been here a while, I'm happy enough to say that personal judgment seems to be working out for now, and that's enough for me to take the word of the person who runs the place over the word of a random anonymous redditor.
Are there rules in real life, in the meatspace that define explicitly, without ambiguity, what asshole behavior is? There aren't, yet for the most part, people get along at work, school, church,...
Not everyone's definition of "act like an asshole" is the same, hence the need to have something written down.
Are there rules in real life, in the meatspace that define explicitly, without ambiguity, what asshole behavior is?
There aren't, yet for the most part, people get along at work, school, church, bars, cafes, and anywhere where strangers mingle or cross paths in the real world. So why the need to legislate -- and that's what being asked here; you're not the first, either and probably won't be the last -- when we don't and can't even do that in real life?
You're not wrong that asshole behavior is defined differently per person. But then you're asking the Tildes community to somehow define it explicitly? Do you see how that might be problematic? Or perhaps impossible? Maybe even undesirable?
In real life, people generally know or at least have a feeling about who the assholes are. Or at least who's being an asshole in the moment. On occasion, it's sometimes ourselves. We figure it out without need of bright lines.
I'll give you that in a text-only medium, without hearing the intonation in a voice and ability to see facial expressions, it does make it harder to suss out asshole behavior. But that only furthers what I'm saying; that it's impossible for us to legislate what is and what isn't acceptable behavior here or anywhere. If we can't do it in real life, where it's a lot easier to determine this behavior (though still not without ambiguity), how are we expected to do it here in a text-only medium?
Every time you write a rule, someone will come up with an exception. So then you have to write a sub-rule for that exception. But then someone will come up with an exception to that new sub-rule....
hence the need to have something written down.
Every time you write a rule, someone will come up with an exception. So then you have to write a sub-rule for that exception. But then someone will come up with an exception to that new sub-rule. So then you have to write a sub-rule for that exception. And so on. And so on.
Soon, you end up with a Code of Conduct that's 1,000,000 words long, to cover every imaginable variation of possible behaviour you do and don't want to see on your website/forum/whatever. Ain't noone gonna read that!
While I personally don't like the wording of the "don't be an asshole" rule*, I do appreciate the reason why this rule is so vague.
* I don't think that, in a rule against bad behaviour, you should break your own rule. As a moderator, I hate having to say "you're banned because you're an asshole", when saying "you're an asshole" is exactly the type of thing I would ban someone for! A rule shouldn't include an insult.
"Don't be an asshole" is inherently not a hard rule, as written. But it is an easily understood rule, as read. That is, if someone cannot figure out what "don't act like an asshole" would mean,...
Not everyone's definition of "act like an asshole" is the same, hence the need to have something written down.
"Don't be an asshole" is inherently not a hard rule, as written.
But it is an easily understood rule, as read. That is, if someone cannot figure out what "don't act like an asshole" would mean, then they would also be precisely the person that rule is meant to filter out. People always put so much weight on "But I don't know what that rule means, what if I find some edge case?", yeah well, it's not about edge cases. And also, anyone who understands what such a rule means and can abide by it would also intuitively understand that it's not the edge cases that matter.
Could you expand on this more please? I'd always thought "fucktard" was a port-manteau of "fuck" and "bastard", meant to be emphatic like "dickwad" or "dipshit".
Also, "fucktards" is not merely a curseword, but is also ableisy [ableist?] hate speech.
Could you expand on this more please? I'd always thought "fucktard" was a port-manteau of "fuck" and "bastard", meant to be emphatic like "dickwad" or "dipshit".
I keep seeing the same few "Stay away from Tildes, I got banned for nothing!" threads being reposted. I would recommend you don't take these posts strictly by their word. The reality is the people...
I keep seeing the same few "Stay away from Tildes, I got banned for nothing!" threads being reposted. I would recommend you don't take these posts strictly by their word.
The reality is the people posting are rarely truthful about the extent of what led to them being banned. I guarantee its more than just a few swear words.
though some of them are still so salty about it they are still going around on reddit posting disinfo about how and why they got banned, years later
Lol, yep. Every time Tildes gets brought up on .r.redditalternatives they seemingly come out of the woodworks to bitch about how they were "banned for no reason" here, and tell various other outright lies and half-truths about the site. It's still going on yeeeeears after they were banned, too. It's been so damn hard to resist calling them out on it... Oh, banned for no reason, eh? Then what about when you openly declared yourself "transphobic" and called it a "mental illness" in a topic on ~lgbt meant for trans people here to meet and support each other, then bitched about being banned on .r.tildes and tried to lie about why (which a ton of community members called you out on) and so we banned you there too? Yeahhhhhh. Banned for "no reason" whatsoever. Uh huh. Sure.
Sigh. Oh well. It would be pointless to do that anyways, since most of the regulars at .r.redditalternatives have already made up their minds about Tildes due to us not allowing absolute "free speech" in the first place. God, I really wish that subreddit wasn't the main place that people looked when they wanted to find reddit alternatives.
Please be careful, you could be banned for using such filthy language on this site. And aren't you one of the only gatekeepers of Tildes invites? It would be even harder to get Tildes invites if...
the lying little shits
Please be careful, you could be banned for using such filthy language on this site. And aren't you one of the only gatekeepers of Tildes invites? It would be even harder to get Tildes invites if you were to be banned, God forbid!
In seriousness though, I do love coming across those people on reddit. Those sorts of posts were the first times I heard about Tildes in general. I smelled bullshit immediately while reading them and suspected that they were the result of a somewhat reasonable admin banning obnoxious, over-the-top people who use the word "fucktard" in the year 2023. After wandering over here and checking out the Docs, I figured I was probably right, and after joining and hanging around for a while, my suspicions were confirmed.
As far as I've seen, you do have to genuinely be an asshole to get kicked out of this place. And at this point, I don't see a need to define that standard in more detail.
I'm hardly a "gatekeeper", since I have probably only denied about 30 invites total, mostly to obvious spammers, out of the many thousands (prob getting close to 10k now!) of requests I have...
I'm hardly a "gatekeeper", since I have probably only denied about 30 invites total, mostly to obvious spammers, out of the many thousands (prob getting close to 10k now!) of requests I have handled on /r/tildes. ;)
And incidentally, AFAIK of all the many thousands of people I have invited, only a handful have ever gotten banned. So yeah, you pretty much do have to be an asshole (or ignore Deimos' warnings) to get perma-banned here. During huge invites waves, the enforcement does tend to get a bit more heavy-handed out of necessity, but even then, none of the bans I have witnessed have ever been totally unjustified or unwarranted, IMO.
I think you could probably have posted this in the New User Questions topic here, but I’ll give my 2¢ as a reply anyway. I don’t think the code of conduct needs updated, and I’m pretty sure curse...
I think you could probably have posted this in the New User Questions topic here, but I’ll give my 2¢ as a reply anyway.
I don’t think the code of conduct needs updated, and I’m pretty sure curse words (in the general sense) are allowed on Tildes.
During the initial wave of Reddit users migrating over (including myself) there were a fair number of people coming over treating Tildes like Reddit, rather than like its own community with its own culture. Some of those users behaved pretty maliciously towards others and were subsequently banned by Deimos, the site admin (and the only user with the power to ban users). I think he did post more explanation elsewhere for a few, but I don’t remember. While I think a “mod log” could be nice, I also don’t think it’s strictly necessary.
As long as you don’t act in an inflammatory manner, I can’t imagine you’d get banned based on what I’ve seen in my (brief) time here so far.
I’d recommend just spending some time reading posts (and the docs) to get the lay of the land, but I wouldn’t worry too much about being banned as long as you’re acting in good faith.
That person was not banned for using swear words. If that was the case, then I would have been fucking banned years ago. Shit, yeah. That person was banned for using fucking hate speech. As I said...
I came across a thread discussing a Reddit thread where it seems someone was banned from Tildes.net for using swear words -
That person was not banned for using swear words. If that was the case, then I would have been fucking banned years ago. Shit, yeah.
That person was banned for using fucking hate speech. As I said when I reported that comment to Deimos, it's the "-tard" suffix which is offensive, not the use of the "fuck-" prefix. "-tard" is highly offensive to disabled people, just like "faggot" is offensive to gay men and "nigger" is offensive to Black people. "-tard" is a shortening of "retard" which is a slur used against disabled people.
"-tard" is therefore hate speech, not just a garden-variety swear word. Whether it's "fucktard" or "libtard" or "conservatard", it's all shitty hate speech against disabled people.
This is one case where I wish people would just make a text post, and not a hybrid post with a link as the main topic, and the body of the topic buried as a comment. I had to scroll about 75% of...
This is one case where I wish people would just make a text post, and not a hybrid post with a link as the main topic, and the body of the topic buried as a comment. I had to scroll about 75% of the way down the page to find this. That's ridiculous.
I'm going to lock this. The OP's question has definitely been answered (thanks, everyone, for explaining the reasoning so thoroughly), and at this point it's starting to seem like excessive...
I'm going to lock this.
The OP's question has definitely been answered (thanks, everyone, for explaining the reasoning so thoroughly), and at this point it's starting to seem like excessive piling-on in some spots. Some of the other comments are also getting pretty far off into the weeds, so I think it'll be best to leave it here.
A code of conduct does not need to explicitly list everything that is yes or no. Looking at the comment you shared, it was determined that this person is probably not the person that is wanted here and removed.
It's been made quite clear that Tildes is not a democracy or a "free speech haven" and doesn't intend to be. We are here because we are permitted to be here and we are contributing here. If we aren't we won't be welcome. If you read "don't be an asshole" and can't figure that out. Then I would prefer that you be gone.
No need for further clarifications on that if you ask me.
This so much. I own a small discord channel and after some drama went down someone recommended that I add a list of dos and don't to help avoid this, but I also came to the conclusion of leaving it at "don't be an asshole" because if you are an asshole I would much rather you "slip up" and get banned immediately rather than deal with you toeing the line for 6 months before I figured out how to "fairly" ban you.
On a technicality talks about that; Why keeping rules broad and unspecific is the best approach. It gets posted here a lot, including by Deimos who originally posted it (IIRC), since it's what inspired the Tildes Code of Conduct.
So I highly, highly recommend everyone here read it, including OP (@BeanBurrito), so they can understand why the Tildes CoC is written the way it is. It explains why getting specific only leads to a rules arms race of sorts, due to rule lawyering, and jerks avoiding bans on technicalities, which then have to get addressed with even more specific rules... which gradually leads to all the nice people quietly leaving the community since they get tired of putting up with said jerks, the people defending them, and debating over the specific application of every rule, and whether or not someone violated them.
Anyone who's ever modded a large subreddit (or other forum) has encountered the rules lawyer - "You have a rule against X, but it doesn't say I can't do X+1!" and then the inevitable "If you don't want to allow X+1, you should say that in the rules!"
It's such a frustrating experience and if you go down that path, as you said, it's a never ending arms race of adding, editing, and expanding the rules to try and fit every niche situation. The tildes coc is, imo, all that should be needed for any reasonable adult to know how to conduct themselves on this site - not being able to adhere to it and claiming it's too vague is likely (not always, but often) looking for ways to skirt the edges of those rules so they can point to a specific subsection to justify poor behaviour.
I have a personal theory that the world is such a shit state simply because of people like that.
Rules Lawyers contribute nothing, they force others to expend energy in pointless, argumentative and very public rule slap fights that does nothing for wider communities.
Even if you give in and ensure they follow the rule to the letter... You end up with rules that are written at different times, by different people, for different reasons. These are impossibly hard to keep perfectly aligned and so things fall down the cracks.
Those cracks are what are exploited by toe rags to get one over on the wider population.
I read a post elsewhere where someone claims they were banned from Tildes without any good reason, possibly for just disagreeing with someone who was acting much more like an asshole than they were.
Obviously this is a one sided story so I won't comment on its veracity or their innocence. However, the post made two good points which I do think are potential failings not specifically with the code of conduct but with its environment.
First, you don't get told why you are banned. Second, there's no formal appeal process. The author in the post I mentioned (I wish I could remember where I read it), basically said they had no way of defending themselves because they had no explanation of why their ban happened and no way to easily appeal their case or even to ask about the details of their ban.
In that regard, I think there's a valid failure of the system. Thankfully bans don't seem to happen frequently, but having a process that is more like a black hole could erode the trust of users in those that hold the power to silence individuals.
As far as I understand, a person could simply request another invite under a different username or through email. There is no need to appeal.
Also, this isn’t a public forum - it’s one random guy’s little virtual playpen, and he’s invited us in, and that’s his prerogative. We are here at his discretion. So, if a user feels they are being silenced, they actually should just leave the site. And I say this as someone who seemingly barely has anything in common with a good majority of tildes users, judging by what I have read here, as well as someone who tends to come off as quite abrasive of speech and personality.
So, personally, if I get banned, so be it; that’s just a sign for me to look for belonging elsewhere. Not everywhere needs to be comfortable for everyone.
While I agree that not everyone needs to be comfortable everywhere, if you invest time into growing, or becoming part of, a community then getting kicked from that community with no explanation will signal to others that the community is not safe nor welcoming. I find that to be a failure of any social site. But I do agree that ultimately we are all just guests here, so it doesn't really matter what any of us think about the issue, we just either agree to the situation or we leave. I still find it regrettable if someone gets the boot without being told, even just in broad terms, why.
Deimos isn't perfect and I understand your concern. As I weigh the costs and benefits, I still think this is a pretty nifty site.
I have read about leadership and seen authoritarian government differentiated depending on how close or far the leader stays from the opinions and experiences of the community. I have also seen Deimos consult the community before making changes and incorporate that input into his decisions.
If a person does all of this, as in, truly cultivates a good relationship with others on the site and still suddenly finds themself kicked to the proverbial curb, then the site wasn’t welcoming. Nor was it apparently safe. That would simply be the truth of it, and again, that’s just the nature of stepping onto someone else’s property.
Also, I would be hard-pressed to believe that such a person who would spread their roots over a good period of time on a site such as this one would be that blindsided by their being banned. If they were, that would either signify their own tone-deafness to the atmosphere fostered here, or a drastic change in direction of leadership.
I don’t find this to be a failure on each and every social site. They aren’t all built for the same purpose.
Plus if they wanted to van you, they would just change the rules. Like how I signed up for Facebook with the promise of never selling my personal data and then they started selling it as much as they possibly could. If you're in someone else's playground, and decide to build a beautiful sandcastle, it's still in someone else's yard.
This is basically my experience with bans too. Outside the rare misunderstanding, ban "discussion" is generally a waste of time and not fruitful.
I have had cases where I had a dialogue with a banned user, they apologized, etc. and were unbanned. So it’s not unheard of. But yes a large percentage do not comprehend what they did wrong, won’t change it, and some even find an opportunity to redirect their bad behavior towards the moderators
I do like the details you provide, and the only thing I will say is that keeping a paper trail, so to speak, can help retain user trust. If people get banned but it's easy to look back and say "oh yeah they were banned for X" then the site can retain some degree of trust among their users. If people aren't being told "you got banned for X" then it can be perceived as a system based on whims alone.
Which, to be fair, is any non-automated banning system. It's all ultimately down to the admin when and why to ban someone. So I don't disagree with the end result of things, and I'm very willing to say no appeal process should be formalized. I just still would find it regrettable if people were just disappearing without any explicit reasoning. But it is ultimately not a community in which each user has equal stake, and so I get that we basically agree to whatever happens as the terms of us using this platform.
I've been moderating online communities for 28 years and have also been banned here and there. I'm going to have to strongly disagree with your position in its entirety.
As you've already been told, this is specific to your circumstances. It's absolutely possible to not know why bans take place, for all kinds of reasons. All moderation actions - banning, locking, deleting - should be explained, even if by a simple quick note. Otherwise, what exactly are you trying to accomplish? Excising people from a community on the judgement of one fallible human is a terrible idea that leads to severe injustice against a few people. We have learned this over centuries of doing exactly that in meatspace. The thing is, those few people are not acceptable sacrifices. They're human beings. Explain what's wrong, so people can learn and improve.
If the user wasn't unbanned, what opportunity did they have to change their behavior?
Certainly a lot of people were justly banned and will not change their behavior. That's the whole point of well designed justice systems, though. Justly accused people can cause a little more trouble, for the sake of those who weren't.
I don't recommend engaging in a debate with people who were banned. A justification should be enough, as well as tracking their moderation history. Which, by the way, is easier if you don't back them into a corner without giving them a chance. As said elsewhere, this can make people create new accounts that you aren't tracking and lose all respect by the rules, if they genuinely do not understand why they were banned. It can lead to worse behavior.
This is a bad thing. You'd think Tildes would be the kind of community where people are actually capable of changing their minds when presented with rational arguments, which I admit is perhaps a dying virtue. Sure, it's not the death penalty, but excluding or unjustly punishing people can have negative consequences for the quality and mood of the discussion in the community and for the victim's own mental health.
To be clear: I'm OK with the code of conduct as it is. I would like moderation actions to be justified by a short explanatory sentence that the target has access to.
I'm going to disagree here just a bit.
While true, I was banned from from a subreddit about a certain stock because I implied it was trading at unrealistic values. This was not against any rules (I was not mean about it, and I provided evidence), but the unwritten "rule" was that you basically can't say anything negative, ever.
So yes, on reflection I suppose I "knew" why I was banned, but obviously knowing doesn't help the fact that it's a terrible reason.
As a mod on a particular big sub (>2M members), we do sometimes unban users who send a mod message to us about the mistake they made (usually involving accident rule breaking), or at a minimum convert it to a temporary ban. So there is some action sometimes from the discourse, at least for our mod team.
This sort of toxic positivity reminds me a TON of how crypto communities were described in the "A Self-Organizing High Control Group" section of Line Goes Up?
So, it sounds to me like you were being a good faith actor in a community full of folks acting in bad faith. In that case, I'd wear a ban like that like as a badge of honor, and move on without really trying to make much sense of their moderation tactics. ;)
I was recently banned from /r/classicwow for failing to comply with a rule because it was vague, confusing, badly written, and erratically enforced.
On appeal, the lifetime ban was converted to a still absurd 30 day ban. Now I can post again, but I don't feel like it anymore. Unjustified bans can do that.
So yeah, mods can and do make mistakes, and decisions can be overturned.
How frequently that happens, I really can't tell. That was the first and only time I was banned from a subreddit.
I make no claims on how that would apply to Tildes, I just wanted to present a differing story. In any platform, it is conceivable for a banned user to be in the right. That must be acknowledged.
TL;DR in last paragraph.
This list is hyper-specific to your experience. Reasons I was banned from subreddits:
Referencing an eight-year-old meme that apparently was racist in origin but was used so commonly that I thought it was just a reference to something. I had no idea it was racist. If they'd just told me it was racist and removed it, I would have been totally fine with it. But they decided to just ban me while calling me racist.
Saying something supportive of the mods' position on a topic. They then reported me to the admins for harassment for responding that they were goofs because they didn't actually read my comment, that they just decided to stifle discussion instead of reading, and then saying I was glad they didn't have real world power because modding a subreddit had obviously gone to their heads. I wasn't a subscriber of that subreddit so I felt no desire to get unbanned there.
Making fun of rapists (Baylor football team during that scandal) or the people who enabled them (x2) (these were just short "warning" bans for supposedly making rape jokes)
Permabanned from AskReddit for making a joke comment, getting a three-day ban, then editing my removed comment to ask why it merited a ban.
Anyone who thought my behavior needed modifying (beyond just needing to be informed that something was originally racist and to be informed of a rule buried in a subreddit's long rules) for these things was being ignorant. When I had questions or comments pointing out the absurdity of what got me banned, I was muted/permabanned, reported to the admins for harassment (I sent one message where the worst thing I said was that they were "goofs"), and I was just told that I was a racist and the mod initially refused to even tell me which of my comments got me banned.
In each of these cases, I would say the mods lacked self-awareness but basically made the same claims about me that you are making about every single ban you ever made.
While I have often criticized the power tripping mods of a lot of subreddits, I have actually much more often been one of their defenders because I know how much utter crap they put up with. I'm sure the vast majority of what you banned was trolling, Nazi-type comments, general assholery, etc. But I've always rolled my eyes when mods made comments like yours because everybody knows about how many reddit mods let the "power" go to their heads and many of them lacked the self-awareness to realize when they were being hypocritical.
The site only has one moderator, who is also the site admininstrator. My understanding is that this has been the case since its inception 5 years ago.
If ever we thought they were abusing their power, our recourse would be to stop using the site.
I'm pretty happy so far with the community that's been maintained here, but I also wouldn't hesitate to leave if that changed.
Wow. I feel like that must be getting to be a lot of work for one person as Tildes grows. Are there any plans of scaling up moderating this online community to ensure the one site administrator is not overloaded?
Future Plans - Trust/reputation system for moderation
Though that was written a long time ago, and probably needs a bit of revamping.
To be fair, Tildes stagnated for the three years up to May 2023. After an initial burst of interest and growth, Tildes grew at a rate of about 1 user per day over that period. The moderation workload was absolutely minimal.
While he did have plans for growing the moderation team on this website (as @cfabbro has shared with you), those plans didn't need to be implemented, because there was no need for them.
All that changed on 1st June, just 6 weeks ago. In the past 6 weeks, Tildes has added about 10,000 users, off a base of only 13,000 users (most of whom weren't even active).
So, yes, there's an increase in workload, but it's only recent and sudden. Deimos has been caught by surprise by Reddit's implosion, as have many other people.
I don’t know the specifics of this case but I’m always wary of people attempting to use public sentiment to overturn their bans. In my experience, omissions and misrepresentation are far more common than someone genuinely looking for answers
yeah...unless the user has links or screenshots of the actual conversation and ban message, more often than not they're misrepresenting the situation to appear sympathetic. Or glossing over the number of slurs they used in casual conversation.
I want to add (and I realise the irony) that maybe people who have just joined the site should be acclimating to the site's culture before asking for sweeping changes to it. There's no rule around that naturally, but we're guests here, not citizens. We don't have rights, we have privileges.
My two cents haveing been here for somewhere between four and six weeks. (I honestly don't remember and can't be bothered to look it up.)
These spots on the internet are watering holes. Voat, Saidit, Tildes, Mainchan, Squabbles, Lemmy, Kbin etc, I see them as being like a series of pubs in a city. Voat is more like a nazi biker bar. Tildes maintains atmosphere of quiet conversation. In both cases, the wrong behavior will get you banned. You have to decide which you prefer and read the room. It is fucking fine to swear here as long as you don't swear at someone in a way that makes their or other people's life worse. I would imagine that our Aussie friends might be able to get away with the word cunt as long as it was clearly not about hate or derogation of women. In the end Deimos is our host. (I say this as an American woman who would never use that word aside from the way I just did) Deimos built this site. He made it open source. He has fostered a particular type of community. And at the end of the day, if I get banned here, I will shrug my shoulders and move on.
And much like a physical bar, it’s right of admission reserved, ie the owner can choose not to serve you at any time for any reason. It’s interesting to me how some of these comments about tildes and reddit have an undertone of the right to be there because it’s online. We mostly don’t have rights to go wherever we want in real life, so it’s interesting when people feel that way about the internet.
For the record, it's 6 weeks as of yesterday!
Thank you! : )
I'll give my two cents as a long time tildes user.
Yes, you can use swear words. It's probably best in moderation, and it shouldn't be directed AT people, even a group of people outside tildes. This falls under the "Don't be an asshole" doctrine. Cursing has it's place at times, but generally the format of tildes is about high quality discussion. Cursing can be hit or miss in that capacity. I personally will occasionally drop a "fuck" or "ass" and here I still stand. The crux of it is context and if it's someone being an asshole.
I don't think we need everything to be spelled out for us. Don't be an asshole is an umbrella of behavior; don't curse at people, don't be malicious, don't act in bad faith, etc. Ultimately it is up to Deimos what behavior falls into this category and I'm sure there have been people who have fallen into a gray zone, but overall it's pretty clear to me.
This example might be in the gray zone, but it could arguably still be under the umbrella of asshole behavior. It doesn't matter if a group is on or off tildes, if you're being malicious, which swearing at them could be construed as such, then it's likely asshole behavior. You can swear, just don't do it at people.
Actually... the OP is being selective in their description of the banned user's story, who was, themself, also a bit selective in their telling of the story. The "swear word" in question was "fucktard".
A couple of us have explained why this word is not just an ordinary swear word:
https://tildes.net/~tildes/189l/the_code_of_conduct_doesnt_say_enough#comment-9mzx
https://tildes.net/~tildes/189l/the_code_of_conduct_doesnt_say_enough#comment-9n5b
Also, the word wasn't used in isolation. It was part of a larger pattern of bad behaviour by that person on Tildes.
I do know the context, and was more addressing it as a hypothetical than the actual situation, and should've mentioned as much because the real situation was pretty clear cut. The person was being an asshole lol.
I'm going to play the pedant and point out that the "Don't act like an asshole..." bit doesn't stand on its own. If it's meant to stand on its own then it should be separated from the rest of the sentence.
As currently written it means "Don't act like an asshole by routinely making things worse for others." This is a much more specific, weaker guideline for conduct than the much broader "Don't be an asshole."
To further being a pedant, it is written as:
Emphasis mine. To me it stands on it's own.
As written it conveys a single instruction, not two.
I think that honestly gets into a personal level of interpretation that depends on the individual. I personally think it can be read "Don't act like an asshole", as that is the highest priority. The addition of "routinely make other people's experiences—or lives—worse." is a further explanation of what acting like an asshole does (making people's experience and lives worse).
I will say though, there's been a lot of posts on the website when talking about the general conduct that it has been informally summed up as "Don't be an asshole". And at the end of the day that's still Deimos's call.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
some previous threads discussing this sort of transparency: August 2018, September 2018, April 2019, and December 2020.
I'll repeat what I said in the latter thread, because I think it applies here:
I believe this is covered with 'Don't act like an asshole and routinely make other people's experiences—or lives—worse'
If you join a community and spend your first moments name calling and harassing others, this is you acting like an asshole. Avoid that.
There is no rule against swearing.
I do.
Tildes is a small community, and in my experience it really is a community in the literal, almost old fashioned sense of the word - not in the branded, packaged, corporate social media sense. One of the things that comes with community is trust and familiarity: I've been here long enough to know it's well managed, and now to take that on good faith until and unless I see evidence of it changing.
That doesn't mean I'll offer blind agreement or unquestioning approval - frankly, even people I've been close friends with for 20 years don't get that - but it does mean I'm happy to judge actions like this in the context of Deimos' personal track record. It's genuinely an unusual attitude for me to be taking in the online world; we're all so used to abstracting away the personal in favour of the objective, because we're all used to operating in spaces populated by millions or billions and run by faceless corporate automata, but the personal matters when you let it.
I get it. If I were in your shoes, I might be asking the same question. If I were on a different platform I might be asking the same question. If issues become systematic as the platform grows I might start asking the same question. But as someone who has been here a while, I'm happy enough to say that personal judgment seems to be working out for now, and that's enough for me to take the word of the person who runs the place over the word of a random anonymous redditor.
Are there rules in real life, in the meatspace that define explicitly, without ambiguity, what asshole behavior is?
There aren't, yet for the most part, people get along at work, school, church, bars, cafes, and anywhere where strangers mingle or cross paths in the real world. So why the need to legislate -- and that's what being asked here; you're not the first, either and probably won't be the last -- when we don't and can't even do that in real life?
You're not wrong that asshole behavior is defined differently per person. But then you're asking the Tildes community to somehow define it explicitly? Do you see how that might be problematic? Or perhaps impossible? Maybe even undesirable?
In real life, people generally know or at least have a feeling about who the assholes are. Or at least who's being an asshole in the moment. On occasion, it's sometimes ourselves. We figure it out without need of bright lines.
I'll give you that in a text-only medium, without hearing the intonation in a voice and ability to see facial expressions, it does make it harder to suss out asshole behavior. But that only furthers what I'm saying; that it's impossible for us to legislate what is and what isn't acceptable behavior here or anywhere. If we can't do it in real life, where it's a lot easier to determine this behavior (though still not without ambiguity), how are we expected to do it here in a text-only medium?
Every time you write a rule, someone will come up with an exception. So then you have to write a sub-rule for that exception. But then someone will come up with an exception to that new sub-rule. So then you have to write a sub-rule for that exception. And so on. And so on.
Soon, you end up with a Code of Conduct that's 1,000,000 words long, to cover every imaginable variation of possible behaviour you do and don't want to see on your website/forum/whatever. Ain't noone gonna read that!
While I personally don't like the wording of the "don't be an asshole" rule*, I do appreciate the reason why this rule is so vague.
* I don't think that, in a rule against bad behaviour, you should break your own rule. As a moderator, I hate having to say "you're banned because you're an asshole", when saying "you're an asshole" is exactly the type of thing I would ban someone for! A rule shouldn't include an insult.
just read the room, bud. If you can't do that, there are plenty of other places that might be worth looking into.
"Don't be an asshole" is inherently not a hard rule, as written.
But it is an easily understood rule, as read. That is, if someone cannot figure out what "don't act like an asshole" would mean, then they would also be precisely the person that rule is meant to filter out. People always put so much weight on "But I don't know what that rule means, what if I find some edge case?", yeah well, it's not about edge cases. And also, anyone who understands what such a rule means and can abide by it would also intuitively understand that it's not the edge cases that matter.
Could you expand on this more please? I'd always thought "fucktard" was a port-manteau of "fuck" and "bastard", meant to be emphatic like "dickwad" or "dipshit".
It's "fuck" and "retard", hence the ableist speech.
It is a blend of “fuck” and “retard”. The “retard” is the particular bit that /u/daychilde was referencing.
The etymology can be found here.
I keep seeing the same few "Stay away from Tildes, I got banned for nothing!" threads being reposted. I would recommend you don't take these posts strictly by their word.
The reality is the people posting are rarely truthful about the extent of what led to them being banned. I guarantee its more than just a few swear words.
From another comment of mine about the lying little shits who still frequent redditalternatives:
Please be careful, you could be banned for using such filthy language on this site. And aren't you one of the only gatekeepers of Tildes invites? It would be even harder to get Tildes invites if you were to be banned, God forbid!
In seriousness though, I do love coming across those people on reddit. Those sorts of posts were the first times I heard about Tildes in general. I smelled bullshit immediately while reading them and suspected that they were the result of a somewhat reasonable admin banning obnoxious, over-the-top people who use the word "fucktard" in the year 2023. After wandering over here and checking out the Docs, I figured I was probably right, and after joining and hanging around for a while, my suspicions were confirmed.
As far as I've seen, you do have to genuinely be an asshole to get kicked out of this place. And at this point, I don't see a need to define that standard in more detail.
I'm hardly a "gatekeeper", since I have probably only denied about 30 invites total, mostly to obvious spammers, out of the many thousands (prob getting close to 10k now!) of requests I have handled on /r/tildes. ;)
And incidentally, AFAIK of all the many thousands of people I have invited, only a handful have ever gotten banned. So yeah, you pretty much do have to be an asshole (or ignore Deimos' warnings) to get perma-banned here. During huge invites waves, the enforcement does tend to get a bit more heavy-handed out of necessity, but even then, none of the bans I have witnessed have ever been totally unjustified or unwarranted, IMO.
Be careful... you might get banned for your filthy language! :P
I think you could probably have posted this in the New User Questions topic here, but I’ll give my 2¢ as a reply anyway.
I don’t think the code of conduct needs updated, and I’m pretty sure curse words (in the general sense) are allowed on Tildes.
During the initial wave of Reddit users migrating over (including myself) there were a fair number of people coming over treating Tildes like Reddit, rather than like its own community with its own culture. Some of those users behaved pretty maliciously towards others and were subsequently banned by Deimos, the site admin (and the only user with the power to ban users). I think he did post more explanation elsewhere for a few, but I don’t remember. While I think a “mod log” could be nice, I also don’t think it’s strictly necessary.
As long as you don’t act in an inflammatory manner, I can’t imagine you’d get banned based on what I’ve seen in my (brief) time here so far.
I’d recommend just spending some time reading posts (and the docs) to get the lay of the land, but I wouldn’t worry too much about being banned as long as you’re acting in good faith.
But then they wouldn't have got the same outraged mob that they got by posting a separate topic and making their complaint more visible! :D
That person was not banned for using swear words. If that was the case, then I would have been fucking banned years ago. Shit, yeah.
That person was banned for using fucking hate speech. As I said when I reported that comment to Deimos, it's the "-tard" suffix which is offensive, not the use of the "fuck-" prefix. "-tard" is highly offensive to disabled people, just like "faggot" is offensive to gay men and "nigger" is offensive to Black people. "-tard" is a shortening of "retard" which is a slur used against disabled people.
"-tard" is therefore hate speech, not just a garden-variety swear word. Whether it's "fucktard" or "libtard" or "conservatard", it's all shitty hate speech against disabled people.
This is one case where I wish people would just make a text post, and not a hybrid post with a link as the main topic, and the body of the topic buried as a comment. I had to scroll about 75% of the way down the page to find this. That's ridiculous.
I'm going to lock this.
The OP's question has definitely been answered (thanks, everyone, for explaining the reasoning so thoroughly), and at this point it's starting to seem like excessive piling-on in some spots. Some of the other comments are also getting pretty far off into the weeds, so I think it'll be best to leave it here.
Did you create this account on Tildes just to write this complaint about Tildes? Are you an existing user on a throwaway, or are you a newcomer?
I see I'm not the only cynic in this thread.
No fear of that with me around! ;)