How is moderation going lately?
I am a reddit refugee and I was drawn to this network by its mission, its decisive rebuff of chasing capital at all costs, and the overall vibe.
I lurked for a while before I was invited to join, but shortly after joining I noticed something. While a good discussion from opposing viewpoints can help everyone broaden their horizons a bit, it felt like white supremacists were testing the waters. While I can't directly cite any threads, there were a couple instances where I felt one side was seeing just how close they could get without being obvious. But it felt like some of the subtler dog whistles were there.
It felt very similar to how QAnon got a lot of people with the disinformative statistic about child abductions. After all, who's going to be on the other side "child abductions are bad?"
After seeing a few threads and getting the same vibe, I stopped visiting the site for the last couple months. Life getting pretty busy also helped.
I haven't been back long enough to determine for myself whether I'm in a "Nazi bar" or not. I would be happy to admit that it was all in my head. But it is a major concern for any up-and-coming social network. And that's an opposing viewpoint no one needs to take seriously. Was it in my head? Was I reading too much into things? Did all the nazis just go to X? More generally, how has moderation been with the influx of new users? The same, but more? A couple extra reminders doing the trick? Uptick in bans? Is this information already somewhere and I'm a bad user for not having seen it?
short answer: we're not perfect, but we're definitely not a Nazi bar.
long answer:
since the Great Reddit Migration, there has been a noticeable uptick in comments with the sort of dog-whistle-y / just-asking-questions vibe you mention. it's a small relative increase to what was already a small absolute value - the vast majority of the site has no problems of this nature. but it has been there.
Tildes is trying to thread the needle between two very difficult goals - on the one hand, rejecting the paradox of tolerance, and on the other hand, embracing the principle of charity.
in other words, if someone says something that can be interpreted ambiguously, and one interpretation is that they're a bigot, the principle of charity pushes us to assume the best possible interpretation of their words. but meanwhile, if they make other comments that remove any ambiguity about them being a bigot, rejecting the paradox of tolerance means that we must also stop treating them with the principle of charity.
and there isn't a clean, easy, simple answer to that problem, as much as we would like there to be. there's inherently a grey area and a zone of uncertainty between the two, where we're left wondering if a particular comment is made in good faith by someone who is ignorant-but-not-stupid and genuinely wants to know more, or if they're a "just asking questions" troll.
personally, the best approach I've found is to either:
a) don't reply at all. if you feel it's warranted, mark the comment as noise, offtopic, or malicious. Tildes, in most cases, uses comment activity as a signal to boost the prominence of that topic on the front page. if you feel that a comment thread is already a tire fire, the best thing you can do is walk away from the tire fire without commenting on it. if possible, find a topic you think is higher-quality and more worthy of discussion, and redirect your energy towards commenting on that instead.
b) engage, but as constructively and non-argumentatively as possible. don't get sucked into a back-and-forth. wait a few hours, or overnight, between replies. if you feel you must respond, remember the principle of charity and let their words speak for themselves. don't assume what they mean, ask them to elaborate. if they're talking in hypotheticals, ask them for concrete examples (this is something I find useful in general, and not just for dealing with the sort of comments we're talking about here)
something that Tildes is perhaps missing is a "dogwhistle" or "bad vibes" or "sus" label. this would be a lesser signal than the Malice label, and probably only looked at if there was a pattern of a particular user having multiple of their comments labeled by multiple different people over time.
I’ve been here since 2020, and I don’t recall any crypto-Nazi JAQing off. I think you’d need to point thread(s) out, as that sort of bullshit is explicitly not tolerated here.
I'm not exactly an old head but I've definitely seen some now and again. I've been pointing it out every once in a while and I feel like I've been seeing some banning so I appreciate the good job done.
If it were my site typing “nazi” or “fascist” into the comment form would start a cooling-off period. There are hundreds of other words people could use to describe other people’s selfish, obnoxious, sharp-elbowed, trolling, authoritarian, etc, behavior. But like some people for whom the “f-word” seems to be every other word that comes out of their mouth, in some circles these words are repeated ceaselessly and senselessly and this behavior gets normalized.
(Some people today are still obsessed with Nazi symbols, granted, like the founder of Russia’s Wagner group, but for each one of them there are other people like Vladimir Putin who use “nazi” as a label to justify attacks on other people.)
I find the “anti-fascist” concept offensive as it exists today not because I am a fascist (although that use of terminology implies that I am and that’s the point, it is a linguistic trap) but because it is applied to every injustice in the world such as unequal access to health care, a breakdown of respect between the police and community, predatory fees on your debit card, etc. We’ve been fighting these for years and until very recently we could do so without calling everyone a fascist but the dialogue has gone badly downhill since 2016 or so.
To be fair to the other side of your argument, some of us are aware and terrified that there are modern, current, politically influential people today who share motivations, strategies and tactics with classic old school fascists.
Umberto Eco wrote the list of identifying characteristiscs of a fascist leader or movement
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
From wikipedia since it is open source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism
You’ve got to watch for A=A equivalencies.
Leaders of Hitler’s “brownshirts”, the SA, such as Rohm were known to be gay, they were still really happy to crack heads for that cause. Hitler cracked down on them not for their sexuality, but because they were (1) demanding that Hitler deliver on some of the equality-oriented promises he had made, and (2) had a following that was a threat to his power.
This book talks about quite a few things
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nothing-Works-Anthropology-Original/dp/0671635778
and one of them is the very long term (thousands of years) trend of cultures to control people’s sexuality and the very different attitudes one finds in different places and times. At this particular time, individualism rules. The thing is that sexuality fundamentally involves other people even if you are consuming pornography; sexuality is how we make more people, and of course it is an area where massive levels of exploitation occur (e.g. frequently coercive relationships are framed as “just an affair”) to the extent where some people question whether a woman really can fairly “give consent” in this society.
So much depends on particulars of medicine and not universal truths: for instance, “Plan B” and pharmaceutical abortions are game changing, if AIDS had not become a chronic condition that can be managed we’d be having a very different discussion than we are now. (e.g. many of the participants just would not be here)
In places like China, South Korea and Japan there is a perception of crisis because birth rates are so low, something that will eventually have a devastating effect on their economies. This is something that motivates some people to return to traditional values but it seems in places like that women are not having children because of sexist bullshit and if anything it takes relaxation of traditional values to promote natalism today.
So I reject the idea that fascism is about sex (it mainly literary critic sorts of people like Eco who subscribe to Freud these days) and would say more it had to do with the completion of what happened in the French Revolution and the resulting crises in Europe (no accident Lenin and Mussolini had their revolutions within a few years.)
People have been fighting to control sexuality since the beginning of humankind and they will keep doing so, the link to fascism is specious.
To the extent that I understand the argument, the claim is that the rhetoric, strategy and political goals of the people who happen to be trying to control sexuality right now is fascist.
two quick points before I step away for a few hours.
Targeting minorities as scapegoats and focuses for suspicion, fear, antagonism and hatred is a political tactic. In the US, there is clear continuity from Father Coughlin to the John Birch Society to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and more recent internet personalities.
We didn't see this out in the open 20 or 30 years ago but there are moves being made to normalize the idea of authoritarian government as an improvement over democratic and republican forms of government.
For example https://tildes.net/~misc/18k4/claremont_institute_publicizes_excerpt_from_a_book_openly_calling_for_right_wing_revolution_coup
I’ll agree with that. I just read
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/19/birchers-review-republican-far-right-trump-desantis-dallek-john-birch-society
and would agree that right wing authoritarianism is a problem in the US and maybe even a larger problem in Europe. This book
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/philip-bump/the-aftermath-last-days-baby-boom/
also makes the case that the electoral case for “white supremacy” (in quotes because I think that term too is over-used but it is appropriate here) is near a peak right now; it was a winner in 2016, it could be a winner in 2024, it won’t be a winner in 2036 when the population is less white.
Yet, the “anti-fascist” who sees a “fascist” everywhere (local police department, labour leader Keir Starmer according to sci-fi writer Charlie Stross, people at the trailer park next to the homeless colony who are afraid of disorder there such as an explosion that killed one person, …) comes across like the member of the John Birch Society who sees a “communist” everywhere (like war hero Dwight Eisenhower.). I wonder if there’s a sort of envy there or if they they want to steal the playbook of the John Birch Society. Or maybe life seems more meaningful if it is like a comic book or a WWII movie. Often “anti-fascism” seems to appropriate the language, emotional tone and other characteristics of fascism and I think when we do that they win.
It’s not the way to build a better society.
I’ll be honest, I agree that fascist as a term is a little over-used (I prefer authoritarian, or right-wing authoritarian if specificity is required). However, OP did use the phrase “Nazi bar” and mentioned white supremacists, so I decided to use “Nazi” for those reasons.
You're probably right about authoritarian. I usually go with fascist because it's the earliest such modern, high profile movement whose denomination is recognizable by everyone, and the word "nazi" (which is short for national socialist) can lead to some really obnoxious arguments from certain types of people about socialism and political alignment.
You are right about the sequence of events.
Yeah, I realize that no sources puts my claim on shaky ground, but it was a couple months ago and it's easier for me to just stop using a social network. Maybe it's wrong to take past experiences from other sites and apply them here, but that downward trajectory is a tough one to correct. It's not as if I need to be on any of these sites.
All the comments have been very reassuring, and maybe I was reading too much into things before.
I've also noticed it, nothing outright hateful but conversations like:
Happens all the time here. There are some users with pretty messed up views, potentially looking to normalize them under the guise of "just asking questions" and "different political opinions".
Most people here are wonderful, but there are definitely user 2s trying to see what they can get away with saying because they know they'll be defended by user 3s
Edit: Obviously this example conversation is hyperbolic to illustrate a point, and it's not like it's a widespread prevalent issue. I mean express that I haven't been here as long as some other users, and I've noticed this kind of behavior several times. I'll certainly make an effort to report problematic content I see.
Are you actually being serious, or are you just being incredibly hyperbolic to make some sort of point? I have been on this site since day 1, and have been incredibly active the entire time. And while I can't read absolutely every comment made on Tildes anymore since there is just too much traffic nowadays, I still read a huge amount of them every day, and the only people I have ever seen make comments even remotely like #2 have always gotten banned, no matter how "civil" they were being. And I have also never seen anyone defending those kind of abhorrent views either, but if I did I would have reported them as well (and you should too!), and trusted @Deimos to handle the situation.
Really? Can you point to an example of this? I'm asking because, TBH, I don't really believe you. But also because I'm obviously not omnipotent, and so I admittedly might have missed seeing something like that going on here. And if you can point to any examples, the very first thing I intend to do is report those comments so @Deimos can deal with them and those users appropriately by potentially giving them the boot, if how you're characterizing the situation is accurate.
I think there's something here about whether we can hear the dog whistles, especially if it's dressed up in "polite" discussion. We know some of the whistles and those are not tolerated. But the point of a dog whistle is that it can only be heard by certain people.
One of the difficulty for Tildes around trans people is that anti-trans messaging is so common in mainstream media, and that media will frequently post disinformation. They may not do that in the news sections because it doesn't pass fact-checking (but UK media does not have fact checking, and there are ways to get it in even fact-checked articles) but they'll happily print nonsense in book reviews. And innocent users come here and repeat it.
You were recently involved in a thread where a long-standing user asked "But, why do we always have to assume there's something behind what we can see?" (about the influence of the LGB Alliance). Multiple people with more knowledge of the stated purpose of both LGBA and Heritage Foundation repeatedly tried to discuss it with that person. The thread is still up. That user isn't going to get banned, those posts are not going to be deleted. To have someone, in ~lgbt, say "well, maybe lesbians just want a trans-exclusionary space and why is that such a problem" is really fucking worrying.
If you're talking about what I think you are, I think a more charitable retelling of that argument is not
but instead: "Maybe this group (LGBA) is simply hateful of their own accord, instead of being part of a grand conspiracy by the right wing." The user is (imo) not suggesting that these are harmless people with some "concerns" (cue Contrapoints voice), but that they are hateful, but could be acting mostly independently of the larger divide-and-conquer campaign. The user does not comment on whether it is ultimately playing into the divide-and-conquer campaign, merely stating that we need not assume that it is orchestrated as such. That is a far cry from accepting their goals as legitimate. I'd read that user as thoroughly T-supportive, whether or not the conspiracy actually exists. Note also that the part that "we can see" from your comment (imo) refers to "[their intentions are to] attack trans people".
Personally, I'd file that kerfuffle as a massive misunderstanding. Because the user does not differ with you in who the bad people are, just in how they operate and to what extent they coordinate.
I personally think that evaporative cooling is a major issue that Tildes (and frankly most social media websites past a certain size) has failed to appropriately address - I'm not sure that it's even possible without a lot of moderation. However, that statement is influenced by my own tolerance for certain kinds of behaviors and where I personally calibrate what I'm willing to tolerate. All in all I believe this website is much safer and tolerant than most social media websites in the current day and age (especially the truly mainstream ones which are absolutely filled with toxic messaging and behavior), but I also think you're right to drag out the nasty parts into the sunlight for others to see.
With that all being said, I think the vast majority of people pushing back against your (and @Gekko 's) narrative is one of framing. The comments you are referencing are a problem that's existed on Tildes for ages, and one that will likely be fought for as long as transgender individuals are thought of as second class citizens and their issues are politicized as different or unique from the general framework of respecting humanity. This problem isn't restricted to just transgender individuals, but includes nearly all individuals of minority status. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to tell when someone sharing those opinions is merely ignorant and not a malicious actor. Sometimes when pressed or questioned on their beliefs they will take their 'mask off' and share their malicious intent, but most of the time it's hard to make that judgement. Unfortunately the mere implication that people could be better or that this behavior is worrying often triggers a fair amount of fragility as well, and people jumping to defend others or to virtue signal, rather than question their own behavior and work towards a brighter future.
This is the space in which I think a more hands-on style of moderation is helpful. People who are well versed in lgbt issues can know enough to know that while that conversation isn't necessarily malicious, it should be removed because it's harmful for queer individuals to experience. In the same way, feminist exemplars can moderate womens spaces and remove unhelpful discussions where people challenge common narratives such as equal pay or a woman's right to abortion. In a similar fashion members of the community can show up and label the comments as noise or malice, and provide counter-narratives to show community support. I'm not sure that there's a perfect mix, but past a certain size you'll end up seeing the same conversations happen over and over again in the same threads and same communities because some people are ignorant and others are malicious and while it may seem like a janitor's duty, cleaning up these spaces is a necessity. If the spaces are not cleaned up, you end up pushing out the minority voice as they get discouraged by what is left in plain sight.
I was part of this discussion (arguing against the user you describe) but I don't think this is an accurate summary of their arguments. @vektor already pretty much laid out the actual thing the user in question was arguing. I've found the user in question to be a great discussion partner overall and would be sad to see them no longer on tildes (they're one of the few usernames I recognize in threads because of this tbh).
Are you meaning to imply you think those posts should be removed and that the user in question should be banned?
I'm not DanBC but all I will say is seeing that weird exclusionary shit peddled on ~lgbt does make me want to use this site less, which would be sad because I have for the most part liked tildes quite a lot. I like having some level of confidence that I'm talking to a real person in good faith that isn't a cryptofascist.
I don't think the user should have been banned no. There's far too many situations where people are just oblivious and not malicious. But it would be nice if every now and again there was a mod (gently) putting their foot down and saying "no, actually, this is wrong and this is why."
Since your comment and DanBC both say something about ~lgbt specifically, I know you can't speak for DanBC but for yourself, do you think it would be the same problem if it was posted elsewhere on Tildes but not in ~lgbt? I'm just trying to better understand your perspective on if the issue was more so the discussion or the content, or the location where it took place, or both?
~lgbt is the place for it, and again lots of people don't know better for various reasons so I do think that it's OK for them to post about it there if it's coming from a place of ignorance rather than malice.
Really my only complaint is with tildes' lack of some sort of 'sub-czar' or similar. People that can step in with a moderator hat and say, gently but firmly, this is wrong, this is why this is wrong, please don't keep pushing this because it's harmful and if people insist on continuing to, get rid of them.
I had been thinking about these groups a little before and more after I posted that and questioning the foundation of them, not just on tildes but on reddit or anywhere else for that matter, and I was realizing there's perhaps different ways people see them that might also cause some strife.
Maybe I'm wrong in how I'm perceiving this relative to how it actually works, but the way I see how tildes works now (because of the limitation you're talking about in lack of specific authority over each group), every group is more like a category of interest but in a way it treats all users as generalists who might have more knowledge over some interests than others but it's not really like something you identify with or a club you're joining.
Whereas on reddit, and elsewhere on the internet, there are many systems that are gearing towards that, where it's more like a club or just overall part of your identity in some way. Someone might view joining malefashionadvice as being part of a club, there's specific direction over what its there for and the type of discussion. Some might just go there casually and look for information, but you still need to follow the specific rules of the club, because there are people who have more at stake in those particular areas than people who come into them casually. It's not enough to just follow reddit's rules, you have to follow the club rules too. To my knowledge, Tildes doesn't have any specific group rules, it's just a matter of what category a particular discussion best falls under.
Personally I like it that way, but I'm more of a generalist personality. However I can see the downsides, like as you're pointing out, there's not a streamlined way for people who are most knowledgeable on a particular subject to potentially use insight that they may have from their additional experience that others don't have other than to comment or make a case for why something should be a certain way, but ultimately it would need to be something that influences Deimos. So I get that there being that much friction for someone to do that can be problematic.
On the other hand, what I like about it is that it feels less like an echo-chamber. Like on reddit sometimes you go into certain areas and you can tell a lot of people participating in there only ever engage with certain ideas and don't want to engage with other ideas and you can imagine it might have started out relatively tame and by the time you're looking at it years later, it's morphed into something more extreme because of the echo-chamber effect. For example, something like r/conservative on reddit only exists the way it does because they're allowed to set their own "club" rules and probably in the past in the very beginning it wasn't nearly what it is today, but that type of system enables it to grow into what it has become.
There are definitely benefits and downsides to both styles. I don't necessarily think that tildes needs more rules in each subforum. Maybe even just more mini-mods that don't have all the permissions Deimorz has but only have perms a-la janitors on 4chan. You can hide posts from public view + block users from posting temporarily + recommend them for banning by an actual mod, and maybe also 'distinguish' posts like on reddit but only to gently remind people to chill out/tell them why something they're doing is harmful/etc.
I just don't see how a community can scale when there's only a single point of failure - Lot of love for Deimorz for all the work he's done, but he is ultimately still only one person.
I think that just having the global rules and not overcomplicating things with tons of specific rules for each subtilde (?) is fine, I just think that as tildes grows it'll be more and more necessary to have strict moderation - it's just kind of the nature of public/semi-public internet spaces.
I think your proposal through Grumble’s framing would be deciding between general Tildes moderators versus ~group specific moderators, not whether there’s more mods or just Deimos.
I agree and I’ve been here for a long time too. This post is reaching, weird and borderline rage bait.
Agreed. The only cases that match what Gekko is saying that I've witnessed were banned within a day. There are always people with much tamer, non-hateful but controversial opinions. Among them, those that give no regard for civility are no longer with us. If it is non-hateful, non-harmful opinions that one disagrees with, I find it incredibly disingenuous to portray them as literal nazi propaganda, even if hyperbolic.
Same for the civility squad. I've never seen it used in defense of nazi bullshit. If this happens "all the time", I'm getting a bad feeling about this, because when conflict arises needlessly, I'm part of the "civility squad" sometimes, and that kind of intervention does happen all the time. So maybe Gekko thinks I too am defending Nazi bullshit? Or Gekko is seeing things I'm not.
I don't think I've seen anything remotely as egregious as the example up there, but there was some discussion in a recent thread about replacing voting with random selection from citizens who pass a civics test that was pretty rough (the original post was basically "let's bring back voting literacy tests and also get rid of direct democracy" after all). That said, I saw pushback from other commenters in the thread more than I did agreement with OP on that one, so it overall left me with a positive impression of tildes as a community.
Similarly, I was told by another user that "Very few people in the real world obsess over identity politics" in a discussion about how reddit could frequently be racist and sexist, but another user promptly pointed out the dogwhistle in the thread and the votes generally seem to indicate that the tildes community "sided" with me on that one. I also remember being pleasantly surprised by how far down I had to scroll in the thread about Feminist Frequency to find someone being even a little misogynistic (and there were comments deleted by Deimos down there that indicated this was not an accident).
The most egregious thread I've seen on Tildes was the one right after the reddit migration where someone talked about wanting spaces like some transphobic spaces they liked on reddit (among other things but that's what I remember most vividly), but that one ended up getting locked (and maybe deleted?) by Deimos pretty quickly and the pushback from the Tildes community on that post actually really heartened me about the general tendencies in this community.
Not trying to be too pedantic but it actually is, but only if you're specifically saying LGB and dropping the T.
I don't recall the username of the people who left the comments I mentioned above but based on your writing style I suspect it wasn't you. Regardless of whether it was or wasn't you, I don't think your perspective is unreasonable at all (though I'd disagree with parts of it, I think we have a lot of common ground). It's just that speaking negatively about "identity politics" is a red flag in certain contexts, especially when in response to the type of comment I made in the thread in question (saying that reddit was often sexist and racist), so that original conversation stuck out in my mind as the type of thing OP was talking about.
And yeah as long as you don't drop the T, I don't have a problem with your choice of letters. Adding Q or + can sometimes make it more explicit but just saying LGBT is totally fine and not generally a dogwhistle.
I can't remember the name of it but there's an effect along the lines of 'you buy a certain model of car and then all of a sudden you're seeing that car everywhere'.
The point being that you most often see what you're attuned to.
I think there's definitely an element of that at play here.
I’m assuming this is in argument of not seeing dog whistles, because those more attuned will be the ones to see it
But to me this also supports the opposite: people that look for dog whistles will see them when they aren’t actually present. They’re so attuned to x = y that then x always = y
I’m not saying anything in regards to here, as I’m a new user without much experience. I just dislike the pure confidence some people have in pointing out dog whistles - some will be right, some will be wrong.
Just a very simplified basic eg 88 in a username doesn’t mean a Nazi. But if you’re attuned to look for dog whistles, you’ll see it when it’s not actually there.
It’s a very hard and complicated line to walk, and why touching base and having conversations like this is important. It’s something I’m glad about here, in the little time I’ve been I’ve seen multiple “let’s talk about the site in regards to X” threads that touch base with the users to see if the site is accomplishing its goals or not
i believe the Baader-Meinhof effect is what you’re referring to (aka frequency illusion)
Thanks.
I do try to attune myself to picking up on dog whistles and problematic behavior because I've seen many a community, big and small, become hostile places as people become lax about creating accepting, empathetic spaces, allowing bigots to push out the gentler users.
It's happening all the time, X is a great example of a massive platform that's making more room for hate and less for everyone else, limiting its content moderation strictly to that which will anger advertisers. I am seeing this metaphorical car everywhere and I worry about Tildes becoming one. Not because this is a bad community, it's awesome, but because we're in an internet/political climate that precipitates bigotry growth.
Message me links to specific examples that you're referring to, please.
Well now I feel silly, I didn't think to bookmark any of them as evidence, nor was my intention to testify as a witness. I'm looking through my post history to see if I felt like engaging with them and will message you with any I find, but I wasn't making my post as a direct response to a specific interaction held in my mind.
Happens all the time and not widespread?
I have a hard time understanding your entire comment. To me it is not at all “obviously hyperbolic”. The exchange your giving as example sounds very alarming and claiming it happens all the time even more so. It puts so much extra fuel on an already heated discussion.
Considering the latter is in an edit, I'd consider that a retraction/correction/amendment of the former. People change their minds in response to feedback, that's good. That the comment is a bit contradictory now is no big deal imo.
If they are backtracking on that much in an edit, then I think it would be better to just remove the comment entirely. If everything in the original text is overblown, what is it adding to the discussion besides confusion?
I don't believe in deleting comments, I'd much rather just fess up in responses or edits that the comment wasn't received well, or that I was mistaken, or in this case that I accidentally used more inflammatory language than I intended. Deleting it removes discussion context for other people, and even an unpopular take can foster discussion, case and point.
I agree with this philosophy as well. It also stops the illusion that things are always perfect. It's sort of the social equivalent of insta filters. People make mistakes, get emotional, phrase things poorly, and get things wrong, and so on. Having a record of what happened is so much more clear than a deletion.
We live in the futurenevermind, crypto meant sneaky, not bitcoinIn this instance, I meant crypto as hidden/stealthy, not as in cryptographic or Bitcoin.
Oh, nevermind then, I thought you meant "crypto insanity or Nazis" as two negative groups you commonly see on Reddit.
Sigh,
You've seen it, then show us? This isn't just some claim, this is an accusation of the nature of this platform and I think it's straight up defamatory.
I'm now more inclined to believe this is based on your interpretation, rather than anything explicitly implied by the content you refer to.
"Explicitly implied" lol, explicitly stated*
No, it's a claim, and one that I admitted might be skewed. A big influx of new users and (AFAIK) a small moderation team can lead to issues.
Most of the other comments have pointed that I might not have misinterpreted what I read, but also that this site is not (currently) in danger of falling down that slope.
I don't see a need for what I'm interpreting as an antagonistic tone.
It is, at the very least, undercutting your argument.
I get the nazi bar story is a popular one, but it feels extremely hyperbolic for what i've personally witnessed on tildes. Further there is absolutely a ton of claiming dogwhistle/whatever kind of behavior on the internet when it's just an interpretation that the claimer doesn't like.
It's a very serious claim to make, but with no evidence/examples, we're all stuck trading anecdotes and interpretations of different things now. There's still very few concrete examples in this topic (with a few alluding to some), so we can't even get on the same page to discuss it.
Personally, it's extremely hurtful and frustrating to constantly be told i'm a fascist/alt right/woke/ANTIFA/whatever because people don't agree with my way of thinking and asking questions. I am absolutely the sort of person who will sincerely "just asking questions", and for a long time this was fine on the internet. In the past decade or so though i've mostly stopped altogether because it's just not worth fighting the hassle (and because a ton of people don't sincerely WANT to explain their positions, or can't. They just want to have them).
So I get the frustration of seeing, to me, what is yet another "lets all fight about nebulous things" bait style topic. I'm sure that's not the intent, but this is already a nebulous claim, and with no evidence all you're going to get is a bunch of different anecdotes. I do understand wanting to vent yourself, which this feels a bit like, but I can't blame people for being frustrated with this because it's easily adjacent to so many unproductive mud slinging fights.
Personally, tildes is one of the few places I'm bothering to have these conversations and this kind of detail again, and it's nice. My reflex for this topic and a few previous ones was "yep no point posting", and it was refreshing to come back later and see real discussion of the same issues I wanted to raise. I'd like to see this remain such a place.
I feel like anyone posting in good faith and not outright spewing hate should be encouraged to contribute to the conversation. I'm tired of people talking about dog whistles, motte and bailey, sealioning as ways of dismissing and refusing to engage in discussion.
Assuming the discussion is actually relevant and not someone just shouting from a soapbox, we need to understand some people have dissenting views. Well researched well argued opinions can sometimes make people upset.
So long as the intention, either openly or subversively, isn't to upset others (trolling) I don't see the concern here.
Too often accusations of "dog whistling" just come across as, "hey you didn't actually say anything explicitly wrong but it's upsetting for me".
I do make an effort to not throw terms like dog whistle around lightly. I put the quotes around "nazi bar" because I'm referencing that anecdote that's gone around a bit about good places turning into nazi hangouts because it wasn't nipped in the bud. If people are unfamiliar, I could edit it into the main post.
I’m not sure what to make of this post. It feels like a great way to start drama in a few sentences.
So you’ve not been here long or much. You’ve already established at some point “white supremacists were testing the waters” and then left. Now you are back and wonder “how is moderation going lately?”. In itself that question is already implying it was somehow not going well in the past.
How are you expecting these things to land with people that have spent tons of time building this community? How valuable is your observation without being able to point at any real example? What are expecting anybody to do with your observations? To me, without any concrete examples, this post is just causing drama for no good reasons.
It’s actually pretty funny. It’s as if he walked into a town, got to talking with some people at a local church, and said “nice community you have here, last time I saw some signs of witchcraft but so far so good”. We are inclined to believe his story, after all most Reddit alternatives have the deserved reputation of being full of witches, who sought an alternative after being banned. Then the comments come in, now that you mention it I’ve seen more black cats, weird things hanging from trees. The accusations get more specific, and slowly enter into the present. We may be burned on stakes within the week!
Clearly he tapped into an ongoing anxiety of tildes.
Not to mention, it sounds like OP didn't report the offending comments which would provide some firsthand experience with moderation on this site. In their defense, the info on how to use the tagging system is hard to find. You have to navigate from Docs to Instructions, and from there click on all relevant-sounding subsections... Just now, it took me three tries before I found it under "Commenting on Tildes". I also tried looking at the Contact page halfway. Perhaps giving "Labeling Comments" its own subsection on the Instructions page would be more intuitive (Reporting = taking action on an existing comment = Labeling? = click).
I agree. As the person who originally wrote much of the content in those instruction pages, I'm always open to improvements. I noted this particular need for improvement a few months ago. I decided that, next time I had cause to update some of the instructions, one of the changes I would make would be to separate out the comment labelling instructions onto their own page.
I had no idea labels really existed until this thread came up. (I am n00b.)
Their function is interesting, but having reporting buried in there seems confusing. Reporting should be reporting and should be accessible with very few clicks. Just putting a "Report" link that popped up some options below the comment like "Label" is today would go a long way to fixing the problem.
I'm also very new here, but as far as I can tell this probably wouldn't be tolerated.
If you think something is toeing a line, consider reaching out to a longtime member of the community (e.g. cfabbro) so you can bounce your thoughts off of them.
If you are convinced that you're seeing something malicious, reporting the comments with the
Malicelabel will get it to the attention of the site admin who may act on it.If that happened people would just get banned by the thousands to restore the site. There's no pressure here to pretend that "engagement" is the ultimate good.
It’s not that we never have threads that go in unfortunate directions, but those are almost always locked or deleted. If we somehow did turn into a ‘Nazi bar’, as @teaearlgraycold said, I have no doubt some kind of mass account purge would occur.
I don't think Tildes is big enough for it to be a real problem. Things that are flagged (the Malice label) get dealt with.
And as long as enough people believe that such things are worth reporting, it should continue to work.
Other people have already said most of what I had to say, but I'd just like to add that the philosphy of tildes is unlike most other new social media websites. Most of them market themselves as "alternatives to big tech" or worse "free speech havens". While none of those things are bad in theory, they tend to attract the type of people you are describing. Tildes philosophy is not like those sites. That being said, most people don't read those things (not saying you didn't, I just wanted to add this for completeness' sake)
It's hard for any community to find the balance between aggressive ban hammer and Nazi free speech haven.....my impression is that Tildes swings closer to aggressive ban hammer side of things. Report away!
Sometimes, I think users who aren't daily immersed in US politics aren't as well versed in the dog whistles of the day and bad faith sneakiness du jour. What @Gekko has observed with folks trying to help but inadvertently giving bad faith actors aid is usually due to unfamiliarity with the constantly evolving slippery slime
If users who are familiar can point it out, and report it, it would not only serve to stop the fester and clear the air, but it would also educate others on "markers" to spot next time. Like training up one's immune system.
I've found myself associating some unrelated opinions with Nazi-ism since being indoctrinated by the Reddit mob. Basically any time anyone falls on the side of 'well maybe immigration in the United States should be controlled in some way' I immediately peg them as a racist, because in the past that's usually been right.
I've had to reel that in when browsing Tildes, and recognize that on this platform with less people it is actually possible to have a discussion about immigration without someone suggesting we just kill all the browns. It's been an adjustment for me, and still sometimes any time I see someone even slightly on that side of the fence about it I still go 'oh here we go'.
I think the above might be what's happening to OP.
It's been very refreshing to have an opinion that lies more to the center of the political spectrum and have worthwhile conversations with people on both sides so we all better understand the topic after our conversation. Reddit is full of one side or the other and doesn't leave a lot of room for nuanced opinions. I feel like this is a direct link to the quality of articles and links people here share. They want to have a conversation about the topic on hand, so the rhetoric they use to talk about it is much less inflammatory.
I don't want to be associated with centrists in general, the 'both sides' thing has really left a bad taste in my mouth, people keep using it as an excuse to do nothing, to not pick a direction and go, to sit still, and those people are voting in masse and forcing our government to sit still and it's driving me absolutely bonkers, I can't stand it. I just want them to do SOMETHING and stick with it for long enough to actually see what happens.
That being said, I do make an attempt to center myself and even with those attempts I find myself on the left. It's hard to ignore that government 'off hands' policy directly lead to the great depression and has continued to cause economic turbulence since then, and it's also hard to ignore that we haven't had an actual democratic president since FDR and clearly what we're doing isn't working, so why don't we try that?
I imagine I would feel very differently had the government been even vaguely leftist for even part of my life. I have a natural disdain for strong governments, bred into me by... well, gestures around and I think individualism is a healthy part of American culture, if only because it seems to be the only thing most of us can agree on. I don't want to lose the one thing most of us can agree on.
Anyway.
What I find refreshing about Tildes is that it's not just social posturing here. You can't just make one comment and get upvoted or down-voted into oblivion. Tildes has removed the popularity contest, so we're more free to share the nuances of our opinions instead of dumb one liners like "Greg Abott is a little piss baby" even if it's true, we get to spend time and type out why Greg Abott is a little piss baby and discuss the nuances of him being a little piss baby.
I debated whether I should reply because I think it's off-topic to the original post, but I just wanted to say that I don't think someone being in the center in US politics necessarily has to take a "both sides" mentality or do nothing, but I do agree that often is what surfaces as a more visible association. Wonder if it could circle back to your original comment about preconceptions being reset, but that reset happens through action in people expressing things that create new associations.
I really dislike simplifying to left-right political spectrum because in a 3D world, there's far more directions than just left and right so I don't really like ideas being misrepresented like that, but rarely do I feel as though I align with ideas that are seen as on the right (in the US, and probably never ones that are the main talking points because these days those are mostly far-right ideas) and mostly align on the left, but I do feel like I sometimes find a middle ground so maybe that makes me a "centrist" in the left-right paradigm, though if I'm forced to identify on that spectrum I feel more accurate to myself to think solidly left.
To that end, something definitely needs done. Nothing isn't good enough. For example of my political ideology, I don't know if I believe UBI is the appropriate solution or even a good solution, nor do I know if that's considered a good "left" solution or if that's more of a far-left thing, but I'd rather try that than do nothing. But I'd probably rather do nothing than most of the things that are considered "right" solutions (if forced to choose between them), like going back to the 1950s socially or deregulating being the solution to competition or various market problems cause fuck all that.
I don't know if it has gotten bad enough yet for enough people to rally around someone like that.
I might get some flak for this, but initially when Andrew Yang put his name out (I think in 2020 elections), I thought that was a way to try something, rather than doing nothing, that might have actually had a chance to go somewhere. I didn't necessarily agree with all of his ideas, and they all weren't fully fleshed out, but the initial perception I had of trying to reach conclusions that were more aligned with the 'left' side of politics while using other market or human-limitation focused incentives seemed like something that was actually possible, especially in a climate where political opposition flares up around the most ordinary things that should otherwise not even be contentious.
I don't know that he was the right person to do that, or that his ideas were the best or right solutions for the problem, but it feels relevant to mention when discussing "try something, rather than do nothing". I'd be curious to know what people who are more comfortable speaking on the left-right spectrum and positioning themselves on the left to know how they view the 'try something rather than do nothing' idea when it comes to some of the things Yang had mentioned. I do understand that he as a person may have been problematic or some of the people who became more fervent supporters were problematic and some of the ideas were problematic, but I think that seems to be why we get stuck in the mud, you can find a problem with just about anything if you're looking for problems. (Note: I don't really follow Andrew Yang, a brief look at his Wikipedia page while writing this comment says he recently donated to Chris Christie's campaign which tells me that his views and mine probably diverge a bit from what my initial perception of him was, so please don't mistake my mentioning of his name as some kind of endorsement).
I reject the comparison the 1930s. There is nowhere near that level of economic crisis now, that is we are not facing massive levels of unemployment. You could make the case that there is something wrong but it's not similar at all.
If I were going to look at US politics through a racial lens it is that the demographics of the US are changing and becoming less white. Playing up white resentment was a winning tactic in 2016 for Trump and might be a winning tactic in 2024 but in 2036 it will not be. The Republicans could very well be trying to make the most of their current alignment before it becomes untenable and they have to make a new alignment.
Tensions over immigration are high in the US and I think worse in Europe. That is a powerful factor behind the rise of the far right, certainly Republican politicians before Trump were keeping the issue off the agenda although they knew it would have played well to his base, Trump broke out from the competition precisely because he attended to that issue rather than the list that would unlock funding from big conservative donors.
I think psychologically people aren't happy with the status quo and I don't know if is the optics of inequality or other things that lead people to think "just one more straw" will break them or the feeling that they're going to die in a world different from the one they are born in or what. But I think everywhere in the developing
The looming challenge is adaptation to climate change which might not be that bad objectively but does mean a billionaire will have to shut down a factory and it means many ordinary people might need to do with less or do things differently or face some inconvenience and without a sense of shared purpose it is going to be hard to get people to do that.
I don't think that's what I'm doing. But it's not like a bit of extra introspection hurts.
I've enjoyed reading quite a few nuanced conversations here. But these recollections definitely gave me vibes of being just a hair removed from the fourteen words. Another, that I believe I actually commented on, was circling the toxic masculinity drain. The idea being proposed was that to help more women get into tech, we should be helping the men. And while not entirely a wrong statement, that particular person was being pretty dismissive of women generally and using the same tired talking points like women aren't inclined to choose it, too sensitive, etc.
I won't link it because it's been soft-deleted, but the thread is available via your comment history. I looked at the thread in question and I think it's quite a bit more than a hair removed from the fourteen words. Not something I agree with, as a major proponent of getting more women into technology but also not quite holding up to your summary either.
My guess as to what's happening here (and with @DanBC's example) is what @snake_case is proposing. People aren't fully digesting what is being argued before their learned defense mechanism of 'I'm arguing with an alt-right person' kicks in and rejects it wholesale. I think everyone on the internet has these filters to some degree, but to differing levels.
In your thread in question, the person is at least acknowledging there is a widespread cultural issue that discourages women from participating in tech and that it's a bad thing. Their proposed solution isn't a great one imo, but I think it was focusing on reducing the problem in men versus helping them over women.
You’re blending two separate things into one. The toxic masculinity issue I pointed out was just that.
Yeah, this sort of thing is kind of what I'm getting at - like, I've kinda started to dissolve that 'you can't be reasoned with' boundary. I really think that boundary on Tildes is useless.
On Reddit it's a massive time saver, you can exchange two comments with anyone and pretty much know if they're conversing with you in good faith. On here, I think for the time being, I'm safe to assume everyone is commenting in good faith. If someone suggests that we help the women by helping the men, I can ask them about it.
I can make them really think about and explain to me why they believe this, and, who knows, maybe they've got a point buried in there somewhere that would make more sense if it had been framed differently.
Maybe when you chose to leave you were unaware of community moderation through the malice label.
Be the change you want to see. Deimos will and does ban bad faith actors. Tag it malice, write an explaination of why its bad, tag it noise to collapse the comment and move on.
I have used Tildes intensely for a long time. There are problems on Tildes, but I don't believe your perception corespond to reality. Your pattern matching is way too greedy and you are seeing things that are not really there. At all. I can't really explain where that is coming from, but I can only assume this has to do with something that is deeply personal and unique to your own fears and subjectivity.
Sorry :/
I would point to
https://tildes.net/~tech/19u6/black_twitter_abandons_musks_x_the_influential_online_community_that_gave_rise_to_social_movements
as a non-productive conversation where it seems nobody has read the actual article, probably because it is behind a paywall. I think ‘Black Twitter’ is a very interesting story from a McLuhanite perspective but that is not what is being discussed here, instead the main gist seems to be generic talk about the (very real, serious, …) problem of racism, othering of somebody (seemingly not present) who doesn’t believe racism exists, as well as of evangelical Christians, etc.
Maybe “unproductive” is not the right word.
At least at the time I saw that discussion it was not about the contents of the article which I think is really a shame because the article is great and has a lot of details about a very complex situation that involves racism but also unique forms of expression developed by black people (e.g blacks are victims but also more than victims), challenges of running a social media site/presence (building something as opposed to bitching about something.)
If you just want to complain that many evangelicals are hypocritical again you’re going in a loop and not responding to very substantial article which is not about that at all.
My take is that a lot of those people are actually pretty nice when they aren’t involved in politics. I know of a baptist church that runs a soup kitchen (does something for the poor as opposed to bitching) and where the people have reached out to help three orphaned children (relatives of mine) who have been badly affected by poverty, mental illness, suicide and COVID-19. I can’t say I know everything that goes on at that church but I’ve been there multiple times and never seen or heard anything hateful about minorities there and nothing about politics.
(For that matter I know another really religious person, who. is Catholic, who used to run a soup kitchen and rides horses at our farm who has been in federal prison because she’s protested war, the military, and nuclear weapons.)
It seems based on this comment that your objections to the 2-3 comments in that thread which discussed the hypocrisy of many evangelical Christians (which began as a discussion of Elon Musk's hypocrisy re: free speech, so not brought up out of nowhere) are more based in your own disagreement with what those commenters said rather than on whether they contributed to discussion or not.
I agree with the content, I mean, it is kind of shocking how many evangelicals seem to forget the whole sermon on the mount or push the idea of a christian nation when my namesake, in Acts, lays out the idea of separation of church and state (“Render onto Ceasar…”), points out the absurdity of the old pagan states like ancient Rome and Japan where the Emperor was treated as a god and laid the foundation for civil society outside of the state.
What I disagree with is the emotional tone and that it seems roll out so glibly. It doesn’t seem to come from a place of love or hope but is more an act of othering, shaming, that other people are inferior, not fully human, deserving of dignity, etc.
My concern is that a lot of people are talking only to other people who do the same thing and this behavior gets normalized and people just don’t experience any pushback when they do it.
(And I am not a Christian, if anything I am the apologist and range safety officer of a coven and my take is that Christian apologetics is so well developed compared to Pagan apologetics that the serious Pagan ought to take an interest.)
Why not respond in the thread in question rather than bringing it up here, though?
That’s a good question.
I’d say it feels like holding back the ocean and I really have to choose my battles. Exposure to that stuff affects my mental health and I know my wife would wish I didn’t get involved with social media at all.
When I do give pushback I often get an immediate rejection of the categorical imperative, statements that I am practing “bothsidesism”, “don’t you realize that one side is aligned with the angels and the other with the demons?”, etc. (Many modern movements that frequently profess atheism seem to mirror the worst aspects of religion as much as they deny it.)
Mind you, if people had been actually talking about Black Twitter in the thread at this time it would not have bothered me at all that this was going on in a side thread, but when it just a bunch of people who seem to be replaying their own tapes and not responding to the article I think “boy that sucks”.
There was a gift link.
it came late.
There will always be people working against your viewpoints, wrong or not.
To even name reddit in the same breath of tildes in mentioning such issues is laughable. I was on reddit for 13 years. You cannot possibly fathom how much less moderated it was. The hate subreddits, the jailbait subreddits. You name it, it was the wild west.
You need to learn to think for yourself and ignore those folks.
If you can't handle the internet, maybe just stay off it if you are so inclined to be swayed that easily.
This is not a fair and just world, and the same applies here. Some bigots will slip through the cracks. I'm going to repeat this because it's so important to learn and understand, it's not a fair and just world. Educate yourself about topics that concern you and learn how to move on. Most of what people say is to get a rise out of you and test you. The only way to play is to leave them alone, lest you be roped into such bullshit.
I must admit that I find these assumptions about my naïveté a bit insulting. "Can't handle the Internet" is very akin to people shouting "meritocracy" to justify their awful behavior in Linux kernel mailing lists.
This isn't about the thickness of my skin, but me choosing where I spend my time and who/what I associate myself with.
I'm not defending bigots. I'm simply being realistic. I always expext this response when you dont 100% state you arent defending biggots. I think its obvious. Most people aren't inhernerntly racist and trying to start trouble.
Biggots will be on the internet.
At some point in your life, ignoring one will be the best option. Don't give these people the time.
That's what they want.
Report them and move on becuase you are not the internet police. You can try your best here but life is going to happen. You can't possibly stand up for every injustice you've ever seen. You've housed every homeless you've seen? Made every site safe on the Internet?
Where are these biggot free waters?
I'd love to join them.
Until that time, I'm going to expect a few to come my way, and just move on without even giving them thought.
Even outside of your condescension, I think this is a rough opinion.
To let bigots in, to ignore festering hatred on a platform as you suggest, is to support bigotry. If someone gets away with a dogwhistle, they can keep using that. Their friends will come along and they'll push the boundaries of what is acceptable under the guise of civility and good faith (the recent thread about whether people need tests to prove they're smart enough to vote is what makes me agree with OP's views).
There's no middle ground here. There's no centrism where "some bigots" are acceptable. If you are not against bigotry then you are for it, it's that simple (see MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail for his views on a related topic).
This is where I think some people get defensive, not because they are supporting bigots or think that some bigots are acceptable, but rather defining who are the bigots or what makes someone a bigot. For the most part on here I don't think I've seen any tolerance that "some bigots" are acceptable, the arguments don't seem to be defending what type of bigots are allowed, just arguing over who is a bigot or isn't.
Exactly. I just don't take such an all or nothing approach. It's a small, freely moderated website, I'm going to have to ignore the bigots that get in. There will be some. That's the way it is. There isn't a website on the Internet that is nice and clean and shiny and perfect.
Can you link that thread about smart enough to vote? I didn't see it and I am here a lot. I value this community and I would like to see it if something is problematic.
The only thing I've personally seen recently that has had discussion around those subjects
https://tildes.net/~misc/19l8/eliminate_elections_for_a_better_us_democracy
Was that thread, and the discussion in there didn't seem to be any support for it but I didn't really participate in that thread or find it very interesting. At a glance I don't see any support for the idea, rather the article linked might have some discussion about it (I didn't read the article myself).
Of course I don't know if that is what the other commenter was referring to, but since they could not identify it and it sounded like something I had possibly read similar subject matter on I decided to look up what I had come across.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
My apologies, I've spent the last 50 minutes looking for it in vain. It doesn't help Tildes search doesn't pick up on comments. I've learned a valuable lesson about why I should start using the bookmark button.
It is possible the Deimos deleted it.
"joke" so in short, Nazis are bad. Got it!
I'm having trouble understanding your comment. You quote the word "joke," but that word wasn't used in the original post, so what joke are you referring to?
Do you agree that Nazis are bad, or not? Your comment leaves things unclear, for me, even with its sarcastic tone. Did you intend to use the word "joke" as a sort of sarcasm tag, like "/s?"
Yes of course I was joking!