To a select minority of less than ten people: please stop getting judo'ed into defending white supremacy
(EDIT: Those in the comments have asked me to remove specific names. I have replaced names with emoji that I like.)
We recently had:
- a thread whose OP defended a confederate statue erected by white supremacists on purely apolitical grounds
- a thread whose OP defended scientific racism on purely apolitical grounds
I'm really annoyed. If you really want to defend something that looks to everyone else like white supremacy, please avoid:
-
Claiming to be apolitical while disagreeing with someone's politics. If you're telling someone else "your political stance is wrong," you're having a political opinion. "You're being too political" is a political opinion the same way "there is no God" is a religious opinion. This happened like a kajillion times in both threads.
-
Granting benefit of the doubt to white supremacists or sources only used by white supremacists. Example: In the confederate statue thread, 🦇 effectively said "OK, so the builders of the statue hired a white supremacist speaker to commemorate it -- but they're not white supremacists and neither is the statue." Seriously, come on. And stop citing the spokespeople of white supremacist groups to prove they're not white supremacists -- they intentionally tone down that shit for the media, which is why you look super tone deaf when people post actual accounts of things they did, like holding town hall meetings about how great lynchings are when they thought no one was looking.
-
Claiming you'd agree with whoever's arguing with you, except for one inconsequential fact you never mentioned any other time. Example: In the confederate statue thread, 🦈 said that he wouldn't mind if the statue had been taken down legally -- but every other time it came up he said it was wrong to take down the statue at all, because that was whitewashing history.
-
Calling leftists "childish" and "easily-offended." Words like this do have a place in politics, but you've been misusing them. I read both threads front to back -- one or two people ended their arguments with "I'm offended" but basically everyone also said "here's why your view of the world is wrong" or "here's why this is bad and it hurts people." When you start your post by saying "oh, how childish!" and then just repeat the thing you said in the first place, you're basically saying "I'm not listening."
-
Accusing leftists of being unwilling to grapple with the facts. Again, this is allowed and fine when it's true, but you've been abusing it. For instance, in a thread by 🦐 on The Bell Curve the original poster claimed The Bell Curve was state-of-the-art, and leftists were ignoring it. That's not true: there was a huge leftist response immediately after it was published, from academics and popsci guys too. Several people linked leftist articles and takedown videos, which he ignored. Maybe the leftists are wrong, but it's not that they ignored it.
Here are some of the ways you were possibly tricked into believing white supremacists:
- They told you their sources were good, and instead of checking, you believed it.
- They told you left-wing sources were shrill and unresearched, and instead of checking, you believed it.
- They told you there was a conspiracy against their viewpoint and that's why the criticism isn't credible. (For The Bell Curve, it's the political correctness conspiracy -- for statues, it's the easily-offended liberal masses.)
- They told you there was more nuance to the situation than it looked like and made an emotional appeal. Intelligent people like to imagine there's no way things could be as simple as they look -- "not everyone would be smart enough to uncover that this apparent act of white supremacy was, in fact, politically neutral!" -- so you believed them.
- You are probably a little bit racist. (Or even a lot racist.) You might not be racist enough to hate black people, but you might be racist enough to find white supremacists more credible than their victims, even though you know the historical facts say their victims were telling the truth.
Here are some preemptive comments:
- I don't want to censor anybody. This thread is not censorship.
- I do want to shout bad opinions down with better opinions. People who support free speech, which I think is most of the people on this website, also want this. This is an example of me trying to do that.
- Yes, leftists can do all the things I listed. (And yes I'm a leftist.) When I go to a site like Twitter or Tumblr I see left-wingers saying all kinds of horrible, unsupported shit they heard from their idiot hippie friends. It's frustrating and sickening and it's a giant part of the reason I don't go on those sites very often. But on this site I only saw right-wingers doing this stuff, not left-wingers. That kinda surprised me because usually it's the side with the biggest groupthink bubble that says really stupid stuff and keeps on trucking.
Thank you and sorry for the long, mean post.
To be honest, I'm starting to get really close to just locking or removing any threads that start turning into these arguments, and/or getting a lot more liberal with bans (and I've already banned multiple people over the last few days). I really didn't want to have to shift to playing babysitter and I keep hoping people will manage to discuss things reasonably, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
A lot of the reason I've been resistant to having a ~politics is because this is pretty much all it is, people just telling—why they're right and others are wrong, with no actual interest in discussing anything. But instead, now we're just seeing it all over ~news, ~misc, and sometimes even others like ~science.
Overall, they're not even good discussions, they're exactly the same every time. Nobody changes their mind, nobody wants to. And it's also just a really shitty look for the site. When someone new comes here, they see... "there's some video game news, 2 comments... and some tech news, 5 comments... oh, and an argument about white supremacists, 150 comments, okay." That's really not what I want the face of the site to be, and as much as I'd like to trust people to be able to discuss controversial topics, maybe I should stop.
Yeah, I agree with you (and to be clear, Raphael is one of the people that was banned, because I had enough of trying to give him the benefit of the doubt).
Overall, I think the core of the issue is that I often look at these controversial threads after they've been going for a while, and while the arguments can get heated sometimes, they're usually not blatantly into "well, that's an obvious ban" territory. There can be people expressing (and defending), er... questionable opinions, but there are also quite a few patient, eloquent people around that will be explaining to them why they're wrong.
At least on the surface, examples like that feel like reasonable discussions, and it feels heavy-handed to swing through and ban someone when things really haven't gotten out of hand. But letting it happen repeatedly is probably having a subtler poisoning effect on the site, so maybe it's better to just start leaning more towards the harsh approach.
Thanks, I appreciate the detailed input. I don't have much more to say for now, but I'll link to an article I like that discusses this a bit more: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/
Specifically, the "Evaporative cooling" section, excerpt:
I'm in the same boat as you. It seems every time I check in here (and as it gets more and more popular) it gets worse. If the Church of Redpill™ discovers an untapped market of course they're going to send missionaries.
What advantage can one say that Tildes has over any other website if it's the same unmoderated dogwhistles and alt-right proselytizing being presented as "rational discussion"? Why should anyone choose Tildes over reddit? Or for that matter- Voat?
I mean, at least here and on most of Reddit they're still using dogwhistles. Voat is handing out megaphones by comparison.
To add a bit to what's already been said. Raphael was one that I did wonder why his threads weren't locked and some terrible comments outright deleted. I do understand the hesitation, because honestly I did read a few of his posts and even commented to them in good faith. Then after seeing, like the fourth one, that made it pretty obvious he was baiting, I honestly felt stupid for not catching it right away. I gave too much of a benefit of a doubt and it was a waste.
I don't want to leave comments and posts like theirs up and undefended, especially because this site is new and I don't want anyone to think this is the norm, so the obvious - it can't be the norm. But in the last few days, I feel like I've been debating (to put it generously) racist, sexist behaviour, or ignoring them and just watching the vote counts increase.
Truer words cannot be said.
The decision to remain "neutral" in the presence of destructive behaviour is not a neutral stance, but a side pre-emptively taken.
That reminds me of the moderator in the Tiffany Tumbles episode of Contrapoints
hey, this is extremely true of my emotional experience arguing with horrible people. (some background: before posting on this site, i spent a lot of time trying to post sanity on extreme right-wing websites, and eventually stopped because it's emotionally draining and unpleasant)
the first time you show any incivility people will quibble about it forever and use it as an excuse to ignore you. i actually think this is what algernon is doing in another comment thread under this post in that he's just listing my crimes over and over now. but i don't think it's like intentional.
fwiw, i've advocated much stronger moderation in communities that are plainly overrun with that shit but the moderators obviously didn't want to be associated with it. like, i used to post in a game dev chatroom that got overrun with Sargon shit -- i now frequent and co-mod a community related to that where we heavily moderate that stuff out.
I don't really have much to add here, other than I greatly appreciate your input and it's helped me to understand the problem through the eyes of someone who is both intelligent and fed up with the bad guys. I also want to say I'm sorry that you had to go through such an ordeal, but I do think you really helped out the world a little, in a very direct way, and I'm proud that you were able to engage with such a vitriolic person for long enough to ease the suffering of another human being who has already been punished way more than they deserved. My hat's off to you for being an outstanding and moral person and you are deserving of praise for such a selfless act.
I've said before that allowing very polite racists to post repugnant things just because those things are phrased politely is opening the door to concern trolling of the worst kind.
From that we get things like "but why do black people commit more crime?" and "but those ovens were too small for that many people" and "but ratesof domestic violence are about the same for men and women".
These things are poison.
If someone doesn't know something, and they're genuinely asking in order to learn, then these are reasonable discussions. But that's the point of this type of trolling. These people aren't asking questions so they can learn, they're asking questions to cause trouble.
I think one of the bigger issues is that once in a blue moon somebody will walk into such a discussion and come out realizing they were wrong. A lot of us who came from /r/tuereddit and similar subs seem to live for that moment, to a point where we sometimes refuse to see that a user isn't interested in any sort of exchange of ideas but rather in proselytizing their beliefs agai st all reason.
I just had a brief discussion with my wife about this post, and I concluded that I can't find anything in it that I disagree with. If you had presented me with just the above statement, I would have vehemently disagreed, but the preceding paragraph puts a different perspective on it.
Thank you for getting me thinking big things this morning.
As someone who would like to know more about this topic and the controversy around it, could you (or anyone else) please link me the best paper or article that outlines why this is the modern scientific view?
Thank-you for these links. I was a little unimpressed by the Guardian article - I felt some of its arguments were fairly weak and unconvincing - but I thought the YouTube video was an excellent deconstruction of the alt-right doctrine.
Hey, that's me! Thanks for the mention! I really like that video, but I was worried it wouldn't get much attention because of the length. You're a good guy (or lady).
Yo, where/when was this conversation? I've got my Proudhon at the hip and would love to hear other opinions from some well versed people
Everywhere and anywhere. It's his bête noire, being a self-described Voluntaryist. He'll discuss the violence of statism and how taxation is theft at the slightest provocation.
Ohhh I see...
I personally don't identify as anything close to Voluntaryist (nor anarchist; but can sympathize with some leftist anarchist principles) but do like hearing arguments outside my normal sphere. Overall, though, I think I misunderstood the general premise that u/Kat was referencing from this person (which is where my Proudhon reference came from in the idea that private property is theft). Carry on!
I might have been exaggerating slightly for the sake of making a point, but I'm not too far off the mark. Everything you write here (and on Reddit, as far as I've seen) is informed by your anti-statist anti-censorship principles. The fact that you choose not to respond to every potential provocation is sensible. However, when you do choose to respond, it's almost always to make a point against statism or censorship.
This is a perfect demonstration of why it's difficult—it's not a straightforward thing where you just say "no, we can't discuss this, ever." That's why I've tried to give some people the benefit of the doubt, but maybe too much.
That being said, I'm going to remove it here, because it's almost certainly going to start the same argument again... in a thread about how these exact arguments are tiresome and causing issues.
The thread is basically about "let's stop repeating the debate about whether there are differences between races and whether statistics are racist", and your response was a long version of... "but there are differences between races and statistics aren't racist". It doesn't add anything new or interesting, it's exactly the same as it is every time, and overall it's just a terribly inappropriate place to try to start it yet again.
I'm sure you feel that it's unfair, but being fair isn't the goal. Moderation has been very light so far, but that's not the way things were intended to stay, and it's obviously not working very well. Moderation is full of judgment calls, and it's going to be unfair sometimes.
Really? The first time? I honestly thought you were more intelligent than that. I know that lots and lots of people come here with their own silly preconceptions about what Tildes will and will not be, without any evidence for those preconceptions whatsoever, and then they get disappointed when they find out that Deimos' vision is different to what they were imagining in their own heads - but I really thought you were more clear-headed than that. It has been clear from the get-go that Deimos does not intend this to be a platform for totally unfettered free speech. He made this explicit in his initial announcement:
For you to now imply a degree of surprise that Deimos "censored" a comment (that just happens to be yours) is a bit disingenuous. You have known - or should have known - that this is not a haven for free speech.
Full disclosure: I'm the person who brought your comment to Deimos' attention. Actually, I was trying to bring one of the replies to your comment to his attention, because that reply was inflammatory and uncivil to you (I knew you wouldn't act on it, due to your principles, but I believed it went against the principles of this site). I understood that your own comment was intended to be a defence of free speech, using scientific racism as an example of a topic that should be allowed to be discussed freely, rather being than a defence of scientific racism itself (even though you did end up "half-heartedly defending scientific racism in the name of free speech", as I wrote to Deimos). I didn't ask him to act on your comment, and I didn't expect him to act on your comment. However, now that he has removed your comment, and explained why, I fully understand why he did it and I support that decision.
You don't seem to realise that human beings are not emotionless robots. If you come to this thread and start appearing to defend something that this whole thread is against (even though you're defending the ability to discuss that something, rather than the something itself), you are pouring gasoline/petrol on to a fire. You are going to trigger strong reactions. And, rather than trying to put out the various spot fires that are being triggered by your comment, it's simpler to remove the flammable material itself (like back-burning near a bushfire) - especially when there's only one fire-fighter available.
I read your original comment and honestly don't think you're a racist or defending racism. However, I do agree with Deimos that this thread isn't the place for the discussion. Not necessarily because this is not technically a spot for this discussion, but because there is honestly too much heat carried over from the original post to have a civil conversation about what level of discussing race differences we can accept.
I think a problem with that is even the meta-discussion of it starts to derail the discussion in to that. I know this probably isn't what you're intending, but that's how it usually goes, and that is what @Deimos was hoping to avoid. Although seeing what happened here, that obviously isn't the case.
I'm mostly surprised that the meta-meta-discussion of this hasn't completely derailed.
Hey, as someone who is solidly in disagreement with many of your positions, I don't think there was anything inherently wrong with your comment or your other contributions to the site. I wholeheartedly believe you're here in good faith and I respect the effort you've put into what you're saying. You are absolutely the type of user I'd like to see on Tildes that I disagree with.
That said, I don't think the middle of this particular thread was a good place to try and have that conversation.The thread itself was already falling apart, and anyone looking at your comment is already going to be primed to fight and unlikely to be interested in the conversation you were looking for. Since Deimos is only one person and can only spend so much time making sure threads don't devolve into flame wars (instead of developing), I think the decision to remove your comment and the entire chain was a good decision in order to keep things managable. Does that make sense?
I think you absolutely should have a voice in the discussion. I can tell your positions have a good deal of thought put into them and are worth discussing, and I think you're more than capable and willing to have a reasoned conversation on them. Unfortunately, with the current state of the thread, I don't think that any constructive discussion would happen from your original comment that was removed-- it really deserves its own post where participants can 'start fresh', so to speak. What good will your voice do if it's buried in the depths of a meta post?
As to the removal - you've been around Reddit for a while, you probably have seen how quickly threads about politics can fall apart into shit-slinging and petty insults. I believe Tildes has the potential to be a quality space for discussing things that other sites fail at. But we don't have the tools to enable us to do that yet, and Deimos has way more valuable things (like making those tools) to be doing with his time than babysitting us making sure we don't go for each other's throats. How do you suggest we enable conversations on difficult topics that doesn't involve someone watching closely to keep things civil?
For what it's worth, I don't think Tildes should ban political content. I'm just not sure how we can avoid falling into the same traps of every other political comment section out there.
Here's the key thing that I think you're not grasping: that's what I've been doing until now, and it's obviously not working. This whole thread is basically about how poorly it's working.
So your post was arguing for "keep doing the same thing that caused the issue in the first place" with a side of re-raising the exact argument that's being used as one of the main examples about how poorly it's working. So again, while the post itself was reasonable, in this context it's kind of tone-deaf and actively detrimental to the discussion.
I suppose it's difficult to go back and check what the conversation looked like, but I believe you when you say it was productive. I recall that my impression of the comment was that it was detailed and deserving of a nuanced discussion that I didn't think the thread was capable of providing. I'd have liked to respond myself but sadly I was at work and unable to devote the time necessary to have a good conversation :(
I agree. I want to see Tildes succeed at being a place for quality discussion. Maybe banning political content until the community and site functionality matures some more is the best way to do that? I don't know how we'd determine what counts as "political", or how we'd enforce it without Deimos making constant judgement calls (which defeats the purpose of him not babysitting us).
The content of your post was fine, it's the context that makes it inappropriate. It's not a coincidence that there were multiple replies before it was removed telling you that this wasn't the place for it. I recognize that you don't seem to understand that, but that doesn't change the situation.
What about a feature where a moderator (or user) could detach a comment (and it's children) from a thread?
Just stop having the same argument with the same people every day I'm mostly a lurker but your arguments are just cluttering up the site for no reason. You have made your position clear to people who you argue with everyday. Enough already. We all know you hate government and are a libertarian that's fine, but don't go argue with people who you know lean more towards socialism. Neither of you are going to change your minds so just talk about something else you are interested in if you have to talk with that person, like sports or the weather.
It's not don't post. It's know when to talk about certain topics with certain people. Just like real life.
This just simply isn't the time and place for the "go1dfish and censorship" show, especially not if your contribution was an extremely pedantic take on racial differences just so you could argue against censorship, in a topic about how people judo themselves into arguing for white nationalism.
No, it's not. This is a conversation about people who argue in bad faith and taking advantage of those who aren't. You just assumed it was about what is and isn't allowed because you saw one line in a much longer message that you got a whiff of censorship about and then freaked out about it, as usual. It's almost a joke a this point. You didn't even register what exact sort of takes on that subject in question were being talked about.
And you're specifically ignoring that you ended up doing this:
Like, does that not make you take a step back and wonder if maybe you should stow it for later?
I read it all. I read it four times since I've been following this thread closely. I know exactly what you said. I know why you said it. I know what you were going for.
It was not of any real value to this matter at hand. It was just another "go1dfish and censorship" show. What you are still failing to acknowledge is that you picked a bad time to make this your cross. I have not said anything about your argument being hateful or bigoted. It wasn't, at all. What I said is that it was misguided, narrow-minded, and ill-timed due to how hyperfocused you are on censorship.
This is simply not the time and place for you to be arguing about the virtues of being able to discuss any topic at all when you're being pedantic about racial differences in reply to a comment about how people use racial differences to frequently argue in very bad faith. If you're trying to convince people against censorship, you did a bad job there.
I have been very specific with what wasn't valid, and it isn't as generally described as "thoughts".
You're being overdramatic. You are not a martyr.
I think that's a good decision :)
Incidentally, is there a way to tell if one's own comment was removed? I replied to a comment in that chain, but I can still see my comment, so I'm not sure if it was removed or not.
It is removed, yeah. There are some strange conflicts between permissions right now (a user always has permission to view their own comments) that's making it act weird. It's on my list of things to fix soon, but that list only seems to get larger. I'll try to fix that today though, lots of things about the removal system need work if it's going to start getting used more regularly.
How do you think it should display? Leave the comment visible to yourself, but just with an indicator on it that it's been removed, or something more drastic like hiding the text of it as well?
i like the indicator -- i'm used to being able to go back and see my own content, to potentially copy-paste and use later
I would think leaving the comment visible with an indicator would be ideal. Personally, I think fading the text and having the 'Comment was removed by site admin" would be enough of an indication.
I'd show you a mockup but I keep getting Content Security Policy errors when I try to edit the style with my inspector (Firefox 61.0.2)...
Content Security Policy: The page’s settings blocked the loading of a resource at self (“script-src”). Source: call to eval() or related function blocked by CSP.It looks like it's probably related to this, I'm not sure if you ever loosened the restrictions on userstyles.
I know I should be able to edit it locally, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Interestingly enough it only seems to be happening when I try and add a style to a specific element (the section labeled "element {} rule") rather than adding my own rule.
It looks like it's actually a bug with Firefox. Works fine in Chrome though.
I want to agree with you, because on principle, I am the exact person you describe. I want to engage with these individuals if there's even a 0.01% chance for them to change their mind, because it's something I know I personally can do to fight the correct and moral fight.
However, the problem as described by both @Kat and @Deimos is a problem of numbers. By allowing this discussion to exist, you will inevitably attract some number of unfaithful actors - trolls who will utilize this tolerant environment to espouse hate for a variety of reasons. They may be recruiting, or they may be simply trying to make themselves feel better by "winning" arguments with others.
Let's imagine for a second that 1 in 1000 members of the community holds these views. When the website is only 1000 members, the likelihood of a post like this existing are fairly low. But when the number is 1 million, there are a lot of these posts. These posts tend to attract a lot of attention, because they are inciteful. The more people there are, the more of these posts there are, and the more "garbage" that people have to sift through to get to the content they want to see. The more difficult you make it for the end user to get to their content, and the more you put hateful messages directly in front of your screen is the more you alienate your user base and destroy trust in the website and platform.
While I am torn on the issue because I want to make a difference, I think there's an important point to be brought up about platform integrity and an even more important point to be brought up about how this website will respond to huge changes in scale. These discussions simply cannot exist on this platform because if they do they will inevitably destroy it.
Your opinion is valid, but clearly not shared by the majority. People do not want to shift through garbage to get to the content they want. Reddit is proof of this. Tildes wouldn't exist if this wasn't a problem on Reddit.
See: tolerance of intolerance, directly referenced by this platform. If you don't like it, you don't have to stay on Tildes, but it's a core value.
69% of the time I'm right all of the time. That's a statistic. Lets spend some time discussing it. Or any other statistic I can come up with easily. Just because something is a "statistic" doesn't mean anything.
We're talking about operating a website on a scale of millions with no way to determine whether someone is starting an honest discussion. The easiest way to ensure no "discussions" with malicious intent are started is to ban discussions on topics that are controversial and are often not started under honest pretexts.
When people use their biases to find the statistic.
This is a problem of scale, as I already outlined. There simply isn't the manpower, nor the means, to truly figure this out.
Imagine for a second that you saw someone drop a piece of trash on the ground in a park. From a distance, you must immediately decide what to do about this. Is it possible they dropped something that is biodegradable? Sure, but chances are they did not. The only way to solve this problem is to remove the trash, regardless of whether it was well intentioned or not, because otherwise people will see the trash and go "hey, they're okay with people dropping trash here, so I'm going to do the same".
I'm not sure I follow. These topics that are sometimes intolerant are trash, and therefore are removed regardless if the intent was good (biodegradable) or not (racist troll).
Again, see the tildes wiki and tolerance of intolerance.
It doesn't matter whether you think it's treasure, it's the platform's stance.
It's not scientific discussion to say "black people have statistically lower IQ scores" in order to push your agenda.
This has been discussed ad nauseam in the relevant field and does nothing to serve scientific discussion. If someone wants to discuss this, they should discuss it in the correct context - in the class in which they learned it, or with their teacher, to understand the implications of this statistic. In fact, this probably would never be a question brought up, because immediately following this statistic in any textbook on the matter, will be a discussion about how IQ tests are biased and how they have been working to improve this bias.
It's very likely someone bringing it up in that context will not be removed.
I can't speak for everyone, or how it will be in the future, but I agree and I think most others do as well.
It sounds like you're searching for a black and white answer of what's acceptable. That's not how this is going to happen. It's the gray areas that fall in controversial topics that will be removed.
We just objectively defined when it's an appropriate context - when it's not being used to potentially argue for intolerance it is okay. When it could be used to argue for intolerance, it is not.
Having dipped my toes in this putrid pool a few times in the past, no I don't think discussions on so called 'race realism science' can be productive outside of scientists well versed in the entire body of intelligence research, removed from politicization of their studies (if such a thing exists); essentially nothing good will come of discussing this type of thing on reddit, Tildes, etc.
However, I do see the some users' complete refusal to even engage on difficult topics as detrimental, and I fear will lead to this site simply being Voat but for liberals. It is easy to call someone a racist or bigoted, and perhaps silence them. It's even easier if 5-10 commentors are doing it. Open-mindedness seems to be at a premium these days.
i think the modding we have now is pretty impartial, which I like, but i agree that the result is that we get nastiness and repetitive discussions. there are people who are never going to stop arguing for their side and are going to be super deaf to the other side. it only takes one (no matter what side they're taking) to prolong an argument for a super long time, so the nastiness is inevitable.
i'm not a free speech absolutist but i earnestly meant that I don't want people to be censored just for having wrong POVs. i think this site strikes a way better balance on that than a lot of ostensible "free speech" sites, probably because many of those form when extreme right-wingers get exiled from other social media platforms.
i'm probably the person who is causing you the most annoyance here, but I think that if you want to be non-partisan and also not have long political arguments on your site, you are probably going to need to block political topics. failing that, you can ban anyone who makes it nasty, but i think this will probably lead to a center-right monoculture because the pool you're drawing from is Reddit and people who have a personal stake in identity politics issues like racism will probably get increasingly fed up with what they perceive (right or wrong) as moderator bias.
The thing is, a lot of the problem is that so many people want to hide their racism and general shitlordery behind "having a political opinion." I mean, you can call it whatever you want. You can call it Unicorn Sprinkles and Rainbow Toffee, but I'm still going to kick your ass out of my house if you start slinging Stormfront talking points over a game of cards.
Combating this sort of information warfare is not censorship, and it continues to not be censorship regardless of how widespread or mainstream those dog whistles become. Propaganda is still propaganda, even when half the world buys into it.
I don't see you refraining from prolonging the argument. A quick Ctrl-F on the thread about the confederacy statue reveals 5 matches for "Zekka" there - out of 87 comments.
So this is only about the tone of those comments, and not about the opinions expressed in those comments?
no, i've explicitly said I'm against moderating based on tone and against censorship in general. you are the person who thinks I am promoting censorship and moderating based on tone.
i also didn't say it was wrong to prolong the argument. i do think it's good to respond to people who have horrible viewpoints by posting the correct viewpoints. that's how arguing works when you have free speech instead of heavyhanded moderation, the thing that i have consistently said i wanted, but you don't believe I want.
... but you still don't want to see racist views here. But that's not censorship! It's just...
... well, what is it when you don't want people posting certain views you disagree with?
Your actions belie your words. You say you want free speech - but only as long as that free speech excludes any topics you don't want to see here. You can't have it both ways. Either you want free speech or you want censorship.
Just to nail my own colours to the mast: I'm not a free-speech absolutist. I believe there are limits to what people should be able to say. (Here in Australia, there are even laws limiting certain types of racist and inflammatory speech.) So I don't pretend I'm a free-speech advocate while I'm saying "Fuck off, racists!" I know that I'm censoring or suppressing that point of view and I'm absolutely fine with that. You, on the other hand - you're trying to have your cake and eat it too.
why do you keep putting words in my mouth? i've already said what I want, which is for people to shout the racists down and reply to their bad opinions with good opinions. if you want to get legalistic about it, yes, that will chill racist speech, and it's sort of the point. but it doesn't absolutely crowd it out and if racists stop coming here it will ultimately be voluntary.
My apologies. I've re-read your post more carefully: you are not calling for censorship.
But nor are you calling for "people to shout the racists down".
What you've actually done is start out by telling the racists how to conduct themselves and how to present their arguments:
Then you told them how they got these racist arguments in the first place:
And, then you got personal:
And you did this while naming two tilders personally. This wasn't a general instruction piece for all readers of Tildes, it wasn't a rant against racism in general, it was a post directed at "a select minority of less than ten people", including two tilders who you named personally. You posted a public attack on two people.
this seems unrelated to your previous posts. thank you for ceasing to accuse me of things i didn't say. you're being even more hostile than i was, but i don't think this is bad because i started it.
i think it's very bad that you're acting like i posted this to be an evil person who attacks people -- i posted it because i thought it was good, because i want the racists to shut up (not because someone shut them up, but because they can't get anywhere with a crowd as good and enlightened as the rest of us) and because i thought other people would too. so far, several people who also dislike my tone agree with me on these things.
i legitimately did not understand that using people's names violated an etiquette guideline. i left them in the post for so long because i'm used to being told that things I witnessed never actually happened. i'm genuinely surprised that you don't believe me.
i feel like you're trying to drag me through the mud by acting as if, because my post is a bad thing, it can't be these other good things i listed, too. if we don't quibble over connotations. you are correct about what my post was, but i don't know why you think that's exclusive with what i said it was.
EDIT: one other edit; i specifically called for people to shout the racists down, several places in the comments, and also in the post, here:
you are definitely, directly misrepresenting me here, so stop that
Tildes is not created to "shout racists down" the same way r/askhistorians was not created to refute holocaust denialism. Deimos has a simple plan for bigots: ban them.
deimos can do what he will! i've posted a ton of thoughts. i won't shout at deimos for banning them nearly as much as i will shout at them for being present, in part because i actually like deimos
I would switch the emphasis: even though your post has good intentions, it's still a bad way to execute those intentions. You did a wrong thing in your effort to correct a wrong thing. And, like the famous cliché says... two wrongs do not make a right.
It sure is. As of today, I’ve invited five people to tildes:
I’m certainly not handing out any more invites because it reflects poorly on me personally when I refer someone to a site where people are defending white supremacy. Three months in and this site is by and large dominated by meta discussion and people falling into the rhetoric traps that Zekka has described. My enthusiasm for your project here has all-but-evaporated because you allow this issue to run rampant, to the point where it’s come to define the site.
A civility requirement without a politics ban is practically a casting call for alt-right/Nazis/white supremacists. They thrive under these conditions since it lets them spread their message without fear of reprisal, because 1) moderates who don't understand they're being played like a fiddle eat this "I'm just a critical thinker looking to debate" shit up, and 2) they can play this card the second someone gets rightfully annoyed by this garbage. The first ban on this site was pretty much exactly this situation and I very nearly called it quits then and there.
100%. Pure politics should be banned here. There’s plenty of places to do that on the web. News threads should be carefully monitored and removed when they veer into pure politics. All other discussions should be pruned when they veer into political discussion. 99% of political discussion where anonymity is involved is toxic waste. You neither want nor need it here.
"Debatable" is a subjective measure. You want political discussion, but only on the topics you deem worthy.
There's a huge difference between "Ban all political discussions because they tend to get messy" and "Ban discussion about this particular thing because I don't think it's a tenable position." Sure, it's not an either-or situation, but it definitely sounds like you're very close to the latter end of the spectrum.
In general, the wider the ban category, the less likely it's influenced by bias and therefore easier to defend:
I don't think we should be allowed to decide which positions are debatable or not. If we're going to ban something, pull back and ban the category.
Consumerism! Atheism! Euphemism! Agoraphobia! Hydrophobia! Acrophobia! All banned. :P
You have my vote.
Are you revisiting the idea of getting rid of explicitly political posts in general, or am I reading too far into this? What exactly do you mean by "controversial topics"?
It might be a positive move, even if it means being stuck with the constant conflict over what "explicitly political" means.
I don't know, I'd really prefer not to have to say "no topics about X" (for about 10 different values of X that almost inevitably turn into a disaster), but when almost every thread about particular subjects turn to garbage, I feel like it might be a net good for overall site quality to just get rid of them.
Discussions of things like race, gender, ethics, and everything in between get super dicey and people will still get mad if you ban all discussion, because it makes it seem like you condone the behavior in a roundabout way because you're silencing discussion about the topic. It seems like a dammed if you do, damned if you don't situation, but in my opinion, discussion about politics will always turn out nasty as long as you try to have a community of many viewpoints. It's an inherent flaw in wanting a varied community. If it were me, I'd ban the discussion of politics, or at least getting heavy into it. There are many shitty, ad-ridden news sites to spout useless garbage and inflammatory comments on the internet. I don't think we need the potential chaos
Yeah, that's a better idea for sure. That's why I said if it were me. Arguing about that kinda stuff gives me mad anxiety so I tend to ignore it unless it gets huge lol
That's exactly why this is a super touchy subject to police. If you ban discussion of it, people get angry. If you let it run its course, people get angry
You don't seem to realize that this is the problem---not the banning of trolls, but the identification of them. How easy is it to label any dissenter a "troll", ban them, and walk away with a smug smile? Not everyone who holds a controversial stance is a troll.
I think it's also necessarily to moderate at less severe levels to encourage good discussion practices too. Not every wrong is worthy of a ban, but there should be more points to offer a user the chance to reform along the way to prove a user's unwillingness to reform. That can really only be done with more moderators than just the main site's developer.
Keep in mind my post was purely my opinion. I don't run the site so these aren't things I could or would enforce. It's just always a tricky thing to try to handle
It might be good to have some sort of automated comment on threads about those subjects that reminds people of the high standard for discussion, and that folks should try extra hard to not fling shit at each other. Sort of like how some subreddits have automoderator sticky a comment with the subreddit rules on any post that hits /r/all. I'm not sure how much you want to start adding automation to tildes, but if you did it could probably just trigger on anything that is tagged with a short list of subjects. If someone posts without a tag, well, you've just given a bunch of people the power to tag other posts, so they can identify anything that seems like it could veer into problematic territory and tag it accordingly. Just a thought!
I would assume topics covered by r/subredditdrama’s low hanging fruit/surplus would be a good start. These are topics that are pretty much guaranteed to have bickering and people talking at each other rather than to each other.
Sorry, I feel a bit behind here, what exactly is this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditdrama/wiki/rules#wiki_surplus_popcorn
Basically just a small list of topics that are pretty much guaranteed to have people fight over, just by even tangentially mentioning them.
When the controversial threads happen (and I'll admit to my part in participating in them, and try to do less of it) it seems like a common pattern is back-and-forth between two users, going on endlessly. I've seen the same pattern happen in Reddit threads too.
As a random idea, maybe there's a middle ground between a normal thread and a locked thread, something like "controversial mode", where back-and-forth replies were restricted or rate-limited? Or a rate-limit per user, across the whole controversial thread, to avoid the phenomenon of one person arguing with lots of people.
Yeah, measures like that are possible, but really only affect certain types of arguments and are more like treating the symptoms than the actual issue. (Edit: also, like @Zekka said, it has the potential of kicking in on threads that aren't arguments, where it hurts legitimate uses)
I've also thought a bit about doing things like excluding certain threads from being bumped back up in the "activity" sort, so that they don't keep coming back to the top of the site as people continue to argue. That may still be a possibility, but I don't really like ruining the "dependability" of the sorting method by having it not really do what you expect it to.
I'm thinking of "controversial mode" as something that would be manually applied, rather than algorithmically, so it wouldn't trigger false positives on other threads.
The idea is, if you (or eventually other mods) notice "hmm, that thread is getting a bit out of hand, maybe I should lock it?" that consideration of maybe locking a thread can be translated to definitely applying controversial mode as an enforced cooling-off.
The rate-limiting I have in mind would be very slow, on purpose - something like 1 post per hour, per user, in a controversial thread (or perhaps across all controversial threads, site-wide). That would very likely achieve what you mentioned of pushing it lower down in the activity sort, because you don't have the phenomenon of 2 users going back-and-forth quickly, which keeps it near the top of the list, which in turn draws other users in, who are also likely to get into back-and-forths, causing it to snowball.
I get what you're saying about treating the symptoms, but this can also be used as a feedback loop to address the root cause (banning users if they're persistently causing negative experiences). Someone gets into an argument, controversial mode is turned on, then with the rate-limiting applied they realize it's not worth the effort and go do something more productive? Likely not a troll. On the other hand, if they come back an hour and two minutes after their last comment to keep up the argument, and then another hour after that, and so on, that's a sign that they're intentionally trying to work around the safeguards built into the site, which is one of the clearest red flags that someone is a troll.
I mean, I suppose we could always give it a shot. If it sucks, we don't have to keep it, but maybe it's worth a try. I've already got rate-limiting functionality for other purposes, it wouldn't be too hard to just apply it to certain threads.
i disagree that returning every hour is a trolling tell -- trolls get bored fast. it's probably more of a true believer tell -- anyone who actually does that is probably seriously dogged.
otherwise i agree that with human intervention this is fine. like i said, i think mods have done a pretty good job not banning people just for having horrible opinions, so i think giving mods a wider range of tools is fine.
this was actually a big problem on stackexchange: Puzzling.SE, a site for sharing riddles, appears on Hot Questions a lot. but the questions that appear tend to be low-effort, because low-effort questions invite a lot of responses. (which are also low-effort) so the site has kind of directed in the effort of super low-effort riddles because those paradoxically get more attention.
imho the conclusion to draw is that activity level isn't a good proxy for how good a topic is. maybe we should consider boosting topics that have a high upvote/log n comments ratio? don't implement anything thoughtlessly ofc!
Yeah, 'troll' isn't the right word there. I debated trying to re-word it but it's late in my timezone and I couldn't come up with something to better describe what I'm trying to say. I agree that it's a "true believer" sort of thing - someone who really, really wants to debate that one particular controversial topic. That's been the case in both of the example threads you brought up to start off this topic.
i actually like this, if you find a way to signal it in the UI. (so it's not just a secret block -- maybe an icon, like a raindrop or something)
i think a lot of people (like me) have a strong "gotta get the last word" impulse and feel personally victimized when a topic is left up, but someone's misrepresentation of their point is the final post. this would basically guarantee that that wouldn't happen.
you can think of it as an equivalent to locking topics that wouldn't make lastworders feel victimized.
As someone else who has a lot of trouble disengaging from arguments, a hide button would be a huge improvement that doesn't really undermine any other feature.
i think the standard format of one of these arguments is definitely "one person who's very stubborn goes through a revolving door of people who are less committed." an example of a thread that follows that format would be this one -- where i'm the very stubborn person.
i'm not convinced it would improve this thread, but maybe other people think that.
But you know that this is the plan for Tildes. You know that Tildes will be a heavily moderated space. Why are you somehow trying to pretend those discussions about this site having thousands of moderators in the future have never happened?
I feel like we probably should have a designated place for political discussion, simply because that discussion will inevitably occur. Simply banning all political discussion seems simple and clean, but in practice is actually pretty messy and difficult to moderate. Not to mention unpleasant for users, when they are inevitably surprised by what some mods will consider "political"
I think such an attitude would be very close to prohibiting every political discussion whatsoever.
Any avenue for political discussion will be frequently "ugly", requiring active laborious moderation. That's an inherent property of such discussions. Expecting for it to be different is naive.
If you don't have the time to moderate them right now, then maybe you really should temporarily ban all political discussion until the community is mature enough to deal with them.
I don't fully agree with how you're presenting this, but I agree with it overall. The culture of this site, as it is right now, is easily manipulated by those who put a calm, friendly, and rational face on some very harmful and flawed views.
Since it doesn't look like the core of that site culture is going anywhere, the rest of us should put in the effort to think about how this can be leveraged and respond (or not respond) to it appropriately.
Agreed. The post is...not the way I would have said it. But the underlying problem it brings up is a real problem.
I suspect this will be one of the thorniest issues of site moderation we deal with as Tildes grows.
I think this is the key. I have no problems doing research, posting a long comment and backing it up with sources, then ignoring the responses if I sense that a discussion involving the topic will go nowhere with another user. I have seen some users get so wrapped up in a discussion to the point that they lose their civility with name-calling or personal attacks, and in my opinion, they end up losing credibility when I see them post later. I have been seen a number of forums where the userbase became hyperfocused and ended up with toxic groupthink because they ended up at the irrational assumption that if someone disagrees with them, they are some sort of negative label. When emotions take over, the discussion is no based around a set of topics, but instead on who can play 'gotcha' better.
I encourage everyone to take time to acknowledge when the effort to post and respond becomes too much where the effort isn't appreciated so that you can save some peace of mind and put that high-effort commenting somewhere more fruitful. We don't have downvotes here but what we do have is the ability to give visibility to a topic/user by interacting with them. By ignoring, you are basically downvoting through inaction.
Definitely agree with you.
I spent years completely out of touch with internet discussions and not recognizing that the voice that I read a comment was the same voice for a particular site. You just don't know who the person that you are talking with online is and as internet forums have become ubiquitous to all walks of life, trying to convince someone they are wrong or incorrect is likely not going to work because the way you discuss topics with scientists is going to be a lot different than the way you approach talking about topics with people who dropped out of high school.
The real person to person context matters so you can get a better understanding of things like background, tone and body language. We lose this context online and sometimes discussions just aren't worth the effort to keep having to have the back and forth that is needed to bridge the gap to make up for lost context.
I'm not saying we should give up or only talk with people we disagree with, but we should recognize when efforts are in vain and try to use the last point you are going to make to be directed at a general audience with the opinion and the sources you have so the bystanders can have the opportunity to learn.
In my mind, when I read threads and I see one side using sources, putting a lot of effort in their comment, and overall keeping the disagreement civil, while the other user does the things you mentioned above, the user who maintains their ability to keep good faith has already won in my mind. I don't go around to specifically comment that but I am sure that I am not in the minority that views the back and forth discussions this way.
Just something to keep in mind when you feel like you nt stop commenting or you will be seen as someone who concedes. I think by having the last word of an argument be an insult towards the good faith commenter is a clear sign that the one who lost the debate is the one resorts to insults.
I think this kind of gets to one of the core problems of discourse online: if this is the standard then 'debate' is not an actual exchange but rather a sparring match to try and frustrate the other into looking bad. So at that point we're not getting productive discussion, we're just get increasingly empty rhetoric.
I wouldn't say this is the standard for everyone, just me in particular. Trolls will try to take the sparring match apprach that you are talking about and get you to be the one who loses your cool.
I know I have seen the internet trolls who will pull the 'innocent happy level-headed ignorant' poster and goad a user by using smiley faces at the end of their comment, but in cases like this, I think it's really easy to tell who the provocateur really is. It makes it much easier to make that distinction when the other side of that conversation is someone who is well-informed, grants some initial patience, and lays out all of their arguments with sources.
The overall goal isn't to make another user look bad or feel bad. But it's to put effort into the conversations that are good faith while cutting out the bad faith.
Honestly, if this place just turns into another white supremacist and neo-confederate shill brigade, I don't see it lasting too long. I don't know about anyone else, but the entire reason I am over here is because Reddit refuses to
kindlyaggressively show these people the door. I don't have the energy to fight a culture war every time I want to get my forum fix. I'm not sure how moderation/banning works over here, but this is something that needs to be figured out now, and in an official capacity.I'm pretty sure most folks here are on the same page of not wanting another reddit. It's mostly a matter of figuring out the best way to do so and what tools / functionality need to be implemented first.
Yeah, well then put me squarely in the "Racists, neo-confederates, and Trump supporting conservatives must earn the privilege to participate" category. It may come off as extreme, but at this point there is an extremely strong correlation between holding these views and bad-faith participation. Within legal bounds, the most effective tool we have is to ostracize and marginalize these views where we can.
The entire reason they aren't interested in starting their own forums is specifically because they are not interested in any sort of earnest exchange of ideas. They are interested in disrupting discussion and injecting propaganda. If we've learned anything from reddit, it's that taking a weak-handed approach to the problem is like not finishing your antibiotics - it just causes the pathogen to adapt and learn exactly how far they can push.
yeah that's what I'm saying -- nobody wants the stormfront-lite chucklefucks of reddit here
They do that on reddit all the time. I always get downvoted like crazy when I point it out
You're obviously not too sorry for being mean, or you wouldn't have posted this in the first place.
I think this is an extremely inappropriate way to address these issues. I think calling people out by name like this is borderline witchhunting. I think you're trying to censor certain political views on this site (you're being disingenuous or hypocritical when you claim otherwise). I think this post is wrong in so many ways.
The only reason I'm not reporting this post to Deimos is that, by the time I came here, there's evidence that he has already seen it. (EDIT: It appears he was writing his own comment while I wrote this comment.) I'm astounded that he's allowed this post to remain here.
This is wrong.
I agree that it's not a very appropriate way to approach it, but a post like this has been due for a while, I'm kind of surprised it's taken this long.
It's been shitty lately, I even started writing a post related to it yesterday, and then decided to throw it out and focus on search instead. Like I said in my comment, I probably need to just stop giving so much leeway and shutting things down, one way or another.
Look, I can see that this post and the issues it raises play into the "paradox of tolerance" that's mentioned in your documentation. Do you allow outright racism here, or not? How far do you go in allowing or disallowing discussions about those sorts of topics? (By the way, I deduce that you've banned that scientific racist since our conversation about them.)
However, even if you are going to disallow racism here and even if you agree that every issue raised in this post is valid (and I'm not exactly pro-racism myself!), that doesn't make this sort of post okay. Before Zekka got push-back from a few people, they'd named two other tilders in their post. That's witchhunting. Two wrongs don't make a right. This wrong is still wrong, even if it's calling out other wrongs.
You're singing my song! :)
EDIT: Phrasing.
"Decimate" no longer means "to reduce by one-tenth". "Awful" no longer means "inspiring a sense of awe". "Literally" no longer means "exactly as written on the page". Language evolves; meanings change.
The Oxford Dictionary website doesn't even list the original literal meaning of "witch hunt": it is only defined as "A campaign directed against a person or group holding views considered unorthodox or a threat to society." And it has been used in this sense for almost exactly 100 years.
I get offended when people use "queer" to include me. I disagree with the exaggeration of the modern meaning of "decimate". And, I'll be honest: I get a little bit judgy when I see someone misusing "literally". But my own personal feelings won't change reality. These words have changed their meaning, no matter how much I might want to police them and hold them to their original meaning.
By the way... I come from Reddit (as do a lot of people here). The semi-official reddiquette literally says: "We all get outraged by the ignorant things people say and do online, but witch hunts and vigilantism hurt innocent people too often, and such posts or comments will be removed." Maybe you should contact the admins there and let them know of your concerns.
I think the horse you're trying to recapture has well and truly bolted. (Disclaimer: I'm not trying to insult members of the equus ferus species by implying that they are temperamental and can't be trained. It's a metaphor!)
Like anyone pays attention to reddiquette. It's literally pointless.
That wasn't quite what I was getting at, but thank you for your opinion.
It has quite a lot of points. Bullet points everywhere! :)
As mods we paid attention to it. And many modled subreddit rules specifically with it in mind, sometimes even using it as a sort of constitutional documeny. The Reddiquette was not pointless, but it's effectiveness was only ever as strong as the desire to promote and/or enforce it.
You didn't overstep any bounds. You just expressed an opinion about the usage of a word, and I expressed my opinion in return. No harm, no foul, as the Yanks say.
So this is a topic I've spent far too much personal time on: the use of (social) media to highlight the misbehavior of certain specific users, which then sees people taking their own personal action against those specific users for a perceived offense. It isn't exactly the old school definition of witch hunting, which usually involves a sense of evidence-less aggression against someone who has "wronged" a group, but outside of including evidence of misconduct, it can otherwise get pretty close on any social media site with scale. Close enough that a vague, generalized definition like on OxfordDictionaries.com might encompass it.
The example that springs to mind is necessarily personal because the subreddit /r/leagueoflegends was a place I haunted for a time in another life (I used to be its top moderator). If you're not familiar, league of legends is a game that has both a regular playerbase and a professional scene of players, casters, youtube personalities, streamers, and journalists. While I was there, we would occasionally see situations where a regular user (with limited potential repercussion to themselves) would create a thread that accused a pro-player or someone similarly visible within the pro league of legends scene of misconduct, a thread that could have real potential consequences for that visible person if left unaddressed (or if true).
In other words, the threads that lacked evidence could impact people's lives in seriously negative ways, and I got several targeted people telling me that they were getting death threats from threads that highlighted alleged misbehavior on their parts, with I'm sure several other people who didn't tell me that was happening but for whom that sort of abuse was regular.
At the same time, we also had good investigative journalistic work that was showing clear, evidence-based wrongdoing by certain people. The people targeted there would also get death threats by people who were outraged, and it would be totally untraceable from the moderating end too because it would usually happen off-platform on a lovely social media site you might know and love called Twitter (Twitter was a mistake). Yet there was a core newsworthiness to the wrongdoing the journalists would often highlight. For example, there was a recent article about culture within Riot Games (the company that made and maintains league of legends) being anti-woman, using the stories of women who had worked in the company and then left because of the atmosphere and they way they felt treated. Both the women who were named as sources and the company were likely to receive tons of hate (and did), and the journalist who wrote the article seemed to do as much as possible to mitigate the number of specific people who would be targeted by the piece. Still, the community is massive, so you have to assume someone within that community is going to react extremely disproportionately to a perceived wrong.
The line I ended up drawing wasn't so much focused on the impossibility of a crime so much as the evidence supporting it. Journalists, the thinking went, could be assumed to generally have evidence for the claims they make even if they don't site their sources, but non-journalistic threads that saw no editorial review? Those would have to bear the burden of proof themselves and take responsible measures to avoid poisoning the well against whoever was being accused of misconduct. We called the failure to do this responsible work "witch hunting," and it was by far the best communicated rule we had for years (and still, four years after we rebranded it, users refer to the rule by that name).
So what I'm saying, I guess, is that I take the middle view between yours and Algernon's views on the correct use of this word. Dictionary definitions are necessarily generalized and often misses nuances that appear in regular use, but I wouldn't go so far as to say the common use of "witch hunting" must be an impossible accusation. Merely an undefended one meant to inspire outrage is good enough given the real impact social media can have on people's lives.
tbh, if you want to delete this and refactor it into what you see as actionable, i would understand that. i have frequently said it's not good to be mean online, but done it anyways, because I'm a little bit of a hypocrite -- it's not one of my strong points as a person.
what would make my blood boil is seeing it deleted and nothing happen at all, but i'm glad you read it.
I don't envy the position you're in. Seeing the tensions flare up as an ordinary user can be difficult as it is, but being in a position of responsibility while seeing this stuff play out has to be incredibly stressful. I imagine that having to make the decision about whether or not to close this topic wasn't easy.
As inclusive as you may want to be, it might be necessary to be more strict and bring the hammer down, even if that means putting a stop to certain kinds of discussion that people enjoy altogether, even if only for your own sanity. Also, maybe take break for an evening and have a good drink. Don't forget to take care of yourself while you're trying to take care of Tildes!
Can automod be ported over? Over the top copypasta triggered by key words or phrases could be sufficiently annoying to curb some of it.
deimos is welcome to delete it, but I'll leave. i disagree that this should be deleted and also that the threads i'm complaining about should be deleted.
you're correct that i'm not very sorry -- it was mostly rhetorical. i'm way more sincere in the other comments.
Of course - you posted it. Most people disagree that their own posts should be deleted!
you can delete every odd-numbered Zekka post, but none of the even-numbered ones, please -- those are precious.
Your entire thread is about telling people what not to say, then claim you're not trying to silence anyone. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off.
Do you think when someone says "you're being a jerk," "you're being an idiot" that's censorship?
The entire history of politics is people saying "that guy is an idiot, don't listen to him" or "all those people are fucking idiots." The key thing is that if you have freedom of speech, no one gets shot or gagged just because someone doesn't like them.
No one's messages are going to disappear because I said "don't say this, it's stupid." Most likely all that's going to happen is that I'm going to get increasingly annoyed and eventually fuck off to some other website.
Some have taken issue with the tone of the post, but I'm really glad you made it. As important as top-level action like rate-limiting comments or banning problem posters is, expressions of communal disapproval is even more important. It seems like each round of invites brings in a few of them. Now it's a bat and a lobster, previously it was tyil, mumberthrax, and trialandfailure. I don't think they were banned, I just think they got tied of arguing and being called out on their support of ignorant beliefs.
Folks who have been here a few months may remember that the first locked post on Tildes was my own reasonably expressed suggestion that we try to recruit from places where white men are not 90% of the userbase like Reddit and HN. There are lots of good people who came from these places, as evidenced by the number of great Tilderinos. There are also, frankly, lots of white nerds that are too socially awkward to talk to their neighbors, a circumstance of life that breeds racist beliefs. It's easy to dehumanize groups of people if you never actually interact with them, not to mention the inherent toxicity of nerd culture.
This is going to continue to happen until we broaden our recruiting horizons and intentionally try to bring in underrepresented minority folks. In the meantime it's important that we foster reasonable communal disapproval and top-level actions against the most problematic users.
I prefere "tilders". "Tilderinos" seems like something an annoying sitcom character would say.
That's honestly why I love the term, Tilderinos reminds me of Simpsons.
I'm always a little sad when we don't agree :P
You do not want to be a clone of me! The mess in my head should not be duplicated.
Anyway, we need nice people here to balance out grumpy bastards like me.
If we are collectively "tildes", that would mean that each one of us is a "tilde". Do I really want to be a piece of punctuation...?
Punctuation is great, it does so much heavy lifting in our writing to convey both meaning as well rhythm.
I'm hoping there will be no one single designation and we can call each other Tilders, Tildes, Tilderinos, or Tilderinokilidokilies interchangeably
That's not exactly a glowing recommendation... :P
They're typical "i'm just asking" / "i'm just skeptical" / "i'm just a rational free individual looking for proof that race realism isn't real" type of nazi troll. Ignore them.
"Just ignore them" never works. There will always be well-intentioned people who either can't identify or can't resist the bait.
If they're worth ignoring, they're worth banning.
Yes, they should be banned as soon as possible, obviously. But that's on the site's mods/admin. I'm just saying what us "ordinary" users should do.
Thank you for posting particular examples of the behavior and rhetoric that you see as showing bad faith. While I can definitely see it being problematic to write more about specific users engaging in bad faith than the rhetoric being used, I think the examples are important to grapple with because they give a level of context that is otherwise all too easy to abstract to the point of uselessness.
I'd also agree that the examples you listed demonstrate bad faith. Each of them do.
This is behavior that I agree we shouldn't tolerate, especially when we see these trends. Any system that reasonably accounts for them needs two responses from our end. First, we need the ability to flag them, which would put these sorts of comments in a queue for that moderator-type person (hi @Deimos) to review and more easily see/deal with. This is the bare minimum response that gives the user the feeling of being able to do something to address the wrong without necessarily having to respond to it (though telling that user what is wrong with their behavior in a constructive and reasonably polite way is something I think we should be willing to do, even if it won't necessarily do any good).
The second thing we need is positive feedback when a report of ours is acted on. This is the other side of that report mechanism, where the moderator-type person has taken action as a result of a report. A little message automated to a user's inbox saying something to the effect of "thank you for your report on X thread, that comment has been removed" or whatever level of feedback the moderator wants to give the reporters that says "you were right that this is problematic," even if the reporter might not necessarily have been right about why it was problematic.
With those two tools combined, dealing with problematic rhetoric like this becomes a lot easier for both a community and a moderator-type person. And that's good for everybody.
Sorry that you had to experience that, for starters.
I think the most important thing from the perspective of someone who feels attacked and wronged is knowing that at least someone has your back. Sure, a comment personally attacking you might have several people voting for it for whatever reason, but you should at least trust that when a moderator-type person sees it, they have your back. And maybe when the reputation system gets put in place, people who vote for comments that end up removed take a slight hit to their reputation.
you should get rid of specifically calling certain people out, because otherwise it comes as you just don’t like that person and pretty petty. Also, this feels like a good time to post a link to @deimos’s post from a bit back: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/3t5/daily_tildes_discussion_just_try_to_relax_a_bit
hm, i'll bend on this if someone says "zekka, thou must," but i think this is actually a bad idea. taking people's names off something makes it look like I'm talking about an alleged thing that may or may not have really happened, and I'm used to people jumping on me and saying "no, prove it." the thought of getting rid of any specifics makes me uncomfortable.
re deimos' post. to the extent that he's saying "hold your horses, don't panic!" -- i wouldn't characterize this as panic but i'm not really inclined to give tildes a ton of faith. this site comes from reddit and reddit loves nodding sagely in response to hyperverbal explanations of why white supremacists are right. i'm not insinuating the site is doomed, but I do think I'm witnessing reddit culture when I see this stuff on tildes and I think that is bad and i want to loudly decry it
To me it comes off as you attacking the person, not the message. It then brings low effort comments like @anti’s. I agree that reddit allows too much hate and bigotry, but attack the belief not the person. He wasn’t the only person with flawed logic, but he’s the only person you name which makes your post feel like it’s aimed at one specific person, rather than the technique or arguments that he uses to draw your ire.
i'll consider revising, but i want to add one more thing
no, anti did that. don't blame me for anti's shitty posts!
oh my god stop personally attacking me im reporting you to the police
🚓🚨🚔🚓🚨🚔🚓🚨👮♂️👮♀️👮♀️
If you're addressing less than 10 people, is a new topic the best way to do it? Can't you just disagree with them where they're expressing this behavior? If they don't want to adopt your view (regardless of who's right) from a direct response, then a new topic is likely going to be completely ignored by the people you actually want to read it.
yes, because this is actually a message to everyone who has to read posts written by the less-than-ten-people I'm complaining about so that those people will know they're not alone in being annoyed
So you're writing to the other 5.8k+ people on ~talk to make sure they know you're annoyed?
reducing it to "i'm annoyed" is bad on my part. i'm trivializing myself and trying to look a little bit funny and ridiculous, but i don't think that bit is working.
i'm not thinking "everyone should know that Zekka is annoyed" -- I'm hoping people will read my thread and think "oh, I have a name for this disingenuous thing that someone was doing in that thread which I read." i think that in general, the rest of the community knows when people are doing the things i've pointed out and doesn't like it, but i don't think the community has put names on it. and it's really hard for me to feel confident in it because it's already happened a few times in a row.
it's also because I don't want to feel like I'm alone in being bothered by this. that's not "annoyed" bothered -- it's a pretty deep-seated "I feel like I'm witnessing the worst side of humanity," bothered. and i'm also a little bit bothered because people seem to have responded to this post so far with comments along the lines of:
which are criticizing the form of the topic more than its content, imho. maybe it's uncontroversial that people are doing these things, or at least it's uncontroversial that it would be bad if people were doing these things, and that's why nobody has responded? maybe I just come off as too cranky and irritable to be discussed with, and in that case, whoa, sorry about that!
i agree that i should be responding to people within their original threads about this -- i have been doing that. it's weird to me that you present making a topic like this as if it's mutually exclusive with writing people directly, which i agree is more effective.
Guys? Can't we all just get along without degrading ourselves to police calling and insults?
The back and forth with editing the tags isn't helping your argument.