I think I may be out of the loop
I wasn't sure if there had been some changes lately or if it was my head, but I thought there used to be a politics group within Tildes. Regardless, it seems that I've noticed a culpible decline in the number of posts that are related to politics and especially US politics. I also noticed that it seems that some more prominent users got banned or left? Obviously I can understand if the people here were tired of hearing about it and wanted to give other groups some more room for the front page, but I just wanted to make sure it wasn't a fluke or my imagination. I don't come here as often as I should, but it just seemed a little different. Hopefully this doesn't spark any massive outcry or anger or anything, I'm just out of the loop, and don't want to cause any trouble. I like this place. I like you all.
Edit: Wow this seems to have really gotten out of control and spread to discussions about moderation logs and how much we should pay attention to US politics in relation to world politics or even how much we should catastrophize over recent political developments. I almost feel like I shouldn't have brought this up and I apologize. I really didn't intend on causing any ire for those in charge or for massive debates.
I remember them getting banned for using an alt, then unbanned after it was discovered it wasn't them. What happened that got them banned again?
I kinda feel like it shouldn't be left to speculation though, for transparency's sake. It should be possible to figure out why someone was banned. That completely went over my head and so obviously I have no idea what's up, but now I'd like to know given that they were a pretty prominent user. I'd like to at least a reason embedded on a user's ban page tbh.
And if anyone does know but wants to avoid a discussion here, I'd really appreciate even just a quick PM.
One of the problems with giving reasons for bans is that unless it's already a really blatant and obvious case, you simply can't do a thorough job of explaining the history that led up to it. And the reasons for these more long-term cases that are more about behavior don't sound as serious either, because there's no simple, egregious issue to point to.
If I was going to write a "brief reason" for banning alyaza, the sort of thing you'd put on a banned user's userpage, it would end up being something like, "Routinely hostile and condescending to other users, showed absolutely no intention of improving despite many warnings." But that really doesn't come anywhere close to capturing it.
You can't see the number of comments I had to remove and arguments I had to lock, far more than ones involving any other user. You can't see the multiple users telling me that they didn't like posting on Tildes because alyaza was in every thread and would attack anyone that she disagreed with (and none of us will see the ones that felt the same way but just left silently). You can't see the multiple warnings I sent, and the dismissiveness and complete lack of change in response. You can't see all the evenings and weekends I spent checking my phone, because I always felt nervous about leaving the site unattended, knowing there was a reasonable chance she'd get into a massive argument with someone and it would keep going forever unless the other person walked away or I was around to intervene.
The situations aren't simple. She was a good user in a lot of ways, and posted a lot of good content. But in other ways, she was literally the worst user, and actively harmed the site's culture and drove off other good users. I let the positive contributions outweigh the unacceptable behavior for far too long.
I think that's when moderation logs become powerful tools. When people can publicly see "this is the full history and breadth of what caused this person's eventual ban, and this is the straw that finally broke the camel's back", they're far more likely to look at it and go...wow...yeah, that makes sense.
They're really not. Moderation logs are just a different form of an incomplete story, and end up being far more useful for conspiracy theorists and people constantly digging for things to cry "gotcha!" about than for anyone reasonable. The log gives them "evidence" that they can easily put their own interpretation on top of and act like it's proven.
I've tried it before. They end up making you have to explain yourself far more, not less.
I have to disagree with you here. As I have pointed out in the past, SomethingAwful has moderation logs and it's rarely if at all used by conspiracy theorist or gotcha moments. Considering you have to pay money to post on SA, you would assume that the higher stakes means people are more incentivized to attempt to overturn moderator decisions but that's generally not the case.
I'd have to argue that the moderation logs you've tried in the past must've been poorly implemented and/or lacking information. If anything, it becomes a tool for people to understand the trends of other posters; if someone has a long history of probations or bans you can see the context and understand if said person is arguing from a point of sincerity or not.
Considering how long SomethingAwful has managed to survive, I'm always surprised by communities not researching how and why it's lasted so long.
The kind of site culture that lets your moderation log be full of reasons like "fuck off", "Your tweet you posted was so unfunny nobody even liked it, nerd.", "Go the fuck back to gbs and stay there you are terrible. fuck you", and so on is really not what I'm going for on Tildes.
It's a little like trying to use 4chan as an example of a well-run site. It works for something, but it doesn't mean it's a good way to do things in general.
See, the thing is that as a result, SomethingAwful has bans and moderation taken at various levels of seriousness depending on the subforum.
You're right that there are some that will send out bans for little things, but there are other (like Games) which has a higher bar for post quality. SomethingAwful has managed to survive through multiple cultural shifts on the internet and a large amount of that is due to the moderation.
And as an aside, your earlier arguments revolved around the invisible interactions you had with Alyaza and their toxicity to the community. When people brought up the idea of a moderation log, you said it wouldn't be helpful, despite you complaining of many issues that people couldn't see.
I'm not going to debate the toxicity of Alyaza but I sincerely think as a forum admin you cannot have your cake and eat it too. If you're not willing to publish moderation logs, then I don't think you can complain of the things people didn't see when you ban someone. I can understanding witholding things for privacy and security reasons, but if you don't keep a log of that stuff then you should expect this problem to get worse, not better as Tildes grows.
I also don't think the comparison to 4chan is apt, considering Tildes shares a lot more in common with a forum like SA than a fully anonymous uncontrolled mess like 4chan. I don't think there's anything wrong with taking some influence from other forums as Tildes has from Reddit.
This is just going in circles. This started with me saying that a moderation log is an incomplete story, because it wouldn't have included almost all of those invisible interactions. Now you're saying that I should have a moderation log to show those invisible interactions.
I wasn't complaining about people not being able to see it, I'm saying that it's not possible for everyone to have full insight into bans and moderation.
At some point you just have to trust me to be making decisions for valid reasons, and if you don't, you shouldn't be using a site that I run and have absolute control of. It's possible for me to insert any kind of "evidence" directly into the database that I want, and it would be completely indistinguishable from things that actually happened. I can make it look like any user said or did anything I want. If you don't trust me, there's no way you can trust anything on this site to be true.
I do trust you Deimos, but surely you see a problem by now right? Every few months you get a thread like this popping up where people are confused about the state of Tildes, why certain users are banned or the conduct that caused it. If Tildes grows larger, that cycle is going to become faster and eventually you'll have to simply lock or ban those discussions, which then creates discontent or resentment among the users. Worse, you'll get just as many bad faith actors who will take advantage of those situations to try and spin someone as a martyr, something we also literally saw a few months ago.
No one is expecting full open insight into moderator discussion but saying it's unreasonable to expect some sort of a paper trail would just be wrong considering how many forums have such a thing. And I don't see Tildes as somehow being a fundamentally different platform compared to said forums.
Right, but a moderation log wouldn't change any of that, the same thread would just pop up 2 hours after they were banned instead of 2 months. The thread would have a bunch of users pointing to things in the moderation log, other people saying that it doesn't make sense or isn't enough to justify it, and I'd have to come in and explain the same additional factors anyway.
It changes the event a little, but it doesn't fix it. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be more information available than there is now, I am open to adding things like removal/ban reasons and will probably do it eventually. But I also know it's not going to eliminate this sort of thing in any cases except the most blatant ones, which aren't the ones people end up questioning regardless.
Some kind of user report card might prove useful for this purpose. It won't support the ban directly for that specific event, but if it showcases a long history of warnings in some way it can at least show the pattern of bad behavior that eventually led to a ban. Even something as simple as a list of warning events (with zero details) listed by date/group could do that.
It can at least prove there's a record of bad behavior and an unwillingness to correct it, even without details. It gains a lot more weight if those warnings aren't just coming from any single human, but instead come from the normal operation of the trust system once that's in place. Since the code for the trust mechanisms is open, it gives a sense that the users are collectively policing this individual using the trust mechanics, and the ban action only happens after the users have stacked up enough infractions for a bailiff to be summoned and take action.
That does us no good at this point in time, but perhaps it's a goal that can be worked towards as the trust system starts to take shape. I think if you can give people the sense that the ban action was carried out by an individual but only after the users collectively asked for it somehow, that'll get most of the heat off of the bailiffs. You'll never satisfy everyone this way, of course, but if you can satisfy the majority, then nobody will take the pedants trying to make a mountain out of a ban as seriously.
It's the difference in perception of one moderator banning one user because of one event, and one moderator banning one user because of a history of infractions registered by many users over a longer period of time.
The danger of that is the same kind of dogpiling that you get with downvotes. Someone with an unpopular opinion gets something negative on their report card and the mob descends to attack them.
The way we've talked about structuring things, it'll take a percentage of users to trigger thresholds. One person's reports won't do jack unless that person has earned some serious trust through good reporting in the past. It'd take multiple users to trigger warnings - and those events would be reviewed by mod types as well before becoming an official part of the report card. It shouldn't be possible for a handful of users to use the system to harass someone.
You've got to piss off enough users to break the threshold and summon the mods, then have it be bad enough for the mods to validate it for any event to become a real warning. Something like that, anyway. It's not like we've worked out specifics yet.
TeamLiquid is probably a better example of a website that maintains moderation logs in the form of an automated ban list. It's not until a few dozen pages in that you start to see reasons incorporated into the bans, even though many of them can come across as rather snarky comments from the site's mod team.
A lot of the bans on TL are due to spammers or previously banned users attempting to slip by on alt accounts, but there are a lot of flame wars and overall shitty comments that the mods there need to sift through. The ban list is certainly entertaining to read through at times.
When looking at the earlier ban logs, it's important to note that Team Liquid started out as a mere Brood War clan and fansite, then eventually branched out into professionally covering the competitive scenes of multiple games and even managing its own multi-game esports team. The ban reasons get more professional and descriptive as time goes on.
Fair enough. I feel like moderation logs are great for reasonable people, and that unreasonable conspiracy theorists should generally be ignored.
I believe Deimos made a post about it when it happened, you could probably find it through searching.
I can't find any such post. There's the original topic announcing alyaza's ban on 14 May. Then the unban announcement the next day. I don't know when the current banning occurred, but it appears to have happened without ceremony.
We're not owed an explanation. I do think something, even a basic acknowledgement from Deimos, would be reasonable — in this specific instance — just because of the very public history of the saga. We don't need or want a post whenever any user is banned. Though I've said before, and still hold, that more ban-reason transparency is needed in general. Just a one-liner below the "this user is banned" on the user profile page would be fine. Something to note for posterity that the ban happened in good faith, for a good reason, and not because of mod abuse or something.
I always give Deimos the benefit of the doubt. Not rallying for an unban or insinuating that he's done anything wrong.
I must have been confused, I didn't know there was a second ban. I was referring to the post about the original one.
I also agree every admin action shouldn't be up for public discussion, that is rarely every productive. Deimos has always acted with integrity and reasonably corrected me when I've crossed the line of acceptable Tilding. I would trust any ban to have been done in good faith and with reasonable consideration.
It wasn't that long ago that the site seemed like it was growing really fast, and people were talking about Tildes like it really was going to be the next big thing, or at least big enough to be successful in its own right.
Now it seems like I hear more about how growth has stagnated and that if anything overall activity is dropping off. That's really worrying to me because even if I haven't been as active as I should be, I do enjoy this site and the direction it's going.
I don't think that it's really important to have big discussions and publicity for tildes right now. People trickle in constantly and so far posts haven't slowed done so much that there is nothing to do around here. Tildes will be great if it pans out roughly like Deimos imagined it in the docs, but untill then we mainly need more development time, and not more users that he has to worry about.
You're probably right. It was just a trend I was starting to see and I was wondering what the deal was. This is probably something that needs to be brought up more often though, simply to can any negative dialogue about Tildes growth.
What is stopping you being a more active contributor to Tildes?
Probably the biggest factor is that I try to limit the amount I post to social media in general.
Secondarily, I usually find myself posting in more niche subs when I do, and Tildes just doesn't really have that yet. I do actually have a couple of big projects I'm working on that I wanted to share here, but they're being held up by college work at the moment.
When people abandon Tildes, and they haven't been banned, is there anyway to see if there are common users in the most recent replies to the abandoning users?
Are people leaving because they don't know how to cope with a user?
This one in particular is difficult because news of current events comes part and parcel with critique, and when you are discussing the politics of a group of people, criticism of their behavior and opinions is an attack on the group. Doesn't matter if you say, "I understand your concern but I think you want to check your methods and biases, they're awfully problematic," it's an attack on the group, so it's an attack on themselves.
I used to post a bit of political content but it honestly got kind of boring. The population here isn't super diverse and so you don't get a lot of diversity of views. There are only so many times you can re-tread the same path. Compared to when I first started using Tildes, there are fewer outright buttholes so it balances out. I've noticed prominent Tilderino dubteedubs hasn't posted in a while either, which is probably another reason it feels less political.
When posting U.S. political content (or any content, for that matter), I've tried to follow my own set of rules for what might work on Tildes:
I think this strategy helps avoid @cfabbro's complaints of parochialism and hysteria, but it means that my posts are less frequent, and less likely to spark extensive commentary. There are a number of areas in U.S. politics that I'm passionate about, but I find lately that energy is often best directed away from the keyboard. The issues are too immediate, painful, and potentially toxic for most of us to engage with utter dispassion, and I find that many U.S. commentators don't seem functionally aware of how differently the rest of the world approaches the same or similar problems. More significantly, they're not asking questions or attempting to engage with those differences.
I do miss @alyaza's energetic input, but there were multiple occasions where I could see unnecessary provocations that led to me walking away for a while. @Algernon_Asimov kept a steady stream of often worthwhile posts, but it was all basic Sydney Morning Herald pieces, and the tendentiousness in commentary could get painful.
All that being said, I personally welcome political posts and discussion from outside the U.S., especially when it's a story about people doing something sensible and rational that we should probably emulate.
As another user said, it’s mostly due to the loss of alyaza that the number of political threads have dropped. I’m not saying she shouldn’t have been banned, I’m saying she did a lot of legwork on things like the democratic debate threads and posted a lot of articles. She debated with people a lot, which kept the political threads near the top and got a lot of others to join the discussion. I’ve debated trying to post more of the political stories to tildes. Maybe I’ll make an alt for posting political articles bc I don’t want my main’a notifications to only be people commenting on political arguments all day. We’ll see.
I obviously can't speak for everyone, but speaking only for myself and as someone who is not American, the near constant stream of US politics topics, and all the highly polarized heated debate and arguments that often went along with them, were really off-putting to me (and I'm sure many others as well). While I genuinely appreciated the effort alyaza put into all the topics she posted, IMO the site feels much more balanced in terms of the types of content visible on it now that those topics are no longer completely dominating the activity sort anymore, and the general sense of hostility around here seems to have dropped significantly now that they are gone as well.
p.s. Please note that I am not saying this to try to entirely discourage you or anyone else from posting US politics topics, but just to give you my perspective so it's something you can be aware of if you do. Balance is important, especially in such a small community with such limited activity.
Most English-speaking online communities tend to be heavily US-oriented. And I appreciate that the demographic here is probably like 40-50% American, and the US is very important to global politics, but I do agree it can be a little much. I would appreciate more balanced news. There's some users that post news from other regions, like @mycketforvirrad posts a lot about Scandinavia, but it would be great to have greater variety.
That said, what bothers me more than having a US politics thread dominate the conversation is when unrelated, non-US-specific threads become dominated by an American perspective. Like one might be talking about poverty, or video games, or food, or anything really, and 90% of the conversation implicitly assumes everyone is talking about the United States.
100% agree there! And that is especially annoying to me when it comes to particularly contentious (in the US) issues like discussing gun violence. I really despise the seemingly prevalent American perspective of "guns don't kill people, etc", constantly intruding itself into topics about gun violence related incidents that have occurred in other countries. We get it, a lot of Americans really like their guns, refuse to give them up or their right to own/carry them under any circumstance, and feel that the weapons themselves shouldn't be blamed for anything the end-user does with them. However that's not how the vast majority of the rest of the world seems to feel about them... at least based on polling data I have seen and the various (strict by comparison) gun control laws the world over.
It's gotten to the point where I honestly sometimes feels like I'm being gaslighted seeing that (AFAIK) rather uniquely American perspective seem to completely dominate all English speaking social media topics on that issue.
/rant... and sorry for potentially stirring up the pot, but that one in particular really gets under my skin! :P
It's not even a consensus perspective in America, it's just that the people who hold it are obsessive about it and our electoral system is set up to massively overweigh their preferences.
You are being gaslighted. There are tons of organizations that funnel millions and millions of dollars in foreign contributions who make it their business to flood the airwaves with pro-gun propaganda.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/27/nra-russia-foreign-asset-senate-report-investigation
Am American, live in a major West Coast city, and I can say for certain around here most people aren't gun owners/collectors or particularly vocal about gun ownership. I'm particularly left leaning and feel that a compromise can be made (like safe storage of the weapon or ammunition, better background check system, maintenance and private sales requirements), but you'll get shouted down on most US dominated websites by a few keyboard warriors who think it's a requirement to stay armed in case the government comes to take you in the night. I feel like a lot of the time it's (tinfoil hat time) staged by the same people who look to sow discord amongst us around things like universal healthcare, and why the wealthy should pay more taxes than they do.
Edit: a word.
As a Tildes user based in Europe, I would definitely love to see more content generated from the region. I have often debated broadening the scope of my own posting history here on the site, but I doubt I'd get the same enjoyment as I do from providing a window into the Nordic region.
Tildes is a great platform, with a lot of great content posted by users who are often very passionate about their respective fields. But the site could really benefit from a broader range of time zones among its userbase. There is a very noticeable peak and trough flow of news on the front page in relation to North America. I'd like to give a shout-out to @Algernon_Asimov in this regard for providing some great alternative topics from Australia and Asia.
Most of that content is probably in languages other than English. I've many times considered posting Norwegian articles to Tildes and tag them with "norwegian" (or "norsk") so that those who don't understand the language can filter them away. As far as I know, there's no rule on Tildes that content has to be in English. It might get annoying though if everyone starts posting content in their own languages, and we have to manually add hundreds of language tags to our personal tag filters.
I think the advantage of broadening the available content outweighs the disadvantage of having to filter. I very much doubt we'd be dealing with "hundreds" of filters. There are lots of languages, but most of them would probably be low enough in volume that filtering isn't a concern.
That said, it might help to maintain something of a lingua franca for the site, so perhaps the foreign language articles could be accompanied by a good faith English summary in the comment if possible. Google translate is honestly good enough now that I can get the gist of most newspaper articles by using it, but a 2 to 4 sentence summary would help me decide if it's worth clicking on to translate in the first place.
One of the big challenges, though, is moderation. Deimos only knows so many languages and might not be able to spot someone posting a bunch of toxic content under innocuous summaries to ban them in time.
I'd welcome content in different languages, especially if there's a link to an English version available somewhere. The thing that really helps if when the OP provides all the cultural notes so I gain more insight about what's happening and why.
At least at one time, the FAQ (which I can no longer find) stated that only English was allowed: there is some discussion in this thread.
It seems unsurprising that a site which doesn't allow languages other than English will tend toward the perspective of the country where the majority of native English speakers live. At the same time, multiple languages would make the site and its moderation considerably more complex.
Found it on the Wayback Machine. That refers specifically to communities. It doesn't mention posting non-English content in existing communities, though I feel the same arguments would apply for that as well.
That's very true about the language. And what I often find is that when there is an English language source for a Nordic story available, it is often of poorer journalistic quality or goes into less detail or nuance than the native source.
I'm going to continue to post English language only articles as they have broader appeal and understanding. But as the Tildes community continues to grow, and with it a greater range of languages on the platform, I'm not averse to posting articles in their original source language.
I'm with you. I don't miss the political posts. I know I didn't have to click them, but it's where much of the activity was focused. Things seem calmer now without them.
But things aren't calm. There is a massive uptick in fascism rising throughout the western world, we have a strong-man-baby as the head of the United States, and the rule of law is being eviscerated, all while weather patterns are growing more extreme, global warming is getting worse, and it seems like very few people are actually doing anything to fix any of it.
I'm sorry, but the US generally leads in political discussion because reverberations of what happens there echo throughout the Western world.
Everything is not okay. Everything is not calm.
This discussion feels a bit like someone saying "man, I really am growing sick and tired of hearing about this Hitler guy, thank goodness people stopped discussing the Nazis, it's so much calmer now". Or, if the Godwin's Law reference doesn't do it for you, it's a bit like a group of people being in a house that's on fire and discussing how they wish that one person in the group would stop screaming about how the house is burning down and can anyone else smell a bit of burnt toast maybe?
Thank you for so clearly, thoroughly, and completely obliviously and unironically, illustrating mine and @imperialismus' points. I'm honestly so fucking tired of the increasingly over-the-top, sky-is-falling, highly polarizing rhetoric and hyperbole that has become so prevalent in the US leeching into every aspect of online life. Your comment here is a perfect example of why I left reddit looking for a better alternative, and IMO it absolutely doesn't belong here on Tildes.
Genuinely no offense intended, and this is just my personal opinion and perspective, so take that for what you will (even totally dismiss it if you want)... but your comment itself reads as over-the-top hyperbole to me too. Nobody is saying don't discuss these things, that some of them aren't genuine issues of major concern, or that you don't have a right to be angry/scared/frustrated/etc and express that... but it's how so many of you choose to discuss these things that has become a serious issue, especially online. By relying on extremely emotionally charged arguments, losing sight of reason, and panicking, you're making things worse, not better. All that utilizing those rhetorical methods does is serve to further polarize everything and everyone, making it virtually impossible for actual solutions to be discussed.
And for the record, I am "queer" myself (I hate that term, BTW) and lived in the US for over a decade... so please don't try to use something like Police on LGBT violence (which hasn't been a statistically significant issue in the US in a very long time) as ammunition against me.
Sorry, I think I was editing my comment as you replied. I sort of covered that in my edit, I think.
So, basically the opposite of that. IMO we should strive to be calm, collected, rational and rely on facts (not just anecdotes or what feels like facts), when discussing all these highly charged issues.
I'm going to be a bit of an asshole here, so bear with me:
Your argument sounds a lot like arguments white moderates use. The white moderates that MLK brought up in his Birmingham jail letter. Specifically, these calls for calm, rational discussion in emotionally charged arguments is one of those things that comes from a high level of privilege and safety.
The reason why there are so many emotionally charged subjects is because for a lot of people it's reaching a breaking point. LGBT people hardly feel safe, especially when there's a case going to the supreme Court about the legality of firing them for the sake of who they are. Minorities feel threatened as the police gun down black people in their home and racists chase away people who look even slightly different.
Yes, these are all america-centric topics but issues with the alt-right and fascism is an issue world wide and often home grown in the US. If you think these arguments are tiring then imagine what it's like having to live with their impacts.
I agree we should strive to use facts and strive to be rational. But there is nothing stopping someone from being both emotional and rational.
Yes, this precisely. I use facts to inform my emotion, not the other way around, and I see no reason why stripping my posts of all emotion somehow make them more valid than the posts I make that include it.
Sure, but the problem is that all too often people discussing their emotional interpretation of a situation (rather than a purely factual one) are incapable of recognizing that they're allowing that to happen to themselves. And because of this, other people who contradict or dispute that emotionally charged hyperbole often get lashed out at, which tends to further escalate things.
And I also absolutely recognize that just because something is not a statistically significant issue anymore, that it doesn't mean it's not still a problem worth discussing and trying to solve or that we shouldn't be wary of the issue returning in force. I and a number of my friends have been victims of LGBT targeted bullying, harassment, discrimination and violence (though not by the police) over the years, and so I am certainly not trying to dismiss that or minimize the impact that has on the individuals it has happened to. It's just that IMO even those of us still suffering from such incidents have to try and put them in perspective; Yes, they still happen and all too often (since ideally they wouldn't happen at all), but overall the instances of them occurring have greatly diminished (at least in the Western world).
💖 :)
And sorry if I wasn't clear enough in my initial comments either. Effectively expressing nuanced opinions, especially in a concise manner through text, is hard!
So when the other side, that is currently holding power, routinely decides that facts do not matter, what does being calm and rational get us?
What about any of our comments makes you think we're "losing sight of reason"? And why do you jump straight to "either you have no emotion in your comments or you're irrational"?
How about general hate-crime then, which has been increasing since Trump took office?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/us/hate-crimes-fbi-2017.html
It's weird how, despite the fact that we have statistics backing up our statements, it's our tone that somehow makes our claims "unreasonable".
This is a generic global content aggregation site. It certainly seems reasonable for you to have a space on the site to discuss issues that are important to you. Clearly there is interest in that content among some users.
But other users aren't interested in that content. The problem is when a user like mike10010100 implies that not wanting to discuss US politics on every thread makes a user uncaring or immoral or whatever. It's not like Mike is organizing anything or actively changing minds. I was arguing with him in a thread about Bernie's tax plan the other day and it was the first time I've ever had a negative taste in my mouth about Bernie. I would call his level of intensity juxtaposed with the level of casualness that tildes represents as "toxic". What do comments like his on this site do for your queer friends?
Again, I'm not trying to silence Mike, or you. I'm just saying that this isn't "your site". It's a community site. Different members of the community have different reasons for being there. Users like Alyaza have a tendency to show up in every thread and talk about things in terms of US politics, and I think that other users have a valid request to be able to engage in quality conversations on this site without being steered toward the same topics over and over.
A final thought, is that since this site is still pretty small, there are users that you're likely to see over and over. Alyaza was an outlier, she was in almost every thread. But I see people like mrbig, Micycle the bichael, mike10010100, and others around here all the time. One thing that comes with that is a pre-conceived notion of what things are important to different users, which, I think, can lead to some undue angst.
Then they are free not to read it, yes?
That's a disingenuous take. If I'm interested in participating in a discussion on a particular topic, then I will certainly be reading the other comments.
It's one thing to post an article about trump calling for foreign intervention in our elections, having one of the commenters say "idk, this seems fine, I wish you all would just chill about the whole Trump thing", and then getting into an antagonistic tone in replying to that. This thread is about tildes in general, and the user you replied to only said that they are strained about seeing those topics creep into unrelated topics. You antagonized them, and made this thread about revolutionary US politics. I assume that that user is not even in the US. And they are "free not to read" your direct reply to their post, but come on. Of course they are going to read it, and it's going to make them feel angry, hostile, discomforted. And all of those feelings are directed at you, the representative of progressive ideas in this situation. So in essence what you're doing is making people less likely to ever engage in the discussion you want them to have.
FWIW, in an unrelated thread the other day, I disagreed with Bernie's tax proposal about CEO ratio. I think that's a bad idea. I canvassed in 3 states and donated hundreds of dollars (as much as I could) to Bernie's campaign 4 years ago. I phone banked for many states that I was not near enough to canvas. I am a big Bernie supporter, and I think that one tax plan is bad. The tone of your responses to me made me so irritated that I finally understood the stigma of the "bernie bro". It's like when you hear any disagreement with the "party line" you feel like you need to exterminate the source. Now I'm sure you're a good person, and you mean well. But I'm saying this as someone who is adjacent to the progressive movement, but not on board with every single idea put forth, it's really difficult to be behind a movement represented so aggressively by people such as yourself. It's completely understandable that people don't want to be hounded everywhere they go online with political ideology. People who voluntarily enter a thread about politics and choose to contribute are getting what they signed up for. But people who come to tildes and don't enter such threads should not be subjected to that.
Yes, but you can then tag it as "noise". That's one of the features of this site, correct?
This thread is about the over-representation of US politics. I responded by summarizing why US politics reverberates throughout the world and how the rest of the world will absolutely follow in the US's wake in terms of governmental practices. Pretending it's isolated to one country is naive at best.
It's also kind of ridiculous to expect that someone involved in politics in their home country wouldn't make parallel conclusions to other countries or situations. Again, if you don't like someone talking about US politics in an unrelated topic, mark it as "noise". If it can be related, I don't see why it shouldn't be considering the crisis democracies are currently facing.
And yet the rule, if I understand my own rebukes by Deimos, is to not feed the trolls and simply mark the content as Malice or Noise. If you continue to do so, then you are considered almost just as bad as the trolls themselves.
In this example, I cannot control the reactions of others. I am stating my truth, making comparisons when I see fit, and others are either able to vote me up or mark me as "noise" or "malice".
I see, so if I remove any and all emotion from my writing and pretend to be a good little robot, then people will suddenly come to my side? Because from every single discussion I've had online, I can perhaps count in the dozens when someone has actively been convinced by "pure" reason and logic.
That's the issue at hand, here. Should emotion be a detriment to someone's writing, or can it be woven in with facts to make a cohesive discussion topic?
I completely agree with that. And this is a thread about US politics, like it or not. I feel that I have attempted to properly respond to a thread that was specifically about US politics.
I'm sorry, but the leader of the free world modifying weather maps with a fucking sharpie to avoid being wrong about a public statement is but the tiniest fraction of a reason to panic about the current state of the country.
The fact that we have a President routinely lying about independently verifiable facts while committing, at this point, multiple provable crimes, and a whole swath of people are happy to run around with their fingers in their ears pretending like it doesn't exist, is absolutely disturbing to say the least.
The President of the United States is actively spreading white nationalist rhetoric, we've had multiple mass shootings where the perpetrators have specifically cited Trump as part of their reason for killing, we are actively tearing apart families at the border and have absolutely no plan in place to ever reunite them on purpose, and a single political party is actively trying to dismantle or gut any semblance of a transparent government.
Our political leaders, the ones in the highest level of power, are both courting foreign governments to help dredge up dirt on their political rivals and have threatened civil war if they should ever be held responsible for their actions under the law. The fact that we are somehow framed as irrational and unreasonable for pointing all of this out absolutely floors me. The fact that we are not out on the streets in droves like Hong Kong really shows just how much everyday life is insulated from the daily political goings-on. Where is this tutting about the behavior of the people of Hong Kong? Are they simply irrational and unreasonable, should their concerns and attempt at publicity be dismissed as not being relevant to the world at large? Or is their struggle a microcosm of the precipice we find ourselves at as a global community?
The house is on fire, the roof is caving in, and all you can talk about is how little your life has been personally affected.
You are privileged to be able to ignore it. Face this fact, then come back and talk.
Hitler had a plan of genocide and killed 6 million people.
I understand the fears about the rise of fascism, but comparing today to a time when millions of people were murdered by a genocidal dictator is pretty weird.
This is a long read, but it's a good read from someone who knows what the Holocaust really means.
"But I beneath a rougher sea": https://medium.com/@abarbararich/but-i-beneath-a-rougher-sea-a3e4ad8eb02c
Trump has a plan to house every noncitizen and homeless person in concentration camps. How many millions do you think that will involve?
Sorry, just to confirm, how many people have to die for the comparison to be apt? 100? 1,000? A million? What's the threshold for when we can start discussing the parallels between now and the rise of the Third Reich?
I appreciate the stats. So now it seems like we're talking about super Hitler.
The main issue with online political content is that it is 99% clickbait garbage designed to illicit engagement for the purpose of advertising. I recently had to completely clear my youtube history because I watched one interview which made youtube think I really wanted to watch 100 different videos from the same news organization of the same topic. If it's going to be political article spam then I'm going to filter it out because I don't see it generating any kind of insight or be of any benefit to anyone here.
I mean if you're only consuming news from places like YouTube, Twitch and Twitter, yes. But there's tons of amazing content by people who are paid via Patreon or subscription model who do not value their work as advertisement material. I think dismissing all political articles as "spam" is kind of reductive, no?
If I were to put a percentage on that kind of content I would say it makes up about 1% or less of the total amount of political media if we consider the sheer volume of content from for profit outlets. I would hardly say that I was being hyperbolic by making such a claim.
I'm Russian, but I miss alyaza's posts. They were quite high-effort, and even though my interest in US-American politics is not even in my Top 5 interests, it was still nice to have a weekly overview of what's going on over the ocean.
I also think she was a good person in general.
I am most likely not going to end up doing it because I'm very invested in some non-political projects right now (or maybe it is political. I don't know. I'm working on a lot of environmental projects right now. The decision of if that is political is left to you, dear reader :P)
I will say though, that if I do start doing this, I do try really hard to not narrow my focus to only the US. I spend a lot of time reading bcc world and translated articles sent to me from friends who are immigrants from China, Ghana, and Mexico.
That would definitely help take the edge off, and I would appreciate that immensely. ;) And IMO reading some more news out of Mexico, and Ghana especially, would be pretty interesting too!
I've noticed that dubteedub (or something like that) has been missing since alyaza's ban. It's unfortunate because both of them - alyaza especially - posted good content and put a lot of thought into their posts. I understand that people (especially those outside of the US) don't like seeing politics threads so often, but it's not like it dominated the site. If anything, politcs threads were just as popular as tech or programming threads, which, if you're not in a related feild, might as well be posted in a completely different language. Also, we're in the midst of a very important period in US and world politics, so having a corner of the site focused on that should be seen as a good thing, even if the ensuing debates get ugly by tildes standards.
edit: I just realized this looks like a passive-agressive response to @cfabbro. That wasn't intentional, and while the second half of my comment is probably better suited as a separate response to their comment, I'm just going to leave this up. Sorry for the pointless meta commentary.
Hard disagree on US politics not dominating the site. IMO it absolutely was and has been for a very long time now, which was in large part due to the contentiousness of seemingly every single US political issue creating a feedback loop with the activity sort. It was even getting to the point where I was genuinely considering trying to open up the discussion on ways to combat that, with suggestions ranging from excluding the politics topic tag from the activity sort, to even outright banning politics from the site entirely.
As for @dubteedub, I have no idea if dub's leave from Tildes is related to alyaza being banned or not, but I don't think it is. Regardless, I hope dub hasn't permanent left the site, since I genuinely do like them and have had some really great conversations with them in the past. And it's actually kinda funny you should mention dub in this context, because we have actually had a brief conversation about this very topic (US politics dominating the site, in large part due to dub's posting habits at the time) earlier this year:
(click
Parenton dub's comment) - https://tildes.net/~tildes/alj/feedback_on_removing_usernames_from_link_topics_and_suggestions_for_a_user_tagging_system#comment-2nzzp.s. Thanks for the ping, and no worries, I didn't read your comment as passive-aggressive at all.
Hmm. Maybe I was blinded by my own obsession for folowing US politics that I didn't realize how often it was posted here. I just remember there were many occassions in which I was disappointed that a particular story didn't have any threads. But since the Trump era has been a constant barrage of scandals and huge stories, it's possible to miss a few while still having tons of coverage.
I would agree that US politics dominated ~news, which isn't a good thing, but I never thought of tildes as a politics-oriented site. Again, that could just mean I had a skewed perspective, and/or your lack of interest made it seem more prevalent. I mentioned comp, tech, and programming in my previous comment - areas which I have little or no interest in - and to me, those seem to be the dominate the site, but maybe I just see it that way because I don't care for those subjects.
Anyway, as the site grows, I do hope there is space for daily political discussion. I understand why many people would be reluctant, but there aren't many other places I know of where a thoughtful and respectful conversation can take place.
To be fair, I fully admit that perhaps my distinct lack of interest in US politics (at least online discussions of it, anyways) may have indeed skewed my perspective here as well. :P
Hi back! I'm glad to hear you haven't left, as that would have made me genuinely sad. :(
p.s. What are you studying, if you don't mind me asking? PoliSci? :P
She was added back, but was recently banned again. You can read Deimos' statement above as to why, if you're curious.
On a different tack, I miss the Colorado-related articles that she would post, as someone from the same state. I guess I could post them, but I feel like either 1) no one would be interested or 2) that I can't start a Tildes-level discussion about it. Maybe I'll have to work on getting over those hangups and post some.
Yes, if you think they're interesting, go ahead and post them. Tildes needs more content, and you never know what people will like.