I stand by my assertion that personal discretion is the only approach that can’t be gamed.

Trust the mods with the banhammer, and if they do a bad job, replace them outright.

This still leaves you vulnerable to shitty admins, but you would be in any case.

There’s basically three problems:

1: Tyrannical powermods can make shitty communities.

2: Trolls and bad actors and generally-sociopathic cunts can be toxic and disruptive by sealioning, rules-lawyering and ‘just asking questions’ (aka JAQing off)

3: There’s no fixed set of rules that reliably walks a middle path between the two.

If you have no control over how mods mod, you can end up with nasty little tetanus-wound shitholes - imagine ferinstance if corpo shills took over all the news and politics subs, and banned anyone critical of Elon Musk or Israel.

If you don’t let mods mod, then for instance every support / activism community would be under constant siege from concern trolls and smug bigots with a new little talking point they want to ‘debate’ every single damn day, and we don’t need any more trans kids driven to suicide please and thankyou.

The admins decided that the former was worse than the latter, and said no, you can’t just kick out troublemakers so long as they use pretty language instead of hurling abuse; you have to humour them and allow some of their shit.

see also: the Nazi bar problem

This was a terrible and shitty approach to take, and I am (provisionally) glad it’s been suspended pending further review.

Though in this age of enshittification, I have little confidence that the next iteration won’t actually be worse.

I actually got a locator beacon recently.

I can’t really justify the cost of a two-way one given how rarely I go anywhere properly remote, but the little one-button boxes make for huge peace of mind. And honestly if I get bitten I’d likley be just as fucked with or without a conversation :D

About a decade ago, I fell and broke my ankle while out running.

It was only by sheer chance that this happened around a bunch of people, and I was able to get help immediately. If I’d been out somewhere else or at a different time, I would have been absolutely fucked.

Since that day, I never leave the house without my phone, ever.

(if I’m hiking somewhere out of range, then I map out my route and ensure that someone else knows where I’ll be)

You have to allow a little raw chicken in the mayo now.

So now people are to be allowed to sealion and troll and JAQ off in your community, so long as they do it respectfully.

Or else.

Imagine running, say, a community for vulnerable trans kids, and being forced to allow a constant influx of ‘helpful suggestions’, just so long as they’re phrased in pretty language.

Probably they’d rather drink a dogshit milkshake every single morning than use fucking JIRA, and they’re hoping you die of natural causes before you get a chance to force it on them.

oof, sorry, got usernames mixed up

And you’re still entertaining the discussion, still kicking it around and keeping it alive, debating the merits and acting like it’s a topic worthy of conversation. Look at you looking up specific definitions and the history of the DSM.

Even knowing it was an illustrative example of trolling, you still got trolled by it.

That’s the entire game, and you willingly, nay triumphantly played it. I bet you’d bd willing to argue it back and forth for pages, giving it a little more legitimacy with every word.

Do you see the problem now?

Lolno. God, lawful-neutrals and their damn rules.

If you do that, they get to play the dictionary-definitions game and well-ackchewally at you indefinitely and demand you provide sources for the word ‘the’, while creating endless reports demanding people be banned because technically that’s not paedophilia that’s ephebepholia… or whatever the fuck.

It’s a game to them; all they care about is making a disruptive and unpleasant environment.

The only way to win is to not play.

When you recognise the pattern, you short-circuit the whole damn thing and just boot them out.

But you’re taking ‘don’t make us ban you’ off the table for the mods.

“Oh no, I’m not attacking trans people, I’m just saying that children deserve protection. Surely you’ll agree there’s no rule against that?”

Sealioning. JAQing off. Ragebait. That very specific, slightly-too-formal dialect of trollspeak. Shitty edgeplay designed to taunt and demoralise without ever quite stepping over any well-defined line, and a bat-signal to like-minded sociopaths that the dog is chained up.

Hell, bluesky has been infested with LLM debate-bots recently that fucking automate the process.

I suspect that you’re mistaking the symptoms for the problem: it’s not that mods are too quick on the button and need to learn to tolerate a little raw chicken in the mayo, it’s that some of them have been captured by corporate / PAC / generally-unsavoury interests, and use the button as a weapon.

And to those people, there’s only one thing you need to say.

Ah yes: just asking questions. Just a point to consider. Just my opinion.

Unlike on TV, if lawyers pull the inflammatory-question-in-front-of-the-jury trick twice, they get in serious damn trouble with the judge.

There’s a reason judges get absurdly free reign in their own courtrooms, because if they don’t, this shit gets weaponised.

Look, I respect the intent, but as someone who’s been on forums since the freaking 90s, I can say with confidence that that’s a toxic meltdown waiting to happen.

You need at least two bitter jaded cybersec experts and at least one game theory person on your team to stand a chance with this kind of thing.

Can you provide supporting documents that disprove :nasty insinuation about you:? Of course not. Do you want to have to keep being required to? No.

Can people provide supporting documents disproving :nasty insinuation about :demographic::? Also no. And they don’t want to have to keep being required to.

So there’s the constant tide of exhaustion of people being constantly undermined and dehumanised, and being forced to either respond to yet another argument that :demographic: don’t really count as people, or to just let it ride and try to ignore it. And then the wreckers use it as rage-bait to get people angry to the point of getting banned, and others walk off in disgust, more trolls smell blood in the water and the whole thing spirals.

It’s the damn nazi-bar problem: even ‘just a few’ nazis smirking in the corner create a hostile and unpleasant environment that other people don’t want to be in. And so they drive the good posters off, reducing the opposition - and within a depressingly short time, you’ve got yourself an alt-right shithole full of trolls and sociopaths that just love being able to exert that kind of power.

I’ve seen it approximately three bajillion times so far, and god dammit why won’t you youngins learn.

Yes, powermods and power-tripping mods are a problem. But the approach to it you’ve chosen was gamed out and defeated in detail probably before you were even alive.

And oh god, if you try to parse a rule about what categories of opinions and statements are covered by this, the rules lawyers are going to clown-shibari the entire damn site.

The only two rules I’ve ever seen be effective over time are:

• Don’t make us ban you
• Don’t make us de-mod you

and probably hard-cap the number of communities one person can mod.

Have other stuff on top of that, but they’re load-bearing and non-optional.

And I get that the site is trying to be a neutral platform that’s insulated from the content, but honestly I don’t think that’s feasible. Sometimes you need to just throw people out of your bar regardless of the exact phrasing of the terms and conditions, and that means picking a side.

Also can we have a better markdown parser that doesn’t turn angle brackets into failed html markup sometime please

This seems oddly timed with the whole meta thing going on.

Are people going to be forced to accept ‘a small amount’ of, ferinstance, asserting that homosexuality is a mental illness?

You can’t cause ADHD, you can’t prevent ADHD; it’s genetic. It’s not a result of patterns of thought, or video games, or television. You don’t have to ‘train’ your child’s attention span, nor can you destroy it.

People with adhd are naturally drawn to high-stimulation activities, so people associate the two - but that’s like saying that smoke burns the toast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l5nAh63W0o

… just don’t use instagram?

I never have, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out

fuck no

I quit reddit for a reason

‘as above’

First thing, I’m buying the finest fineliner I can, go for 4-6 columns on the page.

Then I’m writing in billionaires, one a week, after making them cosign a suicide note that the deaths will stop once wealth distribution flattens the fuck out, there’s a full UBI everywhere and fossil fuels are history.

It’s not women’s job to be attractive.

They aren’t there for your viewing pleasure.

They’re not for you; they’re not a public amenity.

You have no more right to expect them to smile in order to make your surroundings more aesthetic than you have a right to expect them to get their tits out for you to gawp at.