A Modest Proposal to Amend the Community Rules

[Melizmatic]

@M_M

I’d add “Or you’ll get eaten” but that would look a bit odd.

Yeah… that might not be taken as a threat by some folks.

[anon37332521]

@Donald_Petersen

are we sometimes a little heavy-handed with it? I mean, just because we’ve been around this particular block a time or two, does that insulate us from possibly learning from a tentative comment that strays from the zone we normally inhabit?

I don’t think it insulates us at all, and I think learning from those situations is part of a healthy community dialogue. I see these dialogues happening. Unless I’m blind to something that’s currently going on. We’re having one of those discussions right now.

What I’d like to know is, what in this proposal is not covered by the TL;DR?

Maybe: values over style / integrity over panache?

I think punch up / not down is covered under: Be cool. Don’t post insulting, bullying, victim-blaming, racist, sexist, or homophobic remarks.

(It’s also a current turn of phrase that will likely sound dated in 10 years, despite good intentions.)

[anon35121463]

@Donald_Petersen

We Regulars are entrusted with (admittedly quite minor) powers that are withheld from other users. Arguably we’ve earned those powers by… well, blowing a lot of time reading shit around here. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

But we’ve also earned some standing in this community

Probably a good idea to add that any ol’ halfwit can go from noob to Reg in about a month and a half just by having no life.

[Melizmatic]

@M_M

Probably a good idea to add that any ol’ halfwit can go from noob to Reg in about a month and a half just by having no life.

Worked for me!

Even though I came in under the old settings.

[anon35121463]

@Melizmatic

Worked for me!

Yerbut, you’re not just any halfwit.

…

Wait, that came out wrong.

@Melizmatic

Even though I came in under the old settings.

Exactly. If you’ve got nothing better to do than just hang around, it’s not that much of a status symbol.

re-reads…

I should probably stop digging myself into that hole just about here.

[Donald_Petersen]

@tropo

Maybe: values over style / integrity over panache?

I think that’s the key bit. I don’t want to swipe @funruly’s thunder; this thing is his idea, but I think he’s touching on something important, if I’m understanding it right. (I PM’d with him about it a bit, and I know he’ll let me know here if I’ve grossly misunderstood what he was getting at.) But I do think that there have been a few conversations wherein certain positions didn’t always get a fair hearing. I don’t mean to imply that we should shaddap and listen to the umpteenth Gamergater or sexist trolley or racist d-bag blather on unchecked about their tiresome wrongness. Victim-blamers don’t deserve an extended audience.

I dunno. I gotta go home and get some sleep. I’ll come back tomorrow and see if I can isolate some better examples of what I’m talking about.

[Melizmatic]

[TobinL]

I was gonna say… sometimes a derail it all that keeps the thread alive.

[jamesnsc]

Isn’t the hidden curriculum really just reading the BBS long enough for “you” to decide if this is indeed the type of community you wish to participate in? Some people don’t do that, and those that don’t certainly wouldn’t stop to read the rules - which we all flout from time to time… as some threads just need derailing.

That said;

@Donald_Petersen

But every now and then I think we might have a tendency to clobber some benighted comment with, I dunno, maybe a hair-trigger on the slurping GIF. Not always, not even most times such a thing is employed. But every now and then

“We” do tend to have a hair trigger - sometimes I think more can be accomplished by ignoring a comment we don’t like / agree with than by interacting with it.

[anon37332521]

@jamesnsc

Isn’t the hidden curriculum really just reading the BBS long enough for “you” to decide if this is indeed the type of community you wish to participate in?

This is pretty much the key to walking into any new community / group. Read / listen. I’m pretty sure it’s why @codinghorror weighted reading above all other parameters for moving up in trust level.

“We” do tend to have a hair trigger - sometimes I think more can be accomplished by ignoring a comment we don’t like / agree with than by interacting with it.

I’ve seen it happen, and have made comments that were a bit too ‘hair trigger’ myself. I look at it as process and think it’s mostly self / community corrected. There is no way to have uniformity in the way people interact with comments they don’t like, nor do I think it’s healthy to formalize such things. We’re not the f’n borg.

Of course we can always do better, and clearly there is something @funruly feels needs to be explicitly stated. I’m not sure if my attempt to comprehend his intent and distill it down to a single line is correct or not. I’m glad he raised the concern though.

[Purplecat]

I think that’s a good distillation.

I’ll second the bit about getting rid of the punch up/down thing, for several reasons.

1. It does come across as a bit jargony-y new people shouldn’t have to grok some sociological newspeak to know the community rules.
2. It’s never actually something that helps behaviou. People never actually think they’re on top, just like the way nobody thinks that they’re the bad guy.
3. This is a place for discussion. If you’re punching anyone, then you’re doing it wrong.

Overall, the rule change seems to be repeating something that is contained within “be cool” but everything is, isn’t it? And I agree with it. Some of us could do with a little more self reflection, and the high horses need to stay in the stable.

[codinghorror]

@funruly

x. Punch up, not down. Prioritize mutant values over mutant style. Recognize that it’s not always humanly possible to elegantly do both, so always err on the side of including integrity over panache.

What does this even mean? I literally cannot understand what you are trying to communicate here. I certainly agree with “punch up” but I’d summarize in readable English as:

“It’s not OK to attack the powerless, or victims.”

@Purplecat

If you’re punching anyone, then you’re doing it wrong.

Yes.

[anon73629133]

I love all of the comments in this thread so far, and have other thoughts to bounce off the group, but off all of the comments so far this one is quite thought provoking.

@Chesterfield

Click on the heart button and get on with your life.

I mean, I don’t thing it’s framed in a way that’s particularly supportive. It kind of conveys that I’m wasting my life by thinking deeply about how other people connect over the internet. What’s wrong with that? If Biella Coleman and Xeni Jardin can live that life, so can I.

In order to follow the honorable Chesterfield’s suggestion, I would need to see BB as a singular thing. Is it a blog? a multi-author-blog? a zine? a collective? a conspiracy? a directory of wonderful things? a news site? journalism? what kind of journalism (tech, news, games, civil liberties, magic tricks), a place to rick-roll the audience? Is it a place to reflect upon the intersection between technology and culture? Is it a place to organize collective action against governments behaving badly?

I don’t see BB as any one thing, I see hundreds, or thousands of ways to describe it. I mean, just look at it. So I don’t know if there’s any singular right way to act on the BBS: “click on the heard button and get on with your life” is an invalid instruction and does’t compute.

Indeed, the BBS and BB aren’t even the same site anymore. The BBS is the latest experiment in a line of BB conducting cultural experiments (including non-experiments).

And the BBS certainly isn’t any one thing. It’s door games and drinking buddies and flame wars and social justice all the way down, and that’s before getting into any of the shenanigans that @OtherMichael pulls on a regular basis.

Yet, admidst the anarchy of the infinity of combinations of how and why people use the informational tools made and shared here, there are threads that tie the topics and the people together. Security. Privacy. Trust. Liberty. Mercy. Consent. Inclusion. Science. It’s why many of us love libraries and hackers and the EFF and the ACLU and TOR. Ideas wants to be free, and not just free beer or libre software but also ideas want the freedom to associate with any and all other ideas they happen to have affinity for.

I’ve been meditating upon this. I don’t have it all clear in my head, so I don’t expect it to come through with clarity. But I want to share this because I think other fellow travelers might also want to play with the fungal experiment that is our culture.

“Be Cool.” is great, no doubt. But I think there’s a lot that goes into being “cool” and I’m trying to unpack it. And I’m not trying to unpack it all now, which is why I put it under the fuzzy and dizzy label of “mutant values.” Just looking for the next level of instruction that informs “coolness.”

/----------

I’m off to another busy day at the grind.

[Kimmo]

What’s that thread where you link posts you like extra much?

[nimelennar]

@jannamark

Why would I or anyone have to read everything you’ve ever written to call you out on a lapse in civility or whatever on your part?

Just as an example, I’ve seen people replying to @Modusoperandi’s posts to call him out on something he’d said, and some more regular people here would reply in return, saying, “Well, if you’d look at this guy’s posting history, you’d see that he almost exclusively posts satire.” And I’d see that posted about three or four times in that topic.

So, I have seen some of that around here.

[jannamark]

A claim to be a satirist is a poor excuse for being non-excellent to each other.

[OtherMichael]

@Donald_Petersen

But sometimes I think we’ve become so comfortable in our community of regulars (not just Regulars, but all the users we’ve come to recognize over the years) that we have a tendency to be a bit insular.

Yes to all you said, but especially yes to the above.

And insular to the point where we attack obvious trollies as well as fellow-travelers who are less-than-BBS-perfect.

[Mindysan33]

so… I’m kind of curious, @funruly, is there something specific that caused you to propose this particular new rule? Do you not think the spirit of what you say is included in the already established rules?

[teknocholer]

@nimelennar

I’ve seen people replying to @Modusoperandi’s posts to call him out on something he’d said, and some more regular people here would reply in return, saying, “Well, if you’d look at this guy’s posting history, you’d see that he almost exclusively posts satire.” And I’d see that posted about three or four times in that topic.

Like most people, I’m more inclined to tolerate a lapse from someone whose history I know and like, but I think criticism of a post, and defense of it, have to be based on the post in question. If I get called out for a particularly insensitive or flippant comment (it could happen ) I won’t get very far saying “But look at all these other comments where I wasn’t quite such an asshole”. I have to either explain myself or apologize based on how someone, maybe a newcomer, reacted to that one post.

[anon68939300]

I’m also having a hard time figuring out what gap this proposed rule fills or problem it is solving. Look at the current set of ten rules. They are clearly articulated, fun to read, and useful. funruly’s proposed rule is none of those things. IMHO, it doesn’t fit.

I get it that we should all be excellent to each other, but at the same time a milquetoast atmosphere is the last thing any of us want. The most engaging and interesting threads are often the most contentious. I’ve insulted people here and been insulted (and have been banned once). I think I’ve made some good arguments and have often been exposed to points of view I hadn’t considered.

If anything, I wish there was a little more diversity of opinion here. But I guess the more politically and homogeneous community is what differentiates this place from more open forums like Reddit. That and acres of whitespace.