Wait, what? What are you referring to?
Honestly I feel like there is unspoken animosity here to anyone who has vocally supported some of our trans community and I donāt want to get into it. I shouldnāt have said that but whatever Iām basically done here anyway so who cares right?
When I see the buzzwords about āecho chambersā and not being actually tolerant most of the times Iāve seen that it has to do with trans people. And once again it ends up being on the trans people to be the patient tolerant ones while people discuss how and why and where they should exist.
On this board Iām talking about specifically. Like if we are confronting the shadows we see in each other here and I am speaking to one of mine then yeah I feel it happens so much it makes me wonder whether diverse communities can exist outside of likeā¦ war. So yeah, other places, but also here.
But thatās how I see it and why. I have seen it happen over and over again.
And everything marches rightwards? Because thatās the direction the social vector is going at this place. Thatās what I think.
I think itās a process of attrition and right nowā¦ minorities are and will continue to be the ones losing access to this space. Just like everywhere online.
And the irony is that even the people who are trying to protect that space may help tear it apart because we fracture easily but unite with recalcitrance.
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Itās hard for all of us to learn about others. But there are plenty of places where members of those communities write about their lives and the issues they face. We can all try to find time to read them and support their work. And become informed about their lives before joining a conversation.
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And thank you to those who do! 
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As i stated earlier, you should absolutely not stay in a place where you do not feel safe. That said, this breaks my heart. Driving away our diverse commenters, gritching about āecho chambers,ā this is how we lose everything that we value here. If this is what BB is headed for, i am headed out. This is how we get the Nazi bar.
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You are describing the very reason that Iāve started to believe that perhaps itās time to shut the BBS as a whole down. I certainly do not want to participate in a forum where we cannot protect our mutants, and it is increasingly looking like online discourse on the internet has reached a point where āgeneral interestā forums with open registration and community moderation cannot be safe places any longer.
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Same.
I think we are not wrong. Maybe not right but also not wrong.
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That would be a tragedy. But we live in a time of increasing hate and huge Nazi entertainment complexes; not bars. That are funded by billionaires.
Iām not sure I would visit afterwards. Much of the content lately is riffs on things that people have already posted in the threads. That they get from other sources.
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I hope youāre wrong, but if we lose amazing people like you and @anon67050589 then I donāt want to be here, either.
And thatās why I think we need this place even more.
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Wow.
Over this past weekend, I went out and touched grass, heard some great live music, danced my ass off, and got some much needed āreal lifeā in my life.
And then I came back and saw this thread had only escalated since I last commented.
There is a lot to unpack here, and I simply donāt have the energy to try and address it all point by point.
So Iāll just throw out a few nutshells:
1. A lot of this conversation demonstrates the exact complaint that is at the heart of the issue:
Too many people of privilege here actively and consistently DO NOT LISTEN TO OR BELIEVE Others.
Full stop.
Even when you genuinely mean well, and believe with your whole heart that you are acting in good faith, YOU ARE STILL IGNORING THE WORDS AND LIVED EXPERIENCE OF THOSE WHO HAVE LESS PRIVILEGE THAN YOU DO.
It shouldnāt have to take 20+ people explaining the exact same concept over and over again for someone to understand it.
2. āMansplainingā, āHe-Peatingā, āBlacksplainingā, āEnergy Leechingā āIgnoring Women and Only Addressing Men Insteadā are just a few microaggressions that happen here constantly; and as Mindy, Torn danimagoo and several others have already stated, they donāt get called out even an iota as much as they happen - if we tried to do so in real time, weād hardly ever have the time to talk about anything else.
3. Simply expecting marginalized people to just āshut up and suffer in silenceā for the comfort of the dominant group is some straight up selfish bullshit, IMOā¦ and thatās not gonna happen anytime soon.
4. There absolutely ARE some members here who simply flag peopleās comments simply because they donāt like them, not because they disagree with the point being made, or because the other partyās comment actually violates a rule.
The claims of ābullyingā (and the other accusatory language being employed) often seem like psychological projection, frankly.
Speaking only for myself, thereās a nonzero number of people here that I simply donāt care forā¦ and likewise, thereās probably an even greater number of individuals who dislike me. So it goes.
Like I said in my earlier comment, (which apparently offended some folks, because it sure got flagged) itās okay if we donāt all get along. Thatās life. I donāt think of the people I donāt vibe with here as āmy enemies,ā nor do I go seeking them out in order to argue endlessly. I donāt plot against them, or flag every comment they make out of sheer spite.
And lastly:
5. This isnāt āa safe spaceā for anyone who isnāt White, cis-het, male, able bodied and neurotypical - but itās still the best space we have, and those of us here in actual good faith work hard at trying to get it as close as is possible.
To continue hold this space in good faith with my friends and community, without it becoming āa Nazi Barā or a āWhite Men Only Cave.ā
ETA:
Thanks, Liz.
Regardless to all the melee, I still love this community and the friends I have made here.
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Although this account isnāt very old (5 years I think) I have also been round these parts for ages with commenting accounts lost to the ages like the ISP email accounts they were associated with. I took a long break from this site around the time of the Violet Blue debacle (not necesarily related just way back during a previous evolution of the site, and life being too busy for internets).
Thinking about this thread, I think part of the challenge is that the content on boingboing has been increasingly political and less geeky/nerdy/wonderfull. (This has come up a bit recently)
Sensitive topics are very hard to navigate through the text medium and there may be less room for side conversations within a topic. It certainly doesnt help that the current political landscape is regressing towards toxicity and repression. I donāt see an easy path to shutting down harm, but also not allowing for miscommunications to baloon. But I think this thread shows that there is still a diversity of wishes for this forum to be a better place for everyone.
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If youāre dropping concerns without backing them up with examples - youāre not contributing to resolving issues. Which leads to the modās thoughts that the venue is irredeemable.
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Methinks that perhaps thatās exactly what some individuals actively want; if they canāt be the constant center of attention and dictate the flow of discourse here, then theyād just rather shut the whole thing downā¦
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I just want people to stop being assholes. Apparently, thatās too much to ask.
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Fuckinā A.
Treating Others as well as you would like to be treated yourself is not that difficult - it just takes consistent practice.
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If that were to happen, then it might be time for BB to come to an end as well. I go to the site from here, and talk about whatās on the site with people here. As well as many other things with this wonderful community. The topics on BB itself are getting more and more heated, angry, clickbaity and less ācool.ā The mediation of this group as a place to talk about that and a bunch of other things is the reason I still go back and forth between forum and site. If you take away the forum, the site is just another AMP-style click baity news site without a community.
I would ask the other question, go the other way. Discourse is not a necessarily cheap product. It claims to fix internet communication. Surely it has the ability to find out who is targeted wrongly by flags and start introducing massive weights against people who continue to wrongly flag. More massive than just getting a flag wrong. Surely it can throw these people in front of you for sanctioning.
In soccer, which I ref, we have the concept of a foul type called āPersistent infringement.ā Itās when a player fouls another player or set of players enough times that the ref says āOkay, youāre fouling them to shut them down and itās obvious, youāre getting a yellow card.ā However, this also is applied if the same person is targeted by three or four other players. After that, the last one to do it gets the card with the stated warning that any more cynical fouls of this nature will result in everyone doing it also getting the card. (Cynical, not typical fouls, and if that were to be enforced here, itād have to require human intervention to determine whether or not the missed flag was an intentional attempt to stifle or a good faith flag.)
But thatās what itās come to. Discourse is software that claims to solve this problem and make the place safe. If itās not doing that, what are you paying for?
ETA:
Also, this site IS relatively safer for marginalized people than a lot of the internet is turning into. If it were to shut down because of these assholes , then theyāve accomplished their goal, theyāve silenced another place that marginalized people turned to for a safe(r) harbor. I would really hate to see them win.
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Iām going second (third?) what @Melizmatic and @anon85524460 have said. Itās a common tactic in ācertainā groups to find sites they disagee with and either take them over or burn them down. There has to be a third option. Iām very not ok with either of those, although i do understand how much of that falls directly on your shoulders. In the end, itās a problem largely of privilege blind white males, and it is the responsibility of not-so-much privilege blind white males to straighten it up. Otherwise, we are back to telling oppressed populations to clean up our messes.
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I donāt think I have anything valuable to add to the general topic, but do want to say that the loss of BBS would be tragic. For all of the reasons above, but also because as @orenwolf has stated before, the posters here, especially on these back pages, are a very narrow subset of people who visit bOing bOing daily. The vast majority of viewers of the comments arenāt engaged, but as lots of us have stated in the past, learn incredibly valuable lessons here and have grown because of it. Absolutely nobody has a duty to stay in a place that makes them feel unsafe in effort to illuminate this world, but those that do are kind of holding a flame against bitter winds. The impact is far greater than any of us can comprehend, I think.
I know that when I first arrived, probably via a link on Ars Technica or something, all I saw was a funky, general interest blog with some pretty hilarious and well informed commenters. It took years for me to create an account, even longer to feel engaged and longer still before I even discovered that the switch to BBS made it a full-on forum.
It seems inevitable that, at some point, regardless of intentions, users are going to clash, even when they feel a kinship to other users. Itās awful that to hold that flame, those that do will inevitably encounter the brunt of the painful clashes. Itās like putting themselves on the front line with hope that the second wave will win the day. I hope that it at least occasionally feels that those of us with privilege are listening and learning and standing with and not against you.
It would be a tragedy to lose that light.
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Iāve heard it stared repeatedly on this thread that the site has become a non-welcoming echo chamber of groupthink and itās driving people away without anything other than anecdotal evidence to back up this assertion.
Thereās nothing wrong with expressing unpopular opinions in a respectful and thoughtful fashion, and thereās certainly users here who are able to do this. The problem is that thereās a certain element festering on the Internet whose sole purpose is to agitate (on any side of the political spectrum). Those elements arenāt interested in nuanced discussion on complicated issues. They are interested in making other people angry. And thereās certain ideas that simply arenāt up for debate here.
The Overton window has swung so far right in recent years you donāt get so-called conservatives coming here discussing how āReagan maybe wasnāt all that badā or debating tax policies. You get people saying how āTrump wonā, and why women need to know their place as baby makers, and anybody whoās not a straight white Christian person needs to go back to their country because weāre the land of the free over here (all said without a hint of irony). These kind of discussions have no place here and they are truly both intellectually dishonest and factually incorrect.
Iāve been a reader of this site for decades, and have been an active BBS user for many years (and a lurker for longer than that). The irony is Iāve seen far more people leave not because they dare to go against āgroupthinkā, but because they are driven away by other bad actors here. You have wonderful people who are contributing to this topic very basically saying this exact thing. People who themselves are questioning whether or not they should continue to be here because they donāt feel welcome or safe. This isnāt āgroupthinkā winning, this is the agitators winning.
Iām in full agreement here. Sadly, thatās just the way things go. This is a for-profit site and outrage drives clicks and clicks drive ads and ads drive profit and profit keeps the lights on. Hooray for capitalism. Also worth noting is that many of the authors that concentrated on the alt-culture topics that used to make this site great have long since left. What you unfortunately end up is an overwhelming amount of politically-focused topics guaranteed to make people angry mixed with āsponsored contentā for the kind of crapgadgets, ā$1000 worth of classes for $0.50ā, and ālifetimeā VPN subscriptions that the Boing Boing of old would have mocked incessantly.
This is also why I donāt often engage on boing topics anymore. Itās just not interesting to talk for the millionth time about the latest awful thing Trump or some other similarly minded right wing Christo-fascist did. They are terrible and we all know it. Iām tired of giving them oxygen or my brain cycles.
ETA: But, Iām also a straight white dude so I have the privilege of being able to largely ignore these topics. Others donāt have this privilege when the subjects of these posts are quite literally JAQing about their right to exist.
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Hmm. Thatās an interesting thought. Perhaps BBS can exist in some way separated from the āfront pageā. Like a trust level access thing (that I probably wouldnāt qualify for 
). I want to be clear that I am not dismissing the idea that users feeling threatened by other long-term users isnāt legitimate or would be entirely resolved by walling portions off, but it may go some way to insulate the healthier discussions from the ādrive byā chuds. No one who feels threatened should have to simultaneously fend off Nazis while finding community.
