Yes, I 100% agree with that. But there are also times, like every day, when someone’s plain-spoken language is twisted and distorted for the outrage mill. And it ends up so perverted from the original post that it just becomes a pile-on.
People who experienced bullying in their lives don’t get a pass on bullying as adults.
This topic is temporarily closed for at least 4 hours due to a large number of community flags.
From a moderator perspective, I can tell you that this is absolutely happening. In fact, there are several meta conversations happening at various levels between various groups about this very behaviour, especially as it pertains to new users.
But the reasons, I think, are different than you may believe. Vulnerable groups are under assault online like never before, and discourse has become far more polarized and far more dangerous than ever before. I honestly wonder if a place like the BBS, that invites a fairly large readership (tens of thousands of daily readers and a thousand posts a day that is also not a special interest site and invites all topics) can really survive in this climate longterm. But the behaviours I think you are seeing are, from this mod’s view, the direct result of most online Discourse being dangerous now if you are a member of a vulnerable community - and just choosing to participate carries risks that continue to increase.
There’s a lot of discussion about how you can even have a forum like this that welcomes newcomers and diverse viewpoints but also protects the vulnerable from abuse and bigotry. I’m genuinely not sure of the answer to that yet, but the one thing I _am sure of is this change you are feeling isn’t some sort of clique or concerted effort to gang up going on. Instead, it’s a consequence of the times we find ourselves in, and about how one can be vulnerable on the Internet and still feel safe - one of those ways has clearly become pushing back hard against activities and behaviours that sure, could be innocuous or born from ignorance or misunderstanding, but are increasingly instead are acts specifically designed to further marginalize vulnerable communities or make them feel unwelcome, and the propagation of those ideas to communities like this one.
How do you run a civil community in the face of that sort of risk? Can you run a community and protect members when every newcomer may be wittingly or unwittingly propagating bigoted statements and ideas?
This topic was automatically opened after 4 hours.
Damn. Whatever they’re paying you, it’s not enough. One thing I’m sure we can all agree on is the incredible value of this unique forum and that it can only exist with the moderation and leadership format you’ve fostered. I hope that the fear that it can’t persist in the current climate is proven wrong in the long run.
I’ll throw an opinion into this. I am a man of all the privilages, and have used this forum as a way to educate myself and broaden my perspective exactly because it is so much more diverse than anywhere else i have been. In doing so, i have become more aware of just how hard it is to be in one of the less privileged groups. There is a saying, i wear it on a t-shirt often, that goes “When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Having various minority members expecting to be treated with equal dignity and respect is not disrespect or oppression, it is, in fact, the world we are seeking. And sometimes, for us who are of privilege, that can feel jarring. We are not used to it. We expect to be taken as meaning well and being validated. But when we are interacting with folks who face disrespect and discrimination on a daily basis IRL, our innocent comments or jokes can fall flat or even blow up in our faces. But you know what? If that happens to me, it’s on me. It is never the responsibility of a minority group to teach me or correct me. It’s on me. I am a better man than i was years ago when i started hanging out here for that exact reason, and i do not want to see that change.
I respectfully disagree with that, orenwolf, because, while all the concerns that you mention do exist and are true and are absolutely important to address,
at the same time
the concerns that @cannibalpeas has brought up do exist and are true and are important to address. Please don’t paper them over or deny their existence.
Pushback on abhorrent ideas is one thing. Bullying other users is something different. Bullying, even in the service of pushback for marginalized or vulnerable groups, is not okay.
As cannibal peas said, people who experienced bullying in their lives don’t get a pass on bullying as adults.
And being on the right side of history, or being mad at the conditions of the world, or mad at what someone said in their comment, or even afraid because of what someone said in their comment, doesn’t give any of us the right to bully others on this forum.
Okay, so just what is this “bullying” of which some here speak?
Can anyone point to say, a thread where it actually happened?
Cuz I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen people speaking back to and flagging obnoxious statements that in one way or another violate this wonderful community’s guidelines, but bullying? What, exactly, are y’all talking about?
This community has a very robust immune system when it comes to bullshit, one that has developed through countless encounters with bad actors over the years. Honestly, I don’t always understand what initiates an immune response, but I sure am glad that the immune system is there. I don’t have to imagine the hell that this place would turn into without this sensitivity to potential threats; I’ve been to reddit.
What may seem like a joke or a lighthearted offhand comment to one person may actually and literally be deadly serious to someone else. What looks like a healthy cell to you or me may look strikingly similar to a virus when viewed from somebody else’s lived experience. And we can’t just sit and wait to see what kind of cell we’re dealing with.
At the same time, I think that we can all agree that healthy cells are occasionally misidentified as viruses, and this leads to exhausting back and forth exchanges between two cells that are constantly talking over each other, responding to what they both assume the other means. We have all seen it happen. Hell, it happened between two upstanding members of the community right here, hence this thread.
It’s not even the flagging that causes problems; it’s these back and forth exchanges in which one person is simultaneously arguing with four or five other people that cause collateral damage. Flagging would be a mercy at that point. But the flagging often doesn’t start until somebody loses their cool and says something really mean, and then it’s a flag frenzy that shuts down the thread for a while.
Everything that I have just described is still miles better than no immune system at all or an overly weak immune system. But I do think that it’s worth talking about how we handle these kinds of situations, because things can get really nasty really fast even between two upstanding members of the community, hence this thread.
I have at times considered keeping a list, but that seemed too…weird. I’m not one to look for chances to point a finger or to take offense from others. But now that @cannibalpeas has spoken up, I say Yes, I’ve seen it too. And I see that it affects the whole forum as well as my own willingness to participate in discussions here.
(quoting from various of cannibalpeas’ posts above)
gang-ups predicated on what often seem to be deliberate misreads of a poster’s intent. Or at least the assumption of bad intentions.
long-time users and people who join and find themselves lambasted out of the blue.
There seems to be an intentional misreading of intent; an assumption of the worst intentions from the jump.
there is a gate keeping mentality that has taken hold here
times, like every day, when someone’s plain-spoken language is twisted and distorted for the outrage mill. And it ends up so perverted from the original post that it just becomes a pile-on.
Those observations match my own observations.
We need to allow for the fact that other people don’t know the same things we do. This should be a place of learning and uplifting, not a place of shaming and punishment of people who don’t know what we know, or who we believe (or perhaps assume, due to careless reading) to be wrong in their thinking.
Something that I think would help things in general here on the bbs: Avoid using sarcasm, snark, eyerolls, or side-eye gifs when responding to any comment. Even though none of those are technically against the community guidelines, they’re hostile and in general serve to escalate tensions. They are a subtle form of bullying. They are a subtle form of [trolley-driving]. I’ve observed that many times when a topic gets lots of flags and gets locked, the point where sarcasm or snark is introduced is the point where the conversation turns, then it’s off to the races and off the rails. If we want to respond to a comment we find offensive, as opposed to just flagging it, we can present our ideas without the snark. As the saying goes, we can be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem.
I occasionally notice that
- Assume good faith and like the good. However, flag the bad, and avoid contentless comments.
is treated as more of a guideline than a rule.
It’s tough cause you want to nip real problems in the bud, but some bad behaviors can only be defined as a pattern of behavior (e.g., sealioning).
Yeah, and that’s why orenwolf says to alert him of patterns. I wish I’d been keeping a list now, sigh. Ugh.
Ok let me just be unguarded and blunt here. Because I get what your are saying. But truly when I have tried doing this it has backfired so badly, been so exhausting to me personally, wasted so much of my mental energy fo that day, been so utterly draining… that even though I try my best to make the effort anyway because I want to, if tone policing what ultimately amounts to mostly a handful of women and poc who use side eye gifs in this board is the “solution” then I want to join edgore in anonymity.
And I don’t even like using gifs that much personally.
And when I don’t get flagged for it I often just get ignored or my point only gets addressed some time later when some one else says it. It’s frustrating. And I literally cannot say anything about that without getting flagged I think.
I’m serious as a goddamned heart attack though, the effort has gotten me insulted, talked down to, flagged anyway, left me crying irl sometimes.
So I mean flag the eye rolls by all means but the reality is that the people who use that are usually the ones worst impacted by the issue and they are often burned out by the constant microaggrssions. And that’s whose gonna get silenced while whatever they might have found objectionable gets a free pass or only gets discussed as much as “disinterested” parties find amusing.
I had an entire thread eradicated on me because I kept repeating the scientific bases for something that one prominent poster here disagreed with. Many people chimed in agreeing with the incorrect explanation, misattributing my comments as support of the behavior of those affected by this condition. No matter how many times I stated that I did not support the behavior in question, but that there were achievable methods that reduced overall harm to everyone involved I was told that I must want the behavior in question to become socially acceptable.
I have seen other threads go to crap when one or two particular posters decide that someone has disagreed, as said above, incorrectly. Suggesting that no one on this board is capable of having a different lived experience from those posters, so anyone who claims otherwise is lying, driving trollies or acting with bad intent also happens.
I’ve had people defend these posts, claiming that I must be at fault for not agreeing with the prominent poster.
So what, when some poster decides to come in declaring that Trump has it right, or the video doesn’t prove the cops weren’t provoked, or there are reasons to be skeptical of vaccines, or they have nothing against trans people but, or any one of the pieces of bullshit we all know are bullshit but get subjected to anyway…we’re all just supposed to react with sincere discussion, or else leave it stand?
As a leader I’ve seen some of the conversations oren mentioned. I don’t have much to add to them save this – if our reaction to bad-faith posters is just to ask more from the people who do care about this place, it will exhaust them without helping the problem, and drive away the people who make it worthwhile.
I’m going to keep rolling my eyes at disingenuous nonsense. If that’s your example of bullying, the term means a lot less than it used to.
I’m not talking about the posters who come in. I’m talking about us, the regulars here. We won’t be able to control everything that gets posted by all the people who come in, but we can always lead by example. And I’m not saying that those posters who come in aren’t a problem. I’m saying that we don’t have to add to the problem.
That is one example of bullying, and I mentioned it because it’s obvious that most people who do it don’t see themselves as engaging in bullying behavior when they do it. Unfortunately for the rest of us.
Other examples of bullying that are under discussion here are as I quoted from @cannibalpeas.
And I’m saying that enforcing being superficially polite is not refusing to add to the problem, it’s enabling sea lions. I don’t believe letting people be honest about when they are sick of bullshit is bullying at all, it’s a necessary part of making posting here tolerable.
I’m sorry if you’ve been on the wrong side of that, but…well, without knowing why, I can’t say if it was a real problem or a misstep you should learn from. The same applies to most of the other examples of “bullying” too, honestly.
That matches my observations.
Even when some prominent poster has literally misread what someone else wrote, other users will give their response lots of likes and pile on to the first poster. I’ve sadly come to the conclusion that plenty of people don’t actually read very carefully, and they will jump to conclusions about what they think the other poster must be saying. I don’t know how to combat that, other than to urge us all to “measure twice, cut once” i.e., read twice before responding, especially if we think we disagree with someone, or if we’re feeling mad about their comment.
Hunting down and destroying suspiciously new accounts with transparently bad intentions is not just a right, but a sacred duty of all mutants. But at lot of nasty arguments also do seem to grow out of genuine misunderstandings that never get worked out precisely because they escalate so quickly.
I don’t think that @anon3072533 is arguing for superfical politeness. I think that we are talking about avoiding escalation in cases that are not so cut and dry as Trump supporters or anti-vaxxers, where there really is a possibility that it is a misunderstanding.
It seems that communication is breaking down in this thread as well. One side seems to be talking about outright trolleys while the other side is talking about upstanding members who are pilloried for saying something that may be stupid or may just be too ambiguously worded to tell.
