Thank you for following BB guidelines and assuming good faith on my part.
@anon67050589 covered it well, and if I read between the lines of your last statement, you get it. But I’ll go ahead and state it outright:
If “conservatives” who model themselves after the Ben Shapiros of the world comment on BoingBoing, they are going to get flagged into oblivion. 99% of anything they write is going to run afoul of the Community Guidelines against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and disparagement of mental illness. And I’m not just talking about posts that use the n-word, c-word, swastikas, or other catch words & symbols of hate. As a community, we’re clever enough to hear the dogwhistles and call them out. We can translate the calls for “preservation of Western Culture” = “No brown people allowed.”
My guess is that a lot of the flags and post deletions that the Mod Crew here get complaints about are ones where someone who thinks they can sneak by the guidelines finds out they are not nearly as clever as they think.
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If you subtract racism, sexism, homophobia, and various other kinds of punching down, freak-shaming and victim-blaming from “conservatism,” WHAT IS LEFT?
Almost nothing. Tax cuts for rich people. That’s it.
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IOW, Discourse is not Kinja… and thank goodness for that.
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I think @DukeTrout understands best what I was trying to say. The use of the term “conservative” is often a smokescreen in discussions. “You hate my ideas because I’m a conservative”, that sort of thing.
As @orenwolf has intimated, there does seem to be a connection between people who make a point of calling themselves “conservative” and a lot of prejudicial ideas, but it’s the prejudicial ideas that get flagged, not the political leanings of the poster.
I’m dictionary-definition-conservative in nature. People don’t always agree with me here, but I don’t write posts supporting sexism, racism, nationalism, etc. so people don’t feel the need to flag my posts. And on the other side of the coin, extreme progressives like cowicide have gotten banned for stomping all over the TOS, so it’s definitely not a one-sided thing.
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Sometimes it’s not even that. Sometimes it’s just “you hate my ideas because they’re unpopular”. Either way, as you say, a comment is not flagged because the ideas are conservative or unpopular but because they’re offensive or repugnant or presented in bad faith, and (wait for it…) against the site rules.
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I also think part of the problem is that “conservative” (just like “liberal” or “socialist”) is such an overloaded term where it can mean practically anything. There’s nothing wrong with “conservative” preferences around things like smaller government or traditional values. The problem is what these ideas can be twisted into; “smaller government” becomes “let’s give a ton of money to the military to fund foreign wars while taking away social programs that benefit POCs”, or “traditional” becomes an excuse for racism, gay bashing, and misogyny.
I don’t hate conservative ideas, I hate the ideas so-called conservatives tend to profess here and elsewhere.
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Yes! Kinja is probably the worst commenting system I’ve dealt with in twenty-some years online. It’s broken and buggy; it’s all-but-impossible to get out of the grays (their newcomer rank, which is hidden unless specifically called up); moderation’s practically nonexistent and flags seem to do nothing; and trollies abound, including those who swipe other users’ screennames and avatars to cause havok. It is so much easier to have intelligent conversations with the Discourse software and the community/moderator combo we have here.
Edited to clarify statement on “the grays.”
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Wednesday’s post about YouTube’s response to Steven Crowder had several comments that said YouTube was censoring him. All of them were hidden by the time I read the comments and have since been removed, and I can’t see any community guidelines that they went against.
one of the hidden comments i saw in that thread that talked about crowder being censored were also defending his homophobic activities, defending hate doesn’t cut it around here. another one of the hidden comments was tied back to a blatantly offensive comment through a series of replies and it seems like one or two comments that hadn’t been hidden got swept out in the same chain. remember that replies to comments that get eaten are often knocked out too.
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Oy, Kinja is indeed the worst interface I’ve personally ever dealt with.
It’s so bad that many former Disqus users still call the switch-over to that system The Kinjapocalypse.
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Does “doesn’t cut it around here” mean “goes against community guidelines,” or just “we don’t agree with it?” I wish I could read the exact content of those removed comments again because I remember being confused as to why they were hidden, if not just because people disagreed with them.
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Homophobic, transphobic, and ad homimjnen posts will be eaten by the relevant authorities when flagged. Or when @jlw deems it so.
Owl under his eye, indeed.
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as was mentioned by tinoesroho, homophobic statements are against guidelines.
do keep in mind that a comment that is within community guidelines is liable to be removed if it is a reply to a comment removed for being against the guidelines. it could easily be the case that a hidden comment that seemed to to you to be within the guidelines may have been removed because of its linkage to a comment that got removed because it was in violation of the guidelines.
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Also misogynistic posts, victim blaming posts, posts promoting hatred of any sort.
I do miss Falcor’s flair about announcing her intent to ‘have lunch’ whenever folks
stepped out of line, as it were.
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I’m not talking about homophobic or transphobic posts. Regardless of the content of the YouTube channel, someone’s BBS comment was merely that YouTube was practicing censorship, and that comment was flagged and removed.
It seems that this topic was created to address whether or not comments on BBS are removed because they violate community regulations, or merely because people disagree with them. I feel that this was an example of the latter. It’s probably academic, since, being removed, I can’t point out the specific examples.
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This here is a rubbish bin for complaints that were off-topic somewhere else. You can thank @Nightflyer that they weren’t just deleted.
If you’re hoping to actually change or clarify anything, you might want to try posting in the General Moderation Topic. We’ll make popcorn.
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and you’re sure that comment wasn’t a reply to a previous comment that might have contained statements outside of the guidelines? as i keep mentioning, that will also result in the removal of a comment.
otherwise, you’re basically saying that orenwolf or jlw or someone similarly placed wiped out a non-offensive post for no reason, something that seems incredibly unlikely.
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Don’t be silly; we keep a popper going at all times, just in case.
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Thanks for the clarification. I’ll check there.
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