(Content warning, discussions of SA and misogyny, mods I might mention politics a bit but I hope this can be taken outside the context of politics and understood as a discussion of basic human decency)
We all know how awful Reddit was when a user mentioned their gender. Immediate harassment, DMs, etc. It’s probably improved over the years? But still awful.
Until recently, Lemmy was the most progressive and supportive of basic human dignity of communities I had ever followed. I have always known this was a majority male platform, but I have been relatively pleased to see that positive expressions of masculinity have won out.
All of that changed with the recent “bear vs man” debacle. I saw women get shouted down just for expressing their stories of being sexually abused, repeatedly harassed, dogpiled, and brigaded with downvotes. Some of them held their ground, for which I am proud of them, but others I saw driven to delete their entire accounts, presumably not to return.
And I get it. The bear thing is controversial; we can all agree on this. But that should never have resulted in this level of toxicity!
I am hoping by making this post I can kind of bring awareness to this weakness, so that we can learn and grow as a community. We need to hold one another accountable for this, or the gender gap on this site is just going to get worse.
Hey fren, I may have mixed up my words but I was agreeing with you.
I guess I should have just said “no justice no peace” because that about sums it up right?
The absence of chaos does not equal civility or peace, order and uniformity imposed upon a living history of injustices, prejudices and systematic inequality does not create civility, this is why moderators need to be diverse and understand the context of the conversations they are moderating. There is no neutral, a moderation system is like a suspension system in car, it cannot eliminate the bumps in the road, it cannot eliminate the impulse from the car hitting those bumps, it can only react and moderate the resulting acceleration of the car’s chassis.
Car suspension is tuned to ideally behave like a critically damped system, the impulse hits, discomfort happens, but the springs provide a moderating force that returns the vehicle back to its normal ride height as quickly as possible without wild oscillations from underdamping but also crucially without overly suppressing the impulse either and causing overdampening where an impulse is never really resolved, or processed and the car doesn’t really return to its normal ride height for a long time.
No moderation creates wildly underdamped systems, but “everybody is equal and subject to the same precise rules no matter the context” moderation creates overdamped systems where pre-existing injustices and systematic prejudices are encoded into the dynamics of the system, departures from a stable norm are preserved and enlarged and while the suspension system may appear to behaving normally from the outside (no wild oscillations) it isn’t really functioning.
It isn’t easy, but I don’t think it is worth lamenting how hard moderation of communities is. It will until the end of time be one of the most difficult problems to solve long after we have spaceships and unlimited healthcare and cold fusion. That is just the way it is, and we have to do our best and we also have to be willing to say it how it is.
Which is all to say if a black person comes onto the fediverse and starts calling this white af space racist and isn’t being polite about it… well we should think long and hard before silencing that person shouldn’t we? People have a right to be upset when they have been hurt, and we don’t have a right to expect them to be polite about it after a certain point.
We do have a responsibility to understand the context though, and that can lead to understanding how someone who is very outwardly angry and confrontational is actually participating in harm reduction in a community by confronting the overdamped inequalities locking the system into an unnaturally depressed state.
Yes I heard your agreement the first time!! 💖 But this is extremely well articulated and I hope the moderation team reads it. These civility rules uphold some nasty power dynamics.
I have, as a trans person, experienced being on the blunt end of these civility rules for being “impolite” about my disagreement. Passion is not a crime, and at the end of the day, being called an asshole isn’t really going to hurt anyone.
We should definitely moderate for slurs, but we don’t even do that consistently. I remember seeing a thread filled with heavily upvoted sexist slurs against Hillary Clinton. She does suck, but when you’re gleefully using words like “cunt” and “bitch” to articulate that, you’re creating an environment that’s kinda scary for women.