preface: not speaking as a mod here in an official mod context. this is in chat for a reason.
i’ve been watching a community melt down over its new community conduct policy. that policy took probably six months to draft—and the backlash to it may have honestly cost the community six months of hosting money, because for all the good the moderators who drafted it have done they made one big fuck up in drafting it. (bad enough they’ve since reversed course, but the damage is done)
i have many thoughts on this, and the general implications it has.
it goes without saying: we (as moderators) will make decisions You will not like sometimes. that’s just how it is. we cannot accommodate everyone, and it will almost certainly be necessary at times to disregard user opinion to do something for the greater good.
but: can we count on You to understand why we do that? will You give us the good faith and benefit of the doubt that even if You disagree, and stick by us so we can all build something better?
my pessimistic sense is no, absolutely not. i think that a lot of people have been conditioned—by reddit, by twitter, by other platforms—into just assuming the worst of moderation. i think most people have given up on giving any benefit of the doubt to platforms, too. it’s understandable: moderation and Existing is shit on basically all of them. there’s no face and even less accountability. rules are inscrutable and haphazard. enforcement is farcical and comical. you are much better trying to just improve things in Your vicinity than hope these sites do it for You, and to never trust a word any moderator says.
but we’re not those platforms. the community i’m watching is not a platform like that—it tries very hard to give a fuck, and to build something special. we are like them in trying to give a fuck about everything we do and build something better, and i think it shows in everything we do.
and yet it still feels obvious that when we inevitably fuck up something here, we will go through the ringer as if we’re a reddit or twitter. all the community and good faith we’ve built will immediately be discarded in one swoop, and we will not recover to that point of community trust again—because everyone has been conditioned to assume the worst. we will probably lose donations and in kind possibly financial stability. we, from that point on, may then have to scale back our involvement and start to assume worse of You just for safety reasons—we are people too, and we are being vulnerable in the level of transparency being offered here.
and i guess i just i don’t know what to do about this dilemma—or what even can be done. it’s part of why this isn’t being said in a moderation capacity, just a user one shooting off into space. what can i say, even? words hardly bind you to giving us leeway and understanding when we err.
but, to awkwardly conclude: i feel like we need that leeway and understanding for this all to work, and go differently than everything else. the implicit nature of the reaction to these fuck ups is that we have to be perfect Or Else, but we literally cannot be. that’s the nature of moderation, and of people, and i’d hope people get that when we inevitably fuck up it’s not because we’re like reddit or twitter—it’s because we care, and we care about making this place good for you too.
idk. goodnight, folks. i’ll be off for parts of tomorrow hiking.
specifically the issue was is where to draw the line when it comes to fictional, non-human artistic depictions of sexual acts involving minors. this is a weird, very niche, very complicated moderation thing that probably no normal person is going to understand from the jump (generally it’s the purview of internet furries and a subset of anime and manga fans)—but it’s also one where opinion is a lot more varied and less settled than you’d probably think from how i describe it.
a lot of people straightforwardly consider art like that analogous to pedophilia—pretty easy to see why, don’t necessarily think it’s an unfair conclusion to draw as a snap judgement. but there are many people who have essentially been victims of child abuse or pedophiles, and for them that kind of content helps them navigate the trauma of their experiences without uh. being pedophilia, lol. if you ever encounter people like this it’s generally quite clear they’re not pedophiles and they abhor any idea of harming children.
but i’m sure you can see that makes it extremely hard to draw any line here, moderationally speaking (especially if you can’t just do what we do and have one rule). there’s the obvious ick factor on one hand in allowing it, but the very real consequence of the latter group not having a space despite not doing anything wrong collectively because others might. and if you’re making a conscious social space, is that fair? i’d think not.
now personally? i have no stake in the game and i don’t care where the site falls on that one. i think you can make very good justifications for both positions. but more than anything for me: the staff of that site spent six months trying to find a line to draw there—they didn’t bullshit it—and for all intents and purposes with the reaction they might as well have spent an hour on it between martinis. nobody cared that they tried to be fair to everyone, and to make as much of an accommodation as possible to the issues of the first group while not excising the second and giving them a space. a lot of people made it into all or nothing, absolutist issue: if the Wrong Side won, they’d leave and never come back and make the site’s reputation mud. when they Won, they paraded it around and still held their Win against the staff because they even considered anything but the Winning Side’s position.
and that last bit? that’s the shit i’m worried about here. the fuck up here is functionally cosmetic, in my mind, and its form doesn’t matter. ours will almost certainly not be around an issue that emotionally charged or complicated to navigate—but how it plays out will probably be the same or similar, because the rage impulses reddit primes you for are not that much different than the rage impulses of twitter.
Damn. I see how that can be a hard line to draw. I definitely am against that in my immediate reaction, but I also am very disconnected from either community. I do not know how people who have been abused in that way navigate their trauma. Hopefully we all get better at communicating over time. It’s unfortunate how black and white people see things, and how when they see something as wrong they’ll consider it beyond discussion, not worth thinking about. Good luck with moderation in the future.
yeah i’d generally say my outlook is optimistic–we haven’t run into problems here so far at all, other than a handful of comments we have to keep an eye on–but this is just the stuff you have to think about long-term when you’re trying to build a community lol