(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.
I am a cis male mod of multiple communities here on Lemmy and all I can say is that I try to moderate as fairly and equitably as I can, but I also don’t have time to read every single comment on every single post in the communities I moderate, so you have to flag posts you find violate community rules. Every community I moderate has a civility rule, and shouting down or harassing women who are telling personal stories would be against those rules.
But I may not know that it’s happening unless it’s getting flagged.
You can’t moderate women’s perspectives getting constantly downvoted while men’s get upvoted. I doubt any of the comments OP mentioned actually violate any rules but getting ten comments ignorantly telling you you’re wrong whenever you share your perspective tends to make one feel unwelcome even if the comments are all technically civil.
Good insight. While there definitely was quite a bit of rule-breaking comments (largely now acted on as of today), the consistent wall of “technically respectful” disrespect did not help and provided a level of camouflage for the very bad actors to get by.
How exactly are you determining/validating people’s gender identity on an anonymous text based forum?
In the case of the bear discourse, most comments self-identified either explicitly or implicitly.
🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻 guess you can’t handle a fucking emoji
https://theangryblackwoman.com/2008/02/12/the-privilege-of-politeness/
politeness is a social construct that disenfranchises the rightfully pissed. idk who is moderating here but they are clearly dumb as a box of brix if they think they’re helping anything by blocking my comments that are clearly constructive as well as profane
If you are not willing to follow the rules of this community clearly outlined in the sidebar, moderation action will be taken as necessary.
Your original comment, which was removed by another moderator, was a very clear attack towards the OC; Do note that attacks directed towards other users are not allowed in this community.
You are free to share your views in this community as long as they adhere to the community and this instance’s rules. However, if your views on “civility/politeness” means you are complicit in attacking other users here, you are free to contribute elsewhere on the internet.
What did I say that was an attack? “fuck you”? is that an attack lmao ? these rules are arbitrarily enforced because I have seen people say that all the time, or say “fuck you” just in more words that they think are clever. the only reason I didn’t put that in this post was I just forgot to lol
We are volunteers, with full-time jobs. We don’t watch all the comments in our communities. We tend to only act on reported infractions. For example, you are reported often for rule violations (rule 2, mostly).
Okay, and can you see how this is messed up? People most often report “incivility” when someone is expressing a minority opinion. 🙄🙄
The point is that if you see things, report them. That’s how we keep the community civil
That is how you keep a community peaceful, not civil.
In order to keep a community civil you have to understand when conflict is needed and also what types of people are usually silenced either by trolls or by selective enforcement of rules or community guidelines.
My point is that civility rules are oppressive. Allow people to be justifiably upset. The civility rules will always favor majority held opinions. Read the article I linked, do some of your own research. You’re upholding a dumbass rule that will inevitably, and has been, inconsistently used.
another source
https://youtu.be/ezQa9MzJiBg?si=fkXKddpsGfuvxN4X
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.
Well excuse me for trying to be helpful.
Also, when did I say anything about politeness?
You mention the civility rules, excuse me I had to rewrite this damn comment like three times lol
Yes, mods in most communities expect discussions not to descend into people hurling insults at each other because that turns the community into chaos and also does not make it a safe place for marginalized groups and why you would be against such a policy to the point of being so rude to me, I’m not sure. But if you feel that you need a place where you can be as insulting towards people as you like, may I suggest 4chan?
How is “may I suggest 4chan”, a notoriously transphobic website, directed at someone from the Trans Lemmy, not supposed to be an insult?
How is “fuck you” an insult? It doesn’t attack you in any way whatsoever it just shows disrespect. I’m allowed to not respect you. Didn’t say anything about you or even call you an asshole.
You’re not protecting marginalized groups, you’re enforcing a standard of civility that is usually used to tell minorities “shut up, why are you so angry”
If protecting minorities was the goal, the rule would be against racism, sexism, etc… but that’s not the rule.
I already explained several times why I’m against the policy but idk I guess you can’t read that well? Really the only explanation I have here.
That is stated explicitly in the communities I moderate.
Examples-
World News:
Ten Forward:
Lemmy Shitpost:
I don’t know what you are entitled to do in this community in terms of moderation, but you are not entitled to make up your own so-called facts unchallenged.
Okay, if the civility rule is in place to protect minorities as you say, than why would we need a civility rule? That’s my point. We already have rules against bigotry.
You totally missed my point 🙄 and then you get all snooty about “facts unchallenged”. When really you just continually misunderstand or ignore my very clearly spelled out argument against this dumbass civility rule. Is this civility? You’re just ignoring all my points and posting useless screenshots.
Your words:
I showed that this was a false claim.
So you can say I missed your point, but your point was based on a false claim. And now you’re moving the goalposts.
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Preach it. One can appreciate mods efforts while also pushing back against respectability and “civility” discourse. Far from mutually exclusive, we need folks to more often acknowlwdge how exhausting the same tired mythbusting gets.
Moderation is lethal unless it prefigures itself to account for those who are silenced (and often far worse) by the wave of noise that is the statua quo. It’s not just some nice thing a person does. There is a power dynamic and that means responsiblilty, being held accountable to that responsibilty, and if nothing fucking else than not being surprised to be greeted with frustrated profanity where they have fallen short. Maybe mod less subforums, but dont blame the marginalized folks standing up for themselves.
It doesn’t matter friend, nothing is enough because the bottom line is they what Lemmy to be better than Reddit and that’s a problem because that’s impossible in that Lemmy is a decentralized system of instances and there will never be a single standard across them all when it comes to moderation for topics like this post.
All you can do is try your best to find/maintain good instances that reflect your values
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