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Community Rules
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Be nice. Assume others have good intent (within reason).
Block or ignore posts, comments, and users that irritate you in some way rather than engaging. Report if they are actually breaking community rules.
Use content warnings and/or mark as NSFW when appropriate. Most posts with content warnings likely need to be marked NSFW.
Most 196 posts are memes, shitposts, cute images, or even just recent things that happened, etc. There is no real theme, but try to avoid posts that are very inflammatory, offensive, very low quality, or very "off topic".
Bigotry is not allowed, this includes (but is not limited to): Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism, Sexism, Abelism, Classism, or discrimination based on things like Ethnicity, Nationality, Language, or Religion.
Avoid shilling for corporations, posting advertisements, or promoting exploitation of workers.
Proselytization, support, or defense of authoritarianism is not welcome. This includes but is not limited to: imperialism, nationalism, genocide denial, ethnic or racial supremacy, fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc.
Avoid AI generated content.
Avoid misinformation.
Avoid incomprehensible posts.
No threats or personal attacks.
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Moderator Guidelines
Moderator Guidelines
- Don’t be mean to users. Be gentle or neutral.
- Most moderator actions which have a modlog message should include your username.
- When in doubt about whether or not a user is problematic, send them a DM.
- Don’t waste time debating/arguing with problematic users.
- Assume the best, but don’t tolerate sealioning/just asking questions/concern trolling.
- Ask another mod to take over cases you struggle with, if you get tired, or when things get personal.
- Ask the other mods for advice when things get complicated.
- Share everything you do in the mod matrix, both so several mods aren't unknowingly handling the same issues, but also so you can receive feedback on what you intend to do.
- Don't rush mod actions. If a case doesn't need to be handled right away, consider taking a short break before getting to it. This is to say, cool down and make room for feedback.
- Don’t perform too much moderation in the comments, except if you want a verdict to be public or to ask people to dial a convo down/stop. Single comment warnings are okay.
- Send users concise DMs about verdicts about them, such as bans etc, except in cases where it is clear we don’t want them at all, such as obvious transphobes. No need to notify someone they haven’t been banned of course.
- Explain to a user why their behavior is problematic and how it is distressing others rather than engage with whatever they are saying. Ask them to avoid this in the future and send them packing if they do not comply.
- First warn users, then temp ban them, then finally perma ban them when they break the rules or act inappropriately. Skip steps if necessary.
- Use neutral statements like “this statement can be considered transphobic” rather than “you are being transphobic”.
- No large decisions or actions without community input (polls or meta posts f.ex.).
- Large internal decisions (such as ousting a mod) might require a vote, needing more than 50% of the votes to pass. Also consider asking the community for feedback.
- Remember you are a voluntary moderator. You don’t get paid. Take a break when you need one. Perhaps ask another moderator to step in if necessary.
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This is how you get places like 4chan. I'd rather have a place where everyone is nice and bigots get banned than have a "marketplace of ideas" where everyone is an asshole. Really cool that you want your freedom of saying "I want to skin you alive" but what about my freedom of not having to get that said to me?
I don't know if they know that some people are nice because they want to, not because they have to.
As a Zoomer this is what I hate about a lot of Millennials. They think allowing people to do anything that might make anyone a little uncomfortable leads to allowing Nazis to run rampant. I'm not even the abrasive person but... some people really DO need a thicker skin. There's a huge difference between extreme expressions of anger, and genocide advocacy. In fact, a lot of bigotry is disturbingly polite.
What about not having rules against certain words but against certain behaviours?
Fine by me.
To add to my original point: What OP says against corporate sanitization is true (e.g. weid Youtube monetization rules), but it's also the exact same thing bigots say because they want to call people slurs. And I don't want to give them what they want.
The issue is more a loss of contextual awareness. For example - why should a true crime documentary have to self-censor words like rape, died, sexual assault when they are often relevant to the story being told? Why should a blogger talking about mental health issues have to self-censor the word suicide?
These are valid issues. There's a reply in here which has a screenshot of someone saying "elon musk can fucking die". Context tells you immediately it's not a targeted death threat, it's an opinion. Yet the systems that places rely on cannot make that distinction.
4chan existed way before the advent of the attempts to sanitize the internet. Heck I remember the biker forum I frequented having some nasty shit and attitudes on there. But despite their scummy viewpoints, these were people I could rely on when my motorbike shat itself.
Smaller communities police themselves better as well. Large-scale social media and other platforms just made it much harder to have the moderator model that those forums had. The human touch is sorely lacking as much as the automated processes lack nuance and context. A modern form of the Scunthorpe problem I guess.
But I am not agruing for corporate sanitization and algorithm-based word filters. I am also with you that we are in a dire need of smaller communities with a human touch. I am merely arguing against anyone who "just" wants to normalize hyperviolent comments. Because introducing this to the current large-scale, algorithm-monitored communities will not fix the above issues, but backfire spectacularly, because it enables bigots.
OP saw all these problems, but chose the wrong solution. We need smaller, closer communities instead.
So you think slurs should be banned instead of bad behaviour?
If I can't ask what a TERF if or discuss it, it's stupid IMO. Weaseling in racism with ordinary words is, you know it, bad IMO.
No? Where did I say that? Bad behaviour should be banned, no matter what.
But in the current state (huge scale, algorithm based moderation only) this is not properly enforced already. My problem now is that if hyper violent language no longer gets you banned, bigots will use that and will get away with it too often. I'd rather not be able to call someone an asshole than getting called 50 slurs and then watch the algorithm do nothing about it.
You're saying it again, "oh no we must ban bad words!!".
Do you think hyper violent language does not fall under bad behaviour if it isn't a transcript for example? Should hyper violent language be banned so that you can't talk about it?
You're just digging in.
No, the nuance is that I think that in the current state of social media, as shitty as it is, a blanket unbanning of bad words would be a net negative.
I do not think that bad words should be banned generally. In quotes/transcripts etc it should be fine. I know they currently aren't and I agree that's a problem. Also, of course, in small, self-moderated communities bad words are fine if everyone there is ok with that.
But OP isn't arguing for that. They just argued that we should blindly add hyper-violent language (back) to the systems we currently have. And not only regarding transcriptions/etc. And I think that will lead to a way worse outcome that the current status quo.
Again, I do not think bad words in a transcription/quoting/discussing should be banned because that's ridiculous. But, on large social media platforms, they should stay banned when being directed at individuals, because yes, calling Elon an asshole to his face is carthatic, but you are buying that freedom with the price of bigots calling everyone slurs. And I simply don't think that's worth it, nothing more.
The issues we face with capitalized social media can only be solved by forming smaller circles again. Not by adding slurs into the mix and hoping they will only benefit you and won't make the place a miserable hellhole.
Forums that were moderated by small communities were the shit.
Being able to report something and have an actual person review it is a luxury few face on modern social media.
one of the things that i think the post talks about is fostering a culture. extremely over-the-top threats are normal on tumblr because it's a place where everyone is nice. ironically, less overt stuff is taken more seriously because you can tell that it's not in jest.
I principally agree with you, it's why I use reddit/lemmy and not 4chan.
But there is a difference, albeit hard to convey correctly through text. But I think some of the extreme responses mentioned are the ones in the banter type. It's a kind of response when someone jokingly says "Star Wars and Star Trek is pretty much the same" and you go "I'll skin you alive" due to the unjust comparison. It sure as hell don't work with strangers, but it can within an community since everyone knows neither party is serious about it. Which is what the original post kind of says that it can work in the right community.
Oh I totally get that.
But the way OP puts it just reminds me too much of what the "free speech absolutists" are spouting and we've all seen where that leads.
Thats the beauty of the fediverse imo. Find a cosy instance that suits you. Block instances that don't
But it's also how you get places like Tumblr