Permanently Deleted
Personally, I like the “bully the libs” style, in practice it seems to have been less useful here but was more useful during the transphobia purges for example. Being skeptical of authority is obviously fine, but running a website under capitalism has different considerations than running a socialist society. I’d love for people to be able to build a true posting collective, where it is democratically run by the entire community which shares the labor of running it. This simply cannot be put into practice here: we are a small community vulnerable to outside wreckers, and whatever veneer of democratic control one might institute (mod elections, even admin elections), the material reality is that whoever pays for the website, and whoever holds the keys, can shut it down on a whim. What really makes authority dangerous is how it can be used to create oppression, and we really aren’t oppressed because an admin said something mean to us.
As for the tone policing point, that’s what it is. It’s criticism of the tone in which the points were delivered. The thing to do is to argue why this instance of tone policing is correct, not to say it isn’t (not saying that you said this, but rather elsewhere I’ve seen people deflect).
Criticisms of “tone policing” make sense in real debates about real matters because it’s a deflection from an actual argument to zone in on tone over the more substantive matters of the argument. Criticisms of “tone policing” in the context of the administrators of a community space because of how they are addressing a community issue isn’t even half as relevant, personally.
Like if one of your friends was a condescending asshole about your preferences every time y’all tried to make plans, and you confronted them about it, getting told you’re “tone policing” probably wouldn’t fly, would it?
I think the relationship between admins of this site and users is more the latter than the former, or at least it should be, I think, based on the goals of this site. I wasn’t bothered by the posts, and I don’t really care about the name (don’t love hexbear though), but I can see why people would be turned off by the more condescending posts and reactions to the users who do have criticisms.
Interesting. I personally wasn’t really offended by it since the post was directed at the community in general (i.e. not anyone in particular). I have asd so my thinking here mightnot be reflected by the majority, I realize. In social media in general you get an odd mix of both directly social and parasocial relationships which can be kind of hard to navigate to be sure.
