The end of jay and silent bob strike back but it’s showing up at transphobes houses like “hi are you “stupidPolRocks420?” “…yeah?” *bricked *
I usually don’t see the transphobia stuff until after the fact when a trans comrade is explaining it to others. We need a way to get transphobic content in front of the cis users so people can’t dismiss it by saying “I didn’t see it so it must not be that bad.” Maybe a weekly digest of problematic content? I know that sounds stupid but the only other way is for all the cis people to just follow around the trans people’s posts and wait for it to show up. The next issue is that we don’t want to saddle trans comrades with homework. It shouldn’t fall on them to find and document bad posts. Or to explain to cis people why the posts are bad.
Speaking of following people around. I think it’s extremely easy for cumtown and stupidpol users to find someone, target them, and then just keep following them around the site and harassing them with different accounts. Anyone can browse the site without being logged in. Then all you have to do is start an account and you can fuck with people. Maybe something about this needs to change. But I don’t know what tools lemmy provides or what to do on the technical side.
We never solved the discord stuff. Remember the beginning when we were constantly hit with wreckers over discord drama? People carried a lot of online baggage with them to this site and then we were raided constantly for a while until mods cracked down enough and the raiders got bored. But are they bored? How much of this is specifically stupidpol and cumtown? How much of it is some really obsessive people from discord biding their time for a few months and then ramping up attacks? There is a genre of poster that will absolutely wield the racism, transphobia, sexism, classism, ableism, etc they supposedly despise against others.
None of this is to dismiss the real and present transphobia that exists inherently in large groups of chronically online straight white guys (and some women). This is a problem I’ve seen in real leftist orgs too. It’s not flat out “I hate trans people.” But it’s more like constantly questioning their claims, be skeptical of their problems, dismissing their problems as petty infighting. But I feel like outside of the blatant transphobe attacks this kind of transphobia is easier to change. Though it tends to be harder to point out because it’s a little more abstract than someone spamming that /pol/ copy pasta. This would just require a select group of cis people to work with the remaining trans comrades and sort of take on the labor of explaining to other cis people what’s up. Now there’s trouble with that idea because you don’t want cis people ignoring trans people and just listening to second-hand experiences from other cis people. The point is to get people to listen to trans people. I just mean cis people can help with the writing and posting and monitoring the threads and taking on arguments if that’s okay with the trans comrades. Because one of the things I have seen is that our trans friends do not want to keep having to explain basic shit to cis people. So therefore we can let some highly curated group of cis volunteers take up that labor.
People calling for mod elections need to stop. Web sites are not democratic and they don’t have to be. The only real assurance of democracy is the handing off of power. So unless the admin are going to hand off the passwords and access to the site over every election, then it’s not a democracy. It’s a superficial layer of voting on something that’s inherently undemocratic. You vote in new mods then they do what the stupididpol people want and declare trans comrades not valid then the admin boots the new mods immediately. Then you’re right back where you started. If you don’t like the site, make one. Nothing is stopping you from making a branch of lemmy for yourself. Or starting a discord server where you get to be in charge. Or slack. Or many other open source, federated, etc services. Also, why the fuck are people trying to organize a mod team on a website when you can be putting that energy into democratizing your workplace? People will spend hours making sock-puppet accounts and working around bans but can’t be bothered to host a zoom meeting with your coworkers and get them hyped about a union. C’mon. And yes it’s better to spend time creating a safe space online than holding mod elections.
Stop dismissing everything as infighting. This isn’t about trots vs MLs. This isn’t an accelerationism struggle session. It’s a fundamental question of who gets to be part of the leftist project and culture. If you think trans people have no place in the left then you don’t need to be here. I don’t care if you think you have a right to be here or you think I’m a bad leftist for saying so. I don’t know what the path to socialism is but I know it must include all marginalized groups and include them in the decision making process. There is no other side to this debate. Just like there is no other side to whether or not we should have slavery or any other very clear moral choice. This is not just a difference in tendency. It’s not a minor disagreement over tactics. It’s not #forcethevote. It’s people’s lives and livelihoods and that deserves to be discussed and argued about whether it makes you uncomfortable or not. Grow the fuck up.
Going back to the old days of the internet: make the site painful for them to use. Trans-solidarity theme. Make it the only theme available. Pink white and blue. Trans flag. Having to see that shit every time they log on will vex them.
We need a way to get transphobic content in front of the cis users so people can’t dismiss it by saying “I didn’t see it so it must not be that bad.” Maybe a weekly digest of problematic content?
A lot of this, but especially the section I quoted, sounds like some kind of Chapo Chat Wiki would be helpful in this regard.
Maybe a weekly digest of problematic content?
This gave me the mental image of me sitting down in an overstuffed chair by a fireplace in a robe, then pulling out a paper magazine titled Problematic Content with all that bad stuff in it.
+1 for a “Weekly Mod Log Digest” post or something similar, where the funniest, saddest, worst content that got removed or got users banned gets posted (with a CW obviously) and maybe stickied so that the community can see a curated feed of what the mods and admins are removing and what people are getting banned for. Maybe with a “number of transmisogynistic copypasta posts removed” and stuff like that. Curating it would be a little work but I think it would be good to have a “best/worst of” made more visible periodically
Ban private messages if they’re only used for harrasement
Honestly yeah, I have never actually gotten a pm from anybody that wasn’t just a troll. The vast majority of my interactions with anybody on here have been conducted directly in the comments to posts.
Putting limitations on new accounts such as posting cooldowns. Would reduce raiding.
Regarding transphobia from within the userbase, I wish that repeated whining about measures taken to protect trans comrades would be met with a ban. To allow some discussion of things like downvotes, maybe we could have a sticky on /c/feedback where we discuss pros and cons, but I’m tired of hearing how removing downvotes is “ruining the site”. We’ve decided that protecting trans users is more important than a convenient browsing experience, and I’m tired of cis users speaking over trans comrades to insist that removing downvotes is unnecessary because they personally have never seen transphobia on the site.
It was a good idea from day one and i really don’t know why the fuck it was never implemented
Stuff takes time and it’s hard for a dev team to know how much people want stuff, and how exactly to do it, since when you actually do change stuff you tend to get an enormous uproar of complaints. Also there’s a lot of work to do on the dev side and there’s been technical debt and issues to resolve, they’re still rewriting the backend into a new language and can’t do much “big” things until that’s done, for example.
We need more barriers to entry. Right now literally anyone can make as many accounts as they want and absolutely spam their hateful shit everywhere as often as they want.
Those barriers could be invites, IP logging/banning, posting cooldowns, interviews, literally ANYTHING. But we absolutely must have more barriers to entry.
I don’t know about that. It sounds like a great way to slow the growth of the site to a complete standstill while creating actually more work. Why not just have a better system for monitoring new users and potentially a sort of two-tier account system where you can have a regular or high trust level?
I think that literally every poster worth anything leaving is probably going to slow the growth of the site more than a couple of small barriers. The thing about barriers to entry is that they impact good users one time only. Adding a minute or two to a new user, ONCE, is not a big deal to that user. They spend a minute doing a thing, and then they never have to do it again and they just enjoy the site forever. Adding a minute or two to a shit stirrer who wants to make a bunch of shit posts and keeps getting banned suddenly adds up quick. They have to go through that process EVERY SINGLE TIME they want to make a new account. It slows them down massively. If they want to create 100 accounts to spam us they have to spend 100 minutes making those accounts. That’s not insignificant at all.
Small barriers to entry work very well as a deterrent. It’s not going to catch everyone. There is no strategy that catches everyone. But it catches some of the lazier ones, meaning that the mods have less work to do. It’s one tool in their arsenal. And depending on how its done, it’s an easy one to add.
Adding a minute or two to a new user, ONCE, is not a big deal to that user.
Most people click out of a website that doesn’t load within 3 seconds. This would absolutely stop a bunch of people from joining, and that includes good users.
But do you mean like requiring a moderator to approve new users? Because that just creates even more work for moderators for little gain. In the non-virtual world, vetting is important because physical spaces and organizing just has higher stakes than silly online discussions, but online anything is really about the number of active users and good posts drowning out the bad. Vetting an online forum means it becomes as slow as real-world recruiting. Or maybe I’m making thus stuff up.
This does seem like it might be what’s required, but I also understand and applaud the mods for trying to keep it relatively open so it can be a pipeline of sorts.
I wonder if a bigger mod team would be useful, so that trans mods especially don’t have to spend all their time her staring into the abyss of worst shit that gets posted here, but I definitely don’t want to disempower or imply they aren’t up to the task - they’ve done amazingly in face of such hate and bullshit and are a lot stronger than I would be in their situation.
Obviously the rest of us need to be more proactive where we see this stuff and I’m open to any and all suggestions from our trans comrades.
I wouldn’t have a problem with barriers to entry, but I really wouldn’t like an invite system. I was originally a lurker on /r/cth. I didn’t really post there or anywhere else on Reddit, really. After the ban, I googled and searched and found this place because I missed the content. I’ve learned more and become more radicalized, even if I do still mostly lurk here. An invite only system would have locked me out because I don’t know anyone.
Personally, I like the kiddy pool idea or some sort of interview. People that stumble on ChaCha in good faith should be welcomed and given a chance to shake out the liberal brainworms. That, or as someone else said, have some of the subs be invite only or have applications. I never joined /c/transenby_liberation because I am cis. I enjoy reading the content and learning, but it’s not my space to talk in, so I don’t. I did join /c/anti_cishet_aktion because I’m queer. If I would’ve had to apply to the latter to join, I would have seen it as a layer to protect the comm from homophobia.
I guess in the long run, it kind of depends on what we’re trying to build? Are we nothing but a leftist shitposting site? Or do we want to build the movement and be part of the leftist pipeline while being a shitposting site?
