Gaywallet (they/it) @ Gaywallet @beehaw.org

I'm gay

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3 yr. ago

Moderating

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This is going to be a problem in every country, very soon, because we aren't moving quickly enough on laws surrounding AI and in particular ethics.

Honestly I'm not sure what you're suggesting. We're looking into alternatives, please be patient.

A few observations/thoughts.

• There's an awful lot of posts basically saying "this is a part of the job of moderation" and I don't think that's a particularly empathetic or useful observation. I've been on the internet and moderating for long enough to have been exposed to a lot of this, but this is not an inevitability. It's an outcome of the system we've designed, of regulation and law that we have, and of not prioritizing this as a problem strongly enough. Being dismissive of an emotional experience and trauma isn't particularly helpful.
• I'm not technical enough to explain this, but there are technical and legal issues with CSAM and the lemmy platform that we've ran into. For one, there's no automated scanning tools for this kind of content. My understanding is that even implementing or creating said tools would be difficult because of the way pict-rs and rust are storing images in the first place. You cannot turn off image federation, at all. At best, you can clear the content, but doing so may violate CSAM laws depending on the country and reporting requirements. Someone on the technical side can explain better than I can.
• This isn't a thread to discuss who's to blame for CSAM. Please cease all discussions fighting about religion in the comments. I will be removing these comments.

I appreciate what you're doing and I'm sorry you had to deal with a bunch of hateful people. The way to fight it is by doing what you're doing right now. No one person can solve a problem so large, but reach person that decides to roll up their sleeves and do something about it makes the problem just a little smaller. 💜

This is unfortunately an extremely pervasive problem on the internet. I think we're making a lot of headway in recent years, but unfortunately you'll still find a lot of fragility online. It's entirely unsurprising to me that the thread was quickly populated with a fragile male voice (how dare you exclude men, that's sexist they proclaim, when you explicitly don't exclude them 🙄). It's unfortunately not something you can solve as it's a cultural issue. The best you can do is curate a space which is heavily moderated and one in which fragility which is implicitly misogynistic or derailing is not tolerated. Asking for this feedback without making it explicitly clear that fragility won't be tolerated will just allow a thread to be populated with fragility, as many people with fragility problems are hyper-online and get emotional support through validation in that context.

Allowing a space to be populated early with this voice discourages engagement for your intended audience. I've seen this happen time and time again on the internet when people ask for input from only for people to chime in some characteristic with "I'm not that characteristic, but..." Even when it's not fragility, these people often end up make the space not welcoming to those which the space was intended for simply by their insistence to colonize the space.

The HBR article summarizing some of the findings has a lot of really interesting figures and a lot of links to other research in the space.

Archived link

If you're really curious you can search my post history on Tildes. I'm not interested in digging up the past or casting shade in any way, just mostly want to provide context on the platform and the problems I've experienced there.

They have not. It's really below the surface and only shows up every once in awhile in threads about minorities. It's a big reason for the entire concept of how we structured our rule system (lots of rules lawyers there), because it was very clear that there is a small subset of strongly opinionated rather privileged users on Tildes who come out of the woodwork to share their ignorant viewpoints. The easiest way to explain it is to vaguely call them all privileged male rationalist centrists - they are often not explicitly bigoted but they are often blind to the privileges they have been afforded and how the system oppresses others.

Our website came to fruition because many of us started on Tildes. We were upset with the way minorities were being treated on that website. I spoke out vocally about it, and was told in no uncertain terms that meta-discussions like that were not going to be tolerated. Tildes is better than most, but it still has issues that are not in alignment with what we are trying to accomplish here.

I'll have to chat more with Lionir about item 1, because I've seen and resolved reports that came from off instance users of Beehaw users misbehaving on their instance (or another they were browsing).

For source 2, that was referring to various tools which exist on other federated software.

Either way neither of these are incompatible or new requests within activitypub and calling them against the principles of federation is an ideological discussion, one not suited for this announcement thread.

Going to stop this conversation here - you have strong opinions on how moderation should be handled. We get it. This conversation is ideological and won't go anywhere from here. Please cease.

A few high level notes about this post, given some of the discussions and behavior in the informal chat post by Chris the other day:

• We understand this is perhaps the biggest crossroads we've hit yet, and a seriously big issue. It's understandable that you might have strong emotions about the Fediverse as a whole, or the action we are taking as an instance. If you are not from our instance and you come into this thread with a short hostile comment about how we aren't respecting your views or that we should never have joined the Fediverse in the first place, your comments will be removed and you will be banned.
• Any suggestions for what we should do, that involve actual effort or time, such as finding developers to fix the problems we've had should be accompanied with an explanation of how you're going to be helping. We've lodged countless github tickets. We've done our due diligence, so please treat this post with good faith.
• Similarly doing nothing more than asking for more details on the technical problems we are struggling with, without a firm grasp of the existing issues with Lemmy or the history of conversations and efforts we've put in is not good faith either. We're not interested in people trying to pull a gotcha moment on us or to make us chase our tails explaining the numerous problems with the platform. If you're offering your effort or expertise to fix the platform you're welcome to let us know, but until you've either submitted merge requests or put in significant effort (Odo alone has put in hundreds of hours trying to document, open tickets, and code to fix problems) we simply may not have the time to explain everything to you.
• I want to reiterate the final paragraph here in case you missed it - we are not looking to make any changes in the short term. We expect it would be at the minimum several months before we made any decisions on possible solutions to the problems we've laid out here.
• Finally, I want to say that I absolutely adore this community and what we've all managed to build here and that personally, I really care about all of you. I wish we weren't here and I wish this wasn't a problem we are facing. But we are, so please do not hesitate to share your feelings 💜

Locking this post for now because it's quickly going off the rails. We will have more for you soon. Please be patient.

Hey all,

Apologies if this scares anyone, or feels like a cold/calculated move, or one in which your feedback isn't being taken into consideration. That was not the intent. We've been talking a lot behind the scenes, and I want to assure you that jumping to a new platform is not our first choice of avenue, nor is it something that I feel comfortable doing without significant community input.

I've been swamped with a lot of real life stuff lately and so I haven't gotten a chance to write up what's been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while now, which is the start to a conversation about some of the issues we've been struggling with. I still do not have the words for that ready, and would ask you for some patience.

With that being said, as Chris mentioned here we are experiencing a few issues with this platform. More information about these issues will be forthcoming soon. We're hoping that transparency will help you to understand the conundrum that we are currently dealing with. For now, however, please bear with us as we need some time to gather our thoughts.

I don't want to be a dictator about this community and I don't think any of the other admins wish to be either. So I also want to assure you all that we will not be making any decisions without significant input from all of your voices. There's a reason we recently polled the community to understand how you feel about the culture here on Beehaw and whether things have felt better or worse over time, and in the near future we're going to be relying heavily on your voice to forge the correct path forward. Beehaw is a community, and we greatly value your voices.

I'm not saying you're being hateful, I'm asking you to be nicer. You don't seem very receptive to being told by an admin or a mod to follow our only rule, so you're getting a 7 day ban to think things over. If you show up again and keep violating our only rule, you'll get a permanent ban.

And you're making a value judgement on these people that they haven't put in enough effort to make themselves not fat, ignoring the differences in our bodies and experiences. It's simply not nice to keep pushing the same rhetoric all over this post. We get it, you managed to get healthier and you wish to extol the virtues of how you managed to do it. For many people, they already tried all the things it took you so long to adopt and telling them that they need to try harder or have no excuses is not helpful to them.

You need to be nicer on our instance.

The question was whether it was a clinically relevant metric - it is absolutely a useful one. You are correct that it is not an indicator of percent of body fat, it was not designed to measure this and using it for this purpose is mislead. But there's a world of difference between "it's bad at measuring body fat" and "BMI is pseudoscience". It's unfair to characterize it as lacking scientific rigor because there are plenty of scientifically rigorous studies involving BMI. It is extremely useful as a clinical indicator of one's health, in the same way that body temperature can tell us things in the context of other metrics and can also tell us some high level information about a person's general health.

But perhaps most importantly, it's extremely useful when we come to population health where generalized indicators are often more useful than hyper-specific ones. Indicators which are easy to measure and gather from relevant data sources are also often more useful than ones which may be more accurate on a per-individual basis, but less important when measuring the health of entire populations. I apologize for any condescension in my comment, I was suggesting that you become more educated in matters of public health because indicators like BMI are invaluable in this space.