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

I'm gay

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768

Joined

4 yr. ago

Moderating

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I don't think the people raising this as a concern are trying to solve the problem of bigots on the internet; they are just asking for you to change the advertising you provide to remove the bigots from a place of visibility.

And if the racist is here to cause problems rather than commiserate with fellow racists, they now know exactly which community to avoid, thus restoring moderation problems everywhere. I don't think anyone is asking you to moderate every instance to ensure they are sticking to your TOS or your viewpoints, but it's a very minor ask to not showcase off the racists and transphobes and bigots on the 'join this platform' page.

This is quickly devolving into fighting, locking this up.

Love to see it. We need more strikes, pretty much everywhere. Corporations and government stopped listening a long time ago, force them to pay attention.

It's definitely not fine, but they may be stupid enough to try and train a model on healthcare zoom meetings. I think I'm gonna let my healthcare company security team know. We do a lot of cross collaborative meetings with the university and I'm not sure their license is the healthcare one. Typically that's all just resolved through a business agreement, but if it's a part of the ToS now they may be violating HIPAA without knowing it even while having business agreements not to. Might be worth filling a complaint to give the hhs a heads up that they're potentially noncompliant.

😍 she just like me fr

Better moderation tools which could allow others to read but not comment and/or post until whitelisted in some fashion would completely resolve this. Unfortunately this platform is still very new and these kinds of tools really only exist on Mastodon when it comes to federated software. Hopefully one day we will have it.

As I said in another reply I am sorry for making a half-baked philosophy post. I was not meaning to accuse you or anyone of the behavior I was attempting to talk about in the abstract. I have apologized several times for the behavior and tried my best to help everyone understand that I am looking for feedback because I don't want something like this to happen in the future. Unfortunately I think this is at least partially an issue with threaded replies and how people interact with them.

I wasn't aware that they continued to go off on you in the comments. The only reason I showed up in the thread was because of a report. Past telling them to calm down I wasn't present in the thread except when they showed up in my inbox. If someone escalates after being told to disengage please report the additional comments or send me a message in my inbox. I apologize for how things played out, I don't want that to be anyone's experience of this website, but this website is also far too large at this point for me to have eyes on everything.

Edit: and to be clear, I'm going to do my best to figure out a system to check back in on threads which are reported to ensure people are behaving, but it hasn't been a part of my usual workflow because there's just so much content on this site that I've been struggling to keep up with it.

Apologies, I set off on a half-baked philosophy post here. I want to make it clear that I'm not excusing anyone's behavior. I'm genuinely looking for advice from the community. Now that you have pointed it out, I can see how this might read as apologetic towards bad behavior. I will do my best to avoid philosophizing about issues I see on the internet as a whole when responding to direct violations of conduct/behavior. I got a bit lost in terms of replies, and didn't realize that this response is not attached to the same chain as the response where I acknowledge the harm done and take feedback to heart

Great so if I think my job is pointless and meaningless and hate it, I should just keep doing it? Because reasons?

Obviously most jobs are not pointless or meaningless. They exist because we need them to exist for things to function. Perception in this case is ultimately a much more useful metric for nearly any question you may want to answer about jobs.

Job satisfaction? Perception matters more. Job demand? Definitely perception. Mental health of workers? Perception.

What questions do you think are better answered by some kind of more 'objective' measure of job meaning?

what it means to have an individual in a position of power who repeatedly behaves in a way which contradicts the expectations of conduct you have of your regular users.

EDIT: for posterity/transparency reasons I'm not going to remove this, but I'm crossing it out because it didn't land right and is something I clearly need to workshop more and reconsider how to respond.

I think perhaps the biggest issue I have is that these kinds of conversations are already happening yet the total amount of times it has happened as a function of the total amount of comments on the website or even interactions with moderators are often blown out of proportion.

We have a propensity on the internet (and as humans) to hyperfocus on the negative and often to not do so with adequate reflection. A single instance of behavior which annoys someone or rubs them the wrong way is often the starting point for endless discussion and hypothesizing about what is acceptable and whether someone stepped over the line. It's often an act of grandstanding or virtue signaling that people are unaware that they are doing. In the best of cases it's a philosophical discussion or one aimed at providing clarity around rules and behavior, but even in these cases the harm these conversations can cause in terms of morale and the negative energy directed at the person in question are not taken into consideration.

If you need an analogous example, take a look at individuals on the left who have been vilified or canceled over a single misstep. Even in cases of profuse apology and serious steps towards rectifying their behavior, it's practically impossible to discuss these individuals on the internet without someone entering the discussion to grandstand or redirect discussion towards the perceived harm. It's a distraction tactic, one that made discussions about topics like gamer gate practically unapproachable and toxic and shifted the discussion away from it's intent (serious sexism in gaming) and instead towards what was essentially tone policing and questioning whether the motives behind the movement were sound in the first place.

While this is a long route to get back to my initial point, I want to point out this propensity because it's something we need to collectively move past as a society and on the internet. There are endless bad actors and we often end up acting very much like bad actors because this exploitation often ends up so mainstream that we internalize their value sets without questioning them. Starting a private conversation with the individual in question, with other moderators, or with admins to understand how they feel about the situation (or bringing this up via other avenues like matrix or discord) may be a better way to address concerns than airing them publicly and potentially starting a witch hunt over a single isolated incident. Even when you suspect there's a pattern (we've identified a whole two times this has happened, both of which I was aware of and one of which I was directly involved in) you need to consider the pros and cons of having this discussion in public and how it might affect the opinions of others.

Finally, I'd suggest to yourself and others listening in on this conversation to take a step back and self-evaluate. If there was a scale which rests on an axis that goes from "I absolutely hate this person" to "I love this person" where would you rate the admins and moderators on this website. Why do you have that rating? How much do you know these people? Are you willing to change your opinion? What would change your opinion? Is it fair to rate someone so far down in either direction on the scale based on how much you know and have interacted with them? Think about some people you know in real life, people that you've interacted with a lot, and ask yourself where they sit on that scale and how much information is behind that decision. Have they moved on this scale over time based on how they've acted or things they've said? I think on the internet we have the propensity to polarize people, to flatten them down to one dimensional axes and to make snap judgements about their character and in general to be unwilling to question that judgement or allow that judgement to move. It's often a function of necessity to keep us mentally sane on large websites like twitter and reddit where toxicity are rampant. We need to challenge these behaviors and do our best to avoid them on Beehaw if we wish for this place to end up different.

Looking forward is important, but looking too far forward assumes that your vision of the future matches reality and that's just plain narcissism. How much we can accurately predict what the world will look like in the future is a direct function of how far into the future we are looking. Accuracy sharply drops off after even just a few years. Predictions made via science, such as the temperature of the earth with historical and current decisions/energy production is a lot more useful than hypothesizing about how humans might live. Using these assumptions as a starting point for making decisions about how to plan/exist today rather than using predictions made via science to inform a course to not continue or change from are vastly different decisions and the author brings up a good point about the intermixing and equivocating of the two.

Wonderful photos and article, thanks!

Absolutely amazing, I love hearing about little cultural phenomenon like this. I also often bring up subjects as a litmus test for people I think about dating (or have started dating) to understand where they fall. For things that are essential to my survival and thriving, however, I'm often much more open and direct about it. I make it very clear that I'm trans up front, for example, to help weed out the transphobes. I'm not sure how to do that around feminism, however, but I do probe to see how emotionally intelligent the people I'm interested in dating are.

I'll try my best to do that next time. This isn't a criticism so much as just something I'd like to point out is that nearly every time I've asked another user to disengage with a moderator or an admin I've been accused of playing sides. That's not to say that I don't still do it, but I really don't know that there's any way to resolve these issues without people ultimately being upset one way or another. It's part of the reason we've outlined why we don't want certain discussions happening on this website at all as it's not the appropriate venue.

What consequences would you like to see here?

I am simply not interested in allowing space for that on this website for a dozen different reasons, but primarily because many issues people like to debate involve necessarily debating the existence of others or their humanity.

an automatic bot comment would be a band-aid

I'd kind of rather they get this as a direct message or even better a warning on the UI they interact with our site on (we cannot enforce the latter).