TheBananaKing @ TheBananaKing @lemmy.world

Posts

29

Comments

843

Joined

2 yr. ago

I stand by my assertion that personal discretion is the only approach that can't be gamed.

Trust the mods with the banhammer, and if they do a bad job, replace them outright.

This still leaves you vulnerable to shitty admins, but you would be in any case.

There's basically three problems:

1: Tyrannical powermods can make shitty communities.

2: Trolls and bad actors and generally-sociopathic cunts can be toxic and disruptive by sealioning, rules-lawyering and 'just asking questions' (aka JAQing off)

3: There's no fixed set of rules that reliably walks a middle path between the two.

If you have no control over how mods mod, you can end up with nasty little tetanus-wound shitholes - imagine ferinstance if corpo shills took over all the news and politics subs, and banned anyone critical of Elon Musk or Israel.

If you don't let mods mod, then for instance every support / activism community would be under constant siege from concern trolls and smug bigots with a new little talking point they want to 'debate' every single damn day, and we don't need any more trans kids driven to suicide please and thankyou.

The admins decided that the former was worse than the latter, and said no, you can't just kick out troublemakers so long as they use pretty language instead of hurling abuse; you have to humour them and allow some of their shit.

see also: the Nazi bar problem

This was a terrible and shitty approach to take, and I am (provisionally) glad it's been suspended pending further review.

Though in this age of enshittification, I have little confidence that the next iteration won't actually be worse.

I would have kicked ass at emergency medicine.

Unfortunately, the first lull that came along, I'd fuck up and people would die.

It isn't fun.

Yeah, all the stereotypes of the wacky ADHD guy squirrel lol, but it's not like that on the inside.

We are lost in the goddamn fog, chasing phantoms and mirages that disappear when you look at them too long. We are constantly running to catch up and flailing for context. What looks capricious and funny is mostly just desperation. We aren't bursting with unlimited energy, it's as exhausting as it looks. Taking five attempts to actually get a task done because you just forget halfway through. Forgetting where you put the thing, every time. Feeling your working memory slip away like waking from a dream. Fucking up all the time, then having to work twice as hard to fix it, and feeling like shit because you can't get anything right.

It gets old, man.

I actually got a locator beacon recently.

I can't really justify the cost of a two-way one given how rarely I go anywhere properly remote, but the little one-button boxes make for huge peace of mind. And honestly if I get bitten I'd likley be just as fucked with or without a conversation :D

About a decade ago, I fell and broke my ankle while out running.

It was only by sheer chance that this happened around a bunch of people, and I was able to get help immediately. If I'd been out somewhere else or at a different time, I would have been absolutely fucked.

Since that day, I never leave the house without my phone, ever.

(if I'm hiking somewhere out of range, then I map out my route and ensure that someone else knows where I'll be)

You're missing a critical distinction.

People can not care about (topic), while caring a lot about (disruptive discussion of (topic)).

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

It's like I don't have a particular opinion about cornflakes, but if you keep waving a box of them in people's face and hitting them with it, then i'mma ask you to stop.

It can be annoying to have to deal with someone going into excessive detail, making inappropriately-fine distinctions, or taking a strong position on one side or other of an argument that nobody's making - since in all of those cases, nobody is willing or able to engage with the topic, and it's just taking up conversation-space with (effectively) a monologue that they find boring and exhausting.

If someone says 'hey look at that funny-shaped tree' because it looks like something else, it's usually worth a 'heh' in the moment and you move on.

If you start going into great detail of whether or not it actually counts as a tree, or just infodumping neat tree facts, or start ranting about which genus it properly belongs to despite what some people think.... then someone will shut you down with 'Dude. No one cares'.

Necktie.

Bowtie is trying a little hard, at least in comparison.

Are you going to demod people for banning people who do it, without playing along?

You have to allow a little raw chicken in the mayo now.

So now people are to be allowed to sealion and troll and JAQ off in your community, so long as they do it respectfully.

Or else.

Imagine running, say, a community for vulnerable trans kids, and being forced to allow a constant influx of 'helpful suggestions', just so long as they're phrased in pretty language.

Probably they'd rather drink a dogshit milkshake every single morning than use fucking JIRA, and they're hoping you die of natural causes before you get a chance to force it on them.

oof, sorry, got usernames mixed up

And you're still entertaining the discussion, still kicking it around and keeping it alive, debating the merits and acting like it's a topic worthy of conversation. Look at you looking up specific definitions and the history of the DSM.

Even knowing it was an illustrative example of trolling, you still got trolled by it.

That's the entire game, and you willingly, nay triumphantly played it. I bet you'd bd willing to argue it back and forth for pages, giving it a little more legitimacy with every word.

Do you see the problem now?

Lolno. God, lawful-neutrals and their damn rules.

If you do that, they get to play the dictionary-definitions game and well-ackchewally at you indefinitely and demand you provide sources for the word 'the', while creating endless reports demanding people be banned because technically that's not paedophilia that's ephebepholia... or whatever the fuck.

It's a game to them; all they care about is making a disruptive and unpleasant environment.

The only way to win is to not play.

When you recognise the pattern, you short-circuit the whole damn thing and just boot them out.

But you're taking 'don't make us ban you' off the table for the mods.

"Oh no, I'm not attacking trans people, I'm just saying that children deserve protection. Surely you'll agree there's no rule against that?"

Sealioning. JAQing off. Ragebait. That very specific, slightly-too-formal dialect of trollspeak. Shitty edgeplay designed to taunt and demoralise without ever quite stepping over any well-defined line, and a bat-signal to like-minded sociopaths that the dog is chained up.

Hell, bluesky has been infested with LLM debate-bots recently that fucking automate the process.

I suspect that you're mistaking the symptoms for the problem: it's not that mods are too quick on the button and need to learn to tolerate a little raw chicken in the mayo, it's that some of them have been captured by corporate / PAC / generally-unsavoury interests, and use the button as a weapon.

And to those people, there's only one thing you need to say.

Ah yes: just asking questions. Just a point to consider. Just my opinion.

Unlike on TV, if lawyers pull the inflammatory-question-in-front-of-the-jury trick twice, they get in serious damn trouble with the judge.

There's a reason judges get absurdly free reign in their own courtrooms, because if they don't, this shit gets weaponised.

Look, I respect the intent, but as someone who's been on forums since the freaking 90s, I can say with confidence that that's a toxic meltdown waiting to happen.

You need at least two bitter jaded cybersec experts and at least one game theory person on your team to stand a chance with this kind of thing.

Can you provide supporting documents that disprove :nasty insinuation about you:? Of course not. Do you want to have to keep being required to? No.

Can people provide supporting documents disproving :nasty insinuation about :demographic::? Also no. And they don't want to have to keep being required to.

So there's the constant tide of exhaustion of people being constantly undermined and dehumanised, and being forced to either respond to yet another argument that :demographic: don't really count as people, or to just let it ride and try to ignore it. And then the wreckers use it as rage-bait to get people angry to the point of getting banned, and others walk off in disgust, more trolls smell blood in the water and the whole thing spirals.

It's the damn nazi-bar problem: even 'just a few' nazis smirking in the corner create a hostile and unpleasant environment that other people don't want to be in. And so they drive the good posters off, reducing the opposition - and within a depressingly short time, you've got yourself an alt-right shithole full of trolls and sociopaths that just love being able to exert that kind of power.

I've seen it approximately three bajillion times so far, and god dammit why won't you youngins learn.

Yes, powermods and power-tripping mods are a problem. But the approach to it you've chosen was gamed out and defeated in detail probably before you were even alive.

And oh god, if you try to parse a rule about what categories of opinions and statements are covered by this, the rules lawyers are going to clown-shibari the entire damn site.

The only two rules I've ever seen be effective over time are:

• Don't make us ban you
• Don't make us de-mod you

and probably hard-cap the number of communities one person can mod.

Have other stuff on top of that, but they're load-bearing and non-optional.

And I get that the site is trying to be a neutral platform that's insulated from the content, but honestly I don't think that's feasible. Sometimes you need to just throw people out of your bar regardless of the exact phrasing of the terms and conditions, and that means picking a side.

Also can we have a better markdown parser that doesn't turn angle brackets into failed html markup sometime please

This seems oddly timed with the whole meta thing going on.

Are people going to be forced to accept 'a small amount' of, ferinstance, asserting that homosexuality is a mental illness?

You can't cause ADHD, you can't prevent ADHD; it's genetic. It's not a result of patterns of thought, or video games, or television. You don't have to 'train' your child's attention span, nor can you destroy it.

People with adhd are naturally drawn to high-stimulation activities, so people associate the two - but that's like saying that smoke burns the toast.

Alpha quality, like software. Buggy as hell and should not be released. :D

srsly though it's the clusterfuckchild of social darwinism, grindset mentality and randroid zoology, plus a bit of wannabe-dom.

There was this old, debunked concept of the 'alpha wolf' as pack leader - all dominance displays, all the time, stronger and wiser and better than the rest, a sort of rightful-king that owes nothing to anyone, and that all lesser wolves obey and look up to.

Some absolute chuds picked up on the concept and decided that it applied to people, that it was a quality people could and should naturally embrace, unless they were just inherently inferior.

And of course they tied that all up with being male, because apparently men are just 'naturally dominant', unless again, they're broken and inferior ones - so if you are male, it's vital to prove that you're a properly functioning one by being a domineering asshole who deserves to get away with it out of sheer chutzpah, or else you deserve nothing but contempt and getting trodden on.

This ties in with conservative morality, which is entirely based around acknowledging and reinforcing social hierarchy. Right is when power is exerted downwards in the hierarchy, wrong is when power is asserted upwards.

So in this world, 'alphas' are the master race, while 'betas' are submissive half-men who lack the strength (and thus the virtue) to display the proper 'rugged independence'. They're also obsessed with 'cucks', ie cuckolds, men who lack the necessary manliness to fight off 'alphas' who would disrespect and shame them by having sex with their woman.

It's all incredibly toxic, and you need to pick him up and shake the bullshit out of him.

pic related