"If you’re a fan of Biden, Harris, AOC, Stacy Abrams, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie, or whoever. My advice is to try to maybe emulate the language and demeanor of the people you support.
In this case, those people are more than just people with admirable language and demeanour. They are also leaders. I’m asking you to step up and be a leader. None of those people are autocrats. You don’t need to be an autocrat.
Writing a lazy rule is easy. Writing a perfect rule is hard. I’m asking you to do something even harder, which is take action.
And more specifically, don’t keep examples private, and feedback private. Make a thread where only you can post called “Examples of behaviour that we’ve received complaints about” or “Behaviour that will get you a warning then ban”.
Let people know that they have complaints about. Like me. The first I knew that someone had said my posts were causing someone to not want to participate was after you wrote a huge long posts with all kinds of vague points and no concrete examples. Way easier, and kinder on me, and more USEFUL would be to share that feedback with me. And more useful than that is that other people could see that feedback, know what kinds of things should be discouraged, and also see that their complaints were taken seriously.
I both love and hate this idea. I like that it provides clear examples of what it and is not acceptable, and that reduces ambiguity. It also sends a strong message that we have a policy, and it is being enforced. Enforcement being public also lets everyone judge with their own eyes that enforcement is being done fairly.
I don’t like that having this in and of itself darkens the atmosphere. Kind of like when you go into a shop and there it a trophy wall of photos of shoplifters that were caught. Makes you realize that this is perhaps not the friendliest shop. The owner is perhaps suspicious of all customers and treating them as an enemy to be watched carefully and not as customers to be served. It also sort of advertises “Hey, look at all the people we had to ban, join us!” A graveyard is not welcoming, even though all the demons there are at rest.
And while things being public allows everyone to judge for themselves whether we are judging fairly, it also creates a space for meta-flamewars to occur as people argue about whether they agree or disagree with our judgement.
Okay. But at least share it with both the person making the complaint, and the target of that complaint.
Most importantly, if you have an issue with someone’s tone, make the decision yourself, and act on it quickly, even if done so privately.
For every time you let something slide, or fuss about over writing perfect rules in perfect emotionless language, someone else has quit reading or participating in a thread, or even in the whole forum.
Counterpoint: making it known that you are unfriendly to negative douchebags probably makes you appear friendly to the kind of people you’d rather keep around.
In the SCA, we have a procedure called R&D - Revocation and Denial. Basically a formal process by which you are permabanned from participating in any of the organization’s activities anywhere. We have a history of handling this procedure poorly and doing it far too infrequently and with a ridiculously high bar (the last one happened because someone murdered someone else), but the principle is one of a semi-public investigation and may work here.
A lot of personal details are kept private, as are details salient to legal matters, but the body doing the investigation does provide a summary of the offense, the investigation, and the findings thereof. That might be a hybrid approach that could work - instead of posting screenshots, you post the executive summary with enough information that you could derive an actionable rule from it. Maybe?
I am of course in the “ban whoever you want with whatever minimal explanation you want” camp. You make a bunch of rules because as nerds we buy into this fallacy that life can be run with codified rules like a game - but sometimes you do better work by taking action based on a vibe that you can’t quite explain.
If someone makes me feel scuzzy but doesn’t break a rule, I still feel scuzzy. That feeling is real, and that feeling should mean something. It’s as real as breaking a rule, we just don’t like it because it’s all fuzzy and nebulous because life is fuzzy and nebulous.
Personally, I think you could have a core principle - “In all interactions, present your best version of yourself” - and leave it there. If someone is making people feel shitty, odds are they’re not being their best selves. Give a warning, and if it persists, ban.
How about this. If someone behaves in a way I don’t like, but doesn’t break a rule, I will just let them know. I’ll tell them “Hey, I don’t like this post you made, here’s why. I couldn’t find a rule it violates, but I may work on writing one. Please stop doing that.”
That seems basically within the scope of rule zero, yeah.
Also, some clarification on how and what is expected of reporting users for off-site stuff would be a good idea, since that is part of the CCC draft. Like, for example, if there’s a user here who has been joining harassment brigades off-site, how would you show that, what is expected, what’s the preferred way to get in contact, and what information would you like?
It might sound like a rare problem, but we do have two examples already, one that inspired the CCC, and one that hasn’t been dealt with, because the problem was, let’s say, independently resolved through other means before it became pressing enough to untangle what might be an acceptable reporting standard.
Maybe part of the problem is that despite me having maybe the highest quantitative participation rate here, depending on what metric you use, I’m not nearly as aware as other people regarding wtf is going on around here. I have no clue what you are talking about whatsoever.
Well, I was trying to be circumspect, but basically, the first I’m referring to was the chappy that was most recently banned for stalking and harassing members off-site, and the latter is Andy, who has regularly been joining harassment brigades on twitter, particularly on behalf of - unsurprisingly - one of the dirtbag podcasts they were into, Trueanonpod, including against Gwen Snyder as a notable example.
I was in the middle of figuring out how to report it, when Andy just left for a couple months quite abruptly, and I figured that they’d either been banned, or had simply ditched due to being warned off, and it was therefore no longer an issue and forgot about it. I was genuinely surprised when Andy reappeared the other day.
Edit - and that’s why I was being circumspect, because “I’m leaving!” on forums rarely does mean they’re gone.
OK, I’m here because I heard there was some silliness going on. Look, you can disagree with my opinions, but I draw the line at slander. Responding to people I disagree with on twitter is harassment? I have always been factual and topical in my posting, if a bit cutting. I dislike Gwen. I dislike her politics. I dislike her friends who make stuff up with no reality or basis. I think she does more harm than good in generating a better world.
The very first time I interacted with Gwen, she put me on blast to her 20k+ account calling me a tankie because I had “subway stalinist” in my bio, a joke she didn’t get, referencing Elon Musk.
BTW, I’ve never been warned or banned here, I left because I got really fed up with people shouting me down over the months for disagreeing with the pre-dominant thought here regarding politics. I gave people a reasonable amount of space because I understood tensions were high and I didn’t want to upset people more than they had because of the election.
You all have honestly become insufferable and it makes having any reasonable debate really an uphill battle.
Yeah, turns out I care about opinions some IRL friends say about me. Luckily that doesn’t include you.
Maybe, when the discussion at hand is about “hey our community is kinda toxic, even though we have a community code” and you are bragging about mocking, you need to look in the mirror.
This is tricky territory and another thing we’ve been dealing with in the medievalist nerd community, particularly since re-enactment is such a heavily contrived context that a lot of people maintain multiple clearly distinct types of conduct depending on context. What do you do when a person behaves as a community wants in one context, but totally breaks it in another?
Social media has made this problem weird because a community can span multiple different digital “places,” and each place may have a different vibe with a different set of mores. I think lots of us practice a lot of code switching, adopting different behavior depending on the medium.
IMO, this is primarily a concern where there’s bridging between communities. So like, stalking and harassing forumites in other media is clearly over the line, IMO - it’s conduct outside the “confines” of this forum, but the community exists in multiple places at once, and your conduct in any of those places impacts all of them.
I am less critical when there’s no overlap - having a community necessarily means having outgroups - but I think it still matters in a general sense. If you identify as part of a community, whether it’s fair or not people will judge your whole community based on your personal conduct. I usually tout the importance of representing yourself and your community well, everywhere you go, but I also think you need to allow space for people to exist in distinct spaces in a way that is relevant to each of those spaces.
For me, it would take particularly egregious conduct outside of this community to make me think it appropriate to do something in the context of this community. What constitutes “particularly egregious?” No idea, it’s a “know it when I see it” kind of thing I guess.
We’ve really gone off the deep end here. Even with a code of conduct, how can I possibly deal with this? Let’s see.
Ok, so I don’t know who any of these podcasts or people are, so this is a lot of work for me to determine whether this is true or not. Perhaps I’m just poorly equipped to moderate discussions that are outside of my expertise. For example:
This is the first time in my life I have ever heard the word tankie used in a way what wasn’t a cute way to refer to a tank of water or an armored vehicle. Urban dictionary had me covered, though. For the record, actual tankies, not allowed here. We may appreciate the aesthetic of Soviet propaganda, but we do not appreciate pogroms.
I’m going to say that this violates the code of conduct. It’s very mild, but it’s bullying and pestering in a childish way. Cut it out.
I won’t pretend to understand half of what’s going on here. It’s deep into a community I am not a part of. What I can say based on these excerpts is this. Andy here is arguing with people on Twitter. IMHO, that’s a waste of time, and asking for trouble, but not itself bad or wrong. The posts she makes in the initial screenshot are just arguments. The replies from some of the people making accusations like “pretend leftist scold” are definitely behaving badly, but those people aren’t part of this community. They have nothing to do with us unless they try to come here.
The problem I see is after Andy replies to those people. Andy’s posts from then on are angry and nasty. Even if many of them contain a true argument, they are just as unpleasant as the Internet stranger that started it. Now, I have been specifically trying to avoid tone policing in the CoC and in general. Anger at injustice is itself justified, and I do not wish to put a wet blanket on it.
That being said the pattern of Andy’s replies changes from “point” to “point + nasty snark”. Looking at the pyramid in the CoC we have refutation at the top and name-calling at the bottom. Andy is effectively including both in the same tweet. A trojan horse like that isn’t going to fly.
The other thing I see is that Andy is replying to these people, but they stop replying back. They aren’t listening. Their phones are probably going ding ding ding with replies, and they aren’t coming back. If someone else is not engaging with you, leave them alone, or that is also a form of harassment.
If someone else starts shit, report/block/ignore is the appropriate response. You can reply to them and argue if you really want to feed some trolls before enforcement takes place, but do so with care. Not being the one who started it, or actually being right, are not excuses for poor conduct. Damaging the community and making it unpleasant is what we are protecting against.
Again, if shit like this goes down, report, block, don’t say anything. If you really want to “win” that’s the best strategy. Whoever is nasty first will get the boot. And it’s not like school where the teacher shows up and doesn’t know who to believe. I have an SQL database here. It usually doesn’t lie.
I’ve gotta say, it’s really creepy people are just keeping tabs of me outside of this community and never interact with me, in the attempt to somehow get me in trouble with the mods.
I agree, that borders on stalker/harassing behavior. There are valid times to build a “dossier” so to speak - I have done so in other communities - but it becomes a question of timing and motivation.
I don’t know what personality clashes are happening here but I have to agree that I am not fond of people keeping “tabs” on other people.
If you see problematic behavior, say something; if it’s the type of thing that requires demonstrating a pattern, you gather evidence expediently in pursuit of discrete action. If you’re building up a stock of “dirt” to later throw at someone when you disagree, IMO you’re being a fucking shit.
It can be really hard to suss out motivations based on actions, but again, feelings are valid, so IMO if you’ve got an off feeling, it’s probably because something is actually off.
I agree as well. If you are following someone on social media it’s because you are genuinely interested in what they are posting. If you are following for some other reason, then that’s a perfect example of acting in bad faith.
I may have to reword the rules about behavior that happens outside the community being in violation. My original intent was simply that if a known bad person, like that white supremacist who got famous punched in the video, were to come here, I shouldn’t have to wait for them to be bad here before I ban them. They’re a known quantity, therefore they are already banned before they even try to come. I also wanted to be free to share ban lists with others, like if someone tries to come here who is known to be banned from PAX.
Googling someone, digging up all their history to find offenses is itself harassment. As someone who works hard to preserve their entire history online, I can guarantee to you that you can find bad things. I preserve it because I believe in preservation of all data. I look back on it with some shame and regret, but also with some pride of growth. I know that I’m not that person anymore, and I know that everyone else is probably not that person anymore either. Unless of course that shit was from yesterday, lol.
I’m just back and catching up on Internet, and I will say one aside.
Podcasts like Chapo Trap House and TrueaAnon are, in my opinion, not OK to promote or discuss in this forum or the GeekNights community. Please do not bring them up, link to them, etc… They are in my opinion extremely toxic.
But that aside…
What do some of you want from this forum? Because you sure aren’t listening to GeekNights or talking about GeekNights. You sure aren’t sharing anything about your own nerdy/geeky interests.
This is a community literally centered around a podcast that Scott and I make. And as I think on how we are going to alter this community and the TOS as it goes forward, bear in mind that it is very strange to me that anyone would interact here not in one of these two contexts.
Respond to and discuss our podcasts, panels, and other GeekNights media.
Share your own hobbies and try to get other people interested in them.
I don’t see why anyone would or should continue to engage in this broader community unless it’s for one of these two reasons.
