It didn’t work because one part of the community didn’t believe in communities and wanted to run around banning people they didn’t agree with.
Leading to the classic right wing criticism of left/lib spaces, that they are echo chambers, but in this case the chamber would only be echoing opinions that agree with the majority ie centrism.
That’s what they got in the end but it would have been easier on everyone as well as more honest if the pretence of being a forum welcoming to the left had been dropped so that leftists would have gone elsewhere instead of investing time and energy on a fool’s errand.
I dont agree at all that this was one sided or that simple. Mixing politics into internet communities is inherently difficult. I think people on this forum had fundamental and probably irreconcilable views of what a “left-leaning” internet forum should look like and not enough in the way of shared community values to weather disagreements or make a bottoms up governance structure work. The only real underlying community ties were shared history on a heavily top-down moderated internet forum and a vague “left-leaning” bent.
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That’s exactly how it started here. Not sure if you were even here back then but the posts are searchable unless cuse has redacted them.
Sorry, I edited there so not sure what I had written exactly when you responded to it. I know how this community started, Im saying that for that to work long-term there probably needed to be more shared values. Something like the c-word incident was never going to be satisfactorily handled with a 51-49 vote (just to pick the oldest example I could think of…I may be missing some drama and there were certainly lots of incidents after that, but the further we go the more things get colored by teams/history)
I think the split-off forums have more of a chance of lower drama (not none because thats not how interneting works) because they are going to be more self-sorted.
There were two discussions IIRC. Cuse wanted to monetize a UP podcast. Not sure if that discussion ever made it to UP. And then there was a more light hearted discussion a couple years later where there would be a podcast for fun: A discussion of walrus (me +mjiggy), zara with some kind of reflections on life in Germany (?) , marty shouting about football. Can’t remember what else. Jmakin was going to host on twitch.
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It’s an American left-of-center forum where the shared community value is that Republicans are bad and Democrats are clearly better than Republicans, even if Democrats are close to worthless, even the establishment ones. You can survive here if you think Democrats are shit, so long as you think Republicans are significantly worse shit. It’s not going to feel that great for people who feel that both parties are indistinguishable, but it shouldn’t be a surprise to leftists who are honest with themselves about the place of “real” leftists in America, where their best-case scenario is junior partners in a center-left coalition who have to compromise if they want any access to power.
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It’s already been proved that moderation isn’t necessary at all if people are respectful of differences. That’s the nub of the problem, not the ideological differences themselves.
The c-word is a good example. Users of it said they didn’t realise it caused so much offence to non-users (generally but not totally defined geographically) and said they wouldn’t use it in their presence, but this wasn’t enough for some vocal members who continued to insist they knew what its connotations were regardless of colloquialisms, which is pretty fucking condescending, and even set about trying to convince people who had said they weren’t offended by it that they should be.
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When I say values, I mean both ideological values and the stuff BruceZ is talking about, like how a community is managed. I agree with your statement. The key to a light touch community is being respectful of differences, but there has to be sort of a set of core tenets that underlies the community to make it work. Politics forums one of the hardest to do it with IMO. Its why a lot of non-political forums just straight ban the subject.
Plus our shared background is a heavily moderated politics forum. We were trying to move to a completely different model then we were all used to. Major challenge.
lol the democrats are not center left. They’re 1990 Republicans.
I’m nowhere near that point of reading up on threads, but my perception is that no one (other than perhaps me) ever imagined that the there could be such a close split on something people cared strongly about, so there really wasn’t any attempt to figure out in advance how to deal with it. The idea that if there’s a dispute, then we can just have a vote was a naïve idea that doesn’t understand how politics works.
My preference is to have community moderation where posts get automatically hidden (and deleted if not edited) with enough flags and mods don’t actually do much. I would have preferred just allowing c-word posts to get flagged and have mods idly stand by while this happens, unless people start having a flag war on unrelated and non-controversial posts.
Only for the sizable minority who wanted to be able to control what others post.
To be even more specific, the “completely different viewpoints” was always somewhat of a strawman. The minority of NMNM people would say they’re for “no moderation”.
And the reasons for wanting “fair” moderation were twofold:
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It fosters a sense of community to have the same rules, no matter how rigid or lax they are.
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More importantly, my big thing, if you make a rigid rule and ~everybody breaks it, well, that’s a damn good way to figure out you made a dumb rule!
I’ll admit that one triggered me the most, perhaps. Somebody would get banned for a ridiculous reason, I’d say to somebody else that they should be banned for doing the same thing, they’d say “Oh I thought you captains didn’t want moderation!” to which I’d be like “Lol we don’t. Stop me when you see it.”
I’ll also admit that I presented this in a somewhat trollish frame at times. Mainly because at those times, if the rules were actually implemented fairly and evenly like 9/10ths the forum would be banned. And that would be fucking hilarious.
But aye, tl;dr it turned out all this was a feature and not a bug. And if I’m being totally honest… I fucking get it. There’s a goddamn pandemic and reality itself, not just your own life, feels like it’s ripping apart at the seams, why not do a little forum fascism to give yourself a sense of control? But you gotta let the other side in on the joke a little bit, otherwise it’s just weird.
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I see left, right, and center as relative terms. Democrats are a center-left party within the context of America in the year 2023. I don’t think it’s a useful game to play “no true Scotsman” about who is and isn’t a leftist. Anyways, leftist is such a vague, general term that encompasses a wide variety of ideologies. An anarcho-leftist is going to be different from a full-blown communist and there are many more ideologies on the left spectrum.
I would have liked for a thread where people try to formally describe their ideologies and choose the correct label which will convey meaning about what they believe in just a word or two. I think a lot of posters are less politically sophisticated than they think they are and this would be an exercise in learning how they fit into a pre-existing world of meaning.
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Misclicked on the second pole, fyi
One of the great things about Discourse software is that you can change your vote. Click on “show vote” in the bottom left corner of the poll box.
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Not going to participate heavily in a naval gazing post mortem and I think I’m going to take what’s happening as an excuse to spend less time online, at least for the near future. But yes, I still stand by the post about CN and SK and do not feel it conflicts with my recent post about drama.
However I have pretty much done a 180 on the open meetings stuff as I absolutely think it conflicts with the need for minimized drama. If you have any sort of reasonably sane and competent people in charge of something as unimportant as an internet forum then there is no need for the general user base to be aware of or involved in how it is run. We’re not dealing with finance or human rights. It’s just a stupid forum.
What the lol community ownership thing was supposed to do was encourage people to take care of a shared communal space, but instead the concept got weaponized as “You’re not the boss of me, I post what I want.” And ownership wasn’t even what most people wanted anyway, they just wanted a place to post. The tiny minority that did want it just made everything worse for everybody else.
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I see in this thread you voted for chezlaw to be permad on sight. I’ve posted many times with him on 2+2 over the past few years and still do. We have many arguments, sometimes heated, but at the end still continue to post civilly.
In an online community why do you think you or anyone else has the right to stop chez and me from chatting, especially when the facility exists to put one or both of us on ignore?
This is one example of the fascism that 6ix talked about above.
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