“Need” seems like the wrong word here.
Your particular example was a poster who, arguably, followed community guidelines. Should we tolerate people who we think are a net negative to the community even if they follow the rules out of a sense of fairness?
This attitude makes it seem like you think any exercise of majoritarian democracy is fascism, akin to people crying about fascism because someone else is deciding if they have to wear a mask.
It’s not that it’s a good idea or bad idea, it’s that it’s a myth.
Wearing a mask is a matter of public health. This is an internet forum and we are all old enough to decide for ourselves what we want to see,
Egregious posts aside, trying to dictate to people what they can and can’t see is bound to lead to forum dissent, so your next problem is how do you deal with the dissenters. Banning them will likely lead to even more dissent. And here we are.
Repeatedly using fascism to describe basic moderation decisions is really fucking dumb. I don’t think you’re confused about what fascism is. My only question is if you actually believe that it stinks of fascism to ban someone from an internet forum (which is really dumb) or if you’re just here to stir shit up about it (more likely).
That’s a good question which can possibly be handled by guidelines but is ultimately going to be a community decision and depends on what kind of community you want to be part of. I stopped participating here when it became clear to me it wasn’t the kind of place I wanted to be a member of. But before the community can decide on something like this there needs to be a strong set of guidelines and agreements among the members of the community which never seemed to coalesce here.
What’s the line? Repeatedly using someone’s real name? Literal horsep0rn?
So will allowing awful posters to continue. Tons of people complained about Churchill’s shitposting, and he ended his little game with literal anti vax propaganda.
You know where the lines are. Clear racism, homophobia, sexism, anti trans, personal threats, doxxing, horseporn etc
You’re describing people as awful posters? Are you aware of how you’re seen by many people? These things are highly subjective.
I’d like to tie moderation to ethical theories because, hey, it’s all the trolley problem at some level.
There are different views on what a moderator ought to do.
One is a consequentialist theory that a mod is supposed to do what is necessary to create the outcome of getting rid of spam, trolling, and bad posts in general, for some definition of “bad”. (What is bad posting is a debate that is irrelevant to those point I am making.)
A deontological theory might hold that moderators are supposed to enforce the rules evenly even if it allows bad posters to make bad posts, that their job is to, as John Roberts put it, “call balls and strikes”. Applying critical theory, we might believe that no one can really be an unbiased referee.
A third ethical theory is virtue ethics, which might say that we should mainly be concerned with making sure that moderators are moral and virtuous. This, of course, requires us to consider just what virtues are.
Some people see banning bad posters as a matter or protecting our collective mental health. Reading through all the posts, I can’t say that is definitely wrong.
Dissent is inevitable. The people who wanted to get rid of specific mods didn’t seem to understand that. There were always going to be disagreements about how things are run, even if you don’t try to dictate what people can and cannot see. You set egregious posts aside, which suggests that you see value in moderating egregious posts, but what if there is no consensus on whether certain posts are egregious?
The problem of how you deal with dissenters exists no matter how the site is moderated. Let’s consider, for example, a forum where bullying is not tolerated, but people dissent on judgments over whether bullying should be allowed and whether the behavior in question is even bullying. How would you want to deal with dissenters in that situation, what principles are you using to make that decision, and how could those principles have been applied to disputes on this forum?
Is it? Because when churchill played the game of posting CW’s initials repeatedly y’all argued for him to be unbanned. IIRC more people than that were involved in that game.
This is completely irrelevant. Your point was that banning bad posters was bad because it created dissent. Allowing them to continue also creates dissent. Therefore, your point is dumb.
What differentiates clear racism from unclear (and perhaps permissible) racism? How subjective is judging what is and isn’t racism?
My sense is that people didn’t do the work to come up with such guidelines and agreements because they assumed that shared values and experience would be enough to hold the community together.
I was a bit more skeptical and wanted those rules in place, in part because I hoped that expanding the community and bringing in relative strangers would be possible and we needed structure to deal with those people and integrate them.
So, having thought about it more, I think the framework for problem of dealing with dissent is not that big. There are licit forms of dissent and illicit forms of dissent. Making civil criticisms of moderation in an About Unstuck should be a licit form of dissent so long as you color within the lines. Evading bans or making a bunch of gimmick accounts to muck up the forum with a flood of questionable posts would be an illicit form of dissent.
Where the line is drawn between licit and illicit dissent is a debate for elsewhere, but generally licit dissent should be tolerated and illicit dissent not so much.
This is not an argument that people should no engage in illicit dissent, it’s that an argument illicit dissent should carry a cost and people have to decide if that cost is worth it. The talking point that this is just some unimportant internet forum is silly. This place has significant personal meaning for many posters. It is worth questioning whether they are getting good value for their effort if they decide illicit dissent is warranted.
My bad I should’ve said scroll down a few posts. I remember it well. I still miss Georgia Avenue and think about him regularly.
Agreed, he should spend that time stopping beating his wife.
he’s a public figure who’s been on the teevee and willingly had a member of this forum live stream a significant professional (and I imagine personal) accomplishment where his name was on full display. the idea that referencing him by his initials is a problem, never mind a bannable offense, is absurd.
In line with the very general theme of people deciding what it is exactly they want in a forum, this above was another monkey wrench. For example, obv I’m aware of Brandi because it was so huge, the story, but I still don’t know who Bayareabeast is. Point being, we lost the politics forum so we were making a new politics forum. Not to imply judgment, but I was not under the impression we were making another OOT, or SE, or etc. That’s the type of thing that did and could in general have ripple effects.