I might be able to provide some context, speaking as someone who’s no longer involved with site moderation or administration, hasn’t been for a long time, but was very involved in the beginning.
But I think this shows that the accusation of wrecking has really been used as a quick explanation for many things here, from the very beginning, and it's harmful to the community in the long term. We've created (actually this has been lessening in recent times, thankfully) a strange culture of suspicion around the idea of "wreckers".
We were aware this was a tradeoff we were making at the time. Or at least it was a thing that was discussed and I personally saw it as a tradeoff. We tried for a long time to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who asked for it. We had people dedicated to play devil’s advocate and tried to keep with the clock in, clock out attitude of moderation at the advice of some very helpful folks. It ended up being the root of a lot of unnecessary struggle seeded by a small group of bad faith actors. And I’m not just talking about the Kerries, though they were a big chunk of it. There were two relevant problems with these people:
They had every motivation to blur the line between acceptable and unacceptable conduct in both themselves and in others
They were constantly looking for avenues of effort asymmetry where they could cost us large amounts of effort with little effort on their part
Important to the topic is that point number 2 costs you a lot of effort when you’re trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. If I’d known what I know now, we would have handled things differently in some ways, but other ways were kind of materially constrained. The paranoia is a cultural hangover from a time when we had valid things to be paranoid about. And it’s not like we have nothing to be concerned about now either. But we certainly made mistakes and even knew that mistakes were inevitable. I find the site much more inhabitable now and have no way of knowing how much it’s legitimately mellowed out vs how much is just me being more distant from the turmoil.
In addition to people differentiating between leftism and liberalism:
Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead...
Communists are allowed to post on YouTube because YouTube gets ad revenue off of their content without meaningfully changing our ability to actually affect change, at least from YouTube’s perspective.
I feel satisfied with where I’m at (low dose of e, masculine-leaning presentation) but this weekend my dysphoria had me almost crying at the thought of how much I don’t look like a woman and I don’t know what to do with that. I haven’t had dysphoria this bad in over a year since I started my estrogen. I want reskinnable character creator mode for my body so fucking bad.
The bit about looking like a pirate in a head scarf is the most relatable thing I’ve ever heard him say. I just want to wear a cute bandana on occasion and I look like a bad Pirates of the Caribbean extra
I might be able to provide some context, speaking as someone who’s no longer involved with site moderation or administration, hasn’t been for a long time, but was very involved in the beginning.
We were aware this was a tradeoff we were making at the time. Or at least it was a thing that was discussed and I personally saw it as a tradeoff. We tried for a long time to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who asked for it. We had people dedicated to play devil’s advocate and tried to keep with the clock in, clock out attitude of moderation at the advice of some very helpful folks. It ended up being the root of a lot of unnecessary struggle seeded by a small group of bad faith actors. And I’m not just talking about the Kerries, though they were a big chunk of it. There were two relevant problems with these people:
Important to the topic is that point number 2 costs you a lot of effort when you’re trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. If I’d known what I know now, we would have handled things differently in some ways, but other ways were kind of materially constrained. The paranoia is a cultural hangover from a time when we had valid things to be paranoid about. And it’s not like we have nothing to be concerned about now either. But we certainly made mistakes and even knew that mistakes were inevitable. I find the site much more inhabitable now and have no way of knowing how much it’s legitimately mellowed out vs how much is just me being more distant from the turmoil.