• 2 Posts
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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: February 22nd, 2026

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  • Well, if you don’t ban or otherwise moderate unpleasant people, your community will rot until it’s nothing but unpleasant people and those who can tolerate them. So that’s not a desirable outcome.

    Communities should have rules. People who repeatedly break those rules should be banned. This is true online and offline.

    The more challenging question is “what are the best rules to make?”

    Most places will disallow porn and gore, or require them to be appropriately labeled or quarantined. That makes sense to me.

    Many places will ban anything too violent. Threats against individuals I understand. Saying you can’t even imagine violence against organizations doing violence (eg: ice, the Republican party) is lending support to horrible people, so I’m not keen on that. I can see wanting to keep it from turning into revenge porn, or wanting to avoid drawing the attention of the state.

    “No personal attacks on members” was a rule on a place I used to post. Was pretty nice, usually.


  • You cannot assume that the people making decisions are rational, smart, people. They may believe falsehoods, and act accordingly. They may be chasing a hidden goal (eg: “I get a bonus if I hit X metric, so I’ll kill good parts of the site to do it”)

    I worked at a place where management was like “we want to increase time on site”, and the lead dev was like “I can just add loading spinners everywhere then”. Luckily management was a little smarter and move involved than that, and didn’t approve that strategy.