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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 30th, 2023
  • jordanlund@lemmy.worldtoUnpopular Opinion@lemmy.world•Community Locked / Going Dark in Protest [Meta] [Updated 2025-01-13]English
    252·
    2 months ago

    From @TheBananaKing@lemmy.world

    Look, I respect the intent, but as someone who’s been on forums since the freaking 90s, I can say with confidence that that’s a toxic meltdown waiting to happen.

    You need at least two bitter jaded cybersec experts and at least one game theory person on your team to stand a chance with this kind of thing.

    Can you provide supporting documents that disprove :nasty insinuation about you:? Of course not. Do you want to have to keep being required to? No.

    Can people provide supporting documents disproving :nasty insinuation about :demographic::? Also no. And they don’t want to have to keep being required to.

    So there’s the constant tide of exhaustion of people being constantly undermined and dehumanised, and being forced to either respond to yet another argument that :demographic: don’t really count as people, or to just let it ride and try to ignore it. And then the wreckers use it as rage-bait to get people angry to the point of getting banned, and others walk off in disgust, more trolls smell blood in the water and the whole thing spirals.

    It’s the damn nazi-bar problem: even ‘just a few’ nazis smirking in the corner create a hostile and unpleasant environment that other people don’t want to be in. And so they drive the good posters off, reducing the opposition - and within a depressingly short time, you’ve got yourself an alt-right shithole full of trolls and sociopaths that just love being able to exert that kind of power.

    I’ve seen it approximately three bajillion times so far, and god dammit why won’t you youngins learn.

    Yes, powermods and power-tripping mods are a problem. But the approach to it you’ve chosen was gamed out and defeated in detail probably before you were even alive.

    And oh god, if you try to parse a rule about what categories of opinions and statements are covered by this, the rules lawyers are going to clown-shibari the entire damn site.

    The only two rules I’ve ever seen be effective over time are:

    • Don’t make us ban you
    • Don’t make us de-mod you

    and probably hard-cap the number of communities one person can mod.

    Have other stuff on top of that, but they’re load-bearing and non-optional.

    And I get that the site is trying to be a neutral platform that’s insulated from the content, but honestly I don’t think that’s feasible. Sometimes you need to just throw people out of your bar regardless of the exact phrasing of the terms and conditions, and that means picking a side.

    Also can we have a better markdown parser that doesn’t turn angle brackets into failed html markup sometime please