this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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This seems oddly timed with the whole meta thing going on.
Are people going to be forced to accept 'a small amount' of, ferinstance, asserting that homosexuality is a mental illness?
Seems to me there is a big difference between attacking someone's identity and claiming the earth is flat or marijuana is bad. The fact the mods don't seem to address this is concerning.
If you see offensive content, as always, report it, but the default position now is to respond with "No, you're wrong, here are the supporting documents showing how wrong you are" rather than instant ban and removal.
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:
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
For folks who have missed the Nazi Bar reference, this should be required reading:
https://bsky.app/profile/iamragesparkle.bsky.social/post/3lbidcyu5ic2b
(glad to see he left the Nazi bar X is becoming.)
A lot of that falls under "attacks on users" or "attacks on groups". Of course we're still going to enforce that.
"Don’t make us de-mod you" is effectively what a lot of this comes down to. The goal is to be just a little less quick with moderation tools and, when we can, use our words a bit more.
I don't expect this to change much for 95% of communities. The ones that are really going to have to change are the ones with super fragile philosophies that can't stand up to a single sentence of criticism.
But you're taking 'don't make us ban you' off the table for the mods.
"Oh no, I'm not attacking trans people, I'm just saying that children deserve protection. Surely you'll agree there's no rule against that?"
Sealioning. JAQing off. Ragebait. That very specific, slightly-too-formal dialect of trollspeak. Shitty edgeplay designed to taunt and demoralise without ever quite stepping over any well-defined line, and a bat-signal to like-minded sociopaths that the dog is chained up.
Hell, bluesky has been infested with LLM debate-bots recently that fucking automate the process.
I suspect that you're mistaking the symptoms for the problem: it's not that mods are too quick on the button and need to learn to tolerate a little raw chicken in the mayo, it's that some of them have been captured by corporate / PAC / generally-unsavoury interests, and use the button as a weapon.
And to those people, there's only one thing you need to say.
Mods are still generally going to have a lot of discretion. How often do you see admins get involved here?
We're not going to allow hate speech. This is fully intended to give us something against those who, as you say, use the button as a weapon.
Give us a chance and let's see how this actually plays out.
You could as well have said "I want to ban everyone who disagrees with me without them having any recourse".
Introduce rules disallowing lies (anything which can be proved as not being factual - hard facts rather than opinions) Nazi propaganda, illegal contents, post supporting genocide. This is completely sufficient for the vast majority of contents. You definitely should not ban users because they engage in what is in your OPINION "edgeplay designed to taunt and demoralise without ever quite stepping over any well-defined line".
Lolno. God, lawful-neutrals and their damn rules.
If you do that, they get to play the dictionary-definitions game and well-ackchewally at you indefinitely and demand you provide sources for the word 'the', while creating endless reports demanding people be banned because technically that's not paedophilia that's ephebepholia... or whatever the fuck.
It's a game to them; all they care about is making a disruptive and unpleasant environment.
The only way to win is to not play.
When you recognise the pattern, you short-circuit the whole damn thing and just boot them out.
Than you are absolutely not suitable of being a mod, as simple as that.
I would like to underline and emaphasize this one.
As for the rule change in general (note: I'm from a different instance so it doesn't influence me much) - it seems reasonable.
If there is a community where a respectful disputation of facts - with sources to back it up - gets immediately resolved with a ban hammer, that community is not a healthy thing to have on an instance, so administrators might want to step in.
Myself, I've noticed one such community on the "hexbear" instance. Got banned for explaining well-known historical facts, with references to sources and all. The reason: I was "reactionary" and only one narrative was allowed. If it had been on another instance, maybe the admins would have done something. But since it was there, there was no recourse except leaving.
So then it's ok to make outright offensive claims like homosexuality is a mental illness or that we should go back to enslaving people of color, as long as I don't spam it in a community? It seems like you all didn't actually think through the consequences of your policy, because that's an absolutely unacceptable position to take on moderating bigotry.
This only works when the majority of the audience can tell who's right
I really thought this was satire.
It does feel oddly timed, but I personally made a new news community on my instance to fight back against the mod abuse on the more popular news instance in this part of the fediverse.
People are taking notice of mod abuse and leaving because they don't support it.
Ah yes: just asking questions. Just a point to consider. Just my opinion.
Unlike on TV, if lawyers pull the inflammatory-question-in-front-of-the-jury trick twice, they get in serious damn trouble with the judge.
There's a reason judges get absurdly free reign in their own courtrooms, because if they don't, this shit gets weaponised.
I’m responding because I think you prove the point that there are situations where this policy does not work.
This is not the proper forum to be having a “discussion” like this, because there is no proper forum to have a discussion like this. The misuse of the term “mental illness” is a nonstarter. Mental health disorders become mental illness when those disorders begin to consistently and negatively impact an individual’s emotional, physical, and/or social functioning. Simply being homosexual does not do that. Prejudice associated with, and stigma attributed to, homosexuality are the root causes of mental health issues among homosexuals.
Incorrectly labeling homosexuality as a mental illness must be rejected outright and provides no room for further discussion.
The thing is, what is or is not a "mental illness" isn't defined by you, or by me, it's defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, written and published by the American Psychiatric Association.
Homosexuality USED to be defined as a mental illness in the DSM III published in 1980, it was maintained in the DSM III R in 1987, and the DSM IV in 1994 and DSM IV TR in 2000.
It was wholly removed from the DSM V in 2013, and frankly we should be ashamed it took that long.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_the_DSM
Calling it a mental illness now, in 2025, is at best "quaint", and at worst materially and factually wrong.
And you're still entertaining the discussion, still kicking it around and keeping it alive, debating the merits and acting like it's a topic worthy of conversation. Look at you looking up specific definitions and the history of the DSM.
Even knowing it was an illustrative example of trolling, you still got trolled by it.
That's the entire game, and you willingly, nay triumphantly played it. I bet you'd bd willing to argue it back and forth for pages, giving it a little more legitimacy with every word.
Do you see the problem now?
I'm demonstrating the problem. :)
oof, sorry, got usernames mixed up
Say what now?
Discussion about it started before the meta announcement, it just took time to work out the verbiage.