Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[BIONIC]

Random constructive garbage to give context

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Alright. This needs to be asked because we're less than half a year out from primary season and a year and four months out from an election:

Are y'all prepared to prevent this place from turning into the bad faith shit show it did in 2020? When long time members with institutional knowledge were chased off this site by bad actors using moderators like a bludgeon. Bad actors who have been, almost to a person, banned due to the growing transparency of their actions.

Gonna bring this up again

So... last time, the primaries were an absolute shitshow. I know as well as anybody that moderation dropped the ball there; for my part, I wanted to try and bring everybody together, and clearly failed miserably. The simple fact of the matter is that reconciliation wasn't ever possible, and we shouldn't have treated the conflicts we were seeing like a good faith disagreement, because they weren't. They were an effort to drive "opposition" off the site dressed up like a moral cause, and we let it work to a depressing extent. I'm not going to say that this is something we can only see with the benefit of hindsight, either, because a lot of people called it at the time. We got played. No taking that back at this point.

The entire fiasco with Tara Reade's accusations and the fallout from that demonstrates that we needed a different approach to these kinds of high-volatility situations, and we're going to have that for next time. No more letting people toss around accusations and effectively forcing people to defend themselves. No moral crusades against other members. If somebody thinks somebody else is being a shit, they need to report them and move on. In topics that touch on politics, anyone throwing around accusations of bannable behavior at other members *at all, in any context* will get an immediate threadban, and if we think that they're ban-baiting or otherwise deliberately weaponizing something like Reade's story, they'll get at minimum a 2-week ban, with sharp escalation for subsequent offenses. If we think it's a coordinated effort like last time clearly was, that number goes up dramatically. I'm not going to promise automatic permanent bans for first offenses, because we reserve that kind of thing for troll accounts and bigots, but basically anything short of that is on the table.

We - I - know damn well can't allow something like what happened in 2020 to happen again. Not for any specific community, but for everyone on the site who might have had something terrible happen to them. Too many people were forced to discuss their trauma publicly to try and stave off a group of users who were never interested in anything besides scoring points. The ringleaders of that group are mostly banned now, and good riddance, but we lost too many good people, and hurt too many more, through sheer inability to see what was going on and treat it the way we should've. Our eyes are open to that now, and the team is prepared to take whatever steps are necessary to stop it from happening again.

Since this is in response to my question, so it would be rude for me not to respond.

1. Genuinely, I appreciate y'all actually getting back to that question, as it is a critical one. To that end

2. I also appreciate the concrete steps laid out to prevent a repeat of 2020 but

3. I do not have cause to believe your (broad you, not you specifically) actions will match your stated intent.

To be sure, there is one, let's say brazenly illustrative, reason I already knew things will be better than 2020 by default, even without an answer.

But I was here in 2020. I remember who had what conversations where about what was happening. And while I am certainly a renowned loud mouth here, I do a lot of sitting back and observing elsewhere. I lnow how volatile things hot and I remember what was said.

If you do too, then you can understand my doubt.

But I'll say this. Democrats have an incumbent this year. Which means there will be a lot less in fighting. Which means it is a perfect time to take the steps you have laid out and establish a hard precedent, since there will be less pressure.

Which is why I asked the question in the first place.

So thank you. And I hope you manage to prove me wrong to doubt.

I was here too, and honestly you just have to ignore like 300 people for political topics to have meaningful discussion. There's so much open concern trolling whataboutism and not the actual topic. Once the election ends, clear ignore list. That's what I do anyway. Otherwise I wouldn't read the threads because I would be baited and banned for things I don't even believe.

I hope we're both wrong and I know it is a lot of work so I appreciate that. If it's any consolation, like half of those people I ignored were banned during the election cycle. There's just too many.

This is a fight I've been fighting on this forum since day 1. Not just about politics. There is a massive blindspot when it comes to concerted, coordinated efforts by bad actors to get posters banned.

I'm not exaggerating about day 1 either. I was arguing for this forum to be on the look out for The Bore pulling shit only for Cindy Mayweather to step in and lock horns with me. I shut down one of her points with "so is Clarence Thomas" and she backs off, only to run back to The Bore where they were telling her what to say (she edited her post to turn it from, paraphrasing, "that was a good one," to "how dare you call me an Uncle Tom,") and then posted here to support her. I pointed out this was happening. Nothing.

It happened to Gordon Shumway when one of the hate sites (it wasn't The Bore it was one of the worse ones) brigaded to get him banned, he asked me for help, I provided evidence to the mods that that was happening, and nothing was done. We lost a good poster for nothing.

I've been banging this drum for years and it keeps happening, vut 2020 was the worst due to sheer scale.

Look ma, we’re famous!

Garbage response in case anyone cares:

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So, we've been talking about increased polarization internally, and the community sniping stuff, on and off for a while. I'm just going to point out, remember after Biden took office and every time we had a positive thread on inclusion or whatever it turned into "oh, the drone strikes will be done by an lgbtq+ person/woman/black person" thing when there hadn't actually been any drone strikes since he took office? Remember how those dudes were getting banned?

There's a difference between actually caring about an issue and wanting to discuss/bring attention to it and using it as a cudgel. We've been trying to ban people who do that for a few years now--hell, we permed this one guy who tried to blame the war in Ukraine for a Nazi shooting up a grocery in a black neighborhood a while back--but part of the problem is also members refusing to recognize that people are going to have other perspectives due to the history of the region they live in.

For example, people from South America are going to look at US politics through a lens of neo-colonialism and distrust due to what we did down there as a nation. They might look at the former Soviet Union more positively, being the geopolitical rival of the US, as a result. However, someone from Eastern Europe is going to have the exact opposite lens and view the Soviet Union as the neo-imperialist power and the US as the positive influence. Neither of these are inherently wrong opinions, both nations did a lot of harm in those days and any good they did was a result of them trying to stick it to the other. The Cold War was very much just another race for empire, nations scrambling for power in the imperialist tradition.

What I'm saying is that just because we disagree with someone, that doesn't necessarily make them a concern troll. That said, if you feel that someone is concern trolling or ban baiting or in any way just being a total dipshit in a thread just report them and move on. Like Poodle said, we're going to be coming down a lot harder in more contentious and polarizing threads in the future. Expect to see a LOT more threadbans and warnings, essentially kicking people out of these threads, as we continue on.