Hey all,
Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I’d learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it’s run.
This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.
In addition to what jarfil said about this comment let alone the other removed comments, even now your behaviour is very confrontational and not conducive to intelligent, meaningful discussion even if we don’t agree on political beliefs.
You are free to state your opinion, but instead of opening with “Wrong.”, I suggest you express yourself in a way that invites discussion with anyone willing to discuss similarly, be it a liberal, conservative, anarchist, socialist, monarchist, libertarian, or what have you.
I’ll go first. I agree with you that Beehaw is a sanitized space, kept clean to encourage friendly, respectful conversation. Where I disagree with you is where you say only certain political opinions are permitted. The focus of “sanitization” is for inflammatory, inappropriately judgmental, ragebait and flamebait, antagonistic and off-topic comments and posts. It is possible to detach an opinion from its inflammatory delivery, you know. I recommend you give it a try.
This is pretty much the position we took when clearing that comment thread — I didn’t scrutinize between ideologies, I removed a variety of comments just for not being nice or for being potentially inciting/inflammatory. I had to remove several comments in that thread by liberals as well for being unproductive or even toxic.
Only nit I have about your comment is that “sanitized space” is a term we came up with for the mod philosophy. We explicitly meant it in the context of removing “not nice” comments. It expresses the fact that we can’t perfectly clear the space of anything which an individual user might find offensive or harmful. The standards for gauging safety/harm in a space vary from user to user; our moderation has to consider our users collectively rather than just one of them. This is part of why Beehaw is not a sanitized space and aims, rather, to be what one might describe as a safe space, a brave space, an accountable space, or other similar term.
Really just putting this out there for the benefit of others, as it seems some are mistaken about the word “sanitized” and what we really meant by it.
Then the original comment I replied to should have been removed. Fuck that original commenter, and fuck you, for blaming the working class’s conditions on anyone not willing to vote for Democrats. That creates a toxic and unwelcoming community, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Oops. Guess I didn’t knuckle under to your demand for civility; also liberal as hell.
Ok lol.
Then the original comment I replied to should have been removed. Fuck that original commenter, fuck the mod, and by extension fuck your for blaming the working class’s conditions on anyone not willing to vote for Democrats. That creates a toxic and unwelcoming community, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Oops. Guess I didn’t knuckle under to your demand for civility; also liberal as hell.
Ok…? Not sure if this comment was directed at myself, gil or both of us as they are duplicates. I’ll accept my liberal label, but if you think your present behaviour doesn’t create toxic and unwelcoming communities, you do you and shine bright, firebrand. Just don’t be surprised when people don’t appreciate your company.