I'm actually having a hard time deciding between several solid contenders (and their totally-not-their-alts alts) but I'll go with one that I had very little actual interaction with: the "cranking the hog in front of coworkers whether they want to see that or not is liberating and if you're against it you're a reactionary scold" Whedonbrain we had that one time. :volcel-judge:
I can't remember if it was them or another user who said they were poisoning drinks at parties if they suspected transphobia.
Oh Jesus. Totally forgot about that. Not only did they poison drinks, but then they like threatened them after the poisoning and said the transphobia was a threat to their life so it was okay. Way too many upbears on that post.
Yeah a lot of people seemed to support it, which is one of the reasons I left for a while and sort of wrote off the site. Too much unhinged shit and mod drama for a while.
Pretty big jump from "upvoting transphobic content is bad" to "poisoning random people is cool if you get a bad vibe".
Reminiscing on all these old posts makes me remember what chaos the site was the first year. I feel like we’re in our @Dirt_Owl era, just vibing now.
The current mod team is also way better at handling conflict and de-escalation
I used to know who all the old mods were. Now I don’t really know. Probably a good thing.
To be fair, the downside to our voting system is there's no way to express silent disapproval. Most of the time that is a good thing because it forces you to discuss the reason behind your disagreement, but it doesn't leave you with a lot of ways to say "I disapprove of this but also I don't want to get caught up in your drama hurricane."
Yeah I view that type of commenting as putting trans people in more danger. In retrospect, it wasn't storyofrachel who posted that, it was a different unhinged user who was likely the type of wrecker who posts extreme takes to then go back to 4chan to point at and say see, look how dangerous these people are! The fact the mods did nothing about it and actually seemed to encourage that shit pissed me off. This site was fucking weird back then, and I totally blame those early mods who were extremely immature and publicly not managing their personal shit.