So, I want to preface this by saying I do not write well. My thoughts rarely form paragraphs with beginnings, middles, and ends. I get off on tangents and forget my original point. I'm sure a lot of others here are similar, but this disclaimer is more for the neurotypical readers whom I am hoping will see this.

The tone of this entire post is honest and earnest unless otherwise specified.


Tone indicators get a lot of flak for being "cringe" in some circles, and I'm sad to have seen that that mindset apparently pervades here. Trying to put myself in the shoes of a NT person who does not understand the struggles of ND people, I can see why they might have that perspective. Tone indicators can seem unnecessary to someone who implicitly understands tone, and who assumes that it's a skill everyone has.

But not everyone has the skill to recognize and understand tone. In verbal dialogue some ND people may have had enough experience to build up a reference of what sarcastic or joking voices sound like and file those away for later use, but online there are no such indicators -- a problem that tone indicators attempt to fix.

So while to a NT reader a joke comment about, I don't know, literally wanting to fuck my mom or something, might be immediately obvious, because "of course" a person online from another continent who has never seen her before probably doesn't want to fuck my mom, this is not always evident to ND people. Neurodiversity is classified as a disability (and while I acknowledge the push back against this idea as inherently ableist by many in the community, bear with me,) and for many of us, one of the abilities we may lack is one which NT people take for granted: the ability to parse tone. To some of us, that flippant joke someone made might be confusing, or hurtful.

And while I don't expect everyone to indicate tone online all of the time, what I do think should be expected from users on Hexbear, as a space that strives to be inclusive and uplifting to marginalized groups, is that if they are asked to clarify tone, they should. And I'd like to thank the user who made a thread on that topic. This should be the absolute bare minimum.

Now, some of our NT readers might be thinking "but I put a meme face image after my statement! It should make it obvious its tone!" But I don't think that is sufficient to indicate tone. Tone indicators are numerous, but the list is somewhat short. I know of: sarcastic, joking, half joking, honest, confused, and a few others. This is not much to memorize, and their meanings are easily looked up. Meme images... not so much. There are hundreds here on Hexbear, many of which have no documentation like "mainstream"^★ memes do, so their meanings can be even more confusing than your jokes.

So try to put yourself in the shoes of a ND person who has trouble with tone, especially online. They are trying to understand your joke and get in on the fun. They want to be a part of the group. They're having a little trouble understanding, so they ask you to clarify. Do you want to be inclusive and simply clarify your tone, or do you want to continue to uphold the paradigm of ND exclusion that pervades other spaces?


Speaking of exclusionary spaces, this leads me to point two. Intent.

I have already had an experience here, and seen many other such moments, where someone immediately jumped to hostility when they didn't understand another user. I understand that that's just the way online life is now, but again, shouldn't we be trying to be better?

When you read a comment here and immediately jump to the conclusion that a user is bad-faith and start to dress them down, consider that on the other side of the screen might be a ND person with a different communication style than you, or a user whose native language isn't the same as yours^†, who may have not communicated their thoughts in a way that best connected with you but who certainly doesn't deserve to be immediately attacked over it.

ND people already have to put up with so much of this kind of thing in real life. It's exhausting to be excluded or attacked for using language slightly differently, or for trying but failing to mimic our peers, or for talking about things in a "round about way," et cetera. When it happens in a space like this that purports to be inclusive, it's especially harmful.

Does it really harm you so much to ask a clarifying question to determine if you understood correctly before jumping to attacking a user's message? There's a good chance that there was a communication failure between you, and if so then 1) you stand to harm the other person needlessly by attacking them and 2) you waste energy breaking down an idea that was not even real -- it was merely your mistaken interpretation of what the idea was.


And speaking of attacks, let's move on to point three: slurs.

Ableism is so normalized in society that the vast majority of our personal attacks attempt to degrade someone's intelligence or sanity in some way. Here's a non-exhaustive list off the top of my head:

ableist terms

idiot, dumb, stupid, insane, crazy, lunatic, loon(e)y, nuts, "are you blind??", "deaf to [an idea]", lame

Plenty of the terms on this list are alive and well on Hexbear. Please consider how you make ND comrades feel when you use these terms as attacks -- not just on ND comrades, but also on takes you think are bad in the Dunk Tank. These are terms a lot of us have been called all our lives. They carry a lot of pain. And by continuing to use them in the way you are, you're upholding normalized ableism by equating neurodiversity with badness.

They're not even good insults, very low effort. Liberals don't inherently lack intelligence -- and even if they did this wouldn't be what makes their takes bad. They are willfully ignorant, and it's the willfulness that makes it especially bad. People who are just ignorant have a chance to learn.


Speaking of ignorance and chances to learn, neurotypicals: this space is not actually as inclusive as you might think it is. I am calling you out on it. What are you going to do to get better?


★ Honestly, the assumption that everyone from everywhere in the world is going to understand your screenshots from western television shows kind of strikes me as a sort of western cultural hegemony anyway.

† Oh wow there's that anglosphere cultural hegemony again

  • NoGodsNoMasters [they/them, she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I'm not necessarily anti-tone indicators (and I'd certainly not call them cringe) but I feel like they're often not amazing at actually solving the problems they intend to solve. You can certainly put a /s after something to indicate sarcasm, which might help a little, but knowing that what was said wasn't meant literally doesn't necessarily help to know what actually was meant. Sarcasm can have some pretty different intended implications which aren't conveyed by a single indicator. In the case of /hj it's even more ambiguous, because something being 'half a joke' could mean many different things. It can be that it's somehow kind of exaggerated but at its core somehow true, that an unspecified part of what was said was a joke, or even that it's literally true or a genuine statement but presented as a joke or entirely a joke but someone judges it's funnier to imply part of it isn't somehow, and probably many more things.

    Does it really harm you so much to ask a clarifying question to determine if you understood correctly before jumping to attacking a user's message?

    Certainly not, but I don't think this is really where the problem lies. If I genuinely don't understand someone's message I will ask what they mean and I think most people do so as well. It's when you think that you know you've understood the message and that it's worth attacking that you attack them. In theory I guess you could do that literally all of the time, but it's still possible your clarifying question isn't interpreted as you intended it for many of the same reasons you may have misinterpreted theirs in the first place, and people who are acting in bad faith are unlikely to respond in good faith. It's also just seems kind of tedious to have to respond to every bad take by basically echoing the bad take back to them to hope they respond and tell me they indeed have this take so I can actually respond to it, and it gives people acting in bad faith a lot of breathing room.

    • mustardman [none/use name]
      ·
      1 year ago

      If I genuinely don't understand someone's message I will ask what they mean

      Best way forward as long as people answer honestly imo

    • iie [they/them, he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      (I'm still listening to people's takes and figuring out what I think, if your feelings differ from mine PLEASE feel free to share with me)

      Even NT people do not get every joke. I think instead of requiring all jokes make sense to everyone, which might stifle our humor culture, we should normalize asking for clarification. And users should respond with patience and warmth when asked, and that patience and warmth should come from a place of understanding and compassion toward ND people. We might even normalize something analogous to captions for the blind, where in the comments under a bit post there might be a spoilered comment explaining the bit for people who are confused.

      speaking of which, maybe we should also have captions for the blind

      but requiring posters to write their own captions might result in fewer posts, so maybe instead there should be volunteers, or just a site culture of commenters seeing "oh, no one has written a caption yet, I'll do it this time" and adding one.