The prominent user who left recently made me realize that while this place is a lot less full of bigotry than reddit, that is a low fucking bar.
What are concrete steps users and mods can take to make this a more welcoming space? I'm assuming the majority of the bigotry is coming from inside the house, bar the occasional raid.
Banning shitstains is good and all, but that is only a part of community management. How do we proactively create a better user culture here? How do we better establish norms of behavior?
Don't know about any concrete measures against bigotry, but IMO we should rethink the vote system somehow to try to stop redditbrain. It's gamefied bullshit designed to keep people "engaged" that got carried over to this site. A block user button or something similar might be good too.
I'm only giving the devs more work aren't I? I might contribute when/if I feel less self-conscious about where my programming skills are at.
I can't speak for hexbear in particular, but in general if you're willing to write code for a project and not be an asshole you'll get a lot of help if you ask. It's not like they're gonna make you invert a binary tree on a white board to prove your 1337 coding skillz before they let you submit a PR.