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?
can you point specifically at what forms of bigotry you’ve identified here and are interested in fighting
i mean no i dont use this site so much lol you can just answer me it’s fine i would want to root it out too!
I personally haven’t experienced it. I’m sure it’s there but I definitely wouldn’t say it happens “all the time,” I can only speak for myself tho
sorry i’ll try to be aware of everything that’s ever happened here so i never have to ask a question again
Why do people always comment this kind of stuff whenever someone asks for examples. It's major reddit brain to assume everybody asking a question is doing so in bad faith.
Yeah trying to get rid of the bigoted elements of this site is a good thing but the admins are kinda fucking it up by being assholes to everyone the past day or two
I don't browse the site super often, and also don't comment too much unless I feel i have something relevant to share. I personally haven't seen any bigoted or ban-worthy comments while browsing (I do see lots of deleted comments, though, so maybe you guys get to them before I even see them). I have seen multiple times people asking for examples though, and the response is always similar to what you are saying. It would be nice to get examples so I can be aware of any blindspots I may personally have and help aid in reporting them if I see similar content.
i do have a general sense of the issues here that doesn’t fully align with op but that doesn’t mean i act in bad faith. i literally do not know what they’re talking about. i deplore any and all forms of bigotry and i’m fully committed to fighting them. but i need to know what it is rather that some vague general gesturing at unpopular posts. if you think my post itself is “bigotry” then well of course i’m not going to fight myself because i know i meant nothing of the sort? it’s a sensible enough question and legitimate confusion getting a pretty hostile reception
sorry, there's just so much bad faith "whatabout" going around this morning and people constantly asking for evidence and then moving the goalposts when you give it. guess i fell into the trap of being hostile. it really is exhausting around here, though. gonna log off and go grill. like legit, sorry for taking your post as such.
it’s ok, i do position myself in a way that i know invites strong disagreements sometimes. but that’s definitely something i would prefer to talk about rather than just suspecting it’s actually what op means (because i will continue to have big disagreements on how to handle this stuff and i hope it doesn’t end up with a ban and seriously i’d much rather it wasn’t a source of discomfort for anyone)
One thing that stood out among the concerns was the misogyny, and cis-white dudebroism. I know that we engage in a lot of deliberate irony-poisoned gross-out humor (such as the Sandy Cheeks giantess cock vore in the anti-V*sh pasta), and I can absolutely see how that would come off as abhorrent. Cum jokes are rampant. Scatologial humor, usually directed at genuine scumbags, make no mistake, abounds. A lot of what we do tends to be a monkey-see, monkey-do of the Hosts' own twitter behavior with what they like and RT on media, which is pretty fucking reactionary at times, not gonna lie. This sort of culminates in me wondering if I have, even unwittingly, engaged in such behavior here to the point that it seriously hurt another user, to the point of considering leaving.
I'm genuinely at a loss about potential suggestions because I'm really not a "solutions" person.
Lots of the stuff is baked in and means relearning basically how to talk about stuff. Something as simple as "hey dudes" can be problematic in a given context. Not great at it myself, for sure
such as the Sandy Cheeks in the anti-V*sh pasta
Fuck. That's stopped now, right?
Haven't seen it in a while, I honestly thought it was revisionism at first.
PSA type reminders and anti-propaganda posting. Like the user said, it's in the air we breath and working against it is an active thing. Similar to the "we love our trans comrades" post, but just stuff that helps to deprogram. Likely it'll be a obvious stuff for most of us, but it's more of a reinforcement type thing. I try to internalize this stufd, but I'm sure am guilty of lapsing as much as the next person
I think it is important realize that you can call someone out for being shitty while not being a complete dick yourself. Just point out what you think is shitty about what they said. And if they respond positively and are open to changing their behaviour, that's the best possible outcome. If they refuse to listen then yeah, they're problematic and fuck em
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.
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.
It sounds lame and normie af, but simple politeness goes a long way. I think a lot of people want to log on to their preferred social media and pal around with their community (here, or wherever else), which is all good and fine. I recognize that if everyone commented on here as though they were at work, it'd be boring as fuck, and it'd feel pretty damn distant and not like a community at all.
I think that a middle ground would be to imagine that you're at you're local pub or something. Your buddies are gonna be around, and some folks are gonna be kinda drunk or whatever, but you gotta remember that you're still in public, and you don't know everyone who can hear [read] what you're saying. The pseudonymity of the internet and sites like this have stripped a lot of the indicators that would remind us of this away. We obviously don't see each others faces as we post and discuss with each other, you get a name and that's pretty much your entire identity.
If we want this to be a community, we really should start acting like it a bit more. People talk about how they want this site to be a part of an "educate the libs pipeline" or whatever, but you end up with dunk-seeking behavior from Twitter, or debatebro behavior from Reddit. It's obnoxious, and anyone who casually drops by is likely to either be turned off by it, or they're going to like it and want to participate in it. Neither of these builds a community, much less a forum where you can help curious minds grow. Memes and dunks are great spectacle on major platforms where 100k people are going to see it. A site with 12k users and a small fraction of them active is going to need to take a different approach.
Edit: I realize that my post doesn't directly answer the question directly, but I guess my hope would be that a change in atmosphere would be a productive step toward an environment that feels more welcoming overall.
I think you’re right, this might be too big of a step but personally I wouldn’t mind it if we removed Twitter screenshots from main and tried to keep post of the memes in the dunk tank or a similar comm. when you’re using the Reddit voting system effort posts can’t really compete with memes and right now most of the serious posts are locked up in comms that few people visit.
Yeah you might notice me [politely] being the dunk_tank police partly for this reason (and partly cause I don't want to see what some dipshit lib of the day had to say unless I go looking for it)
Do we have a slurs filter? /r/latestagecapitalism had a very good one that helped me learn to not use able-ist language. I don't know if we need to implement it 100%, but maybe putting flags on the words, or letting users mute words. Spitballing here
Yes, there is one. It's very naive and there are circumstances where it removes things in the middle of words. I'm not going to give examples for obvious reasons.
Are there other communities that do a better job of it, and if so, how do they do it? That's an honest question - I'm pretty limited in public internet circles outside of chapo because I found it to be a better place than most. But it's easier to learn from others and from past experiences than to try to re-invent the wheel.
