While some of you may have seen this before, a shocking number of users appear to not understand that we have this wonderful device.
It can allow a user to look at the things mods and admins have to remove; and if you were ever to wonder why you keep seeing users, mods, and admins leave due to transphobia, you could pursue through it to see what they're talking about.
That's some of it for sure, but it looks like the majority of them getting banned for questioning it aren't exactly coming from a confusion place and are instead actively accusing the mods of creating drama themselves.
Like I asked those questions earlier and didn't get banned, just got told about the mod log and browsed through it.
There's a fuck load of people pissed off about the crackdown on transphobia lol
The exact wording was "cissies throw a fit" to list of various policy changes. Maybe that was the subtext of the post, but not everyone is going to read it that way, and I certainly didn't, but maybe that's on me.
I was banned for that post, and mods deleted my userunion post as well so I'll put it here:
My point wasn’t that people shouldn’t be mocked for being cis or whatever, I don’t give a shit and I’m certainly not offended by it. My point was that banning people unnecessarily (e.g. that night of drunken bans) and framing opposition to some of policies/questionable banning as transphobia (or in ways that could be easily misinterpreted) could be giving some folks the wrong impression that that’s the transphobia that people are facing rather than the virulent shit you see in the modlogs. I get that the mods have a lot of shit to deal with, deal with a lot of bad faith actors, etc. but I also think the optics of people getting banned for disagreeing with mods aren't helping with folks who are not sure what is going on, and I also think some folks are very quick to assume anyone that was banned or questions bans must've been a cis dude and a transphobe, which again, I don't know is helping for the users who are here in good faith. But maybe the mods/userbase have made a decision that it's more important our trans comrades have a safe space than the people that get banned not thinking it's fair. That's fine, I accept that.
Anyways, wading into this discussion got me banned and labeled cis and a transphobe. That doesn't feel great, but if that's how the community sees me, I'm not sure what to say. I wanted to elaborate because I felt like my post was misunderstood but I'll be taking my leave now and the admins can delete this post if they think it doesn't belong here.
Again, I wasn't offended by the wording. Clearly my posts are coming off as grandstanding about language that is "offensive" to cis people or trying to minimize the very real transphobia on this site. That's not what I'm trying to say at all.
The only reason I quoted the exact passage was to say that I didn't read that as "nobody understands WHY they enacted the policy," which again, is maybe my problem, but I don't even care to get that bogged down over the language of that particular post. My point was that if the mods are banning people for questionable reasons and that's what you're seeing filling up userunion and sometimes even main or general threads, and you are also seeing some general sentiment about how people getting banned are transphobes and the people who are complaining are transphobes, you might be confused about what is actually happening behind the scenes. It's not on our trans comrades to be expected to educate folks on the harassment they receive, I'm just saying that the optics of some of the bans that are going on are not really helping things and I think it's contributing to the drama which in turn is contributing to the unwelcoming atmosphere on the site... which got me banned and labelled a cis transphobe. :/
Honestly, everyone should make a habit of checking it once a day or so.
If some day you're browsing and chapo seems quiet to you, if you think, well, things have calmed down everybody's just vibing, check the modlog.
You don't know what you're "missing".Yeah, after the Capitol riot, I thought, cool, downvotes are gone and everyone is just vibing, I think things are going OK ... and then I saw Transcomrade69 's farewell post and was like ... fuck. Shit's still going on, I'm just not seeing it.
Cool, now I can read harrowing accounts like the very first one:
whines about policy, but makes no suggestions. senseless contrarian over doing uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh literally anything????
I have no doubt there’s nasty shit that has been removed.
But when the very first action is somebody getting banned for talking back to the mods, rather than actually engaging in any conduct that harms a person, why would I care to look further?
It’s not going to change my habit of occasionally browsing this forum either way, but if you’re going to make a point of naming your crusade and showing everybody your war record, it’d work better if it appeared to not be what worriers think it’s about.
Things like this are typically wrecker account bans as far as I'm aware, historically the site has had wrecker problems from extremely dedicated users making accounts specifically to engage in activity to harm the site and there's active action from the team to cull those accounts. There probably needs to be a clearer policy for writing modlogs about those though, particularly as they're judgement calls based on user behaviour and account age.
I can understand how this might look bad to some who has only been on the site for a month, particularly based on how that log is written. That one I'm really not sure of though.
Is that poster a wrecker though? I didn't think the posts they wrote were ban worthy, but maybe I'm missing some specific context here.
Not in this case I think. I don't know the full context or history either though. I suspect falling on the problem side of things over and over and over again. I'm personally not familiar enough with the user to say with any confidence though.
It's a trans comrade that accidentally got caught in the original purge. They got banned in this case after saying that they found it personally invalidating for TC69 to imply that only cissies criticized the moderation policies and that her only regret was not banning more cissies.
Not just the first one, the first 20. The last post that was legitametly remove worthy was 8 hours ago.
This is kind of an issue though. The most virulent transphobes are troll accounts that get banned right away and their posts get removed. If users get banned and/or called transphobes for disagreeing with mod policy, the unfortunate side effect will be that users are going to miss those worst posts and only see other users get labelled transphobes by the mods for "whining about policy" or whatever and they're going to start questioning the narrative of transphobia on the site, which btw I do think exists.
Why? Did Stonedape have a big history of harassing people and returning with new accounts or something? Or were they just on the other side of an argument about site policy one too many times?
Yeah now is actually a really good time to practice shutting the fuck up and not nitpicking every little thing and boy howdy do a lot of people have trouble with that simple act.
There's a time for that kind of discussion but when there's very clearly a malicious effort going on against the site is not that time.
There's documented evidence of bad faith trolling and shit-stirring, and if in the face of that your biggest concern is nitpicking the goddamn modlogs, you either have brain worms or you're part of the problem.
I'm not one of the ones spending my time auditing the logs, so go ahead and direct all your chill at them, thanks.
Modding a place like this takes some mental fortitude - I sure as heck couldn't do it. Fuck transphobes.
I can definitely see how there would be a disconnect for people who don't really go on the trans community nor look at the modlogs. I can also see how someone who's spent a lot of time in shitty online spaces might see a big farewell post and think it's for drama and attention. I'm guilty of that cynicism myself.
But at this point I don't know how anyone could see all this smoke and still deny there's fire. Well, I do actually, and it's basically between two things: being a reactionary little baby who can't tolerate any sort of change to an online forum they post on, and/or being a straight-up transphobe.
It seems likely to me that the very start of this probably stemmed from a relatively small number of dedicated transphobes brigading and trying to get reactions for their cringe collection or whatever the fuck. But then as the site admins experimented with different ways to address that, more and more formerly uninvested people suddenly start having all these Very Strong Opinions about mod overreach, or e-drama, or other purely reactive bullshit complaints. A lot of that got interpreted as users caping for transphobes although not all of those users thought that was what they were doing, prompting bans that were one layer of abstraction from direct transphobic posts. And it seems to have become a vicious cycle of escalation over the past few days. I'm usually biased against site mods on a lot of platforms, but in this case I can only conclude that it's us, the knee-jerk reactive and cynical userbase, that fucked up by not having a minimal amount of faith in the word of multiple trans comrades, and by being completely unwilling to see if the moderation changes actually help before throwing fits.
I’m usually biased against site mods on a lot of platforms, but in this case I can only conclude that it’s us, the knee-jerk reactive and cynical userbase, that fucked up by not having a minimal amount of faith in the word of multiple trans comrades, and by being completely unwilling to see if the moderation changes actually help before throwing fits.
Seconded. This site has been brigaded by transphobes since day-fucking-one. I can only imagine the mods' frustration and exhaustion after months of dealing with this bigoted nonsense. What fun is a shitposting forum if our beloved trans comrades are driven away? I don't know what the best way to deal with it is -- maybe make the site invite only for a while -- but clearly the mods have an endless stream of hateful bullshit to wade through and should be forgiven for the occasional misstep or whatever. I'm glad they're trying to actually deal with the problem.
:chavez-salute: :fidel-salute: :maduro-salute: :sankara-salute:
Scroll to the bottom of the website, under the About, Privacy policy, and such there is the modlog link.
I think additional links to the modlog, such as the mod/admin badges and banned banners, might make this more accessible to new or unaware users.
I think this is a great idea, especially if we can have the
bannedbanner link directly to the relevant modlog entry for the user.From my reading of the logs it’s a solo action and not tied to any particular comment is it? I also think that could give the wrong impression of one questionable comment breaking the camels back of several awful comments not shown.
That's a good point. Maybe we could have some kind of automated query to show all mod actions relating to the user? So that way we can see the chain of awful comments leading up to the eventual ban.
This was actually super helpful, I'm a hardcore lurker so I didn't know this was a thing. While I definitely think that some people probably didn't deserve the bans on that list, holy shit there's a ton of transphobia. Like Jesus Christ, it's only inevitable that a few randos end up in the cross-fire when mods are having to deal with this torrent of bullshit. Keep up the good work folks
Cause when you go through the modlog and see why people get banned, at least half of it is no reason given/"eat my ass, fuck you, sugma liberal, etc." You even got StonedApe again, ffs. Like should we just dig through the comments of every banned person and guess why they're dead? Some of it is transphobia or Kerry posting that's really obvious, but not all of it.
I think it's the mods just getting fed up with all the reactionary bullshit tbh.
Yeah I just spent a bit of time looking through the modlog. The majority is really nasty stuff that I'm thankful to the mods for suffering through so that the average user, like me, doesn't have to see. But then there are quite a few comments deleted for frivolous reasons and bans that don't give a good reason why they're banned
The reason for the frivolous bans is basically fatigue, there's too much shit to sort through. They are unbanning people who appeal and show that it was a mistake though.
It's too much work to go through all this content with perfect accuracy. Facebook has thousands upon thousands of people basically locked in offices staring at child porn and gore all day with their eyelids forced open, at poverty wages, just to get it to the level of where Facebook is at.
Yeah good point, I can see how that can happen. I imagine the solution is more mods so no one gets overwhelmed. Talking about Facebook, I remember reading a article a while ago about their mods and how soul crushing it is. It basically destroys people mentally
Just wanted to say that this is useful and would be a good sticky, at least for a while. Thanks.
Yes indeed, if you browse the modlog you'll come over things you'll feel uncomfortable about. Big surprise there.
OP's PSA comes from people saying "I don't see transphobic stuff on here, why are you even complaining? Seems like overreacting" While the moderator team obviously works hard to remove all that junk so no shit people are not seeing it. Doesn't mean it's not there. Hence the call to look into the mod log.
The modlog just posts a reason for people being banned. It doesn't have any record of what they've done so that this can be inspected.
The chronological listing is also super buggy (I know the admins are working on this).
