The end of jay and silent bob strike back but it’s showing up at transphobes houses like “hi are you “stupidPolRocks420?” “....yeah?” *bricked *
I usually don't see the transphobia stuff until after the fact when a trans comrade is explaining it to others. We need a way to get transphobic content in front of the cis users so people can't dismiss it by saying "I didn't see it so it must not be that bad." Maybe a weekly digest of problematic content? I know that sounds stupid but the only other way is for all the cis people to just follow around the trans people's posts and wait for it to show up. The next issue is that we don't want to saddle trans comrades with homework. It shouldn't fall on them to find and document bad posts. Or to explain to cis people why the posts are bad.
Speaking of following people around. I think it's extremely easy for cumtown and stupidpol users to find someone, target them, and then just keep following them around the site and harassing them with different accounts. Anyone can browse the site without being logged in. Then all you have to do is start an account and you can fuck with people. Maybe something about this needs to change. But I don't know what tools lemmy provides or what to do on the technical side.
We never solved the discord stuff. Remember the beginning when we were constantly hit with wreckers over discord drama? People carried a lot of online baggage with them to this site and then we were raided constantly for a while until mods cracked down enough and the raiders got bored. But are they bored? How much of this is specifically stupidpol and cumtown? How much of it is some really obsessive people from discord biding their time for a few months and then ramping up attacks? There is a genre of poster that will absolutely wield the racism, transphobia, sexism, classism, ableism, etc they supposedly despise against others.
None of this is to dismiss the real and present transphobia that exists inherently in large groups of chronically online straight white guys (and some women). This is a problem I've seen in real leftist orgs too. It's not flat out "I hate trans people." But it's more like constantly questioning their claims, be skeptical of their problems, dismissing their problems as petty infighting. But I feel like outside of the blatant transphobe attacks this kind of transphobia is easier to change. Though it tends to be harder to point out because it's a little more abstract than someone spamming that /pol/ copy pasta. This would just require a select group of cis people to work with the remaining trans comrades and sort of take on the labor of explaining to other cis people what's up. Now there's trouble with that idea because you don't want cis people ignoring trans people and just listening to second-hand experiences from other cis people. The point is to get people to listen to trans people. I just mean cis people can help with the writing and posting and monitoring the threads and taking on arguments if that's okay with the trans comrades. Because one of the things I have seen is that our trans friends do not want to keep having to explain basic shit to cis people. So therefore we can let some highly curated group of cis volunteers take up that labor.
People calling for mod elections need to stop. Web sites are not democratic and they don't have to be. The only real assurance of democracy is the handing off of power. So unless the admin are going to hand off the passwords and access to the site over every election, then it's not a democracy. It's a superficial layer of voting on something that's inherently undemocratic. You vote in new mods then they do what the stupididpol people want and declare trans comrades not valid then the admin boots the new mods immediately. Then you're right back where you started. If you don't like the site, make one. Nothing is stopping you from making a branch of lemmy for yourself. Or starting a discord server where you get to be in charge. Or slack. Or many other open source, federated, etc services. Also, why the fuck are people trying to organize a mod team on a website when you can be putting that energy into democratizing your workplace? People will spend hours making sock-puppet accounts and working around bans but can't be bothered to host a zoom meeting with your coworkers and get them hyped about a union. C'mon. And yes it's better to spend time creating a safe space online than holding mod elections.
Stop dismissing everything as infighting. This isn't about trots vs MLs. This isn't an accelerationism struggle session. It's a fundamental question of who gets to be part of the leftist project and culture. If you think trans people have no place in the left then you don't need to be here. I don't care if you think you have a right to be here or you think I'm a bad leftist for saying so. I don't know what the path to socialism is but I know it must include all marginalized groups and include them in the decision making process. There is no other side to this debate. Just like there is no other side to whether or not we should have slavery or any other very clear moral choice. This is not just a difference in tendency. It's not a minor disagreement over tactics. It's not #forcethevote. It's people's lives and livelihoods and that deserves to be discussed and argued about whether it makes you uncomfortable or not. Grow the fuck up.
Going back to the old days of the internet: make the site painful for them to use. Trans-solidarity theme. Make it the only theme available. Pink white and blue. Trans flag. Having to see that shit every time they log on will vex them.
We need a way to get transphobic content in front of the cis users so people can’t dismiss it by saying “I didn’t see it so it must not be that bad.” Maybe a weekly digest of problematic content?
A lot of this, but especially the section I quoted, sounds like some kind of Chapo Chat Wiki would be helpful in this regard.
Agreed. Ironically the lack of downvotes seems to be doing this somewhat. I know I've seen more rather than coming after they've been banned/removed etc.
Maybe a weekly digest of problematic content?
This gave me the mental image of me sitting down in an overstuffed chair by a fireplace in a robe, then pulling out a paper magazine titled Problematic Content with all that bad stuff in it.
I think this is an excellent and well thought out post for what it's worth. Thanks.
+1 for a "Weekly Mod Log Digest" post or something similar, where the funniest, saddest, worst content that got removed or got users banned gets posted (with a CW obviously) and maybe stickied so that the community can see a curated feed of what the mods and admins are removing and what people are getting banned for. Maybe with a "number of transmisogynistic copypasta posts removed" and stuff like that. Curating it would be a little work but I think it would be good to have a "best/worst of" made more visible periodically
I agree. For now. It should be completely overhauled before it returns. A lot of safety measures need to be put in place first.
Someone else suggested opt-in and block user function/whitelist function.
I've gotten one PM, a member shared an invite to a private torrent tracker, which is great. Frankly the DM system sucks shit anyways, just get rid imo
Maybe make it an option for users to disable them? I've only had good experiences with PMs, but I can def imagine them being used for harassment
Disagree, I've gotten plenty of good ones. That said, I'm open to the idea that they're bad on balance, but I thought I'd just point out that I've had productive discussion via PM
Putting limitations on new accounts such as posting cooldowns. Would reduce raiding.
Regarding transphobia from within the userbase, I wish that repeated whining about measures taken to protect trans comrades would be met with a ban. To allow some discussion of things like downvotes, maybe we could have a sticky on /c/feedback where we discuss pros and cons, but I'm tired of hearing how removing downvotes is "ruining the site". We've decided that protecting trans users is more important than a convenient browsing experience, and I'm tired of cis users speaking over trans comrades to insist that removing downvotes is unnecessary because they personally have never seen transphobia on the site.
Posting cooldowns for new accounts sounds like an excellent idea.
It was a good idea from day one and i really don't know why the fuck it was never implemented
Stuff takes time and it's hard for a dev team to know how much people want stuff, and how exactly to do it, since when you actually do change stuff you tend to get an enormous uproar of complaints. Also there's a lot of work to do on the dev side and there's been technical debt and issues to resolve, they're still rewriting the backend into a new language and can't do much "big" things until that's done, for example.
Yeah, from what I understand, developing new features is completely on hold until the backend rewrite is done. And, as a developer myself, I do want to point out to anyone reading that developing a "simple" feature such as posting cooldowns still takes a lot of developer time. Considering that the devs are freely volunteering their time, we ought to try our best to patient while waiting for new features. That said, I am also very much anticipating the addition of new features that will help reduce raiding and combat transphobia on the site.
We need more barriers to entry. Right now literally anyone can make as many accounts as they want and absolutely spam their hateful shit everywhere as often as they want.
Those barriers could be invites, IP logging/banning, posting cooldowns, interviews, literally ANYTHING. But we absolutely must have more barriers to entry.
I don't know about that. It sounds like a great way to slow the growth of the site to a complete standstill while creating actually more work. Why not just have a better system for monitoring new users and potentially a sort of two-tier account system where you can have a regular or high trust level?
I think that literally every poster worth anything leaving is probably going to slow the growth of the site more than a couple of small barriers. The thing about barriers to entry is that they impact good users one time only. Adding a minute or two to a new user, ONCE, is not a big deal to that user. They spend a minute doing a thing, and then they never have to do it again and they just enjoy the site forever. Adding a minute or two to a shit stirrer who wants to make a bunch of shit posts and keeps getting banned suddenly adds up quick. They have to go through that process EVERY SINGLE TIME they want to make a new account. It slows them down massively. If they want to create 100 accounts to spam us they have to spend 100 minutes making those accounts. That's not insignificant at all.
Small barriers to entry work very well as a deterrent. It's not going to catch everyone. There is no strategy that catches everyone. But it catches some of the lazier ones, meaning that the mods have less work to do. It's one tool in their arsenal. And depending on how its done, it's an easy one to add.
Adding a minute or two to a new user, ONCE, is not a big deal to that user.
Most people click out of a website that doesn't load within 3 seconds. This would absolutely stop a bunch of people from joining, and that includes good users.
You don't need to prevent ALL interaction and viewing the site, the vast majority of people lurk, at least when they first look around. Requiring some cooldown, a few hours, or days, when someone makes an account is not a big deal as they would lurk anyway, and it would improve the site immensely. Send an email that they can now post when the cooldown is off, and it's fine.
I could see something like this working, although it's hard to overstate how quickly people will nope out of a site they've never used if the slightest hurdle appears. If someone lands here from reddit or Twitter, and sees something they want to comment on, they might make an account -- but they could easily just move on and forget all about the place if the instant they make that account they get a "you can't post for 24 hours" message. I don't think an email would work at the end of that period, either, because I'm betting many users don't attach an email to their account or don't read emails from social media websites.
Maybe a "first 5 posts are free" approach would work? New users can create an account, create 5 posts/comments as fast as they want, but then the 24-hour cooldown period hits. Everyone but users who want to sign up and post a ton immediately would be largely unaffected, and that group of users would still get a sample before they're directed to watch mode for a while.
Yea it's about weighing the pros and cons, but I feel like with a good cooldown time the barrier is lower than actually bothering to make an account in the first place, and the pros would be high.
But do you mean like requiring a moderator to approve new users? Because that just creates even more work for moderators for little gain. In the non-virtual world, vetting is important because physical spaces and organizing just has higher stakes than silly online discussions, but online anything is really about the number of active users and good posts drowning out the bad. Vetting an online forum means it becomes as slow as real-world recruiting. Or maybe I'm making thus stuff up.
You don't need to manually approve, that would be bad. Just add like a cooldown of a few hours or days when you make a new account, after that you can comment and post. Seems like an easy fix since most people lurk anyway, especially when they first join.
I dunno, that could turn away some normal people who want to comment, while still letting chuds who want to wreck sit on an account for a few days before wrecking. It's difficult to be precise with this no matter what I guess. Purges as well always get a few good people, same as it always was :deeper-sadness:
Again the idea is that for most people they won't even notice or will have to wait a bit once, while chuds who want to wreck will have to do it everytime they get banned and that adds up very quickly, it would filter the chuds, raids and other shit like that enormously. It's about pros and cons to me, and honestly most people who join a community they like and want to post in, if they gotta make an account first, and then if they just have to wait a few hours, I don't see it as an issue. Finding this place, liking it and making an account is a bigger barrier than just waiting a bit on top of it imo.
Maybe it's a job that could be given to a set of trusted users? Sort of sub-moderators but only for vetting new users.
That would make things slow as hell. Make new users go through some sort of annoying quiz on trans rights or something.
Sure, but someone needs to evaluate the answers. Could be something like 3 short answer questions randomly selected from some larger set. "Vetting" could be as simple as someone taking 10 seconds to check someone's responses and approve/disapprove.
Multiple choice would be easier to automate, but more prone to abuse when wreckers memorize the right answers.
This does seem like it might be what's required, but I also understand and applaud the mods for trying to keep it relatively open so it can be a pipeline of sorts.
I wonder if a bigger mod team would be useful, so that trans mods especially don't have to spend all their time her staring into the abyss of worst shit that gets posted here, but I definitely don't want to disempower or imply they aren't up to the task - they've done amazingly in face of such hate and bullshit and are a lot stronger than I would be in their situation.
Obviously the rest of us need to be more proactive where we see this stuff and I'm open to any and all suggestions from our trans comrades.
If they want to add a janitor-tier mod role I would 100% be up for that.
I wouldn't have a problem with barriers to entry, but I really wouldn't like an invite system. I was originally a lurker on /r/cth. I didn't really post there or anywhere else on Reddit, really. After the ban, I googled and searched and found this place because I missed the content. I've learned more and become more radicalized, even if I do still mostly lurk here. An invite only system would have locked me out because I don't know anyone.
Personally, I like the kiddy pool idea or some sort of interview. People that stumble on ChaCha in good faith should be welcomed and given a chance to shake out the liberal brainworms. That, or as someone else said, have some of the subs be invite only or have applications. I never joined /c/transenby_liberation because I am cis. I enjoy reading the content and learning, but it's not my space to talk in, so I don't. I did join /c/anti_cishet_aktion because I'm queer. If I would've had to apply to the latter to join, I would have seen it as a layer to protect the comm from homophobia.
I guess in the long run, it kind of depends on what we're trying to build? Are we nothing but a leftist shitposting site? Or do we want to build the movement and be part of the leftist pipeline while being a shitposting site?
Some people have suggested making the entire site invite only, and while I think thats going too far, would it be a good idea to make more sensitive subs on the site invite only? I could be wrong, but from what I understand, a lot of the harassments of trans users seems to be happening/originally starting on subs specifically for trans users, so making it so that users would have to get invited/approved to view and interact with those subs could cut down on the harassment of trans users by taking away the ability of trolls to easily find targets, without making it overly difficult for new users to join the site.
The other thing that I've seen some people suggest is recruitment. Transphobia existed on the subreddit for sure, but one thing that negated that was the fact that the user base was so large and active that reactionaries were instantly dogpiled and downvoted into the ether. With this in mind, I think a recruitment drive would be the best long term solution, especially if we can get new users from online communities that are both leftist and militantly anti-transphobia.
Edit: Another user brought up DMs as a way that harassment happens which gave me the idea that DMs should also be invite only.
Making invites a requirement to post on c/transenbyliberation seems like a good idea.
Here are my views and suggestions on these:
1: Support it fully.
2: Agree, no criticisms there.
3: Kinda agree, but I see a problem, namely that the "50% downvoted" exemption wouldn't work for the first person to downvote it. Maybe it checks retroactively? So a bot would have time to differentiate between someone trolling and someone downvoting a legitimately shit take
4: I am pretty sure we have that already, but it can and should def be expanded if it helps in any way.
5: Agree fully.
6: on one hand, cool idea, on the other hand, could mean even more work for already overworked admins
7: sounds alright to me.
8: I'd leave the decision to the admins as for whether it is permanent, but I agree with the IP part.
9: Kinda agree, kinda don't, because without those posts, chances are that nobody (except the ones affected obv) would have even noticed the rise of Transphobia on the site.
10: If it's possible without having to do too much tech work, sure, sounds good.
Just throwing ideas out, mostly to address offsite brigaders:
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Waiting periods of at least 1 hour, but maybe up to a whole 24 hours before a person can post, comment, message, etc.
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A universal cooldown period for comments, posts, and messages (as in, shared between all of them, so if I comment, I also can't post or message for a few minutes). I'm thinking 3 minutes might be a nice number to start with.
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Potentially limit posting in certain communities to users with certain account age, vote totals, some more direct vetting method maybe? Somebody posting shit in c/gaming or whatever is probably less harmful than people being able to post shitty things in communities specifically geared for more sensitive or serious subjects.
On invites and IP bans: invites would definitely curb offsite trolling but it would obviously, as others have said, affect pipelining. I'm either-or on whether or not that's a worthwhile trade-off when the other measures (such as the above) may be enough, but I'm more strongly against IP bans simply because it would require logging IPs to begin with, and I worry about opsec, privacy, etc.
Addressing on-site transphobia, I don't know. If I see shitty comments or posts, I report them, regardless of if they're a long-timer, or themselves trans (regardless of if it's true or just a cover for a troll).
I'm just gonna echo this - making posting a time-taking endeavor would be a really good move. If someone wants to be a dick enough that they wait patiently to be able to be a dick, well, you can just ban them. But I doubt most dicks will wait that long before getting bored and fucking off
Cooldowns would be good. There is no good reason for anyone to comment more than once per 5 minutes or so.
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Once again, quarantine new people from posting until they reach a point threshold (100?) and/or make them wait like 2 days
Or just a kiddy pool section, where everyone can post, but new people can ONLY post there.
Also we'll know who's a libertarian infiltrator because they'll never leave it.
I think it depends on what y'all want ChaCha to be. If it's supposed to be a pipeline to help radicalize libs and other refugees from reddit and other site purges, you're gonna have to accept that you're going to get people with shit opinions and it's not through debate or banning, but exposure of other people's struggles, that's going to help them change their ways. In a scenario like that you'd probably want ChaCha to have a similar style of admin/moderation to reddit with a much more strict secondary site where people are vetted to entry based on their ChaCha activity. I would even say, use the secondary site to ORGANIZE light brigading of ChaCha to maintain the organic illusion of ChaCha being a safe, unified space without the unproductive struggle sessions and mass bannings. Noting, I don't know how well that strategy would work with downvotes being disabled. You'd want to be able to give the illusion of organic silencing of transphobes in a manner that isn't going to have them feel like they need to make 20 more sockpuppet accounts. A minimal karmic threshold score before posting and commenting would also help with that.
without making a second website, having the option to limit or not specific communities behind a interaction-cooldown would achieve this. Some communities are super open and there's an intent to educate libs (while still banning a lot of obvious shit, same as the old chapo), and some can't be immediately accessed, or maybe even require specific vetting by the community itself/mods. These more vetted communities can even be partially less-visible, as-in you maybe don't see the posts or the usernames on there if you're not on there, etc..
Then you can have a dedicated community (kinda like what user union is supposed to be) that can talk meta, organize education campaigns, response to issues, combat specific trends and suggest features, and that community can be behind a cooldown, an arbitrary amount of comments/votes/posts or even manual vetting.
- user block and mute features
- IP bans
- fewer overall bans and removed content with more public shaming and dogpiling
The Dogpill is actually the pill that my fucking dog can manage to find no matter if I put it in a slice of hotdog or a block of cheese. You eat catshit out of the garden, dog. You can eat a pill the size of an advil.
Most of my perspective on this issue comes from how I don't spend more than 2 hours a day on this site, definitely not the 8+ that it would seem to require to stay up on the nuances of everything. As someone who is not extremely online, there's a lot I don't see. I do notice with some shock when longtime posters suddenly start dropping like flies in ban waves, but I also recognize that there are people who silently leave and this is at least equally bad.
I made a thread about downbulls as the counterpart to upbears, just not a linear opposite. Someone's very clearly here to make a mess? Ban them instantly. Someone's posted for a while but done some hurtful things? Warn them, give them a bull on their user page that links to their problematic post(s), and if they accumulate too many then ban them and any user will easily be able to see why, without sifting through hundreds of actions per day of mod logs.
