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If only for my own selfish reasons: My main Lemmy account is on Lemmgrad (I honestly haven't posted here in a year), so as long as you federate with Lemmygrad it doesn't really matter one way or the other. If you want access to the entire Fediverse and Hexbear, just make a Lemmygrad account and you'll be able to post on Hexbear (because it's federated with Lemmygrad) and the rest of the Fediverse (since most are federated with Lemmygrad as well), but people from other places in the Fediverse won't be able to post on Hexbear (preserving it for people who want the safe space).
We roll with it as part of the fun - the level of an adventure is posted beforehand, and there's enough people that there's always enough players available for a given adventure who are around appropriate. Part of the fun of a West Marches game is having players of slightly varying levels; 3.5e in particular is not really balanced in such a way that characters of the same level are always intended to be of equivalent power.
Personally, I think it's unfair to the moderators to expect anything more from them than issuing bans for outright rules violations and warnings for less clearly infringing behavior. Part of this "siege mentality" I think comes from the people who constantly barrage the moderators to do more and more to fix what are ultimately minor problems with the site. Upvotes were removed, mass bannings happened, but the mods are still overworked, the struggle sessions are still ongoing, and the people who these policies were implemented to protect still aren't happy - I administer a DnD community that primarily recruits on this site, and I know more trans people who were banned from this site or think the new policies are hurting the community overall than those who are happy with the changes or feel safer/more comfortable here. I don't claim the moderators have bad intentions, just that whatever they're doing now clearly isn't working.
Points 1, 2.0, 4, 5, 6? Great stuff. Agreed completely. A community cannot remain healthy with a staff vs. userbase mentality.
But while you might have some points in your other suggestions, I cannot say I am as wholly in support of those. In some ways, I agree that less transparency can be good - and by that I mean, I really think that the moderators should save their smug, personalized, gloating "congrats on your ban" replies for actual chuds and not just - as you point out in point 1 - people who the mods assume are not acting in good faith but whose posts are within the realm of acceptable discourse.
On your "stop struggle sessions before they start" point, I think the most impactful policy the moderators could enforce in this regard is removing "Goodbye Chapo" posts (at least, those that are primarily whining; "college is starting, not going to be posting as often, love you guys" posts are fine of course). It's my belief that a lot of the current struggle sessions can ultimately be derived from drama surrounding this genre of post (a kind that was rarely seen on the original subreddit) and the best way to handle it is to immediately remove any such post and grant their wish with a swift and immediate ban.
They didn't "insult" Brooke's post, and the poster, Terk, is a trans woman herself (and yes, I know this for certain, we play DnD together every week and I can be pretty sure she's not a secret fascist or a "wrecker" or whatever they're calling people these days). And the "Oh, she's ND, it was just a mistake" shit is a bad take. Agree or disagree, what Terk said was entirely within the bounds of acceptable dialogue. Were I in Terk's position, I would have been far less kind.
She expressed mild criticism of posting mindless "I <3 my trans comrades" posts every single day that she thought felt rote and ingenuine. Brooke blew this into some sort of world-ending personal attack and made a self-absorbed, borderline narcissistic "Goodbye ChapoChat" post and the mods, ever eager to signal virtue without using their eyes nor brains, banned Terk before stating that she "won't be unbanned" (LMAO) and profusely apologizing to Brooke (despite the fact that no real assault was committed against her) and calling terk, who is a trans woman, "terfrockerfeller".
It's just the last in a long line of incidents and decisions regarding the lemmy where the penalty for a bad take (or any criticism of the moderators or their favorite users) is turning from downvotes and warnings to permanent bans for the pettiest bullshit.
It's only human to view the world through the lens of the stories in our popular conscience. If anything, the issue is just that the stories in our popular conscience are garbage and are becoming increasing beholden to Capitalist interests and consumerism in general.
It is, literally, terrorism. Rather than attempting to beat the Japanese through military strategy and might (y'know, warfare), they instead decided it was much easier to murder millions of civilians and say "If you don't surrender to our demands, we'll murder millions more". It is utterly indefensible.
Terrorism is sometimes justifiable when the terrorists are operating in self-defense or in service to some inherently just cause. But terrorism to win a war you're already winning faster so fewer of your own soldiers die (and the ebil gommunists get a smaller share of the spoils) is literal supervillain shit.
Most likely they're referring to /r/MensLib, which is the subreddit for the Mens' Liberation movement. Essentially it's "Mens' Rights but not just fashy whataboutism".
There are some legitimate complaints about how discourse on /r/MensLib can tend towards self-flagellative virtue signaling despite aiming to be a male-positive space. It is, on the whole, however, Cool and Good. Most people who complain about it are just incapable of understanding that the basis of male oppression is in the same toxic-masculine and patriarchal social norms that harm women.
I try to stay conscious of the biases inherent in the West Marches format, but the game definitely tends more towards satire than subversion. Players delight in being Imperialist bastards.
Generally preferred that players stick to books published before 2006, but anything - aside from Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, and Magic of Incarnum - is allowed at DM discretion. Optimization threshhold is low, though, to be clear. Tome of Battle isn't banned because I hate Martials; it's banned so new players don't feel like they need any book other than the PHB to play a Martial (as ToB Martials are basically just better versions of PHB Martials).
If all a ban means is losing a name, then what's the fucking point in the first place?
If we're going to be discussing bans we have to treat them as if they actually do what they say on the tin, even if they don't. Especially when you consider that (rightfully) the moderators are much more ban-happy towards very-new accounts. If they're also banning original accounts like it's a symbolic act that means nothing for petty bullshit reasons, you're reducing good-faith, long-term posters to the same treatment as alt-spammers.
It's no surprise that a website that is based on the same general structure as Reddit perpetuates Reddit-like behavior. An anonymous webforum with no vetting process is full of constant brigading and astroturfing? And people with bad takes?
For what it's worth, I don't have any real complaints with the actions taken by the moderator and admin teams so far; but I also don't fully understand what can be done. This site is full of reddit-bros, because most of us are from the CTH subreddit. We have reddit-brain. We mindlessly voice our opinion on whatever topic is shoved in front of us with no regard for the relative weight our opinion should hold, because that is the mentality instilled by a Reddit-like, karma-based webforum. It doesn't matter if a poster is an actual activist, or a long-time active member of the community. All voices are equal, even if they shouldn't be.
Frankly, I'm just unsure what you (and others) expect out of the moderator team and userbase that would make the site more approachable to trans users. The guy Cass was arguing with? They took appropriate action and served a temp-ban. People bitched, likely because they assumed the ban was permanent - there isn't any kind of visual indication as to whether a ban is temporary or permanent short of looking at the modlog, which none of these split-second-attention-spam upvoters are going to do. And people - like me - look at a user being banned for an admittedly bad take, and a common attitude ("I don't know who you are" is the appropriate response to someone claiming expertise on an anonymous forum, though the vulgarity is what pushed it to be a temp-bannable offense in my mind), and I wonder, "What bad take will get me banned?". To dive into the specific issue: while transphobia is often more covert than the blatant and easy-to-spot transphobia we can all spot and agree is ban-worthy, at some point there's going to be a lot of people who are just gullible and unknowingly repeating dogwhistles, and it's better to deal with those people through discussion and downvotes rather than permanent bans. And if you do permanently ban those people, frankly, it's completely justified when people complain that the mods are overstepping their bounds, going from cracking down on rules-breaking behavior to serving bans for bad takes. This isn't happening yet, as far as I can see - but it seems like some people are calling for it to.
Agreed. Encouraging people to organize and do praxis is good. Incessantly bitching, complaining, and shaming about how there are 10,000 people on the site and not all of them are actually doing real-world activism is not.
I'm a Socialist. Yes, I probably should be putting more effort into radicalizing people I know IRL, unionizing my workplace, going to more protests. But also, I'm a lazy piece of shit and I'm not going to do any of that, for the foreseeable future at least.
Any energy spent browbeating people for sitting in front of a computer wasting their life would be better spent building a path to activism. It's easy to say "You should be doing more", but while it might make you feel better, it doesn't actually result in people doing more. It's harder to put in the work of convincing people to do more, and removing barriers to people doing more.
A moderator team that generates a feeling of superiority over their userbase because they're doing more "praxis" than average can only really devolve into said moderator team eventually dissolving the community and telling everyone to "go outside", as if the actual result of such an action wouldn't just be the unmotivated userbase moving onto other websites where they can be lazy fuckers, while destroying a centralized left-wing community that could have been used as a pool for radicalization and recruitment.
·3 years ago
·4 years ago
✅ If only for my own selfish reasons: My main Lemmy account is on Lemmgrad (I honestly haven't posted here in a year), so as long as you federate with Lemmygrad it doesn't really matter one way or the other. If you want access to the entire Fediverse and Hexbear, just make a Lemmygrad account and you'll be able to post on Hexbear (because it's federated with Lemmygrad) and the rest of the Fediverse (since most are federated with Lemmygrad as well), but people from other places in the Fediverse won't be able to post on Hexbear (preserving it for people who want the safe space).