not everyone has free speech here. there is a large contingent of people who feel too uncomfortable and too attacked on a consistent basis to feel comfortable posting at all, much less on more controversial topics. you might think you’re saying that everyone should have free speech, but all you’re doing is saying that the speech of the same three people who constantly derail threads to say whatever they want is more important than that of the people who are too nervous to speak at all. that’s not egalitarian, it’s not equal, it’s not fair, and you should know full well that “free speech for everyone” is one of the weakest, emptiest arguments one can muster.
Why are you asking people to take responsibility for other people’s emotions?
because this is the basic, essential nature of empathy and it’s an integral part of being a kind person
are you seriously asking me “why do i have to care about other people?” because that seems like a cruel, bad-faith question, doubly so given that the deliberate purpose of this thread is to figure out how to make intfiction a better-moderated, more comfortable place for everyone, not just people with 1000+ posts.
This thread was started by an administrator asking for feedback from forum regulars, so I’m offering my feedback as a forum regular.
I’ve been reading and posting here for years. My own forum might have different rules, but on intfiction.org I abide by the same Code of Conduct as everyone else, and I’m happy to offer feedback on how this forum can accomplish what it’s setting out to do.
Also, as aschultz pointed out, Intfic isn’t the only alternative to this forum. If someone wants to discuss a social allegory in IF without the risk that someone will disagree with the game’s message, there are already places for that. I don’t think this forum needs to be converted into another one.
FOR.
WHOM.
Consider the space where speech is “free without exception,” which in effect means free for straight white dudes.
The people who wanna have productive discussions without having their experiences, reality, and identity constantly called into question? They don’t get free speech, they get nonstop sealioning. The people who wanna express something without being harrassed? They don’t get free speech.
People who treat free speech as some airy abstract that essentially consists of “nobody can stop me from saying things” don’t actually understand or care about freedom of speech at all. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? If I exercise free speech but nobody listens because someone derails the conversation into “arguing the premise” of whether or not women are people, do I have freedom of speech at all? Free discourse has to be nurtured and cared for by supplying spaces where it can actually flourish - and yeah, that will mean pulling out some weeds so that the garden can grow. And that will entail deciding what weeds are.
Because, if you don’t decide what weeds are, it will be decided for you. The most vicious and selfish plants will thrive, choking the life out of everything else. Ordinarily, those plants are the ones regarded as weeds. But you have refused to make that assignment. Flowers are free to grow in your garden of weeds. But they won’t.
“For everyone without exception” doesn’t exist. Speech is not consequence-free; if it was, it wouldn’t matter whether it’s free. Speech can be used to silence and attack - and, in doing so, to harm someone else’s access to free discourse. In online spaces, I’ve long observed that discourse is subject to a Gresham’s dynamic: bad discourse drives out good. Bad users drive out good ones. Every time someone exercises their “right” to “argue the premise” that white supremacy is real, they’re signaling to people of color: your concerns will not be taken seriously; you’re not welcome here; and I will push back against attempts at discussing your experiences.
And then, of course, in the traditional pattern of abusers everywhere, people on the receiving end of this are punished no matter how they react.
If you argue back against bigotry, you have to perform the fucked-up dance of arguing against bigots without calling them out as bigots - as that would be a “personal attack” apparently; you have to perform civility and submit to tone policing, lest you be deemed to have lost the argument by getting angry.
If you don’t argue back, the bigotry is implicitly accepted and will only grow bolder and louder, and pretty soon you might as well be on reddit.
If you leave, you will be branded as oversensitive, weak; blamed, essentially, for not wanting to submit to the abusive song-and-dance of “arguing the premise.”
And then, when you are cowed, or exhausted, or gone, or banned, the old white dudes will pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves on safeguarding “free speech” while sitting on the bones of discourses that they killed. Unmoderated 4chan boards have “free speech without exception,” except, of course, the ideological policing of viewpoints in them is the most vicious there is anywhere on the internet, and the reality is that speech is least free there; because it is a garden where only the most vicious weeds grow.
OK, so, actual suggestions:
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No vague “Multiple people have violated the Code of Conduct here. Do not talk about this going forward.” warnings. Be clear about what was a problem and why. Uninvolved people are not going to hunt through five pages of posts in an administrative forum just to find out what exactly was wrong; what they are going to take away is what is in the thread, and what they will probably take away is “both sides are wrong,” regardless of whether this was the moderator’s intention. This is particularly a problem for threads that are likely to be read by non-regulars. Keep in mind how a person just stumbling onto the thread, via Google or wherever, might interpret it.
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While well-intentioned, the suggestion that people just “not reply” to violations is, quite frankly, horrifying. Not replying to violations doesn’t make them go away. It isolates people. It tells them that whatever violations happen, they can do nothing about, nor can they expect anyone else to do it. In this way it’s worse than saying “shut up and take it”; it’s saying “shut up and take it, and I’ll make sure nobody is going to help you.” Again, keep in mind what a reader might think. They will see a comment that no one has any objection to. (This was my biggest problem with the comp gag rule, incidentally. But in this case it’s like the gag rule extends to everyone, except of course whoever made the offending post in the first place.)
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Warnings in private messages are also tacit acceptances. A reader won’t see whether people have been warned. And while it is nice to think people might listen to them and change their behavior, warnings are in reality more likely to cause them to escalate it.
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As far as people responding to threads elsewhere – if people decide the Code of Conduct is too restrictive for whatever they want to say in a discussion they are participating in, and they say it in another trafficked public forum, that doesn’t exonerate them from having said it, and it is unrealistic to expect it to go unread. I don’t, obviously, think this dynamic is good for discussion. Nor do I think “I want to say nasty things and the Code of Conduct won’t let me!” is equivalent to “For my personal safety, I do not want to post on a forum with connections to GG” (source: page 8 and on, https://intfiction.org/t/code-of-conduct-community-standards/7467/1)
I’m 100% for tight moderation. Warnings, limited time bans, unlimited bans and everything. But the forum should be more open too: we should be able to see if the post was edited (by author or mod) or deleted by moderator.
That said, the Code of Conduct is almost irrelevant here. This thread, as many before it, was derailed and transformed into a different discussion.
So I propose A Rule Against Derailment:
Let me demonstrate with some examples.
In this case, [2] expresses her opinion that’s poorly related to the original subject, and [3] moves on to discuss the author’s personality, thereby making it difficult to discuss H. Both [2] and [3] are not breaking the CoC because they are participating in a civil discussion, respect others and certainly don’t use any offensive language.
Despite the fact that [2] is discussing a person and her opinion may offend some users, it’s still related to the subject H. Therefore, it’s still possible for the later posters to discuss H. After [3], however, it’s much harder to return the discussion to the original track.
In this case, an opinion [2] extends beyond supplied in [1] the question, provoking a debate about the identity of the original and impeding the topic discussion.
That’s a tough call because [2] is, again, poorly related. It provokes [3] that’s not relevant to the topic of H. So [2] should probably get its own thread.
Edit: Sorry for derailing the discussion. 
Empathy is different than responsibility.
Caring about other people’s feelings and trying to avoid causing offense is reasonable. Preventing someone from speaking because another person might take offense is unreasonable.
Ultimately, as adults, it’s our individual responsibility to manage our emotional responses to the things that we encounter in life.
Rules that restrain or punish one person’s actions based on the subjective emotional state of another person are oppressive. If an actor can’t reliably determine whether a contemplated action will break a rule prior to performing it, then the rule shouldn’t exist.
There’s an important distinction between being offended and being uncomfortable or nervous, though, and I feel like it’s disingenuous to conflate the two. The ‘subjective emotional state’ of a person isn’t in question here so much as their sense of whether their opinions and experiences are desired in that space and will be heard freely and won’t be overridden or unfairly picked over and won’t invite undue negative attention. This, the way I see it, is the problem marginalized groups face in spaces where their voice is given equal volume, without appropriate moderation, to the voices of those who do not want them to speak.
Hi, also, I guess. I don’t post here much. I suppose I don’t really have a dog in this fight beyond wanting this community to be a good and growing one where people respect each other and treat each other as such, and I can’t pretend to know for sure how to do that. I just hope this discussion ends fruitfully, rather than in deletions and topic lockings and other unpleasant things.
The only thing I’ll say about “should people take responsibility for others’ emotions?” is to pick a stance and stick to it. Be consistent. If you take the stance that they shouldn’t, then you forfeit the ability to, say, criticize people for swearing. If you take the stance that they should, then you forfeit the ability to call it invalid when people bring up how they are affected.
This is closely related to the discussion about civility. “Everyone should be civil” is not the same thing, at all, as “it’s not incivil if I’m right” or “it’s not incivil if they deserve it.” Don’t espouse one if your actions espouse the other. This is, I think, the source of all the disagreements. (I don’t want to bring everything back to politics, but that subject has been broached many times before now, so a fine example of that is playing out right now by people who object to Mike Pence being booed at Hamilton but did not object to Obama being heckled before Congress.) (Before anyone says anything, this isn’t a partisan thing – “everyone should be civil” is essentially a centrist standpoint, with objections on the right and left – it’s just the example in the news today.)
I don’t recall ever having done so.
Edit: I agree with your point about uniformity of civility.
I wasn’t addressing you specifically.
Yes, you do. Free speech doesn’t mean you’re entitled to an audience’s attention, nor does it mean freedom from disagreement.
If people respond to your speech with “nonstop sealioning”, it’s up to you whether you want to respond to them, ignore them, or flag them for moderation. If you’re getting the same questions over and over, you can link to a previous answer or just scroll past. If you’re being harassed, you can report it.
Having civil discussions, and handling disagreement without insulting or swearing at people, is not usually considered a form of punishment. It’s a basic expectation for participating in society, holding down jobs and relationships, etc. It’s not always easy, and it takes practice at first, but it’s a skill that many – if not most – people have a handle on even before adulthood, just like they learn not to hit people and throw things whenever they’re upset.
Perhaps, as you seem to be suggesting, there are some people who are constitutionally incapable of having civil discussions and who are poorly served by a Code of Conduct they can’t help but break. Even so, I don’t think the case has been made for optimizing CoC enforcement around them instead of around people who can choose to comply with the rules, especially if there are other places already suited to their unique needs.
Unfortunately, I think the ship sailed years ago on people respecting one another and treating each other as such. This topic is pointless. No one is going to change their behavior or their opinion. The thread is asking, essentially, “do we want people to harass people here, or do we want them to do it elsewhere?”
(The most grotesque part of the events of the past days is the insinuation that I am enjoying them. I was at WordPlay when this was all happening. It ruined the festival for me completely; now I wish I hadn’t spent the money.)
I feel like I’ve had a rough weekend from all this and none of it was directed at me. I am very sorry this has happened to you and around you Lucea.
The idea is that violations would indeed go away if the moderators took a firmer stance on the Code of Conduct and deleted the violations. Replying to them before that happens just invites the violators to commit more violations by replying themselves, and gives the moderators more to clean up. I sincerely believe that not replying, even now without strict moderator enforcement, would’ve snuffed (sometimes prevented) many arguments I’ve seen over the past two years. Not all arguments, mind, but many. And if that practice is backed by moderator enforcement then I think it’ll work even better.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. It kinda fits into Oreolek’s suggestion that moderated messages should remain visible somehow for the public to see. Maybe replace them with a little “deleted by a moderator” note. For warnings I suppose a little note could say “user was warned” in addition to that. I can understand how keeping the empty posts around would help with transparency, although my worry is that having a bunch cluttered in one spot would still look like an injury to a thread. I could imagine people prolonging an argument by then talking about the quantity of moderated messages itself. In any case, if moderated messages do remain visible as blank spots in threads, I think having a curt and prewritten “user was warned for Code of Conduct violations” line would be necessary. It would need to be something that chills the mood, not something that invites people to throw stones at the moderated party.
On the other hand, I disagree with where this logic is headed. Warnings could escalate things, true, but I believe very much in giving people the chance to understand and change their behavior. If people aren’t given that chance, and bans are handed out automatically with a no-contest policy, that’s when I would leave the forum myself. Thankfully that’s far from being how the Code of Conduct is enforced at the moment.
I would like to see a significant improvement of civility at intfiction.org, and I think that’s an improvement within our grasp.
But that’s the limit to our sphere as moderators. Intfic, euphoria, Twitter, Reddit, etc, etc - these are outside our control.
Quite so. I don’t advise anyone to “just ignore the trolls.” Instead, the moderators should remove the violations.
Note that replying to violations doesn’t make them go away; only moderators can do that.
And do you not see the inevitable result? Nobody is going to change their behavior. They will just take it elsewhere, escalated. Which perhaps makes you feel less personally culpable, but does nothing for the person on the receiving end.
As far as not replying, maybe an extreme example will make people see my point:
Person A: (makes IF post)
Person B: “Person A killed my entire family. They are a murderer.”
By forbidding people to reply, everybody reading the thread will just assume Person A did, in fact, murder several people. No one objected, after all! Person A said nothing in their defense, and no one said anything to support them! Given that it can sometimes take days for violations to be dealt with, this is effectively tacitly endorsing person B’s post by allowing it to stand unopposed. Unless you want to suppose that people will just not read anything, ever, until a moderator shows up.
Relatedly, these are not “arguments.” This is a gross mischaracterization. The incident that prompted this thread was not an argument. It was a postmortem write up of my game that turned into a flame war directed at me, with a diversion for several people to come out of the woodwork to claim I deserved it. Until this is addressed for what it is, no progress will be made.
If the question we’re asking is: “should this forum require its members to take responsibility for other people’s emotions?” then the answer is clearly yes.