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.)
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.)
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.
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.
Some people won’t change their behavior. Others will. This thread isn’t about a particular incident or person, but about how the Code of Conduct should be applied across the board going forward. I believe change is possible, and even in extreme situations I believe rehabilitation is possible. I have to believe that to, well, to participate in society, pretty much.
If people take their behavior elsewhere, though, I don’t know what to say. They will always take it elsewhere as long as they have breath to speak and an opinion to voice. You can’t prevent that without policing the world. I don’t think that’s possible or productive, but it’s certainly outside this thread’s scope and outside this forum’s power.
I think this is impossible to enforce though. You can’t know where all the little corners are. And if people are participating productively on this forum, to me that should count for something. I am not, for example, in favor of banning everyone from here who has an account on the other intfiction forum too. I understand that some people would prefer that, and if it’s what happens, well, this thread was made to get feedback from members, so maybe it will happen. I wouldn’t want to personally participate in a culture with that approach, however. I’d still probably drop in for questions about code but I’d excuse myself from the social aspect. I always prefer trying to give people chances and discussing things (in private when that’s called for).
In extreme situations I’d agree with you. For example, if a Grand Dragon or something appeared here, yes, it would require a very weird scenario for a ban to be inappropriate. Some situations will be that cut-and-dry (although hopefully still never quite that extreme). Usually it’s more complicated than that, however, which is why I view a ban as a last resort, but why I support moderators being able to delete individual messages.
I agree with this sentiment. On this thread people have said things like:
and… wasn’t there a comment about staying away from the forum unless you’re heavily invested (that was not the term used) in parser development? And people have talked about this in other threads. The community is, quite clearly, losing out on a lot of people who could make valuable contributions because of the sort of toxicity that kicked this thread off.
Again, this. If we don’t want to fix the problems here, then fine, I guess people who don’t want a toxic space have to find/make one. But I do find it a bit disingenuous for people to say “If you don’t like the atmosphere here, go find your own place,” when there was a distinct effort to moderate this space to make it less toxic, and it’s been met by a chorus of demands that this space must be kept open to any sort of noxious stuff up to literal Nazism. Why would I expect that if people try to make a decent space somewhere else, it won’t be met with the same demands?
(By the way, there’s an important difference here between not being able to defend your arguments against challenge and not wanting to have to deal with the same argument over and over when you’ve seen it a million times, and it keeps coming back more or less unchanged.)
Again, it’s not just this forum; places like Reddit and Twitter and many other places on the internet have put forth unrestrained free speech as a supposed value, and the result is a swamp of harassment. This is not an obscure fact.
Agreed with all this too.
The thing is, all of this requires a lot of good judgment on the part of moderators. That doesn’t mean that the rule should be that only the most woke people should be moderators, because wokeness doesn’t necessarily mean good judgment; but there does need to be some kind of board standard on some shared values. (Again, we haven’t even been able to come to consensus on this thread on “It’s not OK to be a Nazi.”) And the moderators need to be able to come to some judgment on when those values are being violated, or when “civil discussion” is turning into sea-lioning or harassment, and when people are derailing discussions as opposed to innocently digressing, and to do something about that. Trying to come up with some neutral rules that can be applied without judgment doesn’t seem like it will be enough. And we’ve tried the light moderation thing and it’s not working.
And maybe it’s not worth trying to save this forum. Maybe starting over somewhere else with a clean slate and a trusted mod team is the way to go.
Well, this seems like a situation where the mods don’t necessarily have to seek someone out they could respond to a situation being brought to their attention. If I alert a mod saying “Hey, the person who just responded to my postmortem has been dragging me all day on r/mattweinerisapoopyhead. Would you mind taking them off my thread even though they haven’t said anything out of line there yet?” then I think that’d be a reasonable request, though of course I wouldn’t expect the mods to monitor r/mattweinerisapoopyhead to see who they should ban proactively.
[Note: AFAIK r/mattweinerisapoopyhead does not exist. I am certain that my postmortem, and the game to which it might be attached, do not exist.]
Yeah, like, I wasn’t gonna say this initially, but I was terrified posting the WIP of one of my games here due to its content (it’s about the romantic relationship between two gay men and you know, somehow I am not surprised that when I did post it, it was roundly ignored) and I don’t feel comfortable or welcome posting here, as a gay man and a survivor of trauma. I mean, this is a place that thinks there’s a “discussion” to be had about trigger warnings, for goodness sake.