My concern is that who is the arbiter that determines whether or not a particular comment crosses the line of not being "inventive enough" and what is their exact standard?
the mods, and the community.
don’t focus on the “inventive enough” because, seriously, we’re not going to remove a comment that is low effort. but if that low effort comment is just “ort ort ort” then yeah, probably gonna remove it because it’s A. removing the very real and scary fact that gaters are actual humans doing these bad things, not animals who don’t know any better and B. shitposting.
It's common sense that we're going to avoid hyperbolic and ableist statements. But calling a spade a spade is still an effective, succinct and valid statement.
you’d think so, but we already have some users disagreeing over whether it’s ok to insinuate gaters have mental illness. and the thing is, a spade is not a pile of trash. I’m sorry, but I’m not budging on this part. if you can’t do anything more than use an insult I’d expect in /r/SRSsucks, it’s gonna get removed.
want to point out that a gater idea is vapid? good! criticize that idea with all your might! but are you going to resort to calling the gater themselves a pile of human excrement? bad! they’re an actual human being who holds that vapid idea you were criticizing, and you’re making it seem like they just aren’t smart enough to know any better when they absolutely fucking should!
We already have the ability to downvote: must we aggressively moderate things that don't meet our standard?
I won’t speak for other mods on this, but as for myself: fuck the vote system. it’s easily brigaded time and again, it’s susceptible to driveby votes and bandwagoning where people instinctively vote rather than respond to a comment or report it for us to remove, and people give way too much fucking weight to the size of the number next to a comment or submission.
if I had my way, every thread would be in contest mode and people would just not be able to vote. people care so much more about their ability to down vote than they do about upvoting and supporting the stuff they want to see. that’s why we’ll have threads where a single comment has three dozen down votes but the submission itself only has twelve total votes.
I subscribed to Ghazi on the premise that this was mostly snarking the movement and I recall several times when mods in the past reinforced that we are here to laugh. To enforce these rules takes a kind of straight faced seriousness which moves away from that goal and makes us something more "official" feeling. To me anyways.
again, I do not understand how anybody can read my post, see the heavy usage of sarcasm and encouragement to INSULT AS MUCH AS YOU WANT JUST DON’T BE AN ASSHOLE ABOUT IT, and think that I want us to become /r/AskHistorians in seriousness.
no, you are not being told to stop making jokes. I am encouraging you to make more jokes, and make them better and funnier instead of relying on the exact kind of lazy, toxic tropes that we often criticize in other media.
Asking users to monitor themselves is one thing but to deputize ourselves into policing each other has always been something of a messy experiment in my own experiences.
and if we feel the experiment has failed, then we’ll let the community know.
but honestly, our community usually does pretty good at calling each other out, it’s just that we’ve got a lot more users now than before and there’s a lot more negativity here than before which I and other mods wanted to address. I want positivity, and we all should want rapier wit to shine through the depths of internet hell.
the idea that GamerGate is “right" is another thing that some people aren't willingly choosing to think: they're actually going off what they've been taught to believe is right.
disagree wholeheartedly. GG supporters have been reached out to and shown why GG is terrible time and time again.
remember, this is the group that defended child porn. they actively chose to defend child porn. they actively chose to support calling Wu a man and fostering the idea that transgender = bad.
It’s naive to assume that every GGer is ignoring the facts and that they know better: it's more of a case that they should know better, but possibly do not.
which is exactly what I said in my post. they’re old enough to know better. if they don’t, by now, after 7 months, realize that using “fag” and “tranny” and actual nazi propaganda is a bad thing, how is pretending that they’re little kids or teenagers going to change that? it won’t. so why not take the higher road of not pretending all teenagers are likely to think nazi propaganda and child porn are cool? why not take the road where we point out that these are adults who absolutely should know this shit is horrible, and are still being part of it, with the full agency to better themselves and listen to what everyone else has been telling them about why GG is wrong?
they have agency. just because they don’t use it, doesn’t mean they don’t have it. they can learn. if they choose not to learn, we have no reason to empathize with them and pretend they’ll grow out of it.