I have been looking through a long thread on another instance where a few users have been trying to convince that instance to defederate from Exploding Heads - because they do not want to see the content posted on Exploding Heads.
I have thought long and hard about how to please these people. They do have the option to individually block Exploding Heads communities or users, but they either do not know how to or simply do not want to.
In the end I realized if I ban those specific users requesting defederation from Exploding Heads - they will not see any content from Exploding Heads and therefore will not be offended by it. (Truth be told I am not sure if some of these users have really visited our site or interacted with our users).
So today I have banned those users with the explanation that they have said they do not want to see Exploding Heads content. If any of those users wish to be unbanned in the future, all they have to do is say so and I will happily unban them.
These users are not being banned in order to censor them, but to help them achieve what they have been requesting - to not see Exploding Heads content.
I hope you all find this a fair and reasonable action - if not let me know.
Who decides whether a particular user is arguing in good or bad faith, exactly? I’ve seen a few comments on “tolerant” communities get deleted that I personally thought were made in good faith but brought up inconvenient points for the majority opinion. Before you ask, there is exactly zero chance I will find them for a demo.
In this case we’re talking about a whole community where we’ve got proof that people post intolerant content with false premises. There’s a whole thread with pictures of it. People who disagree with that shouldn’t subscribe to an instance that allows it.
It’s not an issue that can be tackled on a user by user basis… Unless you want to hire and pay for a bunch of full time mods to watch every posts on our instance? You know… What private social medias need to resort to to try and keep extremism and false information under control?
You know what they say, if you hang out with a bunch of racists then you are too.
What I am seeing is any opposition no matter how reasonable instantly gets equated to fascist/nazi/whatever and exiled. This results in the people that subscribe to these views being siloed in an echochamber themselves. I want to see good faith discussions that aren’t cut short by mods or admins because they are too intolerant of what they consider to be “intolerance”.
And having them in an echo chamber reduces their numbers in the long run because they have less space to post their ideas and to convince others to adhere to them.
Let’s not pretend what we can see in the screenshots in the other thread is “reasonable opposition”.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888
Good faith discussions with extremists/those who subscribe to conspiracy theories doesn’t work and all experts agree with that hence why they don’t debate them in the first place.
So you literally just want to control the narrative presented to naive viewers? I thought this was universally agreed upon to be bad joojoo.
Just let people select what they want to see themselves, out of the entirety of fediverse.
Of course you’ll get that if you select the worst of the worst. Surely you could find innocuous conversation there as well.
I mean, way too many non-cooky “conspiracy theories” end up being the actual truth. Some select cases in point: mass NSA spying (thanks Snowden), operation northwoods (thanks JFK), tuskegee syphilis experiments.
Questioning authority and the narrative authority supports should be commonplace.
People are still free to subscribe to that instance if that’s what they want to see, taking a neutral stance towards it is still encouraging it.
If you think you’re better than actual scientists and experts to bring arguments to convince them then by all means, create an account over there and talk them out of their delusions. We’re not a support group, we have no obligations to entertain people that want to live in a parallel reality.
If they get defederated I lose the option to subscribe to them.
I want to have 1 fediverse account, not 10s of them.
You can have one account over there then or on any other instances that is federated with them, I’m sure there are plenty of instances that are federated with everyone.
I started on this instance because the admin stance was to my liking. Unfortunately, he decided to let the mob rule. I need to start looking at VPS providers to run my own instance.
I just read your whole conversation, and I understand what you are saying. I, myself, was once banned from a community for simply talking about the language people use for gender and sex, and what it all means. Anyone who knows me knows I’m really high on the tolerance spectrum, so being banned for that comment really threw me for a loop. That mod took zero time to try to figure out who I was and gave my words no charity at all. “He’s talking about the semantics of gender vs sex. Ban!” (This was reddit, and it was one of the power mods)
It seems to me a lot of mods have a hair trigger when it comes to banning people who want to have a deeper discussion on a topic. Those who want to raise questions that might make people a little uncomfortable because they have to think. They instantly assume you’re “concern trolling” or something. Nope! I’m just a philosopher. I have questions, and I have ideas, and I like to talk about our use of language. Especially when the use of language is a major point of contention between the two sides.
I just proofread this comment and realized that it would probably get me banned from certain liberal communities. I sound like a right-winger crying about free speech. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Fucking humans. We waste so much brain power trying to figure out what “side” a person is on so we know whether to hate them or not.
That being said, nothing in the screenshots is good discussion.
That’s exactly what they would claim as the ban reason. I am way too familiar with this myself.