@The Webmaster: “One thing to note, is that as BobaBoard becomes more public, you might have onlookers not part of the community reaching out to harass people on other socials, even if no one here would be the type of person to do that.”
I’ve been thinking about this, and what troubles there might be in providing people a public space to complain vs. preventing bystanders from taking advantage of those complaints... It’s a very human impulse to complain about stuff you don’t like, and also a very human impulse to rubberneck at drama you’re not involved in. Complaining about people and trends is a strong force for bringing people together. (Case in point: all the gossip sites that exist on the internet, “discourse” channels on discord.) I’ve seen some really interesting and productive conversions come from shit someone brought to the table to complain about. But the problem comes when people start to bully others based on that gossip.
One starting point I can think of is “What policies did KF use and what culture did they foster that led them to become such a horrible cesspool, and how can we try to act against that sort of culture?”
Part of that is the immensely right wing pool that was recruited from which I think was attracted to the encouragement and culture of casual bigoted language, but many people from all over the political spectrum use that site so it’s not just the rw userbase.
I think one thing we can do on here at least is not cultivating “receipts” or anything else that would commonly go in a callout post against someone in these threads. Preventing people from gathering mass amounts of “damning evidence” against a specific individual’s character can really reduce the potential harm of someone with an axe to grind coming across a thread about that person’s action.
In general I think making threads about a specific person’s character should obviously be discouraged too.
Thank you for your write up (and long and jumbled is great)! I think a rule against "making a thread about a person's specific character" or "collectively accruing receipts against someone" makes sense. I think people would likely want to have an exception for "public figures".
I don't know how much of a definition of "public figures" is warranted. Celebrities are fine (though we probably want to still be careful about what we're saying), but are fandom researchers that publish a lot of opinion pieces "public figures"?
Yeah one person’s ubiquitous is always going to be another person’s obscure. It’s going to be a grey area where the line remains hard to draw.