@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.
how does the overlap between 'directly naming people' work with links/embeds? i ask because i'm of a similar mindset, but seeing both listed out like that got me unsure
I guess if you’re complaining about a general trend, I don’t mind seeing a tweet as an example for it. But if you’re complaining about a person, I don’t really feel as good seeing their name embedded in the thread OP.
Also thinking about it I guess for me it depends on scale of the person’s influence, like the difference between complaining about Die Antwoord vs complaining about the guy at your local bar’s open mic night
yeah i think this works! there's still a bit of leeway in interpretation, but like you said, i trust that we'll all figure out where the line is
The standard I try to hold myself to for “I want to use the exact phrasing because [it bothered me that much/I couldn’t make this up/I don’t want to change it in summary when I’m already upset]” is anonymized screenshots (do we have alt text yet? would straight blockquote be better half the time…?)
which still has some deanon risk (eg, exact wording is searchable for public accounts on Twitter), but indicates I don’t want to individualize the person(s) involved; and I tend to appreciate other people doing similarly (because I search phrasing to block so I don’t have to bother OP either)
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.
Ohh, I also agree with keeping !salt for logged in users only. That will push back the drama timeline.
I think having links and embeds work fine as long as it’s a general discussion and not targeted at one person.
Another possibility is to disable links and embeds and only allow edited screenshots. Someone brought up that people will take screen shots and look up the words to find the content, but those are rare and dedicated-to-the-hate kinda people. I don’t think there are many like that here.