the absolute last straw for me on twitter was the realization that my timeline was constantly full of nasty terf stuff, because all the other trans people i followed kept posting fucking screenshots of it to say how bad it was
as if it's all fake, just points in a game with two sides, not words that might actually have an impact on anyone. feelings are weakness and we are forever trapped in the shadow of something awful
maybe part of the disconnect is that i generally gauge people based on what they *do*, whereas it seems very common to gauge people based on who they *are* (or are perceived to be) — even among leftists, despite that i think of it as a pretty reactionary, maybe christian sort of impulse
hence, "it's obviously not okay for a nazi to post hate speech. but it's fine for me to post hate speech, because i'm not a nazi, so i don't mean it"
@eevee yeah “dunk” culture made me tired of Twitter well before Musk came along. Someone saying something evil isn’t automatically noteworthy and warranting of a debunk.
@thomasjwebb @eevee Same for me; just coming at it from the angle of, "Why ARE you doing this? What does it accomplish outside of bestowing an easy but false sense of self-empowerment?"
Sep 25, 2026, 12:56 AM@eevee@slime.global this is why purity politics drives me nuts. instead of not engaging you’re platforming the very voices that are harmful and signalling to everyone just how self righteous and virtuous you are. like, do us all a favour and link to a blog post you wrote about it instead so people can choose whether to engage with that violence or not. or spoiler it if the platform supports it and i’m not one who agrees entirely with the merits of content warnings as i tend to agree with an entomologist i saw who once said that nobody would learn to enjoy insects if we always spoilered them but fuck, this is different!
@eevee this is the kind stuff i hate with people "making fun off" the bad side.
It effects so many people who see it negatively
@eevee Some of these folks will even say POSIWID without irony
@eevee i assume their thought process is along the lines of "me posting this won't have the Effect that nazi hate speech has, since that Effect can only come from the Intention that the original poster had".
which just fully disregards the material effect of "someone sees the post → they are exposed to nazi hate speech"
@eevee I have thought a lot about this in the past decade. there's a lot of validity to what you're saying, but I think there's a really important additional fact, which is perhaps the root cause of this perverse dynamic:
attempting to evaluate behavior on a case-by-case basis, particularly when evidentiary rules exclude "out of context" stuff, grants an asymmetric advantage to bad actors because they can pantomime good behavior in context while having obviously nefarious goals
@eevee circa … maybe around 2010, I had a very strict "always evaluate only the behavior in evidence, in community spaces" approach to moderation decisions and I absolutely got my soul crushed by fascists repeatedly, intentionally attempting to grind down shared spaces by constantly line-stepping and rules-lawyering nonsense. gamergate, CoC debates, you name it, just constant bad-faith bullshit that was technically "within the rules"
@glyph oh sure. but as you describe, the thing they were *doing* was still "constantly testing the rules", which imo is in itself extremely actionable. even if you want to exclude outside behavior, it's not like you forget everything they've already done *in the space*
@glyph having a bunch of people call me a pedophile — an assertion that cannot be disproven and a lens through which a bunch of my actions were reinterpreted — has left me with something of a distaste for label-based moderation
@eevee yeah, and even in less extreme cases, this type of approach presents some pretty terrible incentives. wreckers will start trying to label everyone they even mildly dislike. Read Some Theory jerks will label every moderate who doesn't have time to develop their own unique synthesis of Kropotkin and Marx as an enthusiastic genocidal fascist. arguments which SHOULD be about behavior instead center on ideology
@eevee the problem with trying to penalize "constantly testing the rules" is that it is _very_ easy to muddy the waters and do a bunch of stuff that massively stresses everyone out and is kind of awful but is hard to overtly prove is a transgression. something like the Olivia Hill rule is probably the best way to break this logjam but socializing that requires a surprising amount of effort
@glyph if you're massively stressing everyone out then you probably shouldn't be in the space!
@eevee (cue a lengthy complaint about how that's just, like, your opinion, and doesn't everyone have the RIGHT to be in the space, it's not like I BROKE any RULES, etc etc etc. and yeah the immune system of the space needs to have a way to recognize this)
@glyph rule zero: don't make me moderate you
@glyph @daedalus @eevee re: open source, i was kind of surprised to learn that pro-"benevolent dictator for life" stuff is still being seriously espoused today. i just assumed that people had realized why Having A Guy does not solve the whole governance thing ( and may in fact be quite problematic!) and re moderation, like sure "dont make me moderate you"/"dont be a dick" is a good starting point but if "dont be a dick" was easy to derive for the purpose of determining what actionable steps to take on the scale of a community of hundreds or thousands , we wouldn't have any work to do, right? but clearly (gestures vaguely at everything) we do
@silverstar @eevee I am rarely the unilateral moderator in the unpleasant situations I have seen. Honestly rarely a moderator at all, usually in some kind of advisory capacity. the problem is not explaining to the problematic person, but the stress involved in getting a diverse moderation team on board with this type of orientation. I suspect it would be easier nowadays, but certainly in our collective resist-lib era it was challenging to explain this
The name doesn't really help describe it, but this human tendency is known as the Fundamental Attribution Error
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
“[…] in which observers underemphasize situational and environmental factors for the behavior of an actor while overemphasizing dispositional or personality factors.
“In other words, observers tend to overattribute the behaviors of others to their personality (e.g., he is late because he's selfish) and underattribute them to the situation or context (e.g., he is late because he got stuck in traffic).”
@eevee I'm thankful there's not so much of that on fediverse, at least not that I can see since I'm strict with what I'm letting into my timeline. I barely saw anything about the KDE situation & I had to ask someone to send me links so I could read what was going on.