Chat

If we don’t want it to be like Reddit than we need admins/mods to be more liberal with bans and comment removals. The amount of “free speech” drum banging I’m seeing and demands by disruptive people that instances never defederate is already out of hand. You cannot let these people dictate your policies. If someone is consistently disruptive, even if they don’t technically break the rules or are borderline, show them the door.

We also need to get away from the “performative snark” (credit to another user who used that term recently, I really like it) that Reddit, Twitter, etc. highly reward. Don’t know what the exact answer is for that, but it’s a huge problem and I already see it when people are trying to have real discussions.

Don’t get me wrong, so far the quality here is much higher than most other places I’ve seen. But most conversations go one of three ways: You talk with someone and have an interesting discussion, somebody says something incredibly snarky/quippy instead of engaging “in good faith” and the other person gets dog piled on, or it devolves into a flame war and insults start flying.

Just because it’s better here doesn’t mean those other two undesirable situations aren’t happening way too often. I urge mods to intervene when people just start getting snappy with each other. A simple “keep it friendly“ goes a long way to reminding people to take a step back and remember there’s somebody on the other side of the screen. I know I often need that myself. It’s also a really great way to suss out who is there to pick a fight, because invariably someone will snap back at the mod over that and deserve a ban lol