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I've upvoted you for the discussion, but I completely disagree. Nobody deserves a seat at the table. Tamaki has more than enough voice as it is. He doesn't need to be handed one in our online communities.
Having tolerance for both bigots and the targets of their hate means very quickly that the people being persecuted leave.
Agreed. Letting everyone have an equal say just leads to shitty online forums (Facebook, Stuff comments for example) where misinformation gets spread easily, and hateful content is propagated. I don't want to see that happening here.
There's even a name for this - Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.
At this stage in human history, a community or forum where all are welcome is impossible. If one leaves a forum open for those who are intolerant, then the forum effectively becomes closed to those that they are intolerant of. It's not a problem with forums or how communities are managed, the problem is humans being humans. Maybe in a thousand years time or so ...
At best communities get to choose what they tolerate. I've found in the past that those who demand tolerance of fairly toxic views, fail to remember that tolerance isn't, nor should it be, unlimited.
Ignore Tamaki, he was just a useful idiot for the purposes of discussion. What I am trying to get across is that a truly open and free space for the exchange of ideas can only be hindered by restricting what can and cannot be said, and will ultimately create an echo chamber. We live in an increasingly divided world; we are divided politically, religiously, ideologically and plenty of others. Restricting what ideas can and cannot be spread can only serve to widen those divisions as those who are being restricted to retreat to their own echo chambers and find more and more extreme ideas.
If we want to create a truly open place where people can come and share their experiences, their thoughts and their ideas, then we do ourselves a disservice by restricting what can and can't be said, or who can and can't say things.
So, that's nominally a good goal - but what do you do when the Kyle Chapmans of the world come and try to make a home here?
But it's okay if the Nazis come in and restrict it for us by chasing away the people they hate? No thanks. A truly open place can't permit people whose agenda is quite literally anti-diversity.
100% agree
To be an accepting place, it is necessary to not be accepting of intolerance. A community that does not mute/ban intolerant people becomes a sewer.
Honestly if you're willing to let people like the Tamaki family in, I don't want to be here and will look for/create an alternative. Zero tolerance for bigotry is the only way to run an online community IMO. Otherwise you end up with a different kind of echo chamber, one full of bigots because everyone else got chased off.
Nope. To paraphrase IamRageSparkle:
If you don't kick the Nazi out of your bar, you end up running a Nazi bar.
For your listening pleasure:
Edit: removed suprious formatting tags
Some political views are incompatible with "no one deserves to be shouted down". That's what fascism and neo-Nazis are all about.
I think you're trying to get at the idea that we should be more worried about behaviour than beliefs, but unfortunately some beliefs drive some very undesirable behaviour. You can't really say things like "all gays should be killed" in a behaviour-neutral way.
You avoid trying to be anything like /r/nz. I’ve been unsubbed from that place for ages because it was shit. And part of the reason it was shit is because the mods there did nothing about the brigading and “just asking questions” and dog whistling from users who coincidentally all tended to be pretty active on /r/ck. Funny that. Basically the “welcome to all ideologies” thing can get in the bin, because there are some dickheads who don’t deserve a chance because they’ll just fuck things for everyone else.
I agree with the principle that we don’t want to recreate r/nz but come at it from a very different perspective.
For example, when national came out against bilingual road signs, the conversation devolved into a debate about whether one of our official languages should be neither seen nor heard. That is unacceptable to me as I am intolerant of intolerance and there should be no room for debating the right of any person to exist.
I feel like those designs were intentionally shit so they could come back with the realistic solution of having English on top and let people feel like they've won.
@[email protected] has already stated that he would rather not over moderate (I don't want to put words in his mouth either), and I love the idea of free speech... but, and a big but it is, I wouldn't want to see this become a home to bigots.
I had spun up a Lemmy instance before I saw Dave had created this one. The NZ community I put in place was very deliberately called [email protected] and not NZ.
@[email protected] has already stated that he would rather not over moderate (I don’t want to put words in his mouth either)
I don't want to give the impression of a low amount of moderation. Rather, calling people out on poor behaviour* as a first step and resorting to bans only when discussion fails.
* we don't have to put up with or waste our time on obvious trolls, I just don't think banning anyone that says something in good faith that we don't like is the way to build a welcoming community
I' didn't want to imply that it would be low moderation to the point to where it falls apart, and I another comment I linked to the thread.
So far Dave I think you are doing well to get across what your intentions are.
In terms of the negative whiners that populate r/newzealand, I don't think there's an easy solution. The people with the most extreme views are always going to be the most vocal, and terminally online doomers will always have more time to spend online than productive members of society.
The best we can do is laugh at them.
My view is simply this:
We are a small community (so far). If you see something you don't want in your community, report it. Whether you think others would agree or not.
When there are too many (good faith) reports for the moderators to handle, we can then as a community discuss the path we are on and the path we would like to be on, and how to get there.
Considering there have been a grand total of 2 reports, one about a post on another community and one about a post that started a discussion leading to the creation of [email protected], so far it seems to be working.
This is a very reasonable and rational response, Dave.
Post things you like. Discuss things others post. Be nice. Its a small community users tend to keep each other in check. If users start to see the vibe shifting they can make discussion threads to introduce and set rules.
Useful rules are limiting repetitive topics/complains/rants to a weekly/monthly discussion thread. This is important as topics posted over and over affect people's perception of how prevalent an issue actually is. A small handful of users can whip an entire subreddit up into a frenzy by posting the right topics.
I’m really keen to hear from the admins/mods of this instance on this - I feel like the community has expressed a pretty clear feeling here and I’d love to see that reflected in how this community operates
Can we get a header image for the community? Something not very tall, but uniquely NZ
In the end the moderators make or break the community. If you want to avoid the mistakes of /r/nz you have to make sure none of your moderators are one of their moderators.
Aside from that here are some ideas.
Moderation transparency: Publish every moderation action.
Meta Moderation: Allow people to somehow decide whether or not any moderation act was justified.
Hold people responsible for their words and actions. This of course would include moderators. This one is tricky as often the only real punishment you can dole out is a ban.
In the end the moderators make or break the community. If you want to avoid the mistakes of /r/nz you have to make sure none of your moderators are one of their moderators.
I'm keen to hear what people didn't like about them (and just as keen to know if you didn't mind them)
Moderation transparency: Publish every moderation action.
Moderator actions are published in the Modlog. Note that because servers are federated, the Modlog has lots of actions by mods on other servers.
Meta Moderation: Allow people to somehow decide whether or not any moderation act was justified.
I guess this is possible through creating a topic about it (if mods remove it then you'd know from the Modlog)
Hold people responsible for their words and actions. This of course would include moderators. This one is tricky as often the only real punishment you can dole out is a ban.
The first part of holding people responsible is calling them out. Then yes, temporary or permanent bans are about the only escalation option available.
The mods at r/nz seemed pretty reasonable.
Agreed
The fact you're asking not just for user bans by moderators but also the community can ban moderators will lead to the situation where people are afraid to even moderate. Dave has the right idea here. You don't ban people for opinions even if you don't agree.
