General

It's everyone's responsibility to keep discussions civil on the internet, not just the moderators. If someone is being an asshole or bigot, it's not your job to police the discussion, confront them, or put them in their place. First, not everyone is a skilled communicator, misunderstandings can happen, so asking for clarification is a good idea. Beyond that, you should calmly state your disagreement in a non-accusatory manner, and if they're over the line, report them to the mods. It's this attitude exactly that I've seen time and time again will cause a discussion to escalate to the point where the thread needs to be locked in the first place. All of this is spelled out explicitly in the website rules.



Nah letting bigots have free rein without consequence when they spew their nonsense is objectively worse than being direct and confrontational every time they spew their garbage. Maybe it’s not the job of people to confront abstract things but it’s definitely on the part of our community to keep hate and bigotry out of our spaces, if you let one they will think that behavior is okay others will join in, and that’s no place I or others want to be in.

Ok, but you're explicitly violating TOS. What you're saying might be true for disorganized communities, but not here. This isn't society at large, and this isn't a place for internet activism. In this case, tolerance actually DOES mean tolerating the intolerant until you can get a moderator to act on your behalf. It's literally their job to do so. When you confront people, you're actually being counter-productive to what you want, because all you succeeded in doing is getting the thread closed, while they still remain a member and will continue to post. That doesn't actually scare the trolls at all. If I'm wrong in my interpretation of the rules, I'll gladly accept that correction from a moderator.

I'll edit to add an analogy. If you're part of the gaming community, and someone is acting disruptive, then yes, people should do some gatekeeping on their own. But if you're part of an after school club, and someone says something out of pocket, then by rising up and yelling at them, it only makes you look like you're just as disruptive and part of the problem. But if you turn to the club president and tell them that person is turning this into a toxic environment, then thy have an excuse to act and bar that person from future meetings.

Bro being a decent human being isn’t fucking activism. You’re making it political. I’m dropping this conversation.

Wouldn't it be ironic if this thread gets locked?

Okay, so I'm going to stop you right there.

I am a WOC. While most people on this site are normal human beings, I have experienced discrimination on this platform. I've experienced everything from death threats and slurs to creepy people sexually harrassing me.

I do report it when it happens. And admin has taken action. But that can take time since I have to take screenshots and send an email to people in a very different time zones. So in the meantime, confronting the bigot is important.

I remember about a year ago, we had this extremely unpleasant user who'd be super gross in chat all the time. Complete menace to society. Admin had told him to get his act together more than once, but he didn't care.

One day, he snapped and went on a racist tirade. Started using all the slurs and saying a bunch of really messed up things. He locked on black people and Jewish people specifically. Numerous people reported him, but it takes time to get a response back.

In the mean time, the community rallied together. A few tracked down a mod while everyone else pushed back against his awefullness. There were a handful on black people and Jewish people in chat at the time. So it was really nice to see white people step up and push back against it too.

You do not and should not tolerate bigotry. Yeah, it's nice to be gently corrected if you accidentally say something bigotted. I think everyone has said something bigotted without meaning to be. But that isn't something you're owed. And you especially aren't owed that grace if you say it with your chest.

Also, I don't think it violates TOS to check a bigot. I've done that several times, and when I seen admin forum links or screenshots with full context, I've never been told I was in the wrong. And some of my reports were viewed by the site owner.

If someone is being overtly hateful and targeting other members, then yeah, that kind of response is totally warranted. Guys like that deserve it. I do recall seeing a case like that in the past where a guy was proudly calling himself a white supremacist, and had to be removed, but in the meantime people were shutting down any conversation that started going in that direction.

The only problem I see is in the grey areas where what someone says isn't anywhere near close to that, but some people feel inclined to start dogpiling anyway because they have a personal zero tolerance policy toward anything that smells of bigotry or what they interpret as dog whistles, even if that wasn't actually the person's intent. I've personally seen quite a few cases like that happen too. I think in general it's just a good policy for people to err on the side of civility and take people at their word unless proven otherwise. Even if I strongly suspect someone is arguing in bad faith, I will usually try to give a genuine response anyway.

I guess to answer the OP’s question in a different way, threads get locked because mods don’t have a lot of other tools at their disposal. They can’t discipline individual users, so locking threads is the only real tool at their disposal. I’m sure admins have more tools to use, but there are fewer admins. Threads can be unlocked.

As an alternative to locking threads, having a way to mute individual users for a period of time might be helpful when one person is harassing or spamming, etc. A stop gap until an admin can review the situation.

Are you in community with any minority groups? I am genuinely curious.

I feel like muting a user would be extremely helpful. I've seen a lot of instances where everyone is having a lovely time, and then one person comes in and shits all over the place. Muting could be a useful tool until admin is able to review the situation.

I also think users being able to mute another could be nice. Sometimes, you just don't jive with another user, and not seeing their posts could be nice. When you mute them, you could see they've posted, but not what they posted. Then you could have the option to see a specific post or not. I'm thinking it would work like posts tagged NSFW on social media sites.

I’ve always been confused why blocking users on this site doesn’t work that way. It’s odd. It seems like it would make a better experience for everyone.