my controversial take is that "talking to our community to understand how they feel about things, and to ensure we are doing the right thing in the right fashion" is a good way to run a place, even when the subject at hand is one that is very difficult to talk about
looking around, a lot of the people infuriated by this are folks who used the website a bit a couple months ago and then stopped
Edit: to clarify: the above was to indicate not that someone's opinions should be discounted because they don't use the site often, but to indicate that they may not have familiarity with how the community here operates and how the staff run the site.
i have been on this site a while, comparatively, and it seemed clear to me from both announcements that the staff are trying to avoid setting a precedent of taking unilateral decisions on tough subjects that affect every one of the site's users. asking for community input on everything like this helps them know where the users of their site stand and what they are comfortable with. most social media platforms don't have anything like that.
some users of the site aren't comfortable with that, as applied to a uniquely painful topic that brings up trauma responses for many, which brings up separate issues; are there other things that need to be gone over? how can the process of running the site accommodate people who believe unilateral decisions should be made?
the staff are just people, trying to build a nice place that other people feel comfortable in. all of us here are just people. twitter and mastodon have trained us to have no fucking chill about anything. we have to unlearn that tendency and learn to talk through problem-solving without assuming the people we're talking to are taking the worst stance we can think of, or it will stick around and passively tear apart communities.
