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in reply to @xkeeper's post:
Agreed 100% and I missed this shitstorm cause I was absorbed by Zelda.
I was gonna share this post but I actually apparently can't, didn't know that was a feature! That's a good feature.
the three dot menu in the top left lets you disable shares/comments, it's great
and yeah zelda was better than this dumpster fire
People have never taken the time to learn what moderation requires and the moment a slight infraction occurs on the side of the moderators, it's an affront to everything.
I hate moderating a website not because I have to deal with the content but because if there is -any- level of shortcomings, I am the bad person. Never mind the 99.9% of the shit I make disappear without people ever seeing, that 0.1% where I fuck up is the real problem and it's time to make the discourse train leave its stop because we need to focus on that one tree that was chopped down while the whole forest is on fire.
People need to take a step back and breathe.
I'm going to leave cohost over this!
and go where exactly? twitter? blue sky? tumblr? good fucking luck, don't come back.
Yeah that's pretty much it, huh.
I understand and empathize but I really don't know if this kind of moderation response can scale.
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God i think you summed up my thoughts on this, especially the part with the itch.io shenanigans. I really dont want people on here to blow up at the smallest thing honestly, 've had enough of that on twitter.
I missed today's barrel of nonsense it appears but yeah, all of this
it lasted all of two hours and it was the most asinine, stupid bullshit possible
(edit: i think i've been proven wrong on this; read comment replies)
okay. while i fundamentally agree with all of this here, i feel like kara's post addressed it just fine? this post is at best a bit redundant but at worst actively harmful to those who made the mistake. kicking them while they're already down
i couldn't possibly imagine the stress of being stalked by nazis, overreacting to a misunderstood email (stress makes people overreact- who would've known! /s), and getting Absolutely Fucking Blasted over it by everyone on the site. talk about an overreaction.
This does not help. This adds fuel to the flame, this Hurts people even more. You're not excused just because you're technically correct.
kara's post is nice and civil and understanding because they are a support person working for this website and the target of everyone, and a direct focus of the event in question.
i am an outsider. i have no horse in this game. i see this behavior everywhere, because, again, i am an administrator on several different places. i see this attitude oozing out of many people, not just on cohost.
it was not just one person. it is not just about one person, or even two people, or even the three you could directly construct out of my post (the victim, and the two people who posted comments that i quoted), which is why i did not include their names and indeed explicitly mentioned that i did not do so.
because it's not just one person. it's not just one thing. it's not just one event.
it keeps happening. and it needs to stop.
i understand that, and i agree. but we're not gonna get there by hurting already-wounded people.
the people who started this whole thing caused harm by accident. in retaliation, you're causing harm on purpose. fire doesn't put fire out, it only prolongs the infighting.
i know it hurts to see this sorta thing happen over and over again, trust me, i goddamn feel it too, i need it to stop badly or else im gonna start losing it, but This method really doesn't help!!,
(sorry if this reply seems all over the place. i'm doing GReat right now hhhhhh)
the people who started this whole thing caused harm by accident.
but they didn't. posting a bunch of shit like "wow, i guess this place isn't safe any more", or "i'm going to leave over this", etc. immediately is not just some action in a vacuum with no impact. words have meanings. when you openly posit that this is the beginning of the nazis flooding into this space with staff's blessing, because they didn't ban this person immediately — something that was, not in these exact words, actually said — you are not just making an empty statement. you are flagging to everyone, hey, this place is no longer safe. over what ended up being a complete non-issue, resolved not even two hours later, because this is a site run by actual people who have actual lives and whom are not infallible oracles.
you may not see it as harm, i guess. but if that's the case, then why is me saying more words about it harm? all i did was say that the behavior is shit and posted some examples. how is that different from quoting the original support message, reposting it, adding on your own doomsaying and extrapolating a single support response (that was even, to the note of other people, unusual and unexpected) meant the death of the entire platform?
yeah okay i get your point, honestly the main issue i had with this post was just the aggressiveness, since i'm maybe too soft for my own good,, i worry too much about how people are doing, idk
really sorry for wasting your time, i get it now
the following has been in my drafts since earlier
i suspect a lot of folks on here have some subtle trauma from using websites that are operated by Corporate Teams and ruled by Executives instead of using websites that are run by Just Some People
folks generally need to do some unlearning
this this this holy shit 
times this. people who expect corporate executive activity, cause corporate executive activity.
imo, there’s also some pessimistic metainduction going on. every website before this one has eventually sold out or gone bad, therefore it’s only a matter of time until cohost goes bad or sells out. ofc this creates a self fulfilling prophecy
the number of people i saw swallow that dreamwidth lady's post hook line and sinker but are now making bluesky accounts makes me feel like something is fundamentally wrong with humanity
I'm not sure I would go as far as saying it's trauma, but it's at least a set of expectations. People now expect websites to be a "Service" that are moderated with automation (or mechanical turks), which produce decisions that can't be reasoned with. People feel free to rage at what it does, since it's impossible to have any sort of empathy for it.
Thinking about it more, I can see how there could be a sort of trauma to having someone's access to a community hinging on the actions of an unpredictable and inscrutable blackbox.
yeah. i understand the reporter having a bad reaction to a support response, i understand panicking because of that, and I don't think they were totally out of pocket to react that way honestly; but the immediate wildfire spread of others extrapolating the reaction was just... we all really need to take a minute and flatten out our bases and get our emotional balances stabilized on here. we really don't need to all be Mighty Beanz flipping end over end at the slightest perceived mistake.
a single torch can ignite a mass of pitchforks and it can quickly spread into an out-of-control wildfire. that is basically the point. this stuff keeps happening
me: damn Mighty Beans....haven't thought about those in a 15 years what a deep cut
google: oh word?
agreed entirely. like, when this whole thing was happening, my entire reasoning was:
- it doesn't look great, but
- it's the weekend, like you said. not just any weekend-
- a good percentage of cohost @staff is either playing ToTK or at a furry con right this minute - either way, AFK
- specifically, this outrage engine is literally churning over at the same time as a cohost meetup at furry weekend atlanta. (I'm kinda sad I missed it ;;)
and when it was all settled, I rechosted the email resolution someone posted, with a "thank you staff" there. because they deserve that. they did what they could, and then when that wasn't enough, they did what they had to.
Having the info that this was a totally new person taking the support inbox, puts this even more into perspective.
Legitimately, I think the response they did was less "Oh, but they didn't hurt anyone here so it's out of scope. Ticket closed bye." and more "Okay, I'm on a stack of 96 reports that we're backlogged on, and everyone else is not available right now. I'll let you know if we do something but right now we- I can't background-check every report."
It's not great, but it's absolutely not worthy of this level of outrage.
The only way to have enough staff to have an instant-gratification level of moderation is to hire a bunch of extremely underpaid and probably traumatized contractors working in countries with shit for labor laws. I am fond of Cohost in large part because they flatly refuse to do that. It has consequences. They're better than the human cost of the alternative.
I was at that FWA meetup, and there’s a definite chance that this was popping off while I was talking with jae about the challenges they’ve been facing w.r.t moderation. It’s an unenviable position to be in, and it’s worse when every moderation decision falls onto essentially a single person.
Could have been handled better, sure, but that’s the the reality of this approach to moderation: it will get messy and some folks can’t handle that, especially coming from larger, more corporate platforms. Beats the alternatives, though.
its exhausting to me how internet culture is completely unwilling to deal with the fact that sometimes the world is complicated and making the correct decision very quickly is not always possible
everyone is so quick to torch every bridge
this kind of behavior reminds me a lot of when i was a cashier and i'd have to call for a price check. "BUT THE TAG SAID--" yes i am having someone verify what the tag said and if it's wrong, i have to fix it for you and write it down! we sell thousands and thousands of items! i do not have every price tag in the store memorized! please chill for like 2 minutes!
it's natural to get frustrated when you know something is wrong and you have to wait for it to be made right. but i worry that a lot of people are so raw from bad-faith bullshit from The Other Websites that they can't engage with anything in good faith anymore.
i'm one of the folks that was quoted here and yeah, agreed, I stated my thesis really fucking poorly in that comment, I even admitted to such in a subsequent comment, but the correction never gets as far as the initial wrong post, does it?
Like, exactly like the Itch thing you mention. Even when it was right there at press time.
That said, I agree wholeheartedly with the post here, and I'm glad at least my really clumsy first words provided a jumping-off point for you, because like I said in that post, I've been in that position! I've run discord servers and the like for youtubers and gaming communities with thousands upon thousands of people!
"Soul-crushingly draining" is an understatement and a half, I poured myself into it for the better part of a decade for communities that had grown far bigger than I could've imagined at the outset. over time, the problems got bigger, more unwieldy, problem users harder to deal with, and at some point it just became too much after my world got upended through some really awful events.
people really do not have any clue how difficult moderation actually is beyond "get rid of bad thing". it's almost never black and white and it requires constant judgement calls between situations. and when you're under pressure from every side and a single fuckup causes this kind of outrage, whoof
god, the amount of times I've had to struggle with someone testing a boundary, having to keep a whole watchlist of stuff like "this person looks like they're waiting for the opportunity to cause a scene but I don't KNOW that they're going to, and if I do something now it'll extremely explode and go bad"
the hours and even days spent in staff chats deliberating with the other mods over individuals that had the seeds of a problem but whom hadn't germinated yet, and sometimes never would!
Having to figure out if I was jumping at shadows or if this person really was about to show their entire ass.
it's not easy! it sucks! and in a lot of cases it's entirely uncompensated labor. Thank god that's not the case here, thank god ASSC pay their moderation staff. The most i got from the biggest community was a free t-shirt from the guy's merch shop.
there are so many times I wish I could've acted sooner and realized a problem faster, so many times I wish I'd been able to just act on a hunch, but that's not how moderation works!
You have to make sure you're wielding that responsibility correctly for the sake of your community, and that means "cross-referencing with other staff, watching people, having to make those tough judgement calls," and it means messing up sometimes and then having to fix it afterward.
the amount of player notes in ss13 that basically amount to "this person is giving me extremely bad vibes and clearly testing the waters but nothing bannable yet" is... more than zero, and often times they do catch a ban later, but other times it turns out to be nothing
and in that community's case they are all too eager to go on r/ss13 and post absolute nonsense, complete misrepresentations of what happened (if it was even an attempt at pretending to be honest), and now you have an angry mob over that
bluuuuuuuuuuuggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh
while i agree with the core of this post, gods DAMN that's some flame in this post. ive done moderation before, and still, damn.
i've been at it since 2005 and i'm very tired of seeing it happen over and over because it inevitably tears things apart.
I guess this situation really blow up outside of my timeline's reach or something? Because it didn't seem like it was an explosive issue. I don't even remember all that many responses in the original thread of the affected person when I commented.
this post is referring to several issues, not just the most recent one. it is about how this keeps happening over and over
This sounds like the kind of overreaction that was all too common on Tumblr ten years ago. Everyone just pacify your pectorals for a second... nobody is perfect, and mistakes get made. What you're doing is trying to crush a fly with a sledgehammer... you probably won't get the fly, and you wind up breaking everything in your house.
Honestly, the notion that Cohost is in any way anti-LGBTQ is absurd. I've never seen a MORE gay and trans friendly social network in my life. Half the members identify as LGBTQ. Attacking this site is misguided at best and self-destructive at worst.
Agreed!
Good communities have good moderation, and chewing out moderators for one mistake instead of accepting that they're human & have limitations is how you get bad moderation and a bad community.
Sadly I think the nature of the internet means that behavior like this is common (and encouraged by big platforms). We have limited information/context on what happened, short attention spans, and a lack of any close relationship to moderators beyond functional roles. When you throw the dopamine casino that is modern social media algorithms on top of it, there's a profit motive for big digital platforms to monopolize our outrage, impulses, and attention as much as possible. We've been socially conditioned to respond to online situations in this specific way for years, and we gotta break that pattern.
I guess the most meaningful change we can do is to practice patience and mindfulness individually while collectively practicing solidarity and meta-analysis of our actions? Maybe??
I missed this drama, but I do think that if the team decided to take action on someone based on their external web activity, it could create an expectation for users to feel justified in creating extra work and problems for moderation, by digging through other user's online history for evidence of "bad behavior". (In this case, the user had a reputation for being a straight up nazi which is obviously a valid concern. My worry is that people would exploit this expectation)
There is another website that has this as an explicit rule in it's TOS that users can be banned for certain activity on other websites. It's enabled some really shitty behavior from certain people going out of their way to get others banned from the website.
i relate to this so hard, reading this gives me a weird mix of pain but also relief that its an aspect of moderation at least some people recognise and understand. fucking sucks.
respect moderation, folks - without it the space would be a whole lot worse. also remember these are human beings who are actively having their lives interrupted by stuff like this - sometimes this stuff pops up at an annoyingly awkward time and theres nobody else to handle it at that moment.
i never ever see when drama blows up on this site because i follow the right people i guess but good lord are people stupid for this one.
as a mod for a fairly large discord server, it is a fairly hefty amount of volunteer work but i bet a lot of folks think i don't have to do much. the reason is that i'm good enough at it that folks don't really notice it. so, this strikes a nerve with me lmao
it only takes one mistake to be noticed, really, and that's the hard part. even if you're good (and consider how long it went before anything like this really blew up) you'll eventually make a mistake and then, welp