Hypothesis: in much the same way that school board and city counsel meetings end up dominated by paranoid housewives and 60-something retirees who think that drag queens are operating under the command of Satan and that upzoning will turn their neighborhood into a Charles Bronson movie, internet discourse about illustrated porn, or any sufficiently controversial matter of community standards, will be dominated by people who have the most amount of free time, and the least amount of self-reflection.
- they/them
- meow.social/@kurgarru
Born too late to be an uptight Babylonian priest, born too soon to explore the stars, born just in time to be mentally ill and die in the climate apocalypse
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in reply to @huldratigress's post:
Me, two years ago: "I dunno I think anarchists kinda have the right idea about community consensus"
Me, now, after too many Furry Art Site Discourses: "Fuck it, I'm going toward benevolent dictatorship"
There are two things necessary for community consensus that aren't easily available for all communities:
- A community with a clear and concise common purpose to share. This has gotta be something TANGIBLE to be uniting. "Run this community library" or "maintain this fan wiki" for example.
- Meaningful ability to walk away or renegotiate relationships without losing out (this is very very hard to come by in most places and ways these days because of how expensive doing anything is and therefore the sunk cost that builds up)
I like to do me some anarchism, but I have no illusions about it being easy.
Yeah. I feel like 'community consensus' as a phrase is commonly used as more of an idealistic hand-wave away of these difficulties. It seems like it depends on everything else being held cetaris paribus (all other things held the same) and no additional variables changing at all.
And instead of trying to comprehend these things, especially when it comes with dealing with the presence of very uncomfortable nuances, we shove our fingers in our ears and hold that very concept of 'community consensus' as an article of faith versus an actual, tangible goal that requires analysis of everything. Building a society is hard, but it can't be done through simply praying to the altar of 'the community' that everything will somehow turn out okay in the end because of... something?
It's a set of learned skills that we could start teaching kids from youth onward, but one of the things people are most resistant to in transitioning out of an authority mindset is the idea that kids also deserve to have their autonomy respected. And for the long term project of a better society, I can't fathom how the fuck we'd get there if kids are still taught obedience and authority - then somehow are supposed to know how to be free as adults?
I think there's a Murray Bookchin essay out there where he talks about how direct democracy can ossify to conservatism without radical education and an awareness of hierarchy. Kinda that, I guess. I feel like because social media, even when non-VC-funded, has no real established language for "sit a new person down and tell them the principles," trying to "community moderation" on the internet is always going to be a bit of a pipe dream.
The internet as the ultimate form of the erasure of physical borders is quite the sight to behold. What is even more of a sight to behold is all the baggage that comes with it.
It feels almost like we've turned 'community moderation' into a reason to completely eschew principles. Add money into the mix, like with CoHost Plus for instance, and you've basically turned it into "Where the money goes, the rules will follow."
I don't inherently trust folks to not want to rules lawyer based on personal disgust. I wish I didn't have to worry about this, but the repeated reports I've gotten on Masto regarding me even linking an ABDL server I'm a part of in a pinned message, to being removed from multiple Telegram chats simply by virtue of what I've got on my FA once people look at it (literally nothing that breaks the rules) have taught me completely otherwise.
Rule/consensus-building by personal disgust is, by no means, an acceptable method of governance. It's what drives a lot of our current governance issues under an electoral representative system in the first place!