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.
In my experience as a labor organizer and street rowdy, the way society is structured pushes people into this kind of... demanding to be ruled, even if it's bad. There's a certain segment of the population, whether the population of this site or any other or the world in general, that would sooner just get fucked and complain about it, comfortable in the knowledge that the complaining won't do anything, than engage in any kind of consultative or consensus-based process because they fundamentally don't believe such a thing exists. Better the devil you know and all that. It's one of the things that makes labor organizing so fucking hard is just trying to convince people that we can have collective power and influence, that this is even possible.
I think that ties into how most people in American culture are simply not taught how to work through differences, have difficult conversations, or resolve conflict. Nearly everyone is raised with there being two options: 1. tell The Authority (teacher, parent, principal, police, boss) and They will fix it For You, often by completely disappearing the problem person (suspension, expulsion, separating you into different groups/workplaces, incarceration, restraining order) 2. Some manner of Group Bullying, often as part of a clique. This one is something very explicitly developed in a school setting, because the Authority is unreliable or because the clique has simply decided involving the Authority kills the fun. In America, institutions generally try to encourage people to "grow out" of this option in favor of option one, Telling The Authority (calling the police) but there's not much encouraging people towards a third option: good interpersonal skills and collective deliberation and consensus.
In light of that I think it's worth wrapping back around to & expanding a bit on @atomicthumbs' comment from their first post:
a lot of the people infuriated by this are folks who used the website a bit a couple months ago and then stopped
I made a similar observation to myself while scanning the comments of the original guidelines post. While I don't necessarily endorse an "active/veteran users matter more than looky-loos" viewpoint, I do think it's worth asking which users are going to be invested in using the site and building its community going forward. Is there good reason to believe that someone who made 4 posts a month ago is being entirely honest when they make invective-laden comments claiming that moderation decisions will absolutely ruin their experience using the site? Is there good reason to believe that this kind of user intends to contribute more to the site than invective-laden criticism?
I ask these questions less as a way to police what constitutes "good" usage of the site and more because I think they're good questions to keep in mind when weighting feedback. I also think they're very relevant questions to consider given that I've seen evidence that a lot of the outrage over the post has been frothed up off-site on Twitter and Masto - which is to say that I personally think that giving undue weight to high-volume comments from low-investment users is not going to produce good longterm results for the website, regardless of the issue being debated.
