lori

hearing about the changes at furaffinity, i have no dog (please don't laugh) in that fight and it's one of the few debates about that kind of art that i'm not 100% sold on mostly because it seems so arbitrary, but i do think that this is going to cause a lot of people to get angry, look for new sites, and some percentage will come here.

which is exactly why cohost needed to not drag their feet on community guidelines prior to now when it comes to things like lolicon or cub art. wew lord its comin and there's no storm shelter in place. no matter what cohost ends up doing, this is exactly why you can't wait.

(also please do not reply to this to debate FA's choice i honestly have nothing to do with that i'm just very interested in online community structures and how this may affect cohost. except to say that detective pikachu is definitely a grown up we can all agree.)

Also this is hardly the main focus here but I hate seeing comments about how we have to remember that this is a site where you can have a dialogue with the mod team and really discuss things rather than getting a faceless concrete answer when those dialogues still look like this on mobile. And when I had to switch to desktop view to even post this because if you scale your text up even a tiny bit on mobile (which I need to for Eyes reasons) it breaks the post box.

I'm still thinking a lot about the moderation posts today. This felt like too much or too weird to dump in a comment.

I've been in communities where people bringing forth concerns in good faith were brushed off as "bad faith" because the moderation took concerns or people being upset as affacks on them personally. I've been in a community that basically ran off anyone who had any concerns with how things were going, which left them with nothing but actual bad actors who were basically yes men to the staff until they realized they could bully them however they wanted with more and more unreasonable requests. They spent the better part of a year trying to fix where the community had gone as a result and ended up implementing a lot of the changes those "bad faith" people were concerned with.

Moderation is tricky. You do in fact get it wrong sometimes. But it's how you handle being wrong that matters, and that's what builds future trust. And I think if someone feels unsafe due to a decision you made, and then you publicly drag them because they said they would leave the site over it (something that is always a positive, you don't want users that don't want to be here as a site manager) and talk about how people need to trust you more...this does the opposite of build trust. If you make a serious moderation error, the absolute worst thing you can do is make it about you instead. I don't know how I'm supposed to trust a team that says "hey we made a mistake, but look at THESE people who didn't like the mistake. Don't they know we're trustworthy? Sure, we're total strangers to you on a relatively new site, but you should trust us. We're leftists! We're your friends!" And honestly it's a big reason I was skeptical about cohost from day one, because when I'd ask "who are the people running it, what do we know about how they will run a large scale site", the only answers I'd get were "well I'm friends with them and trust them!" The problem is I'm not friends with them. I can only go by their actions on the site.

Today's events leave a really rotten taste in my mouth. I've seen this exact thing go wrong over and over. There will always be people who feel strongly about moderation errors and moderation choices, but making angry posts about them tends to just make the moderation look worse and more importantly this kind of thing makes people feel less comfortable about reporting concerns or problems because they think they may be the subject of the next post about "bad faith" posters.