This reminds me a lot of a thing I saw once on Mastodon, where somebody was essentially celebrating in unequivocally positive terms the fact that, finally, they had a clique they kick people out of.1 They were the cool kids who could tell you not to sit at their table.
This is...not a healthy vibe, and I feel like sometimes it's one of the things that Cohost shares with Mastodon.
For those who weren't following2, the text bock that people are losing their shit over is this:
Cohost is not accessible for many disabled users, and you can help by adding alt text to your images, posting in support of disabled users, and upvoting their forum requests. Please visit the bug and feature forum and make an account, then upvote accessibility features like the following: Alt text for audio posts — Volume for audio posts — Screenreader user can't use login screen — Need dark mode — "Show Posts" not navigable
Someone was putting it at the bottom of their posts like a forum signature of Carthago delenda est.
For this they were basically accused of haranguing, hostility, bad faith, not being "chill" and slandering staff, and then this weird vaguebug pile-on ensued.
And I'm like, yes, forum signatures are annoying, but also effective advocacy is often annoying. More to the point, there's nothing objectionable about the text; all it really does is encourage people to use the feature request forum, which is....what we're supposed to do?
I think the underlying principle is that if you are perceived as not being on the side of @staff and you are a little cringe about anything, people on here will drag you to shit for very little reason.
And I'm just like...please stop that. Congrats on being a cool kid but please chill the fuck out and let people live.
You don't have to be nice to people. I've never in my life encouraged people to be generically nice. Sometimes cruelty is called for, but you gotta pick your targets.
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Note: I literally don't remember who it was and there's no way to search for it if I wanted to.
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My previous post about this is gone b/c it was a rechost of something that was either deleted or the OP blocked me, either of which is fine. Here's what my post said.
as the person at the centre of the LAST discourse we had on here:
a certain subset of the popular users on here are INSANELY cliquey and insufferable and clearly delight in vagueposting about people they don't know nor care to know. and these people are friends with - or at the very least in the same social circles of - the staff of cohost.
so you end up with this weird pseudo-cutesy "i'm being a cunt but also being vague enough that if you pulled me up on it there'd be reasonable doubt about my motives" shit that cycles around the website, including amongst staff members and people who are like 1st degree connections of staff members.
i stay in my lane now and just vibe with the people i vibe with on here. but some chosters clearly relish in the nasty atmosphere they've managed to create, and hide behind a paper-thin defence of "actually you're the ones telling us we're bad and wrong for doing things the way we've always done them" and like idk. maybe taking every post on here as an attack on your morals isn't a healthy way to use the internet babes x
as nick said about the accessibility posts: "there's nothing objectionable about the text". and thats true of like 99% of the shit A Certain Clique Of Cohost Users decide they are annoyed and going to vaguepost about. i think some of you just purposefully seek out shit to get upset over, intentionally twist it into something it isn't, and rally the troops to make a dozen vague cutesy-wutesy-but-still-absolutely-making-a-dig posts.
