totebug

aspiring cat mom

  • she/her/ella

i can beat alien soldier and play the singing saw

last.fm listening


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alyaza
@alyaza
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alyaza
@alyaza
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MelloMakes
@MelloMakes

regarding blocking: https://cohost.org/renkotsuban/post/7230637-things-that-i-wished

I like cohost, with reservations. I ask my non-white friends if they've considered joining, one time, and I haven't pressed the topic over time because I know why they haven't made an account. There's a smothering vibe. For me, it is the big issue the site needs to address. If it can be said to have any culture, it's "we're better for your brain and cozier than the other sites". But if this is going on, is it really?

Social media should be fun. It shouldn't be about calculating how much fear and hatred you can tolerate today from emboldened ban evaders before opening your notifications tab. Nobody's told me to do this but I'll personally be canceling my cohost plus membership until I see people saying things have actually gotten better. Yes, I am concerned about every dollar mattering for this site's continued existence, but I also don't want to support what's happening (or rather not happening) here.


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in reply to @alyaza's post:

oh my god i blocked this one almost a full year ago after some really inflamatory post abt russia/ukraine and israel/palestine that made it really clear that they had zero beliefs other than "america bad". how the fuck are they still hanging around good god

It's a hotspot for US propaganda, but saying everyone that lives there is like saying every person in Israel is complicit in genocide, when in fact there are a lot of people there acting against it.

showed up in my replies too; idr if i talked about it but it was some "why aren't you jazzed about having people's posts show up in a racism discourse roundup on pillowfort, you're a disappointment for not being mean enough to yt people" stuff

in reply to @alyaza's post:

oh wow, i remember this user from when they posted a simultaneously pro-palestine, pro-russian-ukraine meme. are they an alt? i'd always assumed they were independently batshit.

Before @kaara was hired, we reported someone for admitting to ban evasion so comically blatantly we weren't sure if they were joking, and we said we weren't sure in the report. The email we recieved back confirmed they had been ban evading, and thanked us for the report (and said they had banned them again).

So, uh, dunno if it's foolproof but they definitely have some process for checking.
—🌊

My best guess is they're too swamped with other work to act on the reports they are getting (which, to be clear, is not a good thing). They still haven't acted on a report I sent months ago regarding someone who was either harassing you or whom you pointed out was harassing others.

Wait a minute.

Report tickets.

Not only did the moderators respond to the ticket I sent months ago, they also responded to another ticket I'd forgot I sent toward the same user we're discussing right now, who is still on this site in spite of the moderators apparently acting on that earlier ticket.

What the hell?

They aren't great at closing tickets, I had a ticket (actually two tickets, I didn't realize you could add updates and wanted to send a second thing for the same person) open for weeks with no response, then someone else I knew reported them and they did eventually get banned. This was a few months back and my two tickets are still open, even though it was resolved. I've also had some other tickets closed with no comment and no clue what came of them. Basically it means the ticketing system is unreliable for understanding what came of your reports.

I also know of other instances of people block/ban evading and...it really just feels like a situation they don't take seriously here. Which is why I can't stand that blocking a person doesn't block all of their profiles. I get the whole "you could find out their identity!" thing but that's a hypothetical situation being used to ignore the very real harassment situation already existing now.

This is the person who told me to kill the cop in my head and called me worse than a fascist and accused me of calling the cops on people in response to a post about lolicon being bad.

lol, and lmao,

FWIW I can't find the account in search so I do believe they've been banned (again) we will see if a "usernamenotrequired12" appears. I vaguely recall a "usernamenotrequired1" being someone I blocked at some point?

I think this is a by-product of the moderation team being incredibly short-staffed and not being able to afford to hire another full time member-owner of the co-op to take on moderation. And staff very much do try to log off on the weekends but the weekends are when users are always the most active since they have free time. Hiring a part-timer to be the Weekend Moderator at some point might be wise. The two devs need to dev and that leaves us with like, two people with time to focus on moderating on a site with like 13,000-ish users? I'm a mod on a discord server wish 990 users and it has a lot more mods than that, and a discord server isn't as dependent on report queues since you can see everything that's happening on it by just clicking through all the channels. But discord servers can just have volunteer mods. A for profit website, worker owned or not, can't really depend on volunteer moderators. And that feels a like system design flaw that needs to be addressed somehow since it's clear it's not really working.

Tho I have no idea what would fix it.... but like, yeah the more you have users like this going unmoderated the more you get that effect of everyone who is chill evaporating off the site and it gets increasingly... saline? Stagnant? Dense with people who should have been banned? Can't find the metaphor