twitchcoded

twitch of twitch.cymru

@twitchcoded

celtydd, cerddor, crëwr

☆ 22 • ♿⚧️ • welsh/cornish/irish-scots
☆ celtic studies student, multimedia artist, amateur musician

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twitchcoded
@twitchcoded

i know people (me included) have criticised this site's userbase for being a self-declared queer leftist site but also containing ableists, racists, etc. but is it even possible to create a social media without those kinds of people? i think everywhere has them.

because i don't think that i, as a trans disabled welsh person, am ever going to experience an irl society free of ableism, transphobia, or discrimination against minority cultures within my lifetime. so why would the internet be any different? i don't want to sound defeatist but to be honest sometimes i feel really defeated about these things and i don't know what to do. there will always be horrible people, even horrible people who call themselves leftists, so what can we do?

i suppose if cohost had had a larger staff/moderation team then it would'vr been easier to combat bigots, but i don't think they ever got near enough money to hire a bigger team. volunteer moderators perhaps?? i think there would have been a lot of people happy to help volunteer to work on some aspect of cohost, since so many people here seem to be into web/tech stuff and also have a big interest in this site thriving.

i don't really understand anything about running social media though.

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in reply to @twitchcoded's post:

osteophage
@osteophage

is it even possible to create a social media without those kinds of people?

Strictly speaking, no, probably not. With that said, I don't think that has to be the end of the conversation. There are still things that can be done, both at the level of site features and at the level of users' own social practices, to make for more resilient communities. For example:

  • Multiple levels of moderation. There's the blanket site-level moderation you'll need on every social media site, and with the right features, there can also be smaller groups moderated by users themselves, allowing them to say "we don't do that here" and give something the boot even if it's not against the site terms of service. I believe this could have helped with, for instance, the recurring grievances with how people on here have used the intersex tag. Cohost itself was probably never going to ban people from posting the kinds of images at issue, but if users could have created an intersex community space with tools for user moderation, they could have set whatever parameters they want for what belongs in that space.

  • Strong blocking tools and tools for user-level control over your own posts. Cohost has some of these, like the ability to lock shares and comments, which is good. Taking that idea further, the "hide comment" option could use a stronger "delete" counterpart, so that if you block someone in your comment section, you don't have to be subject to continued notifications as other people continue replying to the blocked person.

  • Valuing persuasion and resolution over excommunication. This might sound counterintuitive to people who believe that taking a more absolute stance will get more absolute results, but I would tentatively say, in my observation, that's not necessarily reliable, unfortunately. Instead you risk the scenario where someone says "no tolerance for bigots! bigots get an instant block/ban," and then they end up tolerating bigotry when it's coming from a friend of theirs because it would feel too socially costly to follow through. If you foster a community with smaller tiers of escalation, then you might find that you can actually confront an issue and get it dealt with instead of letting it fester indefinitely. ...Sometimes. Again, not positing one hundred percent faith in this as a blanket formula.

I'll pause here, but those are a few things that come to mind.

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