First a call-out of fatphobia (https://hexbear.net/post/4189552) that ended up proving its point, then the stuff about "he/hims" (https://hexbear.net/post/4187781) ". Apparently a mod got banned!?
I am not very active and I never look at the megathreads, the number of comments in them scare me away from them. Is that where it's happening? I feel confused about what this community is like now.
I, uh, don't really know what my point is. Maybe someone can explain what the state of the site is? Especially on the he/hims thing. Maybe that's the main point of this post.
I feel sad for people that got hurt by this.
A culture of deescalation and patient communication among ordinary users would also help us.
The more people fight, the more that bitterness builds up, which puts people on guard and leads to even more fights, and it becomes a feedback loop. Eventually people clique up to defend themselves, and communication breaks down even further, until the site dies.
It's hard, because deescalation requires some vulnerability, it's like lowering your hands during a boxing match. People get vicious to protect themselves. They're not inherently vicious, any more than two spouses who argue are bad people. The fight just gains a life of its own.
It's also slow. The longer you pause to gather your thoughts, process your emotions, and write a thoughtful response, the longer their comment goes unopposed, and the longer your peers are reading that hurtful stuff about you and maybe making up their minds.
When you refuse to deescalate, though, that hostility ripples out into the community, it poisons the whole atmosphere. Struggle sessions are what drive people off the site more than anything else, just the sheer misery of them. It drives away people who are more conflict averse and less terminally online, leaving only the people who are too invested to leave—the same people who have the hardest time deescalating.
I really think somehow we need to shift our culture, but I don't know how.
*I keep tweaking the wording of this comment like I'm chewing my nails. I'm going to bed.
Yes, I agree, this is the fundamental dynamic of being "defensively" aggressive. Even when the defensiveness is justified! This is the difficult work of org leadership, how to carefully let certain things slide or receive a soft correction and then out-organize around them, particularly through education.
An important aspect of this negative dynamic is that it is cyclical and self-escalating. When people are frustrated with aggro leadership, they may not recognize that leadership perceives aggro membership and builds their own resentment and alienation, and so on. Opting into an aggressive approach without education or patience is basically a decision to alienate yourself from the group and to be pretty unhappy in general with the state of the organization. Even when your fundamental point is correct!
I'm trying to think of examples where I've seen it really work out. All I can think of is this instance being kneejerk pro-trans (still could've gone better) and an irl instance where a hard line was taken against the sex industry, though that org split in a very toxic way because of the underlying dynamic and basically no longer exists. I tried really hard to think of examples and had to sift through like 9 irl counterexamples that came to mind instead. So many toxic events.