I stand by my assertion that personal discretion is the only approach that can’t be gamed.

Trust the mods with the banhammer, and if they do a bad job, replace them outright.

This still leaves you vulnerable to shitty admins, but you would be in any case.

There’s basically three problems:

1: Tyrannical powermods can make shitty communities.

2: Trolls and bad actors and generally-sociopathic cunts can be toxic and disruptive by sealioning, rules-lawyering and ‘just asking questions’ (aka JAQing off)

3: There’s no fixed set of rules that reliably walks a middle path between the two.

If you have no control over how mods mod, you can end up with nasty little tetanus-wound shitholes - imagine ferinstance if corpo shills took over all the news and politics subs, and banned anyone critical of Elon Musk or Israel.

If you don’t let mods mod, then for instance every support / activism community would be under constant siege from concern trolls and smug bigots with a new little talking point they want to ‘debate’ every single damn day, and we don’t need any more trans kids driven to suicide please and thankyou.

The admins decided that the former was worse than the latter, and said no, you can’t just kick out troublemakers so long as they use pretty language instead of hurling abuse; you have to humour them and allow some of their shit.

see also: the Nazi bar problem

This was a terrible and shitty approach to take, and I am (provisionally) glad it’s been suspended pending further review.

Though in this age of enshittification, I have little confidence that the next iteration won’t actually be worse.

I would have kicked ass at emergency medicine.

Unfortunately, the first lull that came along, I’d fuck up and people would die.

It isn’t fun.

Yeah, all the stereotypes of the wacky ADHD guy squirrel lol, but it’s not like that on the inside.

We are lost in the goddamn fog, chasing phantoms and mirages that disappear when you look at them too long. We are constantly running to catch up and flailing for context. What looks capricious and funny is mostly just desperation. We aren’t bursting with unlimited energy, it’s as exhausting as it looks. Taking five attempts to actually get a task done because you just forget halfway through. Forgetting where you put the thing, every time. Feeling your working memory slip away like waking from a dream. Fucking up all the time, then having to work twice as hard to fix it, and feeling like shit because you can’t get anything right.

It gets old, man.

I actually got a locator beacon recently.

I can’t really justify the cost of a two-way one given how rarely I go anywhere properly remote, but the little one-button boxes make for huge peace of mind. And honestly if I get bitten I’d likley be just as fucked with or without a conversation :D

About a decade ago, I fell and broke my ankle while out running.

It was only by sheer chance that this happened around a bunch of people, and I was able to get help immediately. If I’d been out somewhere else or at a different time, I would have been absolutely fucked.

Since that day, I never leave the house without my phone, ever.

(if I’m hiking somewhere out of range, then I map out my route and ensure that someone else knows where I’ll be)

You’re missing a critical distinction.

People can not care about (topic), while caring a lot about (disruptive discussion of (topic)).

The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

It’s like I don’t have a particular opinion about cornflakes, but if you keep waving a box of them in people’s face and hitting them with it, then i’mma ask you to stop.

It can be annoying to have to deal with someone going into excessive detail, making inappropriately-fine distinctions, or taking a strong position on one side or other of an argument that nobody’s making - since in all of those cases, nobody is willing or able to engage with the topic, and it’s just taking up conversation-space with (effectively) a monologue that they find boring and exhausting.

If someone says ‘hey look at that funny-shaped tree’ because it looks like something else, it’s usually worth a ‘heh’ in the moment and you move on.

If you start going into great detail of whether or not it actually counts as a tree, or just infodumping neat tree facts, or start ranting about which genus it properly belongs to despite what some people think… then someone will shut you down with ‘Dude. No one cares’.

You have to allow a little raw chicken in the mayo now.

So now people are to be allowed to sealion and troll and JAQ off in your community, so long as they do it respectfully.

Or else.

Imagine running, say, a community for vulnerable trans kids, and being forced to allow a constant influx of ‘helpful suggestions’, just so long as they’re phrased in pretty language.

Probably they’d rather drink a dogshit milkshake every single morning than use fucking JIRA, and they’re hoping you die of natural causes before you get a chance to force it on them.

You can’t cause ADHD, you can’t prevent ADHD; it’s genetic. It’s not a result of patterns of thought, or video games, or television. You don’t have to ‘train’ your child’s attention span, nor can you destroy it.

People with adhd are naturally drawn to high-stimulation activities, so people associate the two - but that’s like saying that smoke burns the toast.

… just don’t use instagram?

I never have, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out

fuck no

I quit reddit for a reason

‘as above’

First thing, I’m buying the finest fineliner I can, go for 4-6 columns on the page.

Then I’m writing in billionaires, one a week, after making them cosign a suicide note that the deaths will stop once wealth distribution flattens the fuck out, there’s a full UBI everywhere and fossil fuels are history.

Rita Morgan.

That episode was NOT OK.

I was not ok for about a week.

Working in emergency medicine would be amazing, but the first lull that happened, I’d fuck up and people would die

No, that’s not poisoning.

If you get killed by a tsunami, that’s not water poisoning for fuck’s sake.

whining about downvotes = instant downvote

This is a bad argument. Your conclusion happens to be factual, but it doesn’t follow from the premises.

Being in an enclosed space with an internal combustion engine will kill you because of the CO buildup, and no, that doesn’t happen in the open air. CO does oxidise to CO2 eventually, so it doesn’t just keep building up in the atmosphere.

The main harm caused by burning fossil fuels is the CO2, which is wreaking havoc on the climate and will kill billions - but not by poisoning them.

Goldrush and Badwater