"Tramp stamps" and boyzones

May 14, 2015 10:09 AM

I think the community would benefit from talking about how the recent thread about "tramp stamps" went. A number of Mefites have expressed that they felt that this thread felt like a big step backwards, like they were somehow visiting Metafilter in 2005 and not 2015. What can we do as a community to maintain whatever advances we've made in pushing back on the boyzone mentality here?
posted by dialetheia to MetaFilter-Related at 10:09 AM (1749 comments total)

I don't see why another mod would be a bad idea - preferably female. Also: more flagging by community members?
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 10:11 AM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

Not aware of the thread, what was so bad about it?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:13 AM on May 14, 2015

Oh sorry, here's the link to the thread.
posted by dialetheia at 10:16 AM on May 14, 2015

I don't see why another mod would be a bad idea

This feels kind of out of the blue, so I want to be clear that we have the number of mods we have because we pay the moderation staff and we only have so much revenue to work with. Payroll is by far the majority of Metafilter's budget; if we had the money to afford a higher level of staffing, we'd have a higher level of staffing. It's not a question of whether or not it's a good idea, it's economic circumstance.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:24 AM on May 14, 2015 [39 favorites]

I feel like this is a chain in a pattern recently - if I recall, a similar FPP on male privilege went really, really badly as well?
posted by Conspire at 10:24 AM on May 14, 2015 [17 favorites]

Clicking on that thread was like that moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark when he realizes the pit is full of snakes. "hmm, I wonder what people think of- OH SHIT" *very slowly creeps backwards*.

The Greg Nog uterus socks comment made me choke on my water, though, so there's that.
posted by selfnoise at 10:24 AM on May 14, 2015 [18 favorites]

Yeah holy gods the only reason that thread isn't literally a Bad Old Days thread is the intense pushback.
posted by griphus at 10:25 AM on May 14, 2015 [32 favorites]

And I mean pushback is great but a conversation that is almost entirely revolving around defending the very premise of the article from the loudly ignorant isn't the ideal way to have a thread.
posted by griphus at 10:26 AM on May 14, 2015 [34 favorites]

joseph conrad: I don't see why another mod would be a bad idea - preferably female. Also: more flagging by community members?

Restless_nomad and taz are both women. I am not positive but I believe LobsterMitten is as well. If so, there are more women mods than men. Cortex is a dude. I don't know if gnfti is still a mod (his profile says so, but may be outdated) and vacapinta was never full time.

The current women mods do not have the same presence in threads on difficult topics that tend to turn boyzone that Jessamyn did. I don't know what the difference is, but I sorely miss Jessamyn's presence in those threads. She was good at bonking offenders heads together (metaphorically-speaking) and getting them to quiet down. I think taz et al., do a good job, but still they're not Jessamyn.
posted by zarq at 10:27 AM on May 14, 2015 [18 favorites]

That thread was depressing and sad and pathetic and, as griphus notes, only intense pushback kept it from being disgustingly hostile.
posted by crush-onastick at 10:28 AM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

the fact that we still need to deal with shit like "devil's advocate here but some women really are sluts lol" is fucking unbelievable.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:32 AM on May 14, 2015 [123 favorites]

(Oh that was a silly comment of mine, then, sorry about that.)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 10:33 AM on May 14, 2015

I feel like the thread is far more characterized by the intense pushback than the shitty comments that were being pushed back.
posted by josher71 at 10:33 AM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

The thread on photos of women w/ the objects they carry for protection was also not great (though nowhere near as bad as the other two linked above).
posted by melissasaurus at 10:33 AM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

As I have said before, I wasn't on MeFi for the Serious Boyzone Years, but my participation and reading of those threads linked (and others I can't think of at the moment) have been very depressing and horrifying. I know I'll get lambasted for this, but I really do hold up this community as an example of a smart safe place for me, so it's disappointing to see crap like this happen. Er, rather, keep happening.
posted by Kitteh at 10:36 AM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

People have repulsive opinions on all sorts of things. If it's site policy to delete unpleasant opinions as opposed to simply patrolling behaviour then why have comments at all? We can hire a few professional writers to simply post the opinions everyone wants to see and all move on.
posted by GuyZero at 10:37 AM on May 14, 2015 [26 favorites]

Brandon Blatcher: Not aware of the thread, what was so bad about it?

Dialathea's comment here is a recap:

Also wow, this thread really has everything.

Seriously. To recap the gist of this thread:

- It isn't sexist because lots of women really are sluts
- It isn't sexist because tramp is 'gender-neutral'
- It isn't sexist because it only means trashy sluts
- It isn't sexist because dragonflies are a universal symbol for sluttiness
- It isn't sexist because the author wrote this article for the attention
- It isn't sexist because they are simply signaling that they prefer doggy-style
- It isn't sexist because they just have awful taste, which taste clearly has nothing to do with gender or sexual mores
- It isn't sexist because this dumb girl just regrets her dumb girl decisions

Did I miss anything?

posted by zarq at 10:38 AM on May 14, 2015 [69 favorites]

If it's site policy to delete unpleasant opinions as opposed to simply patrolling behaviour then why have comments at all?

This is a discussion website, so it's fruitful to get rid of the egregiously dumb, ignorant comments in order to have an engaging and nuanced conversation.
posted by easter queen at 10:39 AM on May 14, 2015 [30 favorites]

Let's not forget the repeated trotting out of MRA talking points of the above-mentioned male privilege thread, the hilarribile response to the Toast thread, the tiresome slippery-slope arguments in the "f*** her in the p****" thread, the Rambo fantasies of a bunch of dudes from the thread about an art exhibit of women with self-defense, the usual idiocy about sexual assault in the Amy Schumer thread.

That was just in the last week and a half, folks.

On preview: 17 comments to the first accusation of attempting to silence people all their lives. Hoo-fucking-ray.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:39 AM on May 14, 2015 [57 favorites]

I mean, to try to be less sarcastic, did I miss actual bad behaviour? Were people being directly abusive to other members? I'm honestly not sure what the call to action is here.
posted by GuyZero at 10:39 AM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

Yeah pushback is better than no pushback but MetaFilter can either be that place I go to to argue with jerks, or a place to share links with other grownups. I had the fill of the former in my early 20s and I'm happy the site evolved with me so far.
posted by Space Coyote at 10:40 AM on May 14, 2015 [32 favorites]

Anyway, for the content of the thread itself:

And I mean pushback is great but a conversation that is revolving almost entirely revolving around defending the very premise of the article from the loudly ignorant isn't the ideal way to have a thread.

I basically agree on both points, and it was a frustrating thread to babysit all day yesterday. I deleted a bunch of things, and left several notes. But I also feel like there's a hard point of tension here between the idea that Metafilter threads are and always have been a generalist discussion space and the idea that active pushback on stuff people feel like is problematic is a sign that something's wrong. I think it's basically things working well, that folks are willing to call out stuff they disagree with or think is unkind or regressive or shitty; sometimes that means a frustrating thread because people are expressing unlikeable opinions, but people are allowed to have unlikeable opinions.

Knowing the Metafilter userbase, I'd expect a lot of pushback against the idea that "tramp stamp" is a non-sexist, non-problematic term; I'd expect the assumptions behind that to be picked apart, and for people to essentially call bullshit on the aspects of casual and systemic slut-shaming and classist dismissal and so on tied up in that. And that's what I saw: a relatively small number of people actually arguing the "yeah but it's sorta accurate" or "yeah but it's just words" angle, and a lot of people responding with rebuttals or redirecting the conversation to more interesting or engaging lines of conversation about tattoos, personal agency, etc.

Again: it was a frustrating thread. I think a few people were being somewhere between tonedeaf and actively antagonistic in there in a way that sucks, and had to tell at least one person to specifically take off from the thread after some deletions and notes didn't work. But it was a thread full of discussion from a big group of people with no prerequisite consensus on a bunch of complicated overlapping social issues. I want Metafilter to have good, non-obnoxious conversations about stuff but sometimes it's not going to be, as griphus put it, the ideal way to have a thread. Some threads will be better than others. I mostly find it heartening that we're at a place where people will thoughtfully push back on stuff they find problematic rather than just assuming no one else will think it's a problem.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:41 AM on May 14, 2015 [43 favorites]

I've only skimmed the thread over just now but I think I agree with josher71. Maybe I just feel this way because I wasn't following the thread in real-time and therefore didn't have a chance to have as much of an emotional response to the comments, but in general I think those comments as horrible as some of them are should stand (i.e. not be deleted). I also think it's more positive than not for sexist attitudes to be out in the open instead of censored expect when they get to the point of being hateful. And I think there was a good amount of strong pushback from the majority. But again, perhaps I wouldn't feel the same if I had actually been participating in that thread.
posted by Asparagus at 10:41 AM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm honestly not sure what the call to action is here.

That men educate themselves so they don't turn this site into something defined by obliviousness, hostility, dismissiveness, and tactics that effectively silence female participation?
posted by maxsparber at 10:41 AM on May 14, 2015 [100 favorites]

There was definitely some weird and gross stuff in there and in that other recent thread. I'm not sure it there is a clear pattern of shittier behavior or just two outlier moments but I very much hope it doesn't continue.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:41 AM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Were people being directly abusive to other members?

Do you consider it directly abusive if someone says "all people with this thing are disgusting in my opinion" in response to members saying "i have this thing"?
posted by poffin boffin at 10:42 AM on May 14, 2015 [33 favorites]

> People have repulsive opinions on all sorts of things.

And they are not required by law to subject everyone else to them whenever and wherever.

I only came upon that thread because Errant had a comment that showed up in my sidebar and I was like oh a thread about tattoos that I missed that Errant said something awesome in *click* and then I though I had accidentally somehow clicked a "10 years ago today" link in the sidebar instead.
posted by rtha at 10:43 AM on May 14, 2015 [19 favorites]

The recent hellcanoe about Tinder also springs to mind.

GuyZero, no one was saying to make it "site policy to delete unpleasant opinions" in all cases. But the thing is, when those unpleasant opinions are coming up in every thread about women and are only becoming increasingly crass and nasty, then the effect is for women to stop wanting to be in those threads, because it's exhausting. So if that's the kind of echo chamber you'd prefer, I guess.
posted by kagredon at 10:43 AM on May 14, 2015 [17 favorites]

From now on when I hear people complain about the overmoderation here, I'm going to assume they're an active YouTube commenter.
posted by easter queen at 10:43 AM on May 14, 2015 [14 favorites]

Thanks for starting this discussion, dialetheia. I was talking to a friend off-site about that thread and we both definitely had that feeling of "wow, this is a boyzone shitshow the likes of which we haven't seen in a while and were hoping to never see again."

I mean, as someone who copped in that thread to having almost exactly the type of tattoo under discussion, I guess it's useful to know who in this community would make some pretty gross assumptions about me if they were aware of that fact. It'll inform how I think of some posters moving forward, and how willing I'll be to engage in any presumed-good-faith conversations about gender issues with them. (I'm not crying in my pillow about this - as noted in my post, I give pretty much no fucks about what random people think to themselves about my tattoos. But I do give some fucks about what they feel comfortable saying out loud and what that says about their feelings of entitlement and privilege in general.)

I appreciate the work the mods did in that thread. I think it sucks that people felt this was a space where they could or should post such misogynistic crap to begin with. I love this site. I want to keep loving this site. Every discussion like that makes it a little more difficult to do that.
posted by Stacey at 10:46 AM on May 14, 2015 [56 favorites]

That thread made me feel utterly shitty and judged in a totally unexpected and unprepared for way. So there's that.
posted by shelleycat at 10:46 AM on May 14, 2015 [33 favorites]

It's also a thing where, yeah, stuff that was deleted is stuff that some folks saw and got understandably annoyed by. But the ghosts of those things have a way of living on after the fact in a thread where deleting it to get it out of the mix is somewhat defeated by ongoing reference to it in absentia. Which there's no super simple solution to—I don't expect people to wipe their memories after something's been nixed—but it does create a kind of momentum that I think makes threads bumpier than they would be if folks focused more on what's actually still in the thread.

And that's not to say there wasn't still obnoxious stuff in the thread. On a quieter day or in a slower thread, I think I could have managed some finer nuance with that discussion. But busy days happen, and fast-moving threads happen, and stuff is gonna be imperfect and sometimes a little frustrating or depressing or angry-making even when the system is more or less working as expected.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:46 AM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

The thread was exhausting enough that I had to take a break from it. On the bright side, though, it did let me blow through some of my Netflix queue.
posted by corb at 10:48 AM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

I mean, to try to be less sarcastic, did I miss actual bad behaviour? Were people being directly abusive to other members? I'm honestly not sure what the call to action is here.

There was a commenter (who has repeatedly been a sexist ass in threads about sexism) who started out his first comment with "Ah, the tramp stamp, also known as the "respect-me-not" then continued to assert multiple times that they function as an invitation to sexualize, but had the gall to claim that he was totally not making a judgement call on women, their sexuality, or how open their bodies should be to criticism.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:49 AM on May 14, 2015 [29 favorites]

joseph conrad is fully awesome: (Oh that was a silly comment of mine, then, sorry about that.)

Not silly at all. And more flagging would probably be a good idea. I'm glad you mentioned it.
posted by zarq at 10:49 AM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

And that was just the most visible offender, mind you.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:49 AM on May 14, 2015

People have repulsive opinions on all sorts of things.

No kidding. The point being, repulsive opinions, as distinct from areas in which reasonable people can disagree, are unwelcome here. This is not an accident. It's a choice to make this community function as a community.

If it's site policy to delete unpleasant opinions as opposed to simply patrolling behaviour then why have comments at all?

This is a distinction without a difference on a site devoted to a conversation among community members. Also, don't shift the rhetorical ground from repulsive to unpleasant in the middle of your paragraph.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:50 AM on May 14, 2015 [15 favorites]

actually, the comments I found most infuriating were the several dozen, many from commenters who I think are female, to the effect of "This isn't sexism, the author is imaginining it/has a victim complex", right alongside comments that were describing explicitly sexist reactions and readings of LBTs.

If all you're adding to a thread is "nuh-uh", maybe reconsider if that's really the hot take we are all clamoring for?
posted by kagredon at 10:51 AM on May 14, 2015 [21 favorites]

On closer inspection, there are probably several comments in that thread that would have ideally been deleted, but as corb points out, there are only so many mod-hours to go around and I think they did a pretty good job given those constraints.
posted by Asparagus at 10:51 AM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Count me in as another user who's been feeling a little WTF whiplash lately on this site, not even just in terms of Boyzone crap--it also feels like there has been more than the usual amount of general haterade and reflexive slamming of posts and posters. Had chalked it up to my own perception and maybe just being a little more of an exposed nerve lately, but after that tattoo horrorshow and the abortion access horrorshow and the Tinder horrorshow... I'm no longer inclined to think that it's all in my head.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:52 AM on May 14, 2015 [28 favorites]

even when the system is more or less working as expected.

I think it's exactly that idea, that things are working as expected, that I wanted to touch base with people about, because I'm increasingly hearing from other women members that the misogyny really really feels like it's ramped up here lately. Just speaking for myself, it's definitely been affecting my desire to spend time here recently (yesterday was just the last straw).

It's not that I want anything to be a safe space or to only have sanitized opinions, but we also should be mindful that we aren't implicitly 'sanitizing' threads in the other direction - where people who have traditionally done that pushback are getting exhausted and leaving. I saw multiple great commenters here talk about buttoning after yesterday's thread, and I considered it myself, and I want to make sure we aren't silently losing people over these issues.
posted by dialetheia at 10:52 AM on May 14, 2015 [29 favorites]

It wasn't even just the sexist slut-shaming stuff, I really wasn't prepared for the range of insults thrown directly at people just like me. Apparently I'm also thoughtless, stupid, conformist, low class, easily-lead, too trendy, rebellious, not rebellious enough, a show off, and more I've managed to forget. The stupid part is none of it is even remotely correct.

Some of the of people posting seemed to think that 'those' women are some kind of nebulous other to spit upon, not actual real people also joining the conversation. Which is an internet problem in general I know (forgetting there are real people on the other side of the screen), I'm just not so used to seeing it here I guess.
posted by shelleycat at 10:54 AM on May 14, 2015 [60 favorites]

I have a lower back tattoo and I read the article and was (stupidly, obviously) thinking it would be a cool thread of people showing tat pics and talking about whether they regret them now or whatever, or their experience of them being read in a sexual way or not. So when I started reading the comments and discovered that I had, in fact, been advertising my sluttishness and penchant for certain sexual positions and my poor taste and my sheep-like thinking for the last 14 years I was mighty pissed off. That some men came in right off the bat to say: well generally those types of girls were sluts...ugh.

I was going to tell my little tat story and discuss where I agreed/disagreed with the author and go on my merry way. Instead I just got a raging case of the "fuck yous". I'm glad people were pushing back but I didnt really have the energy yesterday, and it would be great if it wasn't necessary in every thread that references women's bodies.
posted by billiebee at 10:54 AM on May 14, 2015 [127 favorites]

This is a distinction without a difference on a site devoted to a conversation among community members. Also, don't shift the rhetorical ground from repulsive to unpleasant in the middle of your paragraph.

That was unintentional. Sorry about that. I am honestly not making a veiled argument in favour of harassment, directly or indirectly.

Other people's experience of that thread are not the same as mine. I see what you all mean. It's not like the mods did nothing, but per cortex's comment it seemed like a hard thread to moderate.
posted by GuyZero at 10:55 AM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Misogyny is not the "expression of a disgusting opinion of the sort that people have about all sorts of things." It is an expression of an entirely different thing. The expression of a misogynistic thought, attitude or opinion is intended to perpetuate a system that actively harms women, by devaluing them (in its mildest form) or by promoting/normalizing/tolerating violence against them in the form of taunts, punching, rape or murder.

If you think there were not overt expressions of entrenched misogyny at the minimum designed to devalue women as a class and specific women (known or unknown to the poster), I would suggest examining the intersection of thoughts, expressions, actions and approval in the world around you more closely.
posted by crush-onastick at 10:56 AM on May 14, 2015 [39 favorites]

Yeah, the bit about "obviously these women want them so they can engage in X position sex" was unreal.
posted by corb at 10:56 AM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

Yeah, the bit about "obviously these women want them so they can engage in X position sex" was unreal.

The bit about how those women were actively stupid was also pretty unreal tho
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:57 AM on May 14, 2015 [50 favorites]

That thread made me feel utterly shitty and judged in a totally unexpected and unprepared for way. So there's that.

This. I expect the instant, insistent I DIDN'T READ THIS BUT THE AUTHOR IS WRONG stuff, but I did not expect that gross wholesale value judgements about people (people who are me, at that) who might as well be used to prop a door open for all their worth as a human being because of some markings on their skin. Shall we do haircuts next? How about glasses vs contacts?

I haven't decided whether to stay, honestly, or just stop commenting, if this is what the bulk of the commenters want an opportunity to say. I just don't have the energy for a place where women start from a baseline of shit and have to fight their way up to Allowed. That's...the rest of the internet, mostly.
posted by Lyn Never at 10:57 AM on May 14, 2015 [37 favorites]

why have comments at all?

A question I ask myself more and more often.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:59 AM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

shelleycat, you make a good point. I've noticed a lot more boyzone recently, but I've also noticed a lot more cruelty in general. I thought it was just me too (since I've been spending more time on the blue) so it's good to hear that's not the case. I was thinking that maybe with new members the demo is skewing a lot more cranky than usual? I remember this place being cranky but not as outright hostile and tough as it has been lately.

Though also, I think the thing in that thread was that people were assuming women with LBTs were trashy, lower-class women, who probably wouldn't spend time on middle-class "tasteful" Metafilter, so it's OK to talk about them like they're not around.

It reminds me of the time I mentioned to a friend that my mom had a lot of biker tattoos and she said, "ew!" Like, did I not just say that was my mom? Is that the best you could do? It's almost like, "well, it's your mom, but you must realize how distasteful that is, right?" Like good taste is the great class unifier.
posted by easter queen at 11:00 AM on May 14, 2015 [24 favorites]

poffin boffin: the fact that we still need to deal with shit like "devil's advocate here but some women really are sluts lol" is fucking unbelievable.

What shocked me was the sheer volume of victim-blaming/slut shaming justifications. People arguing that tattoos were intended for 'male gaze' because the person wearing them can't see them without assistance. People arguing that only a certain type of person gets those kinds of tats. Etc. etc. Depressing as hell.
posted by zarq at 11:02 AM on May 14, 2015 [24 favorites]

to clarify my example above, it wasn't even a woman being called a gross awful person. it was a guy saying "well i have tattoos and i agree that gendered grossness towards women's tattoos is a shitty thing and men don't get judged like that" followed by another male commenter explaining that the first guy just wasn't smart enough to realize that people thought he was a gross loser for having tattoos.

so yeah, on top of everything else, fuck that.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:03 AM on May 14, 2015 [15 favorites]

Yeah, the bit about "obviously these women want them so they can engage in X position sex" was unreal.

Oh come on. Your first two comments in that thread were awful. They were right up there on the list of people actively trying, and succeeding for a change, in aiming to make me feel like shit about myself. You have nothing to feel good about here, except I guess that your horrible judgements (which aren't even true!) made at least one person feel bad.
posted by shelleycat at 11:03 AM on May 14, 2015 [45 favorites]

A good chunk of what was blowing my mind in that thread was a couple of female posters who decided that the tough love approach coached in talking down or criticizing the woman who wrote the article was a nice way to engage in the conversation.
posted by Kitteh at 11:04 AM on May 14, 2015 [17 favorites]

Actually, I shouldn't assume gender by username, so I apologize.
posted by Kitteh at 11:04 AM on May 14, 2015

Like good taste is the great class unifier.

well, tbf, "good taste" often is little more than a polite term for performing class signifiers correctly, which is how we got that whole weird sidebar about "objectively bad tattoos"
posted by kagredon at 11:05 AM on May 14, 2015 [12 favorites]

I was thinking that maybe with new members the demo is skewing a lot more cranky than usual?

Almost all of them seem to be users of decently long standing, with several going back to the Boyzone days. The latter, rather unsurprisingly, also seem to have a lot of overlap of the kind of people who do this a lot. At least one of them was called out in a previous MeTa about sexism.
posted by zombieflanders at 11:05 AM on May 14, 2015 [8 favorites]

it's definitely been affecting my desire to spend time here recently

I just don't have the energy for a place where women start from a baseline of shit and have to fight their way up to Allowed.

Ditto and ditto. Reading the male privilege thread in real-time was exhausting and sad and hurtful and just plain weird. I was about one evo-psych comment away from taking a break from the site when, luckily, erratic meatsack's comment came through (giving me the glimmer of hope that at least I was not alone in feeling like the thread was a shitshow).
posted by melissasaurus at 11:05 AM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

One of the things that made that thread so difficult and unpleasant to read was several Usual Suspects Usual Suspecting. I know that comments from at least one of them were deleted, but there was such great pushback in that thread and later on some amazing pictures of tattoos that MeFites have and it made me sad because it showed me what the thread could have been but wasn't.

I kind of hate to be this guy but maybe part of the answer is stronger warnings and potentially banning, or at least giving time-outs to, some members? I don't actually think it's an enormous proportion of users that are poisoning these threads and I feel like there are a few names I see over and over. I know that the mod staff is at capacity and I really, REALLY appreciate all their hard work, and I think that maybe recognizing that, sometimes, people have demonstrated that they are not capable of functioning in the community in a healthy way and acting on that could be good?

I understand the principle of educating people rather than exiling them but when a few users have consistently demonstrated that they are going to keep making the same arguments that are hurtful to other members of the site and that it's not going to get better, maybe it's time for us as a community to say "we will not accept this" and to part ways from them?

I am putting this up as a suggestion going forward, not even sure I'm advocating it, but it might be helpful. If it's a few bad apples, maybe we could ban them before they spoil the barrel?
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:05 AM on May 14, 2015 [47 favorites]

well, tbf, "good taste" often is little more than a polite term for performing class signifiers correctly, which is how we got that whole weird sidebar about "objectively bad tattoos"

though also how we all got that sidebar about party dog. So maybe that particular part evens out.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:06 AM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

That Male Privilege thread had a bunch of v. old, low-post-count accounts come out of the woodwork to Deny Male Privilege in a drive-by sort of way. Weirdest fucking thing.
posted by griphus at 11:06 AM on May 14, 2015 [55 favorites]

People arguing that tattoos were intended for 'male gaze' because the person wearing them can't see them without assistance.

I felt sorry for those poor men living in the Land Of No Mirrors. Like how do they even know their lat pulldowns are working??!
posted by billiebee at 11:08 AM on May 14, 2015 [27 favorites]

Actually, I shouldn't assume gender by username, so I apologize.

If we're thinking of the same grotesque "ovary up and get over it already" comment, the poster has in the past confirmed their gender as female.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:08 AM on May 14, 2015 [24 favorites]

well, tbf, "good taste" often is little more than a polite term for performing class signifiers correctly, which is how we got that whole weird sidebar about "objectively bad tattoos"

Yea, I should've clarified that what I meant was that she was basically saying to me, "well, you're one of us now, so of course you agree that your mom is gross!" Which made me want to puke on her.

Thanks zombieflanders, that's actually good to know. I might be conflating shitty boyzone stuff with general crankiness elsewhere. One of the worst (and most obviously deliberately inflamatory) comments I read was from a relatively new user so that might have skewed my POV. It was also deleted so maybe being in the trenches has made me more angry than someone who came along later.
posted by easter queen at 11:09 AM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think it's exactly that idea, that things are working as expected, that I wanted to touch base with people about, because I'm increasingly hearing from other women members that the misogyny really really feels like it's ramped up here lately.

To me it seems like in the last few months we've been seeing a lot more feminist-themed posts on the blue, threads about catcalling and the patriarchy and discussions of sexism in every sort of media. Those threads inevitably reveal people with sexist attitudes that might otherwise go unnoticed if we were discussing, I don't know, architecture or something.

I think that the community in general is making progress in this area, but there are still some retrograde jackasses loudly making their opinions known (and then getting yelled at for being retrograde jackasses, which is as it should be).
posted by JDHarper at 11:09 AM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

That Male Privilege thread had a bunch of v. old, low-post-count accounts come out of the woodwork to Deny Male Privilege in a drive-by sort of way.

This has been going on for a little while, and on some other subjects. There was one other incident that springs to mind about a old, low-activity account that strongly defended the Russian government's ...uh..... participation in eastern Ukraine and Crimea. Which was apparently not occurring at all, but it would certainly be both good and worthwhile if it was, and didn't NATO and the EU deserve it, whatever it was that wasn't happening.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:11 AM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

though also how we all got that sidebar about party dog. So maybe that particular part evens out.

party dog will destroy the false consciousness of capitalism

party dog will awaken the proletariat

thesis: (communist) party. antithesis: (capitalist) dog. SYNTHESIS: party dog
posted by kagredon at 11:13 AM on May 14, 2015 [36 favorites]

At an old site I used to moderate, there was one especially pernicious troll. He had actively harassed a number of female bloggers, in several instances actually contacting their employers and trying to get them fired. But he was very crafty, using multiple aliases and changing his style and his approach. We only managed to figure out it was the same guy by comparing IP addresses and blocking him whenever he'd show up, and, even then, it sometimes took a while, because he was constantly changing his tactics, and often took on personas that pretended to be helpful, and so you'd only get to the misogyny after he had participated for a while and suddenly would say something that seemed innocent, or naive, or just misstated, but you'd check the IP and, yep, it was that guy again. And I couldn't figure out what was in it for him. What did he care if there was a place on the internet where his particular odiousness was unwelcome -- there are plenty of places where they were.

I feel the same way about our usual suspects. I don't think they are trolls, I just think they have a shitty worldview that is especially nasty toward women. But the web is full of places where that is unremarkable. But here they stay, going quite for a long time, and then testing the waters again every so often: Maybe eight months ago I got yelled at for telling people that privilege doesn't exist, that men have it worse in America, but it's been a while, let's give it a shot again ...

And sometimes it rears up, super-agressive, and we have a rash of women leaving the site, and what is that? Victory? It's temporary if that, because every time it happens there is a crackdown on the sort of behavior that led to this site losing a percentage of the user base.

Strange game. The only way to win is not to play, and yet they keep playing, month after month, year after year.
posted by maxsparber at 11:15 AM on May 14, 2015 [19 favorites]

The silver linings I saw while reading that thread in real time were:

* the amazingly thoughtful and intelligent pushbacks, by both male and female mefites, to the sexist, classist BS that spoiled it all at the beginning
* cortex's obvious moderating and also thoughtful participation with his mod-hat off (that was a nice reassurance that Team MeFi is actively feminist!)
* those fantastic photos of mefite's tattoos

It was a tough thread to follow, but I learned SO MUCH from it. Not everyone is a fully actualized perfect arguer for these topics, and it is really good for people like me to read them and become aware of all these words and terms and cites that better verbalize my inner uncomfortableness with patriarchal stuff.

Can I, like, borrow you guys to help better handle my ignorant family members I have to interact with on Facebook and real life?
posted by jillithd at 11:16 AM on May 14, 2015 [15 favorites]

But for real though can the use of "authoress" be forever and ever forbidden here? I'm not saying anything should befall the most recent offender but a ban on "authoress" would be the MeFi Pony I want for Festivus.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:18 AM on May 14, 2015 [35 favorites]

They were right up there on the list of people actively trying, and succeeding for a change, in aiming to make me feel like shit about myself.

I'm sorry that you felt badly about yourself - it was definitely not my intention. Sometimes I get frustrated with other women who appear to be aligning or performing along with patriarchy-driven stereotypes or norms in a really unquestioning way, especially when other women are trying and often succeeding to resist it. However, that is largely my frustration talking, and it's worth noting that it's really hard to swim in the sea of patriarchy and not come out wet in some way. I'm one hundred percent sure that I also have some things that I'm not aware of that are irreparably tainted in some way by the pressures of our current shitty society.
posted by corb at 11:25 AM on May 14, 2015

That last bit was just a flip comment - throwaway, really - to lighten up the previous sentences. I feel fully chastised for making it. Thank you.
posted by jillithd at 11:28 AM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm sorry that you felt badly about yourself - it was definitely not my intention.

You straight out said insulting things along with 'they deserve to be judged because..'. How is that not intentionally and obviously nasty? Then the second time you admitted that maybe some of us have tattoos there because some guy told us to and we're too stupid to resist.

You have no right or reason to be frustrated because other women don't do things the way you want and judging us because of it is not the answer.
posted by shelleycat at 11:29 AM on May 14, 2015 [51 favorites]

sorry cortex, but:

I also feel like there's a hard point of tension here between the idea that Metafilter threads are and always have been a generalist discussion space and the idea that active pushback on stuff people feel like is problematic is a sign that something's wrong. I think it's basically things working well, that folks are willing to call out stuff they disagree with or think is unkind or regressive or shitty; sometimes that means a frustrating thread because people are expressing unlikeable opinions, but people are allowed to have unlikeable opinions.

So we gotta let shitheads be shitheads, and the rest of us have to continue to undertake the ongoing work of pushing back against shitheadery?

What I'm seeing from this, here and elsewhere, is: women are nope-ing out of these threads because (a) they're tired of reading boyzoney commentary, and (b) they're tired of having to push back against it.

Deleting shitty comments is all very well, but it's not enough by itself: the shitlords still get the pleasure of stirring up trouble, their targets still get affected by it, and the threads are still horrendously derailed.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:30 AM on May 14, 2015 [43 favorites]

corb, part of the deal is that having a LBT has fuck-all to do with men. Can you get one to attract the attention of men? Yes, but it's a perfectly acceptable place to get a non-sexual tattoo, and unless it's specifically sexual, there's no reason to dwell on it. The female lower back is not male territory; that's kind of what the original article was about.

I know you're apologizing and that's between you and shelleycat, but I think that's an important distinction.

To be honest, I think a woman could get tattoos on her breasts and it really does not mean they're sex tattoos either. (I feel like this is almost a more widely acceptable statment, and I'm not sure why, but I think it has something to do with the total proliferation of the "tramp stamp" idea. Which could demonstrate that calling them that is doing a lot of harm.)
posted by easter queen at 11:30 AM on May 14, 2015 [15 favorites]

Some of the comments in that thread left this flavor/odor behind them:

"Come on, you can't take everything away from us. Leave us one thing to make fun of. We can't make fun of minorities or gays, at least leave us tramp stamps (read: women)."*

Like they're exasperated by the efforts of people who try to enlighten them out of their comfort zone. I'm not sure why lower-back tattoos where the rallying point for privilege-deniers, but watching the pushback they received was impressive.



*no one said this, it's just my take on the underlying motivation for someone insisting that their misogynist viewpoint is no big deal. also, sorry for saying 'gays', but it fits the voice of that shitty character.
posted by GrapeApiary at 11:32 AM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

You know, of the several comments I've had deleted, the only one that bothered me was when I mentioned another mass murdering dude was a sign of some very male-specific entitlement. And as it was fairly bland, short, and not expletive-laden and not just "kill all the menz!!!" I was annoyed. And shocked. So much so I tried to repost it.

And I feel things like this are why. I can get that my comments are deleted for being too glib and cutting but things like this are allowed to stand? Not just one comment but entire posts full of this kind of behavior. But pointing out the fact that men are more likely to go on mass killing sprees because there is just something really destructive about the patriarchy, that needs to be silenced quick. Okay.

That said, I'm glad these comments are still there because I think it's better than deletion.
posted by bgal81 at 11:34 AM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

And looking at the thread I see there were other comments from corb too, I missed those because the two judgmental ones stood out so much. Sorry if that's confusing.

To be clear I'm talking about this: "They are emblems of their stupidity and conformity. It's okay to make fun of them, because it's like a visible tag that someone thought it was a good idea to make a permanent modification to their body of something with no real relevance to them other than 'Butterflies are pretty!'" and this: "So while I still think it's a terrible choice of terrible placement, it's worth considering that some of the women who got those tattoos may have gotten them because sexist tattoo artist wanted to be dicks."

Coming on the heels of all the other shit being thrown around it was just more ugly shit we didn't need to hear.
posted by shelleycat at 11:35 AM on May 14, 2015 [18 favorites]

So we gotta let shitheads be shitheads, and the rest of us have to continue to undertake the ongoing work of pushing back against shitheadery?

Yep, this is bothering me. Is it really the job of the userbase to respond to the "Convince me this is sexist!!" dance every single time? For the same people who have demanded it before? Even when it comprises the entire thread? Is there really no way to get around that? I don't see how it's not a derail.
posted by almostmanda at 11:37 AM on May 14, 2015 [23 favorites]

I have to agree. I don't think it's a bad thing for the site to have commenters who don't 100% agree with me about sexism; I do think that allowing threadshitting and derailing just because it's about sexism is kind of uncool.

People kept commenting to say, "so she feels guilty about her tattoo, so what?!??" which is threadshitting and/or derailing. The article is about why, if you don't want to read it, or you're straight up ignoring it, you are not contributing.
posted by easter queen at 11:38 AM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

That men educate themselves so they don't turn this site into something defined by obliviousness, hostility, dismissiveness, and tactics that effectively silence female participation?

This is such a hard thing to solve, because I think much of the problem that we see repeated are by individuals that don't always (but sometimes do) have the institutional history to know how we've addressed issues repeatedly in the past, with some resolution to them. As long as we have an open-door policy for new members (which I think is good, by the way), we gain the very real risk that we'll have to repeatedly have the same conversations over and over to reeducate ourselves back to a place of (relative serenity) that has been hard-fought. So, I'm worried that we have one of four inevitable solutions:

1. Change the whole world, so that those who are new won't be bringing in toxic ideas that are typical knee-jerk reactions to social issues that are actually more nuanced and complicated.

2. Stop letting new members in, so that we can get some semblance of equilibrium that will not be sigificantly disrupted in the future (certainly a non-starter).

3. Have mod intervention that rigorously deletes troubling aspects of discussions (but really, this is a non-starter too, for reasons that cortex mentions. Better to have push-back from informed individuals than to overly limit free discourse.)

4. Be willing to keep having these discussions over and over as needed in order to defend precious territory from the barbarian hordes that sometimes come on in over the hill.

As much as it pains me to say this, I think number four is the inevitable reality to a seriously messed up world and an open door policy that invites people in. We want to be open (this is a good virtue), but we want some problems to stay continually solved. Some of this can be resolved by continually tweaking our community responses and moderation policies, but I'm not sure we can rest on our laurels, probably ever. And that's certainly frustrating.
posted by SpacemanStix at 11:41 AM on May 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

If the article is about how patriarchy affects the perception of women's tattoos, I feel like allowing a bunch of "lol patriarchy, not real" comments is an obvious derail. The article is not about whether patriarchy exists. There's a lot of room for opinions in terms of how and why patriarchy affects tattoos, and the entire thread doesn't just have to be cool tattoos and high-fiving, but I feel like allowing it to become referendum on the need for feminism every time is just kind of pointless. It's like saying "let's have the same fight about Mac vs. PC everytime there's an article about the new Apple watch." It's pointless.

The only benefit I can see is that I really do believe that some people read those threads and have their minds change. But I don't want to change minds at the price of not having actual important, nuanced conversations with people. I joined a discussion board for the discussions, not the weird attacks on my personhood.

(Sorry, meant to post this as part of above comment but hit the button on accident.)
posted by easter queen at 11:42 AM on May 14, 2015 [18 favorites]

On a more general note, I don't know if this is an overall trend for this site recently. Basically I stay out of threads about sexism or politics or other likely to be contentious topics most of the time. I work a lot and don't get enough sleep so I know I don't have a lot of energy to go around, so I save it up and only go into those threads when I'm feeling ready for it. I knew last night's thread would be more difficult just because of the article in the post. But today is a public holiday so I had some time and I like tattoos so whatever. I was ready for the slut shaming stuff, but not for the low class thoughtless sheep stuff piled on top. It did take me by surprise, but I can't say if that's because I censor the site for myself or because it's a real overall change.

I think the most annoying thing in the end was that I didn't even get to engage with the article because I was so turned around by the time I got to the bottom of the thread. I did have opinions about it (mostly along the lines of how it sucks that the author was made to feel like that by others) but they were kind of gone by the time I made it to the comment box.
posted by shelleycat at 11:42 AM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

Is it really the job of the userbase to respond to the "Convince me this is sexist!!" dance every single time? For the same people who have demanded it before? Even when it comprises the entire thread? Is there really no way to get around that? I don't see how it's not a derail.

Yeah, I agree with this, and I think that since there are only a limited number of mods and mod hours in the day (and this would be a fact of life even under different economic circumstances) sometimes it's time to start wielding blunter weapons.

Again, I feel like a dick for advocating for bannings, but I've thought about it since my previous comment and I've realized that, while I want to be inclusive and welcoming to everyone, sometimes you get to a point where not everyone can be part of the same community, and you have to decide whether that will happen explicitly by saying to some people "This behavior will not be tolerated. You are continuing to engage in it. You cannot be here anymore." or whether it will happen implicitly by allowing that group of people to attack others until it is clear to them that they can't be part of the community anymore.

I think the way to get around the "Convince me this is sexist!! dance" from "the same people who have demanded it before" is to say "You may not continue to do this" and back it up with action. It clears out the worst offenders, it keeps them from riling up others, and it demonstrates support for the people being attacked. I actually feel really badly and regretful suggesting this but not as badly and regretful as I feel about all the shitty, shitty stuff that got said in that thread by people who have said similar stuff before.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:45 AM on May 14, 2015 [39 favorites]

Isn't there a tradition of not banning but saying "hey, stay out of sexism-related threads?" That's fine with me. I don't care what sexists have to say about aerodynamics or kitty cats or whatever and I'm fine with them being on the site, just not dragging down every post about women.
posted by easter queen at 11:46 AM on May 14, 2015 [12 favorites]

ask allies to self-educate and ask allies to speak up on their own behalf to their ignorant family members.

Here's my take on this, speaking both as a person in a category requiring activism, and an imperfect ally. Wearing ignorant ally hat: Yes, absolutely, it's my responsibility to educate myself, to read what I can. As a human being, though, as much as I read, I can only extrapolate emotionally from my own reflected experiences. Ideological blinders also put constraints on my ability to interpret things I read. So I've been hugely grateful to friends who've shown a ton of patience in bothering to answer stupid questions from their experience, and to challenge assumptions I didn't know I had.

It's not their job to do that, that's not what I'm saying. But an existing close connection makes it easier for me to get past my blinders and approach the idea on an emotional level, even though, of course, I can never really grasp it. I do think finding an emotional hook into a perspective that's not your own is a more certain, or stickier way of getting at it. To reiterate, though, it's no one's job to do that for me, it's a kindness.

Wearing person in category requiring activism hat: It's a necessary burden of givenness, and a fucking pain in the ass. I choose my battles based on how I feel at any time, and whether I think the effort will make a difference.
posted by cotton dress sock at 11:48 AM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

So we gotta let shitheads be shitheads, and the rest of us have to continue to undertake the ongoing work of pushing back against shitheadery?

Yes. Forever. That is the social contract. It's exhausting, and it's unfair, and it is the human condition. There will always be assholes. Always. There will never be a time when all the assholes have been reeducated, or removed, or silenced all their lives while there are still enough people around to hold open conversations worth having. We can restrict speech to the point where there is little of interest left to say, or limit participation until only echoes remain, but we can't have open conversation and open participation without the messy, messy business of rubbing elbows with assholes. Sometimes, we're even the assholes (speaking purely for myself on that point).

The best we can hope for is to always have more people willing to push back than to stir up shit. And sometimes, it's good to take a break.

Because, yeah - it's hard to have the same conversations over and over. Pretty sure that's my definition of hell.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:48 AM on May 14, 2015 [38 favorites]

4. Be willing to keep having these discussions over and over as needed in order to defend precious territory from the barbarian hordes that sometimes come on in over the hill.

As much as it pains me to say this, I think number four is the inevitable reality to a seriously messed up world and an open door policy that invites people in. We want to be open (this is a good virtue), but we want some problems to stay continually solved. Some of this can be resolved by continually tweaking our community responses and moderation policies, but I'm not sure we can rest on our laurels, probably ever. And that's certainly frustrating.

Once a week, we could elect a representative whose sole job would be to smack down people who engage in those arguments. Pay 'em in donuts and beer. The "Schmuck Detector."
posted by zarq at 11:49 AM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

corb, part of the deal is that having a LBT has fuck-all to do with men. Can you get one to attract the attention of men? Yes, but it's a perfectly acceptable place to get a non-sexual tattoo, and unless it's specifically sexual, there's no reason to dwell on it.

Sorry if I was unclear - I in no way think a LBT is a sexual tattoo or is designed as a sexual tattoo. But I do think that in many ways, the choice of an LBT rather than another tattoo placement is heavily influenced by patriarchal considerations of women's worth. It became such a ubiquitous tattoo in part because of male opinions about what women with tattoos at all were. So you have a small, easily concealable tattoo, with plausibly deniable uber-feminine iconography - butterflies, dragonflies, cats, things coded strongly as feminine and unthreatening. And I think you can't look at that kind of thing and say 'well this isn't influenced by men at all, women would naturally choose to get LBTs in a world without shitty men.'
posted by corb at 11:50 AM on May 14, 2015

Boy, you phrased that poorly in the thread, didn't you?
posted by maxsparber at 11:52 AM on May 14, 2015 [49 favorites]

So we gotta let shitheads be shitheads, and the rest of us have to continue to undertake the ongoing work of pushing back against shitheadery?

Yes. Forever. That is the social contract. It's exhausting, and it's unfair, and it is the human condition.

Pretty sure the post you're replying to doesn't mean "everywhere, forever." What we're talking about is whether it is absolutely necessary to replicate the horrifying slog of the worst aspects of being human even in this semi-controlled environment that we participate in on purpose.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:52 AM on May 14, 2015 [12 favorites]

So we gotta let shitheads be shitheads, and the rest of us have to continue to undertake the ongoing work of pushing back against shitheadery?

Topics that are lightning rods for the weird underbelly of contemporary cultural and social shit are going to bring out obnoxious or objection comments from a mixed crowd sometimes. We live in a world that's deeply imperfect and in which people have a wide variety of opinions about stuff even if a lot of folks agree that some of those opinions are shitty or hurtful or just kind of dumb or uninformed.

I'm not saying that's a good thing, or what I think of as awesome Metafilter content. I couldn't have been much clearer that I found that thread frustrating as hell. But I think it's necessary to step back and look practically at the problem of people being wrong on the internet and look at what the options are for dealing with it, because it's one thing to (totally rightfully) complain that shitty behavior appears on Metafilter and another to come up with a workable plan for literally preventing shitty behavior from ever appearing on Metafilter.

We have pushback in comments. We have flags, and the contact form, and a human moderator on the clock twenty four hours a day. We have metatalk for talking some of this stuff out after the fact. These are standard mefi tools, and we can use them, and it works pretty well. It's not perfect, but it's pretty solid; the discussions we tend to have about stuff is the outliers where those tools get stretched to their practical limits.

And I completely understand the sentiment that, well, when shit gets stretched to the limits and conversation ends up going badly anyway, there must be something else we can do. But I think it's really, really non-trivial to turn that frustration into a gameplan that isn't itself moving away from what Metafilter is and how Metafilter works toward something pretty different, something more locked down. Because if it's more bannings, people will not agree on the set of people to ban; if it's deleting a lot more comments a lot sooner, people will not agree on which comments cross that threshold. And there's no clean way to resolve that disagreement without making fairly enormous fiat decisions that essentially say "Metafilter is now only this subset of what Metafilter used to be". Which may be fine for anyone who believes they belong to that subset, but it's a hell of a problem for anyone who doesn't or who doesn't agree with the idea of splintering the site like that.

And, again, again: this is not me saying there's no problem, or that dynamics like that thread are great, or that I don't think we can keep iterating our approach to the details and dealing with recurring problems by trying to increment and escalate our response to repeated behavior and the people committing it. That's something we will do, are doing, keep trying to find the right balance on, and it's an ongoing process. But I feel like frustration with high watermark things like that tattoo thread can lead to an understandable but unrealistic reaction of arguing that Metafilter can essentially become a wholly enlightened place by flipping a switch and without significantly messing with the baked in culture and expectations of this place as a fifteen-year-old community.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:55 AM on May 14, 2015 [19 favorites]

corb, can you please just not.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:55 AM on May 14, 2015 [36 favorites]

Once a week, we could elect a representative whose sole job would be to smack down people who engage in those arguments. Pay 'em in donuts and beer. The "Schmuck Detector."

I was just walking by this sushi place at lunch and I heard this guy with a tremendous amount of hair gel say that there were "not enough females for all the males! It's a bummer". I don't know the context of this but I suspect that he would have benefited from an unexpected moonsault.

So I guess what I'm saying is, how about a "Schmuck Luchador"? I accept payment in potato donuts.
posted by selfnoise at 11:57 AM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

'well this isn't influenced by men at all, women would naturally choose to get LBTs in a world without shitty men.'

Where would they get them instead? The politically correct bicep? The chest? The lower back is a pretty decent place to get a tattoo and I don't see how it's necessarily a result of internalized sexism.

On a different note: I have no personal beef with any of the guys who are in this thread saying they value user pushback over modding (in fact, I respect those that I recognize), but if you're not doing a lot of this work in the trenches (or if you acknowledge that it doesn't affect you personally as much) you might want to think about contributing more to those battles in the future, if you think they're important to the site. (If you do contribute a lot, not talking to you, obviously. I just usually feel like I see a lot of women doing that work and a lot of them are tired/burnt out on it.)
posted by easter queen at 11:58 AM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

That thread was fucking hot garbage up until people just started posting pictures of their tattoos and complimenting each other on the pictures of their tattoos. Then it got sort of ok. If you avoided every comment that didn't have a link in it (including mine), you'd probably have a much better experience, because y'all have some really cool tattoos.

That men educate themselves so they don't turn this site into something defined by obliviousness, hostility, dismissiveness, and tactics that effectively silence female participation?

This is such a hard thing to solve, because I think much of the problem that we see repeated are by individuals that don't always (but sometimes do) have the institutional history to know how we've addressed issues repeatedly in the past, with some resolution to them.

No, it isn't a hard thing to solve, we just have to stop being fucking assholes. The essential problem with "keep having these discussions until the barbarian horde comes to their senses" is that it absolves people who are being assholes of their agency by blaming it on their context or their culture. It presumes that people are, by default, sexist pricks until they have been laboriously taught otherwise. No, they're sexist pricks because power is great and not having power is not great, and one of the ways they retain social power is by insisting that it's just so hard for to let go of, please excuse me while I continue to commit violence, what is a poor boy to do in such a mad world. Context, culture, all of those things are influential, but everyone is a person, and it's everyone's job to get their shit together. It's "hard to solve" because people refuse to take responsibility for their actions, but they're not children. How do you not know that "well, if she doesn't like her whore mark, she shouldn't have been such a whore about it" is violently despicable? I don't understand that, but I know whose fault it is. This isn't a Metafilter vs. newbies scenario; no one needs Metafilter to figure this shit out, and it's not Metafilter's job to be their crucible.
posted by Errant at 11:58 AM on May 14, 2015 [34 favorites]

Just as a general principle, please don't rehash the debate over those tattoos in here. This thread is about site issues.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:59 AM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

corb, can you please just not.

I mean, sure, I can absolutely stop trying to apologize for letting my frustration rule my initial post and trying to clarify where I'm being misunderstood. I can do that whether or not I think it's a good idea, because it is mod dictate and I'm jim-dandy at following orders. I can even leave the conversation entirely, even though I am one of the women who felt some of the dude douchebaggery in the thread was kind of gross and I would like to be able to talk about that. I can absolutely salute and move on. I am fucking fantastic at saluting and moving on. But what I straight up cannot do is figure out what you mean by asking me not to do a thing that you don't elaborate on and I'm just supposed to know.
posted by corb at 12:02 PM on May 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

Would it help if "not" were replaced with "don't"?
posted by maxsparber at 12:04 PM on May 14, 2015

The tattoo thread was a mess because of the obvious misogyny in some of the comments and for reasons that I see popping up in other threads. Personal expression through body and fashion is a language with no dictionary. It can be hard to read, it can be misread for a million reasons. People need to learn not to make judgement on the character of others based on that imprecise language. People need to stop insisting they know the meanings when people are straight up saying that is not what they meant to say. People need to not bring cultural baggage like misogyny into a judgement they are going to stubbornly hold to.

Assume the best of what people are trying to express. Listen if they want to talk. Ask only if it's appropriate. Nothing wrong with just ignoring it if you aren't sure what the message is supposed to be.
posted by Drinky Die at 12:06 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

I really don't mean to defend corb's arguments at all here and I'm staying out of the personal stuff altogether, but is there some reason saying "can you please just not" is not a conceivable reaction to other people causing sexist derails on the site? This is really all that many of us are asking for, and it's clearly something we do with some users since we just did it with corb right now.
posted by dialetheia at 12:06 PM on May 14, 2015 [21 favorites]

Pretty sure the post you're replying to doesn't mean "everywhere, forever." What we're talking about is whether it is absolutely necessary to replicate the horrifying slog of the worst aspects of being human even in this semi-controlled environment that we participate in on purpose.

While MetaFilter continues to have a basically open door policy and a comments section that allows unfiltered conversation - lightly moderated after-the-fact - MetaFilter is part of "Everywhere."

Is it absolutely necessary here? No. But without changing the entire dynamic of the site, it is inevitable.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:06 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Is it absolutely necessary here? No. But without changing the entire dynamic of the site, it is inevitable.

If I'm not mistaken I think the whole point of MeTas like these is to discuss the possibility and desirability of changing certain dynamics of the site.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:10 PM on May 14, 2015 [10 favorites]

I agree with kalessin. I feel like it's more likely for sexist, derailing comments to remain in woman/feminism related threads than in general threads. It's probably a result of the sheer volume of them and the conversations that develop and can't be deleted wholesale, but the result is that we end up defending our right to exist instead of talking about women. Mod predictions and reminders to not be shitty and not derail/threadshit and enforcement of those policies would be welcome. Just because a comment is ostensibly "about" women (and their failings) doesn't mean it's not derailing.

It seems like site policies on contentious issues grow organically out of their contexts; this is a context where I wish we could develop a little more preventative policy. A lot of the tattoo thread stuff was straight up derailing or threadshitting, imo.

It's Raining Florence Henderson, I'll admit I don't totally understand your meaning. A lot of sexist stuff has been stamped out on this site, thanks to jessamyn and others. It changed the site for the better. Telling repeat misogynist users who have a problem playing nice in sexism threads to cut it out seems no worse than telling Russian-interventionist-pro-Apple-anti-GMOs conspiracy commenter to cut it out.
posted by easter queen at 12:11 PM on May 14, 2015 [20 favorites]

Personal expression through body and fashion is a language with no dictionary. It can be hard to read, it can be misread for a million reasons. People need to learn not to make judgement on the character of others based on that imprecise language.

"Imprecise body language" doesn't invite what went on that thread. It doesn't invite declarations that women are sluts, or stupid conformists. It's not an invitation to objectifying women or speculate on any number of bullshit intimate details about them, from assuming their preferred sexual positions to their supposed exhibitionist tendencies.

Misogyny isn't invited or caused by a misread of social cues. It's simply people being assholes towards women.
posted by zarq at 12:19 PM on May 14, 2015 [18 favorites]

But what I straight up cannot do is figure out what you mean by asking me not to do a thing that you don't elaborate on and I'm just supposed to know.

I'm frustrated that you are digging in on the subject of the specific content of that crappy comment you left in the other thread. I'm frustrated that you are walking this line of simultaneously talking about how other people were being gross in that thread and pulling this discussion toward an apology-but-actually-I-was-saying exoneration of your own gross comment instead of just apologizing-or-not and dropping it. I would like you to not do that. I would like you to have the self-awareness to realize that's not helping this thread. I would like to not have to write a paragraph explicitly laying that out. I would like this not to be something that keeps happening, and not have to deal with the pretense that it's some new idea each time it comes up. I expressed my frustration about that too tersely.

cortex, what I'm reading here is a number of commenters saying, please can we somehow figure out how to treat these topics that will derails us AS DERAILS and mod toward that almost certain prediction.

And I'm feeling like, yes, that's doable, and it's something we do, by deleting the nth comment from someone on that subject, leaving a note saying to drop it, asking people to cool it or telling specific people to step away from the thread if they haven't already taken a hint from the preceding. And I can hear and am totally down with the idea that the meter for stepping in early on that could be nudged. Like I said, this is an ongoing process sort of thing.

But I want to be sure that I'm understanding that correctly as the idea, and not something else, and want to be sure that people have realistic expectations there. Trying to spot and preempt derails sooner is fine and practicable (especially with prompt flagging and contact form stuff); some of the other more heavy-handed ideas that have come up in previous discussions aren't so much, and I think when we're talking about site policy and practice it's really, really important to be clear about what the practical implications and ramifications of proposed changes are.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:19 PM on May 14, 2015 [21 favorites]

While MetaFilter continues to have a basically open door policy

Since this has come up a few times, I wanted to add that I agree that we'll never be free of the problem of new people coming in and not having the site background here, which is fine and not something I expect anyone to address. I just get frustrated when the exact same users (I could name several from that thread alone) get to keep coming in and starting the same derails with almost no pushback beyond some silent deletions or a brief universal "cool it". I think "but some women are sluts" was a derail in that thread, I think "but women are ruining the Democratic party" was a derail in the other thread, and I think there's something about these being "feminism issues" that's preventing those derails from being recognized.
posted by dialetheia at 12:19 PM on May 14, 2015 [19 favorites]

I think there's something about these being "feminism issues" that's preventing those derails from being recognized.

And I hasten to add that I don't think it's at all deliberate, it's just a fish-swimming-in-water sort of thing.
posted by dialetheia at 12:22 PM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

While MetaFilter continues to have a basically open door policy and a comments section that allows unfiltered conversation - lightly moderated after-the-fact - MetaFilter is part of "Everywhere."

Lots of places have open-door policies, too. But places that like having women around don't, say, let assholes loudly pontificate to the rest of the patrons on women's lower back tattoos and about how they're a signal that they like doggy-style and/or anal sex. Especially not when said assholes have been in that same place several times and demeaned women or dismissed harassment pretty much every time one of them rightfully complains about sexism and misogyny.
posted by zombieflanders at 12:24 PM on May 14, 2015 [24 favorites]

"Imprecise body language" doesn't invite what went on that thread. It doesn't invite declarations that women are sluts, or stupid conformists. It's not an invitation to objectifying women or speculate on any number of bullshit intimate details about them, from assuming their preferred sexual positions to their supposed exhibitionist tendencies.

Misogyny isn't invited or caused by a misread of social cues. It's simply people being assholes towards women.

Yes, that is why 0% of my comment contained advice to change how people express themselves and 100% advice to stop making judgments on people based on things like misogyny. Jebus.
posted by Drinky Die at 12:24 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm frustrated that you are walking this line of simultaneously talking about how other people were being gross in that thread and pulling this discussion toward an apology-but-actually-I-was-saying exoneration of your own gross comment instead of just apologizing-or-not and dropping it.

FWIW I personally am sick of hearing how corb thinks I'm too stupid and ruled by men to decide for myself where I want my tattoo so I really appreciate this, thanks.
posted by shelleycat at 12:27 PM on May 14, 2015 [43 favorites]

I don't understand why people read (much less comment in!) a thread when they find it upsetting or exhausting to do so. Metafilter writ large has an attitude that lies somewhere between uninformed and hostile on a couple of topics that I care quite a bit about, but I either go elsewhere to participate/consume or come here expecting to roll up my sleeves and get dirty.

I just had a week where I paid very little attention to the internet and no attention to Metafilter. I highly recommend it if you are feeling stressed about this place; I promise it will carry on without you, especially if you're tired of it. There was a time when this site was anything and everything to me but that just isn't a healthy way to use it in my opinion.

Note that this opinion is intended for individual use and is not intended to inform site policy in any way.
posted by Kwine at 12:28 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

I mean, sure, I can absolutely stop ...

Ok, I LOL'd. I stayed out of that thread because of the someone there I have been instructed not to engage with and because I, too, am Jim-Dandy at following orders (tho, perhaps, less Jim-Dandy than some). Did anyone manage to ascertain if the set of Nickleback disdainers is larger than the set of tribal tat disdainers?
posted by octobersurprise at 12:28 PM on May 14, 2015

time to refresh my batteries in the non-misogynist meatspace world

wait

shit
posted by kagredon at 12:29 PM on May 14, 2015 [38 favorites]

One of the derails that went on for way too long was along the lines of "Explain to me how the word tramp could POSSIBLY mean the same thing as the word slut"--does that really deserve a good faith reading? Even when we read it in the best light, it's a dude demanding we Google shit for him.
posted by almostmanda at 12:30 PM on May 14, 2015 [63 favorites]

I don't understand why people read (much less comment in!) a thread when they find it upsetting or exhausting to do so.

Because this community is really important to me, and I don't feel like I should be effectively filibustered out of threads about issues that directly affect me.
posted by dialetheia at 12:30 PM on May 14, 2015 [76 favorites]

cortex: "especially with prompt flagging and contact form stuff"

What does that mean, from an individual user point-of-view? I mostly stay out of threads that are likely to be contentious like this, and when I do read them, it's usually hours if not days after the fact. Is it worth flagging 3 hour old comments in a fast-moving thread, or using the contact form a day or two after the thread has died down, just to register my displeasure with the way it went? It makes me sad to see some of the users who are leaving and who are thinking about leaving, and I truly despair when people say the atmosphere reminds them of the Boyzone days. Maybe someone could create a FAQ for "How to be a Good User" with specific action items and strategies?
posted by Rock Steady at 12:31 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

I don't understand why people read (much less comment in!) a thread when they find it upsetting or exhausting to do so.

Personally, for this particular thread, I was honestly so surprised at what a shit show it turned in to I was kind of stunned and didn't take it in properly until I was most of the way down. Then I kept reading to see the inevitable push back, and then more in puzzlement when that pushback went apparently unnoticed. That plus it was a topic I was honestly interested in with enough good stuff mixed in and I didn't have to get up the next morning so I kept going.
posted by shelleycat at 12:32 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

One of the derails that went on for way too long was along the lines of "Explain to me how the word tramp could POSSIBLY mean the same thing as the word slut"--does that really deserve a good faith reading? Even when we read it in the best light, it's a dude demanding we Google shit for him.

"But is this phrase that contains a synonym for 'slut' slut-shaming in its role? Obviously not"
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 12:33 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't expect a perfect safe space on Metafilter with regard to my feminism, and I respect what the mods are already doing. I am fine with disagreement and some conflict and gridlock and education and arguing and some Feminism 101 happening, and I don't mind having to do some "pushback" when someone is saying something I think is sexist and ill-conceived. My main wish is for threads about women/sexism to be pruned enough to allow a conversation about the actual topic to take center stage... instead of turning into the prerequisite remedial course you have to pass in order to be allowed to enroll in Feminism 101.

I don't think I'm living in a fantasy world, and the most heavy-handed I'd want to get would be giving repeat egregious offenders an advance warning that they can't just sally into a feminism thread and take a shit anymore. There are commenters on this site who I won't name (not to make it personal) who I disagree with about feminism but I would never want them banned or even banned from sexism threads, because the disagreements are relatively civil and in good faith, and it would feel unhealthy to kick them out just for disagreeing. I want a healthy site. It's just that if certain people can't help themselves when it comes to arguing that sexism even exists, and they keep bringing it up all the time in various threads... I don't know why that is not a derail and a problem behavior, same as being a rabid Mac/PC fan.

Metafilter writ large has an attitude that lies somewhere between uninformed and hostile on a couple of topics that I care quite a bit about

I think the point is that if a thread about women and tattoos ends up having mostly male commenters laughing at funny-cruel jokes about women while all the women who would normally push back avoid the thread to recharge... that is a symptom of a certain sickness. If you don't care that much about the site, go on with your bad self.

Thanks cortex, and I will think about using the contact form more when problems crop up in the future.
posted by easter queen at 12:35 PM on May 14, 2015 [38 favorites]

Is it worth flagging 3 hour old comments in a fast-moving thread, or using the contact form a day or two after the thread has died down, just to register my displeasure with the way it went?

It is worth noting that this is also an issue that was talked about in the #JuneBy(?) thread. I feel like we had a pony thread about deleting older stuff that got shot down some time ago. Has the possibility of this been raised again, or would it be too heavy a mod burden?
posted by corb at 12:38 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't understand why people read (much less comment in!) a thread when they find it upsetting or exhausting to do so.

I don't understand why misogynistic shit-stirring assholes should be the only people allowed to discuss topics I might happen to have an interest in.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:38 PM on May 14, 2015 [98 favorites]

What does that mean, from an individual user point-of-view?

Basically, letting us know about something that's a problem when you notice it. Which ideally if we're gonna nip something in the bud is soon after it happened; folks actively reading a thread or noticing something that just hit the front page are the ones most in the position to do this, obviously. I'm really glad that people flag and contact us to the degree that they do, but it's something that could absolutely use a broader population of active flaggers and contacters, both to increase the chance that something will get looked at promptly and to keep those things from relying on a smaller and thus potentially burnt-out-on-it crowd to keep the pointers flowing in to us.

So as a general thing one thing I'd say is, if you're seeing stuff that that's just happened and which makes you think "this is gonna maybe go somewhere dumb/derailing/blech" and you're not habitually tossing in a flag, that's worth trying to be more active about. It's a little thing for any given user but in aggregate it can make a real difference for our responsiveness on stuff.

I mostly stay out of threads that are likely to be contentious like this, and when I do read them, it's usually hours if not days after the fact. Is it worth flagging 3 hour old comments in a fast-moving thread, or using the contact form a day or two after the thread has died down, just to register my displeasure with the way it went?

Absolutely, yeah; the preceding is not to say flagging or letting us know after the fact can't be helpful. Contact form in particular is more useful later on, especially if the idea you want to express is something along the lines of "this situation kind of sucks because x and I wish it could have been maybe handled by doing y". Flags later on aren't wasted data but they're less likely to lead to direct action, so take that into account.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:39 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

Also I'm sorry, but "just get off the internet" just isn't particularly helpful advice to fully one-half the population of the planet.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:40 PM on May 14, 2015 [48 favorites]

I don't understand why people read (much less comment in!) a thread when they find it upsetting or exhausting to do so.

In my case, because even though I know it makes me irritating to some, part of my contract with myself is that I will speak out against misogyny when I see it. Believe me, it's no fucking fun for me either, but, then, despite the fact that some people don't believe this, I get all sorts of privileges for being a dude, and when people are like, well, what am I supposed to do about privilege, just feel bad, the actual answer is that you speak out when the world is unfair.
posted by maxsparber at 12:42 PM on May 14, 2015 [53 favorites]

If I'm not mistaken I think the whole point of MeTas like these is to discuss the possibility and desirability of changing certain dynamics of the site.

It's true, we do discuss it. Over and over, we discuss it. We make some progress and we move forward for awhile, and now we seem to have moved back again. It ebbs and flows. Old users leave. New users replace them. We start over. That's exactly why it's so freakin' exhausting. Because people are intrinsically exhausting in numbers greater than 1.

Yes, this is a place to discuss the possibility and desirability of changing certain dynamics of the site. And my part of the discussion is to say that we can change the way the site works, limit conversation to approved talking points and opinions, users who believe as we believe, or close comments altogether... or we can continue to have open conversations and commit to the idea that hell is other people.

In my opinion, the thing that sometimes poisons the site is the exact same thing that makes it so special. And that is always going to require work to maintain.

I agree that we'll never be free of the problem of new people coming in and not having the site background here, which is fine and not something I expect anyone to address. I just get frustrated when the exact same users (I could name several from that thread alone) get to keep coming in and starting the same derails with almost no pushback beyond some silent deletions or a brief universal "cool it".

Yeah, that's maybe a better expression of what I'm getting at. When I'm saying we will always have to do the work and that the site is worth the work I'm certainly not saying we shouldn't do the work when it's warranted. I'm saying the opposite of that. So if a user is a constant problem, I do think the mods should (and sometimes do) find ways to limit that kind of participation. I just don't think that's going to be anything more than a temporary reprieve.

places that like having women around don't, say, let assholes loudly pontificate to the rest of the patrons on women's lower back tattoos and about how they're a signal that they like doggy-style and/or anal sex. Especially not when said assholes have been in that same place several times and demeaned women or dismissed harassment pretty much every time one of them rightfully complains about sexism and misogyny.

Yeah - continuing with what I just said above, specific instances require specific responses. I do think though that we will have varying ideas of what an appropriate response looks like, so it's not like that's going to keep shitstorms from erupting, either. But it absolutely has to be addressed. Unfortunately.

I see MetaFilter as a garden. Gardens take constant work and tending. Constant. Always. For the life of the garden. Or lots and lots of poison.

Personally, I think the harvest is worth the effort.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:43 PM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

It's Raining Florence Henderson, I think you are concern trolling a bit. This thread seems to be to be about having specific responses to specific misbehavior, not broadly banning anyone without an armband to the site. I think everyone is kind of on the same page there.
posted by easter queen at 12:49 PM on May 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

If Metafilter is a garden, it's like the garden I come home to after a long day of weeding everyone else's goddamn garden and then it's like, fuck it, I don't even LIKE gardening in the first place, why do I spend all day gardening.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:50 PM on May 14, 2015 [56 favorites]

Personally, I think the harvest is worth the effort.

I don't completely disagree, but I think it's worth reflecting on whether you're reaping the harvest from a garden where the burden of weeding falls disproportionately on women, or people of color, or whatever other marginalized group has to Do The Work that day before coming to a conclusion about the cost-benefit ratio of that harvest.
posted by dialetheia at 12:51 PM on May 14, 2015 [38 favorites]

That thread was, for me, the most frustrating experience I've had in about 6 years on this site. I'm a pretty tough dude to rile, IRL, and I was pretty mad over some of that.

I'm a dude, too. If I was a woman, I would've lost my mind in there, and likely nuked my mefi account.

I didn't flag anything in there, because I never flag anything, but I will certainly start, now that I have a taste for how much some things just need flaggin'.
posted by still bill at 12:51 PM on May 14, 2015 [25 favorites]

As someone who thankfully avoided commenting in that thread, I do think there is a difference between a derail and a comment which goes in a direction you don't want to discuss, even annoyingly so. Some of what people are calling derails don't look off-topic to me. They may be opinions which are wrong but wrong and derail are not the same.
posted by Justinian at 12:52 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

It's not just that they're wrong, though. They functionally derail the conversation. Unless you think every conversation about women and sexism is a fighty conversation about whether sexism exists, which I don't. I actually hope this MeTa helps shift that POV for some people.
posted by easter queen at 12:55 PM on May 14, 2015 [18 favorites]

Does the tattoo thread get substantially worse after the first 15 or 20%? It didn't seem that bad. But then, maybe it got worse, or perhaps the tone was greatly altered if I'd been there live and seen the stuff that got deleted.

(I'm saying what I saw was all good, but it didn't seem Worst Thread in Ages bad either. Maybe I just bowed out before the shitstorm truly started.)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:55 PM on May 14, 2015

"Explain to me how the word tramp could POSSIBLY mean the same thing as the word slut"--does that really deserve a good faith reading?

Well, no, but it legit cracked me up. (I skimmed that thread, late, and I'm tired, though.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 12:56 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't understand why people read (much less comment in!) a thread when they find it upsetting or exhausting to do so.

Because this community is really important to me, and I don't feel like I should be effectively filibustered out of threads about issues that directly affect me.
posted by dialetheia

Yeah, I was too grossed out yesterday to comment but after reading this MeTa I just thought "fuck it" and chipped in my tuppence. Why should I - a woman in her thirties with a lower back tattoo - be silenced in a thread about an article written by a woman in her thirties talking about her lower back tattoo? This FPP is relevent to my interests!
It seems horribly ironic that her references to misogynistic bullshit were proved to be true in the comments, and those bullshit comments made me not want to participate. So I decided not to let the sexist bullshit-merchants win this time. But it's shitty that you have to be steeled and ready to comment on something that you're interested in. It shouldn't have to be this hard.
posted by billiebee at 12:57 PM on May 14, 2015 [33 favorites]

So far in this thread, the specific topics that have been called out as derails:

Is it really the job of the userbase to respond to the "Convince me this is sexist!!" dance every single time?

If the article is about how patriarchy affects the perception of women's tattoos, I feel like allowing a bunch of "lol patriarchy, not real" comments is an obvious derail.

I think "but some women are sluts" was a derail in that thread, I think "but women are ruining the Democratic party" was a derail in the other thread

One of the derails that went on for way too long was along the lines of "Explain to me how the word tramp could POSSIBLY mean the same thing as the word slut"

It's just that if certain people can't help themselves when it comes to arguing that sexism even exists, and they keep bringing it up all the time in various threads... I don't know why that is not a derail and a problem behavior

Would you care to explain which of those you think are merely "wrong opinions" that are still on-topic?
posted by kagredon at 12:57 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

However much of my (inherited) money I spend on a loaf of artisanal ciabatta, I don't get to decide whether farmers deserve air-conditioned harvesters.
posted by tigrrrlily at 12:57 PM on May 14, 2015

It's Raining Florence Henderson, I think you are concern trolling a bit. This thread seems to be to be about having specific responses to specific misbehavior, not broadly banning anyone without an armband to the site. I think everyone is kind of on the same page there.

Not concern trolling at all. This thread is about:

What can we do as a community to maintain whatever advances we've made in pushing back on the boyzone mentality here?

And I was responding to:

So we gotta let shitheads be shitheads, and the rest of us have to continue to undertake the ongoing work of pushing back against shitheadery?

My answer was, hard as it is, what we do as a community is what we have been doing. We do the work. Yes, we have to continue to push back.

If Metafilter is a garden, it's like the garden I come home to after a long day of weeding everyone else's goddamn garden and then it's like, fuck it, I don't even LIKE gardening in the first place, why do I spend all day gardening.

I love that comment. Would favorite again.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:59 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

we'll always have party dog though.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:00 PM on May 14, 2015 [23 favorites]

i dunno. i'm just tired. i've been trying to figure out for a while now if it's me or if it's metafilter. i have to admit that i'm caring less about the distinction. i don't know what concrete things to suggest but i do know that if there's not a sea change soon i'll likely be moving on from here. honestly the only reason i didn't hit the button yesterday is that i know long term active users leaving during contentious threads isn't helpful to the people i really like here or the site as a whole. i guess i'm just saying don't be surprised if you check my account at some point and it's deactivated.
posted by nadawi at 1:01 PM on May 14, 2015 [46 favorites]

If that happened, I would be sad but understand, nadawi.
posted by Kitteh at 1:02 PM on May 14, 2015 [11 favorites]

I'm NOT saying is what I meant to type above, clearly.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:04 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm in favor of more blunt forms of moderation in threads like that one.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:06 PM on May 14, 2015 [11 favorites]

I don't understand why people read (much less comment in!) a thread when they find it upsetting or exhausting to do so.

Because in the everyday sexist world and the every day casually misogynist world, every single space a woman walks into--every single conversation she seeks to enter--will quite likely involve similar overtones or undertones, asides or slights, micro and macro aggressions of this nature. So, you know, we don't have the ability to avoid threads where it might happen without avoiding all threads, always.
posted by crush-onastick at 1:06 PM on May 14, 2015 [21 favorites]

Personally, I think the harvest is worth the effort.

Honestly, and I won't speak for other women on the site, but since your comment I keep thinking...ok so when do we get to enjoy this awesome harvest, hm? Because it seems like actually all we get to do is pull weeds, day in, day out, and...then pull some more weeds. I no longer feel like the efforts of the loyal feminist gardeners here are resulting in a harvest of awesome conversations, just derail after derail after shitty derail.

(Real talk, this is actually why I hate literal gardening as well -- I break my back for six months and then some shithead teenagers inevitably get drunk, break into my yard and destroy my garden.)

I know we'll always have Party Dog but honestly, I'm kind of in nadawi's boat too.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:07 PM on May 14, 2015 [39 favorites]

It'd be great if more people could internalize the idea what when you're composing a comment and you think to yourself "hmm, those politically correct Mefites aren't gonna like this!" there is about a .01% chance you are speaking an important truth to power and a 99.99% chance you are just fucking chain-yanking
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:08 PM on May 14, 2015 [62 favorites]

nadawi, I have found that long breaks from the site really helps to clear the bile out. Then, when I come back, I try to start out only looking at threads that present cool new things on the Internet. So that by the time I finally read a thread I know will probably go badly, I've fallen back in love with what the site is before remembering what the cost of that can be. Works for me, anyway. Usually.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:09 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

What is party dog? I think I missed party dog, and I want to know what a party dog is. :(
posted by Rock Steady at 1:10 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

It'd be great if more people could internalize the idea what when you're composing a comment and you think to yourself "hmm, those politically correct Mefites aren't gonna like this!" there is about a .01% chance you are speaking an important truth to power and a 99.99% chance you are just fucking chain-yanking

Can somebody cross-stitch this and put it up prominently in the break room? Cause DAMN.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:11 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

Party Dog: The Beginning
posted by griphus at 1:11 PM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

Then, when I come back, I try to start out only looking at threads that present cool new things on the Internet.

This works as long as "cool new things on the Internet" is somehow a completely separate set from "things involving women on the Internet" which makes it not as practical a solution for some of us as you might think.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:11 PM on May 14, 2015 [56 favorites]

I would like to favorite We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese's comment one thousand times, please.
posted by easter queen at 1:12 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

MeFi is pretty good about deleting personal attacks, when they're directed at other specific MeFites, but not so good about deleting hateful comments about groups of people (that usually include a lot MeFites, because the site has a fairly diverse membership). The site's moderators also seem to rely on really narrow definition of "slur". So we have an "offensive/racism/sexism" flag, but its utility is somewhat limited because our moderators, under current policy, consider terms of abuse like "trash" and "slut" OK ways to refer to other human beings.

This kind of thing does make people, including me, feel unwelcome here. I think we need to talk about where to draw the line on hateful comments directed at categories of people that aren't specifically directed at individual MeFites. And I think the line needs to be in a different place from where the mods are now drawing it. Thank you, dialetheia, for starting this MeTa. This is something we need to talk about.
posted by nangar at 1:12 PM on May 14, 2015 [19 favorites]

Party Dog: The Beginning

Thank you for this, Metafilter.
posted by Drinky Die at 1:13 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Party dog sweeps slowly through the room, people in its wake are dressed more colorfully and are having more fun than they were previously.
posted by nom de poop at 1:14 PM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

It'd be great if more people could internalize the idea what when you're composing a comment and you think to yourself

This does nothing in the face of bad faith comments. There might be one or two people who realize, as/after they say something judgemental or nasty, that they're on the wrong side of the discussion, but for the most part, it appears to be either very important to get their opinion aired or a gleeful opportunity to punch down.

It's those of us getting hurt and ground down by those comments who are doing all the stopping and thinking.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:15 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

party dog 2: the partening

party puppy: the prequel

look who's barking: the direct-to-video quasi-franchise sequel starring the voice talents of screech from saved by the bell
posted by poffin boffin at 1:15 PM on May 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

If you want to discuss that you can start your own MeTa. Don't just come in here to snark or whatever you're doing.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:19 PM on May 14, 2015 [16 favorites]

I'm sorry, but "just get off the internet" just isn't particularly helpful advice to fully one-half the population of the planet.

I have a feeling that the "get off the internet" advice being offered was more of a temporary "log off MeFi for a couple hours, take a break, watch some kitty videos or walk your dog or have a brownie" kind of thing than a "hurf durf can't stand the heat don't be on line at all" suggestion.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:19 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

> walk your dog

Or party with your dog
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:20 PM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

Honestly, and I won't speak for other women on the site, but since your comment I keep thinking...ok so when do we get to enjoy this awesome harvest, hm? Because it seems like actually all we get to do is pull weeds, day in, day out, and...then pull some more weeds. I no longer feel like the efforts of the loyal feminist gardeners here are resulting in a harvest of awesome conversations, just derail after derail after shitty derail.

(Real talk, this is actually why I hate literal gardening as well -- I break my back for six months and then some shithead teenagers inevitably get drunk, break into my yard and destroy my garden.)

Not sure if this was the comment that easter queen would favorite a thousand times, but I thought it was great, and worth a repeat in a long thread. I can only say, yeah.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:20 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

I don't understand why people read (much less comment in!) a thread when they find it upsetting or exhausting to do so.

This is different from "take a break, have a cookie."
posted by easter queen at 1:21 PM on May 14, 2015

IRFH: Yea, it was.
posted by easter queen at 1:21 PM on May 14, 2015

I have a feeling that the "get off the internet" advice being offered was more of a temporary "log off MeFi for a couple hours, take a break, watch some kitty videos or walk your dog or have a brownie" kind of thing than a "hurf durf can't stand the heat don't be on line at all" suggestion.

I find that actually to be just a difference of degree, and maybe the latter to be even more condescending in a preschool time-out kind of way, but I know that the latter is a widely-accepted MeFi self-care directive so that's totally just my hangup and I'm perfectly happy to retract my previous criticism.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:23 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

I don't understand why people read (much less comment in!) a thread when they find it upsetting or exhausting to do so.

Because this community is really important to me, and I don't feel like I should be effectively filibustered out of threads about issues that directly affect me.

Fair enough! Then show up and do the work, if it's important. That's why I commented, I guess, because the kind of perspective that I have on this topic was underrepresented or poorly represented in this thread so far. I don't like conflict generally and especially have little time for it on this website and I thought I'd weigh in, knowing that would generate some conflict and that I would find that unpleasant. I don't think that's a choice that's only available to me, despite what others in this thread seem to think.

I'm really jealous of people who are finding out about party dog for the first time right now.
posted by Kwine at 1:23 PM on May 14, 2015

i do know that if there's not a sea change soon i'll likely be moving on from here.

I hope not, nadawi. You are one of the voices I consistently see doing a lot of pushback on feminist issues. However, having said that, I understand why you might want to. So all I'll say is if you do, I hope you come back soon.
posted by corb at 1:23 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

No, it isn't a hard thing to solve, we just have to stop being fucking assholes. The essential problem with "keep having these discussions until the barbarian horde comes to their senses" is that it absolves people who are being assholes of their agency by blaming it on their context or their culture. It presumes that people are, by default, sexist pricks until they have been laboriously taught otherwise. No, they're sexist pricks because power is great and not having power is not great, and one of the ways they retain social power is by insisting that it's just so hard for to let go of, please excuse me while I continue to commit violence, what is a poor boy to do in such a mad world. Context, culture, all of those things are influential, but everyone is a person, and it's everyone's job to get their shit together. It's "hard to solve" because people refuse to take responsibility for their actions, but they're not children. How do you not know that "well, if she doesn't like her whore mark, she shouldn't have been such a whore about it" is violently despicable? I don't understand that, but I know whose fault it is. This isn't a Metafilter vs. newbies scenario; no one needs Metafilter to figure this shit out, and it's not Metafilter's job to be their crucible.

That was option number one that I suggested as a solution, "change the whole world." Of course people need to grow up. But we are talking about taking practical steps first so that we don't have to wait for the whole damn world to catch up to the obvious. You can do that if you want to, but then we will still keep coming back to the problem of what to do with the people when they show up, and much of the pushback here is all about that, when people who are assholes here disappoint you. That is the practical problem to solve, not simply expressing what we already know to be true for anyone, that the whole world should stop being assholes and take responsibility for themselves. Let's certainly keep working on that though while we figure out how to have good community experience. But until we have a suggestion on how to convince everyone in the world to stop being assholes without excluding them from signing up or having a severe moderator response that becomes problematic (neither of which is a good option, for reasons expressed repeatedly above), expressing what everyone here already agrees with doesn't solve a thing. And perhaps it is solvable in a better way than we are doing through our ongoing discussion (and I'm actually hopeful about that), but to say it's simple undermines the process, and it requires a lot more creative problem solving than we've currently done. And it will, in part, require figuring out how to deal effectively with assholes instead of simply expecting them to be better people. Because becoming better people often is, in part, when people who are good people push back against people who are bad. They don't always become good in a vacuum or because they should know better.
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:23 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

So we have an "offensive/racism/sexism" flag, but its utility is somewhat limited because our moderators, under current policy, consider terms of abuse like "trash" and "slut" OK ways to refer to other human beings.

They're shitty ways to refer to other human beings, is my opinion. Current policy is that bringing those words up or having the personal opinion that as vocabulary they're okay or justifiable is not itself an automatic nuke from orbit, which is not the same thing as considering them okay unless the assumption is that that Metafilter and its moderation staff actively endorse and agree with literally everything that doesn't get deleted.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:24 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

If you do actually want to talk about 'tribal' that's fine, and I agree that terminology is gross -- but it's not the subject in here, so it seemed like a "why don't you talk about this other thing instead" kind of snark or derail.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:28 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Fair enough! Then show up and do the work, if it's important.

We... do. But frankly, the situation is not ideal. The options shouldn't really be 1) stay out of it, avoid, go outside or 2) get ready to wade through shit because you're a woman and want to talk about women.

It's easy to say "that's reality man" but since this is a discussion website with moderation, wouldn't it be nice to be able to actually discuss women/women's issues, and not either have to leave or watch the conversation get derailed into shit?

It's kind of reductive and bullshit to say "put up or shut up," essentially. MeTa is here so we can avoid that dilemma.
posted by easter queen at 1:29 PM on May 14, 2015 [27 favorites]

Are you asking for new rules and/or heavier moderation?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:31 PM on May 14, 2015

Fair enough! Then show up and do the work, if it's important.

So there you have it. Those are the options. Be prepared to fight, or get off the internet. If you aren't willing to have the same tiresome "but what if she really is a slut, is that ok, lolsluts" discussion for the thousandth time this year? Then it must just not be important to you.
posted by KathrynT at 1:31 PM on May 14, 2015 [55 favorites]

Asking in good faith, easter queen. I totally agree with your comment, "It's kind of reductive and bullshit to say "put up or shut up," essentially. MeTa is here so we can avoid that dilemma." I just don't know what the solution is, and am wondering if you have a proposal.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:34 PM on May 14, 2015

my turn to offer an infinite number of faves to easter queen.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:35 PM on May 14, 2015

Seriously wtf?

This thread was specifically framed around the boyzone issues related to that thread.
posted by dialetheia at 1:35 PM on May 14, 2015 [13 favorites]

spitbull, I don't recall seeing "tribal" come up as anything other than a neutral reference to the common name for a style of tattoo in that thread. Which is not to say the fact that "tribal" as a common name for a style of tattoo not otherwise actually associated in any way with indigenous people isn't fraught, and that might be something to talk about if you feel the specific way people used it in the thread was actively problematic in some way, but that's something that it seems like you'd want to unpack a lot more clearly than an "and what about..." one-liner if you're gonna bring it up, especially given that it's something that's really pretty seriously tangential to basically everything in this discussion so far.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:36 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Yeah, spitbull, that was my reading -- I took it this thread was specifically about the sexist stuff in that thread.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:36 PM on May 14, 2015

It was really weird to see someone trying basically to justify the use of the word "slut" or "tramp." But there was a pretty big response to those comments. If anything I was more embarrassed that the fellow chose to double-down. It also seemed more thread-hijacking than Boyzone.
posted by Nevin at 1:36 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

if i had a proposal at all it would be for the mods to keep noticing when specific members are doing the same shit over and over and over again and do something about it - time outs, topic bans, straight up bans, whatever - which is by necessity a sort of back channel fuzzy process where we aren't privy to the ins and outs. for now, i'm trusting the mods and hoping they keep listening and adjusting their own meters.
posted by nadawi at 1:36 PM on May 14, 2015 [40 favorites]

when people hijack threads specifically to make space for them to call women sluts, it's boyzone bullshit.
posted by nadawi at 1:38 PM on May 14, 2015 [24 favorites]

Mod note: One comment deleted. Please skip the needling jokes.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:39 PM on May 14, 2015

Spitbull, I think you ran into a problem I often do, you went too pithy and got misunderstood because of it. I think most times Meta threads would be okay with addressing racial issues too but this thread is pretty focused on the misogyny for reasons coming from a lot of other recent threads. Best to leave it to tackle that issue. Mods did suggest you make your own if you think it's a needed discussion so the issue isn't going to be ignored.
posted by Drinky Die at 1:39 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I recognize that I may not be the best person to judge what is and what is not a Boyzone. I do remember MetaFilter's old Boyzone days. It's pretty remarkable (at least to me) how much the site has changed.
posted by Nevin at 1:39 PM on May 14, 2015

not normally axe-grindy on gender topics

Except for the hurtful driveby comment you left in the #JuneBy thread, but hey. That comment was the reason I was pretty irritated to see you derailing here - it felt stunty.
posted by dialetheia at 1:42 PM on May 14, 2015 [11 favorites]

>So we have an "offensive/racism/sexism" flag, but its utility is somewhat limited because our moderators, under current policy, consider terms of abuse like "trash" and "slut" OK ways to refer to other human beings.

>>They're shitty ways to refer to other human beings, is my opinion. Current policy is that bringing those words up or having the personal opinion that as vocabulary they're okay or justifiable is not itself an automatic nuke from orbit, which is not the same thing as considering them okay unless the assumption is that that Metafilter and its moderation staff actively endorse and agree with literally everything that doesn't get deleted.

Can we talk about shifting current policy to have moderators step in and ask people to back off on racial/ethnic/class/gender slurs when they're using them? There are steps between "ignore" and "nuke from orbit."
posted by jaguar at 1:43 PM on May 14, 2015 [15 favorites]

I say we bring back the concept of hellbans
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:45 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

*gets in time machine. Posts thread about party dog instead*
posted by josher71 at 1:45 PM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

This read seriously like binary and reductive reasoning

I think that is often the case when it comes to online community standards, though - people reach for pat, easy answers that are one-size-fits-all for any kind of situation. I don't think we're facing a dilemma between community self-policing, and mods maaaaaaybe giving a little bit less benefit of the doubt to users who are repeatedly guilty of pulling the same contrarian bullshit over and over again. There are different situations that can call for different approaches. For example: I think that Books Literally Every White Man Owns thread went great as an example of self-policing in action. The few resident contrarians who popped in with their tedious schtick were shut down pretty fast by the others in that thread. In the case of the LBT thread, well ... self-policing was clearly not enough there, especially with another usual suspect doing his damnedest to spray the walls with his effluence. I don't know how the rest of that thread went because I tabbed out.

But essentially, I think it's a mistake to reduce every possible community interaction here to a single solution. Whatever tools we reach for, I think we're all more or less on the same page that there's a difference between having a minority opinion and just being an asshole.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 1:45 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

And I can hear and am totally down with the idea that the meter for stepping in early on that could be nudged. Like I said, this is an ongoing process sort of thing.

I agree with the idea of moving the meter, and I also want to support a couple other proposals that have been put forward in this thread: (1) Heavier and more consistent sanctioning of those who have a history of repeatedly disrupting conversations and, related, (2) revisiting our definition of a derail with regard to sexist and misogynist comments.
posted by audi alteram partem at 1:46 PM on May 14, 2015 [19 favorites]

spitbull - i've been trying to figure out how to word this comment - but things were heated and i wasn't looking at add fuel to the fire. i hope you read this later and take it in the spirit it's meant. to give you some background, i am very disturbed that style of tattoo has that awful name - and that apparently we've moved to just calling all patterned arm bands by that name. i would have loved to have a discussion in the original thread about the problems with the name, any alternatives, links to things people from the cultures where those tattoos are usually ripped from speaking about them, and so on.

having said that - i was confused by your comment here. it did seem drive by and like you were spoiling for a fight, which does seem not in line with how i've seen you participate - so i was just confused, really. it seemed like snark with no real point behind it. maybe next time try either discussing it in the original thread, or if the problem is how mefi is behaving, be a little more wordy in how you describe your issue. as it is, i still don't really understand what your complaint is besides hating "tribal" tattoos and all that go with them (which i totally agree about).

hope your break is as long as you need it to be and that you come back to us when you're ready.
posted by nadawi at 1:47 PM on May 14, 2015 [17 favorites]

I agree that the meter is worth nudging. As a woman, I find that my reaction to threads like this is usually:

Oh, wow, an article that's relevant to me, I can't wait to discuss—
Oh, shit, I can't possibly deal with a discussion or the certain aftereffects of my legitimate input and contribution and conversation if this is going to be the tenor of the discussion.
FINIS

That's...a problem for me, and I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one who feels this way.
posted by mynameisluka at 1:49 PM on May 14, 2015 [13 favorites]

audi alteram partem: Those seem like very reasonable and useful proposals.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:49 PM on May 14, 2015

Can we talk about shifting current policy to have moderators step in and ask people to back off on racial/ethnic/class/gender slurs when they're using them? There are steps between "ignore" and "nuke from orbit."

Sure, and I think that falls pretty well in line with the idea of nudging the meter on this stuff. Like, we already do take steps in that middle space, and I tried to do a certain amount of that yesterday in the tattoo thread, but where our threshold lands in practice and where it would have ideally been in retrospect for any given case is gonna be prone to mismatch and is something we'll have to keep working at.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:49 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

That was option number one that I suggested as a solution, "change the whole world." Of course people need to grow up. But we are talking about taking practical steps first so that we don't have to wait for the whole damn world to catch up to the obvious.

No, I saw that, and if it isn't clear, my irritation isn't irritation at you. But the thing I'm pushing back on in this instance is the idea that "changing the whole world" is an option. It's hopefully obvious that I'm down with having these kinds of discussions and, for better or worse, yelling a lot sometimes, but at the end of the day, there aren't any practical steps that we can take to make people stop being jerks. People just have to stop being jerks. There are lots of things we can do to explain why they should, and I know I for one spend a lot of time talking about that stuff, but there's no way to convince people, people convince themselves. The people with the power have to change themselves, and there's no substitute for that. I think the only thing we can do is hold people accountable for their actions and not let their bullshit go by just because it's unexamined by them. When you say "it's a hard problem to solve", I'm arguing that it isn't a hard-as-in-complicated problem to solve, it's just that the solution doesn't actually rest with us. If you're saying that it's a hard-as-in-strenuous problem to solve to get people to solve it for themselves, sure, I'm with you. I just think a lot of people (not you) say that it's hard-as-in-complicated in order to justify why they haven't even tried yet. It's a lifetime's work to hold to those solutions, and my argument in that thread is explicitly for people to keep talking and thinking about this stuff, but the solutions are pretty much one-liners.
posted by Errant at 1:50 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

("threads like this" being the tramp stamp thread, not discussions of how we can make this place better.)
posted by mynameisluka at 1:50 PM on May 14, 2015

It's Raining Florence Henderson, I think I've explained my POV in earlier comments, which is essentially to pre-warn repeat offenders that it's not OK to be an unrepentant ass in feminism threads, take more seriously sexism and classism (and other isms for that matter) as verbal attacks and hostility against the membership, and consider the idea that drawn out, fighty sub-Feminism 101 conversations are derails unless the topic is specifically related to hashing out sub-Feminism 101 concepts (even then, questionable, not sure when "is sexism real" is really on topic around here).

To me, the most important idea is that there is no need to nurture derailing "but what IS sexism, does it exist" type conversations when they are basically taking over the thread. That is tired, it is pointless, it is better cured in ways other than making a bunch of women explain it to you over and over, and it takes away space and energy for a conversation about the actual topic.

Other people here have offered better explanations than me, but I don't think I've been super vague about what I personally would hope for this MeTa to accomplish.
posted by easter queen at 1:51 PM on May 14, 2015 [8 favorites]

I just don't know what the solution is, and am wondering if you have a proposal.

Here's my proposal:

1. People stop being gleeful, sexist jerks.
2. In the absence or failure of 1, have a more unilateral pushback so that the burden of "showing up and doing the work" doesn't fall disproportionately on women. Pushback can include discussion in the thread, flagging, contact forming, whatever.
3. If that pushback starts to take up all the air in the conversation, mods step in and throw a blanket on it. In a perfect world with infinite moderator resources, this would come along with a note making it clear that the problem is the sexist douchebaggery and the derail, not the pushback / lively exchange of ideas in and of itself, but this isn't always possible with fast moving threads, particularly if there's more than one going on at a time.

the thing is, though, that there really needs to be a step 0: Believe that this kind of pervasive douchebaggery exists and is harmful, and that if a bunch of women see it and you don't, that the problem might be with you and not with them. Perhaps the most tiresome element of the whole enterprise to me is the part where we have to re-derive that theorem from first principles at the top of every thread.
posted by KathrynT at 1:52 PM on May 14, 2015 [74 favorites]

cortex, by "not an automatic nuke from orbit", do you mean "let it stand and don't address it"?

How about, I don't know, a blockade and conventional surface bombardment?
posted by tigrrrlily at 1:53 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Those seem like very reasonable and useful proposals.

And they've been mentioned several times up-thread. I was just summarizing what I agree with.
posted by audi alteram partem at 1:53 PM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

my sole comment in the JuneBy thread was (in its entirety) "we are descending into self parody," and was a reference to the meanness of the discussion, not the topic.

but see - the thing is, that comment is just like the comment in this thread - you know what's going on in your head and what you mean and how you want to express yourself, but what's coming out is drive by snippy comments which aren't really helping anything get nicer.
posted by nadawi at 1:57 PM on May 14, 2015 [21 favorites]

KathrynT, your comment is like a beautiful precious stone cut to a high sparkle. I love it.

Thinking back to the "I'd hit that" days and jessamyn's effort to get that shit gone, that is a pretty good example of 1) the kind of intense amount of mod engagement required to change the culture and 2) the fact that a woman had to do it.

It's sort of problematic, but the fact that the change stuck and the site didn't implode is instructive. (Unless you hate the site!)
posted by easter queen at 1:58 PM on May 14, 2015 [10 favorites]

my sole comment in the JuneBy thread was (in its entirety) "we are descending into self parody," and was a reference to the meanness of the discussion, not the topic.

Then I completely misread you and a lot of other people probably did too, which is probably understandable given your terseness - it absolutely came off to me as a dig at trans folks for trying to advocate for themselves in that discussion.
posted by dialetheia at 1:59 PM on May 14, 2015 [10 favorites]

my sole comment in the JuneBy thread

Your sole comment in just about every gender MeTa has been similar dismissive, useless snark.

I think what happened here is that you discovered that you burned through all your good faith. You squandered it on a hundred little "this is self parody" comments just like that one.
posted by nom de poop at 1:59 PM on May 14, 2015 [23 favorites]

shelleycat quotes: "They are emblems of their stupidity and conformity. It's okay to make fun of them"

I only accept this claim from people wearing full Elizabethan dress to their day jobs at Fortune 500 companies. EVERYBODY CONFORMS, you stupid social monkeys who need interpersonal connections or you literally die!

easter queen: "The article is about why, if you don't want to read it, or you're straight up ignoring it, you are not contributing."

Yeah, having been in college at the height of the lower-back-tattoo trend, when it was first really acceptable for collegiate-type women to get visible (or semi-visible) tattoos, I actually had a lot of thoughts about the personal, cultural, and sociological issues that surrounded that cultural moment, having lived through it and observing its aftermath as those women go on to positions of responsibility and community leadership! Lots of thoughts! But that thread so quickly went to, "Those stupid whores!" that I felt like there was no possible discussion to be had about the actual cultural phenomenon of the rise (and semi-fall) of the lower back tattoo. My sole comment was just trying to push back against "it's only about sex" and I felt like it was lacking in nuance and seriousness but, ugh, there was just no space left to have an interesting conversation, just to defend lower back tattoos as NOT THE FALL OF WESTERN SOCIETY.

zombieflanders: "But places that like having women around don't, say, let assholes loudly pontificate to the rest of the patrons on women's lower back tattoos and about how they're a signal that they like doggy-style and/or anal sex."

Yeah, I have literally been to rural midwestern Tea Party events that featured less sexism. Like, a significant number of people in that thread were being so gross that they would have been asked to leave. Like, I have been at some pretty fucking appalling public meetings over the years, where backwards people feel perfectly free to air backwards points of view, and that thread was still shocking. I run across the occasional individual shocking post on metafilter -- hey, it's an open forum on the internet! -- but to see them in such a virulent cluster, full of so much ugly sexist rage, over such a trivial issue, going on for so long ... it was really shocking and upsetting.

nadawi: "if i had a proposal at all it would be for the mods to keep noticing when specific members are doing the same shit over and over and over again and do something about it - time outs, topic bans, straight up bans, whatever"

I trust our mod team and I understand how it's hard to moderate an open, real-time forum like MetaFilter, but I also do feel like on sexism certain offenders just. keep. coming. back. and never get any serious consequences. They're always on strike one. The count never increases. That does get frustrating.

(Apparently the time I took typing this comment has put me 25 comments behind the thread, apologies if my comments have become dumb in the interim.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:00 PM on May 14, 2015 [52 favorites]

cortex, by "not an automatic nuke from orbit", do you mean "let it stand and don't address it"?

No, I just mean let it stand as in not literally delete it. People responding to rebut and rebuke, mods telling people to cut it out or deleting followup double-downs, etc. are I guess the metaphorical infantry movements in this martial vignette.

I take it as a given that the userbase is heterogenous and folks are never gonna collectively agree with where we end up drawing the line on stuff—whether too permissively or too strictly—but I think it's important to reiterate the distinction between not outright deleting something and endorsing a thing. Conflating the two or collapsing the distance between them isn't workable on a site that operates on guidelines rather than rules and conversational ethos that is generally pretty open, is all.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:00 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

the hilarribile response to the Toast thread

Wait, is there a tl;dr of why this one is so bad somewhere? I'm trying to power through it since it's huge, and all i'm seeing is a bunch of "i don't agree with this". The comments on the actual article and on their facebook are awful and lulztastic, but the ones on here seem relatively tame compared to the other recent shitty threads.
posted by emptythought at 2:03 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

pre-warn repeat offenders that it's not OK to be an unrepentant ass in feminism threads, take more seriously sexism and classism (and other isms for that matter) as verbal attacks and hostility against the membership

I agree.

consider the idea that drawn out, fighty sub-Feminism 101 conversations are derails unless the topic is specifically related to hashing out sub-Feminism 101 concepts

I agree, in theory. We've seen redirecting 101-type conversations to previous threads work at least temporarily before. I think there might be room to improve how that plays out.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:05 PM on May 14, 2015

I definitely feel like the tattoo thread was a prime example of where sexism is just derailment, for the reasons that Eyebrows McGee just outlined. Maybe the thread wouldn't have gotten hundreds of comments if it was a civil conversation, but it would have been much more interesting to actually talk about woman, tattoos, sexuality, and change in a substantive way. It's a very stark example because the sexism was so bad, and the potential for interesting conversation was so high (almost everyone keeps saying they had a lot to say until they opened the comments and saw all the revolting stuff). It was almost like an exciting, fun-serious topic (feminism! tattoos!!) that became totally, depressingly serious in a very bad.

I almost wish we could have that FPP over again but with a mind-wipe and none of the grossness. So much potential for a cool conversation.
posted by easter queen at 2:05 PM on May 14, 2015 [16 favorites]

Not a response to you, It's Raining Florence Henderson, just thoughts.
posted by easter queen at 2:06 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

okay here is a concrete suggestion

how about the next time jayder starts pontificating on the sexual preferences of "lower-class" women or I-Ball starts playing clueless-ass babe in the woods who can't even use a fucking dictionary without guidance--and no I don't give a fuck about not naming names because it will happen again--the next time that happens and women and their allies start saying "what the fuck this is not okay", how about the response doesn't become "oh but dissent is so precious, we all of us contribute so much to the beauty of this place, put up or shut up"

How about that?
posted by kagredon at 2:06 PM on May 14, 2015 [88 favorites]

Aww this is all too bad. That was an interesting article. That thread turned into a shitshow. This thread is going nominally better. I sometimes think that cortex's "Hey cool it" remarks don't always carry the same weight as me or taz being all "I am watching you jokers" even though they totally should.

The biggest downside I've seen to the slightly-smaller mod team (now that LM is back around, woo hoo!) is that sometimes a thread like this can happen under one mod's shift and so you get one mod doing the whole damned thing which is 1) tiring 2) exhausting 3) as hard as anyone tries, one person mods a lot like themselves a lot of the time. If I could make one material suggestion at this point it would be to chop up the shifts into shorter pieces so a troublesome thread gets more than one set of eyeballs in a short period of time. It's tricky, there are great reasons for NOT doing things that way, but aside from new policies on dealing with sexism on the site, that might help. And bring back the 24 hour timeout as a more frequent deterrent for usual suspects who always become That Guy in those threads. But honestly, I think that thread was the system working almost as expected, it's just with a wave of sniping jerkoffs, there's only so much you can do.

And I have one of those tattoos. The only man I got it for is the devil, because it keeps him away.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 2:07 PM on May 14, 2015 [81 favorites]

Because this community is really important to me, and I don't feel like I should be effectively filibustered out of threads about issues that directly affect me.

And this is my biggest issue with this sort of thing, and why i think the bar needs to be a lot lower for suspensions. Not bans, just, you're being a shit take a day off.

The responses these sorts of things get are platonic sealioning. It's basically "you're not allowed to have this discussion without addressing my *legitimate* point".

When it drives people out or makes them not want to participate, you're letting them enforce that.

Fuck everything about that. If that's how it goes, the only thing we have going for us is that they can't upvote other shitheads to the top of the thread like they do on reddit.
posted by emptythought at 2:13 PM on May 14, 2015 [14 favorites]

I trust our mod team and I understand how it's hard to moderate an open, real-time forum like MetaFilter, but I also do feel like on sexism certain offenders just. keep. coming. back. and never get any serious consequences. They're always on strike one. The count never increases. That does get frustrating.

I feel there's a lot of truth to this, to be honest. Without diminishing the work that goes into babysitting an incredibly contentious thread, when I saw some of the names behind the more disgusting comments in that thread, I was like "This guy again?" How much ugliness would have been avoided by showing some of these repeat offenders the door, and by that I mean the door to the thread; not even the door to the site? Often times a user can be fine in a myriad of topics but in one, in particular, their ugliness just comes roaring forth. Wouldn't it have saved everyone - mods and users alike - a lot of time and grief by just giving these guys the night off?

I realize we're loathe to straight-up ban people here, and so am I. But people that cannot take part in Topic X without shitting up the whole thread shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt. I feel like, a giant chunk of our problems here would be solved this way, while still allowing plenty of room for difference of opinion and spirited discussion.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 2:14 PM on May 14, 2015 [27 favorites]

Sure, and I think that falls pretty well in line with the idea of nudging the meter on this stuff. Like, we already do take steps in that middle space, and I tried to do a certain amount of that yesterday in the tattoo thread, but where our threshold lands in practice and where it would have ideally been in retrospect for any given case is gonna be prone to mismatch and is something we'll have to keep working at.

Yes. Which I think we get, and why I think a bunch of us are asking for quicker mod response on men calling women sluts, for example, rather than assuming the users should just "push back" on that for a while and the mods only step in once the users are completely exhausted.
posted by jaguar at 2:14 PM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

but I also do feel like on sexism certain offenders just. keep. coming. back. and never get any serious consequences. They're always on strike one. The count never increases. That does get frustrating.

i agree with this - that's how i feel, that's why i think of buttoning - but then in the last year or so around here there were some big troublemakers who seemed like they would just be given "second" chances forever and ever and ever until one day, poof, they were gone. normally the straw on the camel's back didn't even seem like that big of a deal (which always leads to people not following along to say, "well that was an over reaction! what did they do??" because by nature of how modding works here, some stuff just isn't for us to see).

so, i guess that's what i mean when i say i trust the mods - i trust that they're doing the back channel stuff with the people who seem like obvious problems, i trust that they're listening and adjusting their meters, i trust that some of the people will get better, or stay out of those threads, or get banned. i don't know if my trust is misplaced - that's the thing with trust - but for now, that's what i'm doing, cautiously watching and hoping the change comes before i can't stick it out anymore.
posted by nadawi at 2:15 PM on May 14, 2015 [14 favorites]

This problem might also be aided by a higher bar for FPPs in general, to decrease the overall load on the mods, allowing them to prioritize hot-button threads like this more easily (though honestly, I didn't expect it to be a hot-button thread and was kinda surprised). I dunno, maybe that's just because I feel like I'm seeing less of these threads just by virtue of reading other threads when they come up, and I'm reading a lot fewer comments in general these days.
posted by klangklangston at 2:16 PM on May 14, 2015

Or maybe the mods should stop giving the people who seem physically incapable of not being misogynist in every thread about women that they participate in a whole bunch of 24 hour slaps on the wrist? Some of these people are on, like, strike 20 by now, and unless they know they're facing serious consequences they'll keep on doing it.
posted by zombieflanders at 2:16 PM on May 14, 2015 [28 favorites]

I mean, male users discussing what sexual positions they think the author and women like her prefer and how such women are sluts is not any different from saying "I'd hit it" in terms of levels of misogyny.
posted by jaguar at 2:20 PM on May 14, 2015 [42 favorites]

Eh, I'm not sure what bar the FPPs themselves would be considered as having failed to clear.
posted by griphus at 2:22 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

I feel like between 1) not having "lite" FPPs about topics like women + tattoos and 2) telling men not to call women sluts, 2) is just a better decision overall. I sympathize over the workload trouble but maybe taking a harder line on the "no gendered/sexualized derogatory speech toward women" is better than "women, can you not want to talk about your issues so much?" (I know that's not what you're saying, but that's how I think it would feel.)
posted by easter queen at 2:22 PM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

I meant that as a first time offenders randomly shitting out of nowhere thing. There are definitely career shitposters on here that just inexplicably always come back.

I'd agree with the sentiment that people don't get banned easily enough around here. There's several comments in that thread that i would have agreed with being "ok fuck you, you're banned".
posted by emptythought at 2:23 PM on May 14, 2015

>Eh, I'm not sure what bar the FPPs themselves would be considered as having failed to clear.

Short listicle of male privilege might not be interesting or unique enough content to be worth the trouble. Not defending any of the comments when I say that.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:24 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

That behavior is functionally indistinguishable from trolling. I know we have a "sexism" flag that sometimes leads to the removal of sexist comments. But can we have a "No [public threshhold n]-repeat *ist commentors" policy, too?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:24 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Party Dog: The Beginning

Somehow my brain shorted out when i got up thismorning, and the first thing i thought was ♫we begin to dog, partyyyyy, party doggin all night long♫

It's a very silly place, inside my brain.
posted by emptythought at 2:25 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Meant to refer to zombieflanders' comment here.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:27 PM on May 14, 2015

That so many people have a usual-suspects list, but that they must go un-named here, feels strongly to me like a missing stair. Oh that guy; he always does that in these threads.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:27 PM on May 14, 2015 [53 favorites]

"Eh, I'm not sure what bar the FPPs themselves would be considered as having failed to clear."

Sorry if I was unclear; I didn't specifically mean those FPPs (though I do agree about the privilege listicle, and I don't think the trolled responses to a trolly Toast article really justify it either), but rather the idea that mod attention is fungible and raising the bar in general would mean fewer FPPs to have to moderate at any given time.
posted by klangklangston at 2:29 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Short listicle of male privilege might not be interesting or unique enough content to be worth the trouble.

Well I mean that's the thing; why is it okay to limit the range of things we discuss because some people can't help pulling their "well I'm just a simple country lawyer but the way I sees it..." act.
posted by griphus at 2:30 PM on May 14, 2015 [23 favorites]

It's helpful if people can drop a note to the contact form if you want to name names right now, or in general if you see someone being That Guy and you feel like they've been at it for a long time in a particular thread.

Getting multiple messages about a given person is definitely an attention-getter for us, and can move the needle from "man this guy is an idiot running his mouth" to "ok next comment gets a day off." We can't always catch up on a whole thread when it's a huge one like some of these are, or if it's a crazy busy day with many threads to keep track of -- so we may not realize that the dude was doing the same thing in the same thread yesterday, for example.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:30 PM on May 14, 2015 [15 favorites]

> When you say "it's a hard problem to solve", I'm arguing that it isn't a hard-as-in-complicated problem to solve, it's just that the solution doesn't actually rest with us. If you're saying that it's a hard-as-in-strenuous problem to solve to get people to solve it for themselves, sure, I'm with you. I just think a lot of people (not you) say that it's hard-as-in-complicated in order to justify why they haven't even tried yet. It's a lifetime's work to hold to those solutions, and my argument in that thread is explicitly for people to keep talking and thinking about this stuff, but the solutions are pretty much one-liners.

Cool, thanks for the clarification. I'm sorry I misread you on that. I think this is one of those we were pretty much on the same page and I didn't realize it situations.

By the way, I reread my comment, and I think it sounds a lot angrier than I intended. I apologize for that, too.
posted by SpacemanStix at 2:30 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

how about the next time jayder starts pontificating on the sexual preferences of "lower-class" women

To be fair jaydar was told to stop it in the thread by cortex and it seemed to work at the time, I don't remember him coming back. I was pretty happy to see that when it happened.
posted by shelleycat at 2:30 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

That so many people have a usual-suspects list, but that they must go un-named here, feels strongly to me like a missing stair. Oh that guy; he always does that in these threads.

Have you seen what happens when you specifically call someone out on this site, especially in meta? a ton of people rally around them and call you an asshole for doing it and omg that's so uncouth.

People here are conditioned not to name names. It's like some of the bullshit passive aggressive activist groups i've been in.

So yea, i guess missing stair is apt, but people do it for a reason because talking about it is out of line and as bad as the original sin.
posted by emptythought at 2:33 PM on May 14, 2015 [13 favorites]

sorry if that comes off shitty, that kind of behavior is a sore spot for me, and especially on here.
posted by emptythought at 2:33 PM on May 14, 2015

If I am ever That Guy, please gawd, memail me and tell me right away.

But then, I guess most times, That Guy wouldn't accept being informed he has become That Guy.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:35 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's a hard part of community culture. Because folks understandably want to talk about who they don't like on the site and why they think that person should go, but folks also understandably get really uncomfortable about people getting together and saying "we should ban user x", and that's often the same conversation where both come up.

So we discourage it as a public discussion, but like LM said that's not really an issue with the contact form, so if you feel like there's an issue with someone that you don't think really flies as a callout in public, that's always, always an open channel. Talking about user behavior in metatalk is less of a problem, it's more the "this person should be banned" sort of thing that we've generally asked folks not to get into.

And yeah, finding the balance on stuff like telling people to cut it out or giving them timeouts is something we keep working on. One of the side effects of not wanting to make a public spectacle of bannings and such is that, as noted, some of the behind the scenes stuff and even actual timeouts and bannings aren't super visible when they happen. And as much as I know some folks would rather it be louder than that, I continue to strongly disagree on that specific narrow point; moving toward publicly broadcasting or celebrating bans is a non-starter. We'll acknowledge them if it comes up and sometimes it plays out in-thread, but that's really about all that's ever gonna be okay.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:36 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

But folks also understandably get really uncomfortable about people getting together and saying "we should ban user x", and that's often the same conversation where both come up.

That isn't really what was being talked about above though. It's that even "this person does this shit all the damn time" isn't an allowed discussion.
posted by emptythought at 2:38 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

People get all agitated about naming names because there have been horrible thousand comment long threads in which various people accuse others of having "a list" like it's joe mccarthy all over again and people are going to be driven out of their homes by screaming hordes thirsting for their pinko blood. The reality of this is that the list is called "your memory" and every single one of us has access to their own preferentially programmed example inside their brains. There isn't anything wrong with seeing someone say a shitty thing and then remembering that the next time you see it happen, and the next and the next and the next.
posted by poffin boffin at 2:38 PM on May 14, 2015 [44 favorites]

anyway cortex im sending you my list, it is 2.3gb in csv format
posted by poffin boffin at 2:39 PM on May 14, 2015 [97 favorites]

That isn't really what was being talked about above though. It's that even "this person does this shit all the damn time" isn't an allowed discussion.

Allowed where? It shouldn't really go in a thread on the blue or the green, but it's generally okay on Metatalk if it's not some out-of-the-blue thing where someone goes after someone else in a random discussion. I am sure there are specific situations where we've told folks to cool it, and we've been bearish lately on metatalk posts that look like unproductive "i don't like this person and everyone needs to know it" sort of things rather than something more constructive and less personal, but there's no general proscription on discussing what you see as recurring problem behavior from a member of the site.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:43 PM on May 14, 2015

poffin boffin: "anyway cortex im sending you my list, it is 2.3gb in csv format"

we have received your file and it's full of kitten pictures and sangria recipes, cross-organized by season, then by which kitten is best viewed with the sangria. We note that comma separated value files are a sub-optimal way to transmit both.

yours etc,
posted by boo_radley at 2:44 PM on May 14, 2015 [20 favorites]

Getting multiple messages about a given person is definitely an attention-getter for us, and can move the needle from "man this guy is an idiot running his mouth" to "ok next comment gets a day off."

Sorry to harp on this, but "ok next comment gets a day off" doesn't cut it when it's pretty clear they'll just wait until they think you forget about it and do it all over again, which is exactly what happened here. I don't care if a time-out or banning is public, but I do care that the repeat and/or especially egregious offenders keep on getting second chances. When you're getting a bunch of flags on comments from the same user for the same reason in threads grinding the same axe, to the point where you've told them multiple times to step away from those kinds of threads, doesn't it seem clear that they just don't care?
posted by zombieflanders at 2:45 PM on May 14, 2015 [17 favorites]

I'm glad this discussion is happening.

I'm with those who've seen a general meanness over the past week - and I haven't even visited most of the threads mentioned beyond the tattoo post. The misogynists are definitely taking the lead, but they're not alone.

For my part, I've learned twice this week that I am a part of the tribe of douchebag gaybros - all based on surface details.

I'm glad to see so much push back, but it's surprising to see it here again.
posted by kanewai at 2:47 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Have you seen what happens when you specifically call someone out on this site, especially in meta? a ton of people rally around them and call you an asshole for doing it and omg that's so uncouth

Everybody's got a list but the lists are not the same and sometimes they are in opposition.
posted by Justinian at 2:50 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

anyway cortex im sending you my list

wickerman.csv
posted by kagredon at 2:51 PM on May 14, 2015 [17 favorites]

When MetaFilter feels mean and contentious is when I feel compelled to make a thread like "show us your purse" or "tell us an interesting thing about yourself" MetaTalk because then people blow off steam and bond in a positive way and I learn lots of interesting, humanizing things about other mefites and I feel re-energized about MetaFilter being awesome.

Maybe someone should make a show-and-tell tats MeTa. (I would except I have none to show or tell because I am wimpy about needles and unable to make lifetime commitments to body art, so I would be a lame person to kick it off.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:54 PM on May 14, 2015 [15 favorites]

"Well I mean that's the thing; why is it okay to limit the range of things we discuss because some people can't help pulling their "well I'm just a simple country lawyer but the way I sees it..." act."

I don't think that we should limit the range of things that we talk about by topic; there are a ton of great male privilege or sexism related posts, and a ton more of great content out on the web about that stuff. Those just sprang to mind as being particularly weak sauce recent FPPs.

Though to be fair, in skimming back over the last couple of weeks (just to see whether my impression was an actually supportable one), we've had more good FPPs and less stupid newsfilter/weaksauce FPPs recently than I remembered, and since that's also played more into me reading fewer comments (just going from FPP to FPP), I'm going to concede that it's probably just my version of the GOP's "Cut taxes!" panacea and not something that likely has a ton of bearing on the MeSogyny problem. If more good stuff does mean less mod attention for anti-sexist deletions, the answer shouldn't be to cut the good stuff to give them more time.
posted by klangklangston at 2:55 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

... feel compelled to make a thread like "show us your purse" or "tell us an interesting thing about yourself" MetaTalk...

As something of a narcissist I just want to say I appreciate those threads.
posted by griphus at 2:57 PM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

"When MetaFilter feels mean and contentious is when I feel compelled to make a thread like "show us your purse" or "tell us an interesting thing about yourself" MetaTalk because then people blow off steam and bond in a positive way and I learn lots of interesting, humanizing things about other mefites and I feel re-energized about MetaFilter being awesome."

Those were both awesome, by the way. Like, getting back to good feelz about MeFi after getting kinda grumpy. Thanks again.

"Maybe someone should make a show-and-tell tats MeTa. (I would except I have none to show or tell because I am wimpy about needles and unable to make lifetime commitments to body art, so I would be a lame person to kick it off.)"

I love tattoos but don't have any for exactly those same reasons. I kinda jokingly talked about getting one after getting married recently and my wife was like "Suit yourself," and then I chickened out.
posted by klangklangston at 2:59 PM on May 14, 2015

Everybody's got a list but the lists are not the same and sometimes they are in opposition.

There's worlds of difference between a list of "people who are assholes" and "people who continually imply women's appearances are directly responsible for how society treats them" or "people who will bring up bathroom panic or evopsych or outdated DSM definitions every time we talk about trans* men and women."
posted by zombieflanders at 3:00 PM on May 14, 2015 [16 favorites]

I have a tattoo of my purse.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:01 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

This may have happened and I'm just having trouble eyeballing such a long thread for it, but when I showed up late in the day and read that thread for the first time, it seemed like it could have used some mod notes like [You can use Google or a dictionary to find out information on X] or [Slut-shaming/pontificating on the sexual preferences of lower class women is not what this site/post/life is for].

I know that's not necessarily in the style book, but wouldn't a public pin in that stuff be more effective than the generic "cut it out", or are we afraid the rules-lawyering would then take over the thread? I may have answered my own question there.
posted by Lyn Never at 3:02 PM on May 14, 2015 [11 favorites]

i want a thread where everyone posts photos of their pets in dumb outfits

NO BABIES ALLOWED ONLY PETS
posted by poffin boffin at 3:02 PM on May 14, 2015 [15 favorites]

I love tattoos but don't have any for exactly those same reasons. I kinda jokingly talked about getting one after getting married recently...

Holy shit, really? I've spent most of my teen-to-adult years being terrified of getting tattooed (thanks, weird sensory issues!) and yet wanting to pretty badly. My wife has a lot of tattoos and after we got married, I was finally like OKAY I'M GONNA DO IT and got a tiny tattoo of our wedding date on my chest, and she got an enormous one across her arm also with the wedding date. And now I caught the ink-bug.
posted by griphus at 3:02 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

Maybe someone should make a show-and-tell tats MeTa.

I suggest a pet show-and-tell. Tattoos would be great, but participation would be a little self-limiting. Plus, cats! Dogs! Turtles! The cats and dogs and turtles of Metafilter!
posted by mudpuppie at 3:08 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Cool, thanks for the clarification. I'm sorry I misread you on that. I think this is one of those we were pretty much on the same page and I didn't realize it situations.

By the way, I reread my comment, and I think it sounds a lot angrier than I intended. I apologize for that, too.

No apologies necessary on either count (it read as irritated, and I'm the last person to take someone to task for reacting irritably, especially right after I did), and I agree with you on our shared position. It occurred to me after the fact that I had something specific in my head when I was replying to you, which is a thing a real live not-a-simulacrum-designed-to-test-my-faith human said to me the other day, regarding the difference between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter: "Overall, it's a little too complicated for me to understand. It's much easier, and more acceptable to me, to be labeled as a bigot or a racist than try to figure out what's currently acceptable and what isn't."

That's the "it's so hard" mentality I was reacting to, which I think is often observable in these kinds of conversations even if it isn't stated quite so explicitly. In that context, my reaction to "this is hard" is "oh no, man down, call a waaaaaaahmbulance".
posted by Errant at 3:08 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

emptythought: "That isn't really what was being talked about above though. It's that even "this person does this shit all the damn time" isn't an allowed discussion.
"

I feel like this is chaff from the wilder days of metafilter when people would just up and start metatalks that were just "Yo, fuck boo_radley and his ding-dong opinions". Maybe I'm wrong there. Maybe when it was just Matt? Was his attitude that he didn't have enough hours in the day?

If we're going to allow user callouts, I feel like the mods need a lot of evidence prior to them coming up. People aren't always on the radar in this same way (how many users does metafilter have now?).

zombieflanders: "Sorry to harp on this, but "ok next comment gets a day off" doesn't cut it when it's pretty clear they'll just wait until they think you forget about it and do it all over again, which is exactly what happened here."

I feel like the flip side of this is that people aren't ever going to come around and snap out of their garbage behavior. You can't convert people you don't talk to. I know that's frustrating for people to hear, and the default opinion is probably "it's not my place to convert people". That's OK. I don't expect anybody to do it. It's exhausting, and it's not fair to ask. But I think that conversion is a satisfying result, and I'm typically OK being the person in MeTa trying to engage with people who are outside community norms on these things. I dunno.
posted by boo_radley at 3:08 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

For the first time in my life, I'm thinking of getting a tattoo. I've been feeling nostalgic for times with my grandfather, and he was a decorated Marine. I have a memory of him with a faded tattoo on his arm of the Marine corp insignia. I was talking to my Dad about wanting to do something to honor that memory of him, but I'm pretty sure doing that exact thing would be highly inappropriate for someone who wasn't in the military.
posted by SpacemanStix at 3:11 PM on May 14, 2015

This thread is piling up too fast for me to follow right now but yeah, the tat thread was gross and I noped on out of there after reading a bunch of the comments. Body-shaming, slut-shaming, misogyny, classism, personal insults: the discussion was just awful.
posted by immlass at 3:13 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

NO BABIES ALLOWED ONLY PETS

That makes me think of this. Maybe they can be Metafilter-themed cats.
posted by corb at 3:14 PM on May 14, 2015

Isn't there a MeFite with a MetaFilter tat? Maybe an AskMe tat? How can we not be all in on the ink love when THERE'S A METAFILTER TAT?

Or maybe the drugs have kicked in and I'm misremembering.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:23 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

sigh. the point i was trying to make was less about the utility of individual callouts, and i probably should've stricken that part, because it's all anyone's going to remember about that comment now.

the point was that while it's a very small (but also often dedicated/repeat-offending) portion of the userbase that does this shit, it is supported and reinforced by the much larger portion that responds with useless nonsense about "well what do you want more BANNING? more COMMENT DELETION???!! oh noes free speech! you don't HAVE to be here if these threads are so bad!" I know this was also something that came up in the JuneBy thread: that there is still frequently a very reactionary response to threads where people are trying to address problems with transphobia in Meta and that it's kind of hard to feel warm and fuzzy about Mefi patting itself on the back for being a friendly place to marginalized people when there's still so much dismissiveness.
posted by kagredon at 3:25 PM on May 14, 2015 [16 favorites]

no i definitely remember the part where you accurately named the jerkbags.
posted by poffin boffin at 3:26 PM on May 14, 2015 [8 favorites]

Everybody's got a list but the lists are not the same and sometimes they are in opposition.

Yeah, I think my list is a lot different than many of the people commenting here. Some people are called out for being shitty, others applauded for it. I usually Nancy the worst of the worst but I turn it off for threads like this just this for the entertainment factor. Anyway, why don't the mods just give the 100 users that flag comments the most the ability to delete comments, I'm sure everything would be right as rain in no time.
posted by MikeMc at 3:30 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

"I feel like this is chaff from the wilder days of metafilter when people would just up and start metatalks that were just "Yo, fuck boo_radley and his ding-dong opinions". Maybe I'm wrong there. Maybe when it was just Matt? Was his attitude that he didn't have enough hours in the day? "

I think it was the general user revolt against using MeTa like that, where it became the sort of thing that if you posted about someone being a dick it was assumed that it was part of a long, disingenuous grudge match and that if you were going to post here you had to be ready for a good 100 comments of, "No, fuck you! Ban you!"
posted by klangklangston at 3:34 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Haters gonna hate" in the truest sense of the aphorism. But they especially hate it when you frown upon their hatred or, heaven forbid, try to confront their expression of it. Easy enough to recognize, but difficult to address.

And to that I can only say: quis odit ipsos osores?
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 3:34 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

That thread was awful, and I've seen a lot that have gone similarly badly recently, with many of the same Usual Suspects (jayder and I think dios come to mind, but my memory's not perfect) plus a lot of what seemed like drive-bys. There's a lot of "holy shit why has this person not been banned" that I've been seeing lately. (I don't know how to call corb out specifically without making this Another Episode of The Corb Show but the whole misogynistic-attitudes-toward-feminine-coded-things has been really getting to me lately, and she's one of the people who does that a lot, but it's mostly only noticable from her because her behavior in a myriad of threads has me noticing and remembering her handle; that particular form of misogyny is hardly unique to her.)

Regarding derailing, it seems like JAQing off is kind of an achilles heel for MetaFilter discussions. The fact that an actual honest-to-god "just devil's advocate" (!!!) comment was left up was astounding to me, but that's just an easily pointed to example of this tendency of people to be able to derail entire discussions with questions that often seem to be asked in bad faith. It's also a way of taking advantage of womens' socialization to be helpful, just like many of the "if you won't be nice to me, I won't be an ally anymore" techniques that I've seen a fair amount here. (Though that latter one seems to get hurled around in threads about LGBT, especially trans, issues, but intersectionality is at play, so trans women seem to end up having to deal with it a lot.)

we have received your file and it's full of kitten pictures and sangria recipes, cross-organized by season, then by which kitten is best viewed with the sangria. We note that comma separated value files are a sub-optimal way to transmit both.

in the future please find a host for these and put them on Projects so the world can see them
posted by NoraReed at 3:35 PM on May 14, 2015 [30 favorites]

"Isn't there a MeFite with a MetaFilter tat? Maybe an AskMe tat? How can we not be all in on the ink love when THERE'S A METAFILTER TAT?

Or maybe the drugs have kicked in and I'm misremembering."

Pot and Kettle above a nipple (a tat for tit)?
posted by klangklangston at 3:36 PM on May 14, 2015

in my perfect metafilter "well if you keep telling utterly harmless jokes about men then we're going to do our part to enact laws that actively harm you, neener neener" type comments would be deleted every single time.
posted by nadawi at 3:44 PM on May 14, 2015 [34 favorites]

The fact that an actual honest-to-god "just devil's advocate" (!!!) comment was left up was astounding to me

Speaking of JAQing Off, whenever someone begins a sentence with "Honest question here" in a contentious thread, I feel like we are about to enter the Land of the Devil's Legal Team and Their Fabulous Dancing Goalposts. This and "to play devil's advocate a moment" are almost never tools for stimulating a more nuanced, rounded discussion, or at least never play out that way. More often than not the entire discussion shifts to this one user and their precious But Guys What If speculations. It really oughta be considered a derail at this point.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:45 PM on May 14, 2015 [38 favorites]

oh, poffin boffin - it's not the best costume, but captain tightpants is adverse to accoutrements, so here is a picture of mal being dashing in his hat and then mal showing how he feels about hats.
posted by nadawi at 3:50 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

honest question ok but come on guys, are women even actually human? i don't mean to play devil's advocate here but how do we really know they're not eldritch horrors zipped up inside tittysuits.
posted by poffin boffin at 3:50 PM on May 14, 2015 [70 favorites]

I have a bunch of tattoos, but I am unlikely to share pictures of them on Mefi.

Because of things like the thread we're talking about.
posted by box at 3:52 PM on May 14, 2015 [12 favorites]

No, I think it's important that time-outs and bans be public.

I agree with that. It's impossible for the userbase to have an informed opinion on site issues if key facts are invisible to the userbase.
posted by Justinian at 3:52 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

I know that's not necessarily in the style book, but wouldn't a public pin in that stuff be more effective than the generic "cut it out", or are we afraid the rules-lawyering would then take over the thread? I may have answered my own question there.

What, no, that's a great idea. MetaFilter does actually have particular (broadly defined) values. "Here's a starting point" is way less rules-lawyery and more welcoming etc. than "stop it" or "cut it out" or "go away" imo.

(I have no tattoos because I'm indecisive and the need for symmetry would be overwhelming. And I'm glad I didn't let whatsisface from high school practice on my arm, that was wise.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 3:56 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

in my perfect metafilter "well if you keep telling utterly harmless jokes about men then we're going to do our part to enact laws that actively harm you, neener neener" type comments would be deleted every single time.

a JD from the University of Hell and an MPP from the wolfdreams01 College of Spiteful Dickheadery LOGIC
posted by kagredon at 3:56 PM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

That thread was horrific; I'd love to see a little ban-orgy like when Matt cracked the shits with those four or five people just before he handed over the keys - that was glorious, and I'm sure I speak for the entire universe, including people not born yet, when I say I miss the the presence of those douchesplosions not at all and think the site is immeasurably better without them.

There were four particularly noxious commenters in that thread. I personally, with my medium levels of participation on the site, have encountered them spraying douchiness over threads like a skunk in a sewerage plant multiple times before - and of those four, three in particular seem to have problem with women. How many chances to they need?

Ban them. Let's raise the bar a little here.
posted by smoke at 4:02 PM on May 14, 2015 [21 favorites]

kagredon you're just really lucky i know how to heimlich maneuver myself. i have bigger plans for my tombstone than "choked on a chocolate-covered espresso bean reading MeTa."
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 4:04 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

I mean, you could just say "never comment in any thread with anything at all to do with women, ever again", I suppose.

But this isn't a Home For Neglected Assholes; they can get their jollies virtually everywhere else on the internet.
posted by smoke at 4:05 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

(I don't know how to call corb out specifically without making this Another Episode of The Corb Show ...

You could call corb out in a passive/aggressive sort of way...oh wait, you did.
posted by MikeMc at 4:07 PM on May 14, 2015 [13 favorites]

I just... why would you want to be the devil's advocate in the first place? That guy fucking sucks.

I've entered conversations from the unpopular or uninformed side, and it's just plain obvious* when someone is genuinely trying to have a discussion versus trying to control the discussion.

*Though maybe not always, and not to everyone, especially on the Internet.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 4:09 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

poffin boffin: "NO BABIES ALLOWED ONLY PETS"

What if I let my kids eat cat food? Asking for a friend.

Also, what if my pets are emus?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:09 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Don't let your pets use white face and mascara!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:12 PM on May 14, 2015

I regret commenting in that thread. By itself, I don't think my comment was problematic but it may have contributed a bit to the negativity there.
posted by octothorpe at 4:13 PM on May 14, 2015

You could call corb out in a passive/aggressive sort of way...oh wait, you did.

Why do people keep abusing "passive-aggressive"? Passive-aggression is a sacred tradition in my family. Any problem we faced, no matter how great, we could always get through it through coded language and dancing around the point with snide double-meanings and a lot of eye rolling.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:13 PM on May 14, 2015 [27 favorites]

Why do people keep abusing "passive-aggressive"? Passive-aggression is a sacred tradition in my family. Any problem we faced, no matter how great, we could always get through it through coded language and dancing around the point with snide double-meanings and a lot of eye rolling.

Mom?
posted by mudpuppie at 4:23 PM on May 14, 2015 [27 favorites]

Anyone remotely familiar with my posting history probably knows I don't really bother with the "passive" part when I'm being aggressive.
posted by NoraReed at 4:24 PM on May 14, 2015 [26 favorites]

I used to want a tattoo, partly because they're pretty and partly because I'm the only person in my family without one, but it turns out I'm both picky and cheap, so I never got one.

Now I just pretend it was deliberate because I'm a rebel against conformity.
posted by small_ruminant at 4:25 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

i know PB has root, but i don't think he's ever banhammered, so not mod

I assume if the day ever comes when pb has to personally ban someone, that poor soul's every contribution to the site will be razed to the ground and the rubble burned and the ground salted and the salt licked by ornery goats who will make those empty spaces their home.
posted by griphus at 4:30 PM on May 14, 2015 [22 favorites]

Okay, wtf? I posted in that thread that "tramp" usually means hobo. People disagreed with me and said that the "slut" meaning is much more common and prevalent. This was news to me so I checked it on urban dictionary and saw that the "slut" meaning was quite common even though I never heard it used that way before. The first definition on UD was the slut meaning. The second definition listed mentioned both the slut and hobo meanings and the 3rd definition mentioned the hobo definition so I didn't scroll any further and instead posted in the thread that I didn't know that the slut meaning was that common and that as per UD both meanings are commonly understood (as from the definitions on my screen I saw that it was 50/50.) So now I'm getting attacked for saying that my initial post was wrong? And people were saying "by admitting that you're wrong you're actually saying that you're right and that's wrong" which boggles the mind. And now in this thread the same thing is happening. Apparently you're never supposed to admit that you're wrong on Metafilter and you're not supposed to mention looking things up. So, yeah, lots of hostility aimed at me for me saying that I was wrong because I described the process through which I came to the conclusion that I was wrong.
posted by I-baLL at 4:31 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

wassup bro imma take that shovel from you now for your own sake
posted by klangklangston at 4:33 PM on May 14, 2015 [106 favorites]

I can absolutely not tell what you're on about with these posts, hal_c_on. I'm glad you like cortex but I'm in the crowd that prefers more female moderators, and I don't think saying "I wish there were more female voices on the mod team" necessarily means "because the male voice there is bad". I also think that a lot of this is just us still missing mod hat jessamyn, who did a really good job steering the site away from misogyny in a lot of ways.

I-baLL, you're either being really disingenuous or really dense.
posted by NoraReed at 4:34 PM on May 14, 2015 [14 favorites]

"Also, what if my pets are emus?"

My cousin used to raise emus, but they're total mean shits who love kicking down fences and almost broke my aunt's leg.

So, uh, good luck with the costumes.
posted by klangklangston at 4:34 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

just not a good decision
posted by indubitable at 4:34 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Indecision is really the only thing that has kept me from getting a tattoo. Most of my inked friends have solved this problem by just getting lots of tattoos. One of them began his love of ink by getting the word DRUGS tattooed over his pubic line. Maybe that has something to do with my reluctance.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:37 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

"I-baLL, you're either being really disingenuous or really dense."

Uh, how is me saying that I was wrong in what I said in my initial post on that thread "being really disingenuous or really dense"?
posted by I-baLL at 4:37 PM on May 14, 2015

One of the side effects of not wanting to make a public spectacle of bannings and such is that, as noted, some of the behind the scenes stuff and even actual timeouts and bannings aren't super visible when they happen. And as much as I know some folks would rather it be louder than that, I continue to strongly disagree on that specific narrow point; moving toward publicly broadcasting or celebrating bans is a non-starter. We'll acknowledge them if it comes up and sometimes it plays out in-thread, but that's really about all that's ever gonna be okay.

Speaking only for myself, this is a data point you can do with what you like - frankly, I feel much more supported as a user when I see that someone who's being a shit is getting brought up on their consequences. Mod notes to just "cool it" sometimes come across like when another kid in the lunchroom steals your sandwich out of your hands and you try to get it back, but the lunchroom monitor only says "no horseplay, you too, use your words and work it out on your own", and you feel now they've left you to fend for yourself; whereas "that's it, you get a day off"comes across more like a much clearer "oh, wait, he stole your sandwich? Bobby, give that sandwich back now!"

You know? It's an affirmation that in this community there are some definite codes of conduct, and that the mods will enforce them upon you if you transgress. I appreciate it may not always need to be visible, but in especially heated and contentious threads, I do appreciate seeing it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:41 PM on May 14, 2015 [44 favorites]

So, yeah, lots of hostility aimed at me for me saying that I was wrong because I described the process through which I came to the conclusion that I was wrong.

I didn't take part in the discussion but I'll offer an outsider's take. Reading this portion of the discussion now, your take does not really seem to be what happened. Your comments went from "I never thought of tramp as a slut, but a hobo" which is really hard to believe, but sure. Then what it's pointed out that no, that use of tramp is outdated, you consulted UD and came back to say that actually, it's 50/50 hobo v slut. Again, people pointed out that this is not so. Your final comment was your concession.

In other words, the pushback might stem from both perceived disingenuousness, and digging in with a pretty pointless (but brief) word lawyering about what "tramp" means. I don't think anyone was being overly hostile to you, but in a thread that was already incredibly contentious with a lot of smirky devil's advocate nonsense, it was maybe not the best move to drop that in the thread and dig in over it.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:46 PM on May 14, 2015 [15 favorites]

wickerman.csv

IT WON'T BRING YOUR TATERS BACK
posted by tigrrrlily at 4:47 PM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

endless arguing over the "dictionary definition" of a word that is well known to be in common usage as a slur is such 100% classic trolling that it might as well come with a lifetime achievement montage.
posted by poffin boffin at 4:50 PM on May 14, 2015 [66 favorites]

[soft music plays]

"a bundle of sticks..." [an image of a bundle of sticks fades in and the camera pans back and forth, documentary style]
posted by NoraReed at 4:53 PM on May 14, 2015 [62 favorites]

I-baLL, I'm pretty sure I've seen you do this "I've never seen that word used that way!" song and dance a few times before, which, to me, suggests either genuinely wide ignorance of the language or disingenuousness. My two cents as a fellow user here.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 4:58 PM on May 14, 2015 [11 favorites]

So I opened that thread yesterday morning, saw how it was going to go down, then bookmarked it and noped the fuck out of there because work was already taking its hellish toll. Reading all of it today instead of engaging was the better choice for me, but I want to personally say thank you to all the women who didn't put up with that shit at the time and made it known.

(I also have a tattoo on my upper back that I'm adding to next month, and I'm super excited.)
posted by erratic meatsack at 4:59 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

"came back to say that actually, it's 50/50 hobo v slut. Again, people pointed out that this is not so. Your final comment was your concession."

and

"endless arguing over the "dictionary definition""

Where am I arguing over the definition? I pointed out that it was 50/50 (the first 3 definitions that I saw mentioned both the tramp and slut definitions) because some people said that the hobo definition was out of date and were wondering how I could in any way only have encountered only the tramp definition. To answer that question: nobody in the groups of people with whom I hang out have ever used the word "tramp" that way. However people with whom I hang out watch Chaplin films and know about hobo signs and such so I only heard "tramp" in the hobo sense of the word. Apparently that's not the case for most people.

My initial wrong comment got sensible responses from people telling me that I was wrong and why. The comment after I was corrected,

"What Jalliah said. I checked urban dictionary and half the definitions fall one wa and half fall the other way but I've never heard "tramp" being used as a replacement for "slut" before. I wonder how that definition evolved from hobo."

Was me just calmly stating that I looked at urbandictionary and looekd at the first few definitions. I didn't look at all the definitions.

Oh, on preview, the second definition isn't about hobo tramps.

Second definition: "The difference between a tramp and a woman? A woman lies around and sleeps; a tramp sleeps around and lies."

I literally misread that as "sleeps around" in the literal sense. Still, I was wrong.


"I-baLL, I'm pretty I've seen you do this "I've never seen that word used that way!" song and dance a few times before,"

Really? Where?
posted by I-baLL at 5:01 PM on May 14, 2015

Do you by any chance have a background that's maybe unusual for most people in the US and Canada, I-baLL? You're not e.g. the child of expats or missionaries? (Serious question.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 5:02 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

i-Ball, the idea that someone for whom English is their first language could believe that the "tramp" in "tramp stamp" refers to the "hobo" meaning is very, very hard for me to accept. Come on man.
posted by Justinian at 5:03 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

I actually was wondering something akin to that, cotton dress sock.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:03 PM on May 14, 2015

Huh, CDS had the same thought as me in terms of language and culture.
posted by Justinian at 5:03 PM on May 14, 2015

I stayed out of the tattoos thread because I didn't want my snark over tattoos to be taken as snark about women.

I mean, I respect everyone's right to self-expression... and I'm sure your tattoo is just awesome.

But I tend to subscribe to the Charlie Brooker theory of tattoos, that being that I never need someone to tell me what their tattoo means, since to my eyes, they all mean "I should not have done this."

Except yours. Yours is awesome.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:04 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

If someone's given a timeout for something that happened entirely in memail, then the only people who need to know about it are the people in that conversation. If they were shitty in a thread, that thread should have a [, take a day off] note.

I wouldn't know about the first one, but I see the second one a decent amount, so I think this is probably already happening as a matter of course.
posted by Errant at 5:05 PM on May 14, 2015

I feel like it would be a good idea not to get into a long argument here about the idea of arguing about the definition, etc. I-baLL, I think it's okay to be frustrated that people are disagreeing with what you feel like is just a recap/assessment of your take on the word, but digging back in on it in here feels like a poor decision; better to maybe just recognize that this is a point of friction and let it be.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:07 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

the hilarribile response to the Toast thread

==

Wait, is there a tl;dr of why this one is so bad somewhere? I'm trying to power through it since it's huge, and all i'm seeing is a bunch of "i don't agree with this". The comments on the actual article and on their facebook are awful and lulztastic, but the ones on here seem relatively tame compared to the other recent shitty threads.

The sum total of terribleness in that thread was twenty or so dumb deleted comments from their own page the Toast peeps posted on their Facebook. There were a lot of people assuming it was bad because of course it was, but afaict it was an even mix of good-natured lulz and gentle incomprehension.

For calibration, the Tramp Stamp thread had me smh, but I cleave to Cortex's position that a questionable view being questioned is the best approach for a discussion board, rather than preemptive deletion of non-compliant thought.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:08 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

I've decided I'm going as a slutty hobo for halloween. Thigh-high comedy loose-toe-cap boots, assless bindle, the works.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 5:08 PM on May 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

when Matt cracked the shits with those four or five people just before he handed over the keys - that was glorious

Huh. That's interesting. I wandered away from MetaFilter for a while - not in a dramatic way, just a "lots of stuff going on" way, and when I wandered back in it seemed like some of the people who were driven to the greatest heights of anger by women talking or having opinions that were not theirs had gone. I didn't realise this might have been part of a clear-out.

More generally, I think that GamerGate and the fallout from GamerGate has made it much clearer to me when people are, unintentionally or intentionally, driving women out of spaces by making being present in those spaces debilitatingly unpleasant or exhausting, just by sheer weight of example. And, ultimately, intention or the lack of it doesn't make a lot of difference, if the end result is the same.

I'd like to see MetaFilter not being a place where that is a regular and accepted result. Whether that can be achieved by behavioral mechanics and nudging or whether it has to be more firmly moderated, I'm not sure, but it seems like the current response to it is not achieving that goal - if that's a goal shared with the broader community.
posted by running order squabble fest at 5:08 PM on May 14, 2015 [14 favorites]

DirtyOldTown, that's awesome and all, and totally worked! It's exactly what a basically decent person would have done. Which is not surprising, since everything you've done on this site that I've seen points to you being a basically decent person. So...

This is to inform you that you won't get your basically decent person medal taken away.

I don't know what the fact that you think people who have tattoos make poor decisions has to do with the topic of this MeTa, though.
posted by tigrrrlily at 5:10 PM on May 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

when Matt cracked the shits with those four or five people just before he handed over the keys - that was glorious

Oh, man. It was like the second-to-last episode of a season of The Sopranos up in here
posted by prize bull octorok at 5:10 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's a funny Charlie Brooker joke I enjoy having a reason to bring up, is all. Well, that and it illustrated my aforementioned distaste for tattoos.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:11 PM on May 14, 2015

Okay, so here's a question. Metafilter once banned somebody (reklaw, if you feel like going and looking) for being an asshole by posting Harry Potter spoilers. It was malicious, he was being a dick, bam, get out, don't let the door hit you.

Why isn't being a misogynist troll also banworthy?
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:12 PM on May 14, 2015 [49 favorites]

That would make Metafilter look like a feminist website, is my guess.

(this was to Pope Guilty)
posted by tigrrrlily at 5:14 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

It was like the second-to-last episode of a season of The Sopranos up in here

I just watched Whitecaps!
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:15 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

"I feel like it would be a good idea not to get into a long argument here about the idea of arguing about the definition, etc. I-baLL"

I'm not arguing about the definition. I said that I was wrong about the definition. Maybe my comment didn't relay that clearly but I explained that I was wrong. I don't understand why people keep thinking that I'm arguing about the definition.


"i-Ball, the idea that someone for whom English is their first language could believe that the "tramp" in "tramp stamp" refers to the "hobo" meaning is very, very hard for me to accept. Come on man."

"Do you by any chance have a background that's maybe unusual for most people in the US and Canada, I-baLL? You're not e.g. the child of expats or missionaries? (Serious question.)"


So everybody on Metafilter had English as their first language and everybody here is born to people speak English unless those people are "expats or missionaries"?

I'm going to ask you guys something: In what context would I hear the word "tramp" used to mean "slut"? How is it so amazing to you guys that I've not heard the word used that way before? Like the word "hoagie" to mean a hero sandwich. If people around you don't use a word then how are you supposed to learn it? Maybe this is going to go all Baader-Meinhof on me.
posted by I-baLL at 5:15 PM on May 14, 2015

Because posting HP spoilers is objective, whether or not someone is a troll is subjective.
posted by Justinian at 5:16 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

You could call corb out in a passive/aggressive sort of way...oh wait, you did.

OK, as a newcomer to the thread on the blue at issue, let me say that it has been interesting to read this long MeTa and see that yet again, corb is in the center of the action. Because once again corb did what I have seen corb do over and over again . . . lay and light a fire, then show up to enjoy seeing the building burn.

I'll be blunt . . . in my opinion, corb is a troll. And this site for some reason keeps putting up with the same behavior over and over again, i.e. watching the grenade get tossed and blow, often hurting and sometimes driving out wonderful MeFites, protesting, letting corb deny responsibility disingenuously, and then . . . it all happens yet again.

I don't like the ban hammer but I'd vote for it for corb. Or, at a minimum, deleting corb's inevitable grenade comment the very first time it (predictably) shows up in a thread dealing with a subject of social and site significance.
posted by bearwife at 5:16 PM on May 14, 2015 [29 favorites]

I kinda like bans being handled on the downlow, or at least expediently and tersely. For instance, I didn't notice Matt's banfest, but I sure did notice a few threads that would have been shitty that were unexpectedly decent. And instead of taking it as the result of a bitter battle, it just came across as the website grading ever-so-slightly more toward awesomeness. And I liked that feeling.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:18 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Sorry if that was an outlandish suggestion, I-baLL, you just reminded me of someone, no offense meant.
posted by cotton dress sock at 5:18 PM on May 14, 2015

Because posting HP spoilers is objective, whether or not someone is a troll is subjective.

This is pretty flaccid reasoning, by this metric anyone being an asshole is subjective and no one can ever be banned for being a shit no matter how deraily, upsetting, mean, whatever what they're posting is because "trolling is subjective".
posted by emptythought at 5:19 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

"I never thought of tramp as a slut, but a hobo"

Well, "tramp" can mean "hobo" but I don't think anyone has really used it in that context with any sort of regularity in a long, long time. We've all said stupid shit, just throw up a middle finger and own that shit, backpedaling isn't going to get you any credit.

Oh, and I have a smallish tattoo I got when I was in the service but I've been mulling a largish (Dick Grayson as) Batman and (Damian Wayne as) Robin tattoo pulled from Grant Morrison's B&R run.
posted by MikeMc at 5:19 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

And yea, i also support straight up SA style [USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST] on shitposts, when someone actually gets banned. I think that would be an improvement.
posted by emptythought at 5:19 PM on May 14, 2015 [20 favorites]

"Sorry if that was an outlandish suggestion, I-baLL, you just reminded me of someone, no offense meant."

No worries. Anyways, I gotta go. See you all later!
posted by I-baLL at 5:20 PM on May 14, 2015

So everybody on Metafilter had English as their first language and everybody here is born to people speak English unless those people are "expats or missionaries"?

If you think that is what the people asking about your language history then you are not engaging here in good faith. If you don't know that or not, well I don't really care, it's not the job of everyone here (mods included) to teach you the why and hows regarding this.

As much as I'm hesitant to agree with folks saying "bans are a good idea" and "give more timeouts for X behavior", you're pretty much making yourself a poster child for their cause.
posted by RolandOfEld at 5:20 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

if we all dropped the stupid tramp/hobo derail it would die. just a thought...
posted by nadawi at 5:21 PM on May 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

I'm going to ask you guys something: In what context would I hear the word "tramp" used to mean "slut"? How is it so amazing to you guys that I've not heard the word used that way before? Like the word "hoagie" to mean a hero sandwich. If people around you don't use a word then how are you supposed to learn it? Maybe this is going to go all Baader-Meinhof on me.

It's common usage to the point of not being at all slangy in UK/Aus/NZ English.

And this is going to count as a fighty derail in a thread that is already full to bursting with pent-up rage-jism, so I'd strongly recommend you leave it there if you would prefer people not to shout at you.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:21 PM on May 14, 2015

That would make Metafilter look like a feminist website, is my guess.

To a misogynist troll, it already does.
posted by box at 5:21 PM on May 14, 2015 [10 favorites]

In hindsight, it seems like #Maysogyny was a bad idea for a month tag. I hope #JuneBy does better.
posted by uosuaq at 5:23 PM on May 14, 2015 [35 favorites]

I-baLL, you have two threads full of users talking about how hurt we are by the misogyny on display in the original thread. People are talking about leaving the site over it. Does arguing about why you're being misunderstood about a slang definition really matter as much?
posted by jaguar at 5:23 PM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

And yea, i also support straight up SA style [USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST] on shitposts, when someone actually gets banned. I think that would be an improvement.

Unless we're going to go whole-hog and introduce rpg.net style forbidden lines of enquiry I think this is a terrible idea. Metafilter works. What you are describing isn't Metafilter.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:23 PM on May 14, 2015

Until about the past week -- and I don't read every post -- I had the impression things had calmed down quite a bit (to answer sculpin's question), and kind of assumed it was from the more aggressive modding cortex described. Maybe I'm wrong and it was just luck; no idea.
posted by uosuaq at 5:25 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

And yea, i also support straight up SA style [USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST] on shitposts, when someone actually gets banned. I think that would be an improvement.

Seems like I vaguely recall old threads where timeouts and bans were explicitly called out in-thread. I remember having a sense of... relief? Justice? I don't know - like the system was working. Behind the scenes work is probably fairer and more productive, but it does leave me with a sense of lots of unfinished business lying about waiting to spring back up at any moment.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 5:26 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

Visible, swift consequences matter SO MUCH when it comes to behavior like harassment and misogyny. Assholes REALLY DO think "everyone else is thinking the same thing, I just have the guts to say it" unless lightning strikes visibly and loudly.
posted by tigrrrlily at 5:27 PM on May 14, 2015 [47 favorites]

The entire article is more or less about the term 'tramp stamp'. Asking what that means if you never heard of it before is one thing, although trying to seek basic understanding of the article is something one should probably do on their own with a little bit of googling before hopping into a discussion about it. Wondering if that's even a thing people say and mean, when the entire article is about how yes, people say this term and mean it, falls under 'rtfa'.

To not read and understand the article and then repeatedly commenting on it, that's bad manners even when it's a neutral topic.
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:27 PM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

I can't grammar but the tldr is rtfa.
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:28 PM on May 14, 2015

I saw that thread, saw where it was going and stayed the hell out. The older I get, the more I've lost my taste for conflict for it's own sake. Plus, for the same reason, I've lost interest in how other people dress/adorn themselves etc. I have other things to think about.
posted by jonmc at 5:30 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

I think the reason we won't likely see the [USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST] thing on metafilter is because when one of these misogynist users is finally banned it's more [USER WAS FINALLY BANNED FOR YEARS OF MISOGYNIST TROLLING AND WASTED DAYS OF CUMULATIVE MOD-TIME DEALING WITH IT, USER-TIME ATTEMPTING TO PUSH BACK AGAINST IT IN THREAD, AND DRIVING MULTIPLE WOMEN TO CLOSE THEIR ACCOUNT, STOP POSTING OR AVOID THREADS THAT WOULD OTHERWISE INTEREST THEM, CULMINATING IN THIS POST]
posted by NoraReed at 5:31 PM on May 14, 2015 [39 favorites]

And yea, i also support straight up SA style [USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST] on shitposts, when someone actually gets banned. I think that would be an improvement

Having been on the other side of that particular banhammer for about 5 years, I can tell you it's more satisfying that it is particularly effective.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 5:32 PM on May 14, 2015

I'm going to ask you guys something: In what context would I hear the word "tramp" used to mean "slut"?

Off the top of my head, in the very thread you were commenting in.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:32 PM on May 14, 2015 [61 favorites]

I would donate $50 to MetaFilter to read that mod announcement.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 5:32 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is pretty flaccid reasoning, by this metric anyone being an asshole is subjective and no one can ever be banned for being a shit no matter how deraily, upsetting, mean, whatever what they're posting is because "trolling is subjective".

Well, no, it just means it's a lot faster and easier to ban somebody for an objective action not that it is impossible to ever do so for a subjective one. A pattern of behavior over a long period of time takes a long period of time to establish, tautologically.
posted by Justinian at 5:36 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

This read seriously like binary and reductive reasoning and it doesn't speak well of you. Seriously, how difficult would it be for you to say, "Hey, sorry I misread the situation. Carry on." or something else instead of doubling down on being patronizing and directive?

Because I don't agree that I misread the situation? Sometimes people disagree and in life it doesn't mean that someone is a monster unless the conversation ends with everyone agreeing.

Anyway, I feel like I've already said what I wanted to say and I'm only responding to suggest that if I were treating you the way that you are treating me, the whole thread would be calling for my head, like that's what the whole thread would suddenly be about, I think. But you are piling up favorites because people agree with you so strongly! It is actually the case that this site is already friendly to your perspective, to the degree that you have a free hand with your tone in a way that I don't think that I would. And I am tiptoeing around rewriting this comment several times (like I always do when I'm out of step! (and when I'm in step)) and I'm just not sure that the privilege plays out in the context of this discussion like you're so confident that it does.

In the end I'm reasonably sure that we agree on the vast, vast majority of political and social topics and I hope you'll understand that I'm not the enemy. I won't be back to this thread, but see you next time, it'll probably go better!
posted by Kwine at 5:36 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

In what context would I hear the word "tramp" used to mean "slut"?

In the article that everyone was discussing?
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 5:36 PM on May 14, 2015 [48 favorites]

I'm not sure I've ever heard the word "tramp" used at all unless Ella Fitzgerald was singing, so I have a modicum of sympathy for people who react like "why would I care about this word?" -- except that you've got to be aware it's not a compliment.
posted by uosuaq at 5:44 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Many women have heard the word tramp aimed at ourselves and at other women. It is possible that your lack of familiarity with the word might be yet again an example of male privilege.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:51 PM on May 14, 2015 [30 favorites]

I should've mentioned this in the original thread, and maybe it will appease or gratify the "BUT I THOUGHT TRAMP MEANT HOBO?!?" crowd, but...

I actually have a bunch of hobo signs tattooed on me (no joke, although I don't put photos of myself online so you'll have to imagine them). So, if you insist on clinging to the delusion/willful lie that 'tramp stamp' somehow means 'hobo tattoo', well I'm your man!
posted by still bill at 5:51 PM on May 14, 2015 [8 favorites]

I'm not sure I've ever heard the word "tramp" used at all unless Ella Fitzgerald was singing

Then you need to hear this (one of the best songs ever).
posted by jonmc at 5:52 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Does one of them mean "a dishonest man lives here" ?
posted by almostmanda at 5:53 PM on May 14, 2015 [8 favorites]

The continuing pile on on Iball isn't great. I-ball you aren't going to change any minds. I'd leave it.
posted by josher71 at 5:55 PM on May 14, 2015

Many women have heard the word tramp aimed at ourselves and at other women. It is possible that your lack of familiarity with the word might be yet again an example of male privilege.

I have no doubt that it is.
posted by uosuaq at 5:55 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I should also say thanks to dialetheia for making this post. I have just survived that last month of the semester when all you can do is hang on for dear life, and I've been snatching readings of MeFi while my students take exams and at stoplights (you know, "me time"). I was just saying to the spousal dude "MetaFilter has been really shitty for the past couple of weeks. All these old accounts without a lot of comments are popping up to sea lion and make everything miserable." while reading the tattoo thread. It's nice to know I'm not the only one feeling this way. My speculation to him is that someone is sending folks here, but it may just be the current way the wind is blowing that makes trolls troll and sea lions sea lion.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:56 PM on May 14, 2015 [28 favorites]

It is possible that your lack of familiarity with the word might be yet again an example of male privilege.

Maybe, but I think there are other possible explanations. Easy to see how if any of the other possible explanations were true, a person might feel compelled to respond defensively in the face of a pile-on based on a genuine and very unfortunate, high-stakes misunderstanding. (Though it would probably be simpler to just clear it up.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 5:59 PM on May 14, 2015

It's an ill wind that blows
Sea lions in from sea
Ask not for whom the troll trolls
He trolls for He
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 6:01 PM on May 14, 2015 [16 favorites]

Of all the evenings to need to run to the store. Catching up:

when Matt cracked the shits with those four or five people just before he handed over the keys - that was glorious

I don't really know what this is supposed to refer to. Matt didn't go on a banning spree; we banned a few notable nth-chancers over the period of a few months as team decisions, partly as a response to our stated desire to try and be more aggressive about some of these issues. I think it helped; there were definitely several threads in the ensuing months where my takeaway was "this went...well!" that felt like old stomping grounds on that front.

It's not a one-off thing, it's something we do keep looking at and thinking about. And, again, as much as some people may prefer a much louder ban process, it's not something we're going to get in the habit of broadcasting, because that is however satisfying it may seem something that has some serious negative sides as well. The important thing is dealing with the behavior, not making a symbolic figure of the banned user.

Oh, it definitely does happen. I just have no way of knowing how reliably it happens, because I'm not in the habit of checking the user pages of everyone who's been awful in a thread to see if there was an invisible timeout applied.

If it comes up as a result of something in a thread, we will generally leave a note, yeah; for a day off that's not going to show up on someone's profile page in any case, they're just cut off.

Has that been happening? Because if it has, the change is way too subtle for me to perceive. What I'm seeing here is a call for more explicit responses for problematic stuff.

It's been ongoing, yeah. Still a work in progress, still something that requires for me in particular changing long habits a little bit, but as much as there's been some frustrating shit this last week, the last several months have generally seemed better and we've gotten a lot of periodic good feedback on that front, which is nice. I don't know what is up with some of the recent stuff beyond just the internet and the world has weird fucking swings sometimes.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:03 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think NoraReed mentions a good point about the nuance of this site's moderation that often goes unnoticed, and rarely stated explicitly.

There's a liberally used tool for banning comments, but the threshold for banning a commenter is relatively conservative. This is a good set-up for handling certain situations, and not so good for others (e.g., multiple users who provide consistently flagged or deleted comments, yet exist below the implicit "banned for being an asshole" threshold).

So, do you proliferate the liberally used tool? Or do you reduce the conservative threshold?

I'm using the phrase "banning comments" loosely here to include time-outs, but I guess the proposal for public notices would be an additional option (or maybe something that just strengthens the impact of the tool). Really, I like the idea of the website's significant moderation actions being publicly available data. (It technically already is, for anyone who wants to look for it, but a database is asking somebody to do some extra work.)
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 6:03 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

And this isn't to anyone in particular, but how much easier would it be to just say "I'm sorry. I was wrong. I misunderstood." than to go on trying to prove you should have been right?

Kill the boy and be a goddamn man already, everyone.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 6:07 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

Thanks, Maester Aemon.
posted by Justinian at 6:08 PM on May 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

>"I feel like it would be a good idea not to get into a long argument here about the idea of arguing about the definition, etc. I-baLL"

I'm not arguing about the definition. I said that I was wrong about the definition. Maybe my comment didn't relay that clearly but I explained that I was wrong. I don't understand why people keep thinking that I'm arguing about the definition.

I-baLL, I said an argument about the idea of arguing about it. And that was a pretty gentle attempt to let you walk away from this, that you then dug back into anyway, doing precisely that. You've peaced on out of the thread already but I want to be clear that this is basically exactly the problematic dynamic at issue, and you need to cut this sort of thing out in the future.

This is, to be super duper clear, not an invitation for you to get into this further when you see this. I'd have deleted the comment I'm quoting if I'd gotten to it sooner, but as is I'm just gonna be clear about it here.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:10 PM on May 14, 2015 [10 favorites]

And this isn't to anyone in particular, but how much easier would it be to just say "I'm sorry. I was wrong. I misunderstood." than to go on trying to prove you should have been right?
Kill the boy and be a goddamn man already, everyone.

FAUST PROPOSES CHILD MURDER...DETAILS AT 11.

Also, insecurity is a major factor in human psychology, and it seems like it's often much *harder* to say "I'm sorry, I was wrong". It can be helpful to give the other person an opportunity to do that without feeling humiliated. I'm also speaking quite generally here, since I don't know exactly what you're referring to. But "be a man" isn't helpful in the way I'm talking about.
posted by uosuaq at 6:15 PM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

or see cortex's comment about "a pretty gentle attempt to let you walk away from this"...that's well-put
posted by uosuaq at 6:16 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

And, again, as much as some people may prefer a much louder ban process, it's not something we're going to get in the habit of broadcasting, because that is however satisfying it may seem something that has some serious negative sides as well.

I'm curious: what are the negative side effects of "this user banned for X" notices? Seems to me it's like a signpost warning would be offenders that a particular set of actions has a consequence, rather than turds disappearing into the ether.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:18 PM on May 14, 2015

It also may be harder if it's in the context of an already fraught discussion and someone feels victimized, or if there are say different communicative norms working against each other.
posted by cotton dress sock at 6:18 PM on May 14, 2015

I'm curious: what are the negative side effects of "this user banned for X" notices? Seems to me it's like a signpost warning would be offenders that a particular set of actions has a consequence, rather than turds disappearing into the ether.

Upping the likelihood of often kind of ugly post-banning "good riddance!" celebrations/pileons on one hand and inviting a lot more post-banning wrath/bullshit from aggrieved parties on the other, for starters. Inadvertently validating a culture of expecting to call for bans or of expecting that in the absence of an unambiguous declaration that nothing is being done. Sending the message that when and if someone is banned, their feelings about the situation are assumed to not matter, that satisfying people's desire to know that they're banned trumps any consideration of the fact that, whatever problems they had behaviorally here, they were still a member of this community.

Just as a general community strategy, focusing on banning as a positive public display in its own right rather than as a tool for dealing with an unfixable failure state in the notional goals of this place does not sit right with me at all. If someone's behavior is a problem and then it stops being a problem, that's the core goal accomplished and is what should matter. We'll continue as a team to look at where traditional reticence to drop bans comes up against the worthwhile idea of being more proactive about it, but needing to ban people is still a lousy outcome for the site and not something to ritualize or build a community ethos around.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:30 PM on May 14, 2015 [18 favorites]

Also, a little thing but just since it's come up and I hate having this sort of thing hanging out there wrong in a discussion, gnfti is in fact still/again a mod, working part time during US night hours to split up the week with taz who is full-time.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:34 PM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

what are the negative side effects of "this user banned for X" notices? Seems to me it's like a signpost warning would be offenders

Because some will not see them as a warning, but as badge of honor; an achievement to be unlocked. Having a user profile here that says "This user banned for sexism/racism/assholism" might just be another piece of cred in some other corner of the internet.

Also, because of the approach to banning here tends to give people a fair amount of time to adapt to figure out site culture and multiple chances (with some obvious exceptions for things like the SEO mongers, or maliciousl sock puppeteers), with lots of behind the scenes conversations/coaching/nudging/warnings from the mods for problem users, it might be very hard to provide reason X, particularly if the problem behaviour has escalated in those behind the scenes conversations.
posted by nubs at 6:35 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yay gnifti! Thanks for clarifying!
posted by zarq at 6:36 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I totally agree with you cortex. And yet... when we lose good people due to a lack of perception that shit is being dealt with... that, to me, is possibly worse than if we increase visibility to a marginal degree. You don't have to go all Thunderdome all the time. Maybe just on special occasions.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 6:37 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

#MaybyMisogyny
posted by standardasparagus at 6:37 PM on May 14, 2015

Or maybe just Thunderbigtent.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 6:39 PM on May 14, 2015

I can appreciate that, cortex, though I think we already push against post-ban celebrations, and that part of addressing the core goal could be demonstrating the kind of behavior that can get you banned around here. I'm not saying our entire community ethos needs to be built around it, but it might go a long way towards prevention. Though I see the "badge of honor" point, I think anyone willing to drop $5 to earn that badge is an outlier at best.

Really what's most important to me is we try and find the balance between SA-levels of ban impunity and suffering fools well beyond their expiration date. I think a great part of this is showing that actions have consequences, visibly. Not just for would-be trolls but for the assurance of others here who have left or might leave because they don't see this in action.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:40 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Kill the boy and be a goddamn man already, everyone.

It is possible that this kind of wording is, um, unhelpful.
posted by NoraReed at 6:40 PM on May 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

Really what's most important to me is we try and find the balance between SA-levels of ban impunity and suffering fools well beyond their expiration date.

I hear you, and I think I basically agree. I'm just much more interested in approaching the idea of closing in sooner and harder on repeat bad behavior as a matter of when and where to act, not in how to make more of a spectacle of it.

No note sometimes leads to requiring a later note saying that the user everyone's been responding to for the last N comments can't respond because they've been given a timeout, and maybe people should drop it.

That's almost always one of two things when it comes up:

1. A can't-be-in-two-places-at-once issue where the time between the timeout getting settled and applied and the mod dropping a note about it being the time spent doing the actual account stuff and communicating with the user about it.

2. People responding to someone who has closed their own account, and so not knowing that they're talking to someone who can't respond because there was no mod-side action taken and the user didn't make it unambiguously clear that they were taking off.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:58 PM on May 14, 2015

Can the admin note section of user's profile not be amended when a report comes in? Cause the report field to append a note automatically if it is deemed to be watchworthy/actionable, or to be ignored if it's nothing.

Point 1 seems like it could be automated, with a mod then popping into a thread to say "we've dealt with so and so, please move on" in the usual way.

Closed accounts seem like they could be put in their own usergroup with a little icon or whatever.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 7:11 PM on May 14, 2015

Can the admin note section of user's profile not be amended when a report comes in? Cause the report field to append a note automatically if it is deemed to be watchworthy/actionable, or to be ignored if it's nothing.

I don't know if I'm understanding. Do you mean make a behind-the-scenes note on a user's profile record about for future reference? That is something we will do already, yeah, re: significant issues on the site, or noting recurring behavior, or documenting specific correspondence about warnings or whatnot. Or do you mean something else?
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:17 PM on May 14, 2015

No, no, I was aware of the presence of the notes, I just wasn't sure if they were being used in that way - mostly noting recurring behavior - if a report/whatever comes in about a user's behavior it just makes sense to link that report to that note if it was something actionable. I don't know if that functionality exists but it would seem to be useful.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 7:21 PM on May 14, 2015

...with a little icon…

Perhaps a bindle!
posted by Drastic at 7:24 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, we've got a mix of in-db things that can e.g. attach a user note to a specific post or comment, and more casual "see email re: subject" notes for manually cross-referencing with off-site communications if we need to look something up later for context. All the hard bits of being aware of and tracking and acting on specific examples of problem behavior on the site are more on the soft human-wrangling side of the equation, not the technical limitations of note-taking or so on.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:27 PM on May 14, 2015

It just seems like automation would help somewhere along the lines:

1. A can't-be-in-two-places-at-once issue where the time between the timeout getting settled and applied and the mod dropping a note about it being the time spent doing the actual account stuff and communicating with the user about it.


This just seems over-complicated. If the standard timeout is 24 hours, and the situation is the night mod needs PB to approve it or throw the lever or something, why not code it to be automatic from the mod's get-go? There's only so many of you and none of you seem mad with power.

I know MeFi likes the handmade touch, but an automatic timeout, a "please move on" in the thread, and a "Dear baby, welcome to bansville, pop. : you." shouldn't take too long.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 7:37 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's already very automated; any mod can give any user any sort of ban/timeout right from their userpage, and that itself creates a note in the system. The time involved is not the time required to physically cause the ban to go into place, it's the time involved to deal with possibly-already-ongoing communication with the user, with other users, and with the team if it's a borderline thing where someone wants a second opinion or a second set of eyes, plus everything else that might be going on at the moment on the site.

Again, the tricky bits here are almost entirely the squishy human factors and the random circumstances of the day, not the technical mechanisms. Technically, banning someone is the easiest thing in the world. Practically, though, it's rarely pushing a button in a vacuum.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:41 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Lol & obliviousfilter -- Imagining myself in the author's position, I thought, comfortably, oh, I would just forget about it [having a regretted tatoo]. Also I wouldn't even see it (lower back), not even in the mirror, so. Plus I actually like dragonflies as a pattern. And then I thought, well, everyone's different, some people feel things more. And then I read the comments in MetaFilter -- well, lookie here, proving the point (that people are crazy-sexist)! (And so bracingly! lol (easy for me to say (see Helen Garner)).)
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 7:45 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

I just had a vision, of moving in with someone who had never, ever had to do their dishes in their life. Picturing them just constantly leaving dishes in the sink, that I then take care of with my own, until I just reach a breaking point and ask them to do their damn dishes like an adult.

And I pictured that roommate making the discussion all about how it's not a big deal for me to wash one glass or one plate or one fork or one bowl, and about how I'm a nazi for forcing them to do stuff, and about how I'm making to harder for them to even just eat and come on don't I understand that they have to eat, and on and on and on.

And I realized what women, thus, have to deal with on the internet every damn day.

I don't know if I was part of the problem in that thread or not. I know I felt better about my comments towards the end than towards the beginning. If I hurt anybody, I'm sorry and would like to do better in the future.
posted by Navelgazer at 7:48 PM on May 14, 2015 [54 favorites]

Again, the tricky bits here are almost entirely the squishy human factors and the random circumstances of the day, not the technical mechanisms. Technically, banning someone is the easiest thing in the world. Practically, though, it's rarely pushing a button in a vacuum.

Maybe I was just spoiled by the larger team at SA (or maybe we were just Literally Hitler about banning people) but it seems like the same setup.

(Although I like to imagine Poffin Boffin having a lever of some kind that requires throwing, possibly on a stormy night, shouting, mad laughter, etc. - if this is not the case please remit to PB 1 (one) standard-grade lever.)
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 7:51 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

To be clear, the "kill the boy and be a man" is a Game of Thrones quote that is appropriate in context and was probably well meant - it comes off more misogynistic than I think he probably intended it.
posted by corb at 7:53 PM on May 14, 2015

And I pictured that roommate making the discussion all about how it's not a big deal for me to wash one glass or one plate or one fork or one bowl, and about how I'm a nazi for forcing them to do stuff, and about how I'm making to harder for them to even just eat and come on don't I understand that they have to eat, and on and on and on.

And I realized what women, thus, have to deal with on the internet every damn day.

And often the non-metaphorical version at home, too! And different metaphorical versions at work! And at kids' schools! And for partners' work entertaining!
posted by jaguar at 7:58 PM on May 14, 2015 [13 favorites]

My impression has always been that SA and Metafilter have pretty starkly different approaches to both moderation duties and ban policy and practice, yeah. Which is fine; different sites, different communities, different approaches.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:06 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't want to derail, I just wanted to pop and say, in response to hal_c_on upthread: I didn't mean to be rude to cortex in my first comment ! I don't know why you're interpreting it as some sort of personal attack on cortex.

Nora Reed upthread pretty much reads my mind, so I'm seconding her comment/interpretation. I did not express myself very well if it is being interpreted as a criticism aimed at cortex. (I appreciate the love letter to cortex, though.) I'm kind of deflated from this MetaTalk and the other MetaTalk, but I wanted to pop in to respond.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:11 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't really know what this is supposed to refer to.

Sorry it was decani, sgt serenity and 0 and I think there was someone else? I ascribed it to Matt cause in the first case his comments in thread seemed to indicate it was a spur of the moment kind of thing.

And it was wonderful. I generally appreciate the olive branchy approach you guys take, but I think it's easy to discount the... distress these provacteurs cause others and the community. The troublemakers in that thread have had multiple warnings to not be terrible in other threads, and that's just what I've seen. How many warnings do people need? If they can't correct their behaviour to match site norms, whether they agree with them or no, I submit they are not a good fit.
posted by smoke at 8:13 PM on May 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

There's more overlap in posters than I would have thought, cortex. I'm mostly just curious about the difference in moderation practices and policies - people had suggested an SA-type practice (which wouldn't work imo) and I was wondering how the behind the scenes stuff worked.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 8:17 PM on May 14, 2015

The Fuzzy Bastard was the other one. It really felt like things were improving on the Blue, but it seems like others are eager to move in on the misogyny-vacuum created by their absence. (Though I do appreciate that this thread has been orders of magnitude better than a lot of the other ones; the Grey is much less thunderdome/"mefi with PVP" these days.)
posted by NoraReed at 8:17 PM on May 14, 2015 [10 favorites]

Smoke-And yet, mods said they would welcome them back if said behavior changed. Now that's wonderful.
posted by clavdivs at 8:22 PM on May 14, 2015

I don't want to derail, I just wanted to pop and say, in response to hal_c_on upthread: I didn't mean to be rude to cortex in my first comment ! I don't know why you're interpreting it as some sort of personal attack on cortex.

That is totes how it read, so good on you for making it clear it wasn't.

My impression has always been that SA and Metafilter have pretty starkly different approaches to both moderation duties and ban policy and practice, yeah. Which is fine; different sites, different communities, different approaches.

Yes. SA also doesn't silently delete comments/threads, which is a crucial element of the Metafilter style; more vigorous use of the banhammer really wouldn't sit well with silent deletion, since inevitably people would be being banned for stuff that barely anyone saw.

Metafilter feels more, FWOABT, grown up than SA, and imo part of that is occasionally having to read opinions and viewpoints you violently disagree with .
posted by Sebmojo at 8:23 PM on May 14, 2015

I feel like Mefites and Goons are a lot more similar than I would have first guessed, and with probably a lot more literal overlap as well, but even there, I feel like it's like if you visited a small town, and saw largely the same groups of people at Church, the High School Football Game, and at the PTA Meeting. Totally different cultures with different standards.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:24 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

See, I think a part of being a more grown-up space is not allowing people to use that space to act like misogynist teenage boys trying on sex-shaming in the locker room, as opposed to leaving their graffiti up and adding "THIS STUDENT WAS SUSPENDED FOR THIS" under it, which seems more the SA style.
posted by NoraReed at 8:27 PM on May 14, 2015 [12 favorites]

(^ yes, though pre and post GBS 2.0 needs to be considered; I'd think most Mefites would consider current GBS an irradiated hellscape of badthink)
posted by Sebmojo at 8:28 PM on May 14, 2015

As far as I know he's the only current male mod (i know PB has root, but i don't think he's ever banhammered, so not mod).

Usually power isn't defined by what you do, but what you can do. Don't underestimate the abilities of a wizard just because they choose not to avail themselves of their true power.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:30 PM on May 14, 2015

Current SA is kind of like what Mefi would turn into if the complaints that "SJWs" were ruining Metafilter were taken seriously by the administrators. Though, some of the forums are better than others.
posted by Drinky Die at 8:31 PM on May 14, 2015

You ever hear some great news, but it's a secret, or you're in the middle of a meeting or a class or something, and you want to jump up and say yay but you're not allowed to?

So I understand that celebrating bannings is frowned on, and there has even been a call for people to be given a timeout for celebrating a ban. But after hearing the names of who was banned, I'm thinking, "Man, I've never been given a timeout on MeFi, but I'm so happy and bursting to share it that maybe it's worth being given a week off or something".
posted by Bugbread at 8:32 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

My exposure to SA is actually fairly limited to a handful of goons and ex-goons or whatever you call them I know personally and the emoticons that they use that got implemented on ShitRedditSays back when I was a regular poster there, so that just read like a bunch of English-sounding words in an order that makes no sense to me, Sebmojo. (I may also have misread your original comment because I do not know what "FWOABT" means and read it as "FWIW".)
posted by NoraReed at 8:32 PM on May 14, 2015

I'd think most Mefites would consider current GBS an irradiated hellscape of badthink

it's GBS, why limit ourselves to current
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:33 PM on May 14, 2015

'For want of a better term', sorry.
posted by Sebmojo at 8:34 PM on May 14, 2015

FWOABT = For Want of a Better Term
posted by Navelgazer at 8:34 PM on May 14, 2015

it's GBS, why are we limiting ourselves to current

I had a very nice little fiefdom of proper grammar and no -isms going there for a while.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 8:41 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

For want of a butt transplant.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 8:42 PM on May 14, 2015 [21 favorites]

:gas:
posted by Sebmojo at 8:44 PM on May 14, 2015

(POSTS GIF OF FROG SAYING GET OUT, KICKFLIPS OUT OF META)
posted by Sebmojo at 8:45 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

see that is the part i am familiar with because it stuck around on SRS. but instead of "USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST" they deleted the comment and left a reply which was an image of the word "banned", usually made out of dildos, and there were a zillion variations of these and particularly trolled-in threads would just be a river of different dildo banned images

i do not expect that to work here.
posted by NoraReed at 8:53 PM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

Here is the "Leper's Colony" if you want to get a sense of what moderation is like on the actual forums.
posted by Drinky Die at 8:57 PM on May 14, 2015

Wow, that thread reads like a Orrie Hitt novel.
posted by clavdivs at 9:02 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

TW for slurs in Drinky Die's link
posted by NoraReed at 9:02 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, and that's the moderators.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:05 PM on May 14, 2015

hi i just wanted to make sure that all fans of party dog are also aware of party cat

ok bie
posted by poffin boffin at 9:07 PM on May 14, 2015 [29 favorites]

i do not expect that to work here.

No, mods can still post images. Oh, you mean PURPLE DILDZ would not fit in with the color scheme.
posted by tigrrrlily at 9:13 PM on May 14, 2015

My dog is party cat.

Three times last night:
"get up get up get up!"
"i neeeeeeeeed to be outside!"
"because rabbits!"
"done now! bed!"
"get up get up get up!"
etc.
posted by Squeak Attack at 9:17 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yeah, and that's the moderators.

Those are mostly Idiot Kings and you know it.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 9:21 PM on May 14, 2015

Party Cat full, because "Is it breakfast time?" "No, it's X time" is still a thing my SO and I riff on regularly
posted by kagredon at 9:22 PM on May 14, 2015 [8 favorites]

TW for slurs in Drinky Die's link

In general if certain words make you sad you would be well advised to stay away from the somethingawful.com humour forums.
posted by Sebmojo at 9:25 PM on May 14, 2015

Kingdom Hospitals:Operation open air.
posted by clavdivs at 9:30 PM on May 14, 2015

I pretty much already do that, with the exception of today, when I clicked on a link in a MetaTalk thread.

Anyway, yeah, the purple dildz would only work on FanFare, and I don't think people really get banned there.
posted by NoraReed at 9:31 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Wow, ThatFuzzyBastard really is gone. Just, um. Wow. I honestly thought that was not possible.
posted by tigrrrlily at 9:35 PM on May 14, 2015

I am sometimes of two minds about the effect of deleting comments. Sometimes it isn't just the behavior that is visible in someone's user history that is problematic, and while I appreciate that deletions make a thread go a lot more smoothly, I feel like it can sometimes have the unintended effect of (and maybe this isn't a good way to phrase this) giving users who repeatedly cross the line a better and more "reasonable" public reputation than they have really earned. I get that deletions are visible on the mod side and I'm not really arguing for things to be done totally differently, it's just something I've noticed and wanted to mention.
posted by en forme de poire at 9:48 PM on May 14, 2015 [10 favorites]

Sending the message that when and if someone is banned, their feelings about the situation are assumed to not matter

I mean, i agree with the rest, but these things both seem totally not an issue to me. The second one i actually agree with.

If you were being a shit enough to get banned, your opinion does NOT matter. It is possible to be completely wrong about some things, especially the kind of stuff being discussed here.

Being a misogynistic ass and defending slut shaming BS is something it's possible to have an opinion that is just wrong on. You're either saying "i'm ok with not only supporting others in the process of but actively hurting people" or you aren't.

This isn't "what's the best mario bros game" or something.

"this shit is not welcome here" is not picking a side. I mean, it is, but it's in the same category as "we don't allow people who support beating children who misbehave".

Displaying that the site management is against these sorts of things would go a long way for a lot of people, and shying away from that is more than a bit disappointing.
posted by emptythought at 10:11 PM on May 14, 2015 [11 favorites]

The point being, repulsive opinions, as distinct from areas in which reasonable people can disagree, are unwelcome here.

Golly Gee. I read repulsive stuff here all the time.
Where do I start writing the list of stuff that gets banned?
posted by HiroProtagonist at 10:26 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Okay...that was a depressing little bit of number crunching I just did. Dividing total number of favorites by total number of total comments, to determine average favorites-per-comment, it appears that the comments of That Fuzzy Bastard were liked almost four times as much as mine, and even Decani's comments were liked twice as much as mine.
...urg.
posted by Bugbread at 10:33 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

I don't see banning as helping when the people just come back for another years-long round under a new name.
posted by winna at 10:35 PM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

life is super awesome when you turn off favourites forever and never look back
posted by poffin boffin at 10:35 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

but then how will you know if senpai notices you
posted by NoraReed at 10:37 PM on May 14, 2015 [11 favorites]

they'll make another fucking meta
posted by poffin boffin at 10:38 PM on May 14, 2015 [10 favorites]

even Decani's comments were liked twice as much as mine

He had a sexy accent and that whole badboy thing going on.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:41 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

I don't see banning as helping when the people just come back for another years-long round under a new name.

My tolerance for bad behavior from returnees has gone down a lot over the years, for whatever that's worth. I still believe that Brand New Day has value and is worth pursuing when it makes sense—I have seen it work out well a bunch of times—but I don't consider it a given that someone gets a free pass six months or a year later if they ended up banned for an ongoing pattern of really problematic behavior. There're people we say "talk to us in a year if you get x sorted out" to when they ask, and then keep a close watch on if and when it ever comes up; but there's also people who just aren't welcome back.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:42 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

s-senpai it's n-not like i want you to make a m-meta or anything...
posted by NoraReed at 10:44 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

it appears that the comments of That Fuzzy Bastard were liked almost four times as much as mine

Someone you dislike is gone. There's little need to compare and contrast an insignificant status symbol with them, you "won".
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:44 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

People seek out and like stuff that is "edgy" to confirm their asshole-y worldviews a lot of the time; I wouldn't worry about small potatoes stuff like famous misogynists this small pond getting lots of favorites when there are awful rape joke comedians out there getting paid way more for their shit than plenty of deserving non-assholes, if worrying about it is something you are able to avoid. (I say this in a "well it's indicative of larger world problems and not about you personally" way, not a "I am trying to dismiss your feelings about this dude" way.)
posted by NoraReed at 10:49 PM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

Okay...that was a depressing little bit of number crunching I just did. Dividing total number of favorites by total number of total comments, to determine average favorites-per-comment, it appears that the comments of That Fuzzy Bastard were liked almost four times as much as mine, and even Decani's comments were liked twice as much as mine.
...urg.

Decani had strong opinions about some topics (religion, music and more) that meshed well with the user base. Ranting about religion in particular is popular here.

Going against the grain can be as well.
posted by zarq at 10:52 PM on May 14, 2015

Ah, yeah, I'd kinda forgot about the religion and music stuff. Thanks.
posted by Bugbread at 11:13 PM on May 14, 2015

Hey, zarq, I see what you're doing there behind the scenes. ^_^
That's very nice of you, but really, you don't need to. I was only bummed out for a minute or two, I'm all good now.
(Sorry about responding here, but your MeMail is disabled)
posted by Bugbread at 11:23 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

To be fair, didn't we get favorites two years after you joined? Those should be excluded from your average (though I think Decani was definitely here then too).
posted by klangklangston at 11:40 PM on May 14, 2015

I thought that some people were at best tone-deaf with their understanding of the meaning of "tramp stamp." They were treated poorly as a result. I don't understand why people are so nasty on MF, but there we are.

cortex did amazing work in the thread.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:04 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not a native speaker and I, too, was unclear about the meaning of "tramp". And you know what I did?
I shut up and listened to the conversation and I inferred from it the common usage of the word. That's what you do when you are detatched enough to understand that a thread that is nothing to do with you does not benefit from your input. When you are empathetic enough to see that it is an emotionally taxing and heated conversation and your desire to offer a counterpoint out of idle curiosity would increase people's burden. And when you are humble enough to realise that your desire to have others cater to your quest for information does not trump the other two points because the internet dies not revolve around educating you.

Actually, that's what Metafilter taught me. To STFU.
posted by Omnomnom at 1:31 AM on May 15, 2015 [79 favorites]

Sending the message that when and if someone is banned, their feelings about the situation are assumed to not matter


I mean, i agree with the rest, but these things both seem totally not an issue to me. The second one i actually agree with.

These are real people we're talking about here, people with complex thoughts and feelings not just all-bad straw men doing only horrible things. I'm not defending bad behaviour at all here. But I'm personally totally OK with the mods treating everyone with a reasonable level of humanity even when it's not reciprocated. Be the change you want to see and all that.
posted by shelleycat at 1:45 AM on May 15, 2015 [13 favorites]

I can only think of one character who came back after a ban and had to be shown the door again. I think it works for the most part.

Having slept on this, I'm less inclined to think a demonstrative approach to probations and bans is the only way to go, but I also don't think doing so would mean we'd go full Purple Dildo Font a la SA. I think the small-font comments inthread work just fine. But even if that doesn't happen, if the important thing is that people on the edge of leaving due to the bad behavior of others are reassured, I think a lot of the response to feedback in this very thread provides that.

Also, don't agonize over the favorites count of more awful users. They likely bought theirs on the black market, and they're cheap knock-offs that look a lot like the real thing. Only a trained eye can tell the difference between authentic and counterfeit favorites.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:05 AM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Can ANYBODY send me/post a link?

Really, it's not that hard to do yourself. Just go to their post history, find the last time they commented in MeTa, and look at the comments from mods that follow.
posted by zombieflanders at 4:17 AM on May 15, 2015

Hey, zarq, I see what you're doing there behind the scenes. ^_^

*whistles innocently*

That's just my 'cool stuff to read' list for this weekend :)
posted by zarq at 4:50 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I thought that some people were at best tone-deaf with their understanding of the meaning of "tramp stamp."

I am a native speaker and for a moment I thought someone was going around with an ink pad looking for vagrants.
posted by biffa at 5:32 AM on May 15, 2015

I can only think of one character who came back after a ban and had to be shown the door again.

It happens. There are usually a few different incarnations

1. banned and comes back as exactly the same, banned again and stays banned
2. banned and comes back once their life has gotten better, often things are fine, sometimes things get worse when their life gets worse, gets re-banned with a "come back when your life is better" message of some kind
3. banned and comes back and is Over It and becomes a great productive member of the community
4. never banned, skates the edge of bannable forever

And these are folks who got banned, not just folks who were given the night off. Most people are types 1 and 3 with a few people staying in category 2 who are people who are on-again-off-again issues (my own personal opinions is that there are some people in difficult relationships or with substance abuse issues or with some mental health issues that are difficult to manage). Mods often see the "back end" of what's going on with people in the second category and users often don't. Everyone sees the people in the fourth category and I think they sow a lot of ill will because they'll get numerous timeouts but those never seem to add up to a full banning.

It's challenging and I have, in my retired position here, no easy suggestions except that when those four longtime troublemakers got banned-for-good after a very long reign of general shitty behavior (including some that was very clearly targeted at the mods in uncomfortable ways) I think there was a lot less "We miss their unique voice here" feeling than maybe anticipated. I do specifically miss some of the contributions by those guys, but often it came at the cost of nearly constant ankle-biting and asocial behavior that, for whatever reason, they couldn't or wouldn't change. I think the Band New Day is predicated somewhat on users being willing to make a substantive effort to figure out how to get along here. Which is challenging because we act like it's a thing that anyone can learn but that's not entirely true, in my experience. And mods are (rightfully so, I think) softies and want to give everyone a chance to be their best self.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 5:41 AM on May 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

Actually, that's what Metafilter taught me. To STFU.

MetaFilter: STFU
That would not make a good knuckle tattoo.
posted by MikeMc at 6:06 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Who are these four horsemen everyone is talking about? Decani, TFB, and who else?
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:08 AM on May 15, 2015

Never mind, I figured it out. Wow.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:13 AM on May 15, 2015

I think there was a lot less "We miss their unique voice here" feeling than maybe anticipated.

It's at least a part-time job to keep up with who is banned, who's disabled their account, who's just stopped posting. Even if I did notice X is gone, it would be pretty rare that I'd so much as think about messaging the mods about it. E.g. I just noticed hoopo is gone. No idea why, would not normally raise the point precisely because I don't know whether it's a mod decision, a personal decision, or how private that decision was. From the mods' point of view, if they did ban him then they see a lack of push-back, but that doesn't represent apathy.
posted by topynate at 6:21 AM on May 15, 2015

I will never understand people who just can't stop antagonizing people on a website. Of course we all sometimes feel the need to be sharp, or to express a contrary opinion, but there always comes a time to let it go and mentally regroup, and that time is always "three posts ago".

As a more general phenomenon, I totally grok why somebody might feel like this or that community is not always on their side, but at the end of the day, they're just web fora, and you can always find more. Not even in the sense of replacing one site with another. Just in the sense of never letting any one website feel like your world.

That's not even getting into the whole "if you're angrying so mad, try getting off the computer" thing.

Also, that tramp stamp thread got super stupid super fast.

The book listicle thing is a somewhat different case. I think it shows off the common dynamic in which relatively uncontroversial opinions are generally overwhelmed by the loud, controversial ones. It turned into a weird argument about how the post was either actually rather genius and you'd be dim to think otherwise, or actually rather terrible, and you'd be dim to think otherwise. Those not in that exact argument are going to check out.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:22 AM on May 15, 2015

I think with long time users (I guess I'm one now, weird) we have to get to a point where we understand that

A: Metafilter is not essential to you
B: You are not essential to Metafilter

and if we don't, then sooner or later we're going to fall into one of Jessamyn's four categories above.
posted by selfnoise at 6:32 AM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

MetaFilter: STFU
That would not make a good knuckle tattoo.

S T F U     D O R K
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:08 AM on May 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

I am very late to this thread (traveling), and I spotted the LBT thread, thought "this needs pushback," but they were closing the plane door, and, when I looked at it again, it was like 300 comments long, and I was too tired to get into it. I find it kind of depressing that, not three months after this MeTa, we are once again talking about how badly MetaFilter treats women. It's infuriating. And depressing. If aggressive moderation is what is required to keep contrarian jerks from driving off valuable members, well, that's better than the alternative.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:31 AM on May 15, 2015 [22 favorites]

On the substantive topic of the thread, I guess I do buy the idea that if there's a small, vocal group of people (such that there's wide overlap on "lists") that are making Metafilter a hostile place, then the moderators should ban them. That's a different situation than there being 30% of the userbase who occasionally have a bad day or put their foot in it or are just insensitive on some things. If there are twenty users who make the site a worse place to be for 50% of the population, then get rid of them.

Like most white male academics, I'm always tempted to argue edge cases, but I won't. Just assemble your lists, share them with the mods, and let them collate and prioritize and get it done. Maybe the mods could give them a "you're on the list and if we see even one more move like that you're outta here" email, or not. I guess maybe refund their membership fees: I'll chip in for that.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:10 AM on May 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

I think part of the problem is it's never that simple. For example I can think of hand of a couple username but everytime I see them in a thread arguing with someone they are unrepentant dickbags. But they're also very long term well loved and remembered users. Often people who have been users for seven or eight years and honestly who in many cases as long as they're not arguing with someone they think is wrong on the internet are great people. They have specialized knowledge about a variety of things. They regularly attend meetups and are vested in the community. It'd be easy to say oh man I wish those guys were banned, but the real answer I just want those guys to stop being a dick bags to other users.
posted by corb at 8:39 AM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

the real answer I just want those guys to stop being a dick bags to other users.

The real answer for me is: longterm-member-of-the-community should not be a protective shield for unrepentant-dickbag.

At some point there has to be a line drawn: you can either continue to be a dickbag or you can continue be a member of this community. But not both.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:58 AM on May 15, 2015 [16 favorites]

If they just annoy you, then they would't make it onto the mod's master misogynist list. If they alienate everybody then they would.

The mods could also say "Actually, we don't think this user is that bad, they're not popular but the animus against them is unwarranted." Please don't be offended, but I think you yourself might fall into that category. It's still the mod's call.

Basically it sounds like there are still some problem users around who are really making this site hostile to women, such that we're choosing between these few assholes and almost all the women who are potential members here except those few who are willing to gird for battle every time. Not just dickbags, but something... worse? Reading this thread, I get the sense that a lot of women don't feel like they can participate here as equals so long as these few people are around. So let's get rid of them.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:58 AM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

MetaTalk: Please don't be offended, but I think you yourself might fall into that category.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 9:04 AM on May 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

For example I can think of hand of a couple username but everytime I see them in a thread arguing with someone they are unrepentant dickbags. But they're also very long term well loved and remembered users. Often people who have been users for seven or eight years and honestly who in many cases as long as they're not arguing with someone they think is wrong on the internet are great people.

Speak privately with the mods, who (assuming they agree with your assessment) may opt to have a word with them. If you ask, they may also give offer advice to you on how to navigate the interaction.
posted by zarq at 9:05 AM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I may have missed it (sorry, long thread!) but what is the mod policy on just telling problem users, "hey, we don't want to see you in threads about sexism until you learn how to engage productively?" And then holding them accountable, of course... I don't mind flagging it every time, especially if that's what's going on behind the scenes. I get the feeling that that already goes on. TFB was no favorite of mine in threads about feminism, but if I saw a comment from him in a thread about music I wasn't like "GARR I CAN'T BELIEVE HE'S HERE!!" I really don't care about banhammering people, I just don't want them ruining every convo about women.

There are certain users that seem to absolutely need to go into feminism threads just to say "yeesh, what's the big deal? It's just [sexist thing], everyone is free, man" and if they could just... not do that thing, over and over and over... I would have no problem with them as posters. Is that a situation where flagging and sending a mod note saying "this user ALWAYS DOES this dismissive, derailing thing, can you keep that in mind when moderating his comments going forward?' is more likely to create some kind of mod action?

Sorry if I'm being a bit dense / not understanding the whole flow of the thread here.
posted by easter queen at 9:20 AM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

Didn't we go over list making in the previous MeTa? Unless we are willing to write really specific rules regarding language and engagement, it's the only way to test the waters of who feels welcome and who doesn't. Give everyone the option to submit a ban list, no questions asked, no qualifications needed. 20 names. Tote up the numbers and ban (I'll let people with more stats related backgrounds set the bar, but if 10% of users who have posted in the past year participate, then take the top 10%, something like that). I would argue being transparent about the results (not who voted for whom, but the voting results) would also help give a rough outline of the temperature in the community. Some people may feel validated, some may feel excluded, and everyone can act in a way that make sense for them with that information in hand.
posted by 99_ at 9:30 AM on May 15, 2015

I may have missed it (sorry, long thread!) but what is the mod policy on just telling problem users, "hey, we don't want to see you in threads about sexism until you learn how to engage productively?" And then holding them accountable, of course... I don't mind flagging it every time, especially if that's what's going on behind the scenes.

That's where we end up with some users, yeah, as a pre-ban attempt to say, y'know, whether or not you personally think there's a problem with your behavior, the problem is there and it needs to get better. Which for folks who seem like they want to be here and are okay 90% of the time but then have this recurring 10% that becomes incrementally a bigger and bigger issue, can be a workable compromise if they can actually abide by it. Sometimes they do and things improve; sometimes they don't and that ends up being it for them.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:31 AM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Give everyone the option to submit a ban list, no questions asked, no qualifications needed. 20 names. Tote up the numbers and ban

That is not a thing that is ever going to happen. Everyone already has the option to drop us a line and say "hey, I think this user's behavior is a serious issue", and often what happens when this sort of conversation comes around is people go ahead and do that and it's honestly pretty helpful, but that being an individual, explicitly private bit of communications about personal concerns with the mod rather than an open call for ban votes or any such similar idea is a huge and meaningful distinction.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:35 AM on May 15, 2015 [22 favorites]

Reading this thread, I get the sense that a lot of women don't feel like they can participate here as equals so long as these few people are around. So let's get rid of them.

As much as I truly want to support this and am invested in making MeFi a better, less horrible place for women, I am concerned that it could conceivably cast too wide a net or turn into a popularity contest.

Asking users to make a list of people they want purged from the site is a minefield waiting to happen. There are mefites who have nursed grudges for years.

Be careful what you ask for, folks.
posted by zarq at 9:38 AM on May 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

To be clear, I don't mean that mods need to solicit lists of users to be banned. But there's a lot of good organization among women at Metafilter and it seems like the mods would probably notice if they received fifty or sixty lists of people with a few users showing up again and again. Just because the mods aren't soliciting the lists as some sort of Hugo nomination process thing with vote tallies and voting system arguments doesn't mean that women shouldn't send them: just the opposite.

Since it's a private message and the mods are free to discount it if they think the users making lists are acting from bad grudge-holding and not something more serious and pernicious, it seems like a perfect thing for women to discuss among themselves and either do or not do as they see fit.

Since there's not going to be a big change of policy this time, this seems like a concrete act worth considering to just remind the mods that this is a thing. Sort of like JulyBy doesn't require any moderator go ahead to achieve more participation, either.
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:41 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Asking users to make a list of people they want purged from the site is a minefield waiting to happen.

Asking users to make a list of people they want purged from the site and then doing it would probably destroy MetaFilter.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 9:41 AM on May 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

Or I could just preview next time. Thanks, cortex.
posted by zarq at 9:41 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

99_: "Give everyone the option to submit a ban list, no questions asked, no qualifications needed. 20 names. Tote up the numbers and ban"

This is pretty dumb as far as ideas go! I mean, if it were implemented, you'd be #1 on my list just on principle.
posted by boo_radley at 9:41 AM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Give everyone the option to submit a ban list, no questions asked, no qualifications needed. 20 names. Tote up the numbers and ban (I'll let people with more stats related backgrounds set the bar, but if 10% of users who have posted in the past year participate, then take the top 10%, something like that).

wow. This is an amazingly well presented plan for enabling passive aggressive mob behavior. In fact, it instantly inspires a sort of horror story along the lines of The Lottery. Every year, a small town culls its numbers by removing (via secret ballot) its most contentious, provocative members. Of course, in my version the town would eventually devolve into cannibalism etc. Others may foresee a more positive result ...
posted by philip-random at 10:00 AM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

In the end it'd just be The Whelk and poffin boffin standing on a boundless plain of skulls
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:06 AM on May 15, 2015 [41 favorites]

Vote #1 quidnunc kid
posted by PMdixon at 10:08 AM on May 15, 2015 [23 favorites]

Some the less successful "solutions" remind me of the episode of Angel in which a demon tries to disrupt a group under the guise of a New Age-y style group therapist.
posted by Sticherbeast at 10:08 AM on May 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

Of course, in my version the town would eventually devolve into cannibalism etc. Others may foresee a more positive result ...

It worked OK for Athens...
posted by topynate at 10:10 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

just don't ban mullacc. he does good comments.
posted by mullacc at 10:10 AM on May 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

I really don't care about banhammering people, I just don't want them ruining every convo about women.

Yeah, obviously the lists are silly, so silly that I sometimes wonder if they're suggested as a reductio ad absurdum on what we're trying to accomplish here. I don't think that full-bannings are necessarily the only way out either. Even keeping some of the very usual suspects already named here out of sexism threads would be sufficient.

What it seems like would help most are notes in threads to rerail conversations and set norms. Not just "drop the Urban Dictionary thing", but more like "Your misunderstanding of this term is not the topic of this thread" or, in my dreams, "you can learn more about that confusing term by reading the FPP". I wanted to emphasize what Empress said earlier because she put it perfectly:

Speaking only for myself, this is a data point you can do with what you like - frankly, I feel much more supported as a user when I see that someone who's being a shit is getting brought up on their consequences. Mod notes to just "cool it" sometimes come across like when another kid in the lunchroom steals your sandwich out of your hands and you try to get it back, but the lunchroom monitor only says "no horseplay, you too, use your words and work it out on your own", and you feel now they've left you to fend for yourself; whereas "that's it, you get a day off"comes across more like a much clearer "oh, wait, he stole your sandwich? Bobby, give that sandwich back now!"

I certainly don't want to put anyone in the position of lunchroom monitor, but I completely agree that when the mod notes are just "stop making a fuss," things don't de-escalate the way they might if the note was more specific about what behavior is the problem. Those notes are especially useful for e.g. women reading a horrible thread trying to get a sense of whether this place is really that hostile toward women, or if something's just gone terribly wrong. I've been feeling more the former than the latter, and I do think the decrease in pointed mod notes like e.g. Jessamyn used to leave is some part of that.

I guess all I'm saying is, seeing a single "Everyone please give the 'but some women really are sluts' thing a rest" note from a mod would have been about as welcome a sight in that thread as seeing an oasis in the desert. There were notes, but they were mostly about specific users, not about the overall tenor of the thread.

I also think that keeping these already-named users out of sexism threads, as has been done for plenty of users before on different topics, would likely free up a bunch of time and energy for mods to deal with these threads. From the outside, it ends up looking like most of the mod efforts ended up going into keeping jayder from talking about what sexual positions cheap women like and their "respect-me-nots" and what have you, and if those sorts of big forest fires weren't burning out of control all the time in these threads, we might have more energy to put towards helping women feel welcome here instead.
posted by dialetheia at 10:11 AM on May 15, 2015 [32 favorites]

I don't support list making - I bring it up because it seems specious to posit that 'MeFi would be so much better if X users weren't here" as if there is complete consensus and the mods are just being dicks by letting line play out or are somehow giving cover to people who shouldn't get it. Sorry, it was a little troll-y, but it's a little frustrating to see the conversation start drifting into a presumption that it's super simple to classify and excise assholes.
posted by 99_ at 10:11 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Since this is MeTa, I also just feel like highlighting this thread as a case study, because it seems to me like there is a mass of female users (directly affected by sexism) and a mass of male allies (indirectly affected but sympathetic) and/or male users who are gently objecting/redirecting (i.e., "Metafilter isn't the only website out there"). If you just break it down by female / male:

Female users seem to be suggesting stronger moderation in general, but not many calls for banhammer or new policies being enacted; just stronger moderation of sexist white noise. jessamyn is here saying there is a problem, but there is no silver bullet; in general the call is for a closer eye on the rippling effects of letting women-related threads end in brawling. The question is, what is the balance of making people feel welcome vs. unwelcome? We acknowledge that there will always be sexism on the site, but question the idea that rehashing the same fights over and over isn't a clear case of derailment and threadshitting, which are not OK by the current standards. There is acknowledgment that banning doesn't necessarily solve everything, nor is it always the best option. There is acknowlegment that the best personal solution might be to take a long break from the site, but also the underlying knowledge that there are few places you can really go to "avoid sexism" anyway. There is an exhaustion with defending basic principles and a wish to move on from Feminism 101 to 201 by giving space to feminist discussions to develop, instead of seeing the "good fight" as an end in itself. (I don't mean to speak for anyone, this is just the paraphrase/vibe I'm getting.) The idea that we are "tending our garden" was questioned by a user who says, when will women get to reap?

Male users on the other hand seem to be calling for something directly to be done, and/or for female users to move on and distribute themselves more equally over the web in order to relieve stress. There are more calls for "lists," for bannings, and the idea that Metafilter is never going to be perfect so the MeTa is a bit irrelevant. There is an equation of "this thread about taxation is really pissing me off, I'm going to take a breather" and "this thread about sexism is really making me feel unwelcome on the site and I am not sure whether to try to make Metafilter a better place or just take off for awhile." To me these aren't equivalent situations, though I acknowledge that the advice comes from a helpful place. There are also a lot of call of appreciation for "fighting the good fight" and the idea that the site is better for these long battles over dignity/respect/personhood. Right at this moment, we have male users arguing with another male user over whether "lists" are a good idea.

I'm not highlighting this as a case of gender essentialism; I think the divide is a product of who is directly and indirectly affected, and how being directly affected by sexism hones your sensitivity to the situation and realism about how it can be resolved. I think this is important to note, because there is always a lot of concern trolling about how if the feminists got their way it would be a sterile place of no discussion, or that we would just ban everybody we don't like, and I think for the most part women here are floating practical and nuanced ideas and requests, whether they can be incorporated by mods or not. (And in fact, most of the requests seem to be saying mods are doing a good job, but could they do more of what they're doing, and maybe shift their perspective slightly toward sexism = site problem and derail.)

As someone who doesn't always check profiles or know who is male and who is female, it was surprising for me to go through this thread and realize how the divide between those to whom sexism is very real and those to whom it is theoretical really affects the tone of the suggestions.

Anyway, apologies if this is insulting to anyone male or female, or way off base, it's just something I've noticed in the past in these discussions and this time I actually spent time writing about it. It's not a clear cut case; there are feminist commenters who want more direct action, and male allies with a very subtle view of the situation. And of course, women must negotiate their desire for direct action with the consequences of coming off as too aggressive or "feminazi." Neither side is wrong, obviously, and there is truth in all approaches. Just different emphases that emerge.
posted by easter queen at 10:12 AM on May 15, 2015 [17 favorites]

I suspect the mods don't need doomsday lists in any case. I would wager that they, as a group and as individual moderators, all have a handful of names that they have often needed to say things such as, say, "I would like this not to be something that keeps happening, and not have to deal with the pretense that it's some new idea each time it comes up" regarding repeated bad behavior.

The difficulty is a philosophical difference, where they as a matter of policy, are very very reticent to become less forgiving of that repeated bad behavior. Ultimately it's probably an agree-to-disagree area of site policy. I happen to think it directly and predictably leads to things like yonder tattoo thread turning into alienating shitshows, but I'm just some guy, and in fairness, the field of skulls idea with lone survivors has a certain aesthetic appeal.
posted by Drastic at 10:13 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

(Explanation re Athens comment)
posted by topynate at 10:14 AM on May 15, 2015

what could be a more positive result than cannibalism

Free range cannibalism
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 10:19 AM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

Sorry, it was a little troll-y, but it's a little frustrating to see the conversation start drifting into a presumption that it's super simple to classify and excise assholes.

I'm glad you admitted it was troll-y, because that is a canonical example of concern trolling. I hope we can 100% drop the list idea now.
posted by dialetheia at 10:22 AM on May 15, 2015 [15 favorites]

I guess all I'm saying is, seeing a single "Everyone please give the 'but some women really are sluts' thing a rest" note from a mod would have been about as welcome a sight in that thread as seeing an oasis in the desert. There were notes, but they were mostly about specific users, not about the overall tenor of the thread.

I totally hear you. With a time machine I'd go back and tackle the explicit messaging in that thread a little more aggressively than I did, though of course it's a lot easier to make that call post-game than in the middle of a crazy busy day. I have a personal tendency toward keeping notes a little more non-specific while trying to delete followup not-getting-the-hint comments from the folks who otherwise might have been named, as a compromise between aggressively putting people on the spot immediately and giving them a chance to just recognize the issue and cut it out, but that's something I'm still trying to find the balance on.

I also think that keeping these already-named users out of sexism threads, as has been done for plenty of users before on different topics, would likely free up a bunch of time and energy for mods to deal with these threads.

I think that is a part of it, yeah, though it's a tricker and more energy-sucking piece of work in practice than it sounds like on paper because working with people in a decent way on hard stuff is complicated stuff, emotionally and diplomatically. This discussion's been a useful reminder about getting on with that anyway in a couple cases, though, and I appreciate that.

From the outside, it ends up looking like most of the mod efforts ended up going into keeping jayder from talking about what sexual positions cheap women like and their "respect-me-nots" and what have you, and if those sorts of big forest fires weren't burning out of control all the time in these threads, we might have more energy to put towards helping women feel welcome here instead.

I can understand that perception. In practice, it was actually the whole collective pile of stuff going on in the thread, and the speed at which it was going on plus a couple other busy and needs-active-mod-attention things elsewhere, that was eating up most of my time, more than any one user's behavior. And the worst stuff in that thread, that kicked off a lot of flags and replies-to-replies-to-deleted-things needing cleanup, is the stuff that's not visible anymore, so how the thread looked and played from my end is for sure somewhat different than how it might look to any given user. Not a totally bridgeable gap, that, and so it goes; I know folks can't read our minds and I don't expect them to.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:23 AM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm glad you admitted it was troll-y, because that is a canonical example of concern trolling. I hope we can 100% drop the list idea now.

So we agree list making is a bad idea?
posted by 99_ at 10:25 AM on May 15, 2015

I think this is important to note, because there is always a lot of concern trolling about how if the feminists got their way it would be a sterile place of no discussion, or that we would just ban everybody we don't like, and I think for the most part women here are floating practical and nuanced ideas and requests, whether they can be incorporated by mods or not.

I agreed with nearly all of your comment, and you had me nodding my head until 'concern trolling.'

I think making ban wish lists is a terrible idea. Please don't characterize disagreement with what should be done as concern trolling. At least some of it is not trolling, but actual concern.
posted by zarq at 10:26 AM on May 15, 2015

So we agree list making is a bad idea?

Trolling is a bad idea. And that's what you're doing here.
posted by zarq at 10:27 AM on May 15, 2015 [21 favorites]

I think making ban wish lists is a terrible idea. Please don't characterize disagreement with what should be done as concern trolling. At least some of it is not trolling, but actual concern.

My point is what dialethia said above: the call for ban lists is being floated mostly by men, from what I can tell, and being argued about by men, and it's really just a reductio ad absurdum (as she put it) of the idea that judicious banning of people who can't get it together has been a relief.

What I'm calling concern trolling is the idea that any time a MeTa like this one is posted, we get a lot of "but if we delete sexist comments, we'll destroy the community" type comments that are really not warranted based on the tenor of the actual requests from women.

I could be wrong, I am not running stats on who says what, it's just an impression I get (and a familiar one from being in feminist and ally spaces).
posted by easter queen at 10:29 AM on May 15, 2015 [18 favorites]

What I'm calling concern trolling is the idea that any time a MeTa like this one is posted, we get a lot of "but if we delete sexist comments, we'll destroy the community" type comments that are really not warranted based on the tenor of the actual requests from women.

Ah. Yes. OK. I understand and agree, of course.
posted by zarq at 10:33 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Overall, I think it's really good that we have plenty of tools at our disposal, e.g. visible warnings, thread exits, warnings to avoid X topic, and leaving mod notes to the collective whole to cool it (addressing a practice rather than a specific user), and I really hope the greater visibility of moderation in action will help reassure people that you can click into a thread about anything woman-related and it won't be a howling shit-slinging fest of obnoxious brorcs.

What I'm calling concern trolling is the idea that any time a MeTa like this one is posted, we get a lot of "but if we delete sexist comments, we'll destroy the community" type comments that are really not warranted based on the tenor of the actual requests from women.

In fairness, a lot of our Free Speech For Bigots Warriors are among those who have since been shown the door. I haven't seen anyone float "b-b-but muh freeze peach" on this subject with any great dedication, by cape and sword, in quite a while now.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 10:34 AM on May 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

easter queen, I did a quick ctrl-F and found the comments that inspired me (by showbiz_liz and Mrs. Pterodactyl, both women) and then smoke, and then a lot of other stuff that was basically about topic bans and whether bans should be publicly advertised. I also mean "list" in the less formal sense of "people who I remember and avoid" from poffin boffin (a woman) and not something official in csv file.

It appears that 99_ took my serious comments (which ultimately was just echoing and trying to encourage what cortex and Lobstermitten have both said about private messaging when problematic users surface) and turned it into a concern troll. I'd rather not be lumped in with him, please.

That said, it's true that I am a man, and I'll happily bow out of the thread if it feels to you like I'm not being helpful.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:34 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

"b-b-but muh freeze peach"

It took me about 20 seconds to parse what you meant by this; until then I thought you were talking about a very unique peach sorbet recipe. and now I'm hungry.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:36 AM on May 15, 2015 [16 favorites]

anotherpanacaea, I totally understand and don't want you to leave the thread or anything; men are as welcome as anyone else to make well-meaning suggestions. For some reason though, then a lot of men popped up to argue with another man about an extreme solution to a nuanced problem and it just seemed like it was going to be a derail.

I don't think you're being unhelpful (or a concern troll, you sounded genuine and I appreciate the participation), it's just a dynamic of note.

I feel like my post might start a derail and I actually really don't want to do that, so I apologize.

Thanks for being gracious about it.
posted by easter queen at 10:37 AM on May 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

I haven't seen anyone float "b-b-but muh freeze peach"

Dudes, Metafilter is totally SRS-Lite

{/}
posted by tigrrrlily at 10:47 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thanks easter queen. I should say that one other thing that inspired me is the awareness that our mods are very much overworked and so we/you/somebody probably needs to take an active role here. If the site had more money and mod time available it might be possible to deal with these threads better in real time, but to some extent user-side solutions (including and especially solutions organized by women for women) are going to be necessary just because from comments by the mods themselves in this thread we know that the mods are at or close to their limit as it is. I think they'd love to do more, but we hear time and again that they're juggling a lot and babysitting contentious threads is already very difficult, even though it's obviously very important to them.

So that's one thing I hear from the mods that seems to stymie that more nuanced and sophisticated kind of work that you see as being the female side of this divide. I'm not rejecting it, at all; it's what I've always loved about Metafilter. But I wonder if part of getting used to life without as many mods is getting used to doing some of this stuff ourselves/yourselves.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:49 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

But I wonder if part of getting used to life without as many mods is getting used to doing some of this stuff ourselves/yourselves

Part of the problem, though, is that these users apparently relish forcing other users to stop having grownup conversations, and to instead make everyone start focusing on them. Other users saying "that is completely inappropriate for this discussion, stop behaving this way" not only does not work, it actually encourages them to keep sea lioning in many cases.

The ability of mods to actually turn off the mic of those people is something that users cannot do.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:54 AM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Isn't the point of this MeTa about getting something done?

The last MeTa and this one have all covered the following points:

1. Why can't we have more mods?
2. Why can't mods be more like jessamyn (though this one far less)?
3. Why can't we get the known bad actors permabanned more quickly?

The first two are easily answered. The third always sorts sleds back and forth around 'mods aren't aggressive enough' or 'we really know who those people are dammit and I wish I had the banhammer' and I just sort of throw up my hands and wonder why more people don't call for Survivor-style action.

I have never liked the idea that a person becomes the proxy community norms, so I favor a framework. But I think the same resource constraints that make point 1 a non-starter affect any sort of systemic action.

I don't think it's concern trolling to mention list making because almost every systemic solution involves it. Keep toxic assholes out of 'feminist' threads? How is that adjudicated? The author or mod tags a thread (or elects to monitor it) and then either systemically (via some programming that restricts users ability to post) or actively policies it, but either requires a list that is based on election (self selected, community, or mod-based). And I think it's disingenuous and unhealthy to act like there aren't lists (in our heads or in a DB) and I don't think we will ever stop having threads like the LBT one until something happens to address points 1 or 3. And I think more transparency about lists is the only way to effect any sort of evolution.
posted by 99_ at 10:55 AM on May 15, 2015

for myself, when I realize that a user is being a consistent ass, I consistently flag their useless derailing indistinguishable-from-trolling comments.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:58 AM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

So... are you for lists or against them? You're being pretty confusing here.

I think that as long as the modding system stays living and dynamic, these kinds of MeTas are important to push the envelope and empower users to do more flagging/mod form reporting of repeat bad/injurious behavior. If we establish in a MeTa that there is a problem, it also gives context to an uptick in flagging.
posted by easter queen at 10:58 AM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

easterqueen:
these kinds of MeTas are important to push the envelope and empower users to do more flagging/mod form reporting of repeat bad/injurious behavior

I would be curious to hear from mods about this a week from now with some comparison to the previous MeTa. My sense from the comments here is that we didn't actually move the needle (and reading through the LBT thread, it certainly didn't seem that way). If people think we're making incremental progress, great. But I thought this MeTa existed because we had not.


anotherpanacea, you specifically asked people to make lists.
posted by 99_ at 11:08 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

What I'm calling concern trolling is the idea that any time a MeTa like this one is posted, we get a lot of "but if we delete sexist comments, we'll destroy the community" type comments that are really not warranted based on the tenor of the actual requests from women.

Not wanting to start a fight, but this really jarred me, because I haven't seen this conversation taking place anywhere in this thread. It's like a meta-concern troll, to be honest (and speaking as someone you accused of concern trolling above). Has anybody in this thread suggested that deleting sexist comments is a bad idea? All I've seen are people arguing about how much more can we do, and what specifically that should be, and who should do it. I've been in threads where people argued not to delete shitty stuff, and those were horrible, horrible threads. This hasn't been that kind of thread at all, and I'm at a loss to figure out what your purpose is in trying to paint it that way, now?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:11 AM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

My point was that when it happens here generally, it's not warranted. For instance, this thread has not been policed to ward off radical feminists, and yet the women in the thread are suggesting practical, helpful, civil measures.

And I did think you were concern trolling a bit above, but it's not the end of the world.
posted by easter queen at 11:15 AM on May 15, 2015

I've been traveling the past few days so I haven't been able to keep up here as much as I'd have liked to, but I just wanted to chime in as an unapologetically feminist MeFite who has come to the conclusion that this place is not one in which I can reasonably expect to have any conversations about the reality of life as a woman without knowing that they are likely to be consistently and continuously derailed.

So for real, I give up. I'm beyond sick of the expectation that women need to do shitloads of thankless 101-level work just to be able to converse with our fellow nerds about things that are meaningful to or life-altering for us, and way beyond sick of watching my fellow feminists get burned out by having to answer the same tedious, pseudo-sincere "but if you won't educate me, how can I learn????" douchebags, certainly #notall but easily 90% of them men, every time women try to start operating from a simple first principle of acknowledging that women are human beings. I have those conversations elsewhere now (including IRL with other MeFites, like we'll be doing in DC tonight! you should come!) because it's become increasingly clear to me over the years that they simply can't happen here. Them's the breaks, you can't always get what you want, que sera, &c.

But many thanks to dialetheia for starting this MeTa regardless, I love the hope it holds. I wish our work was worth something, I wish we had a chance of changing something.
posted by divined by radio at 11:16 AM on May 15, 2015 [48 favorites]

Keep toxic assholes out of 'feminist' threads? How is that adjudicated?

The say way that "please stop being disruptive in religion threads" or "in Apple threads" is handled: mods identify a pattern of problem behavior, by their own observations and by flags and contact form comments; mods ask the user to knock it off; user either does knock it off -- great! -- or continues to be disruptive in those threads and gets a timeout or, if it continues, a ban.

At least that's how I understand it to have worked -- as cortex has repeatedly said, mod process is mostly social rather than technological, with the tools (flags, contact forms, timeouts, bans) informing human decisions.

The frustration here I think is mostly that that process isn't being activated enough: mods don't know enough about who who the habitual problems are in feminism threads? Mods aren't invested enough in addressing those problems?

(One thing jessamyn noted in her comment above: a number of the long-time-coming bans were triggered by not only public shittiness, but also ongoing bad behavior towards the mods. That bothered me a bit at the time, and still bothers me a bit now. No, shittiness towards mods should not be tolerated; but here it almost appeared to be the triggering behavior for the "OK, enough of this shit" bans. Ongoing and unchanging shittiness towards other users -- especially towards any specific subset of other users -- should also be visibly sufficient for "enough of this shit" action.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:20 AM on May 15, 2015 [18 favorites]

mods don't know enough about who who the habitual problems are in feminism threads?

Although that said, there's been very clear mod statements in this thread of "please let us know if you see this going on" so: let them know.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:23 AM on May 15, 2015

Okay - easter queen. I agree with your first point entirely, I just don't think it applies to this thread or conversation.

On the second point, we will just have to disagree. I see from the favorites on it that you apparently aren't the only one to have that opinion, so it's also entirely possible that it was my communication fail, so to whatever extent the result of my comments didn't match up to the intent, I apologize sincerely to anyone offended. I was being genuine, but that's not always enough. Moving on now.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:23 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think there is another issue in these threads that needs to be identified as a derail and addressed as such, and it is on full display in the Canadian reporter thread:

That when the subject of the thread is sexism, the discussion in the thread will be about everything but sexism. In this case, a thread that is about the fact that a new trend has arisen that seems to be primarily targeting women reporters that involves screaming a misogynistic phrase into a live mic during a remote broadcast. This is a thing that really happens and apparently happens all the time.

A vast majority of the thread is about the fact that a participant got fired. And the discussion is mostly about what might happen -- maybe in some dystopian future we will get fired because we did something that should be perfectly fine during our off hours. And somehow the topic moves from a real thing that happens to women to an invented thing that might happen to men and women, but I get the sense that the real fear is that it will happen to men.

And so the constant, soul-crushing everyday misogyny that the FPP points out becomes washed away in favor of male fantasies of oppression thanks to responses to misogyny. And whatever the merits of this discussion in that particular thread -- and I personally think there is no merit to them whatsoever -- it happens in every single thread. Every one. There's always a long, often thread-consuming derail about if we respond to misogyny in this way, won't it hurt men in this way in the future.

We need to be able to identify these derails, flag them, and have them actually nuked from orbit as derails. Because when a thread about women becomes a thread about men discussing the things that interest men and affect men, it's a problem. It's a chronic problem. A honestly think the way the tattoo thread is just a symptom of this problem, because that thread turned from "Women are being humiliated for their tramp stamp" to "here's what I, as a man, think about women's bodies."
posted by maxsparber at 11:28 AM on May 15, 2015 [81 favorites]

One thing jessamyn noted in her comment above: a number of the long-time-coming bans were triggered by not only public shittiness, but also ongoing bad behavior towards the mods.

There's some complicated internal context for the being-shitty-toward-mods angle there that is sort of the other way around, though—we'd for way, way too many years taken an approach to shittiness toward mods that was kind of a tough-it-out mantra: yeah, they're being super shitty to us, but what do you do, people get angry on the internet and of course we're the ones who have to just suck it up and be the adult and let it pass. We would decline to take action on someone's shitty behavior on the contact form or private email that, if it were directed at a user instead of a mod, we'd consider bannable behavior.

At some point I think we basically started to come to our senses on that, mostly as a result of expanding the mod team over time to our large collection of staff and realizing that as much as Matt and Jess and I had sort of convinced ourselves we could just wade through the bullshit and let it pass over us, it wasn't actually something we felt comfortable telling everyone else on the team to just deal with.

So the "you've been shitty to users and you've been shitty to us" thing started becoming something we were more willing to draw a line on the last few years, vs. where it used to mostly be more of a "be shitty to us, fine, but don't do that to a fellow user" in some of those older bullshit cases.

And that's certainly only part of the mix of issues with eventually banning long-time problem users, but I want to be clear that it's a lot more complicated than "bother other users, fine, bother us and now it's a problem" or anything approaching that. That a public mid-conversation last straw situation involving someone inter alia being a dick to a mod will probably contain a reference to their dickishness to the mods kind of makes sense as basic happenstance, but it's not the sole or standard form of a someone-getting-banned situation.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:31 AM on May 15, 2015 [12 favorites]

And I should clarify that I think the phrase "tramp stamp" is odious. Had I not been writing with white knuckles and froth pouring from my lips, I would have used "lower back tattoo."
posted by maxsparber at 11:31 AM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

We need to be able to identify these derails, flag them, and have them actually nuked from orbit as derails.

The fact that the guy got fired, having been mentioned in the original post, is not at all a derail, and it's dishonest to characterize it that way.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 11:34 AM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

The fact that the guy got fired, having been mentioned in the original post, is not at all a derail, and it's dishonest to characterize it that way.

Please reconsider whether or not something being mentioned in the FPP means it's the point of the FPP, or the most important thing to discuss.
posted by maxsparber at 11:36 AM on May 15, 2015 [10 favorites]

No, but "what if one day Canadian labor protections become as degraded as the US" absolutely is. This isn't parli debate, you don't get to double win by launching a derail and then successfully attacking the whole idea of "meaning".
posted by PMdixon at 11:37 AM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

"please let us know if you see this going on" so: let them know

OK, I have a *huge* problem doing this. Why? Because in most walks of life, if you're a woman, this is the way to get ignored, belittled, or labeled oversensitive or a troublemaker. *Especially* if you're trying to point out behavior that's by itself not horrible or egregious.

Normally, the way to let the mods know about stuff is through flagging. If I flag something chances are I feel pretty strongly about it, and then if nothing happens I can't help but wonder if some of the same things I talked about above are happening behind the scenes, as I've had happen to me in real life.

Sometimes it really is just easier to go someplace else.
posted by tigrrrlily at 11:37 AM on May 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

Although that said, there's been very clear mod statements in this thread of "please let us know if you see this going on" so: let them know.

Yeah, and I can't emphasize this enough. I feel like there's a frustrating if mechanically understandable thing that can happen where, as sort of an aggregate, group behavior thing that's not anyone's fault, folks will end up in this cycle of: find some behavior problematic, assume we know about it or the extent of it, see us not do something about it, decide we don't care, and then not bother telling us about it because it's assumed we know and don't care.

In practice, we do a decent job of keeping an eye out but as a small team of humans working in shifts on a large community site that none of us can read all of, our awareness can be porous; we can miss individual things, we can see some individual things but not see the scope of a whole pattern of behavior, we can get an aggregate of signals that's more diluted or spaced out than folks expect.

So that decision to short circuit the "if anything were going to be done, it'd have been done, so what's the point" feeling and just let us know anyway is really valuable. It's helps us see what we're missing, it helps us do better to not fall short on something or let something fester longer than it needs to. It really is very much part of what makes this place work.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:38 AM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

In some cases, though, the problem is in the framing. For example, that Canadian reporter thread includes the bit about the guy getting fired from his job in the FPP itself - it's very obviously one of the points being referenced even separately. So I think to ask people not to talk about one of the links in an FPP is a little bit of a nonstarter.
posted by corb at 11:38 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Please reconsider whether or not something being mentioned in the FPP means it's the point of the FPP, or the most important thing to discuss.

It's really not appropriate for commenters to decry something as a derail because it doesn't fit in with the subset of the FPP that they, personally, wish to discuss. That's not pointing out a derail; that's backseat modding.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 11:41 AM on May 15, 2015 [12 favorites]

You may be right, Corb, but, then, I suspect we could go through every single thread about women that has been hijacked by discussions of interest to men and say, well, it was a problem with the thread, well, it was a problem with the framing, well, of course we were going to talk about that.

Let me ask that we not fixate on individual threads, where it is easy to rule lawyer that this sort of thing necessarily was going to happen, and instead focus on the fact that this is apprently true of every thread about women.
posted by maxsparber at 11:41 AM on May 15, 2015 [13 favorites]

I over-debate every flag. There are many that I let go by because I don't want to be seen as a troublemaker. You know, "maybe I'm being too sensitive." I guess that's part and parcel of the larger issue.

I promise to screw up my courage and be click-ier when I see what I perceive as crappy behavior, and if you feel the same as I do ... let's be click-ier together.
posted by kimberussell at 11:42 AM on May 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

hat's not pointing out a derail; that's backseat modding.

Well, that's literally why I am asking for mods help here.
posted by maxsparber at 11:42 AM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

The say way that "please stop being disruptive in religion threads" or "in Apple threads" is handled: mods identify a pattern of problem behavior, by their own observations and by flags and contact form comments; mods ask the user to knock it off; user either does knock it off -- great! -- or continues to be disruptive in those threads and gets a timeout or, if it continues, a ban.

If we were treating the tattoo thread the way we tread Apple threads, dios coming in and dropping a "this isn't sexism" in a post about sexism would have been swiftly deleted. For some reason, it wasn't, and we get to have the sexism version of Mac vs. PC fight again. I am still having trouble understanding why "PCs are better than Macs!" is a derail in an Apple thread, but "This isn't sexism!" is allowed in a sexism thread. It's especially weird that the mods think specific outspoken users pushing back against it is the solution. Would we expect one or two really passionate Apple fans to take on the work of correcting derails in the threads they cared about?

I also want to note that the intense pushback didn't shut dios down at all. He escalated further in comments that had to be deleted anyways.
posted by almostmanda at 11:42 AM on May 15, 2015 [56 favorites]

Well, that's literally why I am asking for mods help here.

I'm not sure how you expect them to help, other than by excising the parts of FPPs you deem to be problematic.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 11:44 AM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

OK, I have a *huge* problem doing this. Why? Because in most walks of life, if you're a woman, this is the way to get ignored, belittled, or labeled oversensitive or a troublemaker. *Especially* if you're trying to point out behavior that's by itself not horrible or egregious.

Normally, the way to let the mods know about stuff is through flagging. If I flag something chances are I feel pretty strongly about it, and then if nothing happens I can't help but wonder if some of the same things I talked about above are happening behind the scenes, as I've had happen to me in real life.

I'd like to be able to dismiss this out of hand, but I can see the problem it's capturing. I mean, I'm a dude, but I ended up pretty much giving up on flagging when I was being targetted by another of our now-departeds (hilariously, as far as I could understand, over whether I loved the model of laptop I own enough), since I didn't really get a sense that it was going to go anywhere, and it felt, over time, like this was just the background radiation of MetaFilter, and all one would achieve would be to feed their persecution complex and feelings of justification. Fortunately, because I am a dude, experiencing that level of woo was rare enough to be picaresque and novel, rather than a tedious reenactment of meatspace power structures, though.
posted by running order squabble fest at 11:46 AM on May 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure how you expect them to help, other than by excising the parts of FPPs you deem to be problematic.

That is what I want. I have made the case that they are problematic, and I want them exised, because unless the mods step in, every thread about women will be derailed by men, who will then argue it wasn't a derail at all, but necessarily the subject of the thread.

I actually think I was pretty clear about that.
posted by maxsparber at 11:46 AM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I over-debate every flag. There are many that I let go by because I don't want to be seen as a troublemaker. You know, "maybe I'm being too sensitive."

I used to have this hesitation as well, but I've reframed flagging for myself as less "this needs to be deleted" and more "I would like a mod to take a look at this comment and determine what to do." Thinking about it like this makes it much easier for me to err on the side of flagging borderline content, which I think is ultimately helpful for the site.
posted by insectosaurus at 11:50 AM on May 15, 2015 [27 favorites]

Yeah. When it comes to flagging, let go and let mod.
posted by easter queen at 11:51 AM on May 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

Let me ask that we not fixate on individual threads, where it is easy to rule lawyer that this sort of thing necessarily was going to happen, and instead focus on the fact that this is apprently true of every thread about women.

So here's the thing - I think these things can actually be useful, because they're really illuminating. So for example - that thread had a link in the FPP about one aspect of the whole situation. Totally normal to talk about a link in the FPP. BUT at the same time, when I read the article, I became enraged that shouting that at female reporters was apparently a thing - and at the point I became enraged, I think I probably would have had little patience with discussing the other stuff.

And that's going to be a problem, because the person who first notices something interesting and brings it in is not necessary going to be the person most sensitive to the rage. So what do you do? What do you, sitewide, do?
posted by corb at 11:54 AM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I responded to you a few times in that thread, one more dead town's last parade, and I thought I did a fairly decent job of pointing out why going down that road is probably a bad idea. It's the same thing maxsparber is telling you now, and I don't really understand why this is the hill you're willing to die on - this weird "we should be allowed to discuss this no matter what". Treating discussions about issues women face as an intellectual game, as an "everything is up for debate" kind of thing is a bad pattern. It's a pattern that's also the subject of this meta, so maybe you can listen to the people who have concerns about threads going down this path.
posted by erratic meatsack at 11:55 AM on May 15, 2015 [23 favorites]

So what do you do? What do you, sitewide, do?

Flag things that seem like derails in threads and ask that mods be more sensitive to the way that threads about women's issues get derailed and ask that they step in to rerail, I suppose.
posted by maxsparber at 11:56 AM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I over-debate every flag. There are many that I let go by because I don't want to be seen as a troublemaker. You know, "maybe I'm being too sensitive."

I think this is a really important point. I have the same feeling a lot of the time, like if I overuse the flag button, it won't be taken seriously next time I use it because I'll be seen as having a grudge or whatever. I think it's completely understandable that people might feel this way, especially women, since so many of us have the experience of speaking up once or twice and then forever being tagged as "the one who's oversensitive" or "the one who's always going on and on about sexism", so that can be a hard thing to get over in this context. When I say it out loud like that it sounds silly, because I can't actually imagine cortex or anyone else thinking that about our flags, but it's so deeply ingrained in me that it really requires a conscious effort to overcome sometimes.
posted by dialetheia at 11:57 AM on May 15, 2015 [19 favorites]

Flag things that seem like derails in threads

So I guess maybe a better question would be - what, precisely, is a derail? My current understanding is: something that's not mentioned in the FPP and no one else is talking about except you. So in that sense, I wouldn't flag things like that as derails. What do you see it as though?
posted by corb at 11:59 AM on May 15, 2015

It's really not appropriate for commenters to decry something as a derail because it doesn't fit in with the subset of the FPP that they, personally, wish to discuss. That's not pointing out a derail; that's backseat modding.

Honestly, I feel like the points you keep on bringing up there were addressed multiple times in the thread, some before you even started commenting in it, and in at least one link in the FPP. Apparently it wasn't addressed to your satisfaction, but that doesn't mean anyone is trying to excise that discussion entirely.
posted by zombieflanders at 12:01 PM on May 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm sorry, Corb, I'm not going to sit down and come up with a specific set of rules for what and is what not a derail. Once again, we move away from addressing a general trend with general tools to hypothetical individual cases, and I don't trust that every single individual case won't be argued as not being something that counts.
posted by maxsparber at 12:02 PM on May 15, 2015 [22 favorites]

So I guess maybe a better question would be - what, precisely, is a derail? My current understanding is: something that's not mentioned in the FPP and no one else is talking about except you.

The problem is that it very quickly becomes something people are talking about, either in agreement or as pushback. When we're specifically discussing violence or oppression aimed at women, for instance, bringing up the context-free general incidence of violence against men is a derail. When we're talking about a gendered slur about women's appearance, bringing up an evidence-free assertion that a gender-neutral and non-pejorative term for appearance means men have it just as bad is a derail. And so forth.
posted by zombieflanders at 12:07 PM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm sorry if I was unclear - I don't actually mean, talking about specific cases moving forward. I mean more generally. We have this idea that something has to be a 'derail' to be bad, but I think these things may be less 'derails' and more 'something else that has not yet been defined but might be useful to be defined'. Ie, I don't think the tools we currently have are adapted to deal well with the situation you seem to be describing, but there could be tools, I think.
posted by corb at 12:08 PM on May 15, 2015

I've also been hesitant to flag things because of a fear of being labeled an oversensitive trouble maker. But, this MeTa is definitely helping adjust my internal flagging threshold. I particularly like the idea of flagging as a derail rather than as sexism, there's just less involved mentally (for me) in justifying use of the derail flag than there is with the sexism flag.
posted by melissasaurus at 12:09 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

oh huh, well erase my last concern then if it seems to be working better for some people to click derail.
posted by corb at 12:12 PM on May 15, 2015

I don't really understand why this is the hill you're willing to die on

That's awfully dismissive of you, given that you were making pronouncements about what was a derail in that thread as though you were a moderator.

I'm not going to sit down and come up with a specific set of rules for what and is what not a derail.

It might help if you did, given that we're now seeing people say "derail" when they mean "part of the FPP I don't think should be discussed," despite that not being a commonly accepted definition of that word.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 12:18 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Well, I'm not going to. I will flag what I see as a derail and if you don't agree, go ahead and don't flag it.
posted by maxsparber at 12:20 PM on May 15, 2015 [11 favorites]

"Read the room, nerds" is a hard thing to codify
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:21 PM on May 15, 2015 [17 favorites]

A derail is whatever the bulk of the conversation thinks it is, where "bulk," "conversation," and "think" are all contextual.
posted by PMdixon at 12:21 PM on May 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

That's awfully dismissive of you, given that you making pronouncements about what was a derail in that thread as though you were a moderator.

Yeah, I clearly should just shut up and know my place. When I think discussing something is trivializing a real problem we have, I will say it. Anyone is free to raise the same concern - including you. Unfortunately you keep throwing out these lines as though every part of a topic is sacred, instead of responding to the actual point I'm trying to make.
posted by erratic meatsack at 12:26 PM on May 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

For people who are afraid "too much" flagging will make them look like troublemakers or like they're crying wolf, I'm pretty sure that it's not immediately obvious to mods looking at the flag queue who is doing the flagging? It takes an extra click or two to see that - am I remembering this correctly from some previous explanation of how the flag queue looks to mods?
posted by rtha at 12:28 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

It was a really fun ride and I stuck with it for a long time, but I'm done with the Blue.

I am very aware of the fact that I don't have the kind of posting history or depth to make this a big deal to anyone, possibly even myself. I just won't feel right without saying it, I guess.

Metafilter, whatever it is and whatever it's becoming, is honestly not a place that I feel welcome to be, and it's been that way for awhile. Conspire's comments in the recent Metatalk threads about the proposed #Juneby______ event read like I'd hired a site advocate to speak on my behalf regarding a significant amount of the tonal shift that I have been trying to ignore for a long time, and now realize that I can't, or won't, ignore anymore.

Metafilter used to be intelligent, irreverent, thought-provoking, and fun. Whatever it is now, it's none of those things, to me.

And, it isn't because of the posts.

It's because every god damn thread I open has one right answer, and I know what it is 90% of the time before I even look at the comments. And that is some bullshit. I'm not interested in spending time in an echo chamber, whether it's my voice or someone else's that is filling the space.

Metafilter is becoming what some of you want it to be (I know some of you don't think that's true, or you're worried sometimes that it will slip back to what it was or sideways into something else, but to my mind you have nothing to worry about), and that's awesome. I really, *really* enjoyed it while I was here. I hope you can get just as much out of it as I did, though my hope for you is that you will enjoy it in degree rather than kind since, and I mean this in all sincerity and without bitterness, you certainly don't enjoy the Metafilter I do. Sadness, sure, but not bitterness.

I'd delete my account, but I've discovered that I really dig AskMetafilter and I don't feel like I have to give that one up quite yet. While I still have to make sure that I stay within the bandwidth when commenting sometimes, it's nearly night and day from FPPs.

I'll miss a lot by not reading Metafilter anymore-- I've gotten to see some really great, informative posts and comments that have influenced my reading, thinking, conversations, and behaviors. But if any of that is still on the Blue anymore, it's just not worth wading through what we've made it into now. Thanks mathowie. This was my favorite website on the internet for a long time. I know I'm not the only one who feels that way either, and that's a hell of an accomplishment.
posted by Poppa Bear at 12:35 PM on May 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

Who are you?
posted by winna at 12:36 PM on May 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

Where the hell did that come from?
posted by erratic meatsack at 12:37 PM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

I for one will miss his brave spirit.
posted by maxsparber at 12:37 PM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

"One of these guys got fired" - not a derail
"Will all men will now be fired if they do things like this?" - totally a derail
posted by soelo at 12:37 PM on May 15, 2015 [27 favorites]

He's the guy who used the word "authoress" in the first comment of the tattoo thread. If that tells you anything.
posted by almostmanda at 12:39 PM on May 15, 2015 [43 favorites]

I think the mods should give fewer chances and ban more when it's the same people over and over.

I have backed off in participation in these sorts of threads, partly because of life and partly because it's exhausting. And women here have been saying for years that it's exhausting and demeaning to argue with people over basic stuff. You lose us. We haven't been assholes or done anything wrong, and the site loses us (and, I guess, Poppa Bear, sorry), but keeps the people who are telling women that some women with tramp stamps really are sluts.

Give a warning and then, the next time, ban them, imho.
posted by onlyconnect at 12:39 PM on May 15, 2015 [17 favorites]

Conspire's comments in the recent Metatalk threads about the proposed #Juneby______ event read like I'd hired a site advocate to speak on my behalf regarding a significant amount of the tonal shift that I have been trying to ignore for a long time, and now realize that I can't, or won't, ignore anymore.

Judging by your comment in the tattoo thread and Conspire's thoughts in the last gender MeTa, I kind of doubt they would be taking your side in this case, but whatevs.
posted by zombieflanders at 12:41 PM on May 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I clearly should just shut up and know my place.

Those of us who are not moderators should indeed remember that we aren't in charge. Thanks a lot for the wholly unfounded implication in the quoted sentence, though.

I guess you've convinced me that I shouldn't flag what you (and, to be fair, many others) were doing in that thread as a derail, but as entirely predictable sexism.

It wasn't a derail, and it wasn't sexism, which is probably why it wasn't deleted.

"One of these guys got fired" - not a derail
"Will all men will now be fired if they do things like this?" - totally a derail

"Where's the line between 'a firing offense' and 'not a firing offense' when it comes to behavior outside the workplace?"—not a derail
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 12:42 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Those of us who are not moderators should indeed remember that we aren't in charge.

What exactly do you think you're telling me with this? I'm so dumbfounded right now, somebody help me out. Did I go around responding to people with "Shutupshutupshutup"?
posted by erratic meatsack at 12:45 PM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

one more dead town's last parade: One of the hardest lessons I've ever had to learn - and one I still struggle with (see evidence in this very thread), is that being technically correct isn't always the same thing as being right. I have an overwhelming urge to argue specific details of complex issues, to discuss the minutia of emergent patterns that I see impacting at larger scales, and for me that means that I am constantly fighting the urge to discuss elements of threads that - while perfectly relevant - are still ultimately derails. I comment far less than I used to here, and I think that's been fine. Other voices have filled the space. And ultimately, when it's actually important to have the side discussions, an opportunity inevitably comes along where that comment I was just dying to make can find a more appropriate home. Even if that means letting someone else beat me to that comment.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:45 PM on May 15, 2015 [20 favorites]

"Read the room, nerds" is a hard thing to codify

This is a big truth, and everything else aside it's one of the reasons dealing with this stuff as a community can be hard. It's hard to teach people to read the room, and it's hard to teach people recognize that they are or aren't doing so. You get the itch to talk, and it can be hard to step back and really honestly assess whether the thing you're talking about and the way you're talking about it is actually improving the conversation for everyone in the room or just giving you some personal I Am Talking satisfaction.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:50 PM on May 15, 2015 [13 favorites]

It's Raining Florence Henderson: I comment far less than I used to here, and I think that's been fine.

Your absence is felt and your comments are missed. Please don't underestimate the positive influence you make here.
posted by zarq at 12:50 PM on May 15, 2015 [20 favorites]

I won't discuss one more dead town's last parade participation in that thread. It was an example I selected to illustrate a larger point, one about sexism, and now we're not discussing the larger point, because instead we need to rule-lawyers the question of whether or not that was the perfect example.

It's never the perfect example. It will always be rule-lawyered. It will always turn into a discussion about how it affects a dude. My example was supposed to lead to a discussion of derails leading to women's voices and experiences being marginalized or shut out. It has, instead, turned into a discussion of how it affects a dude.
posted by maxsparber at 12:52 PM on May 15, 2015 [46 favorites]

"It's because every god damn thread I open has one right answer, and I know what it is 90% of the time before I even look at the comments. And that is some bullshit. I'm not interested in spending time in an echo chamber, whether it's my voice or someone else's that is filling the space."

I dunno, man, I still find plenty to argue about. Plenty of people here feel like they've got the one right answer (I do it too), but in general I see less tolerance for swaths of wrong answers, which is different. Like, for ex, the tat thread: The answer "this isn't sexism" is wrong. That doesn't mean there's no buyer's regret or no "I don't like that this makes other people still think I'm young and dumb" but that there's also a significant amount of sexism, and telling people ('specially women) that there's not is just like tellin' 'em there's no shit in this shit cake, so eat up.

Or to play with a less loaded gun, the Mac vs. PC threads, there isn't one right answer for what's better, but "You only like Macs because you're a fan[gender-pronoun]" is wrong enough that we all benefit from not having another round of "LISTEN TO MY CHALLENGING OPINIONS." Fewer wrong answer doesn't mean there's one right one, just that we've been around long enough that there's no patience for another round of oblivious challops.

I mean, fuck, some of our members who are most concerned with inclusion and justice are wrangling over the JuneBy and haven't (as of last night, the last time I read it) come up with one right answer, just a lot of calls to discard wrong answers for [reasons].

I do feel you somewhat on the "less fun," but I gotta cop that some of that's me — it's less fun for me to argue with people on the internet, especially compared with seeing cool content. And when I just wanna argue with peer-moderated assholes, I can find Reddit pretty easily.

Top this all off with the fact that we're two dudes — which means a significant diminishment of skin in the game — and yeah, other people having their concerns taken seriously can be less fun because it's more serious. But my having fun at the expense of someone else having to pick the shitflakes outta their sandwich is something that I'm willing to give up in order to have a better, broader community. Also, when I just wanna spam SHITCOCK, I know where the chans are.
posted by klangklangston at 12:54 PM on May 15, 2015 [32 favorites]

As a comment on a FPP about a trend of people being fired for behavior outside the workplace, you bet. Is that what you think that FPP was about?

Given that the fourth of the five links in the thread was a discussion about exactly that, it's not exactly the fringe view some are presenting it as.

You're totally free to decide what's in your own FPPs. You're not free to decide what's in others'.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 12:56 PM on May 15, 2015

omdtlp (if, I may call you that): I agree with you that the subject wasn't technically, intrinsically a derail. It was a tangent subject that caused a derail of the main conversation.

So it's still valid to flag it for the reason of derail.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:02 PM on May 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

For people who are afraid "too much" flagging will make them look like troublemakers or like they're crying wolf, I'm pretty sure that it's not immediately obvious to mods looking at the flag queue who is doing the flagging? It takes an extra click or two to see that - am I remembering this correctly from some previous explanation of how the flag queue looks to mods?

Yep, that's the case. We'll do the extra click now and then if it's not really clear why something would have been flagged—and the most common answers there turn out to be either "the user is flagging their own comment as a sign of commenter's regret" or "the user was aiming for fantastic and slipped"—but for the most part we don't have a reason to go looking unless something exceptionally weird is going on.

Just not necessarily thinking a flag justifies outright deletion falls way, way short of that something-weird threshold, so definitely don't worry about it. On the off chance that we see something that looks like an actually wonky pattern of flagging behavior, we'll just send a friendly note to check in about it, and we do that sort of thing maybe twice a year max and usually for very specific repeated flagging-thirty-things-at-once sprees across multiple threads.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:05 PM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

He's the guy who used the word "authoress" in the first comment of the tattoo thread. If that tells you anything.

An "I'm leaving" MeTa post from a man who used "authoress" in the beginning of a thread about sexism helps me feel like I understand the phrase "'Bye Felicia" for the first time.

I'm not trying to be flip, although I know it seems that way, it's just that I read a mournful goodbye from someone who began a thread about sexism with a diminishing term for women and I was like "Ooooooooooh...I get it now".
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 1:05 PM on May 15, 2015 [56 favorites]

I always thought that "authoress" was unbearably twee but I did not know it was offensive until now.
posted by josher71 at 1:19 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

My editrix says "authoress" is OK
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:20 PM on May 15, 2015 [19 favorites]

I always thought that "authoress" was unbearably twee but I did not know it was offensive until now.

And now you do!

The implication is that women don't count as regular authors so you have to add a suffix to make it clear that they (we) shouldn't be taken seriously. Now in the future you'll know and, hopefully, extrapolate this knowledge to other areas of your life.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 1:25 PM on May 15, 2015 [33 favorites]

Yeah it's not always intended as offensive, but it's definitely a word that can be taken that way and often reads as either out-of-touch, old timey or "I am specifically trying to get your goat" This from me, the woman who has had executrix be one of her titles for the past few years and that shit chafes.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 1:29 PM on May 15, 2015 [25 favorites]

I always thought that "authoress" was unbearably twee but I did not know it was offensive until now

I mean I can't speak for everyone but I know my Lady Doctor and Female Pilot hate it
posted by billiebee at 1:30 PM on May 15, 2015 [49 favorites]

The National Council of Teachers of English has a good, detailed rundown on avoiding sexist language: "Guidelines for Gender-Fair Use of Language."
posted by audi alteram partem at 1:31 PM on May 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

Yeah, the negative-or-not perception of gendered variants of job/role titles is probably somewhat porous—some folks are probably fine with it, in some contexts it's more an expression of personal choice and/or the intractability of insider language than an active attempt to reinforce a gender divide, etc.;—but as a general trend certainly movement has been more toward collapsing titles down to a generic single label than toward bifurcating them.

The fact that in practice "gendered variant" has usually meant "variant for ladies, because obviously that's the exception case and not the normal man-is-default thing" is a big part of why it's likely to bug people even if in context its intended as a totally neutral sort of specificity.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:34 PM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm kind of a fan of thinking of myself as a Gentleman Editor and Man Professor, though. Not to mention a Dude Director. (Those are my hats. None are fedoras.)
posted by anotherpanacea at 1:39 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm a Man Cook, but not for the obvious reasons.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:41 PM on May 15, 2015 [13 favorites]

The fact that in practice "gendered variant" has usually meant "variant for ladies, because obviously that's the exception case and not the normal man-is-default thing" is a big part of why it's likely to bug people even if in context its intended as a totally neutral sort of specificity.

Not to mention the pernicious inverse of "Male Nurse" or even "Male Stewardess" which I've heard before and is really silly.
posted by selfnoise at 1:46 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm a Man Cook, but not for the obvious reasons.

Is it for Hannibal Lecter reasons?
posted by Grangousier at 1:48 PM on May 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

I'm a Man Cook, but not for the obvious reasons.

#CrockpotAllMen
posted by zombieflanders at 1:48 PM on May 15, 2015 [30 favorites]

#sousvidetousleshommes
posted by anotherpanacea at 1:51 PM on May 15, 2015 [28 favorites]

Mispandry is real.
posted by zombieflanders at 1:51 PM on May 15, 2015 [16 favorites]

If we're going to start litigating specific examples of crappy derails like this, I thought the "you people are the reason people vote Republican!" derail in the otherwise rather lighthearted White Dudes Book List thread was basically a textbook derail. I was pretty surprised it wasn't deleted and was even basically mod-sanctioned.
posted by dialetheia at 1:53 PM on May 15, 2015 [12 favorites]

We all serve humankind in our own way.
posted by Drinky Die at 1:53 PM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

I want to kind of call a mulligan on that entire White Dudes Book List as a kind of shared hallucination happening-or-is-it-really-happening in parallel to the much more actively difficult and attention-sucking Tattoo and JuneBy threads. When I got up that morning I thought the Books thread would be my main thing I was keeping track of instead of the insane-but-mostly-goofy green room I'd head back to occasionally.

That's not to say I felt like I was in any way sanctioning the Why I Vote Republican thing, other than not literally delete it.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:56 PM on May 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

I just want to know how I get moonsaults for hire.
posted by winna at 1:56 PM on May 15, 2015

That side of it came from the link to that blogger dude, it became a bit of a B-plot to the whole thing.
posted by Drinky Die at 1:57 PM on May 15, 2015

I haven't read through the entirety of this (or the other) thread yet, but both of them appear to have been completely derailed by corb's trolling.

I've generally sided with the mods' discretion and judgment in the past, but I genuinely cannot see how corb's behavior fits within the realm of what MetaFilter has traditionally considered to be allowable.

I have no problem with corb being allowed to voice her opinion (even though I happen to disagree with it), but she's doing it in a way that's repetitive, relentless, and upsetting to a lot of people.
posted by schmod at 1:57 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Sorry, not you cortex, I specifically meant r_n's note here immediately following that derail (sorry, I ought to have linked to it):

[It's totally legit to talk about the purpose and success/failure of articles like this. If, however, we could stay away from one-liner sarcasm it'd probably go better. Thanks. ]
posted by dialetheia at 1:58 PM on May 15, 2015

I know you (and a couple other folks, for what it's worth) had meta-ish comments deleted in the vicinity of that, so I don't know if that's informing the feeling that r_n was endorsing or sanctioning MattMangels' odd line of argument there, but I don't read her comment as doing that at all so much as just trying to deflate that at-that-point-sort-of-escalating back and forth in general.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:04 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm a Man Cook, but not for the obvious reasons.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:41 PM

I KNEW IT.
posted by almostmanda at 2:04 PM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

That one link is the one which ended up getting discussed. This is a thing that happens a lot. People are saying it's a problem.

I feel like this is one of those examples of people discussing the differences they have in detail because everyone nodding their heads in agreement isn't particularly interesting.

Is it a problem that I'm not also including the fact that I think these guys are jerks, MLSE is totally justified in banning them from its venues, and targeting women who are reporting on live TV to shout an obscene phrase at them for shits and giggles is a problematic thing that people really need not to be doing? I feel like basically everyone else here agrees with that. The only place we seem to differ is on the nature and scope of their punishment (which was largely the topic of that segment on The Current).

A lot of the reaction there (and here) based on what people decided I believe was really uncalled for.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 2:07 PM on May 15, 2015

Is it a problem that I'm not also including the fact that I think these guys are jerks, MLSE is totally justified in banning them from its venues, and targeting women who are reporting on live TV to shout an obscene phrase at them for shits and giggles is a problematic thing that people really need not to be doing?

I think it can, at the very least, come off as kind of tone-deaf to specifically elide that when it's a big part of the situation and is what a bunch of the post seems to be focused on.

Like, I get excited or engaged about thin tangents on existing discussions in posts sometimes; I feel that completely. But I think part of being in a discussion is having a sense of where other people are, what the context is, and having the social sense to acknowledge when you're basically saying "okay, all that is actually really terrible but I'm super interested in this specific detail off to the side".

And maybe you don't always think to convey that up front because you're in a hurry to get to the bit that has your brain tingling, but if you skip that bit and then people are like "yeah, but..." the best move there is probably to back up a bit and explicitly acknowledge where they're coming from, not to sort of bull on forward or argue about whether that that's what most folks are focused on should have any discursive restraint on your own topical inclination, etc.

Again, reading the room, basically. It's a hard thing and it's a shared-space thing. And even if you feel like you're ultimately justified in wanting to talk about x when other people are talking about y, there's a lot of value in being willing to slow down a little and acknowledge and concede y for the sake of the overall conversation.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:19 PM on May 15, 2015 [10 favorites]

I'm a Man Cook, but not for the obvious reasons.

Is it for Hannibal Lecter reasons?

glad to see we're getting back to cannibalism again -- clearly the real problem
posted by philip-random at 2:29 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

"you people are the reason people vote Republican!" derail

Granting that arguments in the form of "[insignificant thing] are the reason people vote [x]" are always silly, I'm baffled by how a thread that was two parts sarcasm, one part facetiousness, one part absurdity, could even be derailed. How can you distinguish it from the rest of the nonsense?
posted by octobersurprise at 2:49 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Is it a problem that I'm not also including the fact that I think these guys are jerks, MLSE is totally justified in banning them from its venues, and targeting women who are reporting on live TV to shout an obscene phrase at them for shits and giggles is a problematic thing that people really need not to be doing? I feel like basically everyone else here agrees with that.

I think when someone says "should this even be a thing people get fired for" in a thread like that without qualification, there's probably an even chance that it comes off as "it's PC gone mad!" as opposed to "...but I will defend to the death your right to say it". Especially when "the right to say it" is often the subject of massive "free speech tho" derails in conversations that look very much like that one, pretty much every time.

This is an area where "doesn't everyone agree with that?" seemingly-obvious decency runs up against the real experience of "so many people act exactly like this and think its fine". It's similar to ironic racism or sexism, in that one of the things that fuels that stuff is the idea that no one could really believe I mean this hyperbolically odious thing, when people hear that sincerely odious thing all the time.

Assholes ruin things for everyone. In this case, the thing they ruin is people's generosity in granting the benefit of the doubt, because too many people have gotten burned by it too many times. So yeah, it probably is a good idea to lay out where you're coming from on the central source of pain under discussion, not because you need to prove your progressive bona fides or march in lockstep, but because it helps to avoid misunderstanding. I really think part of coming to these conversations in good faith and without invoking 101-style garbage is understanding all the ways in which this nowhere-near-new topic is derailed and disrupted, and doing your best to demonstrate that you're aware of those things and aren't doing them or at least are not trying to do them. That's how you can garner benefit of the doubt, by respecting the history and struggle of a conversation and showing that you're not treating it like it didn't start until you got there.

Because assholes ruin everything, it's important to prove that you're not an asshole first, otherwise you risk being misinterpreted as one of the people who believes something you didn't think anyone could actually believe, especially when you're making arguments that might not be derails but sound a lot like derails. Maybe that's unfair, but that's where we are. Blame the jerks, not the people understandably worried that you might be another one.
posted by Errant at 3:09 PM on May 15, 2015 [34 favorites]

glad to see we're getting back to cannibalism again -- clearly the real problem

It's a problem?
posted by Grangousier at 3:16 PM on May 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

I saw Errant's post about that dynamic and was like YES YES and wanted to add that there's a similar dynamic with women's behavior in public, where dudes blame us and get mad that we're wary of harassment/assault because clearly THEY aren't that kind of guy instead of the people that make public spaces so hostile to women that we have to be super guarded all the time.
posted by NoraReed at 3:18 PM on May 15, 2015 [27 favorites]

Re: flagging's efficacy, I really hope more people toss up the Bat Signal on problem users. I think dios is more or less notorious at this point, so why his atrocious comment was allowed to stand is beyond me. But I think the community being more active with flags will go a longer way than having to waste time and energy pushing back when we just want to talk like adults.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:23 PM on May 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

feel like this is one of those examples of people discussing the differences they have in detail because everyone nodding their heads in agreement isn't particularly interesting.

That happens a lot. When people agree on 90% of an issue it is the 10% that gets all the discussion. Because "yeah that sucks" is boring.
posted by Justinian at 3:25 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

A lot of times, what looks like boring head-nodding echo chamber to some is actually a conversation (often among women!) about the ways in which sexism affects us, experiences we have had that are like that in the fpp, strategies we have used (or fantasized about using) to combat it. But then someone (often a man!) comes along and nitpicks some tangential detail and if you think THAT isn't boring, I don't know what to tell you.
posted by rtha at 3:44 PM on May 15, 2015 [104 favorites]

Really agree with aya. They're talking about cortex's comment far upthread btw.
posted by halifix at 3:46 PM on May 15, 2015

That happens a lot. When people agree on 90% of an issue it is the 10% that gets all the discussion. Because "yeah that sucks" is boring.

And yet, the people who rely on this explanation often flat-out refuse to establish the 90% agreement.

If we want people to know what we think, we have to tell them.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:53 PM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

So just to be clear, if I started going into sports event threads and going off about municipal funding of stadiums every time, because the venue's almost certainly described in the FPP, I'm wouldn't be being obnoxious and terrible, I'd be forcing a "discuss[ion] of differences in detail," preventing any boring head nodding. Hey, I approve of the existence of sports too guys!

Did I understand right?
posted by PMdixon at 3:56 PM on May 15, 2015 [15 favorites]

what looks like boring head-nodding echo chamber to some is actually a conversation

This is such a good point. There are more ways to have conversation than AGREE/DISAGREE and whenever I see these accusations of "echo chamber," I wonder whether the accuser is aware of that. Not all conversation is debate, and debate is not the only way to learn or to broaden your experience or frame of reference.
posted by Miko at 3:57 PM on May 15, 2015 [86 favorites]

Yeah, accusations of "echo chamber" come across to me as "I am unwilling to parse this discussion at the current level of nuance."
posted by almostmanda at 4:03 PM on May 15, 2015 [43 favorites]

There are just some souls who honestly cannot stand an echo chamber. They need to be challenged! They need to stretch their wings, man. Pew pew pew! Those are ideas being exchanged by intellectuals. Watch them fly! But woah there, hold on. Not all ideas! Let's not get too close to the sun, Icarus. No, just the right ideas. Just the ones that are fun to debate from the relative safety of the couch. (The physical couch? The metaphorical couch of our various privileges? How nifty this all is!) And when they eventually evolve past all the hubris the rest of mankind carries on its shoulders, weep not - they fly to greener lands.

Echo chambers, man! Let loose and be freee!
posted by erratic meatsack at 4:09 PM on May 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

So just to be clear, if I started going into sports event threads and going off about municipal funding of stadiums every time, because the venue's almost certainly described in the FPP, I'm wouldn't be being obnoxious and terrible...

Did I understand right?

If there's a link in the FPP about how people are debating how much municipal funding there should be for the stadium and they're not sure about how much it benefits the local economy, then sure, go ahead. Otherwise, I hope your Strawmen get a good draft pick this year.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 4:10 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

I feel like you're trying to evade the real questions. What if they just mention the source of the funding? Does it have to be in the FPP? What if someone posts a link in the first few comments? Or if a "previously" links to such? Or if there's not actually a link but I had something open in another tab. I mean if you want to try and silence my straight up truth telling that's your prerogative but it's a slippery slope, is all I'm saying, and I think it's vitally important that we focus on me and my ability to force people to respond to me for a second here.
posted by PMdixon at 4:15 PM on May 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

Since you're clearly unwilling to engage in good faith, PMdixon, there's no point in me paying any further attention to you in this thread.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 4:19 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

That's utterly laughable. There have been so many replies to you explaining exactly why people took issue to the way you phrased your posts (cortex even!) and the only thing you've appeared to do is dig your heels in even harder. "Good faith" should be dripping with irony here.
posted by erratic meatsack at 4:21 PM on May 15, 2015 [17 favorites]

Will future tone deafness on discussing women's issues and women's bodies by the people in the LBT thread lead to a ban, eg, has anyone been warned of this? May I ask, has anything about the way bans are applied been changed, either due to the site changes over the last year or so or as a direct result of this thread?

I guess my fear about relying mainly on flagging is that, as many women have already reported, many people who care about these issues have stopped or slowed down on reading boyzone threads, and others read some comments and get explosive and leave the thread before they erupt -- these people reasonably can't do the flagging. I feel like we have boyzone threads all the time where the end agreement is "I resolve to flag more" but then stuff happens and for some reason people don't flag. Why not at least have a one-two punch of flagging and banning?
posted by onlyconnect at 4:26 PM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

I almost sent this as an email, because I hate being critical of the mods in public. It makes me feel like a dick. But I also don't feel like that would be fair to the people who always step up and speak out - they put themselves out there, and I think it's right to back them publicly.

I want to chime in as another voice asking the mods to think about stamping down harder on derailing BS in threads about gender/sexism/something tangentially related to ladies, especially early. I feel like there's a certain inertia when it comes to doing this, but historically mods have told people to STFU in threads about I/P or religion or (as has been mentioned) frigging Apple products if they're being disruptive to the conversation.

I feel like there's a learning curve for that sure, and I respect that Metafilter is a lightly moderated site, but much as I respect team mod and appreciate all that you do I think you guys could be a little more on the ball at this stage about 1) what kind of conversations you'd like to see, 2) what is impeding having these conversations, 3) what users are likely to say stupid shit. I feel like tech threads are more aggressively moderated than threads relating to anything women related. Giving people a 24 hour time out is not going to end their world, it's just going to let the rest of us actually have a chance to talk.

Metafilter is self policing and the community is already doing the heavy lifting with some users doing a heroic job of being vocal and pushing back. I think it's time to toss it back and ask for a bit of leadership on this issue, rather than putting everything on us to fix with the limited tools we have.
posted by supercrayon at 4:35 PM on May 15, 2015 [29 favorites]

That's utterly laughable.

You start right out of the gate with a ton of undeserved opprobrium, continue it all day, and you accuse me of not knowing what good faith is? Spare me the bullshit callouts. Thanks.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 4:37 PM on May 15, 2015

You are abusing the shit out of the "no using profile page info in thread" rule right now in your aggrievement.
posted by PMdixon at 4:40 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

"This could have come across as tone-deaf on your end because [reasons]."
"HAHAHAHA NOPE. UP YOURS!"


The end.
posted by erratic meatsack at 4:57 PM on May 15, 2015

one more dead town's last parade, you need to stop digging in here, and folks should probably drop it all around.

There's a weird parallel between the idea of insisting on talking about x in a thread where folks are mostly talking about y and then rejecting folks' attempts to redirect that, and insisting in here that your analysis of your own behavior in that other thread is correct and other folks' take is wrong, and it's of a piece with some of your past behavior on the site and altercations with other users and the mods. I would really like to see you find some way to just make your peace with the fact that part of how you tend to want to interact with the site keeps consistently not working well, and find a way to change your expectations on your end about what's workable here so it doesn't keep being the same old thing coming back around repeatedly.

NoraReed, comment deleted, cut it out.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:00 PM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

billiebee: " Lady Doctor and Female Pilot hate it"

I feel like you mean Doctress and Aviatrix.

But the ix-suffix is awesome because it makes everything sound more badass and so I APPROVE of aviatrix and executrix and dominatrix and senatrix, like Senatrix Elizabeth Warren.

(Fun fact, it used to be a suffOR, but when English lost its noun declensions it became a suffIX because only female nouns declined.)

(Not really.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:07 PM on May 15, 2015 [19 favorites]

*claps*
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 5:11 PM on May 15, 2015

May I ask, has anything about the way bans are applied been changed, either due to the site changes over the last year or so or as a direct result of this thread?

The previous discussion helped catalyze our thinking about where to draw the line on some of this stuff, which has contributed to the aforementioned decisions to ban some folks who were long-time "one more chance" types instead of giving them yet another one of those chances, as well as more aggressively trying to manage people's repeat problem behavior when we saw it happening, on a "cut this out if you still want to be here" basis, yeah.

It's an ongoing thing; I think it's helped, but part of the difficulty here is that threads that go well don't tend to stand out in people's minds because they just...went well. They were just unremarkably fine, the sort of thing you might notice the way you notice suddenly that you don't have a headache any more but otherwise it's just stuff going okay. On the mod side we notice it more because we've been sort of staring at these things thinking "please go well", and handing off to each other at shift changes the threads that bear watching just in case they're gonna go weird but then they usually don't, the folks we're keeping an eye on just in case they do act up but usually they keep it together or just decline to jump back in.

Which, it remains a hard thing to balance in terms of messaging. Because I know us quietly watching for trouble and either quickly taking care of it or being relieved that it never manifests isn't something that the userbase really gets much direct insight into when things are going well, but we're not going to start leaving reactive or preemptive "boy, it sure is nice that x didn't fuck this thread up" comments on the site because that'd be pretty actively terrible in its own right as a site culture thing.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:17 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

This feels so familiar. It's tiring to have this conversation over and over and over. It's tiring to have to be patient and sweet and explain the same basic things in thread after thread while being so mindful of tone, because we can't be mean to the men. Not just here, but every day out in the world. And it's tiring to see NoraReed cut a curt "cut it out," and a general call to drop it while the other party gets, what feels to me, a gentle talking to. This is exactly the same pattern that happened the last time we had this Meta. I don't intend this as an anti-mod stance, and I want to be really clear about that, but I do want to point out it out as something that maybe could be done better? I feel like a lot of women in this thread are saying that there are certain posters/derails that need more of the cut it out approach than the gentle talking to. I hope that made sense.
posted by Ruki at 5:29 PM on May 15, 2015 [56 favorites]

Or you know, what hades said.
posted by Ruki at 5:30 PM on May 15, 2015

and your response is to continue talking patiently to them while leaving a sharply-worded comment deletion message aimed at the person they finally goaded into breaking the guidelines

I am tired of one more dead town's behavior and felt like I was being pretty clear about my frustration about it and the fact that he needs to cut it the fuck out there, partly as a specific attempt to do the thing people are talking about of directly addressing behavior and folks by name when there's a behavior issue instead of just saying cool it more generally and quietly cleaning up. And I mostly try to keep civil about this stuff even when telling people they need to work on their shit; if that's being too patient with people, I don't see a way around it because I do not want to let myself lapse into being my worst self just because I'm tired and frustrated with some of the cycles of behavior that play out on the site.

Now, NoraReed is a sharp and funny commenter, but she also has a habit of being kind of jerky and button-pushing in the process. I don't think this is something she'd disagree with, and I don't say it as a "and that's why they suck" thing, I'm acknowledging it as just a straight up ongoing issue and one that's come up before despite the fact that she's otherwise a smart, engaged user that a lot of people like and appreciate. It's an aspect of her participation here, not at all the whole of it, but it's there and it's sometimes pretty conspicuous. This was an example of that.

And if part of this discussion is talking about how people who repeatedly display bad behavior on the site is a problem that needs addressing but we're going to get flack for addressing that when it's someone people mostly get along with, then I'm in a totally untenable position. I generally try not to call people out until gets to be sort of a Thing, and that has gone in her favor as much as others a whole bunch of times. But "they were goaded" isn't a good defense for personal jabs in either direction, and if people feel like that sort of thing is a problem on the site then it's a problem on the site even when the jabber is generally considered a righteous party in a lot of conversations.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:39 PM on May 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

I kinda wonder what it would look like if the same norm against "I'd hit that" got applied to "whatabout" ruleslawyering.
posted by PMdixon at 5:44 PM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

Like the last thread, I'm not saying the comment shouldn't have been deleted. But omdt got to go on and on. It became a Thing way earlier in the thread. What I'm saying is that particular behavior should have gotten a nip in the bud way before it got to NoraReed's comment. The line for personal jabs is clear and bright, but the line for wearisome behavior is less bright. And that's a problem. Personal attacks cut quick, but these multiple comments are cuts with a thousand knives.
posted by Ruki at 5:47 PM on May 15, 2015 [29 favorites]

It's the 'I'm not touching you!' of internet arguing.
posted by winna at 5:49 PM on May 15, 2015 [35 favorites]

It's the 'I'm not touching you!' of internet arguing.

This goes back to the lunchroom metaphor way up above.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:53 PM on May 15, 2015

What I'm saying is that particular behavior should have gotten a nip in the bud way before it got to NoraReed's comment.

Sure, but metatalk is the part of the site where we talk shit out. And as tedious as it can be, people being sort of wearisome while seeming to try and talk some shit out is part of what happens here. Even if it turns out that it's going in circles and someone doesn't seem to be trying as hard as they should be and needs to be told to cut it out when they can't figure that out themself despite clear hints and pushback from users and mods.

Personal jabs, not so much, and it's something we've tried to push back harder on the last few years. Even personal jabs motivated by understandable annoyance. It's not a grey-area sort of thing, and there's a lot of ways to say "your behavior here kinda sucks" that aren't that and that aren't a problem.

For all that, I spent 150 or so words basically telling one more dead town to cut the shit in general and declaring a pattern of behavior a problem, and six words telling NoraReed to cut it out with one specific deleted comment. If that's not asymmetrical enough because either (a) I wasn't sufficiently outright cursing at one more dead town in the process or (b) I said anything at all to NoraReed, then, again, that's a problem that I don't see a solution to.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:58 PM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'd like to throw out a couple very loose analogies that this thread has me thinking about, which I hope will be okay, and please bear with me.

Problem: True Detective (season 1, and it's looking like season 2 now as well) is too male-dominated. There aren't enough shows with what Netflix likes to call "strong female leads" on TV. But at the same time, True Detective was a good show in its own right; it's not the fault of that single show that most other shows are also male-dominated.

Solution: TV execs could start looking at balance in programming, bring in more female writers/directors, etc. (I'm not saying this is going to happen; bear with me.)

Problem: huge storm hits Florida/New Orleans/wherever. Global warming is likely causing an increase in huge storms. But that one storm might have happened anyway.

Solution: look at reducing carbon emissions, etc. etc. alongside improving FEMA response and preparedness for extreme weather. (Again, it's way too late and this isn't going to happen.)

Problem: MeFi thread about female newscaster being harassed turns into debate about who should be fired for things they do outside of work. Way too many threads go this way; women and allies get tired of dealing with it. But if this had been the only thread that went like that, it might be just an anomalous thread gone sour.

Solution: ???

Difficulties with finding a solution for MeFi:

- Unlike TV execs, mods don't choose posts (by analogy, shows) or approve their comments (by analogy, scripts/characters); they can only delete here and there.
- Unlike government (again, pretending our government were actually worthwhile), mods can't fund big initiatives to tackle the larger problem. Mods can basically do the equivalent of stepping up FEMA response.

To put this another way, how do you deal with a statistical pattern on an individual basis, *in the context of Metafilter*?

And that's as far as I've gotten. I don't know.
posted by uosuaq at 6:00 PM on May 15, 2015

(I completely understand and sympathize with her position but I wanted to say I will really miss divined by radio's contribution to threads about women.)
posted by gingerest at 6:04 PM on May 15, 2015 [30 favorites]

There's a certain point (and it can be very ambiguous) where people just feel like asking if a person "gets it." Reading the room, acknowledging a topic's background, etc. You just have to know in order to continue to engage with them. And if a person doesn't "get it" that's fine - stating so can also help move the conversation along. What happens very often is a person continues to elephant their way through the china shop regardless of other people going "Wait hold on, there's nuance to this you're missing."

It would really help if when mods notice the elephant they state very clearly the portion about missing nuance, and help someone understand they need to do some extra mental legwork in order to continue.
posted by erratic meatsack at 6:05 PM on May 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

It would really help if when mods notice the elephant they state very clearly the portion about missing nuance, and help someone understand they need to do some extra mental legwork in order to continue

I don't disagree with that, yeah. It's something we try to do but also something we could probably be more aggressive about, and I'm gonna keep it in mind.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:06 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ok, fair enough about Meta being the place where we talk shit out. But my thousand knives comment still stands regarding threads in the Blue. That's where my personal frustration lies.
posted by Ruki at 6:08 PM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

"What I'm saying is that particular behavior should have gotten a nip in the bud way before it got to NoraReed's comment. The line for personal jabs is clear and bright, but the line for wearisome behavior is less bright. And that's a problem. Personal attacks cut quick, but these multiple comments are cuts with a thousand knives."

Amen. The watchwords here at MetaFilter are "using judgment" and "each case is different". I think there's every reason to respond to apparently polite sealioning and the like with extreme prejudice and to their rude, out-of-patience targets with leniance. Because there's a cultural context and a history.

"And if part of this discussion is talking about how people who repeatedly display bad behavior on the site is a problem that needs addressing but we're going to get flack for addressing that when it's someone people mostly get along with, then I'm in a totally untenable position."

This is what I wrote you guys in February in response to that previous thread:

But I began my contact form message before any responses had been posted to the thread and you can see how people are taking this. And, at the risk of repeating myself, it's totally understandable that they'd react this way. Again, you need to strongly signal in the other direction.

If I had anything specific to recommend, I'd do so. One thing I think you guys ought to do is to really strongly suppress your totally-understandable feeling of defensiveness about the criticism. I'm criticizing you guys and yet I agree that [user given a time-out] [...] deserved a time-out. Does that help? I'm sure that many other people agree with this. But people really don't want the result of this thread to be where we talked a lot about how angry, badly behaved feminists were the problem and one of them got a time-out. That's just such a bad outcome in how this will resonate with the concerns being expressed in the thread.

I'd suggest that the "there's a bright-line" and "what do you expect us to do" is not really a helpful response. People are saying something and that something is that NoraReed, in this context, isn't really the problem while omdt is. NoraReed's deleted comment should have been deleted, I suppose (I didn't see it), and, yes, people are telling you that it's helpful to publicly signal what you consider bad behavior, but a carefully composed critique of omdt's mistakes coupled with "cut it out" to NoraReed implies something. You shouldn't be implying what that implies, you should know better, and you should listen to people when they tell you this. You could as easily have written "cut it out" to omdt and a carefully composed warning to NoraReed.

Furthermore, it was LobsterMitten who, in the other thread, felt it was appropriate to write a long comment about how disruptive rude comments can be. She later acknowledged that it was the wrong thing to emphasize, but the reason she did emphasize it is because, as discussed in that previous thread and as discussed in this thread, you guys have an institutional bias that makes you very sensitive to one kind of disruptive behavior but relatively oblivious to another. You say you're figuring this out, you're working on it, but the proof is in the pudding. It's not about the gender of the MetaFilter mods, it's about your institutional biases. There's a reason why we're having this conversation again.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:14 PM on May 15, 2015 [46 favorites]

Part of the problem that I see is that framing things in a "aw shucks" kind of way gets a lot more leeway, even though that framing is no less problematic than blatant -isms. It's very often disingenuous and no less hurtful.
posted by Ruki at 6:14 PM on May 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

Ok, fair enough about Meta being the place where we talk shit out. But my thousand knives comment still stands regarding threads in the Blue. That's where my personal frustration lies.

FOR REAL. One more dead town's last parade got 10 comments that were a variation of the same thing with multiple responses from different users. One (admittedly snappy) comment for them to just leave it already gets deleted and a curt response. This is ridiculous. People who stomp into any thread basically bellowing "My opinion my opinion my opinion my opinion my opinion!!!!" and who don't actually read responses but continue to yell "My opinion!" are not here to have a conversation, they are here to stop any conversation from being possible, and why are they being given the benefit of the doubt?
posted by supercrayon at 6:16 PM on May 15, 2015 [50 favorites]

I think there's every reason to respond to apparently polite sealioning and the like with extreme prejudice and to their rude, out-of-patience targets with leniance.

Sure, but that cannot workably extend to the extreme where telling one person to cut the shit at length but in insufficiently angry or over-the-top language is not enough while briefly telling someone else to knock it off is going too far.

Like, to be super duper clear here, unless there is an expectation that if folks generally agree with a user then that user cannot be the subject of any degree of censure—and I don't think that's anybody's position here, but I guess clarify if I'm wrong there— it is totally inconsistent to both want recurring problematic behavior to be at least called out and to complain about it when it happens to both someone people are fed up with and someone whose poor behavior they're inclined to high five.

I am sorry I did not say something as soon as people would have liked regarding one dead last town needing to cut it out in here. The frustration is clear, and I hear it, and while I think it's difficult to draw a line as cleanly as some folks maybe feel it should be between going-on-at-length as a normal aspect of metatalk in particular and going-on-too-long as clearcut example of unacceptable behavior, I can understand where folks are coming from in wanting to see that calibrated and the fact that the discussion over on the blue is part of the context driving the frustration in this case.

I continue to be honestly surprised by the reading that I was too polite about it, because I don't see a path forward where "the mods should be intentionally meaner" makes any kind of sense. Faster to act, I can understand and get behind. But "insufficiently impolite" is a really problematic metric for us to try and incorporate as a policy thing here.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:31 PM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

I continue to be honestly surprised by the reading that I was too polite about it

It looks to me, and apparently to other people, that the staff yet again patiently and calmly explained to a user who routinely engages in disruptive threadshitting and derailing why their behavior is less than optimal, while telling someone objecting to the behavior to STFU.

Maybe you should patiently and calmly explain to both. Maybe you should tell both to STFU. But it appears that you are structurally prioritized to swiftly and sharply rebuke people with whom you are inclined to agree and who will not be disruptive, and calmly and patiently deal with (and deal with and deal with and deal with and deal with) users who have a demonstrated history of deliberately engaging in disruptive behavior.

It's not working.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:38 PM on May 15, 2015 [37 favorites]

"Cut it out" is not precisely polite. Speaking for myself, I wouldn't want to see you guys actually be rude in your warnings -- on other sites where that's common, it ends up contributing to a very authoritarian tone. I think you're right to not want to go down that road. But "cut it out" in its terseness and its directness and otherwise is pretty far in the direction of signaling impatience and being a reprimand, while your long comment to omdtlp was more ... understanding. I'd like to have seen the reverse. Thats not quite the same as asking for you to be "intentionally meaner".
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:40 PM on May 15, 2015 [19 favorites]

To be clear, I am not high-fiving NoraReed's comment in any way, nor do I think that she needs me to defend her. Nor do I think you, or any other mod, should be meaner. I do think that there is problematic behavior, in this case specifically related to sexism, that is allowed to go on for too long, and the onus is on the female MeFites to be patient and tolerant of bad behavior before official mod action. So yes, it is the going on too long that is a problem. You quickly told NoraReed to cut it out. What I would like to see is that action taking place before other commenters get to dominate a thread.
posted by Ruki at 6:40 PM on May 15, 2015 [17 favorites]

For example, how long was the "tramp surely doesn't mean what you women think it means" derail allowed to go on for? That right there is the problem. The benefit of the doubt was given, heels were dug in, and that is a large part of what made the thread toxic. It went on for way too long, despite the female response that, no, this is our lives.
posted by Ruki at 6:46 PM on May 15, 2015 [17 favorites]

What I would like to see is that action taking place before other commenters get to dominate a thread.

And I totally hear that, and, again, don't disagree with the idea of us trying harder to focus on that. I think it's doable in part just from the mod side and in part with the help of more flagging and contact form stuff from the community side to help us get at stuff early if we're not seeing it or not picking it out of the flow of a very busy thread or day. I'm very thumbs-up on that whole concept.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:50 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

It looks to me, and apparently to other people, that the staff yet again patiently and calmly explained to a user who routinely engages in disruptive threadshitting and derailing why their behavior is less than optimal, while telling someone objecting to the behavior to STFU.

As a datapoint, it looked to me like one person was getting a very clear and formal warning about their overall behavior and the other person got a stage-left aside "stop doing this one thing". Where you (and apparently other people) are reading calm, patient explanation, I was seeing "I am laying out a very logical case for why you are going to get the axe, so that you can make no mistake about why you are going to get the axe if you keep doing this shit". Where you're seeing STFU, I saw a wrist-slap "hey, quit it". Maybe "please cut it out" would have worked better? I wonder how (sub)cultural a thing this is, but "more words" doesn't necessarily equal "more polite" to me, and "brief" doesn't necessarily mean "hostile". Actually, I tend to view sudden increased formality as a signal that there is now serious trouble. I can appreciate that that isn't how that might look to other people and that I might not be right about that.
posted by Errant at 6:50 PM on May 15, 2015 [32 favorites]

I'm imagining Matt right now with a Pina Colada on a beach somewhere. He earned it.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:52 PM on May 15, 2015 [17 favorites]

To use my earlier analogy, it sounded like you were telling omdtlp that "now, it isn't nice to steal people's sandwiches, remember we talked about this?" but then told Nora she had to go to the principal's office for fighting.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:52 PM on May 15, 2015 [13 favorites]

I was literally about to use the principal's office analogy in precisely the opposite direction. So that's interesting.
posted by Errant at 6:53 PM on May 15, 2015

NoraReed's deleted comment amounted to a single sentence not even long enough to wrap around to a second line on my monitor, and while it didn't contain the words "fuck you" or anything like that, I didn't see a problem with deleting it along with the comment she was responding to. I feel sorry for cortex at this point.
And Empress, sometimes you send the good student to the principal's office and try to reason with the bad one.
posted by uosuaq at 6:54 PM on May 15, 2015

I once got sent to the principal's office for getting punched.
posted by selfnoise at 7:00 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

And Empress, sometimes you send the good student to the principal's office and try to reason with the bad one.

But, see, when you do that all that does is send the message that the good students aren't allowed to do anything when the bad kids steal from them, and all the teacher will do is say "naughty naughty" but it's too late because he already ate your sandwich so your choices are to either get in trouble or go hungry and speaking as the good kid who got screwed over by bullies, that is a SHITTY AS HELL way to feel.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:05 PM on May 15, 2015 [11 favorites]

I lost my post, but NoraReed is a red herring. If I made that comment, it also would have been deleted. I'm not arguing that. What makes -ism threads go poorly is that the minority group has to be patient and polite, and any anger, righteous that it may be, gets dealt with faster than the commenters going on and on, making the thread worse. And I think Cortex is coming from the same place I am, and I appreciate that, but putting the onus on the minority group to explain and flag, over and over, is tedious. Like it's on us to make sure the thread goes well. That's not what I want, and I don't think that's what the mods want, so where do we go from here?
posted by Ruki at 7:15 PM on May 15, 2015 [10 favorites]

If that's how you see it, what would have been the downside to a more forceful/earlier call to stop doing something that most members don't have to be told not to do?

None that I can see, and I'm in no way arguing against intervening earlier or intervening more forcefully or both. How I saw it probably doesn't actually matter all that much, since no one was talking to me, but since the man of twist and turns expressed his interpretation of this specific thing and mine was pretty much exactly the opposite, I thought it was interesting. I read cortex's note as being very forceful towards one dead last town and fairly lenient/rote toward NoraReed. That the same note could be read in precisely the opposite way would not have occurred to me and indeed surprised me. Now I wonder how much those contrary interpretations play into the perception of lenience towards seemingly repeat offenders.

It's funny, now I'm thinking about how we constantly say that having a post deleted is no big deal, just reframe and try again, yet we perceive a comment being deleted as invoking a kind of disciplinary action. I think I take the severity of the written rebuke to be a greater indication of transgression than whether a comment is deleted, but it seems like maybe other people don't see it that way? Do people see comment deletion as a worse ticking-off than being spoken to publicly and at length?
posted by Errant at 7:15 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Well, Empress, in my imagination the good student hears the principal say "we expect better from you, because we know you're a good student" and thinks "okay okay" and meanwhile the teachers are trying to keep the bad student in school and out of juvie. That's where my metaphor was coming from. Yours is different, obviously.
posted by uosuaq at 7:20 PM on May 15, 2015

"I read cortex's note as being very forceful towards one dead last town and fairly lenient/rote toward NoraReed. That the same note could be read in precisely the opposite way would not have occurred to me and indeed surprised me."

The thing that you characterize as brief and non-hostile you also describe without irony as a "wrist-slap" -- which implies to me that you oughtn't have been surprised, given that you naturally compared it to a violent act.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:23 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Actually, I tend to view sudden increased formality as a signal that there is now serious trouble. I can appreciate that that isn't how that might look to other people and that I might not be right about that.

That's an interesting take. Myself, I see it in the light of not word count but effort. The imbalance that I think a lot of people are pointing out is that it isn't a bad thing to calmly and clearly explain to a user what they're doing wrong and why; it's when this is happening to a user who has repeatedly demonstrated an unwillingness to listen to such explanations. I didn't see NoraReed's comment, and "cut it out" can be read any number of ways, but I think the major sticking point for myself and others is that our line of patience for schooling a user who's been a problem is a lot farther back than the line of patience for moderation staff. That might be a fairly common dynamic on other sites, but I think it needs to be recalibrated regularly. Flagging goes a long way to direct messaging the need to recalibrate that line wrt User X in threads about Subject Y, and the frustration seems to arise from the perceived slowness that calibration is taking.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 7:24 PM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

Uosuaq, going to email.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:25 PM on May 15, 2015

(remember when they'd call you to the principal's office over the homeroom speakers? I bet that's all done over facebook or some shit now)
posted by uosuaq at 7:28 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

For a data point, count me as another person who saw cortex's comments to omdt as way harsher than his comments to NoraReed. Formality is scary, 'cut it out' sounds like you're talking to your adorable and much loved younger brother.
posted by corb at 7:33 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

As a parent I have used "cut it out" in states of playfulness, solid warning, and you are working my last goddamned nerve right now. I think it's impossible to claim those three words have any objective tone.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 7:36 PM on May 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

> I think I take the severity of the written rebuke to be a greater indication of transgression than whether a comment is deleted, but it seems like maybe other people don't see it that way? Do people see comment deletion as a worse ticking-off than being spoken to publicly and at length?

I tend to see the comment deletion as a function of the general good faith NoraReed brings to MetaFilter. The deletion is a one-off, doesn't need to be explained, NoraReed knows better and because of that, generally fosters a good community here. On the flipside, being spoken to publicly and at length builds a substantial record about a problematic participant who could eventually get banned, and the evidence is available for anyone who cares to look.
posted by Little Dawn at 7:39 PM on May 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

Interestingly, cortex, I feel like your dilemna here is also about reading the room. I have total faith that you are trying to find ways to do the right thing, both now and possibly in improved fashion going forward, but I think you unwittingly communicated the exact wrong thing even while doing the right thing. Both actors deserved a Mod note for their actions, but the reason to balance your response more wasn't because their actions were similar in nature or offense, but because those following the thread deserved clarity of context.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 7:42 PM on May 15, 2015 [22 favorites]

I tend to see the comment deletion as a function of the general good faith NoraReed brings to MetaFilter. The deletion is a one-off, doesn't need to be explained, NoraReed knows better and because of that, generally fosters a good community here. On the flipside, being spoken to publicly and at length builds a substantial record about a problematic participant who could eventually get banned, and the evidence is available for anyone who cares to look.

OTOH, deleting of comments are also used against problem users who are just noising up a thread. It's kind of jarring when it happens in MetaTalk, to be honest, and I really wouldn't be able to guess the sentiment behind it happening here were it not for cortex explaining it afterwards.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 7:45 PM on May 15, 2015

The thing that you characterize as brief and non-hostile you also describe without irony as a "wrist-slap" -- which implies to me that you oughtn't have been surprised, given that you naturally compared it to a violent act.

At the risk of suddenly sounding like I think "tramp" only means "hobo", in the parlance I am familiar with, the expression "a slap on the wrist" is used exclusively to describe rebukes or punishments that are largely symbolic and carry little weight or force. They are very much the opposite of any sort of actually violent reprisal or genuinely punitive measure. So I'm a little surprised by this too, I didn't think it was an uncommon expression.

I think the major sticking point for myself and others is that our line of patience for schooling a user who's been a problem is a lot farther back than the line of patience for moderation staff.

To be absolutely clear, mine is too. I'm all for earlier and more direct intervention, and while I'm generally not a fan of banning, I also think that when you have people like we have had over the years who simply delight in testing the mods' patience, just get it over with.

When you get a comment deleted, it gets deleted whether you want it to or not. A mod speaking to you over and over again about something? It seems like you can just ignore the mod for a really long time, and you might be able to get away with it. "Being spoken to publicly and at length by a mod" isn't really a punishment or a consequence or much of anything at all.

Conversely, I would take public chastisement to be much more punitive. I don't remember the situation, but recently someone threw out an astonishingly tone-deaf and shitty joke into a tense conversation, and one of the mods said something like "I'm not even going to do you the favor of deleting that." If I do something shitty and a mod deletes it, hopefully I haven't hurt too many people and most people won't even see me making an ass of myself. If I do something shitty and that's followed by a mod (and very likely others) calling me out for being stupid, that would weigh on me a lot more.

Having said that, to reiterate what I said above, I'm not arguing for "speaking to someone over and over again". I do think the hammer should come down earlier in many or even most cases. I'm saying that here where our comments and the responses to our comments are our persona, I'm much more embarrassed by the very stupid things I have done which stand than by the (I think few) things scrubbed from my history. Then again, my intent here is to participate in good faith. I can see how the opposite would be true for a troll or provocateur trying to disrupt the conversation, in which case presumably deletions are worse than your shit getting to remain on the floor and stink up the room, and your tellings-off are probably badges of honor. Those people can go the fuck away.
posted by Errant at 7:53 PM on May 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

For the record, I would have added something like, "I know people are getting frustrated, but personal attacks are still not okay here," on the one hand, and "please move on and avoid similar threads until you can figure out how to demonstrate good faith in sensitive topics," or something similar, which if I'm reading you correctly is pretty much your position. Spelling both out a bit more clearly would have gone a long way, in my opinion.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 7:54 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

On the flipside, being spoken to publicly and at length builds a substantial record about a problematic participant who could eventually get banned, and the evidence is available for anyone who cares to look.

I had not considered this aspect, and some instances I recall where users claimed that there was no evidence of their shitty behavior, when comments had been silently deleted, illustrate the utility of this approach.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:55 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I read it that way, too, for the record. Building a case in public for further action - which is kind of what we asked him to do.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 7:58 PM on May 15, 2015

considering that I got through the "hey let's have a MetaTalk thread in which everyone circlejerks about how awful NoraReed is", I can totally handle a wrist slap and a comment deletion, but I'm frustrated as hell with sexist dudes taking over MeTa conversations that were about sexist dudes taking over conversations on the Blue, and I'm losing both my patience and my ability to give a shit.
posted by NoraReed at 8:01 PM on May 15, 2015 [60 favorites]

sexist dudes taking over MeTa conversations

If this is referring to me, I await your apology.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 8:03 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Amazing.
posted by erratic meatsack at 8:04 PM on May 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

If this is referring to me, I await your apology.

Seriously? You think this is the most important point being discussed?

If you do, you don't deserve an apology.
posted by jaguar at 8:05 PM on May 15, 2015 [12 favorites]

For real. At this point it just looks like deliberate baiting.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:06 PM on May 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

Seriously? You think this is the most important point being discussed?

I've been given the impression from the comments above that there was somehow a Nora vs. me thing that I missed entirely because I wasn't sitting in front of this thread all night. If that's an attempt to repost the same, it's inappropriate.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 8:08 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

If this is referring to me, I await your apology.

Lols. I hope you're in a comfy chair dude. Might need someone to turn you periodically to avoid pressure sores.
posted by smoke at 8:08 PM on May 15, 2015 [10 favorites]

Oh please, one more dead town. She's clearly talking about *me*. Must you be so vain?
posted by uosuaq at 8:09 PM on May 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

No, this song is very obviously about me, wretch.
posted by Errant at 8:10 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

If that's an attempt to repost the same, it's inappropriate.

here's some advice:

backseat modding.

making pronouncements about what [is appropriate in this thread] as though you were a moderator
posted by twist my arm at 8:13 PM on May 15, 2015

I've been given the impression from the comments above that there was somehow a Nora vs. me thing that I missed entirely because I wasn't sitting in front of this thread all night.

If it's a thing you think you missed and that isn't there now, and you're coming back to a thread where you've been given a pretty clear "cut it out" message that was reiterated in mefimail just to speculatively demand an apology, you are not making good decisions about how to participate here and I am tired of hoping that you're actually going to manage it on your own recognizance. Take the day off and figure out how not to keep getting into this sort of Yeah But cycle.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:15 PM on May 15, 2015 [50 favorites]

Inappropriate?

Is this self parody hour? *bursts into flames*
posted by futz at 8:16 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

To date, telling someone I am waiting for them to apologize has yet to work at getting someone to apologize. It's a great way to get someone's defenses up though.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:16 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Lols. I hope you're in a comfy chair dude. Might need someone to turn you periodically to avoid pressure sores.

Cut it out?
posted by Drinky Die at 8:18 PM on May 15, 2015

On the bright side, the thread also turned into a "MeFites show off their awesome tattoos" thread, so that part is nice.
posted by homunculus at 8:19 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, just to be clear here, I am fairly sure NoraReed was talking about Mick Jagger, or Warren Beatty.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:20 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I thought she was talking about Caroline Kennedy?
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:23 PM on May 15, 2015

Yeah, we're on the same page here. Happy Friday, or Saturday if you live in the part of the world where it's the future.
posted by Ruki at 8:25 PM on May 15, 2015

Hi from the future, walking my dog on a conveyor belt here and posting on my space phone.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:27 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Well, not reading the room well, I did learn about flagging and reading the room tonight. Can we get new wallpaper? I thought in boyzone threads mods spoke to guys because it was like gangata reapect. I thought my posts just get deleted without comment becaue they are beneath comment, and smell of mothballs and witch hazel covered cotton puffs.
posted by Oyéah at 8:30 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Guys I just came back from an amazing Thai restaurant, and on my way home there was this adorable husky pup that seemed to be running around without an owner, and just as I was commenting on how weird that is to my husband it ran out in front of my car. Thank god the breaks worked and the car behind me didn't crash into us. It ran off across 3 lanes of traffic with a group of kids trying to run after it.

Aya, hug your future dog for me?
posted by erratic meatsack at 8:32 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Before we move completely into one-liner territory, a respite which would certainly be well-deserved, I just want to say that I really appreciate this conversation and I've found a lot to think about with regards to community participation and public perceptions which I think will help me communicate better in the future. I hope this moves the needle in the right direction on resolving the frustrations expressed, and I hope that those of you who are voluntarily taking breaks decide at some point to come back, because you're pretty cool and I like hearing what you have to say.
posted by Errant at 8:36 PM on May 15, 2015 [13 favorites]

Seconded. Things are hopefully moving in the right direction. Shows that it helps when people say what they mean and mean what they say.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:40 PM on May 15, 2015

So one of my best friends lives in Australia, and it always delights me when she wishes me a happy birthday on the day before, to me, my birthday. Which is next week, and the whole she lives in the future thing is so awesome to me, so that's where that came from. Also, my life would be so much better if I could walk my dog on a conveyer belt, especially if I had a robot maid to pick up the poop.
posted by Ruki at 8:47 PM on May 15, 2015

Just my two cents - I think it's shitty the way that boyzone seems to be creeping back in. I usually don't go into the kind of threads that turn ugly against women, just because I'm allergic to both conflict and assholes, but now I see that as really using my privilege to abdicate responsibility. I am resolving to be more involved in feminism related threads, and flag and call out bullshit.

To women users in general - I'm sorry you have to put up this kind of thing. I hope those of you who have thought about leaving reconsider. It's probably unfair to ask you to put yourself through this nonsense, but the site will be poorer without your contributions.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:49 PM on May 15, 2015 [35 favorites]

cortex, thank you.
posted by onlyconnect at 8:54 PM on May 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

I am resolving to be more involved in feminism related threads, and flag and call out bullshit.

This is a great sentiment. I often opt for the calling out (though I can also just feel nausea at the misogyny in some threads and tab out, which is a mistake on my part) while forgetting flags exist in the heat of the moment. Not mistakes I'll be making in the future.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 9:01 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Hey, thanks for checking back in, NoraReed.
posted by tigrrrlily at 9:18 PM on May 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Seems like this thread is starting to wind down. I dig it.
posted by uosuaq at 9:45 PM on May 15, 2015

I feel like the thread is winding down but nothing has been resolved. I do not dig it.
posted by gingerest at 10:39 PM on May 15, 2015 [16 favorites]

I think it'd be a good start if the mod squad all got matching LBTs.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:46 PM on May 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

"As a datapoint, it looked to me like one person was getting a very clear and formal warning about their overall behavior and the other person got a stage-left aside "stop doing this one thing". Where you (and apparently other people) are reading calm, patient explanation, I was seeing "I am laying out a very logical case for why you are going to get the axe, so that you can make no mistake about why you are going to get the axe if you keep doing this shit". Where you're seeing STFU, I saw a wrist-slap "hey, quit it". Maybe "please cut it out" would have worked better? I wonder how (sub)cultural a thing this is, but "more words" doesn't necessarily equal "more polite" to me, and "brief" doesn't necessarily mean "hostile". Actually, I tend to view sudden increased formality as a signal that there is now serious trouble. I can appreciate that that isn't how that might look to other people and that I might not be right about that."

Yeah, having been on the receiving end of "Come to Jesus" talks here, One Dead Town was getting the grinding millstone that precedes a banning. That's not coddling; that's cutting off every "Yeah but" that will come in email from both One Dead Town and other folks who will think he got a raw deal. He was playing the edges, and Cortex was taking those edges away methodically so that there was no confusion over why, exactly, he'd gotten the hammer.

Weirdly, the back and forth with Nora and the timeout probably extended his time here because he'll nurse a grudge over being called sexist (it is a personal attack) but instead of continuing to spar with a mod, he got a night off and since he's not an idiot will probably avoid anything similar for a while until he gets fixated on something down the road and ignores a clear "drop it" again.

It's frustrating because it's asymmetric and exploits a structural disconnect between text on a page and real people — I'd hope he wouldn't be so tone deaf in person, especially since a good five or six women are doing the equivalent of "Shut the fuck up!" — but from my read, cortex was responding in a way that took that asymmetry and structural disconnect away from him, in a way that had to end with either him dropping it here, getting banned, or (Christmas in May) finally understanding why people were upset with him.
posted by klangklangston at 11:02 PM on May 15, 2015 [13 favorites]

Missed this meta, did not enjoy the original thread, and just want to add one more voice to the pile amazed how that one problem user is still getting away with dumping grenades in so many threads. Especially with a now-recognisable pattern of 1) make comment shitting on women 2) make several confusing "clarifying" comments which range from deeply suspicious to incomprehensible 3)drop into thread later with some "go feminism!" comments that are so at odds with the original bomb that I can't even
posted by ominous_paws at 11:02 PM on May 15, 2015 [19 favorites]

I know moderation is different here than on the Blue, but the way this conversation seemed to spend a lot of time in Man v Man time and the way men were able to hijack it a few times does not give me a lot of hope for the future. MeTa is way better than it used to be, and though this thread went better than I expected, it went worse than I'd hoped.

If there's anything I've learned from reading and writing about GamerGate, it's that it's really, really easy for a small group of dedicated trolls to make a space incredibly unfriendly for members of marginalized groups on any platform that doesn't have keeping those people out as a basic principle. MetaFilter doesn't allow that level of assholery and abuse, of course, but I still see the kind of arguments I'm used to from when I used to spend time on forums infested with hate groups; they're better at hiding them in apparently civil language here, but there are still comments that run the gamut from victim blaming to sex-shaming to slavery apologia that are not only awful to see but purposefully derail entire conversations and turn them into debates against one person with a particularly odious set of opinions and a chip on their shoulder. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't when this happens, because you can either be part of the pushback, firmly stating that what these people are saying is vile and hateful and awful, or you can ignore it and hope that the conversation goes back on track, but being silent about that kind of shit often indicates tacit agreement.

I'm definitely going to work on flagging more now, but I doubt we're gonna see this place be a place where women can talk about their experiences dealing with being women/sexism/patriarchy/etc in a way that is an actual conversation and not a debate with a small group of dedicated awful sea lions on basic stuff like "sexism happens", "patriarchy is a thing" and "women are people" unless the serious crackdown we saw with the bans of those four particularly awful misogynists continues. It was a combination of those bans and the general crackdown on using MeTa as the site's very own PvP zone that made me feel okay about coming back. MeTa's stayed somewhat better in general, though the JuneBy threads have raised a lot of issues with how awful and transphobic the site can be, a problem that's exacerbated by the fact that so many of the great active trans posters have been driven off the site because of it.

The Blue, though, was better for a while, but it seems like the banned misogynist users just left a vacuum that other people are working on filling in, and unless they're banned (either from those topics or the site entirely) and we start seeing more clear moderator notes about that kind of behavior being unacceptable even when there is community pushback, we're gonna keep backsliding into boyzone territory, especially considering that most of us have a finite amount of shit we can take before posting here stops being fun and we find other communities, which is already happening.

The community pushback/self moderation thing is NOT WORKING; we really need the official seal to say that hey, we might've seen that "well have you considered maybe some women are (sex-shaming slur)" is not acceptable here. With the rate that these clusterfucks have been going on lately, I think we need the unacceptability of misogyny to be clearly and repeatedly stated from the mods, I think, because right now it feels like nothing is happening.
posted by NoraReed at 11:31 PM on May 15, 2015 [49 favorites]

I don't want to add to any expectation of women being required to always do the work, etc., but for the purpose of some analysis (looking things over in more of a "big picture" way, as opposed to the piecemeal day-to-day that isn't necessarily great for recognizing overall patterns), I'm trying to put together a list of [feminism/sexism/happens to be about women] threads in say, the last year, that have gone badly in the way that people discussing here are sick of, and if anyone wants to send me/us links that they think would be particularly helpful to look at, I'd be happy to receive.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:53 PM on May 15, 2015 [11 favorites]

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the part of this pattern which frustrates me the most - and one piece is the expectation that "we all know sexism is stupid, so lets talk about other things instead because we all agree."

This seems to be of-a-piece with a lot of the "It's 2015, why are we still having this conversation?" and "ironic sexism"; it's a belief that the world is better than it really is, even in the face of explicit evidence it is not as good as we wish it was. I think there are some people who are honestly that naive, but more and more I think a lot of these people are actually made nervous by the profound paradigm shifts that women are calling for in general - including many of the women - and so minimize the sexism remaining imbedded in the culture (I've seen similar things happen with racism - it appears to be standardish).

Your equality is in another Castle.

It would help me a great deal if men who wanted to be feminist allies, or just wanted to help women in general, would be a bit more realistic about what is going on and how profoundly imbedded and complicated sexism is. It would make it a lot easier to spot the people who will claim to be feminist/anti-sexist but act in a manner which undermines the women present. This includes avoiding being sarcastic as much as possible, and in topics about women making a conscious effort to try to keep it about the women, and if it's about a sub-group of women, like trans women or black women or lesbians, it will be even harder because you're dealing with two axes of marginalization, not just one.

This will be a challenge - all of us are so used to focusing on men, white people, cis people, etc... - but I think it's work worth doing.
posted by Deoridhe at 12:22 AM on May 16, 2015 [44 favorites]

I think we need the unacceptability of misogyny to be clearly and repeatedly stated from the mods, I think, because right now it feels like nothing is happening.
posted by NoraReed

Perhaps from your view and experience. Is there any real specifics beyond what has been stated, confrontation, warnings?
I believe the mods are doing as much as possible to facilitate the changes they can make.
That thread was horrid, I did the reasonable thing and not even read it. Problem solved for me.
What works for you is still something you need to explore and examine with some specficity and data.
The progress I have seen is that the mods will be taking more action and keeping a keen eye out for said behavior and no more "rude" notes from mods in thread as Ivan F noted.

The important thing is for you to feel safe and included with in the community and judging from your observations, this is a chronic problem, as evident by that tattoo thread.
Very productive and informative work folks, keen observations and let's put a better foot forward.
posted by clavdivs at 1:03 AM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Addendum" I read parts of it, did not comment.
posted by clavdivs at 1:07 AM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Now, NoraReed is a sharp and funny commenter, but she also has a habit of being kind of jerky and button-pushing in the process.

I, and i imagine the vast majority of the people replying to this thread in agreement that this is an issue, would rather read 1000 brash norareed callouts of argumentative comments than even 1/10th of the but-but-but/i don't see how this is a problem stuff that was in that thread.

And yes, i absolutely agree that, and even i've experienced this, the bar for calling out bullshit is much higher than the bar for just posting bullhsit. You get told to pipe down a lot quicker if you're replying to someone posting something outrageous than the people posting regressive crap.

On preview, as i caught the rest of the way up, many people have already essentially made that point more eloquently. But i guess it's at least worthwhile for me to stand here in agreement with them.
posted by emptythought at 3:11 AM on May 16, 2015 [28 favorites]

I agree with every word NoraReed said. My emphasis on self-policing and flagwork is predicated on that actually working, and the foundation for that is a very clear, loud, solid statement from staff that your sealioning, ironic sexism, diminishing/dismissing and straight up misogyny are not welcome here. Otherwise we get more rules lawyering and talking in circles in threads on the Blue, and right here in MeTa even. We can only do so much from the user end; a brighter line would go a long way.

I really should have qualified my earlier remarks with this. I guess I took it as a given that increased flagwork is done in concert with a clearer voice from the mods. I left this site once before over this same kind of ugly victim blaming. Things have gotten better in some ways, but in others it's creepingly gotten worse on this subject. Mods have pushed back against ugliness before, and it really needs to happen again.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:58 AM on May 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

I believe the mods are doing as much as possible to facilitate the changes they can make.

I love our mods. Modding is a near-thankless job and everyone's a critic. As a community, we're testy, often a bit humorless, and entitled and I am certain that we are really hard to deal with, so credit where credit is much-deserved. But I don't think we should say the mods are already "doing as much as possible," because there are many possible things they do not yet do, or do regularly, some of which might be harmful to the site, but some of which have potential and remain sort of untried.

I've said this before, but I think there is a problem of the frame. I tend to see a hesitancy here, a feeling of obligation to think and rethink and consider and justify and probe, resulting in maybe a bias toward inaction. The moderation philosophy seems still generally focused on atomized behaviors or, now, perhaps, user patterns across multiple threads, but the problem is more one of general sensitivity, of where the needle for 'acceptable' is set. The needle, right now, is set with a pretty high tolerance for background-level misogyny. Because it takes super-overt sexist behavior, and a long and visible pattern of it, for the mods to start asking people to modify their participation style, that means the users have to generally wade through a long 'burden of proof' period of dealing with sexist slings and arrows, and that changes the entire texture of the site experience for those people.

People have raised comparisons with jessamyn. I think that's more than nostalgia or a popularity or personality thing. I think what worked about jessamyn's moderation is that she was an excellent observer of people, highly sensitive to microaggressions and bad faith participation. They pinged her radar much more loudly, and she did not usually advocate for making a lot of room for those opinions to be held up and turned around and argued for as legitimate debate. She could see them, she could see that it was harming the site, and she nipped the heels of those people quickly and unequivocally (most of the time) in a visible enough way for everyone to understand that site standards were in play.
posted by Miko at 6:02 AM on May 16, 2015 [51 favorites]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the general mod policy has always been to start gently and softly for lighter infractions, whatever they are. It's so only recently that a heavier approach is being done and it's constantly being rethought and examined as they try to find the appropriate line for each situation.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:09 AM on May 16, 2015

if anyone wants to send me/us links that they think would be particularly helpful to look at, I'd be happy to receive.

you guys want it in the contact form or in here?

are you only looking for the worst of the worst? what do you think about non-feminism threads where sea lioning happens or is that outside the scope? because i think a lot of times those have some consistent problem users that overlap with sexism issues. i can have that in a separate list to be discarded if not helpful.

should there be any notes so you know why we included it or is it more presented for your consideration without comment so you can do your own analysis?
posted by twist my arm at 6:16 AM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Anything you want to submit, in whatever form, with notes or without. Please send to contact form, and if folks want to use the same subject line for ease of searching on our end, you could use "list for boyzone problem threads."

I've begun to assemble some myself, and have a fairly good list going based on most-flags, plus relevant content, but there are some fuzzy areas, and we have a couple of busy / difficult threads going on at the moment, so a little pushed for time to pursue more just now. Will update though.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:29 AM on May 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

Is sea lioning actually against policy here? Outside of the context of feminism threads? How could the mods ever enforce that on a general interest site, where reasonable demands for backing up outrageous statements are often attempts at fixing derails not creating them.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 6:32 AM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Meaning I get the idea, but whoo boy what a minefield to navigate!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 6:35 AM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think sealioning is already against site policy, under the "Don't be a jerk" clause.
posted by workerant at 7:16 AM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

So this thread is huge and i havent read the whole thing but I have 2 suggestions that I hadnt seen anyone mention:

1. It seems that there are the same people who come in to derail threads about certain topics. The current solution seems to be some mod notes to cool off or a 24 hour ban. Would it be possible to ban users from certain tags? For example, users that have a habit of derailing threads about feminism are banned from commenting in threads tagged with feminism/misogyny/patriarchy, either on a permanent or for a period of time. I dont know how the behind the scenes works here so i dont know if its even possible.

2. The other issue, based on what i had read to this point, is new users who dont know the culture of the site. This may be too mod intensive but how about new users' comments maybe require mod approval before posting for a period of time, like training wheels. I dont know how often new users sign up and how often they comment so this could be totally infeasible based on the resources available.
posted by LizBoBiz at 7:21 AM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Would it be possible to ban users from certain tags?

I see what you're getting at; the issue there is that to be effect that would have to rely on far more consistent and thorough tagging than we actually see in practice. It's far more practical along those lines for us to talk to someone directly and clearly about staying away from General Topic X and holding them to that reactively ("we said stay away from x, you did not, discussion over, adios") than to try and handle it on the technical side based on folksonomic labeling.

This may be too mod intensive but how about new users' comments maybe require mod approval before posting for a period of time, like training wheels.

Queue comments would be a big technical and social change to the site and so is not something I see us ever doing. That said, we do have existing tools for monitoring in aggregate comments by new users, and that's something we could revisit and tweak with a mind toward getting more utility out of it for potential problem situations.

That said, with new users who aren't familiar with site culture getting into tiresome Yeah But Let's Start From First Principles Re: Topic X loops after joining, we tend to see fairly prompt reactions from the community, conversationally but also in flags and heads ups; I'd say as much as anything a brand new person showing up for another round of a tired argument is the least likely case for crappy behavior slipping under the radar, because mefites tend to have a collective sense of this place and to recognize someone new and conspicuous in a way that might not happen so much when a dumb conversation is sort of kicking up from among people who have been around for a while and so seem more familiar.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:32 AM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think we've been seeing old accounts come out of the woodwork with really bizarre comments, rather than a bunch of new users?
posted by erratic meatsack at 7:35 AM on May 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

Yeah, I also feel like some of the recent wtf comments have been from longtime but very low-volume members. Like, joined in 2004, maybe haven't been around much since 2005, but now they're popping into some thread to offer their Factual Information About Women. I have sort of rolled my eyes at a few of these on the assumption that they're going to drop their one stupid comment and then leave again so it won't be a larger problem, and just letting the person show their ass is better than jumping on their comment with a delete and a note that will only draw their further attention. But this thread is a good push to be more firm on those.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:55 AM on May 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

As a possibly-of-interest detail on that, I've moderated boards which have seen that kind of behavior manifest, and it was often that the users of those old accounts either had a public email address or had set up an email address in the same name as their user ID with one of the popular webmail providers. When those addresses fell into disuse and were shut down, trolls could set up new accounts with the same name, and request a password reset from the site.

That may not be what's happening here, but one of the core learnings of Gamergate is indubitably that there are plenty of people out there for whom a credit card payment is an insurmountable barrier, but who have effectively unlimited free time.
posted by running order squabble fest at 7:56 AM on May 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

We haven't seen much of anything obvious there; "person hasn't commented in eight years but suddenly wants to get in a fight about something tangential to...ethics in game journalism?" is a weird enough that we'll go looking when we notice. Not to say it's impossible that it's someone pulling identity hijinks, and the unknowability there makes it hard to say for certain either way, but in practice someone with an old mefi account who dropped off the site but then got reminded of it years later and logged back in is a really plausible situation and one we also see in far more benign and positive circumstances now and then. (Viz. older folks delurking to say a kind word or two when there's big site news, which is itself pretty common.)

But it's something we do sort of keep an eye out for, for all that. Explicit "hey, help me back in" requests tend to put a user top of mind for the the mods such that them immediately getting up to something odd (vs. the much more common case of them just hanging out like an average mefite) will tend to jump out at us. Someone signing in for the first time in a while to get in a fight may also turn out in practice to be someone who, when they were active years ago, was inclined already to get in the same sorts of fights.

While it would be nice if some difficult users could finally internalize exactly how their behavior disrupts the site for others, does that happen often enough to warrant mods interacting with difficult users in ways that allow them to loophole their disruptive behavior, as long as they eventually drop it?

My experience is that there are a lot of users who, whether or not they truly internalize and convert on a problem issue, do in fact acknowledge and internalize the need for them to change or eliminate their behavior on that problem issue. But those people fall off the radar because they stop doing the thing that people were finding bothersome, and so they don't stand out in the collective memory the way a ban or a real final line-in-the-sand moment does. Someone ceasing to behave memorably badly is just kind of inherently unmemorable.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:13 AM on May 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's frustrating because it's asymmetric and exploits a structural disconnect between text on a page and real people — I'd hope he wouldn't be so tone deaf in person, especially since a good five or six women are doing the equivalent of "Shut the fuck up!" — but from my read, cortex was responding in a way that took that asymmetry and structural disconnect away from him, in a way that had to end with either him dropping it here, getting banned, or (Christmas in May) finally understanding why people were upset with him.

Man, did I have a different read of this from you. I think it would be extremely unusual to ban someone outright, rather for a day, as a result of sea lioning.

I also disagree that a good five or six women were doing the equivalent of "Shut the fuck up," which is against site guidelines. I'm not sure exactly which comments you were referring to but I don't see what you see.

I have problems with calling NoraReed's comment a personal attack, but I don't have time to explain what I mean before my computer is taken over for automatic updates.
posted by onlyconnect at 8:25 AM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

The real enemy here is Windows.
posted by running order squabble fest at 8:32 AM on May 16, 2015 [12 favorites]

Seconding cortex that we definitely do have people who act badly at one time, and then something changes (either the penny drops, or their life circumstances change) so that they stop the problem behavior.

It's still useful for people to tell us in a thread like this, look, this is a bigger problem than you've been thinking it is and something needs to shift. We are hearing that. We made changes after the big misogyny thread this winter, and I think those worked pretty well. In the last couple of weeks I don't know what's the cause (are we doing something different or is there just a random uptick in dumbassery) but we're definitely looking at reinforcing the changes we made before and revisiting some of the longtime problem users and acting more definitely on some of those cases. Thank you to the people who wrote in to the contact form about specific people/behaviors; I want to underline, that's very helpful.

It's been a weird week, since r_n and I were both offsite for most of the week (due to unrelated prior plans)... so cortex has been modding the US daytime by himself all week (4x16hr shifts, thank you Josh), during what has mostly-coincidentally been the busiest week in months. So, the particular threads from this week were subject to a very unusual mod situation. They do still represent real problems and I've appreciated the discussion in here; it will definitely inform my actions on this stuff.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:37 AM on May 16, 2015 [13 favorites]

Now, NoraReed is a sharp and funny commenter, but she also has a habit of being kind of jerky and button-pushing in the process.

I, and i imagine the vast majority of the people replying to this thread in agreement that this is an issue, would rather read 1000 brash norareed callouts of argumentative comments than even 1/10th of the but-but-but/i don't see how this is a problem stuff that was in that thread.

This is the kind of thing I think people who fear an echo chamber are talking about. A poster like NoraReed gets called things like "brash" and "kinda jerky" where someone on the "wrong side" would get flagged and called out for their "*ist bullshit" and a general pile on would ensue. No, not every conversation is a debate but I think some people are afraid that no conversation will be a debate because if you're on the wrong side of some ever shifting invisible line you're the devil incarnate where as if you're on the correct side you can abuse people, or groups of people, almost at will, and you're just considered incisive and/or brash*.

I'm not a frequent commentor, or particularly controversial, so I'm not super invested but I do read quite a few blue and grey threads and that's the impression I get. Oh, and I don't mean to make this about NoraReed but she's an easy pull as an example.

* May contain slight traces of exaggeration for effect. Comment processed on a keyboard that contains tree nuts and other allergens. Comment not available to residents of Quebec.
posted by MikeMc at 8:42 AM on May 16, 2015 [14 favorites]

No, not every conversation is a debate but I think some people are afraid that no conversation will be a debate because if you're on the wrong side of some ever shifting invisible line you're the devil incarnate where as if you're on the correct side you can abuse people, or groups of people, almost at will, and you're just considered incisive and/or brash*.

You know if I seriously worried about everything that some people are afraid of I wouldn't have time to get dressed in the morning.
posted by PMdixon at 8:47 AM on May 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

This is the kind of thing I think people who fear an echo chamber are talking about. A poster like NoraReed gets called things like "brash" and "kinda jerky" where someone on the "wrong side" would get flagged and called out for their "*ist bullshit" and a general pile on would ensue.

It's not like I can't see where you get that idea from, but the fact is that the chances of NoraReed saying something sexist, racist, etc. are pretty fucking low, and the chances of someone on the other side saying something like that are... not so low.
posted by topynate at 8:47 AM on May 16, 2015 [17 favorites]

Perhaps from your view and experience. Is there any real specifics beyond what has been stated, confrontation, warnings?
I believe the mods are doing as much as possible to facilitate the changes they can make.
That thread was horrid, I did the reasonable thing and not even read it. Problem solved for me.
What works for you is still something you need to explore and examine with some specficity and data.

I... why was this comment even allowed to stand? This is precisely the problem. "Oh, well that's what you say, but it's not as if anybody else is agreeing with you and you haven't presented sufficient data to prove that you are harmed. On the other hand, I think everything is fine, without presenting any data, or in fact reading the things we are talking about."

Seriously?
posted by Lyn Never at 8:49 AM on May 16, 2015 [20 favorites]

I would like to see a firm line drawn on people coming into a conversation about sexism in which people are already discussing the sexism at hand and gaslighting that it's not sexism. Racism and classism as well.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:52 AM on May 16, 2015 [16 favorites]

I'd like a firm line drawn against "well, if it's a problem for you, just don't participate!" suggestions.
posted by Lexica at 8:57 AM on May 16, 2015 [38 favorites]

I... why was this comment even allowed to stand?

Well, it was allowed to stand because stuff very rarely gets deleted from Metatalk, and would probably have been allowed to stand on the blue as well. Godawfulness is not in itself a sufficient cause for deletion.
posted by running order squabble fest at 9:00 AM on May 16, 2015

OK, here we have the spectre of the dreaded feminist echo chamber rearing its head again. At some point Metafilter will officially have to come down on the "side" that sexism is real, that feminism is OK, that anti-feminism is NOT OK, and that voicing opinions to the contrary is just not acceptable. Until then the women on this site *will* be stuck doing the heavy lifting until their backs give out.
posted by tigrrrlily at 9:01 AM on May 16, 2015 [33 favorites]

This is the kind of thing I think people who fear an echo chamber are talking about. A poster like NoraReed gets called things like "brash" and "kinda jerky" where someone on the "wrong side" would get flagged and called out for their "*ist bullshit" and a general pile on would ensue.

This sounds like you'd rather *ist users be allowed to poison the conversation for everyone than have a "brash" and "kinda jerky" user that wasn't being a bigoted asshole. Which: fuck that noise. And even if welcoming users who were not bigoted but were "brash" and "kinda jerky" over ones who are bigoted assholes defined what an echo chamber was, those two are not two sides of the same coin or equally bad. Of course, that's not the definition of an echo chamber, that's called "not putting up with bigoted assholes."

No, not every conversation is a debate but I think some people are afraid that no conversation will be a debate because if you're on the wrong side of some ever shifting invisible line you're the devil incarnate where as if you're on the correct side you can abuse people, or groups of people, almost at will, and you're just considered incisive and/or brash.

Not referring to women as if they were objects shouldn't be a shifting invisible line, for starters. The whole point of this MeTa is that line seems to be stacked against women rather than your contrarian silent majority pals. Same goes for any of a number of issues such as racism, homophobia, transphobia, and so forth.

Oh, and I don't mean to make this about NoraReed but she's an easy pull as an example.

I call bullshit. For someone who keeps on coming into contentious MeTas to brag about how many people they block, I find this extremely hard to believe.
posted by zombieflanders at 9:04 AM on May 16, 2015 [27 favorites]

Oh, and I don't mean to make this about NoraReed but she's an easy pull as an example.

I call bullshit. For someone who keeps on coming into contentious MeTas to brag about how many people they block, I find this extremely hard to believe.

Call it what you like, that particular user came up frequently in this thread for a reason. My comment wasn't about just her but she's a great example. It gets into that whole punching up/punching down down thing but NR works really well as an example.
posted by MikeMc at 9:11 AM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

It would be great if this didn't slide off into some kind of debate over NoraReed.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:12 AM on May 16, 2015 [34 favorites]

Wait, taking issue with sexists is now punching down?

Dogs and cats living together...
posted by running order squabble fest at 9:32 AM on May 16, 2015 [17 favorites]

Yeah, I... don't think punching up/down really applies here. Maybe try rephrasing that a bit?
posted by erratic meatsack at 9:48 AM on May 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

One rule I've adopted recently is to stay out of threads on contentious subjects when I'm having a rough time in real life. It's makes it very easy to get into the "Oh yeah, you think you got problems?" head. (and I've had a very rough couple of months, but I'm better now. I'll tell you about it some other time, but the advice is good).
posted by jonmc at 9:54 AM on May 16, 2015 [10 favorites]

A pretty gross argument that has come up here before, and which I have unfortunately seen on the rise elsewhere, is that if someone's *ist views go against the majority attitude in a community then this accords them "minority" status, so calling them out on their *ist behavior constitutes bullying and abuse and silencing a minority. It is a really vile coopting of legitimate arguments presented by actually oppressed minorities used to further a hateful agenda and it actually sickens me more than outright unashamed hate speech.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:56 AM on May 16, 2015 [87 favorites]

I went in to that tattoo thread when I was in a good place in my life. It was an interesting subject, I was rested, I was relaxed, I had some free time for a change and was feeling sociable, and it was still unexpectedly awful. So can we give that whole thing a rest now?
posted by shelleycat at 10:05 AM on May 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

I was just speaking for myself.
posted by jonmc at 10:06 AM on May 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

if you're on the wrong side of some ever shifting invisible line

What constitutes misogyny is not an "ever shifting invisible line." What's happening instead is that you used to be part of a culture (and a website) that had a high tolerance for misogyny, that is now very clearly expressing a desire to have much less tolerance for it. What does and doesn't qualify as misogyny, though, has been a reasonably clear thing for decades.

This really isn't that hard. I think a lot of this kind of rhetoric is kind of a way to throw up a "but I'm so confused!" defense/smokescreen. Yep, the rules may be changing. To reduce tolerance for misogyny. Brash, jerky-acting people who are not acting misogynist, though, remain welcome. It's one of the secret ingredients in MeFi's special mix.
posted by Miko at 10:15 AM on May 16, 2015 [61 favorites]

accords them "minority" status, so calling them out on their *ist behavior constitutes bullying and abuse and silencing a minority.

I agree, completely vile. I think the variant that gets played here is the "that person isn't censured because they are popular With other users." It isn't that misogyny is bad itself, it's that the popular people just don't like it, so getting called on your misogyny is akin to being teased for being in the SCA.
posted by OmieWise at 10:16 AM on May 16, 2015 [12 favorites]

using sj-inspired terminology and ideas to imply hypocrisy is par for the course. the minority thing is one. white men talking about their "lived experience." using alleged abuse as a shield (gg calling zoe quinn a rapist/abuser) which then opens up "victim-blaming." reverse *ism eg. equality/i'm a humanist/all lives matter, also "i'm offended that you called my actions bigoted"/this is my religion/you're anti-christian. using actual minorities like #notyourshield, the PoC/women correspondents on fox news.

so then when you take issue with any of that well you're a hypocrite and you don't actually believe in equality, you just want women/"the right people" to be in charge of men and "ooooh some people just want to wear the oppressor hat with the exact same rules whereas i want *actual* equality."

it's impressive the way something horrible can still be impressive. they adapt like the borg and judo your shit.
posted by twist my arm at 10:24 AM on May 16, 2015 [14 favorites]

I was just speaking for myself.

Yeah, I get that. And I wasn't aiming it at just you but at everyone making similar suggestions. Because you're not the first to mention it, like seriously we didn't already think of this ourselves?, and I don't think we need it suggested again.

Because by now it's pretty clear, the only way for me to avoid this kind of shit on metafilter is to not read metafilter at all. So I'd rather work on fixing that than the ongoing suggestions about how we brought this on ourselves by reading the wrong thing or at the wrong time or in the wrong mood or whatever.
posted by shelleycat at 10:26 AM on May 16, 2015 [23 favorites]

I'm now going to take my own advice.
posted by jonmc at 10:27 AM on May 16, 2015

"that person isn't censured because they are popular With other users."

A sentiment that I most see aimed at female users, frankly.
posted by KathrynT at 10:31 AM on May 16, 2015 [23 favorites]

Man, I took like a month off of MF after my last attempt at a go round with the MRA brigade resulted in a ~timeout~, and these jackoffs are still being unmitigated fartlords about NoraReed, really?

Please get off NoraReed's spiritual dick, horrible men with horrible opinions of MeFi. I'm sorry it's bigger than yours, but holy shit.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 10:42 AM on May 16, 2015 [30 favorites]

This was bad, this is why it was bad. What are some ideas moving forward we can take as a community to stop this? What firm actions can be taken by the mods right now?

Once those are answered clearly, for the love of twinkies, close this thread.
posted by FunkyHelix at 10:46 AM on May 16, 2015

I am so, so tired of the Echo Chamber Spectre getting wheeled out whenever there's a pushback against crappy rhetorical devices. If people want to talk like grownups about grownup things without having to entertain tedious and transparent attempts at polluting the conversation, I think this is a reasonable expectation. That echo chamber charge is the rhetorical equivalent of "weed is a gateway drug" - just more unfalsifiable slippery slope bullshit that characterizes people who want to be treated with a modicum of respect as censorious and reactionary. Pretty rich considering the accusation is invariably used to defend reactionary behavior.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 10:53 AM on May 16, 2015 [21 favorites]

Once those are answered clearly, for the love of twinkies, close this thread.

I absolutely hate it when people do this while other people are clearly still talking about stuff. This is MetaTalk. We talk about stuff here, often at length. Sometimes it can feel tense, but without these briefly-uncomfortable conversations, long patterns of entrenched unpleasantness remain unchecked. I think the latter is worse, and I prefer the talking about it.
posted by Errant at 11:01 AM on May 16, 2015 [19 favorites]

I am so, so tired of the Echo Chamber Spectre

For serious. The best part is that whenever dudes get to whining about it, it's pretty much always because they sense the community might be trying to head toward a consensus that people who aren't like them (= the whiny dudes) are also human beings who are inherently deserving of respect.

It's like they think that for women to be afforded more respect and credibility than we currently are (which is to say, more than pretty much none), men will/must naturally be afforded less of those things -- which is where the "I'm not a feminist, I'm an EGALITARIAN" brigade comes in -- rather than just agreeing that men AND women are deserving of respect because we're all people.

So their fear leads them to lash out and raise the spectres of silencing and list-making and McCarthyism, much in the same way that their impending demographic obsolescence is making all the decrepit white dudes in Congress piss their pants over the prospect of one day not being automatically afforded the title of Rightful Leaders of the Known Universe, Forever. And I don't know what to tell them except "sorry bruh, but you're gonna have to get the fuck over it."
posted by divined by radio at 11:08 AM on May 16, 2015 [23 favorites]

I absolutely hate it when people do this while other people are clearly still talking about stuff. This is MetaTalk. We talk about stuff here, often at length. Sometimes it can feel tense, but without these briefly-uncomfortable conversations, long patterns of entrenched unpleasantness remain unchecked. I think the latter is worse, and I prefer the talking about it.

Yeah. If something's really intractable I can see it, but normally when I see this shit it comes with an unspoken sense of "oh no there is a conflict and also I am being exposed for not being firmly in the majority or even the plurality of user opinion, mods halp pls so I can continue to believe that I'm part of a silent majority and the lurkers support me in email!"

It's the same with the "popular users" shit. Why do you think they're popular in the first place, guys?
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 11:10 AM on May 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

People were doing it above with the "I feel SO sorry for the mods" stuff. You know, I get it too, it's really really hard to be a mod and deal with everything that they deal with but is there really any reason to publically pity them other than implying that women here are being too harsh and demanding? Which, if you think that in this thread, wow we can't really tamp down the tone enough for you can we?

If you feel sorry for them, maybe tell them that you appreciate them or send them a private note some time. "Matt's on a beach with a piña colada" type stuff is pretty insulting-- we have an entire subset to bring up site issues, this thread is long but civil and a lot of good conversation is happening, with basically no actual attacking of the mods whatsoever.
posted by easter queen at 11:14 AM on May 16, 2015 [17 favorites]

The thing that bothers me the most about "we must avoid echo chambers!" is that it is just a way of preserving the echo chamber that the speaker agrees with or doesn't even notice.

I'm only just now getting to the "7 examples of privilege" thread, and I'm on the verge of frustrated and angry tears about all the mind boggling stupidity and ignorance there. But it shows what sad sort of echo chamber we'd be stuck with if it weren't for feminists: the assumption of gender essentialism (seasoned with evolutionary psychology) and the denial of oppression. THAT is a fucking echo chamber.
posted by meese at 11:16 AM on May 16, 2015 [30 favorites]

If you feel sorry for them, maybe tell them that you appreciate them or send them a private note some time.

Or fucking donate. We users pay their salaries. For once, there's an opportunity to actually be the opposite of the "MY TAXES PAY THEIR SALARY argh blarghle rarghle!!" crap Tea Partiers spew about every hapless public servant just trying to do their job. We literally pay for their salaries. I bet if everyone put a dollar amount on "the poooor mods dealing with those hysterical terrible OTHER users" and actually donated, after a few 300+ commenters they could at least afford to go out to a nice restaurant or something.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 11:22 AM on May 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

I don't mind people feeling sorry for the mods. They do difficult work, and walk thin lines, and very often just get criticized when something goes wrong but not really remembered when things go well. We have this site only because of the work they do. This is another difficult conversation. It's one of the reasons Matt left the site. I don't mind people pointing out that reality.

I am a woman, and I have historically participated in these discussions.
posted by onlyconnect at 11:23 AM on May 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

The LBT thread has bugged me for days. I think one of my comments did NOT get deleted in that thread. More and more on the blue, I feel like I can't disagree with the content of any FPP that has to do with women. And that really pisses me off, that because I don't have the right, sanctioned opinion, I can't weigh in on a discussion that is relevant to me as a woman. More and more, I feel that some people can get away with summarizing the worst they can think of someone and put it into quotes like a commenter actually said it and it makes the thread unnecessarily hostile. And that somehow is all OK and applauded.

It is uncomfortably like desperately wanting to speak up in class but not wanting to incur the wrath and mockery of the mean girls.
posted by sfkiddo at 11:24 AM on May 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

your comments were deleted because they broke the guidelines - not because of your viewpoint or a cadre of mean girls. you can't complain about how metafilter does this or that on the blue. even if the rest of your comment is fine, if you include that kind of snipe, the whole thing will be deleted. personally, i think your swipes about women not having to be personally oppressed was shitty (especially since you're now using as a cudgel to claim oppression), but that wasn't what got your comments deleted.
posted by nadawi at 11:33 AM on May 16, 2015 [30 favorites]

Thank you guys for the kind words to mods. (Josh especially earned them the last few days, thank you Josh). But as jessamyn always said, we're ok, we are glad to be here, we're well paid, and we're appreciative of the spirit in which nearly everyone engages with the community here trying to make/keep it a decent place to be. So even though tough MeTas can be tough, they can be really necessary and useful (and mods benefit from that in the long run), and I think this thread has gone well considering it's a subject that people are understandably upset about.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:42 AM on May 16, 2015 [14 favorites]

I am willing to own that one of my comments broke the guidelines; I think it is the culmination of the hostility I've seen in past posts (that I've not commented on). It's frustrating to me, I used to really enjoy Metafilter.

Your comment that I'm "now using [the deletion] as a cudgel to claim oppression" is unnecessarily mean and fighty.
posted by sfkiddo at 11:45 AM on May 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

LobsterMitten, I do appreciate you explaining the context of cortex having to work crazy hours this week. I know it doesn't make sense to always share that stuff, but it felt particularly relevant this time.
posted by almostmanda at 11:49 AM on May 16, 2015 [10 favorites]

Yeah, it's a situation that almost never happens, but it's also one that we don't usually want to advertise while it's ongoing - hence the explanation once I was back.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:50 AM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

at least 3 of your comments were deleted for venting your frustration in a way that is against the guidelines or complaining about the deletion.
posted by nadawi at 11:50 AM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

poffin boffin: "A pretty gross argument that has come up here before, and which I have unfortunately seen on the rise elsewhere, is that if someone's *ist views go against the majority attitude in a community then this accords them "minority" status, so calling them out on their *ist behavior constitutes bullying and abuse and silencing a minority. "

So common there's even a name for it: The Paradox of Tolerance ... whether by refusing to tolerate others' intolerance, you have betrayed your own principles of toleration.

The general answer is that there are some baseline "rights" that are more important than tolerance and that if the intolerant want to abridge those rights, the tolerant are not required to tolerate it; and more generally, that when the intolerant are demanding toleration of actions that tend to undermine the community in question, the community is not required to tolerate those actions. To the "You're being intolerant of my sexism!" people, I would respond, "The community needs to be intolerant of that for its self-preservation, as well as to meet the baseline 'right' of members to be recognized as fully human; the virtue of tolerance does not extend to issues that would destroy the community or cause clear violation of its members basic humanity."

If those people still want to complain "But inconsistent!" I say, "Well, yes, congratulations on identifying one of the most basic questions in political theory relating to modern liberal democracies; it's an irresolvable philosophical tension that probably won't be resolved here. Deal with it; it's not going anywhere."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:12 PM on May 16, 2015 [79 favorites]

You know, I kind of wonder if boyzone is at this point rather counter-productive phrasing, because on the surface it makes it seem like the problem is tee-hee boys vs girls, pink vs blues, ewww you have cooties nonsense, which gives a bit of cover to all the reactionary "wah mean girls"/"it's about ethics in forums posting!!!!" types. Sadly, "reflexively misogynist MRA shithead zone" doesn't roll off the tongue keyboard in the same way.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 12:28 PM on May 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

The reason I used it, and what I like about it, is that it appeals to site history in such a way that I hoped we could avoid having to relitigate whether this place could even be hostile to women at all, or whether making this place less hostile to women was a site goal. It didn't seem work particularly well, though, since we're still having the same "but avoiding echo chambers is more important" conversation. I can definitely see your point too, and maybe there's a better a way to reference those conversations without making it sound overly juvenile or polarized.
posted by dialetheia at 12:36 PM on May 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

> ... it's really really hard to be a mod and deal with everything that they deal with but is there really any reason to publically pity them other than implying that women here are being too harsh and demanding?

Yes.
posted by nangar at 12:37 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

I actually kind of like the term 'boyzone' because it sidesteps having to debate any one person's view, or the exact niceties of whether a particular comment counts as misogynist. A bunch of comments of the bad kind don't have to be strictly speaking misogynist to make for boyzone. It's a good term (IMO) for the overall effect on the atmosphere.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:41 PM on May 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

nadawi, I don't have screenshots (because I was gobsmacked that everything got deleted, first time I've had anything deleted in 9 years!) but I don't remember it like that. I was one of the few people actually talking about the article. The fact that I didn't like that she tried to universalize her personal tattoo regret to broad statements about all women was perhaps not framed as well as I could've done (I got pissy about the misandry celebration that was happening). But while I don't like when men speak for me, I don't like when other women do either (hence my issues with this and other posts).
posted by sfkiddo at 12:45 PM on May 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

Honestly, I don't think MetaFilter on the whole, or even certain threads like the LBT thread, can be accurately described as "reflexively misogynist MRA shithead zone." As a woman, that has not been my experience here.
posted by onlyconnect at 12:46 PM on May 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

sfkiddo, on a quick scan, it looks like your deleted comments in there were deleted for being metacommentary ("Mefites are like this" type of stuff).
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:46 PM on May 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think "boyzone" generally works, but It can create some confusion if women are contributing to the sexist atmosphere. I don't think tirades about lower class women or "patriarchy is your imagination, ladies!" are any less offensive or deraily when a female voice is behind them.
posted by almostmanda at 12:47 PM on May 16, 2015 [14 favorites]

I take the point about the desirability of a political neutral term, LM, but I still think it's a little bit... dismissive? Minimizing? on some level.

I think "boyzone" generally works, but It can create some confusion if women are contributing to the sexist atmosphere. I don't think tirades about lower class women or "patriarchy is your imagination, ladies!" are any less offensive or deraily when a female voice is behind them.

It's also sort of giving tacit approval to the idea that being welcoming to women is something only women care about and that men are automatically or naturally opposed to, which is crap because there are a ton of cool, feminist men on MeFi who are totally awesome about these issues.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 12:54 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Ok, LobsterMitten, I will work on not mixing Meta commentary into content. (Or, more likely, just go away.)
posted by sfkiddo at 12:55 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm not at all suggesting you go away! Just meant to be answering the plain factual question about the deletions, that's all. It's fine, you're fine.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:56 PM on May 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

No matter how many of these and past MeTas I read, "boyzone" will forever conjure these guys up for me so it's hard to read it in the appropriate tone. It's an inoffensive word for offensive behaviour.

Taz said earlier it was helpful if people used the same subject line when they were using the contact form to send examples of problem threads. I'd be happy to make an effort to flag more often and follow up with a note to the mods to explain why (which I don't always do). Is there some term - and boyzone is grand as it has site history - that we could all use in the notes we send the mods about problem threads/users? So the mods would be able to collate them easily and clearly see where (or who) the specific problems were?
posted by billiebee at 12:57 PM on May 16, 2015

It's also sort of giving tacit approval to the idea that being welcoming to women is something only women care about and that men are automatically or naturally opposed to, which is crap because there are a ton of cool, feminist men on MeFi who are totally awesome about these issues.

I doubt that any guy who truly cares about the disturbing ways women are being treated or spoken about on this site actually gives a flying wallenda about the term 'boyzone'.
posted by zarq at 1:08 PM on May 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

Given the record of the Wallendas', Boyzone works.

For example, when the dogs and I Rowl up to lamp breaking stage, my wife usually says "easy in the doodle zone"
Works.
posted by clavdivs at 1:32 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Boyzone works for me. In my experience, when women come up with words to describe their experience, it's usually a pretty good choice, and even if they change it to something supposedly neural, men will take issue with that.
posted by maxsparber at 1:40 PM on May 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

I got pissy about the misandry celebration

You got pissy about the celebration of a satirical construct with no real-world examples. Way to go.
posted by tigrrrlily at 1:44 PM on May 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

I doubt that any guy who truly cares about the disturbing ways women are being treated or spoken about on this site actually gives a flying wallenda about the term 'boyzone'.

I was having a conversation about sexism and feminism with a woman once, who was surprised that I thought or gave a shit about any of this stuff. She said, "In my experience, boys don't usually like talking to smart women." I said, "Men do." She said, "Ooh, that is a good comeback, nice one." I said, "Yeah, I'm hilariously proud of myself right now, I'm definitely telling this story again."

I think "boyzone" sums up the childish and petulant atmosphere of ingrained sexism just fine. Maybe more to the point, if I start to feel personally affronted or implicated by that, maybe I should think about why I'm investing in an immature identity.
posted by Errant at 1:57 PM on May 16, 2015 [10 favorites]

Nthing boyzone as a perfectly neutral way of describing how boys carve out a zone for themselves by pushing all other discussion out of the way, especially as it denotes immaturity.

Misandry, though, is right up there with "reverse racism" for bonehead terms that co-opt the language of the oppressed while demonstrating cluelessness about what oppression is. I see that and I stop reading.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 2:04 PM on May 16, 2015 [13 favorites]

...did i miss a misandry celebration?
posted by nadawi at 2:15 PM on May 16, 2015 [28 favorites]

> You got pissy about the celebration of a satirical construct with no real-world examples. Way to go.

"reflexively misogynist MRA shithead zone" as a replacement for "boyzone" may not be actual for-real misandry but it sure does snuggle up reeeal close to it and purr.
posted by jfuller at 2:15 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

what? pointing out misogyny snuggles up next to misandry (which doesn't real anyway)?
posted by nadawi at 2:19 PM on May 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

jfuller, the point is, comments like that garbage "doggy style" one are not good for the site regardless of whether you prefer to call them misogyny or just "the kind of thing that makes for a gross boyzone". Fighting over what counts as misogyny is beside the point.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:21 PM on May 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

jfuller, then your concept of a boyzone differs considerably from mine.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:22 PM on May 16, 2015

"reflexively misogynist MRA shithead zone" as a replacement for "boyzone" may not be actual for-real misandry but it sure does snuggle up reeeal close to it and purr.

No it doesn't. What a weird thing to say.
posted by OmieWise at 2:22 PM on May 16, 2015 [32 favorites]

To elaborate what I mean by "fighting over what counts as misogyny": coming in here to say "oh but it's not misogyny" or "it's not sexism" is fruitless because even if you somehow won that argument, those comments would still be bad. So. More nixing of bad comments of that type, because gross boyzone is bad for the site.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:23 PM on May 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

I hate the "but but but echo chamber!" argument SO MUCH. No one wants everyone to be in agreement, we want to be able to actually discuss the topic of an FPP without it being derailed by this every. single time. I imagine it's like we had many threads on hip-hop on this site, and during the course of the conversation there were always people popping in to say "Is rap even music tho? Prove it to me! I demand this proof and I won't shut up til you provide it!!!!"

So instead of talking about how awesome Kendrick Lamar's last album was you talk about whether rap is even music. Instead of talking about whether Iggy Azalea trying to sound like she's from Atlanta is racist you talk about whether rap is even music. Instead of talking about how 90s hip hop seems to be pinging people's nostalgia radar lately you talk about whether rap is even music.

The echo chamber already exists because only one conversation is possible: whether rap is even music. Nothing deeper or more interesting than this can ever be discussed because yes, please, let's again have another conversation about whether rap is even music because discussing topics from first principles every time is soooo intellectually stimulating and not at all a waste of time.

Not all of the people asking "Is rap even music?" are trying to be deliberately obtuse, some of them honestly are just curious and are asking questions. But their contributions are functionally the same, which is to keep the conversation circiling the drain of "Is rap even music?" so that it can never advance to anything more interesting.
posted by supercrayon at 2:27 PM on May 16, 2015 [60 favorites]

"reflexively misogynist MRA shithead zone" as a replacement for "boyzone" may not be actual for-real misandry but it sure does snuggle up reeeal close to it and purr.

You sure do like inserting weird, ever so vaguely sexualized metaphors into your aggrieved MRA nonsense on these kinds of threads, that's like the third or fourth I've seen you do it and it gives me the hinks every time.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 2:27 PM on May 16, 2015 [25 favorites]

If anything, "reflexively misogynist MRA shithead zone" is less sexist as it describes a behaviour and does not ascribe that behaviour to an entire sex.
posted by cardboard at 2:27 PM on May 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

Neither are sexist.
posted by maxsparber at 2:30 PM on May 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

Is it just me, or would "misandry celebration" in some gorgeous calligraphy font make an AMAZING lower back tattoo? I have about a million pending ideas for indelible inking onto the canvas of my pre-carcass but I'm for real starting to think a beautifully scripted misandry might not be a bad one to add to the list.

And hey, at least it's something I would love to explain to the legitimately unsettling number of dudes who stop me on the street (or walk up behind me, hook their finger on my neckline, and pull down so they can reveal more of my mostly-hidden back piece) and demand a rundown of my tattoo choices. As I'm always fond of saying: misandry IS real... in my heart.
posted by divined by radio at 2:37 PM on May 16, 2015 [21 favorites]

"Misogyny" does not simply describe "hatred of women". Misogyny describes an ingrained socialization of hatred for women, an everyday atmosphere of hostility, contempt, and harm. Sexism is the resulting institutional behavior, but misogyny is the cause. In this sense, "misandry", like "reverse racism" or "heterophobia", does not exist, because there is no institutional and ingrained social framework of hatred for men.

Well aside from all that, the point of saying "reflexively misogynist MRA shithead zone" instead of "boyzone" is not because "MRA shithead" and "boy" are interchangeable, but precisely because they are not, so the former is maybe more accurate about who generates the hostile atmosphere and is less likely to implicate a theoretical bystander with overly broad language. So even if misandry existed, which it doesn't, this would be the opposite of that. It is, however, a worse site tag in any event, although it is probably more satisfying to say out loud.
posted by Errant at 2:39 PM on May 16, 2015 [36 favorites]

divined by radio, my friend has the T-shirt version of this hoodie, and it is glorious.
posted by Errant at 2:43 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Errant, that's more effort than I would have had energy for, and I salute you... but it won't stick. It never sticks.
posted by tigrrrlily at 2:43 PM on May 16, 2015

I don't think boyzone is actually sexist, I just think it's kind of minimizing, and while I'm sure no feminist man would actually find it to to be ~misandrist~ as the entire concept laughable bilge, I don't necessarily feel like it's a good idea to use a term that gives cover to the noxious "war of the sexes" trope or reinforces the misogynist/MRA/reactionary/call-em-what-you-want notion that feminist men aren't "really men".

A term of similar anodyne cuteness is kind of hard to come up with for equivalent atmospheres around race, class, trans and gender issues, access and ableism, but that's sort of my point. I just don't think there'd be the same general comfort level with using "low melanin zone" when talking about race on MeFi.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 2:45 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

More and more on the blue, I feel like I can't disagree with the content of any FPP that has to do with women.

I must say, the fact that a "SILENCED ALL MY LIFE" comment took this long to appear in this thread forebodes good things for metafilter.

Also in passing: was the pun entirely in my head this whole time, but I thought "boyzone" sounds like a perfect crtitical word because it sounds like "poison"? I thought that was the reason it is used...?
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:46 PM on May 16, 2015

Could the people currently trying to decide what to call this kind of behavior please let me know what word you would prefer we use, so we can get back to having a discussion about the behavior itself, and not get bogged down in finer semantic points?

Seriously we can even call it "Sidney" if you want, just let us know what you want us to call it so we can DROP THIS AND GET BACK TO THE TOPIC good god
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:47 PM on May 16, 2015 [18 favorites]

Errant, that's more effort than I would have had energy for, and I salute you... but it won't stick. It never sticks.

No, probably not, but, near as I can tell, having energy when you don't until you do again is pretty much what allies are for.
posted by Errant at 2:51 PM on May 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

i like boyzone - i understand the minimizing concerns, but i do think it does a good job of evoking the idea of an area where by action or inaction the message is "no girls allowed!" to me it's saying that we should work to make this a space that not only tolerates women, but welcomes them.

also, when i hear it i always for a second think of tori amos singing "i need a big loan from the girl zone" which has been my personal rallying cry for going on 20 years.
posted by nadawi at 2:51 PM on May 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

Because people have asked to be more aware of bans, and it's relevant here because of his earlier behavior in this thread: after some further correspondence this morning, one more dead town's last parade has been banned.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:54 PM on May 16, 2015 [45 favorites]

Really appreciate the update and how open you guys are to talking about these things, LobsterMitten. That goes for everyone on the mod team.
posted by erratic meatsack at 2:57 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Could the people currently trying to decide what to call this kind of behavior please let me know what word you would prefer we use

As I said just above, I prefer "poison" (pronounced "boyzone").

With that settled, let's go back to actual issues.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:59 PM on May 16, 2015

Metafilter: gross boyzone is bad for the site

I'm just gonna go ahead and title my mod notes "gross boyzone".
posted by billiebee at 3:03 PM on May 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

That is an excellent idea.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 3:04 PM on May 16, 2015

For transparency - what was the ban reason for odtlp? I mean, it's not that I think there's nefarious hijinks afoot, but more that "conversation" is so broad.
posted by corb at 3:29 PM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

For transparency - what was the ban reason for odtlp?

Ctrl+F is a rather handy shortcut to remember. The reason is here for everyone to see right in this thread, accompanied with a length mod comment.

How did you miss it exactly?
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:37 PM on May 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

Relevant.
posted by Stewriffic at 3:39 PM on May 16, 2015 [11 favorites]

No, i mean- he didn't get banned for actions in thread, but for what he said to mods after that, or at least that's how I read LM's comments.
posted by corb at 3:40 PM on May 16, 2015

Stewriffic, I had doubts but you called it
posted by tigrrrlily at 3:43 PM on May 16, 2015

Well so, this idea of "the ban reason" is one that maybe needs to be tweaked, because it leads to us being too willing to keep people around who really should go.

In this case, he got a careful and detailed note from cortex in clear terms stipulating what behaviors are a problem and what needed to work on in order to stay here. Then he ignored that in thread and got a day off. Then he sent us a message that demonstrated he wasn't internalizing anything we'd been saying to him, and that he wasn't interested in any kind of productive exchange about it. So we talked it over among a few of us, and considered his history (where he's been in this kind of position before and not shown signs that he's even understanding the problem). We concluded this had been a long time coming and further dancing around it was not going to result in any change in his behavior.

In case anybody is missing it, when a mod writes you a detailed note saying what you need to work on, that is something to pay attention to -- it's the sound of thin ice cracking under your feet. (People can come back from that, and have, by actually listening when we say there's a problem and being willing to change their behavior. It's something we've seen plenty of people do.)
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 3:43 PM on May 16, 2015 [28 favorites]

he didn't get banned for actions in thread

Which thread are you reading? This one? Yes, he got banned for comments in this thread. Rather obviously.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:44 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Or, more precisely, as above.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:45 PM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

...did i miss a misandry celebration?

It was a parade! With floats, and kids riding bikes with streamers, and a fire engine, and several marching bands!
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:52 PM on May 16, 2015 [10 favorites]

I mean, it's not that I think there's nefarious hijinks afoot, but more that "conversation" is so broad.

Oh, come on! "Nefarious hijinx?" You have been in this thread the whole time; if you think that omdtlp's comments weren't worthy of banning, you haven't been paying attention at all. And there are "nefarious hijinx afoot," but they aren't on the part of the mods, picking on some poor commenter who has somehow lost his way, it's the shitty behavior of a subset of members who are hellbent on shitting around in every thread on women that appears on the blue. And the whole point of this MeTa is about that shitty shitty behavior and the people who engage in it for months and years before they finally cross a line that gets them banned.

If we are going to keep good women (and men) members who are getting sick and tired of shouting over these parasites and leeches in order to have an actual conversation, the site mores are going to have to move; these people need less room and fewer chances to poison the well before they are kicked out so the adults can talk.

And I really don't care if omdtlp (or 0 or TFB before him) was a disingenuous MRA or just someone who is deeply confused and lacking the social skills and mental aptitudes to figure out why he was going so wrong and fix his behavior, the last note from the mods (which should, in my opinion, have proceeded this thread, but I'm not a mod) should have warned him what was up. We cannot read people's hearts; like most harassment situations, the harasser's motive can't matter because they are unknown; only their effects, which can be known, matter.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:06 PM on May 16, 2015 [21 favorites]

if you think that omdtlp's comments weren't worthy of banning, you haven't been paying attention at all.

I'm sorry - I commented while dropping off the kiddo at a birthday party and didn't go as deeply into my thoughts as perhaps I could have. I was trying to express, while not typing too much on my crappy phone, that I thought it might be totally reasonable - given said behavior, it didn't seem crazy that more had happened - but because a lot of banned users' interactions with mods take place behind the scenes, it's hard to see kind of what percentage of the ban was for, say, actions in thread, and how much of it was because maybe he said 'Fuck you' to a mod or something. This had happened with another user, which I can't remember the name of but I think got referenced in either this MeTa or the last one about dudebrahs, where he was banned as a result of conversation with mods, and some women had said they felt bad about that - about feeling like the problem wasn't that bad until the guy had pissed on the mods.

It's one reason I really appreciate LM clarifying as she did above - because it shows really clearly the totality of the whole process and the weighing involved.
posted by corb at 4:18 PM on May 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

OK, I probably shouldn't be commenting at all right now, because I am just back from a funeral, and I am really raw about it (and seriously, fuck cancer), but, while some of that interaction (omdtlp and the mods, not the funeral) was behind the scenes, it's not hard, looking at what was public in this thread, that omdtlp was headed for a ban or a flameout (what with the bizarre doubling down on the doubling down), and I think hinting darkly about some sort of mod conspiracy against, well, anyone without really really solid evidence is not a productive route to take.

OK, I am out of here for tonight. I'm going to go hug my cat and cry.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:39 PM on May 16, 2015 [18 favorites]

corb, cortex addressed that above: Contrary to what some people think, being shitty to a mod is not okay. This is true because it does actually count as being shitty to a member, which everybody agrees is not okay.

I will add to his answer, it's also a quirk of the process. Bans often-not-always happen because of a long history plus a specific action. If someone's at the brink we'll often-not-always give them a warning. Some people respond to that with "fuck you," or similar "I'm not listening" response, and that seals the deal. Those parting shots are naturally going to be aimed at the mods because we've just given them a warning or a day off, which are often-not-always the penultimate step.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 4:41 PM on May 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm very sorry for your loss.
posted by Errant at 4:42 PM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

I am so sorry GenjiandProust. Fuck cancer and death, too.

It was a tasteless joke - like, I was trying to kind of make fun of the idea of mods as nefarious moustache-twirlers while also making it clear that I didn't actually think that, and it totally bombed and as you say, was unproductive. I'm sorry for communicating more casually than I could have in a loaded thread and sorry for adding on more stress to what is clearly already a terrible day.
posted by corb at 5:02 PM on May 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

Hugs if you want 'em, GenjiandProust.

Regarding the rest of the thread: I'm glad to see that user banned, since he was really taking up a lot of the air in the thread and I think these discussions will go more smoothly in the future, and I have a bit more hope for the site after seeing that.

Regarding misandry: I just have a WAV file of a wet fart that plays in my head every time I hear a dude unironically use that term. I actually wasn't around for most of the day because I was asleep, dreaming, and I had a wonderful dream about telling a dude who was standing in front of me so I could not see to fuck off, and he DID, and then there were like 50 Captain America cosplayers I could watch without any men in my way. I now feel much more confident about my evening, which involves going out into the wider world of sexual harassment and institutionalized misogyny, because I have been gifted with misandry-confidence from the goddesses of dreams.

LobsterMitten, thanks for nipping what looked like another attempt to have a hate-on fest for me in the bud, I appreciate it. I'm okay with being a sort of SJW tank, since a lot of people aren't able to take the kind of damage that those pile-ons can do and I am, but I'd still rather not if I can help it.

It's not like I can't see where you get that idea from, but the fact is that the chances of NoraReed saying something sexist, racist, etc. are pretty fucking low, and the chances of someone on the other side saying something like that are... not so low.

I do fuck up on this stuff, though. I've overstepped myself on trans stuff and ended up acting like I could speak for a group I'm not a part of, stuff like that. No one's immune to this.
posted by NoraReed at 5:46 PM on May 16, 2015 [25 favorites]

Catching up from where i last posted, but i think it's worth reflecting again on how hard it is to have a conversation about this as a whole without SOME bs tidbit getting poked and having to hit the brakes and discuss it.

The entire "is boyzone a bad term? is it SEXIST?" thing could have just been met with "fuck off, that's not the point right now".

Over and over and over when we try to discuss this behavior on this site, and in specific threads, this happens. I'm being that specific because we're not talking about the whole universe right now, just mefi.

Yea, it happens everywhere, a lot. But i'm perfectly comfortable with the response being a hell of a lot more harsh here. Because jesus fucking christ has this thread demonstrated super beautifully that this is on some level a taboo conversation.

It's like, too misandristic or something because hey I'M a guy and I'M not like that!, or this one detail bla bla bla, or whatever.

A bunch of (predominantly)dudes derailing a thread about dudes derailing threads is like "i rest my case, your honor" as far as demonstrating that Yes This Is A Real Problem. It's exactly the problem several people denied existed earlier up.

I really hope if i waltz in to another FPP and people are doing this, that linking to this meta and going "hey, read this, you're doing exactly this" won't get deleted as "fighty" or whatever.

Also on preview, condolences genjiandproust. i just lost my grandmother a few days ago, and just spent all day helping clear out her house. life sucks sometimes.
posted by emptythought at 5:53 PM on May 16, 2015 [11 favorites]

Yeah, sorry, that's bullshit. A derailing conversation makes it impossible to talk about the original subject because it takes up all the space in the conversation.
posted by NoraReed at 5:57 PM on May 16, 2015 [22 favorites]

Man, hang in there GaP. Give your cat a hug from me, too.

This had happened with another user, which I can't remember the name of but I think got referenced in either this MeTa or the last one about dudebrahs, where he was banned as a result of conversation with mods, and some women had said they felt bad about that - about feeling like the problem wasn't that bad until the guy had pissed on the mods.

Hm. Well, there was this comment, which has been echoed by others at different times. I think this might be self-fulfilling though - people who are crappy to other users tend to also be crappy to the mods. In fact I've yet to see someone who was a heel to other users but an angel towards the mods.

1. It's not a room;
2. It's asynchronous;
3. There are literally thousands of people reading and hundreds of people commenting or not commenting; and
4. Stepping back, in real life, a "derail" conversation is basically the equivalent of a website banner ad. You can scroll past it with a minimum of effort and nobody gets hurt.

1. It's a simile.
2. Doesn't matter.
3. See 2.
4. Possibly true in theory, yet never actually spotted in the wild.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:58 PM on May 16, 2015 [12 favorites]

I'm okay with being a sort of SJW tank

My friends and I have a running joke about SJW RPG characters. I believe in my current incarnation I'm a DPS class, on account of being lightweight and detrimentally aggressive, like a shitty yappy dog.
posted by Errant at 5:58 PM on May 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

there was this comment

Thanks, that's what I was thinking of, but I do think you're right - and also don't want to imply that it's totally cool to be an asshole to the mods, because it's not.
posted by corb at 6:02 PM on May 16, 2015

1. It's not a room;

Yea, it kind of is. An fpp is basically a sign outside a room that says "chess club". If you go in, you can expect people to be playing and discussing chess or follow on topics. I really don't get this one.

2. It's asynchronous;

...So? one person talks, another person responds. Or they respond to the original content. This doesn't follow.

Conversations are not full duplex. They're inherently asynchronous. There's always someone talking and someone listening or it isn't a conversation.

You're either reading, or you're replying. If you're replying without reading because you think you just MUST be heard you might be shitposting. That's what reading the room is. It's like playing darts blindfolded

3. There are literally thousands of people reading and hundreds of people commenting or not commenting; and

.....so? As someone who's been a convention panelist this is just wut. It doesn't change the dynamic. One person talks, another person talks or responds, etc.

4. Stepping back, in real life, a "derail" conversation is basically the equivalent of a website banner ad. You can scroll past it with a minimum of effort and nobody gets hurt.

Have you actually read any of the threads being discussed here? Someone comes in and says something ~outrageous~ that comes from not reading what's come before because it just HAS to be heard, everyone then responds to that because it's like someone ripping a really loud fart during a quiet conversation about food. Even if the response is just "eww GROSS!" it still interrupted the conversation.

And the way comments are linearly structured here, it actually fills up your screen for pages of scrolls sometimes, and it really feels like... essentially a DDoS of a conversation that they feel just CANT go on without their word or it's an ECHO CHAMBER OMG.

Fuck.

All.

That.
posted by emptythought at 6:08 PM on May 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

I sometimes miss the old days of metafilter, when a noob would waltz into a conversation and say something dense they would be instructed to lurk moar.

I cordially invite derailers to lurk moar.
posted by supercrayon at 6:21 PM on May 16, 2015 [18 favorites]

Now that I think of it, yeah, "lurk moar" mostly means "watch this place for long enough that you figure out how to read the goddamn room"
posted by NoraReed at 6:36 PM on May 16, 2015 [36 favorites]

☆The Moar You Know!☆
posted by supercrayon at 6:43 PM on May 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

but because a lot of banned users' interactions with mods take place behind the scenes, it's hard to see kind of what percentage of the ban was for, say, actions in thread, and how much of it was because maybe he said 'Fuck you' to a mod or something.

To be clear, this was not a case of a retributive "fuck you" sort of deal. It was just him choosing to make the thing he did with his enforced day off be sending us multiple emails complaining about other stuff on the site and personal injustices and really really failing to acknowledge what I'd said in here and in correspondence or, basically, at all the idea that there was a problem with his behavior that needed fixing. And when part of the problem behavior in question is not letting up and backing off when he gets pushback, and his response is to not let up and back off, taking a wait-and-see approach goes from being maybe foolishly optimistic to definitively a waste of everybody's time.

Ultimately, the "what percentage was being a dick to a mod" thing is immaterial, because the case of someone with no other history of behavior problems on the site getting themselves banned for going nuclear on a mod is a vanishing outlier. I can't think of anybody who ever sealed the deal with a pointed "fuck you" type message who wasn't already skidding fast down the path toward a ban anyway. The co-occurrence of the two things is more just a reasonable likelihood given the circumstances than the actual definitive factor, as memorable and as proximal to the ban as it can end up being when it does happen.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:58 PM on May 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

"Yeah, sorry, that's bullshit. A derailing conversation makes it impossible to talk about the original subject because it takes up all the space in the conversation."

It's revealing that someone would think otherwise -- it implies that they don't see this as conversation, where we necessarily pay attention to others and think about what they say and engage with them and therefore time and attention are finite, but, instead, that it's a series of performative statements that people throw out there for whatever reason and which people choose to read, or not, as they wish.

Which is pretty much how most people think about writing something on the web, more's the pity.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:03 PM on May 16, 2015 [17 favorites]

...did i miss a misandry celebration?

S'far as I know, those are every Friday on the Toast in the review thread. I believe sparkles and drinks with umbrellas are encouraged. Since it's the Toast, a conversation about historical art and/or when you know you're in a novel might spontaneously break out.

If NoraReed is the SJW Tank, we need a bunch of SJW fish and some plants and maybe a nice Castle to go with her...
posted by Deoridhe at 7:23 PM on May 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

Well if we get a couple SJW paladins, a radfem mage, an antifa cleric and a misandrist healer we can raid Castle Patriarchy for some real loot for a change.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 7:28 PM on May 16, 2015 [15 favorites]

and a misandrist healer

Ugh, shadow priests are so 2008.
posted by Errant at 7:37 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

So, looks like this thread is winding down...
posted by uosuaq at 7:40 PM on May 16, 2015

Try (remove from activity).
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 7:43 PM on May 16, 2015

Oh, does that link also drop hints? I didn't realize. ;P
posted by uosuaq at 7:48 PM on May 16, 2015

Derailers never lurk, that is the problem.
posted by bearwife at 8:12 PM on May 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Usually, yeah. Though I think quite a number deliberately ignore content (which I guess is effectively the same end result as not lurking), while others take some tiny detail of the FPP to slingshot the discussion in another direction. As we saw upthread, this tactic gets used to lawyer what a derail is and isn't, which is its own form of tedious.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:25 PM on May 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

More than tedious, it is ongoing derailing/trolling. Oh ban hammer, I eagerly await your fall.
posted by bearwife at 8:39 PM on May 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

....can we start the misandry celebration now?
posted by shakespeherian at 8:56 PM on May 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

seriously, i'm wearing my misandry party hat and everything.
posted by palomar at 9:02 PM on May 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

Can't make the party. Can someone put aside a bit of cake? I could use some cake. Black Forest of Misandry cake, please.
posted by tigrrrlily at 10:00 PM on May 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

can we start the misandry celebration now?

Well, you know what they say: "Misandry loves company."
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:37 PM on May 16, 2015 [11 favorites]

We used to tolerate derailleurs but now it's 'on your bike',
posted by biffa at 11:06 PM on May 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

My next sock puppet has got to be "Shimano Ultegra." Although I guess that might send the wrong message.
posted by koeselitz at 12:18 AM on May 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I just want to complain that because of the derail in that disaster [edit: hyperbole, sorry for the negativity!!] of a thread, nobody answered my really important but boring question about tattoos.
posted by polymodus at 1:53 AM on May 17, 2015

Mine, which was more an assertion seeking support or dismissal, either.
posted by gingerest at 2:11 AM on May 17, 2015

Polymodus: I'm not sure what you mean by 'space of tattoo design' - as in the space you get the tattoo? bodies with tattoos? the design process? In any case, BMEzine has huge image galleries of varying qualities, Pinterest actually has a huge amount of tattoo pics., and most tattoo artists I know use instagram a lot as well. For the tattoos, for designs, for the spaces they work in. It is most definitely a 3d bit of art which a lot of designs don't take into account.

(my thigh piece has a line that curves perfectly along a curve of my cellulite - when it was still swollen it looked unreal and even now has an odd tactile element compared to my other pieces)

Gingerest: the forearm thing is something I've never heard - my inner wrist tattoo is 10+ years old at this point and looks fine (mefimail if you want a link to my tattoos)*. Everything is gonna sag, gonna get frail, that's just skin, I don't think inner forearms are worse than anywhere else and a lot of artists I know have work there. I think the forearm is good because it is relatively flat and less prone to the sun. I have a tattoo on the front of my shoulder which I can see, control external viewing of fairly easily, and quite like. My sister has a large piece on her upper inner arm which looks lovely too.

*somewhat related, that tattoo has been through a LOT of weight loss, as have most of my others, with no discernible deformation but for me the areas of skin that were most affected by that were inner thigh, inner upper arm, lower belly (also had a baby in there so...).
posted by geek anachronism at 2:26 AM on May 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

The privilege discussion has been criticised here just for people disagreeing with the original post, albeit in fairly predictable ways. That OP was a Feminism 101 listicle (which was a long way from being the best of the web), so the discussion is going to be at that level. Calling disagreement "de-railing" seems to extend the word too far. The discussion is on-topic. If you are surprised that people disagree, you haven't realised that you're in a bubble (nothing wrong with bubbles, but it's good to know you're in one).

Actually talking about the OP without insulting your readers doesn't seem to be the same thing as the "yeah but LBTs mean you're a slut" example, to me. Unless Mefi is going to require its users to believe the content of OPs like that one to comment at all on discussions about gender (as tigrrrlily might be asking), you are going to get those threads.

I guess there's a problem in non-101 level threads where people don't want to re-hash the basics. Some boards where there are a wide range of views have allowed posters to start threads with participation requirements. I'm thinking of boards for religious groups where they allow in atheists to the group but have some posts they're not allowed in, and vice versa, so discussions about nature of the the Trinity or whatever don't get sidetracked into discussions of whether God exists at all or worse, the sky-fairy type insults. Editorialising and threadsitting in your OP are against Mefi's norms. Could an exception be made in some cases?
posted by pw201 at 4:40 AM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

If I'm reading you right you are asking if Mefi should consider having feminism-related posts that are closed to some members, and will also be more editorial in format ("My Opinion"), and in which the original poster is encouraged to participate heavily in a way that is dominating or steering the thread?

This is not something we are considering, no, and not something we are ever going to do. I can't really tell if it's more of a suggestion that the conversation here represents a slippery slope to a version of Metafilter that is like this description, but either way, I disagree. People have said similar things before because of political posts, news posts, posts that concentrate on racial inequality, etc., suggesting that maybe the site needs another place just for people who want to talk about those things, separate from the main site, and it's not an option we'd consider.

It's also a bit of a sky-is-falling reaction, I think, because while I'm still trying to get a good overview of feminism and/or sexism posts generally versus the ones that go bad, what I do know is that we've had hundreds that go well versus a much smaller number that turn out particularly badly. I think it's worthwhile to take a look at the ones that stand out as being really terrible and get a handle on why it happens when it does, since we know for a fact that very, very many go perfectly well (for values of "well" that include being a generalist site at all, as opposed to a specialty site).
posted by taz (staff) at 6:12 AM on May 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

That's a reading of tigrrrlily's statement that I think is not supported by the text. "Feminism is OK, anti-feminism is not OK" is both a far more limited and, more relevantly, a different proposition from "Mefi is going to require its users to believe the content of OPs like that one to comment at all on discussions about gender".
posted by running order squabble fest at 6:13 AM on May 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

I had dumb, unexamined notions about tattoos that have been exploded by people's reporting in the original thread and this one. It was worth the time I spent because now I'm a little bit less of a moronic jerk in the silent reaches of my heart. This isn't the first time MetaFilter has done this for me. MetaFilter teaches me excellent things that make me a better person. I love this site forever.
posted by Don Pepino at 6:58 AM on May 17, 2015 [40 favorites]

I love this site forever, too, and that is a lovely comment. But the misogyny in that thread drove me right out the effing door, meaning zero growth for me, so... it works differently for different people?
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:05 AM on May 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

(I know it's not up to MF to educate me, but I would like a thread I can read and learn from, not get so turned off that I have to exit...)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:06 AM on May 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

I think that even in the good threads I think there are people running around dropping comments that are skeptical or somewhat uninformed. I think this one was bad maybe because it went right to dumb sluttiness, whereas other threads don't go directly THERE. ???
posted by onlyconnect at 7:08 AM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

joseph conrad is fully awesome, I agree entirely. I'm not at all trying to say that the boyzone isn't an enormous problem that has to get solved before more people exhaust themselves or leave. (I hate people leaving so so much.) I could only stick it out and find the good bits and get the benefit because of NoraReed and you and Ivan and everyone else who spoke up and fought while I sat on my ass way up in the bleachers lurking with snacks and not engaging, beyond favorite-ing and flagging. I'm saying, though, all the work that should not have had to be done was at least not in vain. I can't be the only one who had some beneficial realizations. "Wait, what's this crap in my head? I have an opinion about what somebody else does with their body? Nope." and "Oh dag, people are doing amazing stuff I didn't know about! A tattoo that incorporates a cellulite ridge so it's like a sculpture? That is so insanely cool." (And dozens of other great things people have done--these threads have completely flipped me out of my original reactionary "O, how sad, god's canvas besmirched" position.)
posted by Don Pepino at 7:43 AM on May 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

I think that even in the good threads I think there are people running around dropping comments that are skeptical or somewhat uninformed.

All else aside I think that's just always gonna be part of the mix; there's no way to get Metafilter to the point where "person says something skeptical or somewhat uninformed" isn't an emergent property of a generalist approach and open signups. You let ten thousand people into the room, and they're all gonna be in different places, in terms of knowledge and familiarity and perspective on any given topic, and someone is necessarily going to be the least informed or most skeptical one in the room.

The takeaway from this discussion for me has been more that the difference between "dropping a comment" and "going on for ten comments in a row" is a big one and one we need to focus more actively on in some of these things-go-poorly occasions; that it's one thing for someone to be like "well, [half-formed thought or tone deaf response]" and have folks be like, ugh, no, here's why, and leave it at that—that's a valuable component of discussion here—and another thing entirely to have that turn into some intractable "Yeah, but..." loop that drags a thread down into a long going-nowhere distraction on well-trod ground.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:06 AM on May 17, 2015 [17 favorites]

Thanks for the good wishes from everyone, although I want to apologize for that derail. I was not thinking as clearly as I might have, and stomping out is way less effective than not staggering in.

I think the problem with the "Just scroll past it" argument is that a) you still have to sort of read it to know when you begin/stop scrolling, so you get some of the effect regardless, and b) it's another way of putting the onus on (in this case) women to protect themselves from harassment rather than on the harassers to just knock it off. It reeks of the clueless privilege of the person who prides themselves on having a thick skin when because they can shrug off the inconsequential jabs that life throws them. There is really nothing you can call a non-poor straight white cisman that has any teeth, because they can always retreat to the 99.99% of the world reserved for their needs and interests. This despite the huge whining about "misandry," "reverse discrimination," etc.And, yeah, someone somewhere can probably dig up an obscure case where someone did get hurt, but it's always one anecdote against 1000 pages of well-vetted statistics, and, so, OK, it sucks for that guy, but it also sucks for the millions of others who get it from the other side.

And, to paraphrase Andrew Ti of Yo, Is This Racist? -- if your response to getting called sexist (or racist or whatever) is to get really angry, that's probably shame you are feeling, and you need to think about what you said and did rather than dig in.

And, honestly, if you are in a thread and like 30 people are telling you that you are full of shit, there is a non-0% chance that you have some shit in you.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:12 AM on May 17, 2015 [22 favorites]

If I'm reading you right you are asking if Mefi should consider having feminism-related posts that are closed to some members, and will also be more editorial in format ("My Opinion"), and in which the original poster is encouraged to participate heavily in a way that is dominating or steering the thread?

Sorry, I wasn't clear. In the cases I'm familiar with, I'm not thinking about excluding specific people so much as the OP saying "in this thread, I want to talk about the Trinity, so if you're just going to debate God's existence or talk about sky fairies, do that elsewhere". I'm an atheist (although I'm out of the "sky fairy" phase), but I'm happy to go along with injunctions like that. Because the ban is on specific off-topic stuff rather than specific people, nothing stops someone like me from asking questions about just what the doctrine is saying, for example.

When I say "editorialising", I just meant that a poster could say something like that in the OP without it being seen as too close to blogging/editorialising/trying to supervise the thread. There is some kind of opinion being expressed by limiting a discussion in this way, because the OP is presumably ruling stuff out because they think it's beyond the pale.

There are a bunch of problems with this, for example, how restrictive you'd want posters to be (e.g. in the recent privilege post, if the OP had said "let's not talk about whether male privilege is real", people could rightly have said "Well, what's the point of your post then? The choir are already in agreement."); and how much you mods would take note of what an OP had asked people to talk about, i.e. is it just a social norm or is it backed by nuclear weaponsmod deletions? Also, if there were suddenly lots of quite restrictive posts like this, maybe the echo chamber complaints would start to have some bite.

Maybe a scheme like the one I'm talking about works better in other places where creating a new discussion is cheaper, so that people don't get the "silenced all my life" feeling: Mefi posts have to be about something you found out there rather than mini-blog posts about a thought that you had, and people generally take bit of care over them.

Running order squabble fest: the impression I got from the reaction to that privilege thing was that it was so basic that denying it was getting pretty close to denying sexism (certainly in the "prejudice + systematic power" sense) is real, which was one of the things tigrrrlily found unacceptable.
posted by pw201 at 8:30 AM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

GenjiandProust, I'm so sorry for your loss. Have lost friends and family to cancer and it's horrible.
posted by zarq at 8:35 AM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Considering that the poster isn't generally given the power to control the direction a discussion takes, I don't see that idea taking off, pw201. I also do not think it is unreasonable to delete comments from people who are questioning whether systematic injustices exist in threads that are about the effects of those systematic injustices. These are basic, 101-level sociological concepts. I am guessing that going into a hypothetical thread about a listicle about 7 interesting examples of evolution to talk about how evolution isn't real wouldn't likely last, and if it did, it wouldn't go over well.

Kalessin, if you aren't already familiar with Derailing for Dummies, you should look it up.
posted by NoraReed at 8:48 AM on May 17, 2015 [12 favorites]

Mefi posts have to be about something you found out there rather than mini-blog posts about a thought that you had

Yeah, I think this is the basic thing. Having OPs add "we should only talk about x" to their posts isn't a direction the site is likely to go.

But people can certainly help their post to hew to a narrow topic - by choosing linked content that is well-argued and focused, and avoiding clickbaity headlines and framing. Clickbaity language lends itself to posters coming in with kneejerk pontification on the very general topic area. Clickbaity or weak articles will often have some bad analogy or some throwaway bit of the framing that widens the permissible topics, so those kind of articles make it easier for a discussion to get broad and stupid. Focused articles with focused description in the post make it much easier for a mod to say, no, the very-most-general questions aren't on the table here.

So a poster shouldn't say "In this post we'll only talk about the Calvinist concept of generosity", but can say "A good article about a Calvinist question: if predestination is true, how can any act be generous?." (And on the flip side, don't headline it "Generosity! what does it mean?" or "Can Christians be generous?", since those will lend themselves to more-general discussion.)
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:50 AM on May 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

Sometimes if you say in the first comment -- not the post itself, but a rapidly-posted comment -- something like, "I was really hoping to dig into the meat of the first link's discussion of the Trinity, rather than a discussion of whether God exists at all" or something like that, you get a good response. Or even just, "That first link blew my mind, the thoughts on the Trinity are blah blah blah and I thought blah blah blah, I can't wait to hear if other smart mefites think he's right about X being Y and Y being Z ..." that can at least start the discussion off on the right foot and it's easier to identify immediate derails or threadshitting. (Of course after posting my enthusiastic thoughts on the post I just made right in the first comment, I then try to stay out of the thread for at least 20 or 50 comments so that I'm not trying to be the boss of the thread.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:53 AM on May 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I made a similar suggestion that OPs should provide "rails," pw201. On reflection reading this thread I realized a problem is OPs could provide unacceptable "rails" to an otherwise acceptable post.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 8:58 AM on May 17, 2015

Yes, this:

"That first link blew my mind, the thoughts on the Trinity are blah blah blah and I thought blah blah blah, I can't wait to hear if other smart mefites think he's right about X being Y and Y being Z"

That kind of specific comment about something interesting in the article can really set the thread off on the right foot. Don't start with "I hope we don't talk about x" but with something you do want to talk about - "y is really great and z is interesting"
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:09 AM on May 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

It's even better when someone other than the OP does it. For example, schmod's comment on this post might have saved it from going off the rails. If it had come from me, the OP, that might have been perceived as an effort to steer the thread.
posted by zarq at 9:22 AM on May 17, 2015

True, yeah. I was more thinking of helpful early comments generally.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:29 AM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

> The takeaway from this discussion for me has been more that the difference between "dropping a comment" and "going on for ten comments in a row" is a big one and one we need to focus more actively on in some of these things-go-poorly occasions

I know in the past you've told us to use the contact form for reporting this. (And that makes sense.) Is there any chance you'd consider creating a flag for "bombarding the thread" (or whatever you decide to call this kind of behavior)? I think people might be more likely to report people using this tactic if reporting it was as easy as flagging, and I think it's something that it's easy for mods to miss if they're responding to flags on individual comments but not reading or following the threads the flags are occurring in.

Regardless of how you respond, thanks for taking this issue seriously and recognizing that it's a problem.
posted by nangar at 9:31 AM on May 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

i enjoy when the mods come into a thread about trans issues and say explicitly in a note something like, "we are not going to debate if transgender people exist, if you should use the pronouns people ask, or if cis is a slur" - basically, in threads that need it, they have set those rails at the first blush of things going haywire. it doesn't always happen when needed and it doesn't always work, but i would still like to see some of that in threads about women's lives - "we are not going to debate if the patriarchy exists/what sex positions the writer likes/if rape culture is a thing/how guys will get laid if they have to stop harassing women, please stay on topic."

to me this is more useful than "lets discuss the fpp instead of going off on derails" or "cut it out" - it's direct, it expresses the values of the site, and it's easy to point to later in the thread if people start veering off again.
posted by nadawi at 9:32 AM on May 17, 2015 [43 favorites]

when people start really entrenching in a thread i usually use the flag "noise" because to me that describes what's going on. if i can't decide why something should be flagged and i just want to say, "can a mod please look at this??" i use "other" and if i know that i will eventually respond if a comment stays i'll shoot the mods and note and say "hey, if that stays i'm going to say this which likely will continue the problem that i see in the original comment." when i've done that last thing the mods are always greatat either a) removing the comment (and sometimes thanking me for sending a note because they didn't understand my objection from the flag) or b) explaining why the comment will stay while giving me pointers on how to respond in a way that won't itself get deleted. we haven't always agreed, but i've never felt like a burden or like they didn't hear me.

i've said it before and i'll keep saying it again a++++++ mod engagement, will contact form again.
posted by nadawi at 9:37 AM on May 17, 2015 [9 favorites]

The takeaway from this discussion for me has been more that the difference between "dropping a comment" and "going on for ten comments in a row" is a big one and one we need to focus more actively on in some of these things-go-poorly occasions; that it's one thing for someone to be like "well, [half-formed thought or tone deaf response]" and have folks be like, ugh, no, here's why, and leave it at that—that's a valuable component of discussion here—and another thing entirely to have that turn into some intractable "Yeah, but..." loop that drags a thread down into a long going-nowhere distraction on well-trod ground.

Those "Yeah, but..." loops also sometimes involve multiple posters, and I hope that's a recognized issue, too. It's not always one poster doubling down but sometimes multiple posters continuing a tone-deaf derail and it would be good to know that's also on your radar, because it's harder to flag; a lot of times the individual comments aren't necessarily delete-worthy, and it's not that one poster is sucking the air out of the room, but the bulk of the comments together has created a problem.
posted by jaguar at 10:20 AM on May 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

It's not always one poster doubling down but sometimes multiple posters continuing a tone-deaf derail and it would be good to know that's also on your radar, because it's harder to flag; a lot of times the individual comments aren't necessarily delete-worthy, and it's not that one poster is sucking the air out of the room, but the bulk of the comments together has created a problem.

I call those "tag team" derails, and for me they are one of the most frustrating dynamics, especially in threads involving gender, sexuality, or feminism. Dropped in at the right intervals, it can derail a discussion more effectively than any one person could manage on their own.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:26 AM on May 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

It's even better when someone other than the OP does it.

This is true. However, it seems to me that a big chunk of early bad comments come from people who haven't bothered to read the linked materials. And that makes bad comments more likely to be posted before careful, helpful readers have a chance to look at things, think about them, and post. If that's right (and maybe I just don't have a good sense of things here -- I've also seen lots of cases where other people have already read the posted materials and can just dive right in), then I think Eyebrows McGee's suggestion is more likely to get the job done.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 10:30 AM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm keeping a somewhat humorous list of common rhetorical tropes (from this very site) that are often used to silence dissenting views [...] It's in my profile and folks can go see it there if they want to.

People, this is gold. Everybody should check out kalessin's list. It's good and funny - and unfortunately also full of hilaripredictability too - to the point that it's a pity I can't make an FPP about a user's profile page.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:57 AM on May 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

cortex, thanks, that was really succinct and helpful, and just to be clear I wasn't trying to say we shouldn't allow skeptical comments or only have ONE OF US threads. The all flavors comments are part of life here and that's how I think it should be.

I think it might be a problem to moderate what Mr. Livengood calls "tag team derails" because whether those are five people sucking all the air out of a room or five people having a back and forth conversation can be much a more subjective call. It's easier to tell when it's just one person dominating the discussion. I mean, sure, if the topic is "should we discuss what sex positions women are signalling with tattoos" that is a derail, but there are topics that some people might legitimately want on the table, but that others in the thread might object to. This isn't a reason not to try, but I am a person who worries about managing people's expectations. (Not that anyone here is asking for too much!)
posted by onlyconnect at 11:05 AM on May 17, 2015

Hummm bombarding a thread, and kneejerk pontificatiom....slinks away, (I have often already read the linked fpp articles,) said over the shoulder, read all comments before posting as a part of reading the room...slink...slink...slink...(sounds like work, but, like the fun of it!)
posted by Oyéah at 12:31 PM on May 17, 2015

I have started to wonder, after seeing a dozen or more discussions about flagging that seem to get hung up on what flag and we need a new flag and if I flag it for this instead of that my objection might be meaningless, and then no flag gets flagged because of flag-choice intimidation.

Maybe the flag options should be reduced to something like:
Spam
Technical problem (link, html, code, duplicate)
Fantastic
Objection to content

And we'll trust the mods to be able to figure it out, and if the flagger is truly concerned that mods can't identify offensive content or a derail or somebody falling apart, the contact form can be used for clarification.
posted by Lyn Never at 12:31 PM on May 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

it doesn't always happen when needed and it doesn't always work, but i would still like to see some of that in threads about women's lives - "we are not going to debate if the patriarchy exists/what sex positions the writer likes/if rape culture is a thing/how guys will get laid if they have to stop harassing women, please stay on topic."

This is basically all i wanted to see come out of this thread. We've already had enough cries of pain, despair, good people leaving, and generally shitty behavior to get that for trans threads and fuck even I/P threads.

Can we not get that for a feminism thread that's obviously going to bring shitposters out of the woodwork, even one-off shitposters?

It wasn't one person litigating their tiresome crap in this thread ad infinitum, it was definitely a team lift. And i really think it could have been headed off at the pass with a "hey, this is not going to happen here, cut it out" at the very beginning before anyone even started to flatulate a little bit.
posted by emptythought at 12:52 PM on May 17, 2015 [21 favorites]

It wasn't one person litigating their tiresome crap in this thread ad infinitum, it was definitely a team lift. And i really think it could have been headed off at the pass with a "hey, this is not going to happen here, cut it out" at the very beginning before anyone even started to flatulate a little bit.

Yes, please, this. A thousand, thousand times. The more explicit the mods are about "your lack of agreement with the basic 101-level feminism is not okay and not in consensus with Metafilter values", the better.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 1:07 PM on May 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

Not disagreeing overall with this, but I'd make a message very clear "You are not going to litigate this issue in this thread which is about something else" and not "Your viewpoints aren't okay" which is going to be a non-starter from a communication perspective. MetaFilter values are more about not making a thread about you, not being an asshole and not generally being awful. It's entirely possible to still moderate on the basis of those values and not try to get into the murky "MetaFilter is feminist and you are not ergo here is the door" territory.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 1:12 PM on May 17, 2015 [34 favorites]

Yeah, I strongly agree with jessamyn. (I should probably just get a t-shirt that says that.) I don't think "you must have certain values/beliefs to comment here" is a workable path. Much better to keep it on the basis of "these are the baseline social needs, to make conversation work here", which allows people with different viewpoints to all buy in to the same set of expectations. Too much boyzone: bad for conversation. Too much returning to the same old tired derails: bad for conversation.

Lyn Never brings up flags: We've talked in the past about revisiting the flag categories and that's something we can look at. One thing the current options do is to tell people broadly what kinds of things are flaggable (derail, noise, offensive). "Objection to content" isn't really one I would want to include there, since I think it's more broad than we'd want... there are plenty of comments that people might object to but which aren't remotely deletable. A further complication with flags is that the subsites have different things that are deletable. (Very little is deletable in MetaTalk, for example, and it would be good to have the available flags reflect that.) Rejiggering the flags is more of a rabbit hole than it seems at first.

But for the moment, people should know: don't be afraid to flag. All you're doing is saying "hey take a look at this, it might be actionable maybe", or in the case of breaks guidelines/offensive, you're saying "wow I think this is pretty much deletable, look at this fast." If you pick the "wrong" category, it's no problem -- they all get displayed in the same place and we check them all. If there's nothing wrong with a comment, nothing will happen, so there's no danger associated with flagging "wrong."

The two flagging behaviors we sometimes see that are "wrong" are:
-Flagging a million comments all at once in a thread -- only flag the few worst, and if you're flagging more than about 3 or 4, drop us a note instead
-Flagging stuff in old threads, or stuff from many hours ago that's now baked into a long thread -- we'll almost never delete comments that are more than a day or so old, since they're usually baked in by that point. So this is usually not going to produce any action; fine if you want catharsis, just don't be frustrated by expecting action in this case. (Exception might be an AskMe, or a late comment in a hardly-any-comments thread where nobody else may have seen it.)

...and even those aren't really "wrong" in a bad way, just in a "this is not really how the flags are meant to work" way.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:49 PM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

If you feel sorry for them, maybe tell them that you appreciate them or send them a private note some time.

Or fucking donate

Ok done, sent another tiny donation. Thanks for handling this thread well, Mod team. I feel like we have had a pretty rough ride on this topic lately but the back and forth here has really helped to get the appropriate course corrections laid in I think.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:01 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I use flags a little sparingly, but, outside of things like HTML errors and doubles and the like, I tend to fill out a comment form too (unless it's in a thread that I already figure the mods are watching), if I feel there is any need for clarification.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:01 PM on May 17, 2015

I think it might be a problem to moderate what Mr. Livengood calls "tag team derails" because whether those are five people sucking all the air out of a room or five people having a back and forth conversation can be much a more subjective call.

Not terribly important, but "tag team derails" was from Dip Flash's comment, not mine.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 2:01 PM on May 17, 2015

"If you pick the "wrong" category, it's no problem -- they all get displayed in the same place and we check them all. If there's nothing wrong with a comment, nothing will happen, so there's no danger associated with flagging "wrong.""

I've more than once flagged something, then realized I should've used a different flag, and gotten a bit anxious as a result. This is really good to know.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 2:52 PM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

hey so whatever happened to that proposal to have summaries of long metatalk threads
posted by Jacqueline at 3:03 PM on May 17, 2015

I use flags a little sparingly, but, outside of things like HTML errors and doubles and the like, I tend to fill out a comment form too

I think, if commentary for clarification is something the mods are specifically asking for, it would be really useful for flag categories other than fantastic and double to pop up/ajax-magic/computer-gnome-wizard a text entry field. Lower barrier to entry than navigating, copying and pasting a link (although, yeah, I've sent stuff like 'that last thing I flagged' assuming you guys get stuff in chrono order) etc. Not sure how feasible this is, and I feel like maybe it's been floated before.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 3:18 PM on May 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

The free-form flag idea has come up before yeah, and it's one that on the balance I kind of like, but we haven't gotten it out of the brainstorming phase so far. A lot of little details that'd have to be figured out to roll it out.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:20 PM on May 17, 2015

Instead of developing a whole new pop-up form thing, would it be possible to have a link by each comment that would open up the (existing) contact form and pre-populate it with the URL of the comment? That would remove a lot of the friction that's currently involved with using the contact form.

My current process: click on link for the comment I'm reading so I can get back to it when I'm done; right-click on link again to copy the URL; jump to bottom of the page; ctrl-shift-click the contact form link to open it in a new tab; fill out contact form and send it; close tab; hit ctrl-L then enter to get back to the comment I was reading when I decided "I should contact the mods about this."

Yeah, I know, it's such a burden, cue the tiny violins. But if I could instead just ctrl-shift-click on a "load the pre-populated contact form" link, fill out the form and send it, then close the tab and be where I was before? Much quicker, much easier, much more likely that I'll do it (instead of just flagging and figuring "the mods will figure out why I flagged it").
posted by Lexica at 3:35 PM on May 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

I've more than once flagged something, then realized I should've used a different flag, and gotten a bit anxious as a result.

I hear that wrongly flagging can lead to wryly flogging.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:49 PM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I like Lexica's idea a lot -- reduce the friction for sending a "I flagged this because..." contact form along with the flag. To avoid cluttering up the page with an extra link in each "posted by" byline: could have a "contact us about this flag" link appear only after the user has flagged the comment/post.

(ISTR it being said that the contact form reports automatically include the referring URL. But this is hidden knowledge to users, maybe it could be made explicitly visible on the Contact Form? And even then, the referring URL won't be the URL to a specific comment unless the user has explicitly made it so by previously clicking on the comment's permalink.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 4:04 PM on May 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

hey so whatever happened to that proposal to have summaries of long metatalk threads

Hmm. That might be strangely amusing because I confidently predict that no user will ever summarize a long thread in a way that rings true and exact across a range of users. But if done as an exercise by several posters we'd get graphic evidence of why communication is so hard because I think we'd see wildly different variations of the story by different readers.
posted by puddledork at 4:15 PM on May 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

"In conclusion, Metafilter is a land of contrasts."
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:28 PM on May 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

"I took a speed-reading course and read this MetaTalk thread in 20 minutes. It was about MetaFilter."
posted by uosuaq at 4:42 PM on May 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

Most all MeTa threads can be summarized as: "Some people are jerks. How can we try to minimize that?"

There are also birthday threads.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:19 PM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

ftr, sfkiddo, I do have screens of the thread that include one of your deleted comments, so if you want them, memail me, but I'm not posting them publicly because they are not a good look on you (or anyone).
posted by kagredon at 8:39 PM on May 17, 2015

Out of curiosity, is capturing screen a common practice for mefis?
posted by clavdivs at 8:47 PM on May 17, 2015

I do it sometimes when a thread takes an unusual turn, regardless of my own feelings on the turn. Just because it's interesting (to me) to see what happens on the mod end. I don't bring it up unless someone expresses a desire to see their own deleted comments, though of course they can also go to the contact form for that (AFAIK, the mods are always willing to reproduce your own deleted comments for you if you ask.)
posted by kagredon at 8:49 PM on May 17, 2015

Looks like this thread is winding down.
posted by uosuaq at 9:45 PM on May 17, 2015

uosuaq, I literally just suggested that you not make comments like that in threads like this.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:56 PM on May 17, 2015 [22 favorites]

Sorry, LM, you're right. I didn't connect your suggestion to my "this thread is winding down" comments. I don't really think of them as particularly sarcastic/ironic/whatever, but you also used the word "oblique", and yes, I guess it's my oblique way of saying "are we done with this now please?" and maybe it would be better to just say that in so many words.
posted by uosuaq at 11:13 PM on May 17, 2015

To be honest, uosuaq, I don't see any reason to say it at all. When we're done, we'll stop.
posted by Too-Ticky at 11:16 PM on May 17, 2015 [14 favorites]

Mod note: A couple of comments deleted. Please don't charge into a long and complicated discussion to make outraged attacks and name names that you think will be on other people's ban lists. This is actually the opposite of helping in the way I think you think you want to help.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:26 PM on May 17, 2015

I guess it's my oblique way of saying "are we done with this now please?"

Half of we is you.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:28 PM on May 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

My reason for saying it, Too-Ticky, is simply that I think that the thread has gone on long enough. I've been wrong about that several times -- it's kind of impressive how a seemingly moribund thread can come to life in a positive way again.
But I'm not silencing anyone, nor do I have the power to close down the MeTa post. This is a 900+ comment thread and I just wonder if we're doing much more than hanging out here.
posted by uosuaq at 11:31 PM on May 17, 2015

uosuaq, go ahead and remove this thread from your recent activity and call it done. We're not closing it at this time.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:32 PM on May 17, 2015 [22 favorites]

[A couple of comments deleted. Please don't charge into a long and complicated discussion to make outraged attacks and name names that you think will be on other people's ban lists. This is actually the opposite of helping in the way I think you think you want to help.]

Well, that was quick on the comments deleted, I stepped away for a minute and didn't see any of them, though I'd be somewhat curious. And I didn't charge in here etc, I've been reading this thread with interest all day. This is supposed to be the place to discuss these sorts of things, and I personally want to advocate strongly against making lists of people who don't conform and therefore should be banned, and to strongly condemn the people who advocate that sort of thing. If not here, where?
posted by amorphatist at 11:34 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I apologize for expressing myself poorly; I didn't mean to suggest I was calling on the mods to shut this thread down. It was more like, "what are we doing here at this point?"
posted by uosuaq at 11:36 PM on May 17, 2015

I withdraw my question.
posted by uosuaq at 11:40 PM on May 17, 2015

yay stoneweaver <3<3<3<3
posted by NoraReed at 11:40 PM on May 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

I was just flagging stuff and I wish there was a flag that was just "Ugh". It is really hard for me to decide what to flag things as but I would like one for "you're making that disgusted face you get when you encounter mansplaining/mansplain-adjacent behaviors, or accidentally eat a tomato, so maybe the mods should look at this"
posted by NoraReed at 11:52 PM on May 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

I recommend "offensive."

Also, I will totally eat all the tomatoes, so no worries!
posted by Deoridhe at 12:35 AM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

#notalltomatoes
posted by disclaimer at 12:39 AM on May 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

i can almost always find someone to pawn my tomatoes off on but occasionally they are roasted and they look like red peppers and I am like "oh yum this will be great" and then apparently I make the most entertaining face ever
posted by NoraReed at 12:46 AM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

"oh I expect this small red fruit will be a delicious berryWHATAKGSGHRWWHE"
posted by NoraReed at 12:47 AM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

I apologize for expressing myself poorly; I didn't mean to suggest I was calling on the mods to shut this thread down. It was more like, "what are we doing here at this point?"

Without any further context, this question serves no function other than to be a silencing tactic, even though you engaged it what appears to be good faith earlier in the thread. I know you say you don't have the power to shut down the thread, but obviously you have some sense of agency, or you wouldn't have felt there was any value in repeatedly expressing your desire to see this thread end.

And it does have an effect. Women go their whole lives with men communicating that their experiences and their input is not valued. Your decision to continue that trend, repeatedly, at the end this thread is very troubling, and mostly communicates that you wish women would stop talking about the subject, even if that's not what you intended to communicate. You may have bowed out of doing that in this thread, but please consider whether or not you are doing that in general, and stop it. And not just you; anyone who sees a conversation about women and feels like it has gone on long enough is part of the problem.
posted by maxsparber at 5:42 AM on May 18, 2015 [42 favorites]

Well, especially when a third of uosuaq's comments in the thread have been suggestions that it's winding down or defenses/apologies for those comments. I don't mean to particularly call out uosuaq, because he's been fairly good in this thread, but there is a tendency on MeTa to sort of Metaderail by calling for thread shutdowns, and it's a problem.

I occasionally call for a thread shut down myself, usually when I think a thread has become really ugly and unproductive and I feel like people are in danger of flaming out/leaving in disgust, but that's a little different from suggesting that, since a thread is no longer interesting to you, it should be stopped (which I don't know if that's what uosuaq was doing, so I am talking in general). Threads are open for a month, after all, and that is a site norm, and, while most fade away before then, there should be a pretty good reason for closing a thread before its time.

The same might be said for the numerous funny bantering derails that crop up even in contentious MeTas, often as a brief lull in the discussion. I don't think they are necessarily bad, and I participate in them (I am resisting the urge to post tomato opinions right now), but they feel different when participants in the thread engage in them as a sort of pressure relief mechanism and when someone pops in as a new voice in the thread and makes a joke -- the first is kind of organic and the second is more jarring.

So I guess that calling for closing threads is usually counterproductive unless you have a really pressing issue (and then its best handled in the contact form) and defending/apologizing for stuff should also be kept to a minimum -- just like responding less frequently to a series of responses reduced the "take on all comers" aspect of some threads.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:16 AM on May 18, 2015 [11 favorites]

hey so whatever happened to that proposal to have summaries of long metatalk threads

I don't have a written summary, but this video provides a pithy summary of MetaTalk threads in general.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 7:36 AM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

I occasionally call for a thread shut down myself, usually when I think a thread has become really ugly and unproductive and I feel like people are in danger of flaming out/leaving in disgust, but that's a little different from suggesting that, since a thread is no longer interesting to you, it should be stopped

Yes, precisely this. There's a big difference between saying "this fire is getting really big and out of control, and we should put it out before anyone else gets hurt" and saying "i'm tired of sitting around this campfire, i've gotten all i need from it, so let's put it out".
posted by poffin boffin at 7:38 AM on May 18, 2015 [17 favorites]

I like the campfire example. I was tempted to say "[X] thread is getting close to a cliff and people are shoving" as a sign to haul a thread back from a perceived edge of no return.
posted by puddledork at 9:03 AM on May 18, 2015

I read the thread, most of it consists of people shouting down the 3-4 people with unsuitable opinions (in the future, Lord forbid you have a non-perfect opinion on the merits of 'tramp stamps'). What, exactly, is the problem here? Some people said some stuff others didn't agree with, the disagreement was made clear, and now we can move on.

Why do we have to go the next step and ban these people? Why are folks expecting that a general interest website will host specialized feminist discourse on the nature of lower back tattoos? Aren't there other places to go for that kind of thing?
posted by corcovado at 9:43 AM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Corcovado: maybe you should read this thread as well.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:45 AM on May 18, 2015 [33 favorites]

So you're telling me there's a reasonable answer to my question in this 1000-post thread? There's an actual reason why we can't just disagree, we have to actively cleanse non-conforming opinions from threads?
posted by corcovado at 9:49 AM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

> What, exactly, is the problem here?

If you can't be arsed to figure it out thanks to the discussion in this thread, I don't think it should be up to anyone here to start the whole explanation all over again.

Also, the entire internet is jammed with places where people can go be judgemental about women's bodies and the choices we make around decorating them. There's no law that says metafilter has to be one of them.
posted by rtha at 9:50 AM on May 18, 2015 [28 favorites]

"So you're telling me I actually have to read what women say to understand what they're saying? Will wonders never cease."
posted by dialetheia at 9:51 AM on May 18, 2015 [54 favorites]

Why are folks expecting that a general interest website will host specialized feminist discourse on the nature of lower back tattoos?

Specialized feminist discourse? Perhaps not; that may be a bit much to expect from a generalist website.

Lack of misogynist discourse, however, is a pretty reasonable expectation. Nah, scratch that... it's a mandatory standard that we behave like women are actually, y'know, people.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:53 AM on May 18, 2015 [23 favorites]

Also, the entire internet is jammed with places where people can go be judgemental about women's bodies and the choices we make around decorating them.

Ok, I understand: the comments are offensive because they question women's choices, which is inherently offensive.

I disagree with this, but I'm happy to actually hear the rationale.

Thanks!
posted by corcovado at 9:54 AM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Don't be obtuse. I'm sure you know the difference between judging and questioning. Even a non-native speaker of English (me!) knows that.
Kindly spare us your sarcasm. It's most unbecoming.
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:57 AM on May 18, 2015 [14 favorites]

No, Mr (or Ms) Sea Lion, the comments are offensive because they exemplify the notion that anything women do is for the male gaze, that a woman is automatically slutty for having a lower back tattoo, that women's bodies are the property of men, that women cannot choose to decorate their own bodies the way they want to without judgement from men.

Or, you know, you could read this damn thread instead of this wide eyed disingenuous thing you're doing.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:57 AM on May 18, 2015 [6 favorites]

"Women are actual human beings just like men and deserve respect instead of constant derision and scorn" is not actually specialized feminist discourse unless you are a grotesque misogynist.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:58 AM on May 18, 2015 [41 favorites]

> Ok, I understand: the comments are offensive because they question women's choices, which is inherently offensive.

My eyes are rolling so hard it's a good thing my fingers know where the keys are.

I've always liked the AskeMe standard "Believe what people tell you about themselves," and I will certainly do so in this case. Thanks.
posted by rtha at 9:59 AM on May 18, 2015 [8 favorites]

I disagree with this, but I'm happy to actually hear the rationale.

no sea lions will be fed in this thread.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:59 AM on May 18, 2015 [21 favorites]

I mentioned this to a fellow MeFite recently, but there really should be a word for comments like those, where you feel so fucking pissed off that it gets said because it's the same kind of dickery being discussed, but you have an incredible sense of vindication that it perfectly illustrates said dickery. It would probably be German and have 6 syllables, but whatever the case, it needs to happen.
posted by zombieflanders at 9:59 AM on May 18, 2015 [24 favorites]

I disagree with this, but I'm happy to actually hear the rationale.

I mean, as people have said, you'd hear the rationale if you'd read the damn thread. I'm going to follow supercrayon's advice above and end with this genuinely serious advice: LURK MOAR.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 10:00 AM on May 18, 2015 [8 favorites]

"maybe we can have a conversation about sexism where people don't theorize about which sexual positions the author of the piece likes because of her choice of body modification" is hardly demanding "specialized feminist discourse."
posted by nadawi at 10:01 AM on May 18, 2015 [20 favorites]

like seriously if your misogyny glands are inflamed and you can't express them yourself, please find somewhere else online to drag your asshole across, because no one here is interested.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:02 AM on May 18, 2015 [46 favorites]

no sea lions will be fed in this thread.

what if we feed the sea lions to some feminist wolves

with wailing & gnashing of teeth &c
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:02 AM on May 18, 2015

I'm not being disingenuous. A call has been made to actively remove perspectives that do not adhere to a certain standard. I want to know what the proposed standard is.

they exemplify the notion that anything women do is for the male gaze, that a woman is automatically slutty for having a lower back tattoo, that women's bodies are the property of men, that women cannot choose to decorate their own bodies the way they want to without judgement from men.

Yeah, this is not a standard, it's a collection of vague feminist platitudes.
posted by corcovado at 10:04 AM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

bye felicia
posted by poffin boffin at 10:04 AM on May 18, 2015 [48 favorites]

Recent account with no profile information, no Metatalk history, and only inflammatory comments on the Blue.

Don't feed.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:05 AM on May 18, 2015 [14 favorites]

I want to know what the proposed standard is.

Maybe you could start by reading the fucking thread instead of popping it at the end with demands? I mean, Jesus Christ, do you really think being both ignorant and shitty is the way to get your way?
posted by maxsparber at 10:05 AM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

I want to know what the proposed standard is.

Read the fucking thread, dude. Seriously.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:06 AM on May 18, 2015

seriously dude - read the thread - it's what the thread is about - there's lots of opinions. hell, you can even just scan the thread for the staff tag and see what comes up. if you're not being disingenuous, you'd find the answers you seek right here on this very page. cheers.
posted by nadawi at 10:06 AM on May 18, 2015

bye felicia

Yes! YES! So good! I conceptualize this phrase better and better!
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 10:08 AM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

corcovado, your behavior since you started this account has been routinely problematic and this does not look like good faith participation. If you are unhappy with Metafilter, hanging out here and hollering at people doesn't seem like a good use of your time or ours, and I am tired of giving this a shot. I'm closing your account, please don't sign up again.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:08 AM on May 18, 2015 [70 favorites]

Cortex, thank you so much for this! I understand the issues with people being glad about bannings and I'm not happy that it had to happen, but it really means a lot to me to see quick action being taken in cases like this. Very very much appreciated!
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 10:11 AM on May 18, 2015 [18 favorites]

I want to know what the proposed standard is.

I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:11 AM on May 18, 2015

cortex - your phrasing of 'since you started this account' strikes me - is this (like fffm thought) a previous user with a new account?
posted by corb at 10:12 AM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

oh sorry, I credited fffm but actually it looks like it was anotherpanacea.
posted by corb at 10:13 AM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ditto. I had just flagged corcovado's latest (as offensive) though I don't think I've ever flagged a MeTa comment before, and then I saw the ban hammer. Thanks very much.
posted by bearwife at 10:13 AM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

oh hey wait, that was JAQing off, wasn't it?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:15 AM on May 18, 2015

Returnee but not someone who had been banned the previous time around. Beyond that, let's let it be.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:24 AM on May 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

Ok, I understand: the comments are offensive because they question women's choices, which is inherently offensive.

I disagree with this, but I'm happy to actually hear the rationale.

Oh oh oh, can someone please send this in to Manfeels Park? Because holy shit, I have a desperate, overwhelming need to see these lines spoken by, I dunno, an illustration of a sour-faced old dude wearing a top hat and monocle. My mind's eye is enthralled by the possibility.

Cortex, thank you so much for this! I understand the issues with people being glad about bannings and I'm not happy that it had to happen, but it really means a lot to me to see quick action being taken in cases like this. Very very much appreciated!

The dittos: ALL OF THEM. Many thanks for the quick cleanup in aisle JAQ, cortex.
posted by divined by radio at 10:33 AM on May 18, 2015 [25 favorites]

I guess corcovado could be credited with providing an almost picture perfect example of "how to participate in bad faith on MetaFilter," so when the next bad faith commenter starts "what do you meeeean!?!" we can say "here is a great example how this thing starts. And how it ends."

The mods' quick action here (25 minutes from start to finish) is a good example of what we have been asking for in the way of positive mod action -- corcovado helped things along by being particularly hamfisted in his faux naivete, but a problem user was identified and banned within a very short time. Additionally, I don't think anyone of good faith would object to the process -- a problem user was shitting up a thread and it was really really obvious that action was needed (and that talks and warnings would only delay the inevitable rather than fix the situation).

So, hurray?
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:37 AM on May 18, 2015 [8 favorites]

With respect to Don Pepino, I would like to say that for myself, "I had dumb, unexamined notions about tattoos how women experience life that have been exploded by people's reporting in the original thread and this one. It was worth the time I spent because now I'm a little bit less of a moronic jerk in the silent reaches of my heart. This isn't the first time MetaFilter has done this for me. MetaFilter teaches me excellent things that make me a better person. I love this site forever."

I'm an oblivious white dude, and since coming to MeFi I listen more than I used to and talk a little less. Thanks to everyone for your comments, and to the mods for keeping these Augean stables clean. In other words:

This Is Just to Say
I have commented
On the
Threads
On the Blue

and which
you were probably
saving
for reasonable conversation

Forgive me
I was thoughtless
so now I know better
and am more willing to listen

(Thanks again, Mods!)
posted by wenestvedt at 10:39 AM on May 18, 2015 [22 favorites]

I must say, corcovado's posts are basically a nearly impossibly perfect example of the object lesson of this thread. Usually the lines are murkier, but bizarrely enough I like his (obviously his) comments, because how textbook they are.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:05 AM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I followed the wonderful advice offered in this thread by The Master and Margarita Mix , and set up a donation. Thank you guys for being so vested in maintaining this community, and having the high standards for discourse that you do.

( ˘ ³˘)♥
posted by erratic meatsack at 11:18 AM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

no sea lions will be fed in this thread.

EXCUSE ME, DO YOU HAVE ANY DORITOS? I HEARD YOU TALKING ABOUT DORITOS.
posted by SpacemanStix at 12:05 PM on May 18, 2015 [6 favorites]

i really want a FEMINIST ORCA meme to appear in savage carnivorous opposition to sealioning.
posted by poffin boffin at 12:21 PM on May 18, 2015 [31 favorites]

you mean like this? or like this?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:28 PM on May 18, 2015

How about preemptive FEMINIST ORCA sealioning?

EXCUSE ME, I SEE YOU WERE ABOUT TO BUTT IN ON A CONVERSATION TO WHICH YOU WERE NOT INVITED. LET'S DISCUSS IT OVER LUNCH. NOM NOM NOM [CARNAGE]...
posted by SpacemanStix at 12:31 PM on May 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm an oblivious white dude, and since coming to MeFi I listen more than I used to and talk a little less.

I started to joke that we should form a club. And then I realized that the entire problem is that it's all our fucking club. So instead, I decided to have some more coffee and keep listening as I best I can.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:35 PM on May 18, 2015 [12 favorites]

Why do we have to go the next step and ban these people? Why are folks expecting that a general interest website will host specialized feminist discourse on the nature of lower back tattoos? Aren't there other places to go for that kind of thing?

See this? This is why I think, as much as it would be an absolute sea change in site policy on a number of levels and would be fairly unpopular and will almost certainly never happen, and as LM and jessamyn have said would be very, very, very hard to draw an appropriate line for it to begin with, this is why the mods should make it clear that modding against MRA bullshit is as much political and from a position of feminism as just mechanic site garbage.

This shit, and posters like corcovado, are just going to keep shitting all over everything, again and again and again, in oblivious bad faith, forever, unless something changes, and more to the point, something changes that tells them that yes, they are in bad faith, because they will never, ever accept it. In fact, they won't even accept it when it does happen, they're just going to blame the feminists for "ruining MetaFilter", but I think there comes a point when you need to stop extending the presumption of good faith to what amounts to an entire ideology, and draw a line in the sand and just say: this is not how to do social justice threads on MF. Your failure is not fundamentally a technical one, where if you just phrase your odious opinion correctly this time it will be okay to shit it out all over a thread dealing with [insert underprivileged group here] issues. The problem is those opinions themselves, and if you have a problem with that and blah blah mean feminist girl cabal blah blah "SILENCED ALL MY LIFE!!!", go to Reddit because Reddit is what you're looking for, not MetaFilter.

I realize that's almost certainly not going to happen, and things will go on as they have and keep happening, but for the life of me I really don't understand why. I'm not saying the mods did a bad job or anything, either. You guys are awesome and cortex did an excellent job in this thread, but it's been a long while that the boyzone has been creeping back in. It was a problem when I took like a two month break and it's a problem now, female and other users were leaving or taking breaks from the site in exhaustion then and they're still doing it now, people are still being dicks to NoraReed, and all it seems like we've moved towards since however many long, 300+ MetaTalks I've missed in the interim is that the mods are slightly moving up their timetable for inevitably - and it is inevitable, we all know it's inevitable - telling the truly poisonous shitheads to Get Gone. And I don't want to belittle that as a positive thing because it is good and it is progress and so is jumping into social-justice-related threads earlier and more aggressively, but to me it seems like a small change in degree that's not going to meaningfully change a pretty oppressive, awful tide, and there really does need to be some kind of change in kind.

My apologies for the TL;DR. I don't know, I'm just tired of this shit and I haven't even been trying to do anything about it for a fraction of the time people like NoraReed or nadawi or GaP or everyone else has. This boyzone crap is really starting to feel like "definition of insanity" territory.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 12:37 PM on May 18, 2015 [22 favorites]

Erk, I should say: all the mods, including jessamyn in her Wise Elder role, have done an excellent job; cortex did a great job with corcovado specifically.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 12:44 PM on May 18, 2015

this is why the mods should make it clear that modding against MRA bullshit is as much political and from a position of feminism as just mechanic site garbage.

I'm totally comfortable personally calling bullshit on what I see as pernicious dumb/wrong arguments being shoehorned into threads, but that doesn't translate to declaring a political mission statement for Metafilter itself, something we have really pointedly declined to do since the site started. Metafilter's not designed to be a political entity, it's a site trying to be a good and interesting and civil generalist place on the web; the people on it can have political positions, and the process of helping this place be a generally good place to be and serve the needs of the people here can be furthered and improved, without changing that, and changing that would be a very big change indeed.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:31 PM on May 18, 2015 [7 favorites]

On the one hand, I totally understand and support that, cortex...on the other, it almost feels like that statement is saying that feminism is political here, and so can't be explicitly supported. I know that's not the case, and I'm not trying to start shit but its a tricky distinction. I get that MeFi isn't going to make any site statement about it. But maybe that kinda sucks.
posted by agregoli at 1:49 PM on May 18, 2015 [6 favorites]

"Metafilter's not designed to be a political entity, it's a site trying to be a good and interesting and civil generalist place on the web; the people on it can have political positions, and the process of helping this place be a generally good place to be and serve the needs of the people here can be furthered and improved, without changing that, and changing that would be a very big change indeed."

I see that, and it's pretty close to my default way of understanding MetaFilter ... but it's a mistake.

The fact of the matter is that the strong cultural norms are the sexist views in the tattoo thread, as well as corcovado's sense about this discussion, and there's no way for MetaFilter to structurally deviate from this that isn't implicitly a political position. And that's fine. It's a mistake to think that establishing our community standards of behavior can escape being political unless the standards are purely technical, which they're not. To the degree to which these standards affect who and how we interact here, they are necessarily political.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:54 PM on May 18, 2015 [15 favorites]

I had an exchange about this with another user over email. I know that the personal is political and that it's weird to not explicitly say you're being feminist when what you're saying is "We expect the "don't be an asshole" edict to include 'don't be an asshole to/about women'" but it does seem like that's the only way that some people will understand the "keep the boyzone from creeping back" actions.

Like, I think the notion that women are people is not so political it's just true. In the gross cesspool that is a lot of online discourse, it's like you have to spell it out, to direct people specifically how it's not okay to be skeevy creeps when discussing women's bodies or choices. I mean it's not okay to be gross creeps when discussing anyone's choices but this just isn't a thing that happens, by and large, in threads about men. Sometimes yes but it's the rare exception. In the past mods have basically had to babysit threads about female athletes' and scientists' accomplishments just so people wouldn't make hurf durf jokes about how they dressed. And so it feels weird, like you're specifically babysitting threads to make sure they're following feminist bona fides or something.

Except all you're doing (long suffering mods) is just making sure women have the same abilities to interact here without being objectified, harassed, belittled other forms of internet hassling (sea lioning, JAQoff was a new one to me) but that's not the same as taking a political stance, that's just managing the fucked up set of expectations people on the internet seem to have about how awful they should be allowed to be. I'm okay in saying it should stop here. I appreciate your assistance in helping stop it.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 1:55 PM on May 18, 2015 [58 favorites]

I'm trying to come up with a proper analogy that doesn't step on the toes of some group I'm not part of by using them as an example or presuming that the moderation/climate around their issues is better than it actually is, which is surprisingly hard, but here goes: I get that it's an enormous change, yes, as I said, and that it won't happen, but at the end of the day I feel like someone in an early post-revolutionary fledgling democracy, constantly working to hammer out the issues and make the Republic a better place, told by The Directorate that yes, yes, of course those monarchist propagandists are terrible and of course the Divine Right of Kings is nonsense and offensive and All Men Are Brothers, but you need to keep explaining to the monarchists why Kings Are Bad And Not A Particularly Effective Form Of Government And Also You Are Not Better Than All Of Us Because Your Grandad Was A Count Before The Revolution, until such time as The Directorate gets fed up with it and throws them in prison or rides out to whatever village their reactionary army has managed to siege and restores it from the loving grasp of resurgent feudalism.

But meanwhile, Have You Considered That Actually You Really Are Low-Bred Scum Who Is Fundamentally Less Worthy Than Your Betters By Blood?

I'm all for diversity of opinions and letting people argue it out, and I think I'm actually way more aggressive in my alignment towards civil libertarianism than much of the rest of the supposed "feminist brigade", but there is actually an important, qualitative difference between giving room and consideration to people I disagree with on something like, to take yet another example where I'm probably more to the right than would be expected, nuclear power or government censorship and having to put up with "okay but have you considered that lol dumb sluts".

The personal is, indeed, political; and that does not hold just for feminist but also for horrifying MRA shitheads. The derailing, the threadshitting, the constant act of superiority like it's fucking beneath them to read the very thread where their questions have already been answered, the whining and scaremongering about an Echo Chamber, the constant and endless fucking bashing of NoraReed and basically just the repeated failure to Get It: it's not politically void, it's how they are doing The Political Is Personal. If the feminists of MetaFilter are asked, again and again, to do the work and explain and educate and pushback, if our participation in threads like the tattoo thread, like the Books White Dudes Own thread, is seen as political, why isn't the crap that we're supposed to be pushing back against seen that way and taken for that? Why are you allowing them the polite fiction and cover of having their flood of sea lion shit be seen as "politically neutral" and forever a bunch of individual acts of individual users, while you're explicitly asking us to get politically active more or less as a collective?

"okay but have you considered that lol dumb sluts" is not civil, but it is also not generalist. It is actively political. Can we please stop pretending that it isn't?
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 2:06 PM on May 18, 2015 [32 favorites]

Personally, knowing the mods, I'm fine with feminism not being "site policy," as long as they treat misogynist derailing/sealioning/whatever with the kind of no bullshit attitude people have been calling for in this thread. I don't really see a need for Metafilter to declare itself specifically this or that politically, and I think that would actually be a move in the wrong direction.

Not all anti-misogynists call themselves "feminists" so that is already a sticking point, and I think that the semantic details of that argument are irrelevant to mod policy and inclusion. (The underlying arguments are NOT irrelevant, but arguing over specific political labels seems like a misdirection of energy since there will never be a way to please everyone.) I'm a feminist because in our human rights tradition it's evidently the right thing to do and I think feminist policies are good for this site because they create space for interesting conversations but I don't think the label is necessary for the site to support either of those principles.

You can't escape the fact that Metafilter has a particular political bent, but avoiding specific political labels or affiliations makes the mod team more agile and effective, imo. As much as I appreciate the historical significance of feminism, saying "stop doing this shitty thing, Metafilter is a largely feminist space" and "stop doing this shitty thing, you are suffocating this conversation about women" are fundamentally the same to me and I actually prefer the latter as it's more transparent and thoughtful about what feminism is.

(Apologies for incoherence, I had a long weekend.)
posted by easter queen at 2:07 PM on May 18, 2015 [9 favorites]

i really want a FEMINIST ORCA meme to appear in savage carnivorous opposition to sealioning.

I'd like to suggest that the next mod hired be a feminist orca. Thanks.

EDIT: I actually have no idea what that means.
posted by small_ruminant at 2:11 PM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

As much as I appreciate the historical significance of feminism, saying "stop doing this shitty thing, Metafilter is a largely feminist space" and "stop doing this shitty thing, you are suffocating this conversation about women" are fundamentally the same to me and I actually prefer the latter as it's more transparent and thoughtful about what feminism is.

You know, I think I'll second that. "We don't tolerate saying shitty things about anyone and it's nothing out of the ordinary here regardless of gender" is appealing. In my mind it normalizes more that women are part of everyday conversations. It's like "Eh, of course they are. Nothing to see here. Don't be shitty."
posted by erratic meatsack at 2:13 PM on May 18, 2015 [9 favorites]

The Master and Margarita Mix: "This shit, and posters like corcovado, are just going to keep shitting all over everything, again and again and again, in oblivious bad faith, forever, unless something changes"

I want to call out for people that are maybe just skimming the thread that corcovado got banned because of his behavior. I'm just one anonymous dog on the internet, but I think that's kind of a good change.

jessamyn: " what you're saying is "We expect the "don't be an asshole" edict to include 'don't be an asshole to/about women'" but it does seem like that's the only way that some people will understand the "keep the boyzone from creeping back" actions. "

Oh man, this is pretty great phrasing, jessamyn.
posted by boo_radley at 2:21 PM on May 18, 2015 [6 favorites]

Okay, how about just being explicitly anti-misogyny, and not just some nebulous, echo-chamber-invoking conception of feminist? Not "mod note: your comment is bad and not allowed because it isn't feminist", but "mod note: you comment is bad because it is actively misogynist and that's not okay", not just wrong on some technicality. I don't see why this wouldn't, (or if it isn't, shouldn't) be the case with comments that were racist in the degree that many of the comments on the tattoo thread were misogynist.

I'm not actually asking for a collective burning of the bras, or anything, but I don't think it's ridiculous to suggest that no matter how "civil" or measured or, frankly, stiltedly pedantic someone on the Blue is about phrasing a racist opinion, those comments aren't okay because they're fucking racist*, beyond simple "Don't Be A Jerk", "we don't tolerate saying shitty things about protesters in Ferguson/Baltimore/whatever because it is racist".

*Not that I'm trying to speak for any MeFites of Color on this, since I'm sure there are plenty who might find my take on that hopelessly naive or optimistic; after the last depressing anti-Semitism thread, I suspect I'm probably more optimistic for issues that aren't my own than I really deserve to be, and that's it's own kind of obnoxious.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 2:21 PM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

but there is actually an important, qualitative difference between giving room and consideration to people I disagree with on something like, to take yet another example where I'm probably more to the right than would be expected, nuclear power or government censorship and having to put up with "okay but have you considered that lol dumb sluts".

I totally agree, and think that distinction is worth making. And more to the point I think the distinction is still useful when you get away from really easy to dismiss literal "but what if...actually dumb sluts?" shitbombs and more toward softer but still frustrating and pernicious expressions of some of those ideas. And I think part of what this conversation has been useful for is helping us recalibrate our sense of where and how to draw the line on that stuff, to be more willing to jump in earlier to explicitly say "hey, cut it out, this sort of thing isn't okay".

But stating, and moderating to enforce, the ideal that a specific line of commenting or type of behavior is not okay and someone needs to cut that shit out is not the same thing as declaring an explicit political mission for the site or saying that that behavior is not okay solely or primarily because the site has a political mission.

If what people are bothered by is behavior we can actively and concretely curtail, that is something we can really reasonable work toward. If what people are bothered by is that there's people who exist in the world and who turn out to have shitty misogynistic opinions once they open their mouths, that is not so easily solvable, and putting up an explicit political mission statement about it won't do it.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:29 PM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Not "mod note: your comment is bad and not allowed because it isn't feminist", but "mod note: you comment is bad because it is actively misogynist and that's not okay", not just wrong on some technicality.

It seems like that just triggers a back-and-forth from the poster about why what he said wasn't misogynist. I'm not sure what it accomplishes that moderators stepping in earlier and being more pointed about who's in the wrong (which I agree is needed) doesn't.
posted by jaguar at 2:30 PM on May 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm pretty sure that insisting that women be treated as people in a culture where women are often not treated as people is inherently a political position and that pretending that it isn't is some weird obeisance to the repressive idea that being "political" is unseemly and uncivil.

It's accepting the framing that in order to be respectable and valid, and not "special interest", an advocated change must be considered "evenhanded" as conveniently defined by the prevailing structure that is itself not evenhanded and which judges what is and isn't "evenhanded" according to that bias. Which cripples a "valid" and "evenhanded" proposal at the outset.

Furthermore, it brings us a world in which MRA folk make accusations of "misandry" and where a majority of white Americans believe that "racism" by blacks against whites is a bigger problem than the reverse. If you remove the political context from the discussion and bend over backward to formulate your principle in a way that's "not political", then what you get is a structure that leverages all of its very unequal power to defend men from people being creeps about discussing their choices while mostly ignoring the far more frequent examples when women are the target. You get threads about sexism that are hijacked by men who argue that men are the real victims of sexism.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:31 PM on May 18, 2015 [24 favorites]

I'm pretty sure that insisting that women be treated as people in a culture where women are often not treated as people is inherently a political position

It is, but an explicitly feminist website would (I hope) go further than that, and this website generally does not. It would be weird to label MetaFilter a feminist space, because it's not. It is working toward becoming a space where all people are respected and given space to participate, though it's not quite there yet as recent MeTas have shown, and it sounds like the moderators are on board with that goal. That seems entirely more important to me.
posted by jaguar at 2:38 PM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

gah i sort of feel like i set off this last batch of long commenting about feminism as a site value. i should have been more clear in my comment. if mods go into threads and say "we're not going to discuss which sexual positions this author of a piece about tattoos likes," they aren't saying "metafilter is an explicitly feminist space" but rather "our members are important to us, which includes our members who are women and we aren't going to foster a space that drives them out." that's what i mean by site value.

it's not about sticking your flag in a specific political ideology and making it part of the masthead, but rather noticing and reacting that patterns that create a boyzone atmosphere at the expense of other groups. i appreciate the work the mods are doing in this vein and i hope we keep getting better on this sort of thing.
posted by nadawi at 2:38 PM on May 18, 2015 [26 favorites]

It seems like that just triggers a back-and-forth from the poster about why what he said wasn't misogynist. I'm not sure what it accomplishes that moderators stepping in earlier and being more pointed about who's in the wrong (which I agree is needed) doesn't.

Because he (or she! or some other pronoun and identity!) is having it with the mods, in a non-public channel, away from the thread and the feminist-aligned users and others who just don't want to listen to a bunch of assholes opine about sluts, who are trying to have a different and better discussion, and because just maybe the other sea lions see it and there is less "but have you considered how misandrist and close-minded you are not to allow me to offer my opinion about the dumb sluts?" crap in threads like these, either because they say to themselves "hmm maybe I should not offer the opinion, it is kind of misogynist, they have a point" or because they say to themselves "wah wah feminist cabal making MetaFilter a worse place a bloo bloo silenced all my life the overmoderation has gotten out of hand best of the web *fart noise*", followed by avoiding social justice threads entirely for ones about bass fishing, or decamps to Reddit, or I-honestly-don't-give-a-shit-I'm-just-tired-of-the-opinions-about-sluts-being-given-equal-air-time.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 2:39 PM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

"We don't tolerate saying shitty things about anyone and it's nothing out of the ordinary here regardless of gender" is appealing.

Sadly, it's vulnerable to the "intoleration of intolerance" rhetorical trick. There is a huge segment of the privileged for whom being disagreed with is shitty behavior pretty much on a moral level with bloody persecution.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:41 PM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

Furthermore, it brings us a world in which MRA folk make accusations of "misandry" and where a majority of white Americans believe that "racism" by blacks against whites is a bigger problem than the reverse.

And that world is Metafilter as it currently exists? Because I don't think it is, not by a very, very long shot; as much as I think it's important for folks to talk about the shit they don't like on the site and their frustration with how good conversation sometimes falls short because of some user's behavior or rhetorical approach or ugly opinion, I am not under the impression that anyone thinks that Metafilter is on the balance more sympathetic than not to misogynists and racists. That stuff gets, on the whole, vociferous pushback from mefites when it does come up; it gets active, if imperfect, attention from the mods.

And again, that's in the absence of any explicit mission statement that this site is a feminist concern, or an anti-racist concern, or a pro-gay rights concern, or or or. That's the product of (a) a user base that has a collective tendency to stand up in words for what it thinks is right and (b) a moderative mission to try and help this place be a decent place to be.

That we don't have an explicit feminist or anti-racist or so on mission is not a rejection of the value of those ideas or a suggestion that people who value them have to go stuff it if Someone Has Something To Say. It's just recognizing the difference between this site, a generalist, open-signup place nominally about sharing neat stuff on the web and answering each others questions, and a site that has been built from the ground up with a specific political or ideological mission and the ground rules, community guidelines, and infrastructure to hew to that mission.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:43 PM on May 18, 2015 [7 favorites]

In conversations I've had with friends and colleagues on other sites who deal with this kind of moderation situation, it seems pushing back against misogyny and racism is a lot easier to do when you stop caring about whether or not you will be perceived as "political" or "making a sanctioned position on [X]" one way or the other. Instead of worrying over how best to phrase a particular rule or guideline so it doesn't sound like you're antifa or, heavens forbid, a feminist, you lose the exactness of language needed to fight this stuff, or at least make the language to be used a whole lot more difficult to wrangle.

For whatever reason(s), on the sites I'm talking about, this seems to be much easier to abide by when it comes to racism as opposed to misogyny. Saying something like "but there are biological reasons why [this race] are more prone to crime" gets shut down a damn sight faster than "well you know, there are biological reasons why women do [some completely non-biology-related thing]", for example. The bar for tolerance of repressive bullshit is way, way lower when it comes to racism - however "politely" phrased, however "relevant" to the topic - that it is for sexism.

So I'm all in favor of being clear and exact: misogyny will not be tolerated, and what constitutes misogyny is at the discretion of mods and community alike. Don't like it? Then flounce on off to some MRA subreddit and cry about it there.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 2:43 PM on May 18, 2015 [14 favorites]

Sadly, it's vulnerable to the "intoleration of intolerance" rhetorical trick. There is a huge segment of the privileged for whom being disagreed with is shitty behavior pretty much on a moral level with bloody persecution.

I think the mods flat out ignoring that rhetorical "trick" and continuing to encourage conversations between and about women (e.g., encouraging Metafilter to pass the Bechdel test with flying colors) by lesser bullshit tolerance is part of what is appealing about it.
posted by easter queen at 2:45 PM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Speaking only for myself, I have zero desire for MeFi to be an explicitly "feminist" or even "anti-misogynist" space, and not just because many, many dudes are very, very happy to argue the definitions of "feminist" and "misogynist" (and "privilege" and "patriarchy" and and and) for literally ever.

All I want is for this to be a place where women are considered people, and for insulting women qua women to be considered equivalent to insulting people -- which is to say, of course, men. (NB if that's all it takes to label a practice or philosophy "feminist" or "anti-misogynist," shit, I don't even know.) But until it isn't up to individual users to repeatedly and persistently attempt to draw that particular line in the sand, I feel like there's always going to be a division between the way "women" are treated here and the way "people" are treated here, and I'll just shrug and continue to operate under the broad assumption that MeFites are likely to be given more editorial leeway when it comes to issuing sexist insults than they are when it comes to issuing personal insults.

That isn't something that I'm necessarily unaccustomed to or even remotely surprised by in my daily life, it's just a bummer to watch it happen here, especially over and over and over again -- I want to think MeFi is smarter than that. And not to harp, but my whole damn life is political, has been since birth, I dunno, I've always had the impression that's it's kind of the whole deal with life as a woman in a patriarchy. I just don't have the option to make my belief that women are human apolitical by fiat, for any reason, up to and including a simple desire to take part in discussions on a generalist site -- or literally anywhere else in the world that isn't delineated by explicitly feminist boundaries -- without having my humanity litigated or repeatedly called into question. I really wish I did, though.
posted by divined by radio at 2:48 PM on May 18, 2015 [34 favorites]

"It is, but an explicitly feminist website would (I hope) go further than that, and this website generally does not. It would be weird to label MetaFilter a feminist space, because it's not."

I agree.

I guess where I'm coming from is not so much that I think that MetaFilter should very explicitly adopt X, Y, and Z political positions, because I don't think that's a good idea, but that I'm very opposed to the sensibility that says that MetaFilter should disavow being political in its moderation and community standards, or otherwise work at being "not political". It's a mistake to think that working to avoid being political is a virtue when we're talking about "how to make MetaFilter less hostile to women".
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:48 PM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

If what people are bothered by is behavior we can actively and concretely curtail, that is something we can really reasonable work toward. If what people are bothered by is that there's people who exist in the world and who turn out to have shitty misogynistic opinions once they open their mouths, that is not so easily solvable, and putting up an explicit political mission statement about it won't do it.

That's not really my problem. My problem is that by not being clear about the fact that part of the problem with their shitty opinions is that they're misogynistic, you're letting them off the hook for the misogyny to some extent, and also encouraging this kind of thing to drag out and recur. The "maybe if I just rephrase my offensive opinion about women, the mods will let it stand this time" is a dynamic, the mods are as much participants as the users who are doing it, it's something you're kind of collaborating with them even if you don't want to be and that's not the intent. Maybe I'm totally off the mark and this won't actually work, but I feel like being somewhat openly political in the modding process will cut down on the kind of juvenile five-year-old-testing-Mom-and-Dad's-boundaries that seems to happen again and again and again with these users. That there's no way they can phrase the noxious comment to have it be okay, so don't even start.

That's not even getting into all the instances of boyzone tactic #37B: "I am a dude and I consider myself a feminist, how dare you call me out for my shitty misogynist opinion, I consier myself a feminist so I cannot possibly be in the wrong about this, also any opinion that differs from mine is therefore dangerous, hysterical radicalism".
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 2:56 PM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

GenjiandProust: "it's vulnerable to the "intoleration of intolerance" rhetorical trick."

Which is solely a sleight of hand, as I suspect you realize. Read your Marcuse. I'll quote from a bit at the start:

Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.
(...)
Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.
(...)
This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested. The political locus of tolerance has changed: while it is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies.

You can also find a good justification for FEMINIST ORCA ENFORCERS in the essay if you look.
posted by boo_radley at 2:56 PM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

I guess where I'm coming from is not so much that I think that MetaFilter should very explicitly adopt X, Y, and Z political positions, because I don't think that's a good idea, but that I'm very opposed to the sensibility that says that MetaFilter should disavow being political in its moderation and community standards, or otherwise work at being "not political".

I haven't said anything about disavowing these ideas; I've been talking about not doing exactly the explicit adoption of political positions that you're agreeing with the idea of not doing.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:57 PM on May 18, 2015

Maybe I'm totally off the mark and this won't actually work, but I feel like being somewhat openly political in the modding process will cut down on the kind of juvenile five-year-old-testing-Mom-and-Dad's-boundaries that seems to happen again and again and again with these users.

Based on a lot of years doing the ditch work here, I do think it's unrealistic to expect that to solve that problem, yeah. Us actively cutting down the repeat behavior before it repeats so much will solve it much more effectively, and that's one of the primary concrete actions folks have talked about wanting to see in here.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:01 PM on May 18, 2015 [7 favorites]

Based on a lot of years doing the ditch work here, I do think it's unrealistic to expect that to solve that problem, yeah. Us actively cutting down the repeat behavior before it repeats so much will solve it much more effectively, and that's one of the primary concrete actions folks have talked about wanting to see in here.

Well, I'm not naive enough to think it will solve everything with problem users, I think you're absolutely right.

That said, that kind of policy is not something that's only aimed at those users; it's also a way of making it explicit to the set of users-made-upset-and-uncomfortable-by-the-boyzone that hey, the mods see it too, it's a problem, it's not okay, we have your back, and This Is Not What MF Is. You don't have to take boyzone bullshit as the price of admission for participating in MetaFilter as a whole or these kinds of threads more specificially, and you also don't have to pretend that this is just one of those areas where reasonable people can agree to disagree.

Also, the thing is that I think at the end of the day those kind of users know; they realize when they're being swatted not just for, in essence, not phrasing the opinion about the sluts "properly", but expressing it at all, because it is a form of Being A Jerk. There's an unwritten rule that they find it very hard to wrap their head around that They Cannot Say The Thing About The Sluts that exists in conflict with their vision of what MF is, and part of that is driving the dynamic, because no one except the "feminist cabal" is actually coming out and saying "that is a bad thing to say, not a good thing said in a bad way", which is actually a lot of what's driving the "echo chamber"/"feminist cabal" crap, and let me tell you it is not a pleasant feeling at all. Hell, given some of these MetaTalk threads, I think for certain users that's almost the point, they want the mods to "admit" that MeFi has "changed", that you guys have fallen from the pure pedestal of The Best of The Web Super Civil Free Speech Zone or whatever reactionary fantasy of the past they have in their heads.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 3:15 PM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

"I haven't said anything about disavowing these ideas; I've been talking about not doing exactly the explicit adoption of political positions that you're agreeing with the idea of not doing."

I understand that. But I hear what seems to me to be an institutional fear of being perceived as "political". It manifests in a number of ways -- it was the resistance to adding a sexism/racism flag eight years ago and it's the desire now to frame moderator decisions as "telling people to stop being shitty to each other" as opposed to "telling people to stop being shitty to women". It's an implication of the repeated response that MetaFilter is a "generalist" site.

Our culture is a sexist culture and that means that there are going to be sexist men (and women) who fuck up and derail many threads.

I have the sense that, institutionally, MetaFilter has reluctantly over time been willing to adopt moderation standards that make it somewhat less hostile to women, but that it's always afraid that if it does too much, then it will fall into the territory of being a "feminist site". And my sense is that this is exactly why MetaFilter has usually been improving in this regard over the years, yet also trailing expectations, and therefore periodically experiencing this sort of blow-up.

This is untenable because, frankly, the "generalist" cultural-norm kind of folk now find that MetaFilter is quite obviously a "feminist" site in practice while, unfortunately, it's not sufficiently so that women don't button or consider buttoning during something like this tattoo thread. The middle-ground you're trying to walk is an illusion; if it was ever that effective in the past, it's increasingly less effective now. Again, that doesn't mean that MetaFilter ought to adopt a mission statement or anything like that, but it does mean that you should just let go of this institutionalized desire to somehow be neutral by framing (and thinking about) moderation standards in apolitical terms.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:27 PM on May 18, 2015 [10 favorites]

MetaFilter shouldn't explicitly say it's feminist, and mod actions already give the impression that it's about curtailing assholish behavior and not about sanctioning specific opinions. The supposed "echo chamber" is the asshole's fault by making us go over basic arguments. But I agree that all actions are inherently political. It's the denial of inherent subjectivity in communication that is a talking point for sea lions, anyways.

One thing which I'd like to add to the FAQ would be that you can be an asshole by floating biased claims without evidence and/or explanation. It doesn't require you actively attack other users personally. The FAQ could also say that you should absolutely not come into a thread without reading/skimming previous comments. Both of these should fall under not making a thread about you, but some people are just oblivious.
posted by halifix at 3:44 PM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Since at its core feminism advocates for women to be treated as equals, refusing to identify MetaFilter as feminist while advocating that women be treated as equals on this site seems not only contradictory, but at cross purposes. Because making sure women are treated as equals isn't as simple as saying "don't be shitty to each other," it's recognizing that there are institutions that support inequality, and unless they are recognized and addressed, women will always get the short end of the stick, no matter how much we demand civility.

As we have seen, it is entirely possible to be civil and still alienate and silence women.

And I think this cannot be solved as long as the site fears that being feminist means being political. Maybe it does, but it is a politics of fairness, explicitly developed to address systematic inequalities, and we're either a site that wants women to be treated as equals here or we aren't.
posted by maxsparber at 3:46 PM on May 18, 2015 [12 favorites]

I think the mods flat out ignoring that rhetorical "trick" and continuing to encourage conversations between and about women (e.g., encouraging Metafilter to pass the Bechdel test with flying colors) by lesser bullshit tolerance is part of what is appealing about it.

I dunno. I agree that "lesser bullshit tolerance" is an excellent idea, but "We don't tolerate saying shitty things about anyone" needs be be defined a lot more finely if we don't want the NoraReed Is Meeeeeean! meme (NRIMM) to be raising it's rotten little head all the time.

Which is solely a sleight of hand, as I suspect you realize.

And I absolutely do, but it takes a bit of work to get that across even to a receptive audience looking for tools, and I'm not sure sentencing the mods to have that conversation over and over is a great treat for them. We can't even get people to read the threads, much less TFA; I'm not sure sending them to Marcuse will help that.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:46 PM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

"Political" is a pretty fraught and messy term, not unlike "religion". And sadly so is "feminism" these days (the Onion did a pretty good job of capturing the zeitgeist with a recent op-ed titled "I'm Not In Favor Of Feminism If It Means Killing All The Men", if memory serves). Using words that have so many different connotations for different people might hinder the conversation. Simple statements like "we want women to be treated as equals here" work better, in my opinion.
posted by uosuaq at 3:59 PM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter shouldn't explicitly say it's feminist

Maybe this, for me, is the ultimate sticking point: why not? Why the goddamn hell not?

I mean, do you think "MetaFilter shouldn't explicitly say that it's anti-white-supremacism" or "Metafilter shouldn't explicitly say that it's anti-homophobia" or "Metafilter should maintain a careful policy of neutral on the issue of whether it is okay to deliberately misgender people" are reasonable statements?

More and more, to me, all these things do seem like they're basically comparable. Obviously, being anti-white-supremacist or pro-basic-humanity-of-gay-and-trans-people is not the entire point of MetaFilter, but why would explicitly acknowledging that level of "well duh" be some kind of problem? Why should it be taboo? What, precisely, is gained from essentially having site policy towards women be something like "well, we're not saying we're FOR white supremacism, but..."?
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 4:00 PM on May 18, 2015 [36 favorites]

The Master and Margarita Mix: "Why the goddamn hell not?"

Yeah, I think this is an OK value for metafilter to embrace.
posted by boo_radley at 4:05 PM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

If what people are bothered by is behavior we can actively and concretely curtail, that is something we can really reasonable work toward. If what people are bothered by is that there's people who exist in the world and who turn out to have shitty misogynistic opinions once they open their mouths, that is not so easily solvable, and putting up an explicit political mission statement about it won't do it.

It's sort of insulting to suggest that some of us are bothered by "people who exist in the world...who...have shitty misogynistic opinions." We have to live in the world and we know what it's like, but we don't come to MetaFilter for more of that. We've confined ourselves to focusing on what happens here on MetaFilter, it's not some hysterical reaction to conditions in the larger world.

This is what I referred to above (and have referred to before) about the problem of the frame, which I think IF among others has laid out pretty clearly. The frame here still identifies the act of clearly saying "we don't tolerate misoygnistic attacks" as a political act, rather than an affirmation of a basic contract of participation that asserts the human rights of the users and post subjects. That's a framing issue. MetaFilter is framed as neutral, civil, "generalist;" vocal misogynists and anti-misogynists are framed as "political," ideological, position-takers. Well, we could debate what "political" means until the cows come home, but by refusing to affirm the right of people regardless of gender to participate here without tolerating oppressive attacks, MetaFilter is being political - it's endorsing the status quo and actively creating and maintaining a space for patriarchal oppression. That kind of language probably scares folks as 'political,' but that's what MeFi ends up doing if it consistently decides this is an individual problem of behavior or personalities or overt slurs that are clearly beyond the pale.

I don't like the thought that being able to participate here without the legitimacy of your viewpoint being called into question because of your gender is "political." I like the thought that MetaFilter is smarter than that, that MetaFilter sets the floor for debate at a certain level, and that level excludes the identity-based marginalizing of opinions shared here. That standard works (somewhat) for LGBT issues, it works for polyamory, it works for body-shaming, it works for religion, it works for race. Why is it only "political" when it needs to work for women?
posted by Miko at 4:05 PM on May 18, 2015 [48 favorites]

[tacked on] I mean, one useful guiding question might be:

-What is the anticipated trajectory for general scope, variety, quality, and participation (considered by gender) on MetaFilter over the next ~3 years if no moderation changes are made?
-How would that anticipated trajectory change if MetaFilter explicitly curtailed expressions of misogyny?
posted by Miko at 4:13 PM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

"Metafilter is feminist" as a site position rubs me the wrong way because as much as the general idea of feminism is equality, the history of feminism is a fraught one wrt to women of color and trans issues and more and I don't think the teleology of the term justifies that. It would be like saying "Metafilter is Democrat" (pardon the U.S.-centrism but it contributes to the point). As much as I'd probably have overlapping opinions with it in that regard, it's a much different claim than casual mod statements that Metafilter leans left (which is pretty undeniable).

Feminism exists as a telos and an actual historical movement, and the implications of that are messy. I think that actively anti-misogynist modding means more to me than any statement of purpose here.
posted by easter queen at 4:16 PM on May 18, 2015 [27 favorites]

I dislike putting it in bold declarations, including homophobia, white supremism, and other topics. Among other things, it seems like the thing that would attract trolls and/or assholes. It also invites the rules/platform lawyering.

But even beyond Assholes Ruin Everything, there's the fact that you simply can't list all of the MetaFilter consensus opinions that go against the status quo. Just a personal opinion that it slightly conflicts with the "anyone can contribute" statement, as if we're personally elevating the listed attitudes over other topics.

As for how MetaFilter's trajectory would measurably change if it explicitly did or didn't officially endorse feminism... I really see no change. Just that we would argue a lot about "what else could we add to the site statement, and what could we remove?"
posted by halifix at 4:22 PM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

Heh, I think it's interesting the Miko and I seem to emphatically agree while apparently taking contrary positions on the word "political". That actually kind of makes the underlying argument we (and others) are making pretty clear -- whatever words we use, the decisions we make about what kind of community this is are meaningful and have a cultural context and you cannot simultaneously oppose within MetaFilter the wider cultural bias while pretending that you're not doing so. Or rather, pretending that you're not doing so undermines your attempt to do so. The wider culture is inevitably going to call this political, or advocacy, or special interest, or whatever, and the bottom line is that to avoid this sort of criticism requires conforming to those values. Which we've already decided not to do. Quit being afraid of the accusation that we've done this, because we have, and we've been right to do so.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:27 PM on May 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

It's sort of insulting to suggest that some of us are bothered by "people who exist in the world...who...have shitty misogynistic opinions." We have to live in the world and we know what it's like, but we don't come to MetaFilter for more of that.

Again, I don't disagree with that. But where I was coming from with that was, basically: lay out the process for preventing it ever occurring on Metafilter. Lay out how that is mechanically accomplished, and what changes need to be made to the basic way that signups and commenting on Metafilter works to accomplish it.

Because saying someone who shows up to start spewing some misogynistic nonsense will get shut down is one thing, and it's something I'm on board with. My feeling is fewer incidents of misogynistic bullshit taking over a conversation is an absolutely good thing. This hasn't been a thread full of the mods saying "nah, it's not a problem, chill out"; it's been us mostly talking with folks about how to better match up the rough consensus of goals for dealing with this problem stuff on the site and how moderation is performed in practice.

My point in the quoted bit is that, even with that moderative dedication to curtailing that stuff, we're still a site where that stuff can show up and need curtailing. That's the case because new people can sign up with whatever opinions they have, and existing members can harbor whatever opinions they have, without anybody knowing it's going to turn out at some point that they're going to start saying, or repeating, something gross and shitty. And then we can deal with it.

That is the reactive nature of the way conversation without an explicit comment moderation queue works. And unless something very significant changes about the mechanical process of joining and commenting on Metafilter, that'll continue to be the case. And so those people that exist in the world who have and share shitty misogynistic opinions will continue to be people who show up on Metafilter sometimes. We can react to it but we can't prevent it.

And I feel like, we're saying here that we will react to it, have been trying to react to it, and will continue to react to it and make an active effort to refine the efficacy with which we do that. It won't be perfect, but we can keep improving it. But as much as we keep improving it, it won't be perfect. That's all I'm getting at: a level of success that's defined as "bad shit never appears" is not practical, and I worry that the achievable idea of working hard to minimize the footprint and lifespan of that bad shit is going to be dismissed as not enough because it doesn't make the appealing but infeasible promise to outright eliminate something that we'd essentially have to shut the site down to actually outright eliminate.

As much as the tattoo thread on the blue sucked, it was notable in part as an outlier—an especially busy, hard to track thread with a surprising-to-a-lot-of-people amount of problematic stuff showing up, on a day where it was only one of several things going on when we were coincidentally more short-handed than usual. And there will always be those shitty situations, those perfect storms. We're talking in here about finding ways to help reduce the impact of bad stuff, to suck to some greater degree the energy out of those storms and out of lesser incidents of shittiness, and I think that is very achievable. But shit will still, to some degree, happen.

I don't expect anyone to come to Metafilter to deal with shit they're already tired of dealing with daily, but folks also need to manage their expectations for the difference between the mod staff here making a real ongoing effort to manage the shit that sometimes shows up and the idea that shit is something we can ever guarantee won't show up sometimes anyway to need managing.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:28 PM on May 18, 2015 [8 favorites]

Miko and I seem to emphatically agree while apparently taking contrary positions on the word "political"

That was not meant to be a contradictory position with what you wrote. I think we are both essentially saying "Any position, even those imagined by some to be 'neutral,' is inherently political, regardless of what you call it."
posted by Miko at 4:34 PM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

I don't like the thought that being able to participate here without the legitimacy of your viewpoint being called into question because of your gender is "political."

While I think I agree more with IF on the idea of "political," this is a really critical idea that we ought to be able to run with. Could part of the MetaFilter guidelines be that "the reality of other users' experience as women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and [I am probably leaving something out] is not open for questioning. Be respectful of others' life experience." Because I think a lot of the palaces where I see trouble arise out of fundamental disrespect for people outside of the white, western, cis-, straight male clique for whom the internet (and the world) is operated.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:37 PM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

While I don't think some broad declaration belongs in the masthead, seeing "don't be shitty to/about women" as a mod note would be welcome.

Sure, and to be super clear I don't have an issue with that at all. One of the things I would do differently in the tattoo thread given the benefit of a time machine would be to have, as folks have suggested in here a few times, more explicitly said not just "cut it out" or "cut it out, x", but "cut it out with [this specific gross/shitty/misogynistic/whatever line of thinking], that's not okay".

Maybe some of this is just talking past each other because of differing assumptions about the terms involved. The idea has come up many times before in various Metatalk discussions of an explicit political position on the site—that Metafilter should, e.g., have a formal statement of ideological or geopolitical position on the signup page and about page and FAQ saying in some unambiguous form "Metafilter is a [leftist/liberal/atheist/US-centric/whatever] site". It's come up both as a positive and as a critical comment, in varying contexts. And that idea is what I'm taking issue with; that's the idea of a formal political-or-ideological-or-whatever-you-want-to-call-it mission statement for the site that I'm not onboard with.

It's not an argument that Metafilter has no or should have no functional expression of ideological bias. It's not an argument that it's politically dangerous to e.g. acknowledge that on the balance the general goals of feminism serve the Metafilter userbase a hell of a lot better than those of anti-feminism, or that misogyny is an issue in the world that misandry is not. It's just an argument against putting that up on the masthead, of going from "Metafilter is a place to share stuff on the web, and don't be an asshole" to "Metafilter is a feminist place, and please share stuff from the web".
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:40 PM on May 18, 2015 [9 favorites]

where I was coming from with that was, basically: lay out the process for preventing it ever occurring on Metafilter.

That's a request that already situates the problem as some kind of extreme. I can't come up with anything that will prevent something from ever occurring on MeFi, and neither can you or anyone else. This isn't some medieval-ballad quest for silk never woven by human hand - it's a request for resetting the needle at a new and more respectful baseline.

I feel like you're sort of missing something here. We all understand the nature of a non-queue site is reactive. We're asking you all to look more at the kinds of things you do/don't see as needing reaction.

This hasn't been a thread full of the mods saying "nah, it's not a problem, chill out"

It sort of comes off that way, though, actually. I say that not to needle you all or be a bad-faith complainer but because maybe you're unaware of it and I think it looks that way to at least some folks. Or maybe it reads more as "it's kind of a problem, but it's so so complicated, we're doing the best we can but this is the way the world is and we're a generalist site so...chill out." It's one of those things where maybe we all agree but it really doesn't look like agreement, it looks like the requests are being deconstructed and analyzed when what the need probably is is a change in sensitivity level and perhaps the philosophical adjustment of frame some have been talking about.
posted by Miko at 4:42 PM on May 18, 2015 [9 favorites]

I don't expect anyone to come to Metafilter to deal with shit they're already tired of dealing with daily, but folks also need to manage their expectations for the difference between the mod staff here making a real ongoing effort to manage the shit that sometimes shows up and the idea that shit is something we can ever guarantee won't show up sometimes anyway to need managing.

Is anyone actually asking that? We're just asking that when you shovel out the shit, you acknowledge that it's stinky.

I mean yeah, personally, I don't think it will solve everything, but I think the mods being explicit about misogyny (or racism or transphobia or homophobia) being a reason for deletion would, eventually, see something of a reduction in behavior. But even if it never does, I'm almost certain it will change the perception a lot of users have of boyzone-y-ness and what it's like to participate in those threads that get shit all over.

On preview: what stoneweaver said. It's honestly as much about the quality of life for the non-shithead users, particularly the ones who are doing the pushback, as it is about the shitheads themselves.

I don't need or want one single word changed in the site policy. I just want, when people are misogynist jerks and their comments get deleted, the mods to publically say "it is not okay to be a misogynist jerk" and not just "it is not okay to be a jerk". Anyone who thinks it's currently okay to be a misogynist jerk and starts whining about it is just being a rules lawyer. Nothing needs to change.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 4:42 PM on May 18, 2015 [8 favorites]

that idea is what I'm taking issue with; that's the idea of a formal political-or-ideological-or-whatever-you-want-to-call-it mission statement for the site that I'm not onboard with.

For the record, I don't think that's a good idea either, and wouldn't accomplish anything except to draw trolls. I also wouldn't label the site feminist. Still, I would like to think we could convene around a consensus of thinking about people's basic ability to participate as full and legitimate human beings without being subject to attack/marginalization based on an identity. I think this calls for actually a much more nuanced way of working than saying "This site is feminist, you said a non-feminist opinion, out you go" which obviously is a position that has little to no support.
posted by Miko at 4:47 PM on May 18, 2015 [7 favorites]

No offense to Cortex, but I do think the "explicit political mission statement" notion is a bit of a strawman.
We could have (as a page that new users have to click through, and as something for mods to send to people from time to time) a list of desirable and undesirable behaviors using non-ideological terms. Instead of "be feminist" or "don't be misogynist" or "don't be a reactionary douchebag", stuff like:

- treat women, gays, bisexuals, transgender people, and all races and nationalities as equals in the conversation
- don't assume gender, race, or anything else based on username
- don't be dismissive
- read carefully and generously before you disagree with a comment
- etc. etc. etc. I'm not going to pretend I should be the one to come up with the list; these are just examples.

I say "desirable and undesirable" because I think it wouldn't hurt to end with some positive things:

- we like posts about just about any subject, and enjoy intelligent, thoughtful comments
- we like it when people support and encourage each other's efforts
- we like diverse viewpoints, expressed respectfully
- we like cats, especially cute ones
posted by uosuaq at 4:56 PM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

You know, I definitely feel the desire to shut misogynists up, but I do feel like it's important to note that honestly the moderation at Metafilter is stronger than it is in some of my defined activist spaces that have taken on feminism as a watchword. So maybe it's not important how Metafilter politically identifies - there's already huge work being done.
posted by corb at 5:00 PM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

"Still, I would like to think we could convene around a consensus of thinking about people's basic ability to participate without being subject to attack/marginalization based on an identity. I think this calls for actually a much more nuanced way of working than saying 'This site is feminist, you said a non-feminist opinion, out you go' which obviously is a position that has little to no support."

Yeah. And TMaMM wrote this:

"I just want, when people are misogynist jerks and their comments get deleted, the mods to publically say 'it is not okay to be a misogynist jerk' and not just 'it is not okay to be a jerk'."

My sense -- and I apologize if I've misunderstood the mods -- is that even at that level of explicitness, there's a reluctance. Which is to say, there's a mod ethic that says that if "don't be a jerk" is sufficient, then that's better than saying "don't be a misogynist jerk". I think that preference is counterproductive.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:03 PM on May 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

So, what are models of feminist comment moderation that folks would like MeFi to be more like? Autostraddle? Shakesville?

(Even with new tools, Jezebel comments are still a shitshow; I couldn't find any written policy at The Toast, which, while explicitly feminist, seems much closer in tone to what would work here [except it's threaded because they're still heathens].)
posted by klangklangston at 5:08 PM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

"I dunno, isn't that pretty close to what cortex is saying he would've done differently[?]"

Yeah, and I didn't intend to ignore that. Where I'm coming from is asking for an evaluation of the institutional bias that resulted in the mods doing otherwise in that (and other) threads. There's something underneath this that's at issue -- it seems like that's what people are trying to get at.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:11 PM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I stopped reading Shakesville years ago because the comment moderation policies were getting really arbitrary and byzantine, so unless that's really changed, theirs is not a model I would like to see reproduced here.
posted by jaguar at 5:13 PM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I agree with Corb. Even of late, I'm seeing specific and considerate mod notes that seem effective at steering conversation.
posted by clavdivs at 5:18 PM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

Okay, yeah, I got sidetracked earlier into thinking that this was including the mission statement instead of just moderator notes. Apologies. I agree that mod notes can include the reason for removal. Perhaps only on the second note and beyond. Hopefully commenters can realize that a comment is shitty on first mod note without specific pointers, but it's not required.
posted by halifix at 5:25 PM on May 18, 2015

Which is to say, there's a mod ethic that says that if "don't be a jerk" is sufficient, then that's better than saying "don't be a misogynist jerk".

That's an interesting observation. That does seem to be true and I wonder what that's about. The fear of being called "political," or "biased," yeah, maybe. In itself, kind of an effective silencer.

So, what are models of feminist comment moderation that folks would like MeFi to be more like?

I don't have any to bring in here. I don't need MetaFilter to be "feminist" (just, ideally, non-misogynist). I don't want MetaFilter to be like elsewhere. I want MetaFilter to be the best MetaFilter possible.

One thing I was just thinking about it is that we all seem to embrace is the idea that the site is "generalist," in that it's not here to discuss a specific group or topic or set of topics but to surface and share and discuss interesting things from all domains of life. But the site can't actually be "generalist" for me if there are threads I'm particularly targeted in and that targeting is sustained. If I want to indulge my generalist interest in, say, comics or tattoo culture or sports cars or sci-fi or home brewing or politics or whatever, but it means enduring the subtle or not-so-subtle taunts or dismissals of misogynist jerks, the site has completely failed to be generalist for me. I learn that there are simply places I'm not welcome. Too many of those conversations and the overall feeling is that the site isn't able to support my generalism, my desire and willingness to follow my interests anywhere while being female. So there's no property of the site that isn't also co-determined by actual user experience.
posted by Miko at 5:45 PM on May 18, 2015 [13 favorites]

I've basically been responding to this comment by jessamyn and this one by LobsterMitten, if that clarifies anything for anybody. In a certain sense I do agree; I don't want any kind of active political litmus test to comment here, I don't think people should have to explicitly identify in any way in particular or believe any particular thing to participate.

What I do think is counter-productive is when bad user behavior crosses the line that already exists, in a way that's both political and technical, there's kind of a general modly refusal to call out the political aspect, or maybe I should say the interpretation, because in fact I do think there are a lot of people who think that by current rules, "Don't Be A Jerk" means "It Is Okay To Be Misogynist If You Are Sufficiently Pedantic In How You Phrase It".

In these threads, the mods have basically been advocating the position that, well of course misogyny(/sea lioning/dismissing people's experiences/"but convince me that it's racist"/pick a shitty reactionary behavior) is a form of Being A Jerk in and of itself, but overall I haven't seen the actual modding as being fully in accord with that. If I'm not wrong on my own interpretation, I just want the modding to make that more visible.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 5:50 PM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

...would be to have, as folks have suggested in here a few times, more explicitly said not just "cut it out" or "cut it out, x", but "cut it out with [this specific gross/shitty/misogynistic/whatever line of thinking], that's not okay".

I think that would be super-helpful as a general thing to do. Also, maybe more notes in general when stuff is deleted (unless it's one-off jokey snark or whatever) so folks are aware the thread is being observed.
posted by leahwrenn at 5:55 PM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Since at its core feminism advocates for women to be treated as equals, refusing to identify MetaFilter as feminist while advocating that women be treated as equals on this site seems not only contradictory, but at cross purposes.

I'm... not exactly champing at the bit to discuss what, exactly, is advocated by the core of feminism with a man, but as easter queen notes, feminism isn't just a word, it's a historical movement with many, many branches and numerous painful, exclusionary chapters in its history. (Which branch would folks be wanting MeFi to identify as, anyway? Socialist? Liberal? Third-wave? Now that's what I call politics.)

Don't get me wrong, I love the pat, easily-digestible summation of feminism as the "radical notion of women as people" as much as anyone, but for better or worse, that level of tidiness is simply not achievable if you want to use the word "feminist" as shorthand and just hope everyone gets to picking up everything you're putting down by saying it. Like how a significant number of women don't identify as feminists because of the feminist movement's history of marginalization along the axes of race and class -- the thought of pushing those kinds of concerns to the side in favor of trying to establish or maintain an overarching site ethos makes me more than a little uncomfortable.

I would like to think we could convene around a consensus of thinking about people's basic ability to participate as full and legitimate human beings without being subject to attack/marginalization based on an identity. I think this calls for actually a much more nuanced way of working than saying "This site is feminist, you said a non-feminist opinion, out you go" which obviously is a position that has little to no support.

Agreed, 100%. If we want to rally around an idea like "this site is feminist," then we're probably also going to want to rally around, "but not the racist, classist version of feminism, because our site ethos also explicitly excludes racism" (NB I, uh, don't think that's always true) "as well as classism" (and that's not always true basically never true; in fact, it feels like the goddamn Final Frontier around here). But if we're looking to build around something more akin to, "identity-based marginalization is patently not OK," we're covering all of that ground and so much more without co-opting the labels of any extant legitimate political movements or inadvertently marginalizing already-marginalized populations by wanting to put an oversimplified label on what should and shouldn't pass for reasonable discourse.
posted by divined by radio at 5:55 PM on May 18, 2015 [26 favorites]

So maybe it's not important how Metafilter politically identifies - there's already huge work being done.

Maybe it's not important to you, and other folks seeking to preserve plausibly deniability, but it's important to me and a lot of other people commenting in this thread.
posted by OmieWise at 6:02 PM on May 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

I see what you mean. In what ways could metafilter be more political to fit your criteria of a safe place. Not sure what plausibility deniability means but if you mean users who do not give names, perhaps that's something that can be explored though it is predicated on heavy mod involvement and their expertise to address such an issue.
posted by clavdivs at 7:12 PM on May 18, 2015

I don't understand that comment, clavdivs. Is it a statement or a question? What is it you think can be explored?
posted by Miko at 7:28 PM on May 18, 2015

For whatever reason(s), on the sites I'm talking about, this seems to be much easier to abide by when it comes to racism as opposed to misogyny. Saying something like "but there are biological reasons why [this race] are more prone to crime" gets shut down a damn sight faster than "well you know, there are biological reasons why women do [some completely non-biology-related thing]", for example. The bar for tolerance of repressive bullshit is way, way lower when it comes to racism - however "politely" phrased, however "relevant" to the topic - that it is for sexism.

I respect the spirit in which this was said, but I have to argue against this specific construction of argument "x-ism is treated differently than y-ism because x-ism is less of a problem here". Often, different kinds of discrimination and prejudice show up in different ways, which leads to difficulty in making 1:1 comparisons even when they would seem to be obvious. Comparing axes of prejudice in this way runs the significant risk of appearing to be minimizing the effects of one kind of prejudice for no actual rhetorical gain and significant cost if one is attempting to be mindful of all axes of prejudice.

Women, for better or worse, have made MetaFilter something worth fighting for and that is a good thing, I think, but I think it's important to not minimize the prejudice women of color and people of color in general face in that fight.
posted by Deoridhe at 7:46 PM on May 18, 2015 [7 favorites]

In what ways could metafilter be more political to fit your criteria of a safe place.

Literally the only time "safe space" has come up in the thread was people explicitly saying they didn't want MetaFilter becoming that, and no one said safe place except you. Expecting to not be called a tramp even in implication is not the same as a politically safe place.
posted by Deoridhe at 7:49 PM on May 18, 2015 [22 favorites]

"(and that's not always true basically never true; in fact, it feels like the goddamn Final Frontier around here)"

Yeah. I don't want to minimize in any way the sexist crap that was at the heart of what was rotten in that thread, but it was an exceptionally rotten thread because it intersected with several other ways in which MetaFilter in general is even worse.

I'm struggling with finding ways to talk about it, but it seems to me that there's generally way more unexamined privilege here than most people suppose and so what happens is that people believe themselves to be on the side of the angels, but when the topic moves into a territory where they haven't so much become aware of that privilege at all, or haven't been confronted with the reality of their unexamined biases, then they'll clomp on through with a bunch of offensive comments that are contemptuous, or judgmental, or condescending, or whatever. And if they're called on it, then they'll do that predictable dance of outraged defense of privilege.

This is relevant to this specific discussion because, as was the case in the LBT thread -- with, in that example, sexism -- you don't really have to move very far from the territory where people "get it" to find that in these other territories, not only do you get the crap that's specific to those territories (transphobia, classism, ableism, whatever), you find that it pulls to the surface whatever latent sexism is still there, too. Or, in other cases, racism or some other ism. So, for example, sexism or racism that many people would have otherwise buried is prone to being called forth from the deeps when it's hooked to the lure of indulging in some classist ridicule. I hate to be the person who stereotypically invokes kyriarchy, but there ya go. There's a pattern, a regularity to this and I think we could stand to be much more aware of it than we are.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:55 PM on May 18, 2015 [20 favorites]

Good questions miko, I would need more info on "political" from Omniwise and what is meant by plausible deniability from said comment.
posted by clavdivs at 8:02 PM on May 18, 2015

So, I guess you could (a) either ask for more info about this thing you didn't understand, or (b) refrain from commenting.
posted by Miko at 8:07 PM on May 18, 2015

You know, I definitely feel the desire to shut misogynists up, but I do feel like it's important to note that honestly the moderation at Metafilter is stronger than it is in some of my defined activist spaces that have taken on feminism as a watchword.

I really don't think "a lot of activist spaces are shit" is a very good argument for the status quo
posted by NoraReed at 8:07 PM on May 18, 2015 [8 favorites]

There's a pattern, a regularity to this and I think we could stand to be much more aware of it than we are.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich

An outstanding and well written description...all of them. Do you have some solutions or suggestions on curtailing this behavior and increasing awareness that dovetails to members needs?
posted by clavdivs at 8:08 PM on May 18, 2015

OK, it looks to me like this is trolling. What are you trying to achieve here, clavdivs? Do you have a point of view, or are you here to needle and bother people working hard to have a respectful, good-faith discussion about improving the site?
posted by Miko at 8:11 PM on May 18, 2015

An outstanding and well written description...all of them. Do you have some solutions or suggestions on curtailing this behavior and increasing awareness that dovetails to members needs?

Stop being a dialectical hobo. Go read the entire thread, you clearly haven't, but you should get the gist pretty easily.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 8:12 PM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

clavdivs, this is not a great place to jump in with this line of de novo inquiry/intervention/whatever it is. Unless you've got a point you'd like to make, maybe leave this alone.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:12 PM on May 18, 2015

Mod note: A few comments deleted; clavdivs agreed to step away.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:20 PM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

MetaFilter shouldn't explicitly say it's feminist

Maybe this, for me, is the ultimate sticking point: why not? Why the goddamn hell not?

Yeah, this.

Why the fuck not say we are explicitly feminist? Literally the only thing that 'feminist' means is that 'women are equal, women are people, the voice of a woman has the same weight as the voice of a man.'

Insert 'person of colour' or 'trans/intersex/asexual/gay/lesbian/bi/____/' or 'Jewish' or whatever in that sentence.

We, as a community, support the full equality of women or we don't. It's an absolutely binary choice.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:41 PM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

(modulo 'same weight' meaning 'needs to be listened to more to address historical imbalances,' I hope that was obvious and if not, my bad)
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:43 PM on May 18, 2015

I think I wasn't the only person to say above that "feminist" doesn't literally mean only that one thing to all people, which is why "MetaFilter belives women are equal, women are people, the voice of a woman has the same weight as the voice of a man" would be a clearer statement of values. So, for me at least, that's why not.
posted by uosuaq at 8:47 PM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

"Why the fuck not say we are explicitly feminist? Literally the only thing that 'feminist' means is that 'women are equal, women are people, the voice of a woman has the same weight as the voice of a man.'"

You might have paid more attention to the points made by easter queen just four hours ago before you just now basically disrerarded them utterly.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:49 PM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

On postview, what Ivan Fedorovich said, minus the unnecessary harshness.
posted by uosuaq at 8:54 PM on May 18, 2015

Yeah, that was too harsh -- but she and others made good points about that and it was, like, just recently in the context of this thread.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:59 PM on May 18, 2015

And to be fair, the feckless one has called out other people on this same thread for not reading it. But it's now over a thousand comments long and FFFM was just being passionate about something we probably all agree with in spirit if not in letter. So maybe we can just agree to agree.
posted by uosuaq at 9:21 PM on May 18, 2015

MetaFilter shouldn't explicitly say it's feminist

Maybe this, for me, is the ultimate sticking point: why not? Why the goddamn hell not?

because to be an ist means you subscribe to an ism, and I've learned not to trust isms.
posted by philip-random at 9:23 PM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

tho I do appreciate very many witticisms
posted by philip-random at 9:24 PM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

That's witticist, yo.
posted by uosuaq at 9:24 PM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'd totally dig it if the site somehow designated itself "feminist." But that raises some other questions. Are we for Black Power? Are we anticapitalist? Are we I-feminists? Are we queer? Are we sex positive? Is heterosexual sex the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women? Are we statist? Are we anarchist? Because feminism can entail any of those positions, or worse: none. There's good reason to criticize the kind of feminism that doesn't feel like there are entailments for the rest of these positions, that doesn't feel like women's equality has to hook up with ending white supremacy and capitalist domination, for instance, or worry deeply about "the Man in the State" and the ways that women's vulnerabilities feed into sovereignty and statism. But the positions aren't all compatible, either. There are disagreements, as easter queen and Ivan and benson have already mentioned.

So could we settle for the moderators being feminist, with maybe conflicting ideas about what that term means? We can't really guarantee that all the users of an open signup forum will be feminists, so it seems at most a kind of hollow and always already disappointed promise to call the site feminist. You call a site feminist when it's consistently demonstrated feminism, and I don't think we have, which is why we're here in this thread. But taz and LobsterMitten and pb and cortex and restless_nomad have consistently demonstrated feminism and maybe that's enough. (Is gnfti still a mod? gnfti's a feminist, right?)

Maybe we should say we're working on becoming feminist. Because that's what they've promised to do: to work on the project of reducing the shitty misogyny here, to name and shame and delete and ban misogyny when they see it.
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:27 PM on May 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

I respect the spirit in which this was said, but I have to argue against this specific construction of argument "x-ism is treated differently than y-ism because x-ism is less of a problem here". Often, different kinds of discrimination and prejudice show up in different ways, which leads to difficulty in making 1:1 comparisons even when they would seem to be obvious. Comparing axes of prejudice in this way runs the significant risk of appearing to be minimizing the effects of one kind of prejudice for no actual rhetorical gain and significant cost if one is attempting to be mindful of all axes of prejudice.

Whoah, hang on, that is not at all what I meant. I am not saying one type of prejudice is more or less of a problem. In fact I'm trying to say the opposite. I believe that all forms of oppression must be fought, I think most of the people I'm talking about agree with this in theory, and yet in practice there's a stark imbalance of implementation. That's why I don't see why axing comments and behaviors that reinforce oppression should have this imbalance. And again, I am not saying Metafilter is consistently guilty of this lopsidedness; just that we ought to be mindful of it. Not because one type of oppression is more important to deal with than another; on the contrary, precisely because all forms of oppression should be pushed back.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 9:33 PM on May 18, 2015

omg...! uosuaq, are you... I'm sorry, everybody, I'm not trying to derail, but I've been staring at this thread for days and suddenly all I can see is this one name. uosuaq, do you... become benson when you stand on your head? You do, don't you! That is charming.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:45 PM on May 18, 2015 [13 favorites]

Is it possible that it's time to take a step back and just see how things are going to go from here before thinking about further changes?

I am concerned that there are maybe 30/40 people max in this thread hashing things out for the larger site, and it is difficult for new people to join in the thread without reading and really grokking the thousand odd previous comments, which is a pretty stiff barrier to entry.

I'm also a little worried that this thread is now nearly a full week old and I don't want to burn out the mods!

I don't mean we should stop talking -- I think this discussion is really productive! I'm just worried about inclusivity, backlash, and the mods.

(I hadn't noticed that, Don Pepino!)
posted by onlyconnect at 9:50 PM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

It can be kind of a shock when it first hits you. Just sit down and take deep breaths, Don Pepino.
And onlyconnect, you did a good job of saying what you mean instead of something snarky like "looks like the thread is winding down"...which is kind of a dick move...I hear.
posted by uosuaq at 9:58 PM on May 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

because to be an ist means you subscribe to an ism, and I've learned not to trust isms.

if it helps you to greasemonkey in "taking women seriously as people of value" every time you see "feminism", feel free.

I'm also a little worried that this thread is now nearly a full week old and I don't want to burn out the mods!

I think the mods will tell us if this is a problem. I think your concern is genuine based on your participation in the thread, but...well, it's kind of pre-emptive? Don't borrow trouble and all that.
posted by kagredon at 10:16 PM on May 18, 2015 [7 favorites]

I think your concern is genuine based on your participation in the thread

Wait is this what we are now? Show your feminist cred badge before you speak or you may be a troll?

My concern is genuine. I've been a member since 2002, and a lurker before that. I've been fighting the good fight against boyzones in MetaTalk for over a decade, and have linked to a seminal boyzone thread in my profile for nearly that long.

I am a member of this tribe, is what I am saying. Yet I just haltingly expressed a reservation about the potential exclusivity of this thread, and my motives were automatically called into question? I'm not sure I'm comfortable with how far the needle may be swinging in the other direction.

I think the larger userbase should be given the chance to adapt to the changes in moderation policy that we have already discussed here (and that many users in this thread have themselves already noticed being applied by the mods) before we make other changes to the site such as potential statements of ideological affiliation or values, etc., as discussed above. MetaFilter has many members who are feminist but also not keen on heavier site moderation, and imho I think everyone should adjust to the new status quo before further sea change.

This is just my opinion, you needn't listen to me. But I'm a worrier, and I'm a bit worried about things.
posted by onlyconnect at 12:13 AM on May 19, 2015 [11 favorites]

Yet I just haltingly expressed a reservation about the potential exclusivity of this thread, and my motives were automatically called into question?

How are you getting that? kagredon said they think your concern is genuine, i.e., that you are not a concern troll trying to shut people down here, citing your participation in this thread to underline your sincerity.

On the subject of the exclusivity of this thread, yes, it's a lot to read at this point, but discussions can run long. What else to do, write up a summary of the larger points? Anyone's free to do that. Start a new thread with a bullet point summary at the top? Sure, maybe that'll work, too. But I share kagredon's opinion that I think the concern is pre-emptive at this point - no major sweeping decisions are being made here, and things are still being hashed out. They will likely continue to be hashed out in future discussions. It's really OK.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 12:23 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

Concern trolling is a real thing. We had a pretty nasty case of it over in another Metatalk thread today. And yes, onlyconnect, to be totally honest your last comment kind of pinged something on my meter. There have been no big policy changes announced or even seriously mooted by the mods; people who are interested in the Metatalk and dynamics on Metafilter can read the thread, and even if they don't want to read the whole thread, they can skim or use GraphFi or skip down to the most recent 100 or so comments and still have a pretty good overview. But your participation in the thread seemed in good faith and so I decided to read your comment as such.

I'm sorry if I caused offense or hurt. I wish I didn't have to feel vigilant or on-edge about that kind of thing, but experience has taught me to be wary.
posted by kagredon at 12:55 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've read this whole thread and want to chime in to +1 Miko and IF and Master Margarita Mix (and others). As a woman who's paid a lot of attention to the boyzone conversations, I've been feeling like the mods (or maybe specifically cortex) seem to be aiming for some kind of neutrality in their modding. Kind of even-handedly admonishing everyone, and seeming reluctant to recognise and name sexist patterns of behaviour no matter how often they repeat.

I have also felt like feminists are sometimes reprimanded as if they were children (the "cut it out" to Nora Reed upthread), whereas commenters saying obviously sexist things are treated more like equals, with long carefully-written explanations. I've read what cortex wrote above and I get that's not what he intended and it's not how it played out; I'm just describing how it felt to me as it was happening.

The thing is, and as has been said above, that stance of "neutrality" doesn't feel neutral, because the world isn't neutral, either outside Metafilter or here on it. To not intervene to prevent sexism condones and perpetuates it. And so as a participant here, if I don't feel like the mods have my back in helping to make the experience less sexist, it just makes me want to walk away. Because I'm here casually, socially, and like Miko said above, if I can't hang around and talk about comics or tattoos or politics without the conversation being clogged up with people being misogynist jerks .. well then why would I want to be here? And that's super-sad. I've been reading Metafilter for I dunno, six or seven years, and I really like it. I have other places to go for feminism and I do want this place to be generalist: I just also want it to be non-sexist.

FWIW, I do feel asked to chill out. I do feel like the problem isn't taken seriously enough. I don't think things are getting better. I feel like they're standing still, or maybe very slowly back-sliding. I have felt that way since jessamyn left.

Personally I don't want dramatic change to how the site is moderated. I would like the mods just to recognise that there's a cost to every repeat-offender misogynist. That cost isn't necessarily feminists flaming out and rage-quitting: it's probably more us just participating a little less. That's still a real cost. So I'd like to see the mods be a little quicker to boot out people who make Metafilter much less enjoyable for a large number of us. And I'd like to see the warnings and deletions be more specific about the offence -- like someone said upthread, not "don't be a jerk" but "stop concern trolling" or "it is not the job of other commenters to educate you about sexism" or whatever. I feel like if the moderators were a little more explicit in naming the patterns when they see them, it would reduce jerks' ability to plead ignorance, maybe sidestep some of the echo chamber stuff, and go a long way towards showing that women's participation is wanted here.

Thanks to dialetheia, for starting this thread.
posted by Susan PG at 1:06 AM on May 19, 2015 [39 favorites]

I haven't been hanging out steadily enough to detect a tone change since jessamyn left, but I've been dropping in and reading since early days, so I remember boyzone, with its eightmillion repetitions of "I'd hit it" and how very difficult it was for everyone to learn that "I'd hit it" was maybe problematic and the thousandcomment threads about it. Now boyzone is not "I'd hit it" anymore. It's not hanging out in a room with your adolescent brother and his asshole friends. It's more like trying to talk to your uncomprehending dad who won't listen to you and doesn't know you but who nevertheless thinks he knows what's best for you. Dad's wall of yap is not as obvious as "I'd hit it," apparently, but it's just as harmful as "I'd hit it," it's no more tolerable than "I'd hit it,"it's directed at the same group of people, and it's driving those people away.

Therefore. If dad lecturing is allowed to stand, responses to it must also be allowed to stand. When people speak up against it, their comments must not be summarily deleted for being rude. I saw NoraReed's deleted comment when she made it and I glimpsed the pithy and perfectly apt first response to the "isms are for ists" fatherly sophistry before it disappeared, I'm assuming because it appeared to be an obvious, off-the-cuff, unconsidered piece of rudeness. But that comment and NoraReed's were responses in kind. The comments that inspired the deleted comments are themselves off-the-cuff, unconsidered pieces of rudeness, but people have figured out that all you have to do now is be sufficiently jolly and avuncular or professorial and your comments will stand. You won't have to go to your room and think about what you did and come back when you can be civil because patronizing people is fine. It's talking back that won't be tolerated.

Why? Why not treat everybody like grown ups and why not treat everybody's rudenesses the same way? It's like, "You kids cut it out! [Delete.] You know better than to tell people to shut up! [Delete.] No rude hand gestures! [Delete, delete.] O god, the hollering in here!" Meanwhile dad is pontificating away like a foghorn, totally oblivious and apparently--I know a ton of stuff is going on behind the scenes--but apparently to everyone in the thread, he's not seen as a problem at all. Either he keeps going for-EV-er, or he gets gentled along for a really long time 'til suddenly he's banned. (Again, I know tons of slog is getting done behind the scenes with these guys.) But why does it go that way? How's Dad supposed to learn anything? How's any would-be dad lurking going to learn anything? Why not just tell poor dad, right away, in the thread, in no uncertain words what the hell it is he's doing? Name the misogyny, as people have been saying, and then individual commenters won't feel driven to soldier on against it alone and unsupported. They won't get exhausted, they won't get dispirited, they won't feel attacked, they won't feel belittled, and they won't leave. If that can't happen for some reason, then at least if the lectures stay, the backtalk should stay, too.
posted by Don Pepino at 5:13 AM on May 19, 2015 [25 favorites]

My opinion is that having a comment deleted is not an opportunity to learn, whereas having it debated is. I would prefer, in most contexts not just here, to only have the egregiously nasty stuff censored, so that the opportunity is only lost in the cases where minds were very unlikely to be changed in any case.
posted by walrus at 7:35 AM on May 19, 2015

i've totally learned lots of stuff from having my comments deleted, namely, how to better participate at metafilter. i want to give guys who can't stop talking about how slutty women are the same chance to learn through deletion.
posted by nadawi at 7:47 AM on May 19, 2015 [25 favorites]

People don't get to learn at the expense of other people's hurt. If only because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one. And every comment has only one writer but a great many readers.

Plus, having a comment deleted can totally be educative. The mods are always happy to explain why a certain comment was deleted, and often even do it unasked, in-thread.

In other words, I disagree.
posted by Too-Ticky at 7:48 AM on May 19, 2015 [22 favorites]

My opinion is that having a comment deleted is not an opportunity to learn, whereas having it debated is. I would prefer, in most contexts not just here, to only have the egregiously nasty stuff censored, so that the opportunity is only lost in the cases where minds were very unlikely to be changed in any case.

That sounds like it's going right back to the expectation that women should bear the responsibility for teaching misogynists not to be misogynist. There are SO many resources - both internet based and otherwise - for people who genuinely want to learn, that expecting threads on women's issues to stick to the same "teaching" every single time seems utterly unreasonable.

Maybe we would like to discuss - and learn about - the actual topic of the thread without having to slough through the same arguments and justify ourselves to the same people every time.
posted by DingoMutt at 7:49 AM on May 19, 2015 [21 favorites]

And of course that doesn't even touch upon the sealioning aspect, brought up many times in this thread and others, wherein certain users will never be "egregiously nasty" but will reliably derail these discussions with their same (ostensibly "politely" phrased) pet argument every time. I completely agree with the calls to cut that shit short MUCH earlier than has been done in the past - no learning is happening by suffering these arguments time and again. Let's focus instead on the learning opportunities being lost for people who would otherwise actually like to discuss the meat of a thread.
posted by DingoMutt at 7:56 AM on May 19, 2015 [15 favorites]

I just want to stand up and slow clap for Don Pepino's comment. That is a brilliant analogy and it summarizes what's going on absolutely perfectly.

Like, really, is there a reason the mods needed to let uosuaq's backseat modding and smarmy dismissal of IvanF's comment stand when they were cleaning up that particular derail? Is there a reason someone like IvanF, who has been making vastly better contributions to the thread, is the one getting publically chastised, and not the dude using the cover of another dude wandering in to play dialectical hobo once again to smirk condescendingly and tsk-tsk at a woman poster?

I don't even necessarily have a problem with that one particular instance being allowed to stand or just not getting caught up in the sweep or whatever, but this is exactly the kind of bias towards shitheads who present themselves as avuncular that is a huge problem. It's not just one comment, one time. This is a pattern in the modding and it contributes to the boyzone atmosphere.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 9:10 AM on May 19, 2015 [11 favorites]

My opinion is that having a comment deleted is not an opportunity to learn, whereas having it debated is.

While I believe, in absence of other evidence, that this was a typical drive-by threadshit (and mildly eponyhisterical, if I weren't too tired to laugh), it raises a point which we haven't talked about too much in this thread:

The demand for education and opportunities for the utterly ignorant to learn gets in the way of actual conversations between people who have the experience or have done the homework. There is a point where "you must be this informed to get on this ride" is a fair response, and I think the mods should back that up (at least to a degree), although this may demand that mods have more experience in everything than is reasonable to expect.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:20 AM on May 19, 2015 [11 favorites]

Cortex the day before yesterday: "it's one thing for someone to be like 'well, [half-formed thought or tone deaf response]' and have folks be like, ugh, no, here's why, and leave it at that—that's a valuable component of discussion here—and another thing entirely to have that turn into some intractable 'Yeah, but...' loop that drags a thread down into a long going-nowhere distraction on well-trod ground."

What's actually happening is "someone" is like "well, [half-formed thought/tone-deaf response]" after several dozen or hundred "ugh, no, here's why" comments in the same thread all pointing out that "[half-formed thought/tone-deaf response]" is a pernicious room-poisoning derail that we'd like to avoid because it "drags a thread down into a long, going-nowhere distraction." In those cases we often have folks be unlike "'ugh, no, here's why'" and instead more like "'ugh, no, stop,'" because "'ugh, no, here's why'" a. has already been said fiftyhundred times and b. is harder and more time-consuming to write than "ugh, no, stop." And most importantly because c. "here's why" isn't being heard and we have arrived at the point where "stop" needs to be said.

Folks' "ugh, no, stops" are getting deleted as if folks' "ugh, no, stops" were the problem, when in fact the problem is someone's "[half-formed thought or tone-deaf response.]"

Could there be a flow chart for responding to this? Like:

If "ugh, no, here's why" is already in the thread, especially if multiple times, and if despite the presence of "ugh, no, here's why" we see "[half-formed thought/tone-deaf response]" a-fuckin-gain, then "ugh, no, stop" is required. If the "ugh, no, stop" provided by folks is insufficiently civil and must be deleted, their "stop" should be not merely deleted but deleted and replaced with an official "stop" directed not at folks but at someone. Folks should not have to come up with endless "here's whys" for someone. Someone needs to do someone's own homework.

(Oh, wow! Thanks so much, TMaMM! I think... I think this is my first slow clap.)
posted by Don Pepino at 9:23 AM on May 19, 2015 [10 favorites]

there's generally way more unexamined privilege here than most people suppose and so what happens is that people believe themselves to be on the side of the angels, but when the topic moves into a territory where they haven't so much become aware of that privilege at all, or haven't been confronted with the reality of their unexamined biases, then they'll clomp on through with a bunch of offensive comments that are contemptuous, or judgmental, or condescending, or whatever.

This, a lot. Honestly I mostly see it in terms of class-based anti-rural stuff - for example, a quick google reveals that "trailer trash" as a phrase is used on Metafilter far more than I am comfortable with.
posted by corb at 9:24 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

Like, really, is there a reason the mods needed to let uosuaq's backseat modding and smarmy dismissal of IvanF's comment stand when they were cleaning up that particular derail? Is there a reason someone like IvanF, who has been making vastly better contributions to the thread, is the one getting publically chastised, and not the dude using the cover of another dude wandering in to play dialectical hobo once again to smirk condescendingly and tsk-tsk at a woman poster?

What? I disagree. I have deep respect for Ivan Fyodorovich and his contributions to present and past boyzone threads here but (1) I don't read what happened in that comment exchange the same way you did (am I missing something?); (2) I don't see anything wrong with making a comment that agrees with another commenter in every way except disclaims the rudeness or sharp elbows you perceive in that comment (there is still nothing wrong with politeness); and (3) I am very much against creating some sort of hierarchy of commenting credibility where disagreeing in good faith with someone who has made valuable contributions in the past makes you a target for comment deletion or rebuke by the mods. (Not that the mods would do this. But I definitely don't think they should.)
posted by onlyconnect at 9:24 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

This, a lot. Honestly I mostly see it in terms of class-based anti-rural stuff - for example, a quick google reveals that "trailer trash" as a phrase is used on Metafilter far more than I am comfortable with.

Has been, yeah, and there's been a lot of pushback against classism. The general disapproval of People Of Walmart comes to mind. Still plenty of room to grow, though, to be sure.

What? I disagree.

In fairness, I don't think that particular comment of uosuaq's is the best example, but the repeated "so I think the thread is winding down" and then the smirky-jokingness over being called out on that is grating. It's silencing and kinda crappy.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 9:29 AM on May 19, 2015 [7 favorites]

Wait, for some reason I'd formed the opinion that IvanF was a woman, I have no idea where I got that. I know at one point I knew he wasn't. Sorry, comrade, my apologies.

What? I disagree. I have deep respect for Ivan Fyodorovich and his contributions to present and past boyzone threads here but (1) I don't read what happened in that comment exchange the same way you did (am I missing something?); (2) I don't see anything wrong with making a comment that agrees with another commenter in every way except disclaims the rudeness or sharp elbows you perceive in that comment (there is still nothing wrong with politeness); and (3) I am very much against creating some sort of hierarchy of commenting credibility where disagreeing in good faith with someone who has made valuable contributions in the past makes you a target for comment deletion or rebuke by the mods.

I'm not advocating for any kind of hierarchy in order to comment, for fuck's sake, maybe other than "please shut the fuck up if you haven't read the whole thread, your half-baked contributions just aren't that important if you haven't". But when people wander into threads to be all [but have you considered this offensive thing?] or [I didn't read the thread, I demand you re-argue it with me, but with extra incoherence and senility] or [this thread is too long and I personally don't care, mods delete!] or any other such garbage, it is very tiresome that in the end, what's visible to new readers of a thread and the site as a whole is that it's very often the people who have been doing the work to be the ones who are publically chastised or given a "short leash", whether through direct mod action or just letting tsk-tsky editorializing comments like that stand, while deleting pushback that may be a bit snippy. It happens and it happens a lot.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 9:38 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

In fairness, I don't think that particular comment of uosuaq's is the best example, but the repeated "so I think the thread is winding down" and then the smirky-jokingness over being called out on that is grating. It's silencing and kinda crappy.

And he got told to quit it by LobsterMitten and taz, and then he apologized and hasn't done again. What other or further action would you like to have seen?
posted by Errant at 9:46 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

because to be an ist means you subscribe to an ism, and I've learned not to trust isms.

if it helps you to greasemonkey in "taking women seriously as people of value" every time you see "feminism", feel free.

weird. I don't usually let things get under my skin, but his has for some reason. I guess I feel condescended to. My initial impulse is to fire back with something perhaps less than mature.

But instead, maybe I need to go a little deeper into my issue with isms and ists. What they are, to me, are politicizations. That is, they suggest that whoever's using them (assuming they don't have a tongue stuffed in their cheek) is falling back on some kind of ideology as their guide. This concerns me big time because some of my experiences over the decades with the politically motivated haven't been good. In fact, no one's ever f***ed me around worse in my adult life than a few folks whose politics were pretty much unimpeachable. For lack of a better way of putting it, what was missing was in them was a moral center.

So yeah, though I doubt kagredon intended any offense with that comment, I felt one anyway. Why? Because I've always taken women seriously as people of value. ALWAYS. My mom (and my dad) wouldn't have tolerated anything else. In fact, just having to write those words down feels absurd. Like I've found myself backtracked in time to the McCarthy era and someone has questioned my patriotism. Fuck that shit*.


* I guessed I failed the maturity test anyway.
posted by philip-random at 9:50 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm not advocating for any kind of hierarchy in order to comment, for fuck's sake, maybe other than "please shut the fuck up if you haven't read the whole thread, your half-baked contributions just aren't that important if you haven't". . . .

I thought you were advocating that uosuaq's comment should be deleted or rebuked by a mod (from a MetaTalk thread no less) because uosuaq said he agreed with Ivan Fyodorovich "minus the unnecessary harshness" and where the next comment in the thread is Ivan agreeing his comment was too harsh. I disagree and do not think any mod action was necessary in that exchange.

I am also not comfortable with a new policy of not deleting comments made by either women or men that are personal attacks against another user, even if they are in response to sexist bullshit. I support a policy where the mods call out the sexist bullshit but also delete the personal attacks.
posted by onlyconnect at 9:51 AM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

And I thought you were saying that part of the reason uosuaq's comment should have been dealt with by a mod was that it criticized the harshness of Ivan's comment, where Ivan had previously proved himself to be a valuable contributor to this thread. That's where my concern that you are setting up a hierarchy comes from.

I guess I see now (now that I realize you thought Ivan was a woman and understand better who the pronouns in your comment were referring to) that you were concerned that someone who you thought didn't seem very serious about the conversation was trying to shut down someone who was. I guess given the circumstances here (even Ivan thought his comment a little harsh!) I still don't think mods should have erased anything. The standard for deletion in MetaTalk is higher, I don't think uosuaq was really trying to insult or shut Ivan down, and everyone seemed to come out of that exchange unscathed. I think a deletion there would be overmoderation.
posted by onlyconnect at 10:02 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Rereading that exchange I am wondering now if you misread it and thought the small-text comment made by Ivan agreeing that his comment was too harsh was actually made by a mod? Otherwise I'm not sure what you mean by mod cleanup there -- I don't see any mod intervention.
posted by onlyconnect at 10:10 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

One comment deleted, don't call people trolls.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:18 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

And he got told to quit it by LobsterMitten and taz, and then he apologized and hasn't done again. What other or further action would you like to have seen?

For that kind of threadshit to be deleted. Nothing more. There is literally no reason for someone to pop in to voice their disapproval that a thread is still going when you can just as easily remove it from activity and never have to be bothered by its existence again, least of all after two mods have told you to quit it. I do not think this is unreasonable or excessive.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 10:24 AM on May 19, 2015

The Master and Margarita Mix, I get that you have strong feelings here but there's no call to go after people in a personal way -- it's not necessary to make your points and it makes this already difficult discussion harder.

phillip-random, this isn't time to get into a larger discussion on the nature of ideology. People are already talking about how they feel this kind of topic-shift is a derail and even a (perhaps unintentionally) aggressive move, so better to stick to the concrete site questions in here about what we can do on the site about the problems people have identified.

Don Pepino, I appreciate your points and I think they're well made. Even when the speaker is IMO rightfully pushing back against something bad, there will always be some kind of comments that are over the line, so that kind of deletion isn't going to stop -- but I can be more reflective about where I'm drawing that line. I think it matters that the boyzone we have now is different from the boyzone we had then - and I thought that a lot of the original concern about the threads that led to this MetaTalk were that (in a spate of recent threads) it seemed like the old more-juvenile boyzone returning. That's something that I think just about everybody can agree is a bad direction and one we can move against with maximum firmness. I take the point that the current style of pontificating dudes is also a problem, but I think the solution to that is trickier and more of a gradual-shift thing (except for egregious cases, where we've already banned a couple and banning is fully on the table for others).

As for the 'ugh not again' stuff, in a given thread -- especially a long thread, where a mod on duty may not have read the whole thing -- the most helpful thing people can do is drop a quick note to the contact form with a sentence or two saying "this exact thing has been argued three times, it's been responded to, please come leave a note here" or "this guy has been banging this drum all day". It's unfortunately easy for us to miss the more subtle stuff (like if different people are raising what amounts to the same annoying derail over a 12 hour period, we might not connect those dots because our attention is split or there's been a shift change) but a poster in the thread will have a clearer picture of what's happened overall in there and it's very helpful to tell us. It's also useful in cases where we might be reading and thinking "huh, that guy is sure talking a lot, but he's on topic and nobody's flagging, so maybe people are fine with it" -- a note to the contact form can push me toward intervening in those circumstances. Already the way people in this thread have articulated some of the derails that bother them has been helpful in shaping my own deletions and comments since the thread has been active.

The abstract stuff like 'believe that women have equal value' is less useful as a mod guideline, because we all agree with that statement, but we may have different ideas about how that gets translated into specific comments in specific threads. Obvious stuff like that 'doggy style' tattoo comment we will delete; but there are a lot of less-obvious things and the devil's in the details with those things. Specific "there is always this kind of derail in rape discussions, let's not go there again" stuff is much easier to act on.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:26 AM on May 19, 2015 [14 favorites]

The abstract stuff like 'believe that women have equal value' is less useful as a mod guideline, because we all agree with that statement, but we may have different ideas about how that gets translated into specific comments in specific threads.

This, so much. Even Paul Elam brays on and on about how he supports EQUALITY between men and women. Saying it demonstrably does not necessarily make it so.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 10:34 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

To Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane's point about deletions, in general we delete very little from MetaTalk. We've already deleted more and left more notes and had more bans in here than we ordinarily would. It's a fine and open question whether the standard on MetaTalk deletability should shift.

To people who like to come in and buzz around, commenting with attempted 'lightening the tone' one-liners or 'this is silly' or whatever, especially at the end of a long angry thread: that is unhelpful, and it would be better if you stopped.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:35 AM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

I think it's more than unhelpful in a discussion about how we can take some major steps towards more positive moderation around here; it contributes zero beyond "I want this discussion to end". I realize deletions are rare in MeTa, but this kind of commenting strikes me as borderline antagonistic, at least towards the discussion at hand, and nothing of value would be lost by simply removing that kind of noise from a discussion about moderation issues. Just my two cents.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 10:40 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

NB: I don't think it warrants anything more than a deletion, and maybe a note, lest anyone think I'm going punitive here.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 10:42 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Is it possible that it's time to take a step back and just see how things are going to go from here before thinking about further changes?

I completely disagree with this. The entire point of MeTa is to talk about site issues, and this kind of concern is just unnecessary. I don't usually see this kind of concern show up in long MeTa threads on other topics and I would love to know why people always seem to be in such a hurry to shut down conversation about the treatment of women on the site like it's dangerous or something. We've had any number of endless MeTas that go on and on like this and as long as it remains an interestng conversation with no one being ganged up on or anything, I see no reason to shut it down prematurely.

Re: should MeFi be explicitly feminist... first of all, I've really enjoyed everyone's thoughtful points, and this has been a really interesting conversation down here at the tail end of the thread. I wanted to highlight this clause from divined by radio earlier in the conversation, because I think it gets to the heart of the issue:

All I want is for this to be a place where women are considered people, and for insulting women qua women to be considered equivalent to insulting people -- which is to say, of course, men. (NB if that's all it takes to label a practice or philosophy "feminist" or "anti-misogynist," shit, I don't even know.)

I think it's that NB phrase that's important. Women consistently have to argue for their own decent treatment, here and everywhere else, and they just want the same "don't be a jerk" protection that men get here to apply to them. The problem is that in every case where there are additional clauses to the "don't be a jerk" rule with respect to women, like "don't call them all sluts just because they got a tattoo", those clauses frequently get dismissed as being political requests.

The people who call 'treating women decently' a political request very much exploit this conflation between "feminism" and "don't be a jerk to everyone including women" to attach all of the baggage of feminism as a broader ideology to the very simple idea of not calling people sluts to their faces in public. This allows them to play the "you guys are bias! And political! This is just because feminism!" card when they're called out for being jerks.

The big problem occurs when that ploy of theirs succeeds in creating a chilling effect around calling things what they are. If you hear 'don't call people sluts' labeled a 'feminist' opinion enough times, you might be hesitant to explicitly call it sexist next time just because you don't want to start a whole fight about feminism and politics, right? But literally all you're really saying is "don't be a jerk", same as you would to a dude in a non-charged situation.

After reading everyone's great comments, I really think all anyone really wants with any of this is for the chilling effect associated with that conflation to go away - to call people out for being jerks to women for specific reasons and not to feel like pointing out the reason makes anything explicitly "feminist". It should not have to be considered a "feminist" move to come into that thread and say "stop calling women sluts".

If simply saying "don't call people sluts" is considered feminist by the conflaters' framing, then sure, we should be feminist! But I'd rather drop their framing altogether and have "don't call people sluts" be incorporated into the bare minimum of how to treat people decently here. This only works if everyone agrees that not calling people sluts is the bare minimum though - if we end up having to defend that as part of the "don't be a jerk" rulebook every single time, then I start to agree more with TM&M that we might need that more aggressive framing to help carve out those troublesome woman-specific clauses of the 'don't be a jerk' rulebook.

One comment deleted, don't call people trolls.

Is the threshold for deletion in this MeTa lower than usual for certain commenters? Several comments have been deleted here that would otherwise not seem to reach the "go fuck yourself" MeTa deletion standard.

I take the point that the current style of pontificating dudes is also a problem, but I think the solution to that is trickier and more of a gradual-shift thing (except for egregious cases, where we've already banned a couple and banning is fully on the table for others).

On this point, I vigorously agree with Don Pepino that allowing those comments to stand, but deleting the pushback responses to them, is part of the problem. Don Pepino put it perfectly: If that can't happen for some reason, then at least if the lectures stay, the backtalk should stay, too.
posted by dialetheia at 10:46 AM on May 19, 2015 [21 favorites]

So yeah, though I doubt kagredon intended any offense with that comment, I felt one anyway. Why? Because I've always taken women seriously as people of value. ALWAYS. My mom (and my dad) wouldn't have tolerated anything else. In fact, just having to write those words down feels absurd. Like I've found myself backtracked in time to the McCarthy era and someone has questioned my patriotism.

Here's the thing - and I get why this gets your back up - but we have increasing evidence that unconscious bias is a very real thing that has a very real effect that we're consciously unaware of. I've been a feminist literally all my life, was raised in it like you were, and I'm still catch sexism in my thoughts and actions. Having an automatic "Don't question my patriotism" response means those implicit sexist tendencies will be less likely to get caught and corrected because so much of one's identity gets tied up in identifying in a certain way.

More and more I think the only way to effect change is to go about it not with certainty but with humility, with an awareness of how insidious assumptions are, and of how unconscious bias is pervasive. This also means giving up most of the "I'm a good person" ties to being anti-sexist or anti-racist because you can't ever really say that and be honest and humble. I've had to shift my "I'm a good person" needs much more over to my actions, to my attempts to hear and respect others, and less to any hope I might stop being sexist in my lifetime, nevermind the other -ists I'm more likely to be.
posted by Deoridhe at 10:53 AM on May 19, 2015 [47 favorites]

You come in here and drop glib "ism is for ists" and then I'm the one who's being condescending for asking you to take this seriously? Yeah, fuck that shit.
posted by kagredon at 11:00 AM on May 19, 2015 [17 favorites]

For that kind of threadshit to be deleted. Nothing more. There is literally no reason for someone to pop in to voice their disapproval that a thread is still going when you can just as easily remove it from activity and never have to be bothered by its existence again, least of all after two mods have told you to quit it. I do not think this is unreasonable or excessive.

I think one of the things here is that because the mods don't close threads except in MetaTalk, and the delete bar in MetaTalk is so high, this is the only place where it's even possible to perform that sort of "just close the thread" stunt, and it isn't possible on the blue. But also, I don't see him doing it after mods told him to stop, I see him doing it, mods telling him to stop, and him stopping. I think this is an area where that's useful as a visible object lesson, not in the sense of "the women have to teach everyone how to be a human being" but in the sense of "here's what someone did and was told to stop, so that we all have a firm idea of what not to do and can point to later". The mods do have a responsibility to educate people about Metafilter and norms that regular users do not. So I'm fine with not deleting the instance + the course correction. If someone doubles down after that and keeps doing it, sure, there's no reason to have to make that point more than once or to disrupt the conversation any further. I think not deleting in this situation has more utility, but that's because I suspect that not as many people take in deletion reasons as site guidelines to be observed the way they take mods laying those guidelines out as direct responses to behavior. If I'm wrong about that and people do retain stuff like "[one comment deleted, please don't ask mods to close threads]" without having to see the comment in question, then my opinion on this probably changes, but (obviously anecdotally) it seems to me like the back-and-forth sticks better for more people.
posted by Errant at 11:11 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't usually see this kind of concern show up in long MeTa threads on other topics and I would love to know why people always seem to be in such a hurry to shut down conversation about the treatment of women on the site like it's dangerous or something.

For what it's worth, I feel like, whatever else there is to be said about them, "this is thread is long and fatiguing and maybe we should wrap it" sentiments have been pretty common occurrences in lots of long metatalk threads, regardless of the specific subject matter. There's a tension between different folks' thresholds for long conversation and conflict and that tends to come out, in better and worse ways, as the occasional bid for closing a thread or putting the brakes on a conversation. Totally fine to disagree with it—I do in this case, I think the thread's basically fine and we're still talking stuff out productively—but it's not a thing that only or primarily happens in metatalk discussions about women.

On this point, I vigorously agree with Don Pepino that allowing those comments to stand, but deleting the pushback responses to them, is part of the problem.

My problem is that that reduces the situation to a false binary. It's not "be a pill, don't get deleted; push back, get deleted", or anything close to that. I've more or less encouraged and endorsed pushback at least a couple times in comments in here, because while I agree that it shouldn't be anybody's job or obligation to do that, I think smart and vocal pushback on problematic ideas or gross opinions or whatnot is a big part of what does work well here in conversation. But we can't collapse "pushback" and "pushback that gets really aggro or personal" into a single thing and pretend that the deletion of the latter is the deletion of the former. And as totally understandable as getting angry or impatient or frustrated about something is, turning that into sniping or venting spleen at someone is still a problem on a site aiming for civil discourse.

That does not mean that anything with a veneer of politeness gets a pass, and I hear people loud and clear in here that they're frustrated with it and that notionally-polite-but-obnoxious opinioneering is something we should be more prompt about shutting down. I absolutely am on board with it. It doesn't come with a "and don't discourage lashing out in response" sidecar, though. People still need to not do that sort of thing.

Is the threshold for deletion in this MeTa lower than usual for certain commenters? Several comments have been deleted here that would otherwise not seem to reach the "go fuck yourself" MeTa deletion standard.

We've been trying to be a little less beholden the last year or two to the "nothing except fuck you gets deleted" tradition that used to be part of the Thunderdome reputation of Metatalk. We delete stuff to cool off or prevent escalation elsewhere on the site all the time; we don't delete near as much stuff here, but there's some value to that so we're trying to be willing to do it a bit more.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:15 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

would love to know why people always seem to be in such a hurry to shut down conversation about the treatment of women on the site like it's dangerous or something.

Hey my apologies for my inartful phrasing, but if you had quoted more of my comment I did say that I thought conversation should definitely continue, just that I was concerned about making further changes about site policy at this time.

I made an attempt to find what I thought the changes in site policy were but I have a busy day and can't find the cortex comments I was looking for -- I thought cortex had definitely stated that he was going to aim to be quicker to intercede in threads to tell people to stop making sexist comments, and I also thought he had said that the times were a'changing regarding how many chances repeat offenders were being given, as evidenced in this thread. This thread itself has had more mod intervention than usual in terms of giving warnings regarding the direction of discussion, for a metatalk thread, one user was banned by a mod, others I think were given or took voluntary time outs. Other members had mentioned noticing a corresponding uptick in moderation in threads in the blue. So I did think that site policy was changing in the direction that we were asking for (AM I WRONG ABOUT THIS?), and was just asking that we not stop discussion, but consider holding off on further changes (like announcements of MetaFilter's political stance) until people had felt the effect of the current changes. Because I think a lot of people who might disagree with other changes are not here reading this week-old thread, and I don't think it's crazy to be concerned about that.

But I apologize for sounding like I was trying to silence discussion here, because I didn't mean to do that and I know it's annoying when it's been done to me in other threads. I should have written more carefully. Also, I fully understand now that nobody agrees with me regarding the concern about the people who are missing and the difficulty level in their joining this now thousand comment thread, so my point is moot anyway. I do apologize for the unintended message it might have sent that I wanted people to stop talking, which is not something that actually want.
posted by onlyconnect at 11:15 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

You're not wrong, but you need to place this thread in the context of an ongoing conversation on this topic. Part of this thread is reactions to similar incremental changes proposed in threads from January and February--we're evaluating how those changes are or aren't working. It's a conversation that will probably continue in future threads, so it feels a little strange to close it up now like we're done or need to wait for implementation to form opinions.
posted by almostmanda at 11:25 AM on May 19, 2015 [12 favorites]

Errant, I think we generally agree with one another - I don't think this is a major issue. But noise is noise, and though the bar is high for deletions in MeTa in general, we're trying to work out some moderation stuff here. Snipping out this kind of silencing stuff and leaving a note is something I think is pretty appropriate in that context, and serves the same purpose as "setting a visible example" that leaving it up does. Though it should be noted, for accuracy, that he dropped by three times to either express approval for the thread to close or encourage that to happen before dropping it at last. I mean, kudos for listening to the mods when listening to other users was too much to ask, but it really shouldn't have to come to that.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 11:35 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

So I did think that site policy was changing in the direction that we were asking for (AM I WRONG ABOUT THIS?), and was just asking that we not stop discussion, but consider holding off on further changes (like announcements of MetaFilter's political stance) until people had felt the effect of the current changes.

This is a strawman. It's already been explained, repeatedly, by a number of different users who are advocating for more direct, explicit mod noting, why this is a strawman and not what they/we actually want. No one in this thread has actually asked for anything like "an announcement of MetaFilter's political stance", except one person basically spitballing how it would work to take an obnoxious "Devil's Advocate" stance to further the strawman. Several people have gone to great lengths to explicitly disavow any connection between some kind of change in site policy from their calls for slightly more visible and explicative enforcement of existing site policy.

Please stop repeating this idea that anyone in this thread has requested something like that, it is a strawman.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 11:37 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

If you hear 'don't call people sluts' labeled a 'feminist' opinion enough times, you might be hesitant to explicitly call it sexist next time just because you don't want to start a whole fight about feminism and politics, right? But literally all you're really saying is "don't be a jerk", same as you would to a dude in a non-charged situation.

After reading everyone's great comments, I really think all anyone really wants with any of this is for the chilling effect associated with that conflation to go away - to call people out for being jerks to women for specific reasons and not to feel like pointing out the reason makes anything explicitly "feminist". It should not have to be considered a "feminist" move to come into that thread and say "stop calling women sluts".

Accent mine because YES YES YES. I get that the thread direction is shifting again but I wanted to highlight this wonderful comment and thank you for so perfectly articulating a point I've been struggling to make (internally and otherwise) for a very long time.

The idea that people need to extend the same amount of respect -- specifically not to mention the benefit of the doubt; imo, that's usually the #1 killer around these parts -- to men and women alike is not "feminist." The idea that people should take women at their word exactly as thoroughly and as often as they take men at their word, as opposed to mistrusting them because they're women, is not an articulation of a core political value of "feminism." It's nothing more than a standard iteration of "don't be a jerk," being applied regardless of gender as opposed to mostly refraining from pulling out the yellow card unless or until the insults are deemed "personal" as opposed to "sexist."

To my ears, when a person tries to equate treating women with basic human respect with some value of "feminism" (vs. "basic human respect"), it sounds like they're trying to imply that it's OK to insist that gendered (broadly, "female-directed") insults must clear a higher (more undeniably offensive/blatant/100% undeniable?) bar than personal (broadly "male-directed," where "male" is the default value of "person") insults in order to be curtailed. I'm doing the miserably-failing-to-articulate thing again, but the line between "feminism in action!" and "don't be a jerk to men or women, because it's bad to be a jerk to anyone!" is fantastically bright to me.
posted by divined by radio at 11:46 AM on May 19, 2015 [15 favorites]

This only works if everyone agrees that not calling people sluts is the bare minimum though

So I actually am somewhat changing my opinion. Because honestly - the concept that a woman can have a lot of sex and not be a slut is a feminist concept. It's a recent feminist revolution, honestly, and has not taken hold in the majority of the population - that a woman does not inherently devalue herself by having a lot of sex.

And it's one thing to say 'Don't call women you're talking to sluts.' That's I think an easy bar and one that has taken hold on the site because it falls under civility guidelines. But 'Don't call women sluts, period, even if they're not on site, regardless of their actions, because by calling them that word you are reinforcing a patriarchal worldview where women are devalued by sex - that is absolutely a political stance and a feminist stance.
posted by corb at 11:52 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't think we need to untangle all the complexity of what feminists might mean by "sluts" to agree that a dude being gross about women with tattoos is not working on high-level reclaiming of the word, though.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:56 AM on May 19, 2015 [14 favorites]

This is a strawman. It's already been explained, repeatedly, by a number of different users who are advocating for more direct, explicit mod noting, why this is a strawman and not what they/we actually want. No one in this thread has actually asked for anything like "an announcement of MetaFilter's political stance", except one person basically spitballing how it would work to take an obnoxious "Devil's Advocate" stance to further the strawman.

Back when I made my original comment, people were discussing whether or not MetaFilter should explicitly say it's feminist. That's all I mean by political. I don't think I'm arguing strawmen.
posted by onlyconnect at 11:58 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Well, corb, I'm not going to argue with you about whether not using the term is or isn't political or feminist. if you voice that view of women, I will be flagging your comment as offensive and likely also filling out a mod contact form.
posted by bearwife at 12:00 PM on May 19, 2015 [18 favorites]

Of course! I think that's consistent with my comment though.
posted by onlyconnect at 12:03 PM on May 19, 2015

i think she gets that:

Also, I fully understand now that nobody agrees with me regarding the concern about the people who are missing and the difficulty level in their joining this now thousand comment thread, so my point is moot anyway. I do apologize for the unintended message it might have sent that I wanted people to stop talking, which is not something that actually want.
posted by twist my arm at 12:10 PM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

To my ears, when a person tries to equate treating women with basic human respect with some value of "feminism" (vs. "basic human respect"), it sounds like they're trying to imply that it's OK to insist that gendered (broadly, "female-directed") insults must clear a higher (more undeniably offensive/blatant/100% undeniable?) bar than personal (broadly "male-directed," where "male" is the default value of "person") insults in order to be curtailed.

Whereas, to me, it's about acknowledging the historical and present fact that there are specific, gendered, political kinds of disrepect that women face that men do not, because they are women.

Ultimately, though, the only reason I care about this sideshow is that I think the pushback against being willing to say "yes, MetaFilter is against misogyny"* on the occasions when it is relevant, is because I think that pushback is coming from a bad place. Which, once again, holy crap has this been gone over at length.

Back when I made my original comment, people were discussing whether or not MetaFilter should explicitly say it's feminist. That's all I mean by political. I don't think I'm arguing strawmen.

Maybe you should have kept reading.

But, again, to quote EmpressCallipygos: you can call it Sidney for all I care, that's beside the point.

As I've said like four or five times already in this very thread, in terms of actual practical actions and changes I am advocating for, and as far as I can tell this also goes for everyone else who has posted in the thread, I'm not adovcating for any kind of manifesto or deliberate change in policy beyond what already exists.

The people on "the side" you seem to be arguing against, such as it exists, have offered a lot of specific examples of exactly what we want to see happen, and if you take issue or disagree with those, by all means make that objection clear. But the way you and others keep repeatedly voicing your disapproval for things that no one in the thread has actually asked for while not actually addressing the very specific actionable things they have is muddying the waters and yes, it is a strawman.

*I totally understand and want to be sensitive about easter queen and other's discomfort with using "feminist" as a stand-in for "anti-misogynist", because they feel they are the one but that the other is a historical movement that has been shitty to people like them. People who are uncomfortable with "feminist" who would also be uncomfortable with "anti-misogynist" or anything too ~political~ can go jump in a lake.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 12:13 PM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

Well, corb, I'm not going to argue with you about whether not using the term is or isn't political or feminist. if you voice that view of women, I will be flagging your comment as offensive and likely also filling out a mod contact form.

To be clear, the view that women should be entitled to sexual activity on an equal level with that of men is my political, feminist stance. The fact that I'm saying it's a political and hard-won stance does not mean I'm saying that it's totes awesome when dudes slutshame, it means I'm saying that some things are in fact (sadly) not settled questions and as such are inherently political choices.
posted by corb at 12:19 PM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

"... it means I'm saying that some things are in fact (sadly) not settled questions and as such are inherently political choices."

Well, in my utopia it's a settled issue. (sigh)

Something like slut shaming can be very common and very normalized in a culture and still be sexist and misogynistic. (So an argument like -- but it's not sexist, lots of people say it -- doesn't hold water, even if it is a popular way to think.)

Most of the most derailing critics of feminism (not aiming this at you, corb) claim to be interested in egalitarianism and humanism (suggesting equal rights for people of any gender). Having a double-standard about sexual activity isn't at all egalitarian. So, as an aside to the "equalists", please work on your cognitive dissonance on this issue promptly.
posted by puddledork at 12:31 PM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

The idea that people need to extend the same amount of respect -- specifically not to mention the benefit of the doubt; imo, that's usually the #1 killer around these parts -- to men and women alike is not "feminist." The idea that people should take women at their word exactly as thoroughly and as often as they take men at their word, as opposed to mistrusting them because they're women, is not an articulation of a core political value of "feminism."

I agree with you that calling those assumptions "feminist" tends to come out of the weird double standard where a man talking about his experiences is unmarked but a woman talking about hers is subject to extra scrutiny or dismissal because male is default. But I think that because that is still a dominant assumption, pushing back against it is a feminist stance. And there is a difference, one that is noticeable between Metafilter and many other places on the Internet, between just saying "Don't be sexist" and only punishing the most egregious and unambiguous slurs, and saying "this pattern of stuff is hostile to women in a more subtle way, let's not do that." Kind of the difference between people who identify as "equalists" and feminists.

I don't think Metafilter really needs to make some kind of formal declaration, because I think the whole history with Boyzone and the way moderation has evolved means it is a feminist site already, in the sense of trying to create an environment where women can participate equally (the distinction that dbr draws between that and more overt "political" action is an important one, too, but I don't think the folks suggesting some kind of formal position are looking for "Metafilter is against the wage gap" or w/e.)
posted by kagredon at 12:35 PM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

Man this discussion keep my mind turning and my thoughts gelling and reforming. In essence, for me, I'm coming from this: What I like in particular about expressly stating (in general or per thread when the need arises) that misogyny will not be tolerated is it greatly narrows the margin of bad behavior to a small spectrum of things, with mod responses running the gamut from a mod note, maybe a PM, to greater measures if needed. Proportional response, in other words. This kind of spectrum recognizes that, as with pretty much any other type of moderation here, threads can be re-railed and de-shitified without it necessarily meaning that the offender is an irredeemable shitbag who needs to get the boot tout de suite. Not because people who drop misogyny in threads need to be actively educated or something; that's on them, on their time. I just think it's important to remember that no one here is suggesting some Soviet-style political enemies purging campaign be taken up by moderator staff. As I understand it, anyway.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 1:13 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm nearly sure I've read every comment so sorry if I missed this being asked. But why don't mods leave a note after every comment deletion? I've read lots of old Metas but I can't find anywhere that explains why so many (most?) deletions are the silent but deadly type. Can there not be a fairly standardised version of: [comment deleted: misogynistic/homophobic/racist/personal attack/derail etc] like with post deletions? Echoing others, I'd prefer the hateful stuff to be deleted but I would like people coming after to know why it was deleted and what won't be tolerated.

But as for Meta I'd rather see as few deletions as possible, unless they're nuclear-grade. I think of the mods as facilitators here, rather than supervisors as on the other parts of the site, and I'd rather them step in when needed to help steer us back from derails and caution people who are being disruptive rather than be too heavy-handed.
posted by billiebee at 1:16 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

So I actually am somewhat changing my opinion. Because honestly - the concept that a woman can have a lot of sex and not be a slut is a feminist concept. It's a recent feminist revolution, honestly, and has not taken hold in the majority of the population - that a woman does not inherently devalue herself by having a lot of sex.

I agree with corb on this, and this is why it's not enough just to say "what's good for the goose is good for the gander." Feminism as a system was called into being because of asymmetries like this in gender expectations that required active advocacy and reframing. Assuming that insults traded across the gender gap are equivalent in their attempt to degrade is how we ended up with decades of dudes mocking women with the likes "har de har, what's your complaint, I am a slut, I'm proud to be a slut." Calling a man a slut is rude and jerky. Calling a woman a slut is rude, jerky, but also particularly shaming and marginalizing and aggressive because of the use of the term in patriarchal oppression.

I think this is worth dissecting a bit, because I think this is where things have the potential to go quite wrong if judged under the "even-handed" rule system of "just don't be jerks to one another, male or female" or playground equivalencies of "you don't do this to me, I don't do it to you." As was pointed out above, there are specific ways people in this culture are socialized and entitled and empowered to be jerks to women specifically, in order to keep women restricted to a narrow range of forms of behavior and expression. These things are part of systems, not just individual, atomized insults, and sometimes people who are angered or irritated or threatened or arrogant find that calling on misgynistic tropes offers them a great way to marginalize, minimize, dismiss or taunt women simply by activating that system. Calling a man a "slut" has very little of the sting, social threat, or attempt at suppression that calling a woman a "slut" does, and misogynists know this, and use its power to dissuade participation. This is exactly why a rebuttal can be on its face polite and "civil" and at the same time be a personal attack employing misogyny to express anger. And it's that kind of thing that we need to be aware of in order to create a non-misogynist/nonsexist space.
posted by Miko at 1:17 PM on May 19, 2015 [21 favorites]

Billiebee, a lot of threads would end up with stretches where there are just a bunch of "comment deleted" notes, and it's super easy to derail a conversation into being ABOUT the stuff that's deleted, and you get this weird one-sided information thing where people are talking to people who DID see the deleted stuff with people who DIDN'T, and people can assume the worst about the deleted content or assume it's better than it is or whatever else, and it's just a mess.
posted by NoraReed at 1:19 PM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

I see what you're saying. The reason I was wondering is because someone dropped a tiny polished turd in a thread today and it was disappeared. Which is good, it didn't turn into a shitstorm. But someone coming later to that thread might read it and see everyone playing nicely and decide that they too feel like having a wee dump. If the note is already there to say [nope] then the message doesn't have to be repeated over and over.
posted by billiebee at 1:26 PM on May 19, 2015

The flipside is that there are times when it's unclear why a comment was deleted and a note would help. Not so much in the shitshow threads, of course, when it's pretty dang obvious why stuff gets deleted.
posted by Justinian at 1:26 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

"But why don't mods leave a note after every comment deletion? I've read lots of old Metas but I can't find anywhere that explains why so many (most?) deletions are the silent but deadly type. "

I can't find the specific threads, but the general reasoning has been that most deleted comments are things that don't need notes — anything from "CLICK HERE TO WORK FROM HOME" to a user grabbing a mod and saying, whups meant this for another thread.

There's also the belief that most of that is meta-commentary that belongs in MeTa, and dropping notes encourages further derails over whatever was deleted. There's also the mod belief that, in general, notes like that are more effective when written in private to members, rather than being a public scolding. That's something that because (kinda definitionally) we can't see, we have to take the mods' word for it.

Add to that the points that Nora makes, and there's a bunch of pretty decent reasons to not make that the policy.
posted by klangklangston at 1:26 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, a strict note-for-every-deletion rule would yield way, way more disruption than it's worth. For most members, the site experience should ideally (IMO) be one of mostly seamless, more-or-less reasonable discussion, and it shouldn't feel like there's a ton of work going into keeping it that way., or like there's a continual low-level fight among users/conflict with mods going on. I think people pick up the atmosphere and mostly adjust their participation to site norms -- case in point, once we had been nixing 'I'd hit it'-type jokes for a while, they just stopped appearing, even though we weren't announcing their deletion most of the time. This just became a place where that wasn't done, and people adjusted their commenting. (And yeah, the other more housekeeping-ish deletions don't get notes either.)

Justinian if you have questions about a deletion you can just ask us.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:32 PM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

And NB I'm not saying we shouldn't leave notes of the kind we've talked about upthread. We should and will. Just saying, there's a reason we don't note every one.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:35 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

you can just ask us

That would require something besides incredible laziness.
posted by Justinian at 1:35 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The reason I was wondering is because someone dropped a tiny polished turd in a thread today and it was disappeared. Which is good, it didn't turn into a shitstorm. But someone coming later to that thread might read it and see everyone playing nicely and decide that they too feel like having a wee dump. If the note is already there to say [nope] then the message doesn't have to be repeated over and over.

That's a case where, if we saw something that wasn't obviously going to be a trend turning into one anyway, we'd likely end up leaving a note after the second incident saying, "hey, seriously, do not pop into the conversation with this species of turd". Doing that only when it actually seems like an ongoing issue in a thread rather than just one person displaying bad judgement in isolation means, aside from just less clutter and in general and less chance of counter-metacommentary knock on stuff, also just less of a sense of heavy-handed modding and a little more weight to those interjections when they do come up.

And, like, as an example: this thread about diet and exercise yesterday is the sort of thing that immediately hits my radar as potentially gonna be trouble. People have a whole passel of strong feelings on those subjects. And if you look at the thread, there's a little bit of bumpiness out of the gate, and then I left a mod note to specifically try and head-check with folks to keep it cool. That wasn't following any deletions up to that point; it's the sort of thing we can and do leave as a discretionary thing, rather than strictly in response to the act of deleting.

And the couple of things I did delete didn't really make sense to add a note for, because they seemed like one-off "not really gonna work" things of a couple different sorts rather than someone coming to the thread with some endemic bad approach or poor intentions for the discussion. Leaving notes would have brought attention to the deletions when there was nothing to say publicly about them and no obvious benefit to shining a spotlight on the fact that a couple of comments had been quickly removed or on those users to make them feel self-conscious about it or put them on the defensive.

Like LM just said, this isn't to say that leaving notes isn't something we'll work on doing more for cases where it really would benefit tone-setting and getting a message across about what's not okay. That's just not ever gonna translate into always following a deletion with a mod note, because it's not something that always bears a public placekeeper or message. The goal with comment deletions is primarily to help a thread go better, not to make a point of having deleted something and telling people about it.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:48 PM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

it means I'm saying that some things are in fact (sadly) not settled questions and as such are inherently political choices.

There is no such thing as a non-political choice. Which bagged salad you buy at the supermarket is a political choice. Here, on metafilter, though I think it's fair to treat the idea that you shouldn't call women sluts as a settled question. The price of admission is $5 and you don't get to call women sluts. That seems ok to me.
posted by Doublewhiskeycokenoice at 1:48 PM on May 19, 2015 [18 favorites]

"I think people pick up the atmosphere and mostly adjust their participation to site norms -- case in point, once we had been nixing 'I'd hit it'-type jokes for a while, they just stopped appearing, even though we weren't announcing their deletion most of the time."

It seems odd that everyone is forgetting the cooter clock.
posted by klangklangston at 1:59 PM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

Well, I said 'a while'.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:01 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'd be in favour of a automagic metafilter mail notification for comment deletion. I don't think I've had a great number of deletions over the years, but I could easily have missed some. I've taken those few I recall as warning flags, "don't do this" indicators. If I don't realize that I've been warned, it might not be as effective a mechanism for user feedback.

On the other hand, I'm sure there's reasons for not doing this that I haven't thought of.
posted by bonehead at 2:11 PM on May 19, 2015

Volume maybe?
posted by bonehead at 2:12 PM on May 19, 2015

For one thing, we are really strict about limiting what we mail people, just on a general anti-spam principle.

But for another, it would be like sending automated messages "do you want to dispute this routine mod action? click here".... it would eat up a ton of time with not-productive correspondence, often with spammers or drive-by commenters who wouldn't otherwise notice the deletion. As it stands, I'll often MeMail a person their deleted comment if it seems like something that can be reposted with minor changes, but even that can be pretty time-consuming. People are always welcome to ask us if they have questions about a deletion, though.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:18 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I can certainly respect the low-noise principle. I also appreciate that email invitations to fight with the mods might not be the best idea ever.
posted by bonehead at 2:29 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The price of admission is $5 and you don't get to call women sluts. That seems ok to me.

Literally no one is arguing you should be able to call women sluts on the blue, green, grey, or any othershade here on metafilter. No one.
posted by corb at 2:46 PM on May 19, 2015

No, but people (including yourself) are arguing that the stated opinion should be considered a "political" stance. Since people seem to be using "political" as a rough shorthand for "debatable", and since everyone seems agreed that MeFi isn't going to adopt an explicit political bent, defining "don't call women sluts whether they're here or otherwise" as an overtly political stance in this context is tantamount to saying that it shouldn't be grounds for deletion or moderation without a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth. That's how I read your comment, anyway - either you're not understanding the way people have been using "political" in this thread, or you're arguing that we shouldn't expect moderators to nix comments where people call women sluts (as long as the women aren't in the thread or something? it's unclear).
posted by dialetheia at 2:54 PM on May 19, 2015 [13 favorites]

I think I'm just frustrated by how we have to wiggle things to make them things they're not just to get what we want. Like, yes: saying that certain bullshit patriarchal opinions can't be expressed here is a political stance. It's a great political stance! But it is absolutely a political stance. I shouldn't have to say 'no, it's not really a political stance, it's totally stale white bread and completely unthreatening' to say you shouldn't be able to dudebro it up talking about ladysluts amirite hah hah. I shouldn't have to hide my analysis of patriarchal structures in a corner just so that it seems bland enough to be cool.

Everyone has agreed that MeFi isn't going to adopt an explicit political bent - like, "You have to be a Democrat" or "Anti Capitalists Only" or "X Brand Feminism." But just because it's not declaring an explicitly political bent doesn't mean it's not making political stances. Hell, 'sexism/racism is offensive' is a political stance, and we already have that on a flag.
posted by corb at 3:01 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Literally no one is arguing you should be able to call women sluts on the blue, green, grey, or any othershade here on metafilter. No one.

Except for all the people who called women sluts in that thread. Can we agree that they need to be run out of town on a rail?
posted by Doublewhiskeycokenoice at 3:04 PM on May 19, 2015 [12 favorites]

I also appreciate that email invitations to fight with the mods might not be the best idea ever.
posted by bonehead at 2:29 PM on May 19 [+] [!]

This made me laugh way, way more than it should have, because I am a child.
posted by Errant at 3:05 PM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

I think I'm just frustrated by how we have to wiggle things to make them things they're not just to get what we want.

Yeah, totally fair enough. I'm not sure how to untangle any of this. There are just so many sources of slipperiness in the language, the two biggest ones being:

- feminism as the idea that women should be afforded a baseline of respect and decent treatment / feminism as a broader social movement
- political in the "the personal is political" sense / political in the "we don't talk about politics at the dinner table" sense

and I think if we're going to talk sensibly about what it means for MeFi to deal with this stuff, we have to be way more specific about which versions of those concepts we mean. Personally, I think not calling women sluts should fall under the feminism in the first sense, not just the feminism in the second sense; and I think this request should only be considered political in the first sense and not the second.

Conflating all of these different senses is a commonly-used rhetorical technique to undermine basic requests for respect, so I do apologize if I seem to have a hair trigger about this. It's one of the reasons I think it's so important to be specific and clear about what we mean by these terms before we end up talking past each other.
posted by dialetheia at 3:14 PM on May 19, 2015 [16 favorites]

corb, I'd have a hard time agreeing that sexism/racism are de facto political stances. They're not issues that are solved in the world right now, yes, and political parties in the US at least tend to be divided on how much sexism/racism they tolerate, but I think it's quite a leap that "Women aren't sluts" (or similar) becomes in itself a political statement. I don't even know what to call it - something closer to humanist maybe? I'd agree that feminism as a movement is very political, but something about the way you phrased your last comment kinda rubs me the wrong way.

Like... why is saying "Women aren't sluts" political? I could honestly be missing something.
posted by erratic meatsack at 3:14 PM on May 19, 2015

I think another thing that complicates this kind of discussion is that a major component of kyriarchy is that personal choices of oppressed people are scrutinized and politicized, which is really what the original thread is about: the author of the FPP link just wanted a tattoo and thought that was a nice place for it; she wasn't heading into it with the expectation that she'd be belittled and judged for making a choice on her own body, but patriarchy. I agree with corb that because of the context this all happens in, it is a political stance to stand up for women, but I can also see how that's frustrating because of how what should be personal choices for women get politicized.
posted by kagredon at 3:15 PM on May 19, 2015 [11 favorites]

Yeah, totally fair enough. I'm not sure how to untangle any of this.

I am. This is baseline stuff, so I have no idea (except corb) why we have to discuss whether it is "political" or not. (Good grief, political itself is a word that is derived from "polis," the Greek word for people/community). It is called R E S P E C T, and it is the minimum people deserve. So women don't get called that name, LGBTQ people don't get called other well known choice names, people of color don't get called other well known terms, etc.

Political or not, MeFites who fall below this baseline shouldn't have their comments/posts stand, and if they keep it up, they should be banned for good.
posted by bearwife at 3:23 PM on May 19, 2015 [14 favorites]

I have no idea (except corb) why we have to discuss whether it is "political" or not.

Jesus Christ on a pogo stick I am having a hard time feeling like this is in good faith when there were men discussing whether or not this stance is political all day just fine for hundreds of comments above my thoughts about the political nature of feminism. The reason some of us feel we have to discuss it is because dudes started talking about it in here. If you don't want to talk about it you are welcome not to.
posted by corb at 3:31 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Let me try to sum up the stance those of us advocating for a change want to be made more visible in moderation: You are not allowed to call people assholes, because it is rude. You are not allowed to call people sluts, because it is rude and also because it is a form of misogyny. The mods are encouraged to actually say so when they delete things that are misogynist, instead of just focusing on very specific bad behavior or lumping it under the apolitical label of "rudeness", because that is just not cutting it right now and also contributing to an atmosphere of boyzone-ish-ness and what feels like a weird double standard for (some) female users who are uncomfortable with that atmosphere.

Political statement or "simple courtesy", "feminist" vs "anti-misogynist" vs "equalist", these semantic issues are all fundamentally kind of tangential. Misogyny is a thing that happens on MF; it should not happen; it should not happen both because it is rude and also because it is misogynist. This is also true of other forms of misogyny, whether it is interpersonally rude or not; they are bad and should not be on MF, full stop. Whether any one particular incident constitutes misogyny is up to mod discretion as influenced by feedback from the userbase, the general principle that misogyny is not going to be tolerated is not and should not be in question, nor is the idea that there is more to misogyny than "being rude to women". In fact not all rudeness towards women is misogynistic, so it's an important distinction to make, but as of right now, the way site policy is enforced does not make that distinction very clear.

I feel like this particular sentiment has been expressed enough times in enough different ways that people in the thread should, at this point, at least know and be willing to say whether or not they're in agreement with the basic idea of "misogyny is bad for it's own sake and should not be tolerated, and it is also okay make no modly bones about that fact whenever it becomes appropriate".

Everything else is pretty much a sideshow, even the very excellent point about some people's discomfort with feminist vs anti-misogynist, womanist, etc. The mods have up to this point focused on individual behavior without ever putting it in any kind of context at all, and there are certainly some good arguments they have made for that policy. I just happen to disagree both in principle and what I see as the practical results of that preference. But that's the basic question we're wrestling with right now, yes?

I am. This is baseline stuff, so I have no idea (except corb) why we have to discuss whether it is "political" or not.

Because one of the proposed changes is having the mods be more explicit about the reasons for the modding, including say "this is misogynist" and not just "this is rude", a change that is going to be interpreted politically even if, and I cannot fucking stress this enough, it doesn't actually reflect a change in site policy or even what tends to be moderated. It's a question of how the moderation is presented. I, for one, would like to explicitly reject all the "it's just baseline human decency" shit, because there are a very large number of people on MetaFilter who think that it is okay by baseline human decency to call people sluts, and also as we can see in this thread, a great number of people who think that calling people sluts is merely a matter of rudeness.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 3:36 PM on May 19, 2015 [14 favorites]

i actually think the political discussion sprang from some sloppy wording on my part and then just go a life of its own. i tried to clarify but things were well and truly on their way by then.
posted by nadawi at 3:38 PM on May 19, 2015

why is saying "Women aren't sluts" political?

Okay - when saying this, I want to be super clear that I am just unpacking this and that I strongly oppose 'women are sluts and deserve to be devalued' thinking.

But the gendered slur 'slut' is itself a continuation of a certain type of political slur. The class of political slurs for sexually available women was created by political needs - patriarchal men wishing to control the generation of children and the sexual agency of women, who they viewed as their property. Their control of the sexual availability of women they viewed as 'theirs' could only exist in a society where there are rigid negative consequences for violating their social directives. While the current meaning of slut is in fact new, this particular type of slur is age old and has a lot of history behind it - history of expelling a woman from a community for sexual agency, because she violates the appropriative norms of patriarchal control of women.

People who are trying to eliminate the use of those slurs are not, generally, trying to eliminate them because they think the people being called them are not, in fact, sexually available. They are trying to eliminate them because they believe that question is irrelevant - that the patriarchal mode of control of access to women's vaginas is bullshit and needs to be opposed. That women and women alone control access to themselves sexually, and it is fine whichever way they choose to utilize that access. That women are not judged on a spectrum of value according to how many penises have penetrated them. That is a political fight - a good, important, political fight that has been raging for decades and is moving very, very slowly. But it is still a political fight.

tl;dr - 'Slut' is a political insult, thus saying 'women aren't sluts' is a political defense.
posted by corb at 3:41 PM on May 19, 2015 [7 favorites]

Delurking just long enough to say I wish corb could be shown more respect, or at least less knee-jerk disrespect.
posted by jfuller at 3:43 PM on May 19, 2015 [17 favorites]

Thanks corb, I really appreciate it. Thinking about this on top of divined by radio's great comment way above (particularly the last paragraph) makes sense to me.
posted by erratic meatsack at 3:47 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

> tl;dr - 'Slut' is a political insult, thus saying 'women aren't sluts' is a political defense.

This is true for a ton of slurs - other kinds of insulting language directed at women, as well as slurs aimed at gay people, black people, etc.

I guess I don't understand why we have to give Special Political Scrutiny to "sluts" and whether or not we are allowed to call women (whether or not they are mefites) sluts when this is not a needle we seem to need to thread when it comes to other kinds of slurs directed at women (I don't recall this line of argument coming up about "bitch," for example), and slurs directed at e.g. gay people, black people, etc. Is there argument that we should have a conversation about the political nature of those slurs?
posted by rtha at 3:47 PM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

I really don't think the opinions vis-a-vis respect (or vis-a-vis anything, to be honest) of someone who has unironically dropped the term "misandry" in this thread are particularly relevant to anyone, jfuller. Corb has really run out of any benefit of the doubt most of us were giving her in this particular exchange with her shitty, misogynistic/classist dismissals of feminine-coded tattoos in the original tattoo thread. Additionally, given her general, long-term site participation, a lot of us are really, really sick of her skirting the line on enforcably bad behavior on a variety of issues (off the top of my head: rape and abuse apology, slavery, patriarchy's insistence on devaluing what is deemed feminine, dogwhistles). I kind of hate to bring this up because I know it'll probably throw the thread firmly into another episode of The Corb Show, but I also feel like unless she's banned or reigned in by the moderators, we need to give the damn thing it's allocated 22 minutes or we're just gonna keep getting "The Corb Show Is On At 8 (7 Central)" teasers every 3 seconds in every MetaTalk from now until the heat death of the universe.
posted by NoraReed at 3:56 PM on May 19, 2015 [23 favorites]

So I think there are two arguments going on, and people are mixing up statements from one as statements about the other.

Argument 1 - Should mods delete sexist/misogynist shit - I think has been resolved? maybe? I feel like mods have agreed to that and shown their stuff. I feel the vast majority of people in thread are in agreement.

Argument 2 - When mods delete that, should they explicitly define their deletion in political terms - ie 'Slutshaming is wrong, don't engage in it' rather than 'Be nicer'/'Cut it out'

And that argument is bumping up against the thing dialethia described above, where political means different things to different people and for some people are dirty words.
posted by corb at 3:57 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I guess I don't understand why we have to give Special Political Scrutiny to "sluts"

Do we? Who has argued this? To me it reads like corb is just saying that any position you could take is necessarily political, but maybe I've misread, and I agree with The Master and Margarita Mix that whatever the point is, it's basically tangential.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 3:59 PM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

I guess I don't understand why we have to give Special Political Scrutiny to "sluts" and whether or not we are allowed to call women (whether or not they are mefites) sluts when this is not a needle we seem to need to thread when it comes to other kinds of slurs directed at women (I don't recall this line of argument coming up about "bitch," for example), and slurs directed at e.g. gay people, black people, etc. Is there argument that we should have a conversation about the political nature of those slurs?

"Slut" is just an example, albeit a relevant example because a whole bunch of users were shitting up the tattoo thread with it very recently. The same holds for "bitch", for "let's fake incredulity and sneer at women who chose last night to decide to nope out of watching Game of Thrones, heh heh stupid females where was your delicacy when they were throwing Bram out a tower, huh?", for anything that is misogynist and that would be modded, especially if it's something that's threatening to swarm a thread.

I'm not going to say "I think the mods do a better job with gay stuff", although that's my impression, and I'm certainly not going to pretend my assessment of the job they do with racial stuff matters, but in as much as there are similar atmospheres around those issues, and the same current mod policy of refusing to be explicit about the political content of bad behavior around those issues is contributing to them? Yes, go for it, I'm all for it and I'd pretend to be baffled why you think any of us advocating for more visibly feminist modding wouldn't, but I'm not that disengenuous, so: no one has been trying to play Oppression Olympics in this thread, no one.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 4:00 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

"Since people seem to be using 'political' as a rough shorthand for 'debatable'..."

I certainly am not and I strongly oppose that view!

Like (it seems to me) TMaMM, I partly think this is a destructive digression but I also worry that it's relevant. But can we at least acknowledge that it absolutely is not the case that all of us in this thread have used "political" as equivalent to "debatable"?
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:02 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

> Do we? Who has argued this?

People in this thread who are arguing about the political (or not) status of the word "slut" when it is employed or deleted here. I don't know how else to explain. Various people are discussing the political implications of (e.g.) mod notes that might tell people why their "slut"-containing comment was deleted. I don't recall this coming up in other discussions about (e.g.) deliberately misgendering someone or using ironically racist language.
posted by rtha at 4:04 PM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

Women like sex. Men like sex. Women like tattoos. Men like tattoos. Oh look at how this back tattoo has morphed into yet another sexist thing. Fuck that sexist thing. The end.

So yeah I'm not really sure, aside from bad tendencies, why the thread wasn't all, 'holy shit, men think that?' (my reaction) and "here's an even greater tattoo than party dog," if it exists.

Anything along the lines of but yeah promiscuous women/doggie style/body shaming, unless one finds the aesthetics of ass antlers in and of themselves appalling -- I just don't get why it's there.

Sorry if I'm jumping on sensitive shit or retreading shit from earlier in the thread.
posted by angrycat at 4:06 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I agree this tangent is potentially destructive.

I don't think we need to agree on whether or not disallowing misogynist silencing tactics is "political" to agree that it is bad for discourse and we don't want it.
posted by Miko at 4:09 PM on May 19, 2015 [15 favorites]

I've been reading as much of this thread as I have been able to take in (obviously, it's quite large and I just stumbled upon it). Genuine apologies if my comments are somehow obviated by something that has already been said.

For what it's worth, I'd like to represent a point of view that diverges from the consensus (if it can be said that there truly is one). I do not like the idea of more moderation, banning and other forms of official censure. For some time now, the Metafilter community has been moving further and further towards a uniformity of politics and philosophy. I am deeply ambivalent about this.

Yes, there were some objectionable things said in the tattoo thread. But we're still a long way from youtube comments (yes, we really are), and I would rather weather some unnecessarily gross comments in the service of preserving a diversity of viewpoints. For issues like this, I have a very old-school appreciation for an open blend of ideas, even if it means you occasionally get some shit stirred in.

In the case of some of these comments, there are some clear-cut reasons why these were objectionable. But in a lot of other cases, there's definitely a kind of political bias that sneaks into phrases like "reading the room." Sometimes, this is just a coded way of saying not to go against the group-think. Not always, but definitely sometimes.

Asking for more moderation and bans is, in economic terms, asking mefi to spend more money in order to have fewer users. And I thought the site was experiencing funding issues. I definitely have the sense that a small but highly vocal segment of users want to make this site their personal clubhouse where everyone is "smart" enough to share the same set of opinions.

So is it so important to remove any opportunity for objectionable comment that we drive away people who might not be objectionable but have different points of view? Obviously, there's a trade-off, and the question is where the line should be. A lot of folks seem to want to move the line in a more restrictive direction, and I think that would be a shame. I'm positive that some people really don't see this as a trade off, because they think it's as simple as just getting rid of the "bad" ones. But it's never that simple, and it can only seem that way if you think that social/political truth is an obvious thing.
posted by Edgewise at 4:10 PM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

Delurking just long enough to say I wish corb could be shown more respect, or at least less knee-jerk disrespect.

I agree. We should treat everybody here with respect, even if we disagree with them or they are behaving poorly. (or take the, "If you have nothing nice to say..." approach.) There are other websites out there for folks who want to engage without that requirement.
posted by Drinky Die at 4:10 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, sorry I done goofed by pursuing this further on my end. If I need clarification on something that's going to be so digressive I'll use mail next time.
posted by erratic meatsack at 4:10 PM on May 19, 2015

Argument 2 - When mods delete that, should they explicitly define their deletion in political terms - ie 'Slutshaming is wrong, don't engage in it' rather than 'Be nicer'/'Cut it out'

The drawback to this is that a problem that has repeatedly been brought up in this thread is that there are a fair number of users who have repeatedly derailed threads by skirting the edge of offense, wrapped in "polite language." So saying "be nicer" doesn't get to the root of the problem; saying "you regularly engage in misogynist disruption on the site; you need to stop that" actually sends a clear message, both to the perpetrator and the semi-silent fellow travelers. And would, with luck, have the effect of letting women know that it is OK to post here, because you will be treated like a human being or the mods will have your back.

I'm not sure why that is so abhorrent; yes, it is taking a political stance, but, as we have discussed at wearying length above, pretty much everything can be construed as a political stance (including the effort to not take a political stance), so where is the harm. It will make future LBT threads less horrible.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:11 PM on May 19, 2015 [17 favorites]

But can we at least acknowledge that it absolutely is not the case that all of us in this thread have used "political" as equivalent to "debatable"?

Yes absolutely, and my apologies! I was specifically speaking to the turn the conversation had just taken at that point and why people might be frustrated or get that impression from corb's comment.

I continue to think that people are talking at cross purposes w/r/t "political", that whether it's political or not is basically immaterial, and that the way people have historically used "that's political, don't talk about it in polite company" as a way to silence discussion is muddying the conversation here. I tend to agree with rtha that even responding to the "eww, that's political" shutdown version of the term is sort of beneath us, but also with corb that "the insult itself is political" is a great comeback to that particular rhetorical technique.

But in a lot of other cases, there's definitely a kind of political bias that sneaks into phrases like "reading the room."

On preview, just for the record, this is precisely why so many people were skeptical about the "is it political or not" framing.
posted by dialetheia at 4:13 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yes, there were some objectionable things said in the tattoo thread. But we're still a long way from youtube comments (yes, we really are), and I would rather weather some unnecessarily gross comments in the service of preserving a diversity of viewpoints. For issues like this, I have a very old-school appreciation for an open blend of ideas, even if it means you occasionally get some shit stirred in.

Ladies, the idea that having a tattoo makes you a slut is something we should just deal with because Free Speech.

Uh, no.
posted by winna at 4:13 PM on May 19, 2015 [40 favorites]

I don't recall this coming up in other discussions about (e.g.) deliberately misgendering someone or using ironically racist language.

Because this is a call to action that is relatively new, like within the last couple hundred comments of this very thread, and there hasn't yet been time for similar calls to action in other contexts or if there have I've missed them.

Which is to say: so fucking what? What possible relevance does "MeFites of Color have not yet asked for this kind of modding to combat ironic racism" have, except to make some kind of brain-searingly stupid logcal fallacy as a gotcha, like "heh heh YOU DIDN'T SAY MOTHER MAY I (by explicitly speaking out about every other kind of oppressive comment on MeFi in a thread specifically about feminist issues), nanny-nanny-boo-boo, I don't have to pay attention to your actual elements but explaaaaaain it to me, I don't understaaaaaand"?

If trans users feel like this kind of more explicit modding against transphobic comments would help them, great! Awesome! They're different issues, I can think of at least a couple reasons why trans users might not want it or it might make them uncomfortable, but I'm not trans and it's not my place to say! In fact, it's not like they're a hivemind, I imagine there would be a fairly strong plurality of opinion, just like their is in the #JuneBy threads. Yes, obviously, if any group I'm not a part of has a MetaTalk huddle and broadly, since I am in favor of it in the context of misogyny, I'm certainly not going to be against it in principle for any other group, but this is the thread about the boyzone pushback and that's not relevant.

Just what the fuck, specifically, are you trying to accomplish with this line of questioning?
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 4:14 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

But we're still a long way from youtube comments (yes, we really are), and I would rather weather some unnecessarily gross comments in the service of preserving a diversity of viewpoints.

Oh good grief, better than YouTube? Wow, set that bar high.

Also "diversity of viewpoints" is not some sacred cow that must encompass truly odious rhetoric that makes this place harder to be in, most of all for women and minorities.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:15 PM on May 19, 2015 [27 favorites]

co-sign
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 4:16 PM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

But we're still a long way from youtube comments (yes, we really are), and I would rather weather some unnecessarily gross comments in the service of preserving a diversity of viewpoints.

This is such an incredibly low bar I'm fairly sure it might not even qualify as a bar anymore. We are not stepping over a metaphorical bar. We are stepping over a metaphorical unbar. This bar is so low it cancels out other bars. It is a hole in the ground.

Drinky Die, I'm going to send you my medical bills next time a comment of yours makes me roll my eyes so hard I sprain something.
posted by NoraReed at 4:19 PM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

The Master and Margarita Mix, I think you're taking rtha's comment exactly opposite to how it was intended?
posted by nobody at 4:19 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Asking for more moderation and bans is, in economic terms, asking mefi to spend more money in order to have fewer users. And I thought the site was experiencing funding issues. I definitely have the sense that a small but highly vocal segment of users want to make this site their personal clubhouse where everyone is "smart" enough to share the same set of opinions.

Given how it was rather thoroughly noted above how the accusation of cabal/clubhousery/'Popular Users' is disproportionately directed towards women on the site here, effectively saying that "We don't want to drive away racist/misogynist/transphobic users because we need their money" feels like a non-starter.

If Metafilter couldn't survive without letting in the Youtube-comments-level slavering maw of the Internet, that'd be the point where I think it'd be better to give the site/community the chance to close on a good note than survive-at-all-costs.
posted by CrystalDave at 4:21 PM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

For reasons stated above by me and others, I am tired of pursuing corb's derails and no longer willing to presume good faith in any corb comments. Kudos to those of you with more patience than I or who have better ability to perceive benevolent intent than I do.

And, now that I hope we need not again discuss corb, on the central issue this thread, I think, is now pursuing, here is my two cents -- yes, it is past time that misogyny on this site, however innocently, ironically, or codedly phrased, was modded/edited/banned off it. I don't care if that is political or feminist or gets rid of some users who in some contexts have interesting things to say. The misogyny/boyzone stuff has been hurtful, to fine MeFites and to this place in general when we lose them. And it needs to stop.
posted by bearwife at 4:22 PM on May 19, 2015 [16 favorites]

I definitely have the sense that a small but highly vocal segment of users want to make this site their personal clubhouse where everyone is "smart" enough to share the same set of opinions.

Unlike those who want to preserve this site, along with the rest of the internet, as their personal clubhouse where everyone must be willing to put up with a bunch of woman-hating bullshit all the time to participate?
posted by dialetheia at 4:23 PM on May 19, 2015 [34 favorites]

So are there people in the thread who want to keep talking about what counts as "political" or are we all stuck in circles responding to other people at this point? (Honest question, not trying to shut down conversation about this from people who think it's important to keep talking about it.)

Because it seems like corb and almost everyone else at this point are in a spiral of responding to earlier comments about whether or not modding against misogyny is "political"-- many/most of which aren't saying "it's political" as a bad thing or a reason not to do said modding-against-misogyny, but are maybe getting read that way at this point? I wonder if it might make sense for people who are in just-responding mode to try to let it go (which is not to say that people who personally feel strongly that we need to be having this conversation shouldn't talk about it.)
posted by EmilyClimbs at 4:23 PM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

Yes, there were some objectionable things said in the tattoo thread. But we're still a long way from youtube comments (yes, we really are), and I would rather weather some unnecessarily gross comments in the service of preserving a diversity of viewpoints. For issues like this, I have a very old-school appreciation for an open blend of ideas, even if it means you occasionally get some shit stirred in.

See, here is the deal. That shit you are talking about? Some people get a lot more of that taste than you do, because few, if any, of the shitclots can easily be thrown in your direction. You're insulated. So, when a bunch of users are saying "this is hurting me," saying "I only taste the diversity of viewpoints" is not evidence of your enlightened tolerance but a lack of notice an empathy for people who are regularly pushed face down in the shit until that is all they can taste. They are literally asking for less shit in their lives, and you'd rather defend the dubious rights of people to shit on them.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:23 PM on May 19, 2015 [49 favorites]

Edgewise, viewpoints (comments, to state this more directly) with misogyny sprinkled in them have no redeemable quality whatsoever, and I really doubt you'll be able to argue otherwise.

If people leave because viewpoints with misogyny are deleted I think that says more about them than this site.
posted by erratic meatsack at 4:26 PM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

The Master and Margarita Mix, I think you're taking rtha's comment exactly opposite to how it was intended?

Bleh, if I am, my apologies. But good lord, when people are starting to have to derail the derailing, yeesh. But the sentiment still stands, even if I mistook who it should have been directed at.

Seriously, EmpressC had it right, let's just fucking call it Sidney. So many cognitive kill-switches.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 4:26 PM on May 19, 2015

I also think that corb is doing a sort of well-couched, extremely artful form of JAQing off, or something similar, and it is the kind of thing a lot of this thread is Asking Dudes To Stop Doing, and so I would like to extend that asking to corb: Dudes And Also Corb, please stop Doing That Thing. It is Terrible.
posted by NoraReed at 4:26 PM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

And, as a bit of a derail, could people stop using the small tags as "sotto voce?" It makes them look like mod comments and that's confusing, plus, for those of us with vision problems, they are hard to read. If you don't want to talk at normal size, maybe memail is a better route?

Sorry if that's harsh, but it's been a long week, and I don't need more eyestrain....
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:26 PM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

Drinky Die, I'm going to send you my medical bills next time a comment of yours makes me roll my eyes so hard I sprain something.

Just to be clear, that wasn't him/her, that was me. Clearly, I already owe you for sprained eyes.
posted by Edgewise at 4:27 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Ehh, what? Did he leave himself logged in on your computer or something?
posted by NoraReed at 4:29 PM on May 19, 2015

I'll repeat something I said earlier, and several other people have said better: I think "political" is one of those abstract words that have too many different connotations to too many different people, and sticking to more concrete terms or examples of behavior has a much better chance of moving things forward. Even "misogyny" is probably not as immediately effective as "don't use this word/don't respond to a comment like that/etc.", although it's a lot clearer than "political".
posted by uosuaq at 4:31 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

I assumed the first paragraph of NoraReed's comment was in response to this comment by Edgewise and the second paragraph in response to this one by Drinky Die which immediately followed, which may be read as an allusion to this MeTa by Drinky Die, which went ... badly.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 4:33 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

And, as a bit of a derail, could people stop using the small tags as "sotto voce?"

Drives me nuts too, but nobody listens when I say all mod notes should be in blink tag instead.
posted by Drinky Die at 4:35 PM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

I assumed the first paragraph of NoraReed's comment was in response to this comment by Edgewise and the second paragraph in response to this one by Drinky Die which immediately followed, which may be read as an allusion to this MeTa by Drinky Die, which went ... badly.

That is to say, it may be read as a request to keep the disrespectful stuff off Metafilter and on Twitter or Facebook or the "misc." section of your favorite Twilight Struggle fan forum. Or whatever.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 4:36 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Edgewise, viewpoints with misogyny sprinkled in them have no redeemable quality whatsoever, and I really doubt you'll be able to argue otherwise.

Thanks for addressing my comments directly and without snark (I REALLY appreciate that). In response, I will say that, as you say, I would not argue otherwise, nor did I. My intended point is that it's not as easy as some may think to tease apart the good from the bad. If policies and mod activities change, then some things that were previously acceptable will no longer be acceptable. I'm not defending the clearly awful comments. I'm far more concerned by what will fall on or near the line.

I don't really expect many people here to agree with me at all. Likewise, I find nothing compelling about most of the responses to my comment. I'm just stating my opinion because, in case mods are actually listening to this and caring about what we say, I want to make it clear that there is at least one user who has a contrary view. Who knows, maybe I'm not alone, maybe I am. I can live with either scenario.
posted by Edgewise at 4:40 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Oh, the metaphorical bar comment was separate from the eyerolling comment, which was in response to Drinky Die's comment about "if you don't have anything nice to say", but also a kind of response to pretty much everything he has ever said on this website, so I didn't want to understate the amount of eyerolling I might be doing. I'm also kind of dehydrated, so eyerolling is a bit more painful than usual right now. Sorry for leaving that unclear.
posted by NoraReed at 4:40 PM on May 19, 2015

Drives me nuts too, but nobody listens when I say all mod notes should be in blink tag instead.

Only if it's the sort of blink tag where the mod comment gets closer every time the offending user looks away from the screen until at last that user meets a terrible end...
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:40 PM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

I'll repeat something I said earlier, and several other people have said better: I think "political" is one of those abstract words that have too many different connotations to too many different people, and sticking to more concrete terms or examples of behavior has a much better chance of moving things forward. Even "misogyny" is probably not as immediately effective as "don't use this word/don't respond to a comment like that/etc.", although it's a lot clearer than "political".

I'm having a hard time finding anything to say about this other than: tough shit for those assholes. If a simple word causes your entire brain to shut down to the point where you can't process the ideas behind it, I can't imagine why the hell a site that supposedly caters to thoughtful discussion is supposed to cater to you because of it.

If someone has a problem with their views or statements or opinions being called out as misogynist, or told that a position they hold is one that is political, because either of those words make them unable to think, well, so what? This is the ~free exchange of ideas~ the ~old school free speech~ dudes want to protect from those of us who would prevent users from speculating about the sluttishness of women with lower back tattoos, really?

If someone has a meltdown because a mod told them that their misogynist comment was, indeed, misogynist and contributing to a bad atmosphere in a thread about women's issues, well, tough. I don't care. The mods should not care. No one should care.

And, as a bit of a derail, could people stop using the small tags as "sotto voce?"

Sure, I'll do this. Say something if you catch me slip up.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 4:40 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Ehh, what? Did he leave himself logged in on your computer or something?

No, I think you just missed my timestamp. I could have let it stand, but I decided to bravely step forward and take the full force of your reply in DD's place. Truly, I am a hero.
posted by Edgewise at 4:42 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Edgewise: My intended point is that it's not as easy as some may think to tease apart the good from the bad. If policies and mod activities change, then some things that were previously acceptable will no longer be acceptable. I'm not defending the clearly awful comments. I'm far more concerned by what will fall on or near the line.

Mod activities change based on community feedback, though. The community is reaching a critical point where nearly all women want a quicker smackdown on "the bad" - which also doesn't seem so nebulous from where I'm standing. This is a crazy long thread, but there are many great comments here where people explain exactly what problems they are looking to have solved.

Your concern over where we draw the line seems to disregard all that.
posted by erratic meatsack at 4:46 PM on May 19, 2015 [11 favorites]

augh fine I'll send you a bill too if you'll stop :P
posted by NoraReed at 4:46 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

TM&MM, my point was not that people's brains shut down when they hear the word "political" or "feminism", just that they might hear it as meaning something other than you do, and then there's going to be a lot of talking past each other, so I think that in practical terms it might be better to list some good examples of specific behaviors that aren't tolerated. Meaning, that might be simpler and more effective, for the mods and everybody. Or it might fail just as badly; it's just the best suggestion I've got at the moment.
posted by uosuaq at 4:52 PM on May 19, 2015

But the problem of "listing good examples of x" is that it just leads to more ruleslawyering and sealioning, so the mods are back where they started. ""Deleted for misogyny," :deleted for racism," "deleted for homophobia" are not that hard to parse, except for the willfully clueless.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:57 PM on May 19, 2015 [10 favorites]

I agree that the list would potentially be infinitely long unless the examples were brilliantly chosen, and I also don't really expect it to happen. And I definitely think "misogyny", "racism" and "homophobia" should be a *lot* easier to grasp than "political" or "feminism". I still think that the more concrete, the better (which does make misogyny, racism and homophobia already a big improvement on political or feminism).
posted by uosuaq at 5:01 PM on May 19, 2015

The other problem with listing examples is that people's ingenuity is endless. No matter how long the list of misogynistic examples, new forms arise. Reminds me of the old saying about wardens and prisoners -- the warden watches all the cells, but the prisoner only has to think about their own door's lock.

Also, I trust our mods to edit well. They have quite the track record.
posted by bearwife at 5:05 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Your concern over where we draw the line seems to disregard all that.

I truly don't know why you'd say this. Just because these things have been discussed doesn't mean I suddenly have great confidence that everything will be implemented perfectly.

I think it's hard to argue with the fact that, if policy shifts towards greater restrictiveness, that some things will end up getting cut when maybe they shouldn't. This is just the consequence of implementing a set of guidelines across a large community from a group of mods who are human beings sifting through a huge volume of content. Again, I think folks greatly oversimplify if they think it will be easy to "surgically" remove stuff that "everyone" thinks is bad.

Mod activities change based on community feedback, though.

Hence my comments.
posted by Edgewise at 5:06 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

TM&MM, my point was not that people's brains shut down when they hear the word "political" or "feminism", just that they might hear it as meaning something other than you do, and then there's going to be a lot of talking past each other, so I think that in practical terms it might be better to list some good examples of specific behaviors that aren't tolerated. Meaning, that might be simpler and more effective, for the mods and everybody. Or it might fail just as badly; it's just the best suggestion I've got at the moment.

Specific behaviorial guidelines aren't in conflict with either increased mod notes on deletions themselves, or a broader contextual explanation of the reasons for those deletions. I don't know why you're pretending these things are in conflict, but they're not. Mods can cite specific bad behavior (speculating on women's sexual position preferences due to their tattoo placement) and call it out in a political way as well ("this is misogynist and slut-shaming, don't do it), or whatever else they care to say about it. There's no reason, while they are doing both of these things, to cater to any kind of squeamishness about, in essence, calling a slut-shaming spade a spade.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 5:07 PM on May 19, 2015

augh fine I'll send you a bill too if you'll stop :P

I'm not seeing the incentive, here.
posted by Edgewise at 5:08 PM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

well thank god you're here to save the day

heaven forbid that "some things will end up getting cut when maybe they shouldn't"
posted by kagredon at 5:11 PM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

I think that "political" has a lot of baggage for people because of the whole "LET'S NOT TALK ABOUT POLITICS" thing that happens a lot, which usually means "don't rock the boat by calling out your gross uncle on his atrocious racist comments during Thanksgiving" or "pretend the microaggressions that happen to you at work aren't happening because pointing out that it is, in fact, patriarchy/kyriarchy that makes it okay for your boss to lean creepy-close to you over your shoulder all the time will make you 'too feminist' or 'overly political' despite the fact that patriarchy/kyriarchy is a well-established view of how to encapsulate many forms of gendered oppression and is a 100% legit explanation for all that bullshit". And then you have the "personal is political" view, which I totally subscribe to and which has been alluded to here, which explains that the "don't bring POLITICS into this" is a political view that implicitly supports the status quo and reinforces kyriarchical oppressions.

But because of the inherantly political struggle of what even gets defined as a political topic, you end up with this weird definitional ouroborous every time it comes up where everyone is all caught up in their connotations and arguing over denotation and all meaning is lost because language is inherantly a flawed method of communication and words can never mean exactly the same thing to other people as you and communication with it is always inherantly imperfect.

Tl;dr: the human condition is hard
posted by NoraReed at 5:11 PM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

i mean that is the real problem, here, not the concrete actually-happening-right-now creation of an environment hostile to women
posted by kagredon at 5:12 PM on May 19, 2015 [7 favorites]

Edgewise: when cortex and LobsterMitten responded to the voiced concerns here I think they were pretty clear on the sort of action they'll try to take.

You may be getting into some murky territory if your issues are "Well what KIND of sexist comments really warrant deleting?" or "Just how BADLY misogynistic do people have to be to get banned?"
posted by erratic meatsack at 5:12 PM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

I think it's hard to argue with the fact that, if policy shifts towards greater restrictiveness, that some things will end up getting cut when maybe they shouldn't.

Then those commenters can try again and rephrase the comment in a different way, or consider whether their hot take was really so important or insightful that it needed to be said at all. I'm pretty sure we've all had to do this at some point or another in our commenting careers, and I don't see what you think the problem is.

We have all dropped turds in the punch bowl, but it takes a special kind of asshole to think that everyone else should always be eager to lap theirs up. You want a free speech zone, go to Reddit. Think Reddit's too lowbrow or not Best Of The Web? Consider whether the kind of user self-restraint encouraged by modding isn't part of what makes you like the commenting and discussion on MeFi better in the first place.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 5:13 PM on May 19, 2015 [15 favorites]

As an FYI, Edgewise, what I'm getting from this is that people who are kind of jerks to people for no apparent reason oppose more cohesive moderation against misogyny. I don't know if that's what you're going for, but I hope it's useful feedback.
posted by running order squabble fest at 5:13 PM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

I think it would be great for mods to tell users not to call women sluts for having LBT or making similar judgments about women or women's bodies. As I said upthread, I am also generally in favor of asking them not to give a dozen chances before banning is employed anymore, as well.

I am less comfortable asking mods to label things as misogyny or racism because I think that would lead to more fights and MetaTalk threads over terminology. I also think it's harder on the mods to ask them to make a value judgment about whether or not something is misogyny vs a mistake vs. someone still figuring things out.

I apologize in advance if I am stating an opinion about something that people are not debating.
posted by onlyconnect at 5:14 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

I would also be okay if this or this were the future mod notes in response to misogyny.
posted by corb at 5:15 PM on May 19, 2015

I'd be pretty happy to see more aggressive/clearer moderation on anti-women comments, and if edgewise feels some sort of "chilling effect" tragedy is thereby occurring, they are welcome to open a MeTa about it.
posted by Chrysostom at 5:15 PM on May 19, 2015 [10 favorites]

I also think it's harder on the mods to ask them to make a value judgment about whether or not something is misogyny vs a mistake vs. someone still figuring things out.

I don't think intent really needs to be precisely nailed down, though, and it's not really how comment deletion has worked in the past. It's that thing about distinguishing between "This is a misogynist comment" and "You're a misogynist." It doesn't matter what a person's reason is for posting a comment about women being sluts, it's not something that should be tolerated here. If someone is repeatedly making those sorts of comments and isn't getting the message from having them deleted, then I don't think it really matters whether it's out of ignorance or malice.
posted by kagredon at 5:19 PM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

I feel like the only people whose peaches would be frozen by an anti-bigotry chilling effect are the people I want to hear a lot less from anyway
posted by NoraReed at 5:20 PM on May 19, 2015 [12 favorites]

I think it's hard to argue with the fact that, if policy shifts towards greater restrictiveness, that some things will end up getting cut when maybe they shouldn't.

I think KathrynT's excellent comment about poop milkshakes is relevant here. The key takeaway:

"Hitting in a friendship [or misogyny in a comment] is like poop in a milkshake. Even a little bit is too much; there is no amount of it that is OK, and no amount of greatness in the rest of the friendship [/comment] can make even a tiny bit of hitting[/misogyny] OK."

I think we've all had our fill of poop milkshakes.
posted by DingoMutt at 5:21 PM on May 19, 2015 [13 favorites]

I think that whole digression is relevant only insofar as it touches upon whatever the hell it is that's going on with preferring "don't be a jerk" to "don't be a misogynist jerk". Ahh! The sentence I started to write and then erased just rehashes it. Dammit.

Okay, I'm going to avoid the p-word. There are varieties of problematic behavior here that have a distinct character in the sense that arguably a majority of people outside MetaFilter think such behavior is normal, acceptable, and not problematic. But we've come to agree that it's not acceptable and it is problematic. We want to reduce it.

The outside world's standards are going to see this as aberrant and as a specific declaration of a set of values that are distinct from what's the norm outside MetaFilter. And so people are going to come to MetaFilter and say, hey, if you are prohibiting the expression of these "reasonable opinions" then you're no longer a "generalist" place that doesn't take a specific stance on a particular set of social values.

And they're right!

But, traditionally, MetaFilter really really wants to avoid this accusation. And so we bend over backward to frame things as just not being a jerk, and about prohibiting things that discourage productive conversation, and mostly go to a lot of effort to avoid simply saying "we hold social values x, y, and z and so we prohibit behavior that are antagonist to those values".

Frankly, I'm long past caring that Joe Average Liberal NYT Reader who would otherwise be inclined to think that MetaFilter is the bee's knees will be repulsed and angered when he's reprimanded for mansplaining or talking about how ugly some female Fox News host is. Or saying things that are transphobic but doesn't realize are transphobic because he doesn't even understand that transphobia is a thing or is bad. I just don't care anymore that lots of pretty average, intelligent, well-intended people will find MetaFilter to be inhospitable because they discover that people get upset when they talk about which Facts of Life character they have sexual fantasies about.

Ten years ago, I would have cared about this. I did care about this, in the sense that I bought into this whole idea of there being some maximal good by MetaFilter being mostly like the rest of the web, but just a little bit better. I now think that was an unbelievably stupid and utterly privileged perspective.

What I see now is that, amazingly, while MetaFilter didn't explicitly endorse a set of socially progressive values, it did add the sexism/racism flag -- and, again, it was opposed at the time as being a step in an explicitly political direction -- and the sky didn't fall and we didn't lose members and become some tiny little special-interest (not "general interest") site. In fact, the membership has grown. And, more to the point, while it has grown it has also quite notably included a much higher rate of participation by women. None of those slippery-slope fears came to pass.

That truth of the matter is that we really do have a fairly specific set of social values in mind that we apply when we criticize the toxic comments in the LBT thread. We've been sort of stealth-promoting those values and stealth-prohibiting the violation of those values, and this is proving to be a pretty crummy way of cultivating our community. It's not totally ineffective. But it's far less effective than many alternatives. And it has many costs. The costs are a lot of these things that are increasingly the bulk of the problem. That's why they're the bulk! If our explicit rule is "don't personally insult someone" then that's going to effectively cover the "you're a slut" comments (but not always, apparently), but it will do jack-shit to stop all the sea-lioning and derailing and the "in this pay inequality thread, let's instead talk about the number of men in prison" stuff.

I don't care if we're talking about being "political" or "feminist". What I do care about is that we abandon this perspective that somehow we, as a community, don't have a set of shared social values, because we do, and there's no avoiding that we do -- if we revert to what MetaFilter originally was, and which is much more like the rest of the web, well, that also is a set of social values. It's the dominant set, and that set includes misogyny and racism and transphobia and all sorts of things. Whatever we do, we're implicitly endorsing some set of values. But we've pretty much agreed, over time, to endorse a set of values that are distinct from the wider web and the wider culture. We need to stop pretending that we haven't.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:22 PM on May 19, 2015 [62 favorites]

TM&MM, I hope I wasn't pretending anything. Cortex has made statements to the effect of not wanting to have a "political" mission statement, and I feel like the word has already caused a lot of time to be wasted on this thread alone. As I mentioned in a much earlier comment, "feminism" has also become such a messed-up term (due probably to the same kind of efforts that have turned "liberal" into a curse word on the right) that the Onion had an op-ed titled "I Don't Support Feminism If It Means Murdering All Men".
I'll say once more (I shouldn't complain about wasting time going in circles while I keep doing it myself) that my suggestion is only that using more concrete terms about what kind of behavior is unacceptable might make things clearer to the users who need a clue and easier on the mods.
posted by uosuaq at 5:23 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

> Just what the fuck, specifically, are you trying to accomplish with this line of questioning?

Pretty much exactly the opposite of what you jumped down my neck for, as nobody said. I was not attempting a derail: I was asking questions. Sorry that pissed you off so much.
posted by rtha at 5:28 PM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

I do not like this new knives-out version of MetaTalk, where nobody seems to remember anyone else from threads five years ago and we jump down one another's necks for making a mistake or, in many cases, our own misreading of a thread. I was against this version of MetaTalk a dozen years ago when it was called "self-policing" and we joked that only the strong survived and made it out of the MetaTalk thunderdome.

I know that many people here feel that people being obstructionist and sea lioning are perhaps best met with rudeness and being firmly put in their place, or at least feel as though politeness doesn't matter in such situations. However, people who are participating in good faith are getting angrily chewed out and insulted. Maybe the majority of people in this thread don't care, but for what it's worth: Do not want.
posted by onlyconnect at 5:40 PM on May 19, 2015 [52 favorites]

I think it's hard to argue with the fact that, if policy shifts towards greater restrictiveness, that some things will end up getting cut when maybe they shouldn't.

Things are already "getting cut"--we are losing the perspectives of thoughtful, valued users due to exhaustion from dealing with tedious assholes. There are people in this thread who are expressing that they just can't handle doing the heavy lifting in these threads anymore. I would much rather keep their contributions than gamble on Guy Who Hates Trashy Sluts But Maybe Has Some Good Ideas Too.
posted by almostmanda at 5:42 PM on May 19, 2015 [30 favorites]

As an FYI, Edgewise, what I'm getting from this is that people who are kind of jerks to people for no apparent reason oppose more cohesive moderation against misogyny. I don't know if that's what you're going for, but I hope it's useful feedback.

What an amazingly oblique way of calling me an asshole!
posted by Edgewise at 5:43 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Hi everyone! I just got back from a particularly hellish family destination wedding and it's going to take a while yet for me to catch up on this thread. In the meantime, please don't call each other names. Thanks!
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 5:46 PM on May 19, 2015 [25 favorites]

It's not nice to performance-art threads where people are talking about serious issues, doesn't seemed to have stopped you.
posted by kagredon at 5:46 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

"I do not like this new knives-out version of MetaTalk, where nobody seems to remember anyone else from threads five years ago and we jump down one another's necks for making a mistake or, in many cases, our own misreading of a thread. "

Seriously. In a thread about feminism where rtha gets put on blast based on a misreading, that signals that everyone with less established progressive bonafides (which is most of us) will have to deal with the same thing, then either nope the fuck out or dig in and fight because they won't have the years of consistently being on the right side that she has.
posted by klangklangston at 5:58 PM on May 19, 2015 [30 favorites]

What an amazingly oblique way of calling me an asshole!

Well, no. Rather, a relatively acute way of pointing out that, if your objective is other than to sound like an asshole, then you are not achieving your goals. Which is not the same thing.
posted by running order squabble fest at 6:01 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

The deleted followup comments kind of made it clear what the meaning was.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:03 PM on May 19, 2015

The deleted follow-up was me, not rosf. I'm not him and don't speak for him.
posted by kagredon at 6:03 PM on May 19, 2015

I wonder if restless_nomad didn't mean to say "in the meantime, please don't call each other names or otherwise keep escalating things".
posted by uosuaq at 6:04 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Ignore previous comment, I assumed the deleted comments were from the original poster. Sorry!
posted by Drinky Die at 6:04 PM on May 19, 2015

I know that many people here feel that people being obstructionist and sea lioning are perhaps best met with rudeness and being firmly put in their place, or at least feel as though politeness doesn't matter in such situations.

I could not have said it better. Part of the reason that I am suspicious of increased moderation is because it is partly (not wholly) driven by the sentiments that lay behind what you describe. The presumption of bad faith here very much discourages anyone who doesn't agree with everyone else. It's very easy to decide that it's not worth it.
posted by Edgewise at 6:04 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Edgewise, I think you're trying to turn a "what you did" conversation into a "what you are" conversation. Whether you are or aren't an asshole isn't relevant or actually possible to reveal, but a lot of people feel you're acting like an asshole, so maybe you should reconsider your behavior if that isn't your goal.
posted by NoraReed at 6:06 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thanks for addressing my comments directly and without snark (I REALLY appreciate that). In response, I will say that, as you say, I would not argue otherwise, nor did I. My intended point is that it's not as easy as some may think to tease apart the good from the bad. If policies and mod activities change, then some things that were previously acceptable will no longer be acceptable. I'm not defending the clearly awful comments. I'm far more concerned by what will fall on or near the line.

Likewise, I find nothing compelling about most of the responses to my comment. I don't really expect many people here to agree with me at all.

My policy is to put precisely as much effort into rebutting inane concern troll comments as I feel warranted. If you want thoughtful responses maybe try a new line of attack rather than the boring old BUT BUT BUT FREE SPEECH canard.
posted by winna at 6:07 PM on May 19, 2015 [12 favorites]

sometimes people get snippy at the end of a long meta and that's why feminists are wrong. 389th verse, same as the first.
posted by kagredon at 6:07 PM on May 19, 2015 [23 favorites]

I, too, really want people to listen to each other and to be more kind to each other, but that includes being forgiving when they fail to live up to this ideal, especially when the discussion is fraught. And also to avoid leveraging those failures in service to some other argument.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:12 PM on May 19, 2015 [12 favorites]

Edgewise: I think the key is that if someone is sea lioning or being obstructionist even after other commentators engage in good faith, that's the turning point. I don't think people are going to be shut down for asking well-phrased questions seeking clarifications (WITHOUT insinuating some bullshit sexist opinion behind the question).

"I don't think I understand the position most people are taking here (and it's not clarified in the links) - can someone help me out a bit?"

is different from:

"I don't think I understand. Obviously [opinion on women presented as fact, or some other nonsense]. I dare you to prove me wrong."

Continuing to politely entertain the sea lion is a bloody road fraught with many missing limbs.
posted by erratic meatsack at 6:14 PM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

...I feel like there's a great irony here to me patiently explaining why it never works to be polite to sea lions.
posted by erratic meatsack at 6:19 PM on May 19, 2015 [23 favorites]

I feel like that is emblematic of this thread in general. "I wish men would stop doing The Thing in threads where they kind of take it over for a while with their reprehensible viewpoints/JAQing off/etc", a lot of people discussing that in detail in a conversation for a while, and then someone (usually a man) comes in to do The Thing for a while
posted by NoraReed at 6:21 PM on May 19, 2015 [33 favorites]

It's a step forward from the Thunderdome-style thing where there's an entire thread about how a bunch of people are physically incapable of getting off my dick, but it's still annoying as all hell
posted by NoraReed at 6:24 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Woo, lots to address, pardon the TL;DR.

uosuaq: TM&MM, I hope I wasn't pretending anything.

Well, you advanced a thesis that was pretty patently bullshit that made no logical sense, so at the very least you were pretending two things were incompatible that really aren't.

Cortex has made statements to the effect of not wanting to have a "political" mission statement, and I feel like the word has already caused a lot of time to be wasted on this thread alone.

Which, as has been gone over at length, no one has ever, at any point, short of a disengenuous Devil's Advocate post basically arguing for it so as to argue against it, no one has ever made. If there has been time wasted, it's because people can't or won't read what has been written and keep jumping in at the deep end.

We're all aware of cortex's position, regardless of agreement, but it's not even relevant in this case because no one has ask for a political mission statement.

As I mentioned in a much earlier comment, "feminism" has also become such a messed-up term (due probably to the same kind of efforts that have turned "liberal" into a curse word on the right) that the Onion had an op-ed titled "I Don't Support Feminism If It Means Murdering All Men".

If your vision for MeFi is "I value the contributions of people who are literally so stupid they would not realize an Onion headline is sarcasm more than I value all the female users who are pulling back from the site because of the upswing in the boyzone", then, well, hopefully the mods and most of the rest of the userbase disagrees, because no matter what you think "Best of the Web" means, surely it doesn't mean "Lowest Common Denominator".

I'll say once more (I shouldn't complain about wasting time going in circles while I keep doing it myself) that my suggestion is only that using more concrete terms about what kind of behavior is unacceptable might make things clearer to the users who need a clue and easier on the mods

As I said the first time, a "concrete, actionable" explanation (for example, r_n's wonderful comment in a GoT thread: I don't know about y'all but I do not need a play-by-play description of violent rape as an attempt to explain to me why it's artistic. Please don't do that. Thanks), and a more "political" explanation (my hypothetical addendum if I were a mod: "because that's contributing to an atmosphere of rape culture and boyzone in this thread") are not incompatible, not in conflict, can co-exist.

The mods have already taken on the idea that, in essence, we need to feel sorry for them using their jobs or that it's a reasonable thing to site in arguing against a proposed change, since everyone tends to use that argument in a disengenuous and cynical way for their own ends. It might or might not make more work for them, we don't know, but if it does that's not an argument against it unless it actually also fails to achieve a lessening of the boyzone, which we don't know yet because it hasn't happened.

Ultimately, what I think you are arguing for, whether you realize it or want to acknowledge it or not, is that we should be deferent and polite and "respectful" to the sense of ickiness that problem users feel about the word feminist*, that in the hierarchy of MetaFilter users, it is more important to maintain the comfort level of someone spewing misogynist opinions or behaviors in a thread that is getting boyzoned or sea lioned or rape cultured up by not actually telling him or her they are being misogynist, than it is to publically push back against the overall trend of the behavior and reassure female users who are being made uncomfortable with the thread that it's something that the mods care about and that they are on the right side of.

*Once again because this is important: not the discomfort WoC, trans women, and others feel about the historical political movement of feminism and being umbrella'd under that term; that is legitimate, that is also not what you or anyone else seems to be arguing when they're arguing against political explanations of mod notes.

rtha: Pretty much exactly the opposite of what you jumped down my neck for, as nobody said. I was not attempting a derail: I was asking questions. Sorry that pissed you off so much.

Sorry for the misreading, my bad.

onlyconnect: I do not like this new knives-out version of MetaTalk, where nobody seems to remember anyone else from threads five years ago and we jump down one another's necks for making a mistake or, in many cases, our own misreading of a thread. I was against this version of MetaTalk a dozen years ago when it was called "self-policing" and we joked that only the strong survived and made it out of the MetaTalk thunderdome.

I know that many people here feel that people being obstructionist and sea lioning are perhaps best met with rudeness and being firmly put in their place, or at least feel as though politeness doesn't matter in such situations. However, people who are participating in good faith are getting angrily chewed out and insulted. Maybe the majority of people in this thread don't care, but for what it's worth: Do not want.

And I do not like the version of MetaFilter where people wander in to a thread that's been going on forever, refuse to catch themselves up, shit in the punchbowl and blame it all, once again, on Mean Girls / Echo Chamber / FREEZE PEACH, because that is truly what's important in a thread about users who are sick to death of the boyzone and what's going to be done about fighting it. Especially when they wade in with what amounts to "but really, is the boyzone that bad?" in a thread that explicitly takes it as a given that yes, the Bad Old Days were indeed Bad.

I'm not saying it's not a legitimate issue, although obviously I'm probably an outlier about this kind of thing to begin with. I'm just saying, for the love of little green apples, this is not the thread, and the way that this kind of thing keeps coming up in this thread is derailing. And dismissive. And a whole bunch of other shitty things I'm not going to enumerate because, at this point, I have reached my definition of insanity threshold. I don't know what it is that some sharp words are so much for some minds to bear that they in turn think it entitles them to a free pass to sea lion.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 6:38 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

I was talking about your angry, condescending, fuck-filled comments to rtha, as well as the similar shit you have given to me.
posted by onlyconnect at 6:42 PM on May 19, 2015 [11 favorites]

TM&MM, you seem to have the impression that I'm on a fundamentally different side from you rather than discussing different tactical approaches to improving the site. And I can't begin to relate to your interpretations of my comments, so (to everyone's great relief, I'm sure) I won't attempt any kind of response to them.
posted by uosuaq at 6:43 PM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

I think it's a mistake the believe that just because the suggestion - that we be far, far more concerned about losing the money of misogynists over perceived "cutting too much" than people leaving the site because of misogyny - is a suggestion phrased politely means it's a suggestion that needs to be extended due entertainment. And any amount of curtness or snark to this offensive suggestion is met with "why can't you be more nice?" when pretty much everyone here is being pretty damned nice relative to having to hand-hold through more echo chamber alarmism.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:43 PM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

I was talking about your angry, condescending, fuck-filled comments to rtha, as well as the similar shit you have given to me.

Yes, I know. If you want to make a MetaTalk about snideness or Mean Girls or whatever, go ahead, but I think it's inappropriate for this thread and I'm saying so.

TM&MM, you seem to have the impression that I'm on a fundamentally different side from you rather than discussing different tactical approaches to improving the site. And I can't begin to relate to your interpretations of my comments, so (to everyone's great relief, I'm sure) I won't attempt any kind of response to them.

I disagree with your tactical assessments. I disagree both on technical grounds, although obviously we're going to have to wait and see what effect the proposed changes have in any case, and also because I think they need some unpacking from a political perspective, as I think they're based on a lot of unspoken valuations and assumptions that are bad. In as much as I suspect they also may be because you are, from my perspective, making incorrect judgements about just how well the current policy is working, that's something I'd address as well, but obviously I'm not going to put words in your mouth, and hey, that could just be my impression.

If you choose not to engage with my arguments because you think I'm too mean, fine and dandy, but since you're not the only person to have advanced similar and this thread is not actually about any of us on a personal level, it doesn't really matter because you don't have to respond to my criticisms of your arguments for them to be appropriate in this thread. That you happened to advance the arguments isn't the most important factor. So, pretty much, this comment I'm replying to is you just saying "NO U!!" and "so mean"; it doesn't have any other content.

But fundamentally, you seem to be arguing for a kind of deference to the cognitive kill switches or tender sensibilities of bad users that, I would and have and will continue to argue, is not working and has not worked and is actually a fairly large part of the problem.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 6:56 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Tender sensibilities? Onlyconnect has been advocating for pro-feminist, anti-boyzone changes since days when "boyzone" and "I'd hit it" were actual things, not just metaphors.

LURK MOAR
posted by klangklangston at 7:01 PM on May 19, 2015 [32 favorites]

obviously I'm not going to put words in your mouth

Both your past two comments seem to me like they're doing a fair amount of that, actually.
posted by uosuaq at 7:07 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Master and Margarita Mix, I feel like you're coming out swinging and managing to hit a bunch of people who agree with you in the jaw.
posted by jaguar at 7:13 PM on May 19, 2015 [32 favorites]

Tender sensibilities? Onlyconnect has been advocating for pro-feminist, anti-boyzone changes since days when "boyzone" and "I'd hit it" were actual things, not just metaphors.

LURK MOAR

You've misread that comment. "tender sensibilities" was in reply to uosuaq. Easy mistake to make in a thread like this, eh?

READ MOAR CAREFULLY

Both your past two comments seem to me like they're doing a fair amount of that, actually.

If you feel like explaining where you think I'm putting words in your mouth, please, go right ahead. I mean, I'm not going to put words in your mouth over that, either.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 7:23 PM on May 19, 2015

"You've misread that comment. "tender sensibilities" was in reply to uosuaq. Easy mistake to make in a thread like this, eh? "

Sure. You gonna cop to misreading onlyconnect as whining about snide mean girls? Or are you adult enough to recognize that when multiple people who agree with you on the larger issues are telling you that you're coming across as an asshole, you're probably coming across as an asshole?

Lots of us in this discussion have benefited from similar advice before; I know I have.
posted by klangklangston at 7:34 PM on May 19, 2015 [7 favorites]

Hey, thanks for the matches and the gasoline, klang. That helps a lot.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:12 PM on May 19, 2015 [7 favorites]

i don't know why y'all are arguing in here when we could be agreeing about the grossness of the GoT thread.

[I don't know about y'all but I do not need a play-by-play description of violent rape as an attempt to explain to me why it's artistic. Please don't do that. Thanks.]

is actually a thing that needed to be spelled out.
posted by twist my arm at 8:16 PM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

No Country for Told Men.
posted by JLovebomb at 8:25 PM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

my favorite of those is still Cash4Told

but yeah there was a lot of rape apology in that thread. it's one of those things where I look at the stuff people are posting and am like "wow, I would not feel safe at a meetup with this dude"
posted by NoraReed at 8:32 PM on May 19, 2015 [21 favorites]

When I was doing a 40-hour training to become a sexual-assault counselor, there was an older guy in the training who said, in one of the first sessions, that it was ridiculous to try to educate boys and men to respect women (a core mission of the organization sponsoring the training), because rape was not preventable; it was just something men did and women should learn how to protect themselves better. He finished the training with us, but there was a graduation interview required before someone who had gone through the training could then volunteer on the crisis line, and he was weeded out during that process, as far as I could tell (he definitely was not allowed to work the crisis line). I still wonder why on earth he signed up for training to become an advocate for people who had been sexually assaulted, and how he justified that cognitive dissonance.
posted by jaguar at 9:09 PM on May 19, 2015 [13 favorites]

However, people who are participating in good faith are getting angrily chewed out and insulted. Maybe the majority of people in this thread don't care, but for what it's worth: Do not want.

Thank you for saying this. I have been afraid to voice similar concerns, but I think they are valid.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:09 PM on May 19, 2015 [14 favorites]

Yeah, I'm a GoT nerd, and I had to ragequit that thread once I got to the point of actually wishing I could virtually set people's computers on fire.
posted by corb at 12:56 AM on May 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

It was my comment R_N deleted in the GoT thread, and for the record it was not at all what the deletion comment characterizes it as. And that is all I'm going to say, since you can't argue with someone who hides your counterarguments.
posted by localroger at 5:39 AM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Your undeleted comments minimized both that scene (discreet!) and rape in general (litany of horrors that aren't rape and also rape is survivable!) while also being dismissive about the people for whom Sansa's rape was the last straw (you sensitive types should have bailed after Dany's rape!), and also mansplaining how the real problem isn't the rape but that people were starting to think Sansa was safe (dude, srsly, we've watched the show). I suspect seeing your deleted comment wouldn't actually reflect well on you.
posted by Mavri at 6:09 AM on May 20, 2015 [27 favorites]

localroger, you should probably start a new Metatalk if you want to discuss your deleted comment, and of course, the contact form exists as well. You've commented many times in that thread about why you think people shouldn't be upset, or why it's surprising to you that they are upset, and the deleted comment was describing the scene, what was shown and what wasn't, in order to prove that because we didn't see explicit forcible penetration or thrusting or her tortured face or "outline boobage or ass" that it was actually an artistic success. But the post isn't about whether that scene is an artistic success or not, and continuing to repeatedly insist that nobody should have a problem with it when the entire post is about the fact that many people do indeed have a problem with it is becoming overbearing.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:23 AM on May 20, 2015 [37 favorites]

Have you moderators discussed this study, summarized here, and discussed here at all? Basically the study found that over a wide ranges of different sites:

trolls of all kinds post too much, they obsess about relatively few topics, they are often off topic, and their prose is unreadable as measured by an automated index of readability. Readability was one of the strongest predictors they found. They also generate lots of replies and monopolise attention.

It seems very relevant here, because while at most sites there's a pretty standard set of behaviors that are treated as disruptive that is content-neutral, we've been asking for the moderators to attend to content predictively in such a way that we can prevent this kind of thing entirely. And I just saw taz do a deletion and timeout that was a perfect representation of the difference: a single, totally shitty derailing boyzone comment that was immediately eliminated before there could be followups, followed by an explicit callout of the user and explication of what he had done.

So it seems like one way to think about this thread is as a request for the mods here to adopt a different style than the one that could be algorithmically detected in other forums.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:35 AM on May 20, 2015 [13 favorites]

telling her to explain herself and calling her a "coward" for deleting your comment in your follow up deleted comment weren't the height of sophistication either. she did you a favor.

why it's surprising to you that they are upset

i know it's a tough thread, there's no way that it would be an easy to read thread even without the dudebro "well actually"s but LM left a couple mod comments telling people to stop this stuff-- were people not flagging? should that type of thread just be hopeless? my issue isn't with this specific thread but i think the dynamic of men not willing to pay attention to the mod notes about how to act in this difficult rape thread, i mean help me understand. i think that's the type of general thing this thread is talking about.
posted by twist my arm at 6:38 AM on May 20, 2015 [7 favorites]

And I just saw taz do a deletion and timeout that was a perfect representation of the difference: a single, totally shitty derailing boyzone comment that was immediately eliminated before there could be followups, followed by an explicit callout of the user and explication of what he had done.

I'm not an automated index of readability, but I could also barely parse the comment you're referencing. Something about it not making a whole lot of immediate sense and being highly emotionally charged feels like it was designed to let people read whatever inflammatory stuff they wanted into it, while being vague enough for plausible deniability if accused of poor intentions. Good deletion, and a good example of what that study was talking about.
posted by almostmanda at 6:46 AM on May 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

Readability is probably still predictive at Metafilter, but nothing like 80% predictive. What I was pointing to was an effort to nip obsessive over-posting that generates lots of replies before it starts. In practice, that's what trolling looks like elsewhere.The algorithm can detect that, but it can't detect misogyny. Our mods, though, can: especially with good flagging from us.
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:00 AM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

[self-awarely] my god, my comment showing why the amount & treatment of rape & abuse of women on the dragon show is actually okay was deleted. I will take my grievance to the big thread where people are complaining about an uptick in sexist commentary
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:02 AM on May 20, 2015 [42 favorites]

for the record it was not at all what the deletion comment characterizes it as.

Given that you're the person who finally made me ragequit the thread, I kind of doubt that.
posted by corb at 7:14 AM on May 20, 2015 [5 favorites]

you're the person who finally made me ragequit the thread

(looks at Localroger) Duuuuuuuuuuuude.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:46 AM on May 20, 2015 [8 favorites]

trolls of all kinds post too much,

Check.

they obsess about relatively few topics,

Check.

they are often off topic,

*cough* I plead the fifth.

and their prose is unreadable as measured by an automated index of readability.

That is a perfectly uh... cromulent objection.

They also generate lots of replies and monopolise attention.

Check.

By most of these criteria, I and a buncha other people who are active in Meta and on the Blue could be considered trolls. That said, I apologize if this sounds flip. It just struck me as amusing.

In all seriousness, it's generally not hard to identify people who are trolling in threads. Especially not when they're literally calling women derogatory names and questioning their morality for getting a friggin' tattoo. The site has grown since the early Boyzone years. Team Mod has more site and more members to cover. If your concern is that an algorithm would catch that behavior faster, then we in the community also need to act. It's up to those of us who see those things happening in real time to flag and then send a contact form message with a link to the problem and a couple of sentences of explanation. It's not hard or time consuming. And if you don't want to start a conversation with the mods, all you have to do is say, "No need to respond. Just wanted to bring it to your attention / ask you to take action."
posted by zarq at 8:51 AM on May 20, 2015 [8 favorites]

Mod note: Comment removed. localroger, you have a habit in general of digging in hard on conversations and not dropping it even when folks are being pretty clear it's an issue, and that is something you need to work on not doing so much going forward.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:45 AM on May 20, 2015 [8 favorites]

Mod note: Comment removed; seriously cool it with the over-the-top interpersonal stuff, there is no sufficient threshold of annoyance or dislike that makes it suddenly not a problem.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:36 AM on May 20, 2015 [9 favorites]

Taz' vague details of localrogers' comment made me feel physically ill. This is not "dislike or annoyance", this is fear. The sheer amount of rape apology on display in that thread, which he was involved with, made me grit my teeth and curl my fists tight enough to leave marks. Participating in a community with members who do that kind of thing makes me incredibly uncomfortable. It sets off the warning bells I have to protect myself to see that in text, and the way that the rape apology spiraled out of control in that thread has a chilling effect on people who just nope out when they see that kind of behavior, which many of us are intimately familiar with, because people who display a willingness for rape apology frequently have a lot in common with our rapists, and that can be uncomfortable, triggering, infuriating, or a combination of the three. The line should've been drawn long before it was, and the attempt to co-opt a thread about how women are treated on this site in order to allow more of that made me want to throw my computer out a window.
posted by NoraReed at 12:00 PM on May 20, 2015 [37 favorites]

There's only one criterion for trolls that matters: they aren't commenting in good faith. They may even believe what they say, but they're intentionally being provocative and perhaps intimidating. It's about annoying their targets to rage and quit or to become scared enough to quit. Their technique is to silence their opponents with volume and brutality.

Troll bullying takes many forms, and may even ape reasonable discussion, but its goal is simply to quiet everyone else. It's key that whatever guides or rules get used here, in my view, are capable of differentiating with good-faith discussions, even disagreements, where the goals are things like mutual understandings or consensus building.
posted by bonehead at 12:23 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

And to be clear: I do think the "don't be a jerk" standard does a pretty good job of that.
posted by bonehead at 12:25 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

I do not support MetaTalk returning to a place where insults, belittling, and tirades against particular users are acceptable.

I campaigned against this practice when it was used against me when I complained as a woman against men in boyzone threads. We were listened to and it stopped.

I do not support the new jujitsu of using it against men and justifying it by saying we are angry or fearful. We are typing comments on the Internet at one another on a discussion site where we talk about things. We control what we type.

I am a female commenter that has noped out of thread because of boyzone comments. I am also a female commenter who is now noping out of threads because the insults and sniping are too personal and ugly. This isn't the MetaFilter I want.
posted by onlyconnect at 12:29 PM on May 20, 2015 [35 favorites]

I am in favor of a kinder, more respectful metatalk. Have said so in multiple threads prior to this one. I truly dislike it when people are mean to each other here.

However. There has to be a line.

Rape apologias cross my personal threshold in a big way. Being vicious or nasty about women, or obtuse about rape/abuse/assault/harassment... well that crosses it as well. Which is why when I respond to people who are doing those things I tend to be harsh. Two large parts of the discussion that arise when people speak about enduring sexual assault are fear and anger. They are bound up in the topic and the experience and simply inescapable. They're also totally valid topics of discussion when someone is defending or being dismissive of the devastating impact of rape.
posted by zarq at 12:41 PM on May 20, 2015 [10 favorites]

The importance I place on being nice goes right out the fucking window when it's clear to me someone is deliberately trying to upset, anger or intimidate myself or other users. I think it's a reasonable part of the pushback against that behavior. We're not on the debate team here.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 12:44 PM on May 20, 2015 [9 favorites]

One of the things that struck me about that thread was how often the same crappy/provocative comment from right up top got exhumed over and over by people disagreeing with it. I wonder how much of that played into the "Oh this again?" sense; I know that instead of replying to it myself, I read through the thread and saw that it had already had basically the same replies written to it several times.
posted by klangklangston at 12:45 PM on May 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm pretty sure a "kinder, more respectful metatalk" doesn't involve implying that my talking about the feelings I have about rape apologia because of the traumas of living in rape culture and being in a sexually abusive relationship is some kind of rhetorical trick by calling it "jujitsu". Given that the mods said that the gaslighting shit aryma pulled on me in the January anti-NoraReed hatewank was not acceptable, I'm surprised that it's suddenly okay for onlyconnect to do it. But maybe there are special standards for gaslighting people who are ~mean~
posted by NoraReed at 12:51 PM on May 20, 2015 [13 favorites]

I agree that dialing things down so we have a higher light-to-heat ratio would be beneficial. However I also think that when we see stuff get this heated, it's not because of the failure of any particular "side" or person, but because things have simply been allowed to escalate too long.

If you'll pardon the sports analogy, it's sort of like a basketball game - when you start getting a bunch of technical fouls and people yelling at each other, it usually means that the refs didn't call a bunch of fouls earlier in the game. When the refs call the right fouls, everyone feels pretty good about the game's fairness and things don't tend to escalate too much. But when fouls start getting missed, especially when they're pretty flagrant, or when fouls are disproportionately missed against one team, that's when you start to get more trash talk, more elbows, more shoving.

That's essentially why I started this thread - I wanted to see more fouls get called w/r/t sexist comments earlier in the game before things escalate to the point where people feel that their only recourse is to either leave the site or get super pissed off and yell about how shitty people are being.

I wonder how much of that played into the "Oh this again?" sense

Eh, maybe a bit, but there was absolutely no shortage of shitty comments in that thread to make me feel unwelcome here.
posted by dialetheia at 12:53 PM on May 20, 2015 [13 favorites]

However. There has to be a line.

It's not one single line that everything falls to one side or the other, is the thing, and it does us zero favors to suggest otherwise while working this stuff out. Grouping (1) arguments for more effectively and promptly quelling sexist/misogynistic/etc. comments on the site with (2) justifications for over-the-top personal comments is a problem: it creates a false dilemma of supporting either both or neither, when what folks generally agree is the unassailable good is the first point and a hell of a lot of people have unrelated and totally legitimate objections to the second point.

And this is the thing: saying people need to cool it with the over-the-top stuff is something we are, and have to, keep doing, because it's important even with everything else going on. It's important because it's a basic part of the community expectations here. It's important even while working on other stuff like looking more closely at how to deal with the won't-stop-talking and the polite-but-not-actually-civil dynamics people are concerned about. It's not one or the other, and the need to work on other things does not and cannot wholly supercede the need for folks not to write off other existing guidelines stuff.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:55 PM on May 20, 2015 [5 favorites]

Given that the mods said that the gaslighting shit aryma pulled on me in the January anti-NoraReed hatewank was not acceptable, I'm surprised that it's suddenly okay for onlyconnect to do it.

I didn't read it as gaslighting, I read it as a pretty straightforward expression of what onlyconnect feels about the situation and her historical relationship with the site, and I think the comparison to that shitty behavior by aryma a while back is really off the mark and unfair.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:59 PM on May 20, 2015 [23 favorites]

I wanted to see more fouls get called w/r/t sexist comments earlier in the game before things escalate to the point where people feel that their only recourse is to either leave the site or get super pissed off and yell about how shitty people are being.

I've long felt that more aggressive comment deletions early in threads would be really beneficial. The mods are doing more (a lot more) now than in the past, but I think that they could go even further than current practice.
posted by bonehead at 12:59 PM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

As in, they should be less afraid of big clean-ups. If removing the original post means removing many reaction posts too, I think there might be benefit to doing so.
posted by bonehead at 1:01 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

I wanted to see more fouls get called w/r/t sexist comments earlier in the game before things escalate to the point where people feel that their only recourse is to either leave the site or get super pissed off and yell about how shitty people are being.

I hear you there, yeah, and that is pretty much what we've been talking about and working to focus on as a reflection of the concerns folks have expressed in here. And as much as I think yelling about shittiness is still a problem per the above, it's not because I don't understand how the instinct to do so could arise.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:02 PM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

Bizarre data point about this topic beyond this thread (and the tattoo/GoT threads): just today, in a fairly old Ask thread about how to cope with heavy periods, someone made a comment suggesting that the OP should engage in menstrual pornography. I flagged it and it was deleted pretty quickly, but it seems at least remotely possible that there is going to be some trolling in older threads, maybe with the hope that it won't get caught/deleted.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:04 PM on May 20, 2015

I do not support the new jujitsu of using it against men and justifying it by saying we are angry or fearful.

It's not "verbal jujitsu," it's something that is rooted in reality, and actually happened here in the very recent past. The last time the idea that there was validity to being angry and afraid of misogyny and rape apologia anywhere on this site was expressed in MeTa, one member who kept on assuring us he wasn't defending or dismissing harassment ended up directly harassing the member that expressed that fact, as well as several other members and even innocent bystanders who had similar social media presences. Another one bemoaned the fact that women got away with asserting this was actually a thing, and has continued his misogynist behavior and whining about getting pushback from it, to the point that he's cited in this thread as one of the prime examples of a boyzone type.
posted by zombieflanders at 1:06 PM on May 20, 2015 [12 favorites]

There's actually a "straggling comments" tool that the mods have at their disposal that will help with that. But realistically if someone trolls in a long dead thread and no one sees is, are they really trolling?
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 1:07 PM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I saw that and nixed first, asked questions later because it was so fucking weird. The good news, if that's the right phrase, is that based on what I was willing to look up while laptopping from a busy diner it was a genuine fetishist rather than someone trolling for the luls with an invented interest in the subject.

And, per jess, it's something we're likely to find within a day or so on the long side even if no one notices and flags it, and as sort of galling the idea of someone quietly being weird/gross/trolly in a thread no one's watching is on principle, in practice if literally no one is seeing it then they've displayed extremely poor targeting sense to begin with.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:09 PM on May 20, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm guessing the motivations for creepy fetishists might be slightly different than for average trolls RE: needing people to see their comments. Sex stuff is weird.
posted by NoraReed at 1:16 PM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

But realistically if someone trolls in a long dead thread and no one sees is, are they really trolling?

I'd say yeah, and moderation practice should treat it with no less leniency. It's still shitty defacing behavior, even if it's just being left as a weird gross thing for people to stumble into ages after a given thread is historical.
posted by Drastic at 1:20 PM on May 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

It's not one single line that everything falls to one side or the other, is the thing,

I did not say "everything." I'm not applying my personal threshold to everyone and I hope that it was very clear that I was expressing my opinion and not speaking for the rest of the site. But I am saying that my limit is certain topics being brought up in certain ways, or when certain disturbing opinions are expressed. When that happens, I speak up more aggressively than I normally would.

...and it does us zero favors to suggest otherwise while working this stuff out.

Comments that degrade women being allowed to stand unchallenged or undeleted are part of an ongoing, problematic pattern. They need to be addressed individually AND as a group -- reductively and holistically. I do understand that it's easier to treat every individual event as if it's not part of an interconnected whole, but they from the perspective of a user affected or targeted by them, they are. So I think it's important to maintain focus on that. Because every individual event is not isolated. They conglomerate and build to a sense that certain people are not welcome here. Multiple injuries that add up.

I TRULY appreciate that you and the other mods are making an effort to change that, by the way.

And this is the thing: saying people need to cool it with the over-the-top stuff is something we are, and have to, keep doing, because it's important even with everything else going on. It's important because it's a basic part of the community expectations here. It's important even while other stuff like looking more closely at how to deal with the won't-stop-talking and the polite-but-not-actually-civil dynamics people are concerned about. It's not one or the other, and the need to work on other things does not and cannot wholly supercede the need for folks not to write off other existing guidelines stuff.

I understand and agree that we don't want these threads to devolve into free-for-alls. But lately, visible, vocal pushback leading to bans seems to be the only thing having any diminishing effect on the problem. Vehemence seems to be more effective than civility.
posted by zarq at 1:24 PM on May 20, 2015 [9 favorites]

I'd say yeah, and moderation practice should treat it with no less leniency.

To be clear, I'm not inclined to treat misbegotten dead thread trolling with any leniency; more a point about resource allocation vs. risk of disruption. If someone trolls ineffectively by trying and failing to get a rise out of a ghost town of a thread, they're still being an asshole and we still will zap it as soon as we see it. They're just, essentially, failing at trolling in the mean time.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:24 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

But lately, visible, vocal pushback leading to bans seems to be the only thing having any diminishing effect on the problem. Vehemence seems to be more effective than civility.

Visible, vocal pushback is not the exact same thing as unchecked vehemence, though, and again distinguishing those two things is important if specifically condoning and encouraging unchecked vehemence as a standard of behavior here is not the goal. That is along with everything else, not in lieu of it; but neither will it work to worry about everything else but not that.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:27 PM on May 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

> I'm not inclined to treat misbegotten dead thread trolling with any leniency

At least I can't imagine anyone would ever go "You deleted my comment, WAH" about one of those.
posted by jfuller at 1:29 PM on May 20, 2015

> I'm not inclined to treat misbegotten dead thread trolling with any leniency

And seriously, this doesn't happen. Every day, unless things are way too busy on the site elsewhere, I use the handy-dandy tool that pb made for us to check out new comments on old threads. I usually do this at approximately 2-4 hours into my shift, because that's about the time I get mostly caught up on what's gone on overnight, deal with mail, immediate action stuff, etc., and am able to go to what I see as the the next step, which is basically a quick patrol of the perimeter, including this and some other investigations. Other mods are also doing this kind of constant check-up stuff, and we catch pretty much all shenanigans going on there within a few hours at most, typically. If it takes longer, it's only because stuff is super busy on the site and it gets pushed back.
posted by taz (staff) at 1:35 PM on May 20, 2015 [7 favorites]

This is a masterpiece:
One of the things that struck me about that thread was how often the same crappy/provocative comment from right up top got exhumed over and over by people disagreeing with it. I wonder how much of that played into the "Oh this again?" sense; I know that instead of replying to it myself, I read through the thread and saw that it had already had basically the same replies written to it several times.

Here's the "ugh, no, here's why" for this comment:
I have no doubt this is an accurate description of your experience in that thread. The trouble is, it posits you as dispassionate, objective observer, and at the same time it suggests that other users may not be as objective as you are. Your comment also assumes that other users have not realized and must be told something about their own actions, something that you can see and understand but that they cannot. In this case, you want to instruct other users about how what they're doing could be creating the very problem they're protesting against. You phrase this in I statements, which you probably in good faith intend to be mollifying. "I know that instead of [doing what you did], I [did what I did]." This is having an effect opposite to the one you no doubt intend because while you may think of it as placating, what it actually is is bragging: "I did X and avoided contributing to a problem, you people did Y and made the problem worse." The people you're instructing haven't asked for instruction from you. They're members of a marginalized group that you're not a member of, and they are saying that the problem you're telling them to ignore so that it will go away is keeping them marginalized. In a small way, your comment, too, marginalizes this group of users.

So, as predicted, "ugh, no, here's why" took me forever to type. In the future could I register dismay by just typing "ugh, no, stop dadblabbing?" Or would that get deleted?
posted by Don Pepino at 2:11 PM on May 20, 2015 [13 favorites]

I do not support MetaTalk returning to a place where insults, belittling, and tirades against particular users are acceptable.

I campaigned against this practice when it was used against me when I complained as a woman against men in boyzone threads. We were listened to and it stopped.

I do not support the new jujitsu of using it against men and justifying it by saying we are angry or fearful. We are typing comments on the Internet at one another on a discussion site where we talk about things. We control what we type.

I am a female commenter that has noped out of thread because of boyzone comments. I am also a female commenter who is now noping out of threads because the insults and sniping are too personal and ugly. This isn't the MetaFilter I want.

Thank you, onlyconnect.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 2:12 PM on May 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

Here's the "ugh, no, here's why" for this comment:

also - the thread as it is now isn't the thread as it was in progress. even still though, if someone reads that thread and thinks the top comment is the only issue then i think we fundamentally disagree about the issue.
posted by nadawi at 2:17 PM on May 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

In general, I think a civil, moderate tone is the right way to approach a discussion or even an argument. Most posters on MetaFilter start out their presence in a thread with some variety of that tone. However, it's not the only tone that should be acceptable -- people say outrageous things, and outrage is a correct response. People do outrageous things like doubling down on their doubling down, cherry-picking which refutations of their position they engage with, and restating already-disproven stances as if they had not been challenged (feel free to fill in others; this is hardly an exhaustive list); in all of these cases, outrage is not an unreasonable response. Different people express their outrage in different ways, and I reject the "a pox on both your houses" approach of demanding that everyone be "nice." That will not work unless the moderators are willing and able to identify problem users and ban them much, much more quickly. Pushback is not a calm or pretty business, and, without pushback, a lot of people end up as doormats. So I think it's unreasonable to castigate some of our more "blunt" members while simultaneously failing to recognize the regular provoking and picking that goes on. As I said above, there are people on this site who say poisonous things through a pleasant smile, and I would take a wall of raging f-bombs before that, thanks.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:36 PM on May 20, 2015 [20 favorites]

I think that TMaMM and NoraReed are examples of people who see some amount of belligerency as a virtue, especially within the sexist cultural context where women are held to strict standards of "courteous" and "civil" behavior and where men use their privilege in all sorts of ways to silence any complaints about sexism. So, in my opinion, that's one good reason to not judge all "rude, personal" comments by the same standard. Furthermore, it's not as if those two posters and those like them are belligerent randomly -- they may be prone to it, but it almost invariably comes up in a context where they have good reasons to be upset.

And, most importantly, the bright-line and low-effort standard of prohibiting angry, insulting comments is an acute care modding (and community reaction) that is often treating the symptoms of the disease -- the anger caused by sexist, trolling behavior and derails and sealioning -- and mostly ignores the disease itself. The result can be threads like the previous one where TMaMM is the person who gets slapped down by the mods and given a timeout while the sealioning largely continues.

That hasn't happened in this thread, and I think one reason that it hasn't happened in this thread is because the mods have worked really hard to avoid that outcome. But posters like onlyconnect and klangklangston and others seem highly motivated to ensure that a portion of this thread is devoted to sanctions against such posters and to the arguments about their behavior. I think that's a terrible result.

All that said, it's not as if we reached this moment by chance. TMaMM and NoraReed make conscious decisions about how they interact, and they are surely aware of how this affects the larger conversation, and although for all of what I wrote in my first two paragraphs, I sometimes wonder why in the world they don't realize that it's arguable that the net of all this, despite their perfectly valid reasons to sometimes be belligerent, is that we're almost forced to end up talking about this sort of belligerent behavior. Maybe we oughn't -- lord knows, I don't want to talk about it, I want this whole subtopic to be removed from this thread and burned in a fire. But what I want doesn't matter, here we are, talking about it.

There has got to be some goddam way for everyone involved, including the mods and those of us not directly involved, to work at ensuring that whatever needs to be worked out about rudeness and belligerence and onlyconnect's grievances and the concerns about MetaTalk and MetaFilter somehow becoming more mean-spirited, are all things we talk about in a way that doesn't shift the focus away from the shitty sexist sealioning stuff and the backsliding into a boyzone, which is the actual point of this whole fucking thread.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:36 PM on May 20, 2015 [14 favorites]

you can make the personal choice to talk or not talk about anything you please.
posted by nadawi at 2:47 PM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think that TMaMM and NoraReed are examples of people who see some amount of belligerency as a virtue, especially within the sexist cultural context where women are held to strict standards of "courteous" and "civil" behavior and where men use their privilege in all sorts of ways to silence any complaints about sexism. So, in my opinion, that's one good reason to not judge all "rude, personal" comments by the same standard.

I strong oppose the notion that we should have separate standards of acceptable behavior for certain members. I also see you already have in mind who you would confer special status upon.

However, people who are participating in good faith are getting angrily chewed out and insulted. Maybe the majority of people in this thread don't care, but for what it's worth: Do not want.

Thank you for saying this. I have been afraid to voice similar concerns, but I think they are valid.

I'm with these people.
posted by amorphatist at 2:57 PM on May 20, 2015 [10 favorites]

This thread is going in a really weird direction, but also a kind of predictable one?

I'm trying to tread carefully here because a lot of people seem really pissed off and I don't want to make anyone feel worse or more angry.

The reason I asked for the mods to step up and show leadership on this issue in my comment way up yonder is because I explicitly pointed out that as members we only have a limited amount of rhetorical tools we can use to curtail shitty sexist behavior. And if those tools don't work then of course we'll look for sharper ones, and things will escalate. It's not about wanting to turn Metafilter into a place where if you hold the Right Opinions you have carte blanche to be a dick to anyone, being a dick to people sucks. It is however about wanting Metafilter to be a place where people don't do things that derail threads, and I think we'd be better served as a community by having mods that say "that behavior sucks" and nipping it in the bud than leaving it up to us to serve up verbal vigilante justice.

I'm not asking for the mods to radically change their approach. I'm asking for them to extend their (already excellent) current approaches to letting threads breathe and conversations flow. There are only a couple, excruciatingly predictable, rhetorical tricks people use to derail threads about women's issues, I'm asking that these be recognized for what they are and dealt with. There's nothing "political" about that, I think it's very consistent with how the rest of the site already works.
posted by supercrayon at 3:13 PM on May 20, 2015 [22 favorites]

I trust the mods to evaluate how many authoritative statements are needed in threads, but would appreciate if they pointedly said what specific behavior is not allowed.

Sorry for bringing up the devil's advocate mission statement derail. Here's hoping we hash out non-deraily new ground and ways to proceed.
posted by halifix at 3:15 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure it is right to say that some people aren't allowed to be unambiguously belligerent when others are allowed to launch intellectual assaults that they can afterwards claim they're not doing on purpose, etc.
posted by polymodus at 3:19 PM on May 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think supercrayon really has it. It's not about wanting to let people post personal attacks that are beyond the line the mods would tolerate, it's about a desire to have greater recognition that some comments that don't cross any bright lines can often be even more hurtful and offensive and in need of clean up. It's a request to understand why people respond with the anger they do, and that is completely reasonable and I think the mods will continue to put a strong focus on this going forward.
posted by Drinky Die at 3:20 PM on May 20, 2015 [7 favorites]

As I said above, there are people on this site who say poisonous things through a pleasant smile, and I would take a wall of raging f-bombs before that, thanks.

Which is fine, and in a gun-to-head situation I'd make the same choice I think. But, as I've said, it's a false dilemma, because what I'd actually prefer is neither, and that is something we can reasonably aim for and I feel like is something we've had some pretty good discussion of the details of in here and are, mod-side, actively working toward in accordance with what folks have been talking about. I am feeling positive about our ability to make progress there, and I'm all for continuing to talk constructively about ways to make that work well.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:27 PM on May 20, 2015 [10 favorites]

Or to put it another way, re: the problem of shitty sexist behavior and what we as users can do to deal with it:

1.) Be nice and welcoming. Doesn't work, people keep being shitty and sexist.
2.) Be nice but point out where people may be wrong. Doesn't work, people keep being shitty and sexist.
3.) Be patient and assume good faith and explain things. Doesn't work, people keep being shitty and sexist.
4.) Enter into a debate involving multiple users about where people are going wrong. Doesn't work, people keep being shitty and sexist.
5.) Use facts and figures to point out where people are going wrong. Use tropes to point out how common behavior is. Doesn't work, people keep being shitty and sexist.
6.) Critique users worldview and point out that the entire premise of their argument may hinge on a biased view of how the world works. Doesn't work, people keep being shitty and sexist.
7.) Make jokes and try and change the subject. Doesn't work, people keep being shitty and sexist.
8.) Try and ignore other users and rereail the conversation to the original topic. Doesn't work, people keep being shitty and sexist.
9.) Think other users are full of shit and tell them that in no uncertain terms. Doesn't work, people keep being shitty and sexist.
10.) Get sick of users who do shitty sexist things and tell them you are being sexist and shitty. Doesn't work, people keep being shitty and sexist.

and I could go on.

But the point is that in no option here does what we do have an impact on shitty sexist behavior. It just keeps rolling in like the shitty sexist tides. I think that's because the world itself is often shitty and sexist. But that doesn't mean Metafilter has to be.
posted by supercrayon at 3:29 PM on May 20, 2015 [15 favorites]

And your last bit captures the part 0.) of it in that damage can be done the moment someone reads it. It seems to me to be a type of mysogyny (etc.) that works by evading the extant flagging mechanism. And to me that suggests the challenge, how to grapple with this kind of content.
posted by polymodus at 3:34 PM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

What if comments that received a certain number of flags were auto-deleted? Wouldn't that take a lot of the work off the mods' hands?
posted by Enemy of Joy at 3:35 PM on May 20, 2015

Never gonna happen. It's a long discussion but it collapses to the inability of automated thresholds to even start to approach the kind of care and consideration in moderation that we consider important to how this place works, and the profound difficulties that come with dealing with continuity of conversation when things can dynamically disappear piecemeal without a human overseeing the whole.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:37 PM on May 20, 2015 [14 favorites]

What if comments that received a certain number of flags were auto-deleted? Wouldn't that take a lot of the work off the mods' hands?

That would be supremely vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation. Also, that's basically Reddit, so, eponysterical!
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 3:37 PM on May 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

I would take a wall of raging f-bombs before that, thanks.

The thing is, the wall of raging F-bombs isn't really good even for those people doing the pushback, either. I know that when I get to the point that I want to rage and drop a lot of F-bombs, it is better for both me and the site that I back the fuck away and come back later. Even if it is some dude being like 'but really I mean is Sansa even raped, it's so sexy!'
posted by corb at 3:38 PM on May 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

That would be supremely vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation

Yeah, but then the What Is Gamergate Currently Ruining tumblr would do better, so it'd be helping out users, kind of. Hahahahahah oh god.
posted by corb at 3:39 PM on May 20, 2015

I am with Ivan, here. I wish we could get away from "some women (and a few men, I suppose) are mean" back to "some men (swap the previous parenthetical) get away with posting horrible stuff in threads about women," which was the topic of this thread.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:41 PM on May 20, 2015 [24 favorites]

(Between MeFi:Reddit comparisons, "go back to League", basically everything anyone ever says about Tumblr and Twitter, and Crime and Tonic's current gleeful $company:Zynga analogies, I feel like "this isn't Reddit" is currently ruling my life)
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 3:42 PM on May 20, 2015

the inability of automated thresholds to even start to approach the kind of care and consideration in moderation

That would be supremely vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation

Gotcha...or, this would probably not fly either, but what about a cadre of longtime member, upstanding citizen "trustees" given comment deletion power as volunteer mods?
posted by Enemy of Joy at 3:45 PM on May 20, 2015

Oh hell no.
posted by futz at 3:46 PM on May 20, 2015 [13 favorites]

what about a cadre of longtime member, upstanding citizen "trustees" given comment deletion power as volunteer mods?

oh god i just imagined what metatalk would look like in that world and i think i need to lie down for a while
posted by kagredon at 3:48 PM on May 20, 2015 [11 favorites]

Oh hell no.

Haha yeah, I heard the rumble of a torrential shitstorm as soon as I hit post.
posted by Enemy of Joy at 3:48 PM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

The thing is, the wall of raging F-bombs isn't really good even for those people doing the pushback, either.

I do get this. I think the raging f-bomb has less impact the more it is deployed, so it's best used extremely infrequently. I also think that being enraged is really bad for the rager, on a bunch of levels. But I also think that sometimes you need to speak up, because the alternative is worse. And, funny thing, while you could easily compile a list of "ragers," you can also compile a list of people who are busy setting the fires, which takes us back to the main line of this thread.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:49 PM on May 20, 2015 [7 favorites]

oh god i just imagined what metatalk would look like in that world and i think i need to lie down for a while

We can only hope that was not the First Trumpet, summoning the cabal from its fitful slumber....
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:50 PM on May 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

Gotcha...or, this would probably not fly either, but what about a cadre of longtime member, upstanding citizen "trustees" given comment deletion power as volunteer mods?

I think people, in general, on the whole, in the abstract and in a sufficiently broad context, are basically (if not necessarily exhaustively) pretty much okay with how moderation works right now.

Deleting things fast enough is not really what's at issue with the boyzone. If that were the problem, it would be a much easier solve than it is.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 3:51 PM on May 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

Long thread and I haven't read all of it. I don't do the raging f-bombs per se, but a certain ridicule and barbed comedy has always been an extremely important reaction for me when I've been marginalized, especially when encountering plainly disingenuous tactics. It's not extremely important in terms of changing minds - that's unlikely to happen (though it might eventually happen when such a response happens enough times in enough situations). It's not important in winning points either (it's not a game and there aren't sides). But it's important for me, personally, to place myself back on an even footing when someone sees me as lesser, tries to cut my status down or frames the discussion in a way that does injustice to my identity. And I feel like it's important for others reading my words to also feel validated and placed back on an even footing. Because when you do it right, it has the effect of cutting right through all the rhetoric, all the obfuscation of appearing "reasonable" as cover.

I understand some degree of even-handed moderation has to occur. But try to treat my response as equivalent to the response that is marginalizing me, and the effect will only be that I am marginalized further without recourse to bring myself and others back up. If I can't use a certain pointed absurdity/ridicule to defend myself and unravel a damaging comment, then I may have lost what little recourse I have just to go on with my day feeling intact & whole. And don't discount the importance of that; it's something non-marginalized groups don't have to think about in quite the same way, most of the time.
posted by naju at 4:09 PM on May 20, 2015 [22 favorites]

So I have read the whole thread, and I think everyone is in agreement that repeated, just under the radar postings are a problem and there needs to be a better way to alert the mods. I CTRL-F flag and didn't see a response to It's Raining Florence Henderson's way upthread suggestion that there be a flag specifically for that on and on shitty posting that we'd almost all like to avoid. That seems slight more useful and less labor intensive for mods and users both than clicking sexist or noise over and over again.
posted by Ruki at 4:18 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

We'd really prefer (given the current flagging system) that people use the contact form to give us that kind of information - it's much, much easier to understand if we get a specific sentence or two than have to trace it by a pattern of flagging. We're contemplating various improvements to the flagging system but, for the moment, the contact form will work better for this specifically.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 4:20 PM on May 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

"Here's the "ugh, no, here's why" for this comment:
I have no doubt this is an accurate description of your experience in that thread. The trouble is, it posits you as dispassionate, objective observer, and at the same time it suggests that other users may not be as objective as you are. Your comment also assumes that other users have not realized and must be told something about their own actions, something that you can see and understand but that they cannot. In this case, you want to instruct other users about how what they're doing could be creating the very problem they're protesting against. You phrase this in I statements, which you probably in good faith intend to be mollifying. "I know that instead of [doing what you did], I [did what I did]." This is having an effect opposite to the one you no doubt intend because while you may think of it as placating, what it actually is is bragging: "I did X and avoided contributing to a problem, you people did Y and made the problem worse." The people you're instructing haven't asked for instruction from you. They're members of a marginalized group that you're not a member of, and they are saying that the problem you're telling them to ignore so that it will go away is keeping them marginalized. In a small way, your comment, too, marginalizes this group of users. "

Just quickly numbering to organize my thoughts:

1) I'm not a dispassionate observer; I think the comment at the top of the thread was problematic and that it was generally good that it got pushback.
2) I don't assume that anyone is a dispassionate observer in basically anything. We're all coming to conversations with selective attention, selective engagement, different priorities and different conversational styles.
3) My comment assumes that the repeated quoting of the "You've been warned" bit is:
a) Congruent with other threads in which an early, provocative comment gets repeated responses in terms of conversational pattern.
b) reinforcing the provocative nature and rhetorical weight of that comment.
4) I do think that in general this is a MetaFilter conversation pattern that can end up reinforcing the perception of more disagreement than there is on a given topic.
5) That reading the whole thread before commenting is good practice, and something that people have repeatedly advocated here for avoiding repeated flare ups.
6) I'm sorry for coming across as bragging or marginalizing.
7) I tend to think that the pile on is more a symptom of the larger problem than the problem itself.
8) I wanted to see if the repeated requoting of that early comment had influenced anyone else's perception like it had mine.
posted by klangklangston at 4:21 PM on May 20, 2015 [6 favorites]

We're contemplating various improvements to the flagging system...

"Smite"
posted by zarq at 4:28 PM on May 20, 2015 [7 favorites]

7) I tend to think that the pile on is more a symptom of the larger problem than the problem itself.

Could you elaborate on this, please?
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 4:30 PM on May 20, 2015

what about a cadre of longtime member, upstanding citizen "trustees" given comment deletion power as volunteer mods?

MetaVanguard
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:35 PM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

"That hasn't happened in this thread, and I think one reason that it hasn't happened in this thread is because the mods have worked really hard to avoid that outcome. But posters like onlyconnect and klangklangston and others seem highly motivated to ensure that a portion of this thread is devoted to sanctions against such posters and to the arguments about their behavior. I think that's a terrible result."

Sanctions? The hell are you on about?

I get annoyed when I see bombast and attacks indiscriminately deployed based on bad faith readings, and I said so. I've never been an advocate for civility-based comment evaluation, and have consistently argued that it's an asymmetrical burden — I don't even think the "don't be a jerk" or "don't be an asshole" metrics are very coherent. I've even argued over this with onlyconnect. There are plenty of things worth being an asshole about, and plenty of things worth breaking a false ideal of comity over. But assuming bad faith is toxic in a community like this, especially when we're dealing with stuff that takes nuanced communication and significant community buy in.

Go be sanctimonious over something else.
posted by klangklangston at 4:37 PM on May 20, 2015 [15 favorites]

MetaVanguard

Or, in the case of the fedora-wearing sea-lioning Echo-Chamber-scare-mongering shiheads people who believe it already exists in an unspoken form, Uptight Citizens Brigade.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 4:38 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

MetaVanguard

The CoMeta of Public Safety
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:39 PM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

Anyway, I'm also down with GaP's observation that this thread took a strange meander from "how do we better deal with misogyny on Metafilter?" to "I wish people were nicer when arguing". I mean, it's not exactly unrelated, and I do think starting from assuming the best of a poster is a great way to go, but it's a secondary point; it's totally possible to be "polite" while spewing or defending toxicity.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:46 PM on May 20, 2015 [9 favorites]

"Could you elaborate on this, please?"

Sure. I tend to think that the general problem is too many rape apologias, both here and in the wider world, and that it's probably a better strategy to axe an early one from a thread (especially if it's just repeating arguments made in one of the links in the FPP) than to have it be something that keeps pissing off people who are new to the conversation and provoking them to respond.
posted by klangklangston at 4:49 PM on May 20, 2015 [5 favorites]

But assuming bad faith is toxic in a community like this

I'm still kind of putting together my thoughts on a whole lot of what's gone down in this thread recently, but I just want to say: no. Sometimes it's poisonous to assume bad faith, yes. It's even worth enshrining as a general principle. However, it is not universal and the attempt to insist it is always and forever universal is wrong.

In fact, with people who are acting in good faith, incorrect assumptions of bad faith are often something that can be worked out and worked past. But there is nothing toxic in assuming people who are in bad faith are in bad faith, and what is toxic in that cases is an extended assumption that they're not, well past the point where it's obvious, and an inflexible taboo against saying so.

It is not toxic for me to assume that localroger is in bad faith when he posts art criticism of rape scenes and sneers at women for drawing personal boundaries he doesn't approve of, in repeated defiance of mod action in that very same thread, and then gets angry about it and tries to shit up this thread, and to hell with anyone or frankly any kind of site consensus that says it is; or, at the very least, it is no less toxic to insist that I or any other user, particularly those who are survivors of rape or abuse, have to take him in good faith every time and squelch their opinion that he (or any other user with a misogyny problem) is to some degree or another intentionally shitting up the thread.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 4:49 PM on May 20, 2015 [10 favorites]

We're contemplating various improvements to the flagging system...

"Smite"

How about we can request various plagues from the book of Exodus? Some days I'd like someone to get boils for a few hours, and on some days I'd like them to wake up covered in frogs. Or have some big pieces of hail find their way to their newly waxed Trans Am (as I envision some participants).

I could see myself closing my eyes and envisioning these things in place of wanting to drop the f-bomb.
posted by SpacemanStix at 4:49 PM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

what about a cadre of longtime member, upstanding citizen "trustees" given comment deletion power as volunteer mods?

"I told you not to start with zarq."
posted by zarq at 4:53 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

"It is not toxic for me to assume that localroger is in bad faith when he posts art criticism of rape scenes and sneers at women for drawing personal boundaries he doesn't approve of, in repeated defiance of mod action in that very same thread, and then gets angry about it and tries to shit up this thread, and to hell with anyone or frankly any kind of site consensus that says it is; or, at the very least, it is no less toxic to insist that I or any other user, particularly those who are survivors of rape or abuse, have to take him in good faith every time and squelch their opinion that he (or any other user with a misogyny problem) is to some degree or another intentionally shitting up the thread."

I don't think localroger is posting in bad faith. I think that he legitimately believes what he's writing and that his motives are pretty apparent rather than being ulterior. "Good faith" doesn't mean "not sexist" or "not harmful." Just like he doesn't actually have to be to some degree or another intentionally shitting up a thread to shit up a thread.

This is especially true knowing a bit about fiction localroger has written elsewhere — I don't think you have to be insincere at all to promulgate some really ugly shit about abusive sex, and I don't think that he has to be lying to us or to himself to make the arguments he has.
posted by klangklangston at 4:57 PM on May 20, 2015 [17 favorites]

It is not toxic for me to assume that localroger is in bad faith when he posts art criticism of rape scenes and sneers at women for drawing personal boundaries he doesn't approve of, and to hell with anyone or frankly any kind of site consensus that says it is; or, at the very least, it is no less toxic to insist that I or any other user, particularly those who are survivors of rape or abuse, have to take him in good faith every time and squelch their opinion that he (or any other user with a misogyny problem) is to some degree or another intentionally shitting up the taboo.

I don't think there is much disagreement on that. Nobody has had comments deleted for suggesting that localroger was not acting in good faith and I doubt anybody ever will. Deletions occur when the belief in bad faith crosses over into personal attack, which is simply not allowed here. You can say a heck of a lot about what a person is saying here as long as you don't cross that line. I think it's a pretty reasonable compromise even though it can be extremely frustrating for everybody, users and mods, at the same time.
posted by Drinky Die at 4:59 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

(I definitely identify with what naju said about wanting to handle it in your own way and feeling really messed up if you aren't allowed. It's basically a survival trait you need to develop in many situations or you get walked all over. It's really hard to put your faith in the mods at times instead and just give them as much feedback as you can, but I haven't found a better way to handle site frustrations in my time here.)
posted by Drinky Die at 5:12 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

You can say a heck of a lot about what a person is saying here as long as you don't cross that line. I think it's a pretty reasonable compromise even though it can be extremely frustrating for everybody, users and mods, at the same time.

And this takes us back to the central issue of this thread. Part of that "heck of a lot" that people can say about other people is really hateful and hurtful to other members, whether the person writing it thinks so or not. Aggressively apologizing for rape or slavery or Nazis, for example, while not a personal attack on a particular member, damages the fabric of MetaFilter and drives away good members who find the space to toxic for them to continue to participate in. Broad-brush sneering at women who have chosen a particular tattoo, while not an attack on a specific member, can knowingly or unknowingly stab at a wide swath of members, possibly driving them away. This is the effect that we are trying to find a solution for in this thread.

In some ways, even the good faith/bad faith discussion is a derail. As I have said before, the intentions of a member are, to some degree, irrelevant because we cannot (members or mods) know if they are in good faith. If they are regularly derailing threads, on the other hand, they are a problem whether they are doing this from malice or ignorance or cluelessness or some other motive/cause. The question, in the end, are you defending the people who are hurting or the people doing the hurt? Are you in favor of rape apologies or people who are offended by rape apologies? Is being racist less bad than calling someone a racist?
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:12 PM on May 20, 2015 [28 favorites]

100% agreement there.
posted by Drinky Die at 5:14 PM on May 20, 2015

klangklangston: "Good faith" doesn't mean "not sexist" or "not harmful." I don't think localroger is posting in bad faith. I think that he legitimately believes what he's writing and that his motives are pretty apparent rather than being ulterior.

I know what good and bad faith mean, I simply disagree with your definition and/or assessment, when "don't be a jerk" has been there all along, and when he was doing it in the face of mod and user calls to stop and just kept on doing it.

DrinkyDie: I don't think there is much disagreement on that. Nobody has had comments deleted for suggesting that localroger was not acting in good faith and I doubt anybody ever will. Deletions occur when the belief in bad faith crosses over into personal attack, which is simply not allowed here. You can say a heck of a lot about what a person is saying here as long as you don't cross that line. I think it's a pretty reasonable compromise even though it can be extremely frustrating for everybody, users and mods, at the same time.

Well, look up.

I think at a certain point, also, something that would normally be taken as a personal attack, like "this person is a gross creepster" is just the plain damn truth. I don't think we necessarily need a site where everyone gathers round to stone them and shout it from the rooftops, but I think there are cases, and this is one, where "personal attacks are not allowed" reaches the point of absolute farce, and particularly in cases where rape and sexual violence are factors and survivors are involved, demanding those survivors participate in the farce is actively harmful.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 5:15 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

this thread took a strange meander from "how do we better deal with misogyny on Metafilter?" to "I wish people were nicer when arguing". I mean, it's not exactly unrelated, and I do think starting from assuming the best of a poster is a great way to go, but it's a secondary point

But what do you do when men are socialized into using dominance and abusive language to silence opposition? Isn't that misogyny, too, even if it's less obvious a form?
posted by corb at 5:21 PM on May 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

But what do you do when men are socialized into using dominance and abusive language to silence opposition?

In this context, the implorings to be nicer were being directed at people pushing back against misogyny, and as we have seen time and time again, misogynists are savvy enough to use polite language to say vile things. That's why I'm saying "nice" is of secondary importance here.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:34 PM on May 20, 2015 [9 favorites]

I think at a certain point, also, something that would normally be taken as a personal attack, like "this person is a gross creepster" is just the plain damn truth.

If in the future you find yourself in a situation where you feel that way about a user, I would recommend the contact form. But, as a practical matter, the mods approving personal abuse in some situations in public threads is just a huge mess waiting to happen. Some people have really screwed up ideas about what is right and true and it's better to just tell them not to voice personal attacks at all than to evaluate them on a case by case basis for truth. It's not a moral issue, it's just extremely difficult to work that way.
posted by Drinky Die at 5:52 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

But what do you do when men women are socialized into using dominance be afraid of being labeled "bitchy" or "strident" and abusive language the focus on a woman's tone and not her words are used to silence opposition? Isn't that misogyny, too, even if it's less obvious a form?
posted by kagredon at 6:24 PM on May 20, 2015 [12 favorites]

I like the idea that we could resolve all of these issues without anybody getting heated in these threads, I really do. But people might be seriously over-romanticizing the path that it took to get Metafilter to be as welcoming to women as it currently is. If you go back and read the old boyzone threads we've had over the years, it took a lot of people saying a lot of uncivil things to get these ideas across to people. I don't want to link to any particular threads and reignite any weird old arguments, but there was a lot of very angry, combative pushback that helped set the limits of sexist behavior where they currently are, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to act like MeTa is meaner now, or even close to as mean. If anything, MeFi is much, much nicer and kinder than it was before, in myriad ways. And that's great!

But it's not fair to pretend that the changes in the way we talk about sexism came about solely through lots of nice rational discussion and generous compromises, when it was really a knock-down drag-out fight until fairly recently. I'm not arguing that over-the-line comments shouldn't be deleted, only that we shouldn't hold up a few angry comments as any kind of proof that one side or another has any moral high ground when virtually every conversation we've ever had on these topics has had people getting angry and saying angry things. (I also think people are often much more critical of women for even a slightly hostile tone than they are of men for much more hostile comments, but I'll leave it here.)
posted by dialetheia at 6:36 PM on May 20, 2015 [52 favorites]

I can relate to the tendency to use mindreading of intentions as a way to gauge the way forward in a conversation. Sometimes it makes me doubt whether people argue in good faith. And honestly, I sometimes feel that I'm the KING of reading other people's intentions. I actually, deep down, fell like I'm pretty good at it. But lately, I'm discovering that maybe (just maybe) I'm not as good at it as I sometimes think that I am (thanks, little-me attachment issues). But better yet, it's simply not fair to assume the negative intentions of others as an adequate way of making good progress in a conversation. Even if I'm right, it can be condescending to assume. So when I'm tempted, I sometimes go back and read grubmlebee's post from awhile back that I've always found helpful when I need to recalibrate. I share it with you in case others gleen any benefit as well. I think assumption of a positive -- or at least uncertainty of a negative that should default to a positive -- can continue to set a good atmosphere for productive conversation on differing opinions.

I offer this to only inform the context of determining "good faith" readings, not at all whether or not jerkish comments themselves (no matter how honestly intended) need some rigorous and consistent pushback, as they often do.
posted by SpacemanStix at 6:54 PM on May 20, 2015 [6 favorites]

I was thinking about Louis CK's recent controversial monologue in light of this thread.

His monologue on pedophilia was really upsetting, and part of it was that he tried, via comic logic, to justify it.

If he had said a throwaway line about pedophilia as a joke, that would have been trouble for him. But he wrapped it up in all of this language that pushed the joke as a reasonable observation. Which made it palatable enough for it to at least get it approved by SNL.

I found it particularly insidious, because what he said was hurtful to those victimized by pedophiles -- it got me very angry, as someone I care about has been victimized by same. But it was wrapped up in this language of *hey I'm just making an observation here* that seemed carefully calculated to insulate him from pushback.

And, coming back to the thread, that's where the *be reasonable and nice* solution doesn't cut it. Because when somebody is wrapping up vile sentiments with justifications that are designed to appeal to reason, they are shifting the argument away from *this thing you said is pernicious* to *this thing I said is not unreasonable because of x y and z.*

When somebody slaps you in the face, you say ouch. I think people saying ouch is fine. It would be nice and lovely if what follows ouch is not further anger, but sometimes it's inevitable.
posted by angrycat at 7:01 PM on May 20, 2015 [7 favorites]

To follow up on Spaceman Stix' comment:

I have the problem of assuming people *will* read my mind when I make an oh-so-clever ironic comment. And then it's pretty educational to see what people *do* read, which ranges from "oh yeah, that could totally be taken that way, d'oh" through "kind of extreme, but also just an extension of the first category" to "that seems pretty unfair, but I did kind of bring it on myself".

It's the cases where I'm trying my best to be clear and unobjectionable and someone *still* seems to know what I'm thinking better than I do myself that bug me the most. And it's still true that I sort of invited that kind of reaction by having made the other kind of comment, but it's why I liked what Spaceman Stix said.

There are situations where people skirt the line of what's acceptable over a long period of time -- in some cases, trolls playing the long game, maybe in some other cases, people whose actual opinions are borderline acceptable to this community. Maybe you need to do some mind-reading in those cases. I think it's a bad habit to adopt in general, though. Communication by text alone, between people who mostly don't know each other, is bound to be tough.
posted by uosuaq at 7:18 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

OK, who dares register as "troll playing the long game"?
posted by telstar at 8:14 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, but then the What Is Gamergate Currently Ruining tumblr would do better, so it'd be helping out users, kind of. Hahahahahah oh god.

I'm not sure what you're on about here, but that's not a tumblr.

It is not toxic for me to assume that localroger is in bad faith when he posts art criticism of rape scenes and sneers at women for drawing personal boundaries he doesn't approve of, in repeated defiance of mod action in that very same thread, and then gets angry about it and tries to shit up this thread, and to hell with anyone or frankly any kind of site consensus that says it is; or, at the very least, it is no less toxic to insist that I or any other user, particularly those who are survivors of rape or abuse, have to take him in good faith every time and squelch their opinion that he (or any other user with a misogyny problem) is to some degree or another intentionally shitting up the thread.

I'm not totally sure how to define good faith in this context, but I assumed he was being creepy and boundary-testing the community in a way that was pretty honest. Which is why his comments freaked me the hell out.
posted by NoraReed at 8:25 PM on May 20, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm not totally sure how to define good faith in this context, but I assumed he was being creepy and boundary-testing the community in a way that was pretty honest. Which is why his comments freaked me the hell out.

I think at the end of the day we probably shouldn't get hung up on whether "good faith" means with sincere motives (I think the right definition) or being sort of jerky in an inconsiderate way. It might be an academic discussion that currently revolves here on some cross-wire semantics. I tend to agree with others that while motives are important, we ought to camp out more on the practical effect of words and whether they come across as jerky/creepy/sexist/mysoginistic, etc. and have a community response to those, while still being able to acknowledge at the same time people may actually, in good faith, be sincerely misguided (although we also don't need to use "good faith" to be giving kudos as if it's some great accomplishment, it's just a properly basic assumption). Addressing misguided albeit sincere motives simply becomes a lot more difficult if we throw "bad faith" in there too much. I've rarely seen that ever go well without people doubling down on the motives questions and never getting to the problem of reevaluating a potentially problematic belief structure. The cool thing is that not assuming bad faith fundamentally until there are good reasons to think otherwise does not mean (at all) that we can't be appropriately freaked out and push back strongly against creepy and inappropriate behavior. Some well intentioned people are often not good people.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:48 PM on May 20, 2015 [9 favorites]

Yeah, Mefi has a better understanding of the concept of, "Indistinguishable from trolling," than other sites. That means that even behavior that is in good faith isn't necessarily something we have to tolerate. It's a good concept to have a handle on, because it can smooth things over when you tell a user why they need to stop that they aren't necessarily being accused of screwing up a conversation intentionally...just that they have done it and they really need to stop now and re-evaluate future interactions because assumption of good faith isn't forever. I think one of the important takeaways from this thread is that "not forever" is likely gonna get much shorter. It's pretty obviously (past) time for it, I think.
posted by Drinky Die at 8:55 PM on May 20, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'd just really like the people who are talking past and around and over and through a whole chorus of different users talking about how hurtful and silencing this shit is, to please consider collectively hiking down their dad jeans a bit.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 9:25 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure what you're on about here, but that's not a tumblr.

That was from a place of dark humor - essentially I was suggesting that if we have some sort of autodelete after X number of flags, that'd be something a bunch of GamerGaters would totally love to plunk 5$ each down to stick it to or something, and the only benefit would be that your website (didn't remember if it was you or poffin boffin) would have a new thing, which is not really a benefit, because the thing is still ruined.
posted by corb at 9:26 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, you mean like the Hugo Awards.
posted by uosuaq at 9:29 PM on May 20, 2015 [5 favorites]

Having a "ten flags yer out," rule would be like junior high, in the end. Mod is good.
posted by Oyéah at 9:56 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's pretty unfair to characterize my website as "benefiting" from those shitlords, since it's something I threw together in the hopes that putting sunlight on their shit would shame platforms into stopping them, but whatever
posted by NoraReed at 9:56 PM on May 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

NoraReed, you really might give pause to the thought that your use of neologisms like "shitlord" and "hatewank" doesn't exactly lend credence to your position.
posted by 7segment at 11:42 PM on May 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

NoraReed, you really might give pause to the thought that your use of neologisms like "shitlord" and "hatewank" doesn't exactly lend credence to your position.

....because I was all set to agree with you otherwise
/concerntroll
posted by The Gooch at 11:49 PM on May 20, 2015 [29 favorites]

Yeah, let's make this a conversation about my language! What a REVOLUTIONARY IDEA! I was just hoping that someone would come along and mansplain to me how to lend "credence" to my "position"!
posted by NoraReed at 12:09 AM on May 21, 2015 [35 favorites]

Hey, at least "your language has too many new coinages in it" is a novel tone argument.

As long as we're talking language: that's not how the idiom "give pause" is used. The person is given pause (for thought) - the thought causes the person to hesitate.
posted by gingerest at 12:20 AM on May 21, 2015 [16 favorites]

"NoraReed, you really might give pause to the thought that your use of neologisms like "shitlord" and "hatewank" doesn't exactly lend credence to your position."

but really its about ethics in shitlords

Not really getting what "shitlords" and "hatewank" have to do with her position that Gamer Gaters being shitty and brigading things doesn't help her site so much as ruin other things. They're profane; so what? The problem with Gaters isn't profanity.

Anyway, just had a flash of, "Oh, god, I hope that's not what people think I'm trying to say," so I'll bow out for a while.
posted by klangklangston at 12:21 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

not really a benefit, because the thing is still ruined.
posted by corb
posted by Drinky Die at 12:22 AM on May 21, 2015

Yeah, the two remarks are orthogonal:
corb said the website (and thus its creator) would benefit from the content boost, but it wasn't much of a benefit because it comes at the cost of MetaFilter being ruined.
NoraReed said that she doesn't benefit from having more content, because she created it out of a painful necessity (and would be thrilled if it never got another entry because it would mean GG had stopped ruining things).
posted by gingerest at 12:28 AM on May 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

Hey, at least "your language has too many new coinages in it" is a novel tone argument.

It's really just 50% "I'm mad about your un-ladylike swearing behavior" and 50% "I am angry about words I do not know", which I'm used to from people who are mad that I used words that they would have to look up to understand, though generally that's because either they don't understand basic sociology or because they are offended by young people creating new self-identifiers and sharing them on tumblr. So I guess this is a slightly novel form of it. But "stop using your new swearing portmanteaus to make your arguments that women are people" is still rancid shitgarbage
posted by NoraReed at 12:35 AM on May 21, 2015 [16 favorites]

corb said the website (and thus its creator) would benefit from the content boost, but it wasn't much of a benefit because it comes at the cost of MetaFilter being ruined.

That is not how I interpreted it. She said "not really a benefit" meaning the benefit is not real. There is no benefit because the purpose is not to farm traffic. Gingerest, I think you are making a mistake if you read corb's comment as a swipe. It read to me as a poorly conceived and executed attempt at dark, commiserating humor.
posted by Drinky Die at 12:41 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Can we please not make another thread the fucking Corb Show?

This was already requested up thread by someone else. Enough already, please.
posted by zarq at 12:51 AM on May 21, 2015 [6 favorites]

zarq is wise.
posted by Drinky Die at 12:55 AM on May 21, 2015

Thinking about diversity reminds me of the advice about approaching Metafilter threads as if you are talking with strangers and acquaintances at a large party.

In theory there exists a conversational compatibility or connectivity graph of all the users on a website. A graph of who gets along with whom. Suppose I tend to react poorly to so-and-so's comments. Hypothetically I could have a web browser plug-in that screens out their comment wherever it appears. It doesn't have to be a permanent thing; there could be a time delay involved.

It's a technological solution, but I might see it as trying to reflect a property of what it means to be at a physical party, such as the ability to mingle. The intuition of a spatial relationship and recovering that somehow.

The other half-baked thought I have is suppose threads had panels that function like real-life discussion panels. You have a group of people who read the text, open the discussion, then turn it over to the audience. Now I'm not saying this is something that should be done or would work. I am saying that structural possibilities are technically limitless and Metafilter is just one particular way of organizing discourse.
posted by polymodus at 12:57 AM on May 21, 2015

So it's really about portmanteaus in ladyswears. I see.

And here I imagined that the point of this thread was discussing misogyny on MetaFilter and what could be done about it. I suppose it would be impossible for those who love this derail (many of whom, oddly, cropped up with the derail) could maybe go next door and start their own MeTa so we can get back to this one?
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:07 AM on May 21, 2015 [9 favorites]

Brought to you by Sting's little-known side project, The Tone Police.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 2:47 AM on May 21, 2015 [21 favorites]

Rox-anne, you don't have to use that tone to-night
posted by NoraReed at 3:32 AM on May 21, 2015 [29 favorites]

In theory there exists a conversational compatibility or connectivity graph of all the users on a website. A graph of who gets along with whom. Suppose I tend to react poorly to so-and-so's comments. Hypothetically I could have a web browser plug-in that screens out their comment wherever it appears. It doesn't have to be a permanent thing; there could be a time delay involved.

Indeed we could design and implement some algorithm that does amazingly complex user behavior analysis to predict emergent network structures (and would incidentally be worth billions of dollars for other applications) OR

and this is the really crazy impossible thing but hang with me

people could not approach conversation on metafilter as if it were their own gross little treehouse with their dad's Playboys and empty Dew cans scattered all over the place.
posted by winna at 4:33 AM on May 21, 2015 [27 favorites]

7segment, you really might give pause to the thought that your one and only comment in this thread was an expression of distaste for the neologisms another user happened to use, as opposed to any comment on the shaming neologisms which were used in the other thread and in this thread, doesn't exactly lend credence to your position.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:45 AM on May 21, 2015 [6 favorites]

I assumed he was being creepy and boundary-testing the community in a way that was pretty honest. Which is why his comments freaked me the hell out.

Oh jeez. Let me try to explain this in a way that hopefully will not cause any triggers to go off.

I have an honest question for a group of people in that thread who have presumably all watched 45 hours of Game of Thrones, one of the most infamously violent, gratuitously naked, and yes rapey series in the history of television. One assumes that the people in such a thread do not need a trigger warning each time the music comes up. One assumes that they have watched the show.

And my question is, exactly what is in this particular scene that is so explicit, so awful, so unusual compared to the other 45 hours of GoT you've watched, that unlike those other 45 hours of GoT, this three minutes is what drives you to ragequit the show?

That is a nontrivial question with a very non obvious answer because every single element of that scene has been used before, multiple times, generally more explicitly, and those scenes did not drive hordes of ragequitters to the door. Why?

Now I find that an interesting question, and it's not one I would bring up in a thread I know is likely to be populated by rape survivors but remember 45 hours of GoT all around. And it's not really possible to find an answer to that question without examining the various elements of the scene to ask exactly what it did to fuck with peoples' heads so much.

At no time did I ever suggest there was no rape, that nothing happened. What I said was that there is very little on-screen compared to other scenes you have presumably already watched in the series. But there is something about that scene -- and apparently even discussing it in any detail -- which drives people over an edge. I was just asking exactly what that is. And that's all I was doing.
posted by localroger at 5:05 AM on May 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

I would like to float the idea that it may not be possible to understand that fully, unless one has been raped.
(And there's also the cumulative effect, which has been mentioned many times.)

But please respect the fact that rape, interesting as it may be in theory, is not theory to many of us, not academic, and not something we can be interested in and happily discuss, in the same way that you can.
posted by Too-Ticky at 5:14 AM on May 21, 2015 [24 favorites]

Oh geeze, how did I miss that? Ayup, that thing you would not do is exactly the thing that you did.
posted by Too-Ticky at 5:22 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

localroger, I understand you see this as an "innocent" question, but it really doesn't seem appropriate for this thread, and I sincerely hope we don't have to discuss anything about it other than why one person's "innocent" question does, in fact, reflect distance born of privilege and (especially in its repetition) might constitute harassment. I can't quite believe you asked it again after you'd already been moderated away from it. There is no way to answer your question in a way that will be satisfying to you and to your discussants in this question. Potential answers are individual and personal, and your seeming need to have it demonstrated to you why your request for a personal narrative about people's individual reactions constitutes an intrusive request that you should not expect anyone to have to honor. It is about a hair away from "but was it really rape" and "why object to X behavior if you never objected before," both tropes of rape culture that (a) you should be aware of by now and (b) the users do not want or need to entertain.
posted by Miko at 5:28 AM on May 21, 2015 [24 favorites]

LR. Please don't die on this hill. I'm a big ASOIAF fan, a big show fan, and a big localroger fan. I can't give you an educated opinion on why this scene hit me harder than other scenes, but it did. I'm not gonna stop watching, but my enthusiasm level has definitely taken a big hit. It's much less of a fun type of show now and more of a, "Well, sunk cost let's see where it goes now..."

I've been spending a lot of time since looking at other scenes in other works of fiction and wondering how and why they impacted me in various different ways. I can't quite come up with an answer yet, but it's something in the emotions of the scene and the storytelling that led up to it, not the camera angles. You are coming off as too clinical, and that's why your examination is rubbing people the wrong way I think. Please, just back off on this one. There have been some hurtful things said, but they are coming from a place of hurt as well. Just let this one go, please.
posted by Drinky Die at 5:29 AM on May 21, 2015 [6 favorites]

> That is a nontrivial question

.... That really doesn't need hashing out in this thread where we are discussing something different that is not the thing you showed up initially to complain about. Go start another meTa if you really want to talk about it so much.
posted by rtha at 5:40 AM on May 21, 2015 [23 favorites]

LR showed up initially in response to a comment that directly mentioned him. I think it's reasonable to forgive him one statement of his position on that. Digging in beyond that though is progressively worsening the situation.
posted by Drinky Die at 5:48 AM on May 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

He had a range of possible responses that did not include trying to re-argue the argument here, which I'm pretty sure he was already asked to not do, and he chose to do it anyway.

Can we go back to discussing NoraReed's swear neologisms because at least they are amusing and the subject is not as worn out as "how to artistically appreciate rape."
posted by rtha at 6:01 AM on May 21, 2015 [17 favorites]

I agree, users such as LR and others who have had to be repeatedly chastised by moderators about their bad behavior in this thread should discontinue it in the future so we can focus on the topic of this thread instead.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:15 AM on May 21, 2015

welp, that's too much rape talk for me. time to remove this thread from recent activity. maybe in the future those who find rape to be a fascinating intellectual argument could at least keep their pontificating about it out of threads where we're discussing the comfort of women on this site.
posted by nadawi at 6:16 AM on May 21, 2015 [42 favorites]

This has been ugh, no, here's why'd multiple times in multiple threads and it's been officially ugh, no, stopped in this thread and the other one. It's several orders of magnitude more harmful than the defensive rude stuff that's getting deleted--see how nadawi just checked out? The less harmful defensive rude stuff is gone, the astronomically more harmful "polite on the surface" thing is here and several people are once again wasting time ugh, no, here's whying it and leaving. This is the problem. I don't want this dude banned. I want this dude to learn that his honest curiosity about a thing is his responsibility. Nobody has to answer your question, yappy guy; you've been told forty times to stop asking it. You can answer it if you just slip on the subaltern moccasins; you don't want to, that's perfectly understandable. But that's the only way you're going to get the answer you want. Do the work or GTFO.
posted by Don Pepino at 6:19 AM on May 21, 2015 [23 favorites]

I'm pretty confused about why it wasn't deleted. I don't think I'm alone in having flagged it quickly.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:21 AM on May 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think he deserves a chance to show what he said if others are calling him creepy and suggesting that he makes them feel unsafe (and calling for him to be banned, which I think was in a now deleted comment).
posted by Reggie Knoble at 6:25 AM on May 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

His failure so far to empathize is creepy. Nobody "suggested" he made them feel unsafe, they said he made them feel unsafe. (Yup, must be shift change.)
posted by Don Pepino at 6:28 AM on May 21, 2015 [7 favorites]

I think he deserves a chance to show what he said if others are calling him creepy and suggesting that he makes them feel unsafe (and calling for him to be banned, which I think was in a now deleted comment).

He posted here and got a reply directing him that this thread was not the venue for it. Again, I don't blame him for wanting to reply when he is brought up here, but when the mods tell you something and the thread is angried up at you, it's time to listen to the mods and read the room and take the case elsewhere if you feel it has to be made.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:31 AM on May 21, 2015

That really doesn't need hashing out in this thread where we are discussing something different that is not the thing you showed up initially to complain about.

In LR's defense, I don't think he is actually attempting to hash out the question itself in this thread, but rather he is attempting to explain his motivation in this thread for posting the question elsewhere. And, I can kind of see his point if you sort of squint at it - that the motivation itself was sincere.

That said, though, even if you do something in sincere and pure intent and you accidentally piss someone off unawares in the process, if they let you know that you pissed them off, the best thing to do is indeed to back the hell off.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:34 AM on May 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

Localroger's question has been answered multiple times in the original thread. For him to show up here and pretend it hasnt, or maybe just to make clear it hasn't been answered to his satisfaction, is some bullshit. It's the perfect example of why mod intervention is necessary.

Localroger, when someone tells you that a rape scene upset them, the correct response is NEVER to minimize or belittle their reaction or to say that it's wrong to be upset or demand that they justify their feelings to you. You've done that over and over and over.

Reggie Knoble, we've all seen is undeleted comments, which were terrible, and taz described his deleted comment. His defense is apparently, "but I'm just trying to understand" and it's been explained ad nauseum why that sort of sealioning or JAQing off or whatever cute thing we want to call it is harmful and shouldn't be tolerated here as much as it is.
posted by Mavri at 6:39 AM on May 21, 2015 [19 favorites]

My immediate thought was that this is not the right venue to reboot the GoT discussion, for sure. Considering localroger's comments were under discussion here and seeing the thoughtful responses to his recent comment I decided to monitor the exchange instead, with an eye on drawing a line under the derail were it to carry on. I wasn't exactly thrilled to see the comment here but at the same time it didn't immediately strike me as an instant delete by MeTa standards. Let me be clear: I'm most definitely open to the suggestion I made the wrong call. Regardless I'm gutted that nadawi chose not to participate in the thread anymore.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 6:43 AM on May 21, 2015 [8 favorites]

LR was told to knock it completely off by cortex in an emphatic way. One of the problems with human moderation is that other mods have to step in and sort of pick up the torch of "We TOLD you to knock it off" when someone goes off shift. He should not have been able to just start up again after being told to cut it out.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 6:47 AM on May 21, 2015 [26 favorites]

Told to knock it off. Continued. Told to knock it off again. Continued. Told to knock it off again. Continued.

I know the mods are "recalibrating" how they approach this multiple-multiple-multiple-chances thing, but perhaps they could look into recalibrating their recalibrating.
posted by Drastic at 6:53 AM on May 21, 2015 [10 favorites]

Considering that a repeat complaint in this thread has been that comments that boil down to "educate me!" are entitled and shitty even when posted in good faith, I don't think that has a place here.
posted by almostmanda at 6:53 AM on May 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

localroger, what you were doing was bringing that up a half-dozen or more times after the question had been answered. Answered in the article, answered in the thread. This is disrespectful to the other people in the thread, because you're not listening to them and you're assuming that whatever they say, it's because they don't understand you... you do this in threads on lots of topics. It sucks. It kills threads. It requires everyone to focus on you even if they think your question is not interesting or already answered, or even disturbing and gross and shouldn't be pursued. Don't do it anymore.

On top of that, yes, there's a topic-specific thing you did, which is to drop a gross descriptive comment into a thread where you know (because they said it in the thread) that there are a bunch of people who've been raped, and it should have been blindingly obvious that was an inappropriate comment. And then continued to protest that deletion over and over, not listening to what other people are saying about why it was inappropriate.

You need to stop these behaviors, and start (silently) listening to other people. I'm going to give you a day off to consider this, and this is a warning: don't be gross in threads about women, and stop the overcommenting threadkilling behavior.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:10 AM on May 21, 2015 [41 favorites]

And I have for the first time in *looks* over seven years on this site been motivated to use the contact form to point the mods' attention to harmful behavior.

This thread has given me the confidence to do that so that's something, I reckon.

On preview: lobstermitten is on it already. Thank you.
posted by pointystick at 7:14 AM on May 21, 2015 [7 favorites]

Yeah, I literally gave an answer (or my answer) to that question in the thread when it was first posed, and I included your name in the response. Which, if you didn't find satisfying, I didn't hear a response on. If that answer doesn't satisfy you, fine, but I wasn't the only respondee and at a certain point if you want to be taken as a good faith participant you need to stop stirring up a thread full of angry people.
posted by selfnoise at 7:14 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

(oops, probably should have dropped it but didn't see LM's comment)
posted by selfnoise at 7:15 AM on May 21, 2015

Sorry about that, shift change here, thank you to people for flagging and contact-forming. (I'm leaving the comment so people can see it, so just to let folks know, flagging it more at this point won't have an effect.)
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:17 AM on May 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

This is a perfect example btw, of a comment that might be ok in isolation, but where a quick contact form message from someone who's been following the thread and can see the problem in context is really valuable. (Just mentioning this for future reference in other threads - if you see someone is coming back to the same well after a warning or after having their "question" already be answered several times, it's so helpful to tell us that rather than just flagging, since just flagging we might miss what the actual problem is.)
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:27 AM on May 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

In my view, that should have been an immediate delete and day off and not a "let's see how this plays out" conversation. I suppose if the contact form is the only resource that provides granular enough data, then so be it, but it's much less convenient than the flag and also allows more time to elapse between comment and (possible) deletion, meaning more people see it. Also, does it mean we end up with duplicated systems?

This is a perfect example btw, of a comment that might be ok in isolation

See, I don't really think so. First, it wouldn't even happen in isolation. It's only going to come up in rape-related or GoT-related or maybe wider fiction-related threads, and it deserves as much side eye there as here. I think this is exactly the kind of comment that contributes to a hostile environment and there are really few places it would have been okay without a lot of couching and opting-in to that conversation. If nothing else, it's the kind of comment that I hope, in future, gets well flagged and that people take into account when they consider whether or not MeFi is being as anti-misogynist as it would like to be.
posted by Miko at 7:35 AM on May 21, 2015 [17 favorites]

Considering he was pulling this shit for, what, three days in a row now, my opinion is that assuming that localroger was acting in the close-enough-to-good faith manner that would get as much slack cut for him as he had is causing more problems that shutting him down with extreme prejudice would have.
posted by griphus at 7:53 AM on May 21, 2015 [7 favorites]

The user showed no empathy for others even after they explained why it was damaging (i.e., using "suggesting" rather than "said' to denigrate the seriousness of their experience),

That was me, not localroger.
posted by Reggie Knoble at 7:56 AM on May 21, 2015

Wow - I think it's an example of a problematic comment made even more problematic by the context.

Yeah, for real. localroger's GoT comments have been such a spot-on example of A Guy Doing The Thing that has been under discussion in this thread from the get-go: ignorant, unempathetic JAQing off that makes me nope out of threads time and time again; dudes trotting in to theorize and pontificate at privileged arm's length about topics that far too many MeFites have painfully direct experience with. Who is anyone to say where any other person on earth is allowed to draw their own personal boundaries? How is that ever appropriate? For so many of the rest of us, discussions about rape, sexual assault, and sexism in general are not academic; we don't have the luxury of walking away from it as soon as we walk away from the computer; it isn't cute or funny or "interesting," it's spiritually and psychologically exhausting like not a lot of other things can be.

I guess I just can't imagine any circumstance where that kind of "and now I'm going to repeatedly explain how and why you are not entitled to be upset by [in this case, a specific depiction of rape], ladies" deal wouldn't be problematic. It's dehumanizing, it's patronizing, and as someone who has been raped, I find it personally insulting. Which brings me back to my impression that personally insulting comments tend to fly under the radar here as long as they're personally insulting to groups that aren't always equipped with the energy or wherewithal to bring the motherfucking ruckus every time they get insulted, like, I dunno, groups that are socialized from birth to tamp down and silence their own objections every time they're on the receiving end of insulting behavior.
posted by divined by radio at 8:12 AM on May 21, 2015 [36 favorites]

Sorry, to be clearer, I wasn't at all defending the comment. I was just thinking more generally about context and how important it is to understand the real effect of a comment. I made that point in a bad unhelpful way.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:18 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

In my view, that should have been an immediate delete and day off and not a "let's see how this plays out" conversation.

I agree, but I also think that not-really-visible practical context here matters, which is in part that (as jessamyn noted) handing stuff off from shift to shift when it's slow-burn behavioral stuff involves trying to have everybody know everything even though we're working on stuff piecemeal, and goodnewsfortheinsane, who works part time, had the weird luck to pull his first shift in most of a week with half this thread to contend with. I think he made a reasonable call under the circumstances; I'd have made a different and more aggressive call if I were the one up at five in the morning because I've been basically living this thread for the last week; LM has been more up to speed on the details as well and so put that into action retroactively to the degree that was workable when she showed up this morning.

We've been working to try and keep everybody on the team up to speed with at least the broad strokes of this discussion and related moderation actions on the site, and talking a lot about individual issues and user behavior, but there's gonna be a little bit of porousness even with things working pretty well. Which I have zero problem with people offering critical thoughts on, that's totally useful. Just want folks to try and keep in mind the actual-humans-doing-a-complicated-task aspect here and not worry overly much about the minute-to-minute details if we're managing to get reasonably promptly to the same shared goal state.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:19 AM on May 21, 2015 [5 favorites]

Right, but when you think about it, this was not really a context-dependent call. Arguably JAQ comments that go on for a few cycles and are basically, "I haven't had your experience with this irritating thing and can't empathize with your mild annoyance. Explain your experience to me again. No, I still can't empathize with you; please explain better" should be okay unless they keep going and going, in which case a note about the context would be helpful. But this was not that. This was "I haven't had your experience with this devastating life destroying thing and can't empathize with your pain/horror/grief/rage. Explain it again. Again, please. Again, can you please tell me exactly how and why this hurt you when it didn't hurt me? I honestly want to understand so please relive the experience of getting hurt so that you can tell me more about how you are hurting right now." "Just askin' why you buggin'" comments about horrifying things that most reasonable people don't have to work to empathize with should get immediate reprimand.
posted by Don Pepino at 8:24 AM on May 21, 2015 [6 favorites]

You've got a point, Jess. On reflection I think I went for a way narrow interpretation of the earlier "cut it out" exchange, leading me to basically go "well, at least this isn't just him repeating his complaint like earlier". It's clear to me now that this was probably too generous. More to the point, I guess I should just be more proactive pushing back in this kind of situation. Especially in longer threads I do tend to sort of get preoccupied with "should I delete this" when it's evident I could just, you know, leave a note. When that happens at a time of day when things on MeTa are slow but *just* about to pick up steam again, if I sit on my hands for just too long then I'll miss my opportunity.

This is basically me retracing my steps, I don't intend to replace one derail with another or draw attention away from the topic at hand. But I do feel I owe it to you all to do my best to avoid any repeats at least. It's embarrassing at any rate and it seems to communicate the opposite of what I want to: I can't claim to be unaware of the context in this instance and it's basically what we're here for in general, so yes perhaps it's wise to avoid the impression that I don't quite know what's going on. That's bad PR on top of everything else.

I'll look at this again later, regardless. I want to give it some thought because this caught me by surprise somewhat and clearly it shouldn't have. Right now my take is that I need to avoid getting sidetracked in some legalistic up-or-down reasoning about whether something needs deleting or not and just, you know, pipe up. That's embarrassingly obvious -- to me as well, but that's no use to anyone if I don't act on it. In this instance I was slow in realizing that, and for that I would like to apologize.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 8:28 AM on May 21, 2015 [22 favorites]

Don Pepino, to the mods, though, the difference in knowing the context makes a difference between "shut down the interaction and reprimand the user" and "user deserves a timeout" or even "user gets banned".
posted by zarq at 8:29 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

We've been working to try and keep everybody on the team up to speed with at least the broad strokes of this discussion and related moderation actions on the site, and talking a lot about individual issues and user behavior, but there's gonna be a little bit of porousness even with things working pretty well. Which I have zero problem with people offering critical thoughts on, that's totally useful.

Is there some sort of system in place where the new-on-shift moderator can easily see the previous shifts' moderators' comments asking users to knock it off? Or are you all relying on the ending shift's moderator to convey that information in some other way? I'm not asking for super-technical details, but it seems like needing off-duty moderators to stay up to speed on contentious threads while they're off-duty in order to avoid mod-continuity errors is not an ideal solution for anyone.
posted by jaguar at 8:29 AM on May 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

We've been working to try and keep everybody on the team up to speed with at least the broad strokes of this discussion and related moderation actions on the site

Could you share a (perhaps pruned) version of that update here? It'd give us a concrete sense of what the policy changes are from the mod side of things: we've gotten a lot of comments in this thread from you and other mods indicating changes, and I've seen what I think are changes on the site as a whole. But if there's been a shift in policy or practice it'd be nice to read how that's being articulated so we have a sense of what the new normal is and thus what the result of this thread has been.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:46 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Is there some sort of system in place where the new-on-shift moderator can easily see the previous shifts' moderators' comments asking users to knock it off? Or are you all relying on the ending shift's moderator to convey that information in some other way? I'm not asking for super-technical details, but it seems like needing off-duty moderators to stay up to speed on contentious threads while they're off-duty in order to avoid mod-continuity errors is not an ideal solution for anyone.

We've got a few things, and we continue to try and iterate on both our technical toolset and our team practices to make it work as well as we can.

On the manual communication side, we do a fair amount of group emailing throughout the day and person-to-person chatting over IM at shift change and for checkins about specific user or thread issues. We'll follow up with internal team discussion on some contact form emails, or on flag-count alerts we get if something is suddenly racking up several flags while nobody is watching (which I've taken to thinking of, in restless_nomad's coinage, as The Red Shower, where you sneak off for ten minutes and come back to WHAMMO), or on email alerts about new posts or questions or metatalk submissions. We'll also write up team heads-up digest emails on an as needed basis, e.g. rounding up recurring suggestions or concerns into one place and digging into it as a team discussion apart from the piecemeal bits.

On the more automated side, we have admin-side user notes on individual user pages where we can track ongoing issues with someone's interactions on the site, which we can use (and are trying to use a little more actively as part of the outcome of this and previous discussions) to explicitly track things like specific low-grade-but-problematically-recurring behavior or the state of last-chance or do-not-engage-this-topic type warnings.

We've also built out a note-taking system in the last year that allows us to do more specific annotation to individual posts and comments, that get aggregated chronologically on the front page of the admin interface; one more recent improvement there is auto-folding note from admin stuff in as entries in that blotter to make it a little easier to figure out where notes have been left. That's an interface that I think we continue to get more out of, but it's a relatively new way of handling information gathering and passing for us (compared to many, many years of mostly just email-based communication) and so we're still figuring out what works.

That automated note-aggregation thing has been great, in part for letting us collect stuff without as much explicit shift-by-shift handoff work with schedules stretched tighter than they used to be, but I'm feeling like one thing we can do as a team is try and push a little harder on some of the "hey, heads up everybody about weird little situation x" when there's something more concrete like an explicit warning made in a thread, so that we can be sure that everybody knows it needs to be a bright-line situation vs. just something they have to catch up on and make a personal call on when and if it comes up.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:58 AM on May 21, 2015 [7 favorites]

one more recent improvement there is auto-folding [note from admin] stuff in as entries in that blotter to make it a little easier to figure out where notes have been left. That's an interface that I think we continue to get more out of, but it's a relatively new way of handling information gathering and passing for us (compared to many, many years of mostly just email-based communication) and so we're still figuring out what works.

That seems like another good reason to have earlier mod notes in a discussion, and for those notes to be more explicit about what the problem with the comments (deleted or not) is, then -- it not only helps keep conversations on track and non-oppressive, but actually makes it easier for the next mods on shift to see what's been going on.
posted by jaguar at 9:04 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Could you share a (perhaps pruned) version of that update here? It'd give us a concrete sense of what the policy changes are from the mod side of things: we've gotten a lot of comments in this thread from you and other mods indicating changes, and I've seen what I think are changes on the site as a whole. But if there's been a shift in policy or practice it'd be nice to read how that's being articulated so we have a sense of what the new normal is and thus what the result of this thread has been.

There's not a single monolithic update or anything like that; it's more a rolling discussion over the last week of a bunch of different pieces of stuff that's come up. We've talked as a team about the specific concerns folks have brought up in here and via the contact form—specific patterns of behavior that haven't been as much on our radar as they should, specific users who have been slow-burn issues that we can push harder to get to a shape-up-or-ship-out place with, older issues that we've been chewing on that we should get more proactive about, ways to improve further our overall team communication about stuff when it gets busy and complicated.

But for example the tendency for some folks to sort of keep popping along doing The Same Old Thing but avoiding ever crossing some obvious bright-line threshold with a comment, and so skating a line of permissivity long-term in a way that becomes more problematic and disruptive than just some one-off case of obnoxiousness, is definitely one of the big things we're looking harder at.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:09 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

That seems like another good reason to have earlier mod notes in a discussion, and for those notes to be more explicit about what the problem with the comments (deleted or not) is, then -- it not only helps keep conversations on track and non-oppressive, but actually makes it easier for the next mods on shift to see what's been going on.

Yeah, it's something that's been sort of itching at me while catching up on shift change stuff when I come on, looking through the notes and thinking about which things I immediately know what's up vs. which things are more of a "I'd better click through and see what's up". When we folded in the mod notes as an auto-detected part of that stream, it was such a nice obvious-in-retrospect addition that I think the newness and helpfulness of the change didn't really leave me with eyes to really see where it could be tweaked to the better. This conversation's been helpful to get that itchy feeling to cohere into an actual sense of the issue with how that works and could work better for us.

And part of that is I think being a little more explicit and detailed in mod notes where it makes sense to do so; the other part of that is just us not allowing ourselves to treat mod notes as self-documenting, as convenient as that feels, so some further note-taking on the admin-eyes-only side of things to supplement those notes would be a good thing as well.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:24 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Shitlords" is one of my favorite new words. I have some long term internet friends who are women, incredibly skilled at using and creating, modern explicative language. They always, by sharing this skillset, give me tools to keep my humor on point when navigating some of the more annoying everyday realities.
posted by Oyéah at 11:16 AM on May 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

It was coined back in 2009 on Something Awful by a poster named MaggotMaster when someone called him the homophobic F-word master instead. Internet history fun fact of the day!
posted by Drinky Die at 1:36 PM on May 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

It was coined back in 2009

Wait, what was coined in 2009?
posted by josher71 at 2:56 PM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Shitlord. (IIRC, am I wrong?)
posted by Drinky Die at 3:01 PM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

It looks like it was around in 2008.
posted by josher71 at 3:02 PM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

And some stuff in 2006 that I don't want to link here.
posted by josher71 at 3:03 PM on May 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

I could give two shitlords less about the etymology of the term, really.

But I am glad to see the transparency about moderation regarding extensive user histories and the like. Because as much as people wish for a more automated system, it takes some difficult, human decision-making to get these kinds of things "right" in the eyes of the community. Detecting good/bad faith is hard enough in real life. It can't be any easier on an Internet where everyone pretends to have Asperger's or some other flippant excuse to not empathize with the people participating in the discussion.

But the good news is that your faith is independent from the harm caused by your actions. No one's getting out alive, so I'm all about minimizing the obvious and measurable damage related to lived experiences instead of slaking someone's ignorance or curiosity about information-laden issues they could easily research on their own without being an attention-hog and interjecting themselves into conversations where they have no meaningful contributions to provide.

Would more specific flags (to address JAQing off and other obscene behaviors that shouldn't be done in public) be helpful in comment deletion decisions? Are the flag reasons like "offensive" and "noise" and "breaks the guidelines" counted/considered together for a given comment? Even if, it sounds like there are unlisted types of disruptive behaviors that are still distinguishable and relatively agreed upon by different users.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 3:54 PM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Would more specific flags (to address JAQing off and other obscene behaviors that shouldn't be done in public) be helpful in comment deletion decisions?

To be perfectly honest, I personally don't distinguish a ton between flag reasons as it is. It's flagged, therefore I look at it. Most of the time it's either obvious what the problem is, or requires enough context that the flag reason isn't enough on its own and I need to skim the surroundings anyway. (The exception being "display error", which isn't always instantly obvious.) We have multiple reasons to indicate to users what potential reasons for flagging might be, more than for mod use. We've talked back and forth for a while now about altering the set of reasons, but haven't come to any firm conclusion. In this case, a freeform field would be the most helpful, and we are poking at the various implementation issues around it.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 4:09 PM on May 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

I was going to suggest a freeform field earlier but wasn't sure about the implementation so I'm glad to hear you're already thinking about it! I think it would not only help give clarity about flagging reasons but maybe give people a mild release valve-- if they can say "this guy is doing that awful thing he always does," maybe then the desire to leave such a comment is not as strong, and the comment gets deleted without the problem of a big derail thread.
posted by easter queen at 4:14 PM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Short free form would be helpful, there are some times where it's really hard to communicate what the issue with a comment is through flagging but the contact form feels over the top.

everyone pretends to have Asperger's or some other flippant excuse to not empathize with the people participating in the discussion.

I sympathize with being frustrated with how people sometimes fail to use empathy in online discussions but I also kind of feel like claiming people who say they have an autism spectrum disorder are faking is failing at empathy a little bit as well.
posted by Drinky Die at 4:22 PM on May 21, 2015 [9 favorites]

I support the freeform field idea. A site that I mod has this, with a character limit, and it really helps in understanding why a post was reported: a denizen telling me User X is notorious for a particular thing gives me context, and tells me what to look for in said user's posting history, which in turn helps the whole staff respond appropriately.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:24 PM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

> I sympathize with being frustrated with how people sometimes fail to use empathy in online discussions but I also kind of feel like claiming people who say they have an autism spectrum disorder are faking is failing at empathy a little bit as well.

Precisely why I used that example. People on the spectrum actually don't suck at being emotionally concerned about others. It's a misconception, so to use it as an excuse is kind of a tell.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 4:39 PM on May 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

In my strong opinion -- in 2007 and now -- the benefit of "sexism/racism" as a flag is not to help the mods understand what's wrong with a comment, because most of the time that's going to be self-evident, but that it signals an official MetaFilter prohibition against sexism and racism. So, similarly, I think the benefit of an additional explicit flag (of this type) would be in what it says to the community as a whole about standards of behavior and not for the benefit of the mods.

The exceptions, in this context we're discussing now, would be those cases where the problem isn't as self-evident to the mods. And maybe it's the case that mods need to be told that someone is doing that thing that they do. But I feel like they usually know this. And, also, they've said that it would be most helpful if people just wrote them with their concerns about this sort of long-term problem.

The free-form field would provide something that people have often requested. If nothing else, I think it would make people more comfortable about flagging something -- that's what people (including me) have said would be the case. And it also could be helpful to the mods to spot trends and the zeitgeist, looking at those reasons individually or at a list of of them.

But, generally, I think that a consistent theme of this thread has been that it's really important that the mods and the community make it clear that the kinds of misbehavior we're talking about will not be tolerated. Thus, more explicit mod notes and the like. In the acute case, we need quick action. But we really want to treat the chronic condition, and that requires that people stop doing this sort of thing in the first place. And that's all about making it very clear what the standards are.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:43 PM on May 21, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm not familiar with people faking this--is that really a thing?

Yeah, it unfortunately is a thing. Not ever seen it on the Meef, though.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:44 PM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

The idea of people not so much faking as just casually giving themselves a lay diagnosis has come up before, not particularly a Metafilter thing as a general internet thing and probably past its peak and them some at this point. It seemed like a little more of a thing when general social awareness of Aspergers and the idea of the autism spectrum was on a significant uptick years back.

In any case, not something that, JGF's clarified intentions in mentioning it notwithstanding, really needs to be dug into here and now I don't think.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:44 PM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

MoonOrb: Not on MetaFilter (from what I can tell), but it was rather infamous at Something Awful, which was recently mentioned (and another reason why this particular example came to mind).

On lack of preview: cortex explains this better. Consider it dropped from me.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 4:45 PM on May 21, 2015

I'm really, really uncomfortable with the whole condemning of laydiagnosis thing because I see it regularly used against people for whom seeing a doctor is either unhelpful or not possible but who find the support of communities, education, etc really useful for describing the problems that they have not being neurotypical. I'm not on the autism spectrum, but there's some intersectionality with seeing this used against people who have depression, where people often act like shits to people who "diagnose themselves using quizzes on the internet" when a GP will give them the EXACT SAME QUIZ and an official diagnosis afterwards. I haven't seen the empathy-excuse-thing here by anyone who self-identifies on the spectrum but I have occasionally seen it used dismissively by people who aren't, and that contributes to stigma that actively makes already marginalized peoples' lives worse.
posted by NoraReed at 4:56 PM on May 21, 2015 [11 favorites]

SomethingAwful is a very strange place. It's always amused me how much their site culture is almost exactly the direct opposite of MeFi, and in fact their forums function in a way directly opposite as well. But as someone who hangs out there a lot, I can safely say that the basic values of most users on the site are suprisingly similar; it's very hard to pick up on if you're not comfortable with the way at least everything goons say is at least three levels of irony deep, but if anything, it's more generally liberal and anti-misogynist. Very different mode of expression, for what I suspect come down to some demographic issues that are mostly class and age based, but MeFites and Goons share a lot of the same basic assumptions that, as Ivan Fyodorovich has pointed out, the "Rest of the Web" absolutely does not. They express those values in a way that's probably incomprehensible to outsiders, but they do share them and act on them.

I'm pretty comfortable saying that if anyone had pulled anything close to what localroger did in one of the parts of their forums that was for serious-grownups-are-having-conversations-here discussion, particularly a woman-centric thread, he would have been shitcanned pretty much instantaneously.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 5:11 PM on May 21, 2015 [5 favorites]

I should make clear I'm not saying "MetaFilter should be more like SomethingAwful!!" or "MetaFilter modding is worse than SomethingAwful's!!"; I'm just saying that the current two-dozen-strikes-and-you-might-or-might-not-be-out general mod policy of forgiveness, education, leniency, second changes, etc, does have an opportunity cost in cases like this. It's not actually a universal good all of the time, even if it's part of a site culture that does make MeFi unique and Considerably-Better-Than-Average-of-the-Web.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 5:14 PM on May 21, 2015 [6 favorites]

it's more generally liberal and anti-misogynist.

That has not been my experience. Not even close. But it's kind of like Reddit where you can point to one forum that is completely disgusting and another that is relatively okay. Metafilter has a much more homogeneous site culture.
posted by Drinky Die at 5:22 PM on May 21, 2015

That has not been my experience. Not even close. But it's kind of like Reddit where you can point to one forum that is completely disgusting and another that is relatively okay. Metafilter has a much more homogeneous site culture.

It's basically my experience of every part of the forums outside of GBS/FYAD/etc. Even in GBS, to a certain degree. The way they express themselves is incredibly offensive, particularly in the generalist parts, but even there, go into the political discussions and it's really, really liberal. Even moderates are basically outliers. An awful lot of their disdain for Reddit is for basically political reasons, too.

Their sports threads are 100% the least misogynist/most-pro-women I've ever been involved in, which is saying a whole lot.

But, I mean, we can debate which-userbase-is-more-uniform-in-its-leftward-political leanings; they're still much more aggressive about deleting gross rape and pedo and other shit outside of the "anything goes" boards.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 5:30 PM on May 21, 2015

That "outside of..." is doing a lot of work there. :P (And current GBS is a total cesspit.)

But anyway, I'm pretty sure LR's comment would have stood in TVIV. Plenty of similar comments to his can be found in the current GoT discussions there. And hell, have you heard of "The Bad Thread" in The Book Barn? Anyway, this is derailey so enough said from me.
posted by Drinky Die at 5:36 PM on May 21, 2015

Actually, "The Bad Thread" basically had a discourse that was exactly the Horrible GoT Thread like in miniature, where in one commenting A GLISTENING HODOR (hero of the people) was like "man hey what's wrong with all these people who are just now getting horrified at how rapey the show is?" and then like ten comments later he was like "hmm, [works it out for himself], actually I guess I get i!!" It was like fucking magical. No one even needed to laboriously educate him while keeping on their super polite face or anything!

And then everyone sat around seething about the possibility of Maisie Williams having to do a rape scene and comparing Dorne to a telenovella, comparitively speaking to the thread on the Blue it was great.

But hey, they use a lot of slang and ironically offensive language and don't pretend everything is a fucking seminar, clearly it's a cesspool, unlike MetaFilter: feminist utopia.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 5:46 PM on May 21, 2015 [7 favorites]

(Longtime readers may remember A GLISTENING HODOR as the lead figure in SA's attack on Reddit which forced Reddit admins to close r/jailbait among several other such subreddits and admit that hey, maybe child pornography is something Reddit shouldn't be hosting. Redditors have never forgiven.)
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:50 PM on May 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

Ahh, I see they did finally, after years, end the bad thread stuff. It was pretty much just the rape jokes and lemoncakes thread back in the day. My mistake.
posted by Drinky Die at 5:57 PM on May 21, 2015

They still make fun of show watchers relentlessly. It's delightful.

They were the ones who coined "stabbed in the bab(b)y" to pithily express utter disdain for the over-the-top violence and gratuitousness of that scene and plot change.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 6:00 PM on May 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

Sounds like it could be an interesting site, but every time I've gone to have a look because it was mentioned here it tries to crawl inside my eyeballs and tear out my retinas. Shame.
posted by uosuaq at 6:41 PM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

I like MetaFilter, SA, and my own curated portions of Reddit. Each place has its own way of being.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:54 PM on May 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

I know the mods are "recalibrating" how they approach this multiple-multiple-multiple-chances thing, but perhaps they could look into recalibrating their recalibrating.

It really looks like if I wanted to be a gross and trollish asshole, and if I had the social skills to adjust my approach based on warnings and feedback, that I could probably sustain it without a banning for a very long time.

There is a lot that is wonderful about the moderation approach that has been developed here over the years -- it is thoughtful and skilled and supports a high level of discourse. But in this one respect, I think the jerkwads have outflanked the moderation approach and are taking advantage of that same care and consideration.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:56 PM on May 21, 2015 [8 favorites]

... or we'll just always have jerkwads. Free discourse's other shoe dropping. Or as the Margarita Master put it ...

the [...] general mod policy of forgiveness, education, leniency, second changes, etc, does have an opportunity cost in cases like this. It's not actually a universal good all of the time, even if it's part of a site culture that does make MeFi unique and Considerably-Better-Than-Average-of-the-Web..

I prefer the site that errs on the side of encouraging free discourse and thus inevitably allows some assholism to thrive. It ain't universally good, but what is?
posted by philip-random at 12:14 AM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

The thing is that this "some assholism" isn't cost-free. By choosing the "some assholes" option, you're choosing the "fewer women, people of color, gay people, and trans people" option. Why would you rather have assholes then those good folks?
posted by KathrynT at 12:26 AM on May 22, 2015 [40 favorites]

Here's what I don't get. If we'll "always have jerkwads", if the premise we're supposed to accept here is that some people are going to be assholes about this no matter what, why do we have to let Mefi be their platform? Because the end result is that women and their allies are then always put in the position of pushing back against those jerkwads and never getting anywhere, like Sisyphus. And...why? Because "discourse"?

Is this entertaining to some of you? Is it really that important to pat yourselves on the back for free speech? Does it make you feel secure to know that there will never be any real pushback on misogyny, so as long as you aren't as bad as "the real assholes", you never have to question yourselves?

I can accept that I may never be able to do anything about folks who are really hellbent on calling women sluts or whatever, but what is really hard for me to understand is all of the people here who think it's ~so important~ that they be able to spout off their shit and then women will come in and spend their time and energy pushing back and then that makes it okay.
posted by kagredon at 1:41 AM on May 22, 2015 [32 favorites]

One problem with allowing some assholism: it hits some of us harder than others. That's because some of us are more protected by privilege, while others are inherently playing life on a harder setting. Those people are already dealing with more assholism in daily life, and there's only so much a person can handle, or is willing to handle, especially on a site that's supposed to be fun/interesting/entertaining.
So it seems reasonable to assume that those of us who are likely to be driven away by this low-level assholism are those who lack that level of privilege. In other words, the site will become more white cismales from the US, less everyone else.
Less diversity. More freedom to be a jerkwad. Is that a good deal? Are you sure?

In yet other words, I agree with KathrynT and kagredon because of logic.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:04 AM on May 22, 2015 [20 favorites]

I prefer the site that errs on the side of encouraging free discourse and thus inevitably allows some assholism to thrive.

privilege.txt
posted by NoraReed at 2:16 AM on May 22, 2015 [25 favorites]

Oops! I meant heterosexual, neurotypical white cismales from the US. Sorry.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:20 AM on May 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think that's a false dichotomy. Letting assholes be free to be assholes actually means more restricted discourse for some of us.
posted by almostmanda at 5:21 AM on May 22, 2015 [19 favorites]

It's easy to prefer the site/place/society that errs on the side of a little prejudice when you are not the object of said prejudice.
posted by Tarumba at 5:49 AM on May 22, 2015 [15 favorites]

Beyond that, haven't we already had the "but free speech!" go-round in this thread a few times over already? What is new this time?

Isn't this "same argument many times over" dynamic one of the things we're trying to address?
posted by DingoMutt at 5:51 AM on May 22, 2015 [11 favorites]

I prefer the site that errs on the side of encouraging free discourse and thus inevitably allows some assholism to thrive. It ain't universally good, but what is?

To be more specific, I am totally ok with a certain level of assholism and strife. Where I wish a sharper line was drawn is on people being gross. I see something very different between a person who takes things a step too far in political arguments or who likes to be a tad provocative in their rhetoric, and someone who deliberately (in most cases, I have come to think) or accidentally says gross things.

The first really is part of open discourse, but tolerating grossness is just not something I am interested in at this point in my life. There have been and continue to be a fairly small set of users who have learned how to stay just this side of the line in terms of the current moderation policy, while having an outsized impact on the site culture. Some of them have been banned, but usually only after being exceedingly gross for a very long period of time and playing roles in making smart and interesting people either leave or reduce their participation.

So if there was to be a recalibration, I'd love it to be on that specific element: is this person being consistently gross? If so, let them go on to be gross somewhere else, because that person is a net cost to the site, not a benefit in any way.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:52 AM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Where I wish a sharper line was drawn is on people being gross.

With the caveat that what is gross varies from person to person, so obviously some community definition of grossness should apply.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:55 AM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Isn't that exactly what's been said over and over in this thread? Don't call women sluts, tramps, whores etc. explicitly or by implication. That would be a great place to start.
posted by h00py at 6:00 AM on May 22, 2015 [9 favorites]

Is it really that important to pat yourselves on the back for free speech?

we've had enough of these conversations in the past 50 metas on the topic, and in this one, i'm comfortable saying people will answer 'yes' to this rhetorical, also 'diversity of viewpoints'. i'm actually not completely unsympathetic, for the reasons that Dip Flash stated.

but i'll put it more concretely: should Decani, 0, TFB, sgt serenity, omdtlp, and corcovado (is that everyone? i think that's everyone) not have been banned, and do you think the tramp stamp and GoT threads went well, and do you want threads like those to keep finding a place on metafilter? do you think this is a wrong direction for metafilter to go in?

i think there are still people who will answer yes to that, but i think it will look somewhat more embarrassing and tone deaf to do so. and that should tell you something about the free speech argument if you're literally supporting the continuation of people like that consistently shitting up mefi, instead of making vague plausible arguments that you could drag out for another 1000 comments.

(i also think we're not really hearing from those folks in this thread. they're out there, but strictly practically speaking, this is a hard thread to continue engaging in if you take a certain stance and take it too far--see amorphatist, localroger, bannings, also it is huge and unwieldy. i'm guessing most who disagree consider this thread a lost cause. if the moderation needle is actually moved, probably there will be a meta in our future in the vein of metafilter: the end? the echo chamber has won? for which i will bring the potato salad.)
posted by twist my arm at 6:05 AM on May 22, 2015 [18 favorites]

Beyond that, haven't we already had the "but free speech!" go-round in this thread a few times over already? What is new this time?

Isn't this "same argument many times over" dynamic one of the things we're trying to address?
posted by DingoMutt at 12:51 PM on May 22 [2 favorites +] [!]


If each viewpoint was only allowed to be stated once this would have been a much shorter thread.
posted by Reggie Knoble at 6:36 AM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

And many of us wouldn't be half as worn down as we are now.
posted by Too-Ticky at 6:41 AM on May 22, 2015 [8 favorites]

You know, Dip Flash, the assholishness wears people who are constantly dealing with assholes in their daily life down too, even if it is "only" about politics.
posted by corb at 6:51 AM on May 22, 2015

Speaking of people arguing in bad faith, trying to claim that someone asking that we not have the same argument many times over is stating that each viewpoint is only allowed to be stated once seems to be a prime example.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:59 AM on May 22, 2015 [12 favorites]

> I meant heterosexual, neurotypical white cismales from the US.

I would just like to point out that "assholishness" comes in many flavors, not just this one.
posted by I am the Walrus at 7:03 AM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

It is in perfectly good faith.

We aren't having the same argument over and over. The original argument never ended and people are continuing to have their say. They don't have to have a completely unique, never before made point in order to do that.
posted by Reggie Knoble at 7:09 AM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

The point isn't that assholishness only comes from one source. It clearly does not.
The point is that it hits some of us harder than others.
posted by Too-Ticky at 7:11 AM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

If there's a discussion about circumnavigating the world and people keep coming into the argument to talk about how the theory of the celestial spheres is important, the Ptolemaic folks can be as earnest as the day is long but it's still a pointless derail.
posted by winna at 7:24 AM on May 22, 2015 [17 favorites]

Followup: or, more to the point, that by trying to work out a way to have fewer of them or have them be dealt with more effectively we're losing... what, some asshole's rhapsodious analysis of why a rape scene totally was or wasn't titillating?

Chilling effect, echo chamber, open discourse, what the fuck ever: these arguments would be a lot easier to take in good faith and not as a derail if the people who made them ever actually put forth a legitimate and reasonable example of just what they think is actually threatened by a change in modding. I've never seen it happen, and until I do, I'm just going to keep on keepin' on assuming that most of what they're afraid of losing isn't some higher level discourse, it's just the right to have their dick out while commenting.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 7:39 AM on May 22, 2015 [12 favorites]

If there's a discussion about circumnavigating the world and people keep coming into the argument to talk about how the theory of the celestial spheres is important, the Ptolemaic folks can be as earnest as the day is long but it's still a pointless derail.
posted by winna at 2:24 PM on May 22 [4 favorites +] [!]

And if there is a discussion in MeTa about moderation standards a comment about moderation standards isn't a pointless derail.

You don't have to agree with it and you don't have to like it but pretending that is a derail is just ridiculous.
posted by Reggie Knoble at 7:43 AM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Comment nixed, once you're framing complaints about gross behavior by speculating accusatorially about mefites' secret erections we're into totally unworkable counter-grossness territory that needs to not happen.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:44 AM on May 22, 2015 [13 favorites]

You don't have to agree with it and you don't have to like it but pretending that is a derail is just ridiculous.

Pretending that a privately-held website has to adhere to the ideal of free speech is ridiculous.

metafilter could insist that all comments be villanelles about dust bunnies; there is no right to speech here. Appealing to a U.S.-based misconception about free speech in the context of a discussion about website norms is specious and (what is worse) boring.
posted by winna at 8:04 AM on May 22, 2015 [27 favorites]

Timestamp question. localroger is showing as disabled and it looks like it was 24 hours and 51 minutes ago he got banned for a day. Does banned for a day mean 24 hours and he got an extension? Did his ban expire and he auto-disabled himself in the last 51 minutes?
posted by bukvich at 8:05 AM on May 22, 2015

He asked to have it closed down entirely the same day we gave him the timeout.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:06 AM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

probably there will be a the leventy-teenth meta in our future in the vein of metafilter: the end? the echo chamber has won?

It's predictable as the sunset, but it doesn't mean it's worth worrying about. It looks to me like we lose many more users who make substantive, positive contributions to the community by tolerating high levels of misogyny than by moderation of people who use the ideal of free speech as a banner under which to deploy subtle forms of hate speech and microaggression.
posted by Miko at 8:21 AM on May 22, 2015 [22 favorites]

It looks to me like we lose many more users who make substantive, positive contributions to the community by tolerating high levels of misogyny than by moderation of people who use the ideal of free speech as a banner under which to deploy subtle forms of hate speech and microaggression.

Yes, and threads like this tend to weed out the latter herds a bit, which is positive.
posted by zarq at 8:39 AM on May 22, 2015 [5 favorites]

metafilter could insist that all comments be villanelles about dustbunnies

Pony request!
posted by running order squabble fest at 8:51 AM on May 22, 2015 [10 favorites]

Comment nixed, once you're framing complaints about gross behavior by speculating accusatorially about mefites' secret erections we're into totally unworkable counter-grossness territory that needs to not happen.

Okay, fair enough. What's kind of funny to me, not funny ha-ha but funny oh-god-if-I-don't-laugh-I'll-cry, is that after I posted that comment I went "man, I believe every word I said but that imagery was probably over the top, I hope it doesn't trigger anyone, I really should have been more neutral given the overall context of the thread". Then you deleted it, and your modding apparently didn't even take that angle into consideration at all. You're straight up modding entirely from the perspective and in defense of the kind of guys who make those comments. It's not encouraging.

Could you at least acknowledge that there's something kind of gross itself in telling a bunch of survivors of rape and sexual assault who are feeling uncomfortable and unwelcome at best because of the endless parade of this shit, shit which right now you guys haven't been doing the best job of dealing with effectively*, "let the Proper Authorities deal with it, in the meantime don't you dare impugn the pure and noble motives of the dude not just speculating about but insisting that he knows what sexual positions you enjoy for making such a comment"? Is this really a dynamic you think is "workable" in the longterm? Can you at least see the implications? Next time this happens, especially if it turns into yet another third-fourth-fifth-seventeeth chance solution, just how many women/survivors/[insert other privilege dynamic here] users are you okay with telling "let the proper authorities deal with it, but if you get too angry about it don't let the door hit you on the way out"?

I'd like to hope things will get better instead of worse. But look, whatever reasons LR had for leaving, he got to do it on his own terms and I'm not at all sure that's a good sign for a positive change in direction. "You may be at least this gross about rape and still continue to ride the ride"; probably not indefinitely, but I think if a single day's timeout for that whole incident is the best that can be expected, we're all in for a whole lot more of this shit. We could have a whole other discussion about the power of precedent and common law and how those expectations shape people's idea of what's fair or just and how that can effect not just what people are willing to accept in terms of sanctions but also what authorities are willing to enforce.

I know that the current state of failure or backsliding or whatever we want to call it is as much a question of time and resources as it is what I'd say are failed policies. I also know it's not anything to do with intent, since if I doubted that I wouldn't be bothering to make this comment in the first place. Combined with the way you're handling this, though... I don't know. This all just feels off, somehow, like there's a massive misalignment of what you say and what you are doing.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 8:53 AM on May 22, 2015 [7 favorites]

The point is that it hits some of us harder than others.

You're right, but it hits some of us harder than others regardless of the motivation behind it. It doesn't really matter if the guy deliberately being an asshole and trying to make a woman feel bad about her thoughts or opinions is trying to make her feel bad because she's a woman or not; at the end of the day he is just another asshole trying to make her feel bad about what he feels is her incorrect ladythinks. And there are certainly a lot of those she's already dealing with.

Cutting down on all assholish behavior protects specially impacted groups too and maybe even more - because it also cuts down on aggro behavior regardless of intention.
posted by corb at 8:53 AM on May 22, 2015

It doesn't really matter if the guy deliberately being an asshole and trying to make a woman feel bad about her thoughts or opinions is trying to make her feel bad because she's a woman or not

It may not matter to you. It matters to me.
posted by kagredon at 8:55 AM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

I mean, it matters for a lot of things, but it doesn't matter as much in terms of impact for some of us, and I don't think it should matter in how it's treated.
posted by corb at 8:56 AM on May 22, 2015

.I prefer the site that errs on the side of encouraging free discourse and thus inevitably allows some assholism to thrive. It ain't universally good, but what is?

A. My apologies for posting this and then just disappearing. Something came up at home that had to be dealt with. Then I fell asleep. Hope it didn't feel like a driveby. And for the record, if I could go back in time and reword the bit about allowing some assholism to thrive to "allowing some assholism to trickle through", I would.

B. No, no and no to this ...

Is this entertaining to some of you? Is it really that important to pat yourselves on the back for free speech? Does it make you feel secure to know that there will never be any real pushback on misogyny, so as long as you aren't as bad as "the real assholes", you never have to question yourselves?

And not just personal no's, also a kind of objective no (certainly to the last one), because I believe that we are seeing some real pushback on misogyny, and have been for years. Though I'm not for a second arguing that we shouldn't see more, maybe a lot more. I've read pretty much all of this thread. I'm not that thick.

The question for me that has to be asked is best outlined here in what TMAMM said:

It's not actually a universal good all of the time, even if it's part of a site culture that does make MeFi unique and Considerably-Better-Than-Average-of-the-Web..

that is, the line we're walking is between that freedom that allows one to become reckless (or worse) and thus clearly abusive (even if they don't mean it), and that freedom that has allowed Metafilter to be Considerably-Better-Than-Average-of-the-Web. I don't think we'd be deep into a novel length Meta if it were remotely easy to quickly decide which is which all the time for all community members ...

But I think that the three comments starting here suggest where to start.
posted by philip-random at 9:04 AM on May 22, 2015

Then you deleted it, and your modding apparently didn't even take that angle into consideration at all. You're straight up modding from the perspective and in defense of the kind of guys who make those comments. It's not encouraging.

Oh, bull. It was a gross, out-of-line comment that you shouldn't have made. It should not require some explicit disclaimer that other people's shitty behavior is also shitty, in a thread where that has been acknowledged a ton, to be able to say don't write gross boner fantasies about people you don't like. Framing this as some white-knighting-for-jerks failure of moderation rather than just a case of straight up super poor judgement on your part there is a crappy dodge of personal responsiblity.

There are a ton of useful and constructive things people, including you, have said in this thread to further the goal of doing better about curtailing repeat crappy/gross behavior on the site, but that comment was not in any way one of them and does not deserve a defense.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:05 AM on May 22, 2015 [28 favorites]

corb: It doesn't really matter if the guy deliberately being an asshole and trying to make a woman feel bad about her thoughts or opinions is trying to make her feel bad because she's a woman or not; at the end of the day he is just another asshole trying to make her feel bad about what he feels is her incorrect ladythinks. And there are certainly a lot of those she's already dealing with.

Motivation can matter, and I don't think it should be dismissed so easily. It can affect how people feel about whether the person making a questionable comment should be handled. Whether they should be given the benefit of the doubt or not. And whether their behaviour has breached a threshold after which the mods feel Something Must Be Done.
posted by zarq at 9:05 AM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

You're straight up modding entirely from the perspective and in defense of the kind of guys who make those comments. It's not encouraging.

I think that's of crappy thing to say to and about cortex. LRs comment should have been deleted, I think people are in agreement about that. And I think the mods are looking at ways to communicate more effectively about those sorts of "this is your last chance" sorts of pronouncements so that sort of thing won't happen again.

I'd say the modding is coming from significantly more of a "There are some types of comments that we don't allow from anyone regardless of whether we generally agree with their views or not" perspective. And I realize that is what's being discussed/debated at this point. But I feel like going back to principles: MeFi isn't a safe space. It's fine if people are mindful in their own comments about triggers and similarly graphic statements, but that's a per-user thing for them but something that gets moderated on a per-comment basis based on more overarching principles over time which is a very real factor.

But at the heart of this issue is whether people should be able to respond to difficult/problematic/triggering content with things that are also difficult/problematic/triggering. And there's a sense of unfairness that LRs crappy comment should get to stand while other similar comments that may be more understanding/mindful of this large situation don't. And people will have to decide how they feel about that and what's most effective on pushing back on casual misogyny and sexism. Turning on the mods is not going to get you there.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 9:06 AM on May 22, 2015 [23 favorites]

I prefer the site that errs on the side of encouraging free discourse and thus inevitably allows some assholism to thrive.

O.k., but the thing that always seems to get overlooked by people who say that the price of free discourse is some assholes, is that allowing some assholes to be assholes implies that the site is not allowing others. Given that, I think it's perfectly reasonable to have a discussion about what kind of assholes aren't allowed.

I also think that if we're going to get all transactional about what ideals we support, that I'd prefer a site that attempts to give various people breathing room from some of the general micro-aggressions they deal with everywhere else, even if that means that others pay the price of not being able to say everything we may want without thinking about it (on a personal level, I think that part is actually a bonus, as I try and get more careful with my speech and actions, it's REALLY helpful for me to have a place where I have time to consider what I'm saying, and that I know I'll get called on anything crappy that makes it through my filter).

I value hearing people who don't get as much room to speak everywhere else over the people used to getting the hecklers veto and calling it free speech.
posted by Gygesringtone at 9:11 AM on May 22, 2015 [15 favorites]

I mean, it matters for a lot of things, but it doesn't matter as much in terms of impact for some of us, and I don't think it should matter in how it's treated.

I guess I should clarify a bit since in general I think ultimately moderation has to be mostly intent-agnostic, given the mods aren't mind-readers: I agree with what Miko says in this comment: the additional context of misogyny matters beyond the "interpersonal" aspect of being a jerk to someone. There is an impact on the environment and culture of the site that occurs when misogynist comments are allowed to stand, even if they aren't directed at a particular user and even if they're couched in "polite" language. I think the issue of how to deal with people just kind of being jerks to each other is largely orthogonal and not really the best way to approach this.

that is, the line we're walking is between that freedom that allows one to become reckless (or worse) and thus clearly abusive (even if they don't mean it), and that freedom that has allowed Metafilter to be Considerably-Better-Than-Average-of-the-Web. I don't think we'd be deep into a novel length Meta if it were remotely easy to quickly decide which is which all the time for all community members ...

"women with lower back tattooos are stupid/low-class/slutty"
"please do not make specious and insulting generalizations about women"
(repeat with minor variations 3-4 times)
Is that really the most interesting and edifying version of the thread you can imagine? Is it desirable to have any thread about women potentially become variations on that conversation? I mean, you're here and not on your local newspaper comments section, so presumably you think that moderation and community norms/meta-conversations play some kind of role in facilitating good discussion and that "discourse" ≠ "free-for-all". What do you think is lost if we break the loop on these kinds of conversations?

And not just personal no's, also a kind of objective no (certainly to the last one), because I believe that we are seeing some real pushback on misogyny, and have been for years. Though I'm not for a second arguing that we shouldn't see more, maybe a lot more. I've read pretty much all of this thread. I'm not that thick.

A lot of that pushback is being met with "oh, but we can't do anything about it." The pushback you're citing isn't enough if the dominant community response is still to allow any rando with $5 and an axe to grind about sluts to throw bombs into threads and then sit back when women respond with hurt and outrage and say "mmm yes how interesting, how great this discourse is."

Most of the people in this thread acting like some dude speculating on what sex women with LBTs enjoy is goddamn Mary Beth Tinker are not the same people who are dropping poisonous misogyny into threads about women. But that makes me wonder why they they're okay with this dynamic in which a different group of users do that and then women and their allies are left with the shitwork of pushing back on it instead of maybe getting to have a discussion of a thing.

If my and other people's pushback in-thread on misogyny is considered of equal value to the shitty lazy knee-jerk misogyny that we're pushing back on, then fuck it, this isn't the community I thought it was and it's not a community I want to be part of.
posted by kagredon at 9:48 AM on May 22, 2015 [21 favorites]

You know, I came into this thread advocating more bannings and fewer chances ("Give a warning and then, the next time, ban them, imho" was my first comment above), but I am leaving it with a different opinion.

As a feminist on MetaFilter, I don't want to be forced out or outshouted by men who marginalize my voice because they accept their point of view as the dominant one. And in the past I have not liked it when I've read a thread and come out of it feeling like an object or a person who is "less than." It's demeaning and hurtful.

Then I would come to MetaTalk to hash it out with people in good faith, only to be laughed at and treated dismissively by a portion of the userbase who thought it was okay to call women users cunts or load up threads about female athletes with "I'd hit it" comments that reduced them to their sex parts. The mockery was the double whammy for me; I'd come to MetaTalk for a hearing and it would feel like a lot people were shutting me out because they knew what I was going to say and it was beneath them.

But it has been a long time since I have been mocked or dismissed for being a feminist on MetaFilter. Nobody calls me a cunt anymore. I'm not labeled oversensitive or told to "Get out if you don't like it" (2008) for arguing that a post is inappropriate for MetaFilter because it feels demeaning and objectifying. My arguments are heard now, and really listened to. I just need to make them.

The needle on the dial has certainly moved. And I agree with dialetheia that the LBT thread was a surprising step back. I don't think it actually went back to Boyzone 2005, but I agree certain comments should have been deleted. And cortex and the mods have agreed to move the needle back. And I think that's good.

Here is something that I said back in 2004: "It's hard to articulate the issues sometimes, and it's tiring and numbing to be called oversensitive, reactionary, etc., or to just have people whose names you know and respect make snarky asides that belittle your pov, when you've been nothing but earnest throughout the discussion."

Feminists are not shouted out or mocked in MetaTalk anymore. Now we are the ones who are shouting out and mocking the people whose comments we don't like who are honestly trying to figure out what they did wrong. The shouting is coming from inside the house! People who are honestly concerned that we will lose not just sexist voices here but other voices who don't want to participate in a site that might be getting narrower have their arguments reduced to a "freeze peach" joke.

So here we are at the bottom of a boyzone thread, and is it any wonder that practically nobody is left arguing the other side anymore?

I am now not inclined to ban people for what they say in MetaTalk, as opposed to other parts of the site, as long as they are not using slurs or making openly misogynistic etc. statements. If they are trying to "get it" I don't think people should be banned after one or two attempts. Hell, NoraReed thought I was gaslighting her in this thread and compared me to anyms earlier, when that certainly wasn't my intent, so I am frankly much, much more empathetic now to the guys who are being put on the block for banning.

So I am coming out of this thread with a different opinion than I started it with.

One exception I would make, though I'm not sure how workable it is, is for trans issues. I feel like there are now a large number of vocal feminists on the site who can certainly hold their own in a MetaTalk thread. I'm not sure that is true for trans issues and I might be more inclined to have a stricter standard in those MetaTalk threads.
posted by onlyconnect at 9:53 AM on May 22, 2015 [24 favorites]

onlyconnect, I've been on the receiving end of that sort of aggressive reaction and it sucked.

But I was in the wrong. And sometimes when you're wrong it's actually quite valuable to be confronted aggressively with the fact that you're wrong, by multiple people. Especially on topics where your own privilege is being brought into question because people can be incredibly defensive when their conscious or unconscious privilege is threatened.

When it happened to me, I thought one person went way too far, told her so, quit the thread and took a break from the site over it. The rest? They were completely right. Not only were they right to speak aggressively or even harshly and smack me down, I'm grateful they did. Because if they hadn't I probably wouldn't have learned anything. I needed a course correction and got one.

This is going to happen sometimes in conversations about difficult topics, and yes, when we try to hash out ways to deal with site toxicity. Even to allies. Even to people who are wholeheartedly devoted to doing the right thing. They're bumpy conversations. Because we all carry a certain amount of privilege, and sometimes it's hard to see beyond it.

The bar for people being crappy about women is Too Damned High. The bar for people getting a Stern Talking To if they push back is Too Damned Low. For civility's sake, those two things deserve to be reversed. Not just civility. For this site to be a nicer, more welcoming and less traumatic place for women.
posted by zarq at 10:14 AM on May 22, 2015 [26 favorites]

onlyconnect, you and I are veterans of those same battles and you know I have the greatest respect for you. At the same time, I feel like your opinion is getting close to suggesting that because you are no longer uncomfortable here, and you find the atmosphere better than it was a few years ago, everyone who sincerely thinks there's still a problem is being unreasonable. I can agree that it was once worse, but I still think this isn't the MetaFilter it could be because of ongoing microaggression that passes under the radar, and that's a very real form of oppression that, if anything, has amplified since we (and the broader culture) have achieved many more successes on the 'bright line of sexism' front. I think it is perfectly reasonable of today's participants to ask to continue raising the bar. I personally do accept the principle that there is no hierarchy of oppressions, and even if I have a private opinion about who has it badly and who has it worse and whether it was worse or better in the past, I don't think it's a good practice to share that evaluation with others, essentially saying "you [whomever] shouldn't be so offended - you have it easy compared to ____." All of it is bad.

So here we are at the bottom of a boyzone thread, and is it any wonder that practically nobody is left arguing the other side anymore?

What would the 'other side' be? Beyond the 'freeze peach' joke, what are the legitimate arguments for allowing microaggressions to continue? We've heard 'innocent question' (easily corrected with a 'you may not realize this but what you just said is something that has been contentious in the past, here's why, and we recommend you sit back and listen more now'), and I do think that vocal response can handle 'innocent question'....once. But what other legitimate arguments are there for allowing that behavior to continue, even after being advised against it?
posted by Miko at 10:15 AM on May 22, 2015 [28 favorites]

"women with lower back tattooos are stupid/low-class/slutty"
"please do not make specious and insulting generalizations about women"
(repeat with minor variations 3-4 times)
Is that really the most interesting and edifying version of the thread you can imagine?


no.

Is it desirable to have any thread about women potentially become variations on that conversation?

no.

I mean, you're here and not on your local newspaper comments section, so presumably you think that moderation and community norms/meta-conversations play some kind of role in facilitating good discussion and that "discourse" ≠ "free-for-all".

yes.

What do you think is lost if we break the loop on these kinds of conversations

nothing ... if we do it right. And to be clear, I did finish off that comment with a link to the three consecutive comments which I felt went a long way toward defining how we might do it right. A quick summary:

Where I wish a sharper line was drawn is on people being gross. I see something very different between a person who takes things a step too far in political arguments or who likes to be a tad provocative in their rhetoric, and someone who deliberately (in most cases, I have come to think) or accidentally says gross things[...] tolerating grossness is just not something I am interested in at this point in my life. There have been and continue to be a fairly small set of users who have learned how to stay just this side of the line in terms of the current moderation policy, while having an outsized impact on the site culture. [...] if there was to be a recalibration, I'd love it to be on that specific element: is this person being consistently gross? If so, let them go on to be gross somewhere else, because that person is a net cost to the site, not a benefit in any way.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:52 AM on May 22 [1 favorite −] [!]

With the caveat that what is gross varies from person to person, so obviously some community definition of grossness should apply.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:55 AM on May 22 [1 favorite −] [!]

Isn't that exactly what's been said over and over in this thread? Don't call women sluts, tramps, whores etc. explicitly or by implication. That would be a great place to start.
posted by h00py at 6:00 AM on May 22 [7 favorites −] [!]
posted by philip-random at 10:18 AM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Onlyconnect, I hope you don't mind but my curiousity got the better of me and I tracked down what I believe is the 2008 post you were referring to.

It is really, really interesting in terms of how site culture has changed.

I kind of agreed with you having read this 2015 thread (and FWIW I feel like people are leaning on the very helpful and accomodating mods awfully hard in a way I'm not super comfortable with), but then reading that thread... I dunno. If that's the kind of debate we're missing out on, I'm totally ok with that.
posted by selfnoise at 10:20 AM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

It is really, really interesting in terms of how site culture has changed.

This was arguably worse.
posted by zarq at 10:26 AM on May 22, 2015

Also note that Brockles' victim-blaming comment in that thread, saying women need to not wave their breasts in someone's face and "sit the fuck down" was not only heavily favorited but praised.
posted by zarq at 10:30 AM on May 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

By the way, I mention this not to start an argument about Brockles' comment way back then or to rehash the argument being put forth in that thread. But rather to note that in the ensuing 7 years there has been a massive change in not only what is considered tolerable but also what the mods are willing to delete and reprimand people for.

That sea change happened because people expressed themselves with Metatalk posts like that one. Because they were not afraid to speak out or be aggressive. They expressed their discomfort and anger about what they found unacceptable, and as a result, things here changed for the better. The system worked.

I'm not saying that we should all attack each other. But with the benefit of hindsight we know that speaking out loudly and expressing sadness and disgust has made a big difference.
posted by zarq at 10:38 AM on May 22, 2015 [20 favorites]

What would the 'other side' be?

Metafilter does not do competing rights issues very well at all, in general. In discussions we've had where feminism comes up against intellectual freedom or class/race issues, for example.

I'm not going to argue for some stupid whiny MRA shit, but the balances of rights, when they pull in different directions, is most definitely where people of principle can and have disagreed in recent threads. I believe that there should be no trumps or absolutes in working out competing or overlapping rights issues. I'm not sure that I agree that there should strictly be no hierarchy of rights either. Some folks do have it worse than others, multidimensionally, and I think, we need to be aware of that.
posted by bonehead at 10:42 AM on May 22, 2015 [5 favorites]

Going back over those threads, it's interesting to discover how much my own experience of this site has changed, and I have to credit the web for that. As much as people make fun of Tumblr, supposed Social Justice Warriors, and the like, I don't recall ever having heard the phrase microaggression before, and it has made me realize just how alienating the world can be when you are subject to that all the time.

I've been forced, repeatedly, to confront my own unexamined privileges, which has made me much more sensitive to how others experience the world. Participants on this site have made it clear how different their experiences are than mine, and how blind I often am to their experience, and how important it is to be aware of this. I've become painfully aware of how ironic jokes often don't come across as ironic, and how little the intention behind them matters.

I'm not happy with how oblivious I seem in some of those threads, how much of my tone comes across as "I'm a neutral observer just Spocking my way through this," when I was anything but. But, then, being confronted with your own failings is rarely fun, but it the only way we learn.

The result of all this is that those old threads are actually shocking to me -- just how crassly, gleefully sexist they sometimes were, and how actively men told women to shut up when they spoke up for themselves. I'm happy that I never engaged in any of that, but I was sometimes in the background, part of the chorus that didn't take it seriously enough and was happy to say so.

I'm glad it's not that way anymore. I agree with the posters who are concerned that limiting dialogue will have a chilling effect on the quality of the conversation, but I think they are looking at it backwards. Because that was not good conversation, and the people who wanted to have good conversation were minimized or ignored. We drove away diversity when we did stuff like that, but we benefit from diversity. We benefit from other people being able to clearly explain their own experiences and their own ideas without fear of being scolded or shouted down for it.

I have benefited from it. I'm a better person for being able to hear what women, and people of color, and LGBT people, and others have to say, because I have not had their experience and cannot know it except from them. I want them to be welcome here, just as I want to be welcome here, and the sites moderation policies -- which are critiqued ad nauseum by people who think conversation is a contact sport -- have contributed to that.
posted by maxsparber at 10:45 AM on May 22, 2015 [36 favorites]

It's probably not a coincidence that the term "tramp stamp" comes from the same time period as those threads. That might be contributing to the retrograde attitudes in the 2015 thread--it's a term that evokes the mid-2000s and has kind of fallen out of favor, so it makes sense that a lot of people wouldn't have reassessed it since.
posted by almostmanda at 10:54 AM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

I kind of agreed with you having read this 2015 thread (and FWIW I feel like people are leaning on the very helpful and accomodating mods awfully hard in a way I'm not super comfortable with), but then reading that thread... I dunno. If that's the kind of debate we're missing out on, I'm totally ok with that.

Right that's my point. That's not happening anymore! It's frankly inconceivable that we we would ever return to that dark, dark place! Hurray!

But I read the comments dismissive to my point of view in that thread, and some of it sounds like what we're saying to men in this thread who are just trying to "get it." So is it any surprise that a lot of those men have left this thread?

I can't speak to all the arguments re what do we lose if we move the needle even further over than where it's been reset to now, particularly since I'm heading out on a trip. But it says something to me that a lot of the people who could have done so either aren't in the thread anymore because we've shouted them down or are understandably unwilling to be seen as the poster boys for attacks on feminism here.

I'm sorry that I'm not responding more fully but I really am heading out.
posted by onlyconnect at 10:56 AM on May 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

Nixing assholish commenting and issuing timeouts or bans for repeating that behavior does not hamper "discourse", which is a frankly hilarious way to describe some of the more odious comments in the LBT thread. Discourse is people with mutual respect for each other exchanging ideas in a respectful manner, even if they vehemently disagree. Being an asshole is just being an asshole. I am baffled that people would expect to be able to act like an asshole without censure or being shown the door in an online community when you could hardly do the same in a great many offline communities. Groups of people talking together, even in heated disagreement, usually don't abide assholes in the discussion for the sake of "discourse". This isn't rocket science/brain surgery.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 11:00 AM on May 22, 2015 [20 favorites]

If men have left the thread, there's no reason to assume that they did so because they are offended or feel it's impossible to speak in a respectful manner. Perhaps they did so because they are recognizing a moment to sit back and listen, or to take a break and think it over, and do the kind of reflection maxsparber is talking about as having helped him. It's impossible to interpret silence, but there's no reason to think that it represents hundreds of people running off in a huff. It might be the sound of thoughtfulness.
posted by Miko at 11:02 AM on May 22, 2015 [27 favorites]

And a great many of the comments dropped in here don't strike me as "but I'm just trying to get it" so much as "but I really want to push this hobby horse through the crowd without bothering to consider or read anything already discussed". Moreover, I disagree with the general idea that there's been a recurring theme in this thread of reasonable men asking reasonable questions being shouted down by hair-trigger feminists. But I guess interpretations vary.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 11:06 AM on May 22, 2015 [10 favorites]

My silence for the last 500+ comments has not been for lack of interest. It's been a gesture of respect.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:08 AM on May 22, 2015 [28 favorites]

My silence has been due to general agreement of being a welcoming place for all and being unwilling to argue to side points that seem to come down to individual perspectives.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:21 AM on May 22, 2015 [8 favorites]

I don't know if I've learned anything new so far but there is development going on and that is important to observe. This seems to be a pretty pivotal MetaTalk.
posted by charred husk at 11:22 AM on May 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

Timestamp question. localroger is showing as disabled and it looks like it was 24 hours and 51 minutes ago he got banned for a day. Does banned for a day mean 24 hours and he got an extension? Did his ban expire and he auto-disabled himself in the last 51 minutes?

IIRC, an account won't show as disabled during a temporary ban. You can assume the account action is a button or perma ban if you see it marked that way.
posted by Drinky Die at 11:28 AM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

I have nothing to add to this conversation except more etymology stuff, but I'll leave that be and just continue to listen.
posted by josher71 at 11:30 AM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Being an asshole is just being an asshole. I am baffled that people would expect to be able to act like an asshole without censure or being shown the door in an online community when you could hardly do the same in a great many offline communities.

I suspect that we're deep enough into this thread for there to be no serious dispute of any of this. But it still leaves us with the problem of defining assholish behavior on the run, as it were. That is, you've got a full-on discourse happening on a controversial topic where emotions are mixing it up with calculations and opinions and ... stuff happens. It may be deliberate, it may just be ignorance, there likely won't even be consensus on whether it's assholish or not.

What I've come to love about Metafilter is how it generally manages to walk the tightrope of managing all of this without either A. turning into a toxic bullyzone, or B. going all homogeneously friction-free.

As Jessamyn put it a while back:

I feel like going back to principles: MeFi isn't a safe space. It's fine if people are mindful in their own comments about triggers and similarly graphic statements, but that's a per-user thing for them but something that gets moderated on a per-comment basis based on more overarching principles over time which is a very real factor.

In this particular thread, I guess I've been one of those arguing in the direction of not letting the bullyzone concerns completely trump the homogeneity concerns. If this has caused offense, I'm sorry for not presenting myself more thoughtfully.
posted by philip-random at 11:41 AM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

My lack of commenting has been due to traveling.

And, for what it's worth, I agree with Aya Hirano... immediately above. Replying to a poster is not necessarily "shouting down," and, when everyone disagrees with you, it's not necessarily because of your principled stance or their incomprehension. Sometimes, you are wrong.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:57 AM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

My lack of commenting has been because I've just been reading along and learning thanks to the "add to activity" button.

Add to Activity^TM: Letting people listen, just listen, since 2014. Seriously, it's okay to not have anything to say for once.
posted by Think_Long at 12:21 PM on May 22, 2015 [14 favorites]

not letting the bullyzone concerns trump the homogeneity concerns

The problem is that the bullyzone (nice, btw!) concerns are real but the homogeneity concerns are not. By which I mean that it is possible to stamp out the boyzone tendencies of the site (in theory) but it isn't possible to make this a homogenous site. Even if every assholish comment was nuked the second it appeared, and the user banned 4 lyfe, what would remain would not be a place free of discourse or dissent. As has been said already, in this thread and others, there is no True Feminism or One Trans* Opinion or The Black Voice etc. Hell, there's generally someone in a cute animals thread who comes in to say that actually the tiny tortoise eating the tiny pancake looks like it actually might be malnourished. So even if we were MetaFilter: Officially Asshole-Free Since 2015! there will not be a chorus of voices saying exactly the same thing forever. It just means that people will be free to have the genuinely interesting and valuable discourse that some are afraid of losing, without having to waste time and energy trying to make space for their voices to be heard.

If it was an either/or between Boyzone and Bland I might choose the bland, but the good news is I don't have to because the choice is actually between Boyzone and Interesting Discussions. To use the garden metaphor again, pulling up the weeds doesn't mean you end up with only one kind of flower. You end up with a garden where lots of different flowers have room to flourish.
posted by billiebee at 12:29 PM on May 22, 2015 [42 favorites]

IIRC, an account won't show as disabled during a temporary ban. You can assume the account action is a button or perma ban if you see it marked that way.

Oh, interesting, I did not know that. Thank you.
posted by corb at 12:33 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

I recognize that I live a life that is more-or-less easymode. I recognize that there is stuff that others can find offensive, disturbing, and threatening, and I'm working so that I can be able to recognize these kinds of things on my own. Until that point, I've found immense value in taking people at their word when they talk about their feelings and experiences, and metafilter has been an enormous influence on who I am today.

I have also been a moderator and dealt with some pretty toxic people, so I have some familiarity.

For me, this really boils down to the following:

Metafilter is a site intended to promote and facilitate discussion.

If you are talking and no one is paying attention, that is not a discussion.

If you have been talking and now nobody wants to talk with you, you are not having a discussion.

If you have been having a discussion by reiterating the same points over and over, you are not participating in a discussion.

If you are not having a discussion, it probably shouldn't be on Metafilter.

This is not a free-speech issue. Being able to say what you want is not the same thing as having a conversation.
posted by mikurski at 1:27 PM on May 22, 2015 [14 favorites]

It is really, really interesting in terms of how site culture has changed.

This was arguably worse.

I spent some time reading this. It's truly stomach-turning. I keep reading it and it keeps getting worse.

Kind of amazing how many of the flame warriors from this era have disabled accounts. I went through and clicked on profiles when I found a particularly hurtful or disgusting comment and it was maybe 50% either way.

Kind of amazing that I bothered to stick around during that period, even to lurk. If I had read that thread I would probably have written the site off.
posted by selfnoise at 2:06 PM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

Reading those threads makes me glad I hung out on the Green for years before moving to the Blue.
posted by corb at 2:15 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Kind of amazing how many of the flame warriors from this era have disabled accounts. I went through and clicked on profiles when I found a particularly hurtful or disgusting comment and it was maybe 50% either way.

Some are probably still around under new names, as BND's. But yes, it's very interesting.
posted by zarq at 2:19 PM on May 22, 2015

For some perspective, that thread was from 2008. Boyzone issues had been going on for a good two-three years before that.

Change takes ages.

If I had bandwidth for a side project, it might be interesting to catalog these threads chronologically on the wiki.
posted by Miko at 2:22 PM on May 22, 2015 [5 favorites]

I have thought about doing that, too. But man, reading those threads gets really depressing.
posted by zarq at 2:27 PM on May 22, 2015

A revealing comment from that thread:


(user), I can dig that you're comparing today to the bad old days and thinking, "hey, it's better now". I think a lot of folks are looking at today and hoping that they'll have the same benefit of anti-nostalgia a similar interval into the future. From that perspective, belittling people who've decided to close their account on a website for not sharing your take on the situation comes off as pretty damned lousy, however comfortable you may be here.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:15 PM on January 24, 2008 [6 favorites +][!]

1. Yuuuuuuuuuuuup.
2. There were bad old days, so days that were significantly worse than this flaming pile of trash thread. Amazing.
posted by selfnoise at 2:28 PM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

In this particular thread, I guess I've been one of those arguing in the direction of not letting the bullyzone concerns completely trump the homogeneity concerns. If this has caused offense, I'm sorry for not presenting myself more thoughtfully.

No offense cause on my part, anyway, and I appreciate you clarifying where you're coming from. Though I have to disagree that homogeneity is anything to be concerned about. This is why:

I bought up online v. offline behaviors because I think it can be helpful in calibrating our expectations. For example, if like 10 or 12 people are in a thread discussing a subject, some in total agreement, some in complete disagreement, and others somewhere in the middle, but all in more or less a respectful space towards one another, and then someone drops into the thread to make some assholish remark, there is invariably going to be pushback, but there is also quite likely going to be someone who cautions, "Hey, wait a minute, what's up with this pile on? Lighten up the groupthink, guys, we have to take the bad with the good to have an open dialogue".

Now let's say 10 or 12 people are sitting around a table at a dinner party discussing a subject, some in total agreement, some in complete disagreement, and others somewhere in the middle, but all in more or less a respectful space towards one another, and then someone walks into the room, puts his ass in the soup and farts, loudly and forcefully. Though he hasn't hurt anyone physically, it would be a pretty safe bet that most people at the table would want this guy shown the door at once. Not so likely is someone speaking up to say, "Whoah, guys, come on. What's up with this hysteria? Let's hear him out. We have to have room for differing points of view here, no matter how repugnant."

So all I'm saying is I see little danger of the creeping menace of homogeneity by pushing back against unhelpful and in many cases hurtful bullying and assholery. And that we should guard our soups closely.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 2:29 PM on May 22, 2015 [8 favorites]

Apologies to the mods for all of the comments I accidentally flagged in those 7-year-old boobs threads.
posted by almostmanda at 2:32 PM on May 22, 2015 [7 favorites]

Yes, I've found more of those threads from 2003 and 2002, but I don't really feel like keeping on digging.

What's interesting about them is that yes, there is less in the way of slurs and confident, loud assertions of misogyny, but a lot of the silencing tactics are exactly the same -
-"you're too easily offended/too PC/it's gone too far"
-"this is just how the world/the internet is, you can't change the whole world/internet"
-"but how are people supposed to leeeearn"
-"I would listen to your opposing point of view but you aren't being civil"
-"don't be so serious, these are just jokes, and you're a joyless buzzkill"
-"free speech/echo chamber"
-"you're just trying to get cred from people who think like you"
-"it's true there is a problem but this [example in question] isn't a good example of the problem because [qualifying reasons]"

It's sort of interesting to see where people (including me) were coming from 10 years ago on these issues. There's definitely been movement and a lot of learning and agreement formation... but it doesn't mean we're done. It's like if my mom said "Hey, we did 2nd wave feminism for you, and now you can have any career you want to work your ass off in, and, bonus, prenups! So we're done here!" Not really, no. There are so many ways the impulse to hold the line/roll things back keeps arising, and so many things you can only see as obstacles to equality of access once the bigger boulders are moved out of the way. We don't get to just keep ground once established, we really have to hold it.
posted by Miko at 2:46 PM on May 22, 2015 [32 favorites]

Oops. Shoulda labeled. Sorry, almostmanda. And sorry, mods.
posted by zarq at 2:46 PM on May 22, 2015

I've been laying off commenting for a while because even my attempts to make a positive contribution (as opposed to jokes both offensive and inoffensive) were met not just with disagreement, but with the kind that made it clear that any attempt to follow up would just lead to more talking-past-each-other and wasted column inches. (And since my attempted contributions were about ways we might avoid that kind of thing, I could at least be the change I was looking for, or whatever.)
I'm afraid this might come off as me complaining about one user, or about my hurt feelings, and if this comment gets posted, it's not because I haven't thought about that danger. But I think the not-even-hearing-each-other phenomenon happens more than it needs to, especially when tempers get hot. I think there might be a third "axis" beyond "are we tolerating too many assholes and driving good people away" vs. "are we being too quick to judge/ban", namely "are people even really engaging with each other". (I realize one response to this will be that clever trolls will pretend to engage nicely. I don't have an answer.)
I greatly appreciated onlyconnect's last couple comments (although the responses also made good points) because it felt to me like they were touching on that dynamic -- whether or not I was reading that into them, they were still excellent comments. (The last one introduced the "have people dropped out?" question, which is what I'm following up on, a bit belatedly.)
posted by uosuaq at 3:03 PM on May 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

Oops. Shoulda labeled. Sorry, almostmanda. And sorry, mods.

No, I knew they were old threads---I apparently favorited comments in the really bad one back when it was live!--but still ended up flagging without thinking. I just didn't want the mods to think I expected them to do something about konolia or whatever.
posted by almostmanda at 3:13 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane: "Now let's say 10 or 12 people are sitting around a table at a dinner party discussing a subject, some in total agreement, some in complete disagreement, and others somewhere in the middle, but all in more or less a respectful space towards one another, and then someone walks into the room, puts his ass in the soup and farts, loudly and forcefully. Though he hasn't hurt anyone physically, it would be a pretty safe bet that most people at the table would want this guy shown the door at once. Not so likely is someone speaking up to say, "Whoah, guys, come on. What's up with this hysteria? Let's hear him out. We have to have room for differing points of view here, no matter how repugnant.""

Not that I'm not agreeing with you otherwise, but this is a horrible analogy.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:14 PM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

Thanks for the driveby. The analogy was partly for comedy purposes and not meant to be an example to be argued, but the main point is that it makes little sense that tolerating some bullying/assholery is necessary for a non-homogenous discussion online, when this is not a point people profess in offline situations.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:19 PM on May 22, 2015 [8 favorites]

Those old threads still make me just as sad as they did back then, with the extra bonus sad of awesome women who got run off the site and never came back. I guess I should be glad that other users have become better, more interesting people along the way, some of you under different names modernly. And some of those assholes got banned eventually after many years of that. But mostly, just sad.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:26 PM on May 22, 2015 [9 favorites]

"are people even really engaging with each other"

Well, perhaps you could engage this point. A number of people in this thread (and others) have pointed out that they don't want to be asked to engage the points of people whose points are, or include, oppressive tropes. They have called it "exhausting," doing the "101," "draining," "tiring," "boring," "repetitive," "upsetting," and "discouraging." I feel like a lot of people have said pretty clearly that part of the point of this thread is that perhaps we should not expect women to have to engage these kinds of points that are really beneath effort. And we don't want the site standard to be that we just endure those tropes, because many people won't endure it. They'll just leave. They have left.

So, you may not be arguing that in fact they should engage these points, but it seems like your please to "engage with each other" leads in that direction, since we seem to be engaging with each other fairly well here. I wonder if you could clarify, and perhaps say a few words about how our site expectations could navigate between not requiring people to engage directly with people whose rhetoric is oppressive to them, and not requiring them to turn their heads and quietly tolerate such rhetoric while wading through it in an effort to enjoy other site content, and requiring anything they do say while engaging to be contained within constraints deemed 'civil.'
posted by Miko at 3:28 PM on May 22, 2015 [17 favorites]

I guess "engage" was a bad word choice. (I think I was just trying not to repeat "talking past each other" again.) I meant something along the lines of avoiding a situation where one person is saying "grilled cheese with tomato is way better than plain grilled cheese" and the other person is saying "are you kidding? Picard was *way* better than Kirk!" and they keep going around like that.
posted by uosuaq at 3:38 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane: "Thanks for the driveby. The analogy was partly for comedy purposes and not meant to be an example to be argued, but the main point is that it makes little sense that tolerating some bullying/assholery is necessary for a non-homogenous discussion online, when this is not a point people profess in offline situations."

Yeah, I understood that. I thought the problem with your analogy was that the acceptable behaviour was talking, while the unacceptable behaviour was something completely different, farting in soup, so it was really easy to see the difference and where the clear dividing line is, which is not the case when people talk (or write comments on MetaFilter).
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:46 PM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

one person is saying "grilled cheese with tomato is way better than plain grilled cheese" and the other person is saying "are you kidding? Picard was *way* better than Kirk!" and they keep going around like that.

I don't really disagree that dynamic can sometimes be a thing on Metafilter on a broad range of topics. However, I think this thread is much more focused on the stuff that is just clearly across the line coming from one side. The verbal equivalent of farting in the soup, and yeah, sometimes stuff really is over that line even when verbal stuff can have nuances. It may be talking past each other to a degree not to keep most of the focus there.
posted by Drinky Die at 3:48 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think the thread is *supposed* to be focused on that, and like any thread it can get bogged down when the talking-past thing starts to happen. The one point I'd disagree with you on is that both (or all seven) people can be quite focused on the topic, but they're not hearing each other; i.e. it's not exactly about being "on-topic".
posted by uosuaq at 3:54 PM on May 22, 2015

Let me just add quickly that not-talking-past requires doing your best to express *yourself* clearly, too. I think Miko didn't quite get what I was trying to say, but not because of some assumption that whatever I said had to be stupid and in need of contradiction. "Engage with each other" was a bad choice on my part and sounds worse the more I think about it.
posted by uosuaq at 4:00 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

My bias on this question is that I tend to feel like people identify a problem of "talking past each other" when they're mainly really just disappointed that people don't agree.

Another thing is that sometimes the motion of conversation can look like "talking past" without being that thing. Sometimes, for instance, I read someone's point, take it in, feel like I get it, but in the next comment I don't address it, choosing instead to move beyond it to a new place. I might agree, I might disagree, but there's no need to address every single thing. It doesn't (necessarily) mean I didn't understand or pay attention to their comment, it may mean that it just didn't need addressing. It could get tedious if all comments were detailed breakdowns and responses to previous comments.

Again, I could have this wrong, and maybe you mean something different. Could you give an example of a real-life point in this thread where you saw people "talking past" each other?
posted by Miko at 4:01 PM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

(Male, just reading quiet like, but fwiw my vote goes for mods sharpening their response to sexist bullshit. If I'm afraid of any echo chamber it's the MRA sea lion brigade that dominates the rest of the damn internet. That'll make me leave a site; anti oppression modding will not.)
posted by ead at 4:21 PM on May 22, 2015 [17 favorites]

And to be clear, I did finish off that comment with a link to the three consecutive comments which I felt went a long way toward defining how we might do it right. A quick summary:

I'm going to try to be gentle because I do think you're trying to engage in good faith, but I can't help but note that in a thread with over a thousand comments from women talking about the problems they have with the site and the solutions they'd like to see, you managed to find and quote three men to tell us how to "do it right".

That's not to say that those comments you quoted were bad or anything (I particularly like Dip Flash's take) but your comment reads to me as painfully tone deaf, and especially since you dropped in to tell us how to do it right after leaving a number of (frankly) condescending comments about how people are "ists" with their "isms" or how we're in danger of homogenizing this place with our concerns.

This is really a great example of how to a lot of people, men and women alike, a man saying a thing can sound so much more "reasonable" than a woman saying the exact same damn thing. It's a big part of the problem and it might be worth reflecting on why those men sound so much more reasonable to you.

uosuaq, I honestly don't think that you can easily disconnect your interrupting "jokey" comments from the reception you get when you try to engage earnestly with the conversation. I don't think of you as one of the "problem" people at all, but your "lightening the tone" comments often feel very tone-deaf and disruptive to me. It might be something to keep in mind for future threads because it really burns up a lot of benefit of the doubt that you might otherwise receive.

Kind of amazing how many of the flame warriors from this era have disabled accounts.

It's almost more amazing to me how many are still around saying similar things in slightly more polite terms, especially all the stuff about how MeFi will be a ruined echo chamber if people show more restraint with their sexist pontificating.

onlyconnect, I see where you're coming from but I guess I just strongly disagree with your view of how those old threads went. The people who did most of the shouting were the people arguing for better treatment of women for the most part - that's the way I remember it and that's the way it reads going back to those old threads. The people who didn't want to change the way the site worked didn't need to get as heated because they had complacency and the status quo on their side. In my experience, the people who want to change the status quo almost always get angrier than the people who want to defend it. Reading that boooobs thread (ugh) for example, by far the angriest rhetoric is from people (and actually usually men in those cases, which is interesting) who were really angry about the sexist site dynamics, not from people defending the way things worked - they were just dismissive and shitty, not angry.
posted by dialetheia at 4:21 PM on May 22, 2015 [24 favorites]

(1) You're right that people will often think "well, if you disagree with me, you obviously don't get the obviously true point I was making".

(2) Not responding to someone else isn't what I meant by "talking past each other". I mean responding to someone else, but responding to what *you assume* they were saying rather than what they did, but you assumed wrong because you were in a hurry/you just know this person is always wrong/you're too busy making your point to hear theirs/etc. (As I said above, cases where they expressed themselves poorly don't count.)

(3) I'm not sure it's a great idea to supply examples from this thread, but maybe I could say "the opposite of the comment you just made, where you said "I could be wrong about your intended meaning, and if so, let me know how I can understand it better". That's talking *to* and not past.

(editing for content: this was addressed to Miko)
posted by uosuaq at 4:21 PM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

uosuaq, I honestly don't think that you can easily disconnect your interrupting "jokey" comments from the reception you get when you try to engage earnestly with the conversation.

I agree, and I only left that point out of my comment because it was long enough already.
posted by uosuaq at 4:24 PM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

(3) I'm not sure it's a great idea to supply examples from this thread

Well, that's why I see this latest foray of yours as sort of gaslight-y, because I'm not sure there are examples that I would agree with you represent "talking past." You're staying safely in the hypothetical, which makes it impossible for me to press your case.

but maybe I could say "the opposite of the comment you just made, where you said "I could be wrong about your intended meaning, and if so, let me know how I can understand it better". That's talking *to* and not past.

Yeah, but it's also engaging respectfully. So, once again, what if the point/comment is too odious/harmful to engage respectfully? I think it's more than okay to reserve the right to say "that's a shitty thing to say" rather than "I could be wrong about your intended meaning."

And I don't think that you can only avoid "talking past" by doing that psychotherapy-influenced form of conversational engagment, either. Again, what if I already totally understand your comment, am not wrong or mistaken about your meaning, and not interested in understanding you better? I can still understand your point, not agree, not interview you about it, and yet still get your point loud and clear.

I mean, the careful, calm, interested tone you propose can easily be another example of privilege at work. Being calm and deliberately engaging someone's point is something that comes at a much smaller cost to people privileged enough by the status quo that not a lot is at stake for them. It's worth giving that some thought.
posted by Miko at 4:33 PM on May 22, 2015 [7 favorites]

Yeah, I understood that. I thought the problem with your analogy was that the acceptable behaviour was talking, while the unacceptable behaviour was something completely different, farting in soup, so it was really easy to see the difference and where the clear dividing line is, which is not the case when people talk (or write comments on MetaFilter).

Well I guess this is where our takes differ: I think sealioning, calling women sluts, doing whatever it was LR was doing and such crosses a very clear dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable. But I am glad you explained what you meant; I thought it was kind of crap to just drop in "that was a horrible analogy", with no elaboration, as your first comment in a 1,500+ comment thread.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:39 PM on May 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I understood that. I thought the problem with your analogy was that the acceptable behaviour was talking, while the unacceptable behaviour was something completely different, farting in soup, so it was really easy to see the difference and where the clear dividing line is, which is not the case when people talk (or write comments on MetaFilter).

I think it's actually often pretty clear to many readers, although not all. The farting in the soup metaphor works better if you agree a) that the kind of speech act intended to hurt or marginalize women, trans people, BME people and so on is materially distinct from the kind of speech act intended to be an act of good-faith participation in the discussion. and b) that this speech act is not just distinct but visibly distinct, at least for the people on the receiving end of it.
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:41 PM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's true, being calm really does take a lot out of you. The post I made upthread about how fearful localroger and other users made me because of the rape apology they were displaying, for example, was incredibly hard for me to write, but my one-off AUGHH posts about it were getting deleted, so it seemed like spending that energy was something I had to do if I wanted to actually see this place improve.

I'm struggling with depression and a sleep condition that means I've gotten little to none of the sleep that your body does most of its healing in. I exist in a near-perpetual state of physical exhaustion. I put in some of that little amount of energy I have here because online engagement is literally one of the only things I'm capable of doing a fair amount of the time and there aren't a lot of spaces for that where women aren't treated like absolute garbage. So when people direct their goddamn tone policing at me, it's basically telling me that I have to use all the emotional energy I have JUST TO BE LISTENED TO, that I have to give ALL THAT I HAVE in order for a TINY CHANCE that misogynists will take me seriously if I'm "civil" and "nice" enough, and all the while I'm supposed to bear the damage that seeing misogyny and rape apology and all this other shit is causing to the emotional energy I actually have, and that's when I say 'fuck it' and go play video games.
posted by NoraReed at 4:46 PM on May 22, 2015 [34 favorites]

Miko -- If the point is really too odious/harmful, I quite agree with you. (No need to be careful, calm and interested there, either.) And if you correctly understand the point (odious/harmful or not), you're not talking past it. I think there are cases other than those where people are not understanding each other, when they might if they tried, and keep going on.
I've harped a lot on avoiding words like "political" in favor of more concrete terms (this falls a little closer to the "not expressing yourself clearly" case, but it's not as bad as my choice of "engage"), because I think people have different understandings of that word, i.e. they're not talking about the same thing, so they're not talking *to* what the other person said. Neither person is being odious or hateful, though. I think a lot of time gets wasted that way and a lot of unnecessary frustration builds up.
posted by uosuaq at 4:46 PM on May 22, 2015

Another thought: in a sense, too, this "talking past" thing can also function to minimize objection to a point of view and foist responsibility for lack of agreement on the rejector rather than the person offering the point of view. In essence, it can function as 'we'd probably agree but you just don't understand me,' or 'we'd probably arrive at an agreement but you're not being patient enough/you're too blinkered to listen to me." That can be a bid to shift the ownership of the problem off the person who complains of "talking past," and that's not always cool.

That's not to say there are never real incidents of "talking past," there are, but that it often comes up at about this point in a contentious discussion and yet it's not always an accurate description of how things lie.
posted by Miko at 4:49 PM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think there are cases other than those where people are not understanding each other, when they might if they tried, and keep going on.

Well, that's what the thread is, and that's what essentially happened with the discussion of 'political.' Everyone talked about what it meant for them and questioned one another's meanings, and we didn't end up talking past each other about that. We moved from that point to returning focus on the behavior, while noting that term is one there is a generalized anxiety about. I hope, and I think, that many people's personal definition of 'political' was challenged and complicated in that discussion. That seemed to me a conversational success, not a conversational failure.
posted by Miko at 4:52 PM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm a 47 year old woman. I feel very Eowyn right now.
posted by h00py at 5:03 PM on May 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

me on my way to dismantle ur patriarchy
posted by kagredon at 5:34 PM on May 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

I read the LBT thread as it was developing and felt it was going much like the past thread of a woman complaining about a sexist rolling stones song playing in whole foods. In both threads there were some people who were with the intent of the article and discussed the examples of sexism, others who were distracted by their dislike of the writing/outlook of the writer (tbh that was me in both cases), and others still who were chiming in with really sexist views the end result was the same where women ended up feeling belittled. So I sat this one out and followed this meta and add my voice to those who are happy to see the resolution to give more temporary bans and for the explanation of use I f the contact form. I do prefer the idea of temporary bans because people can get fixated and it's a good way to force someone to step back, and then if like the Last Parade guy their behavior persists, well, it's a good reason to extend the ban
posted by biggreenplant at 7:22 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Indeed we could design and implement some algorithm that does amazingly complex user behavior analysis to predict emergent network structures (and would incidentally be worth billions of dollars for other applications) OR
and this is the really crazy impossible thing but hang with me
people could not approach conversation on metafilter as if it were their own gross little treehouse with their dad's Playboys and empty Dew cans scattered all over the place.

To be blunt, your level of reply does not deserve a response.

Because my reasoning continued:

It's a technological solution, but I might see it as trying to *reflect a property of what it means to be at a physical party, such as the ability to mingle*. The *intuition* of a spatial relationship and *recovering that somehow*.

The other half-baked thought I have is suppose threads had panels that function like real-life discussion panels. You have a group of people who read the text, open the discussion, then turn it over to the audience. Now *I'm not saying this is something that should be done* or would work. I am saying that *structural possibilities are technically limitless and Metafilter is just one particular way* of organizing discourse.

I think the negative sarcasm in your reply got people to agree with you instead of considering what I had actually written then. My last sentence made it implicitly clear that I would not be one for Metafilter to become another Facebook or Reddit. I wrote as pragmatically as I could in part because I needed time to think through some related issues, and in part because the other things I wanted to say plainly, I was afraid would not be taken well. I will put it this way:

1. Maybe, sometimes groups fracture in part because members don't get along. Meaning, maybe moderation has its limits, and Metafilter no exception. Specifically, maybe there are such phenomena as cultural shifts in a community, which entails that people of differing ideologies coming in, and others leaving. Maybe these conflicts are part of that: working out, implicitly, who gets to stay and who gets to leave.

I dislike zero sum arguments. Because they tend to presume that healthy integration is not possible. But that's separate from the assumption, i.e. from the question of: Is it something that occurs to extant forms of online discourse?

2. Maybe these kinds of conflicts should be thought of as a kind of exploitation by online media of the users. The reason that I personally considered this as even a possibility was reading the explanation that the site's staff is limited. Limited resources is a known argument used to rationalize various forms of oppression.

I see these as quite sobering thoughts on the structural aspects of online social media. These are not supposed to be solutions, but rather ways of looking at a problem: potentially descriptive, but never prescriptive. So I do think there is some value to these points, because I don't think people have really brought them up. The first point challenges the ideals of a community, and the second point challenges the moderators and site designers.

My question, was and is, How can the choice of formats of online discourse encourage and nurture social properties, including but not limited to diversity, and freedom of association?

And to be absolutely clear, there is a world of difference between thinking about things, versus advocating the use of computer programs as a subsitute for what should be human activities. But I do think it they deserve to be mulled over from the stance of asking open questions about the relation between technology and society.
posted by polymodus at 8:42 PM on May 22, 2015

I dislike zero sum arguments. Because they tend to presume that healthy integration is not possible.

This is a zero-sum argument, whether you like them or no. On the one side, we have women (and many men). On the other side, we have men who don't believe that women are equal. There's no 'healthy integration' to be had there that doesn't come at the cost of women. 'Healthy integration' means either a) these guys stop being misogynist assbags, or b) women have to put up with men being misogynist assbags. B is untenable, and is precisely what so many women have been saying here for years they categorically will not do.

The simple truth is that it is not possible to have 'healthy integration' between two groups when one group believes/behaves like the other is not an equal human being.

But I do think it they deserve to be mulled over from the stance of asking open questions about the relation between technology and society.

Not really, no. Misogyny is what we're discussing here, and only men have the luxury of approaching it in a dry and clinical manner, as questions to be 'mulled over.' Women have a slightly different take, which is the one we should be listening to.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:07 PM on May 22, 2015 [27 favorites]

I have learned a lot about what is thought of as respectful, pleasant behavior on this site. I have also learned some very basic social constructs, that for whatever reason, I never related to. So, thanks.

I still do not know what gaslighting is, or sealioning though I have observed sea lions. I do better understand the dynamic here, and how I could annoy folks here and there. I will do better.
posted by Oyéah at 9:08 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

gaslighting

sea lioning
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:11 PM on May 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

Thanks, I looked them up, but was too late to edit, that I had done that, I will read these definitions.
posted by Oyéah at 9:15 PM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

polymodus, your suggestions upthread (individuals using killfiles, and having each thread be led by a panel that approves topics to be discussed) aren't really ones that are on the table for MeFi. I agree there are many ways to organize online discourse, but this is MetaTalk, so let's stay focused on Metafilter-specific issues rather than branching off into consideration of very general questions like the ones you mention.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:22 PM on May 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

OK a few quick responses--

I never posed a technological solution. It was misread as one.

I didn't qualify who should be doing the mulling over. I do think it is an admin-y way of looking, which is why I chose to speak here.

My own thoughts were a reaction to I think lobstermitten's note that they were collecting threads for analysis. That's the kind of lens that I had on, so to speak.

I had a much earlier comment about flagging, and these meta-questions that I've posed are a development from that.
posted by polymodus at 9:22 PM on May 22, 2015

Maybe I misread your previous comment. Still, let's keep focused on workable solutions for Metafilter, rather than the larger abstract issues.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:26 PM on May 22, 2015

"I think the negative sarcasm in your reply got people to agree with you instead of considering what I had actually written"
That's not exactly what happened for me. I admit that the treehouse jibe came as a relief, largely because I understood it, whereas I could not parse either your first comment or this latest one, and I did consider what you wrote. I read this one multiple times, once out loud. I am trying, but I can't understand what you mean by for instance, "suppose threads had panels that function like real-life discussion panels. You have a group of people who read the text, open the discussion, then turn it over to the audience." How did you mean "mingle?" Do you mean the phenomenon at a party where you drop into conversations one at a time? So you're not trying to converse with the entire room? How would that change anything?

I can see how your 2. could apply to, say, Facebook, which profits when conflict keeps users in thrall, but I don't see how Metafilter can be seen to be exploiting users. Conflict absolutely keeps some users in thrall (me, for instance.), but it drives others away. In any case, Metafilter doesn't profit from conflict thrall. It creates a lot of unprofitable slog and no small atmount of anguish (see goodnewsfortheinsane's remarks yesterday).

In any case, given that the problems that happen in social media also happen at parties and academic conferences, it's not clear how solutions that rely on making online "rooms" more like party rooms and convention center rooms IRL would help.

Oh. Wait. I see by your latest that you're maybe talking about ideas not for conversing in real time but for summarizing/analyzing longboat threads? That wasn't clear 'til now and does sound interesting.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:29 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

lobstermitten--Agree and thanks for your guidance.
posted by polymodus at 9:30 PM on May 22, 2015

I think it's possible to say that you have recognize that other people and other members of the site, regardless of their background and gender, are human beings it's possible to have a conversation with, because that's necessary to have conversations and any kind of a community on a site that's as diverse as MetaFilter, without also saying 'anybody who has opinion I disagree with should be banned from the site'.

I feel like a lot of comments here, both pro and con, have intentionally elided this distinction. There's a big difference between using dehumanizing rhetoric and slurs to refer to other members of the site and disagreeing about tax policy (or some other issue) while treating other people you disagree with with respect and explaining why you disagree with them.
posted by nangar at 9:53 PM on May 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think the negative sarcasm in your reply got people to agree with you instead of considering what I had actually written then.

I have a bunch of snarky things I would like to write in response to this, but I will try to be polite.

I think it is quite presumptive for you to assume that people only favorited that comment because they thought it funny and flip, and not because they shared its frustration and agreed with its premise in a thoughtful way. It is even more presumptive for you to claim that everyone would like your comment better if they only read it more carefully. You're so convinced that you're right that when other people express support for an opinion counter to your own you attribute it to the comment's tone and wording rather than its actual content.

It should be noted that this particular sort of condescension--the assumption that the other person hasn't really thought about their own opinion and doesn't really know what's best for them--is particularly apropos to this thread because it is something women are subjected to all the time. Women constantly get their opinions dismissed or belittled, told they hadn't thought something through or are being too "emotional" about a topic.

So I think it bears some self-reflection on your part on why you're making these assumptions and why you're so sure that you know the hearts and minds of other commenters better than they do in relation to this topic.
posted by Anonymous at 10:12 PM on May 22, 2015

METAFILTER: So I think it bears some self-reflection on your part on why you're making these assumptions and why you're so sure that you know the hearts and minds of other commenters better than they do in relation to this topic.
posted by philip-random at 12:22 AM on May 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

Well, here comes a minority view. Simplistically and reductively, but I think it cuts to the heart of this conversation: Is this site a debate club, or a support group? And I ask that in full knowledge of the history of boorishness, misogyny, racism and you-name-it associated with the term "debate club" and, mutatis mutandi, the derision heaped on "support group". I attended one of those kinds of universities. I am very well familiar with the connotations.

I am firmly on the side of wanting it to be a debate club. This site is still the place I come to, when significant events occur, to hear intelligent people give their - often directly opposed - analyses.

In that context, **I** am OK with members examining highly-charged topics in a manner that is intellectual, artistic, philosophical, or plain argumentative, even when other members exclaim loudly and repeatedly that this sort of discourse directly affects them emotionally.

As a thought experiment (yeah, I know, those have gone out of fashion around here), take something like Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil", an esteemed (and sometimes despised) analysis. If it were today's MetaFilter, there is simply no way that one could even begin to discuss her attempt to understand the mind of the regime without somebody declaring "this hurts too much" or "victim blaming" or "nazi sympathizing". It couldn't happen here today. That is a loss.

It should be possible to discuss all sorts of horrible topics, intellectually and analytically. Including artistic and comparative arguments. There must be a place for that in society. There has to be. Otherwise, it is to grant anti-intellectualism and appeal-to-sensibility a coercive power over reason. And on the web, I somewhat thought MetaFilter was that place, or at least over the years, I've found threads that made me think that.

It seems that there is a very vocal group of members who feel very strongly that MetaFilter should not be that debate club. I hear their arguments, and the logic is undeniable if you accept the premise. However, there must be space on the internet for both sorts of discourse. I want MetaFilter to be a venue for the sort of discourse I enjoy, and I understand equally that others want it to be moderated to avoid any implication of disparagement or disrespect.

With all due respect to those in the latter camp, I fully grant that your desires are valid and worthy, within their own context, but I am in the opposing camp in terms of what the animating spirit of this site should be.

Finally - and this does not apply to the vast majority of members arguing on this thread who earnestly want to improve the decency of interaction here - but the subset of members calling for making lists of trouble-makers, calling for "trusted" members to have executive authority, calling for swift banishment, and other sorts of consent-enforcement mechanisms, puts me in mind of early 20th century idealists who followed their logic to tragic ends.
posted by amorphatist at 1:11 AM on May 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane: "Well I guess this is where our takes differ: I think sealioning, calling women sluts, doing whatever it was LR was doing and such crosses a very clear dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable. But I am glad you explained what you meant; I thought it was kind of crap to just drop in "that was a horrible analogy", with no elaboration, as your first comment in a 1,500+ comment thread."

I'm glad I followed up, then, I was uncertain if I should press the point, but I see now I wasn't actually clear enough.

So yeah, that was my point, and not about sealioning and calling women sluts and such. I was trying to make that point specifically regarding the "homogeneiety/diversity of opinion" discussion, that is, there's probably a bunch of points of view and expressions thereof that are not at all as clear as your examples, but that might still be iffy, but also maybe be good-faith disagreement. That's what I meant was a different part of the speech spectrum, not soup farting.

(I also feel like "soup farting" has some potential as a term for the kind of blatantly unacceptable bullshit sealioning and slut-shaming falls under.)
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:23 AM on May 23, 2015

amorphatist: "As a thought experiment (yeah, I know, those have gone out of fashion around here), take something like Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil", an esteemed (and sometimes despised) analysis. If it were today's MetaFilter, there is simply no way that one could even begin to discuss her attempt to understand the mind of the regime without somebody declaring "this hurts too much" or "victim blaming" or "nazi sympathizing". It couldn't happen here today. That is a loss."

I'm personally somewhat, slightly worried about homogenization of opinion on this site, but in this case, I think you're wrong. Something as well-written and thought through as "Eichmann in Jerusalem" could definitely be discussed constructively on MetaFilter if it came out today.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:28 AM on May 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm personally somewhat, slightly worried about homogenization of opinion on this site, but in this case, I think you're wrong. Something as well-written and thought through as "Eichmann in Jerusalem" could definitely be discussed constructively on MetaFilter if it came out today.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong too, but that's a tome with a half-century of intellectual tonnage behind it that renders it somewhat impervious now, but without that history I think it could be cannon-fodder for today's sensibility-first climate. Indeed, it still is in some academic circles.
posted by amorphatist at 1:37 AM on May 23, 2015

If it were today's MetaFilter, there is simply no way that one could even begin to discuss her attempt to understand the mind of the regime without somebody declaring "this hurts too much" or "victim blaming" or "nazi sympathizing". It couldn't happen here today. That is a loss.

The whole point of this discussion isn't that women are delicate flowers who can't discuss distressing things. It's presuming things like this that makes this conversation as difficult as it is. Just don't come blundering in with assumptions based on how you think women think when there's actual women right here more than happy to tell you.
posted by h00py at 1:41 AM on May 23, 2015 [34 favorites]

I genuinely don't understand if you missed this? Or if you're saying it can be discussed now because it's been around for a while but couldn't be discussed if it was written now?

Also please refer me to the debate club where calling someone on the opposing team a slut mid-debate would not get you thrown out.
posted by billiebee at 1:42 AM on May 23, 2015 [35 favorites]

You're both in luck.

Well, here comes a minority view.

That's a funny way of saying "giant, shrieking strawman". But closing with Godwin? Come on man.

So yeah, that was my point, and not about sealioning and calling women sluts and such. I was trying to make that point specifically regarding the "homogeneiety/diversity of opinion" discussion, that is, there's probably a bunch of points of view and expressions thereof that are not at all as clear as your examples, but that might still be iffy, but also maybe be good-faith disagreement. That's what I meant was a different part of the speech spectrum, not soup farting.

Well this is a more honest approach. I think there's room for those expressions; what people are arguing about here are behaviors. I agree there are edge case, line-skirting examples on this site, and I'm also in the view of erring on assuming good faith when that happens. You're right, those examples are not soup farting. The benefit of the doubt is a good thing; it's when the benefit of the doubt needs to be exercised, repeatedly, towards a single user that I start looking at them sideways. But I don't clamor for their banishment anyway.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 1:42 AM on May 23, 2015 [6 favorites]

Ack, ninja'd by billiebee. A coke is owed.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 1:43 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

It should be noted that this particular sort of condescension--th

Yes, I was condescending. That is the effect of being blunt, like I said. winna made a personal attack at a comment that I wrote yesterday. How is this fair?

And guess what? I hadn't flagged it, because it was exactly one of those under the radar moments. How about some application of reflexivity here?
posted by polymodus at 1:46 AM on May 23, 2015

I genuinely don't understand if you missed this? Or if you're saying it can be discussed now because it's been around for a while but couldn't be discussed if it was written now?

The latter. If it were written now, and the victims were present now to discuss it on MetaFilter. Yes, a thought experiment.

Also please refer me to the debate club where calling someone on the opposing team a slut mid-debate would not get you thrown out.

Personal insults are already against site policy, I think that policy could certainly be enforced more strictly.
posted by amorphatist at 1:49 AM on May 23, 2015

"debate club" vs "support group" is a false dichotomy and I don't see a reason to reply to it as if it's an actual legitimate question, but people who want "debate clubs" seem to universally be the kind of incredibly long-winded boring writers who want to pretend that the fact that the issues they're "debating" don't effect their lives gives them some kind of lofty authority on them instead of making them look like mansplaining dicks.

i guess what i am saying is that i am 100% okay with those kind of people looking at metafilter and seeing a "support group" or "echo chamber" or "hugbox" or whatever the current nomenclature is for "people engaging in an actual conversation and not pretending other peoples' lives are a purely intellectual exercise", both because that unfairly marginalized people and because everything they have to say is the kind of tedious bullshit you hear from white male college freshmen getting in intellectual dick-measuring contests with each other, and that is of no interest whatsoever for most people outside of that group (but there are a thousand subreddits dedicated to that kind of "debate" so it's not like metafilter needs to become yet another goddamn space for it)
posted by NoraReed at 1:52 AM on May 23, 2015 [58 favorites]

amorphatist: Is this site a debate club, or a support group?

Here is the simplistic and reductive answer that cuts to the heart of whatever:

No.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:53 AM on May 23, 2015 [41 favorites]

I genuinely don't understand if you missed this? Or if you're saying it can be discussed now because it's been around for a while but couldn't be discussed if it was written now?

The latter. If it were written now, and the victims were present now to discuss it on MetaFilter. Yes, a thought experiment.

To elaborate, I am certain that to many victims, any intellectual consideration of the Nazi regime, its methods and motivations, etc. is some sort of shameful exercise in excuse-making, while the plain moral truth is that condemnation is the only righteous response to their crimes. That is perfectly understandable. But not a sentiment that should deter free thought.
posted by amorphatist at 1:57 AM on May 23, 2015

If it were written now, and the victims were present now to discuss it on MetaFilter.

So, not only are some Mefites like Nazis; at the same time, were the victims of the Nazi regime on Metafilter today they would be too thin-skinned to discuss Arendt. This is about as muddled as it is insulting. I'm not sure this is a line of reasoning you want to pursue.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 1:59 AM on May 23, 2015 [23 favorites]

I began writing this prior to NoraReed's comment, but yeah, before we get too deep into "debate club" versus "support group," this isn't a realistic characterization of the problems we are discussing here, and not something we need to spend another few hundred comments arguing about, because neither is actually a realistic outcome. Metafilter has never been a debate club, thank deities, and will never become a support group. We have a lot of different types of posts and discussions, and that won't change. It would be great not to derail more with this false either/or argument, as well as maybe dropping the derail of possible things that maybe could never ever be posted here... again something we could fight about for a few thousand comments, but not actually useful in this conversation.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:01 AM on May 23, 2015 [30 favorites]

please stop trying to make this an intellectual thought exercise about whatever off-topic bullshit you're on about, it makes you look like a tedious goddamn blowhard and is yet another example of the whole "any attempt to start a conversation on a sexist behavior men engage in will have men constantly coming in and doing that thing" problem
posted by NoraReed at 2:02 AM on May 23, 2015 [18 favorites]

(sorry i missed taz' comment before posting that, it may now be irrelevant)
posted by NoraReed at 2:03 AM on May 23, 2015

I began writing this prior to NoraReed's comment, but yeah, before we get too deep into "debate club" versus "support group," this isn't a realistic characterization of the problems we are discussing here, and not something we need to spend another few hundred comments arguing about, because neither is actually a realistic outcome.

Agreed, of course not, this site is so much more than either, and that is its beauty. But I do think it's a useful (but simplified) distinction for understanding the expectations that members bring here.
posted by amorphatist at 2:06 AM on May 23, 2015

No, it really isn't. It's a characterization that simplifies things for a certain type of argument about the possible chilling effects of being more demanding about non-misogynist / non-sexist expectations on the site that is actually a distraction here, and I'm asking you to drop it now.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:10 AM on May 23, 2015 [45 favorites]

"I'm just trying to have a civil debate!" is well-known as a sea lion's battle cry that he makes before trying to throw himself into a conversation he doesn't probably even belong in or that he is attempting to make all about him, and though the sexism of the behavior should be enough to shut it down when it comes up, the fact that it's predictable as all hell and boring as shit, especially from the users who've been doing it in this thread (of which amorphatist is only the latest) is also a pretty good reason.

seriously: learn to read the fucking room
posted by NoraReed at 2:16 AM on May 23, 2015 [14 favorites]

taz, it was an earnest attempt at analysis of the dynamics at play on the site, which I'm well aware is not in vogue these days. However IMHO, this is what MeTa is for, and it shouldn't be policed to this degree. But at your instruction, I will bow out.
posted by amorphatist at 2:19 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

To elaborate, I am certain that to many victims, any intellectual consideration of the Nazi regime, its methods and motivations, etc. is some sort of shameful exercise in excuse-making

Did you just learn about Hannah Arendt yesterday, or did you just sort of forget the fact that, like almost all European Jews of the time in some way or another, she herself was a victim of the Third Reich?

This is almost certainly a derail and I'm sorry, but the mental gymnastics required to make that argument absolutely boggled my mind, and as someone with survivors of both the Third Reich and various other Jew-persecuting-historical-regimes in my family, I really feel compelled to point out how Not Even Wrong this entire line of reasoning is.

Not ~offensive~, not a product of a ~sensitivity-first mindset~, it doesn't ~hurt too much~, it's just... Not Even Wrong. I'm laughing in disdain, not crying wounded ladytears.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 2:20 AM on May 23, 2015 [20 favorites]

When Lewis' Law and Godwin's Law converge, does it make a hypercube?

I don't think it can be over-emphasized that communities communicate a lot about who is vulnerable and who is not with the "jokes" and "rhetorical questions" that are tolerated. I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Missing Stair phenomena (tw: rape/abuse) where people who cause problems are "worked around" and how abuse towards women tends to get downgraded to "shenanigans" or "lechery" or something else surprisingly mild sounding like "online threats". It's a lot like how the recent gang violence in Texas ended up being described as a ruckus or brawl in contrast to the organized movements in Baltimore being usually referred to as riots, even when violence in the latter case was perpetrated by a minority of the people present (overview).

These biases are baked in at every level, racially as well as in terms of gender, and those biases are glaringly obvious when someone claims to be analyzing the dynamics in a discussion using gross caricatures.
posted by Deoridhe at 2:21 AM on May 23, 2015 [15 favorites]

an earnest attempt at analysis of the dynamics at play on the site, which I'm well aware is not in vogue these days

Ha. Haha. Hahaha. Hahahahahaha. Ouch, I have a stitch.
posted by Thella at 2:26 AM on May 23, 2015 [36 favorites]

Spocking is what this kind of interjection should be forever known as, except for the fact that Spock usually knew when it was appropriate.
posted by h00py at 2:26 AM on May 23, 2015 [9 favorites]

When Lewis' Law and Godwin's Law converge, does it make a hypercube?

The real trick was comparing the same people to Nazis and victims of the Nazis. That contortion is so absurd I can't even believe it was serious.

My headcanon explanation is there's some kind Sealion Bat Signal blazing in the sky, high above this thread.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 2:30 AM on May 23, 2015 [8 favorites]

The real trick was comparing the same people to Nazis and victims of the Nazis.

Clearly it's a klein analogy; there is only one side.
posted by Deoridhe at 2:33 AM on May 23, 2015 [10 favorites]

Spocking is what this kind of interjection should be forever known as, except for the fact that Spock usually knew when it was appropriate.

For the benefit of any Spocks that might still be reading, I'll mention that many MetaTalk threads have tempted me to link to Jonsen and Toulmin (1988), The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning and in particular two sections of the prologue: "The Tyranny of Principles" and "The Locus of Moral Certitude."

I mean, I've skipped it in the past, because they basically just say stick to the point, judge the case at hand, and don't argue hypotheticals, which are things people already try to do here. But if you need an overly academic presentation to be persuaded, maybe it's a helpful lesson that getting people to agree to your principles is way, way harder and much less relevant than getting them to agree on the vast majority of practical judgments.

I'd also suggest they re-read the LBT thread and especially dialetheia's map to the sexism of it with that in mind. That thread was rich in double standards, negative stereotyping, denial of rationality, denial of agency, and other common instruments of oppression. If there's something in that garbage worth preserving, I can't find it.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 2:36 AM on May 23, 2015 [16 favorites]

Folks, let's not continue to pursue the Hannah Arendt derail (as pointed out, there is actually an open thread where the actual topic can be discussed for realsies), and try to avoid a whole disruption based on a false dilemma about site dynamics. Also, addressing amorphatist once I've asked him to leave that line of argument alone here is a problem. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:39 AM on May 23, 2015 [9 favorites]

So. I still learn fuckloads from threads like this. In tandem with it developing, I told a guy on OKCupid as a heads up, that I found the use of the word "females" where "women" would do problematic, that it has baggage and he told me I was wrong for being a language prescriptivist. I explained further, gently, that it was a term used by mysogynistic types. Beyond the pale. He told me he didn't want to communicate with more anymore as my ridiculous fear (?!) wasn't his problem. I expressed my sincere gratitude .

But the first time this happened, that I asked someone to not use that word, I believed them, when they told me I was hysterical, unreasonable, strident (female). It's funny because I'm using the Jay Smooth method of talking about the behaviour, not what they're thinking or what they are. I don't call them sexist or mysogynistic or privileged or patriarchal. But they... They know what I am and are thinking, and that I'm wrong-wrong-WRONG about my lived experience. So the first guy who did that (when I started dating) convinced me that I was too picky about ridiculous shit, and until I mended my ways, I'd remain an unwanted, unloved fatty-boombah, so shut the fuck up bitch and suck my cock. Okay, not the bit after boombah.

Metafilter's women and allies help me to set standards I never knew I was entitled to. I sometimes feel like I experience this alone - I don't tend to talk about feminist issues with my friends (few of them are dating, some that are accept the ways things are and haven't been reading metafilter for the last ten years, you know?) it's extraordinarily powerful what these arguments do for me, especially in the face of the casual sexism in other places on the Internet, in advertising, in politics. I wouldn't know if it weren't for you guys, and these annoying, tedious, repetitive discussions where it has to be explained over and over again, that no, one gender cannot dictate the behaviour of another; that a group of people, however stereotyped they are, do not all hold the same beliefs and values and interests; that sexual activity, performed with ethics, should not be criticised and that people should not be shamed for their choices. Over and over again, metafilter exposes to me a little more of my internalised sexism (until that thread I might have casually used the term 'tramp stamp' without considering what exactly I was implying, against my own values of being sex positive, body positive and even art positive).

I don't know what the solution for the site is, but those of you who fight the good fight - please, never give up. You will never know how many minds you are changing with your efforts, how many women learn to stand up for themselves because of what you so eloquently say. Beyond me, your influence has extended to my workplace where I mentioned to my boss something I'd read here, and that I was going to verbally slap down a male co-worker next time he made a sexist joke. It was a casual conversation so it surprised me when in a tearoom event, when he was about to joke (and maybe it wouldn't have been sexist, this time) and she shut him down, pleasantly and firmly in front of the entire staff. I discuss your concepts with my children, and my son discusses it with his gamer friends, and my daughter applies it as a very young phd student.

And me, I don't date men who aren't prepared to at least listen to the concepts, and discuss them politely. I date less often, but it's more fun, because the guys are decent guys who are open to seeing me as valuable a human being as they are.

Thank you.
posted by b33j at 4:32 AM on May 23, 2015 [111 favorites]

I want to link casual sexism with bad faith commenting. (And maybe I'm stretching the frame a little far.)

The way localroger interrogated the comments of other posters about their feelings watching Game of Thrones was skeptical and disrespectful to their statements about their own feelings about the scene. (Paraphrasing from memory), he seemed incredulous that other people could find that the worst bit yet, and implied that if people had watched this far, they might keep on watching. Is it really in good faith to make statements along the lines of ~ "I don't feel that way, why should you?" and then argue about how someone else says they felt?

In a culture where the male point of view is the norm in media and young men are taught to speak up more than young women, don't we end up with an ongoing bias where a male-centered POV "feels right" and unassailable, but a POV from women sounds different and is easy to bat away as not fitting?

Interrogating people's emotions is disrespectful and tiptoes up close to being actual threadshitting. I don't find it a "good faith" way of responding to what people have stated. Arguing is for issues and policies, not for how people feel about assault in art or in life.
posted by puddledork at 8:01 AM on May 23, 2015 [11 favorites]

Thank you, b33j, for that articulate and heartfelt contribution.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:02 AM on May 23, 2015 [4 favorites]

he seemed incredulous that other people could find that the worst bit yet, and implied that if people had watched this far, they might keep on watching.

Considering that the first episode of GoT had two beheadings (along with a massacre), in the first first 10 minutes and then ended with a joking attempted murder of child because he was a witness to incest, it seems a perfectly reasonable question to ask, IMO. The show hasn't been 44 hours of singing families, so asking why a particular act was too much is a natural question.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:15 AM on May 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

Let's please not get derailed into a conversation about Game of Thrones. Thanks.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 8:20 AM on May 23, 2015 [20 favorites]

I can see why someone would ask such a question, yes. It's what happened afterwards that made it not okay. Ignoring the answers you're getting, implying that these aren't really the reasons... that sort of thing.
It's not the question, it's the doubling down when people are telling you 'hey, that shit hurts'.
posted by Too-Ticky at 8:27 AM on May 23, 2015 [11 favorites]

And then coming in here and saying "I would not ask such a question in a thread I know is likely to be populated by rape survivors". That part really gave me a brain sprain.
posted by Too-Ticky at 8:30 AM on May 23, 2015 [6 favorites]

amorphist, you have a habit of digging in on discussions—on Metafilter but also notably here—in a way that's frustratingly repetitive, and as much as you express a desire for a debate club vs. a support group it feels like the actual dichotomy that has played out in practice is between you being able to say whatever you like vs. you ever experiencing criticism or pushback on your comments here.

That's got to improve, period. If you're willing to make your peace with the fact that the dynamic you seem to be after isn't the one we actually have here, and can participate in a way that doesn't routinely just come down to defying people to prove you wrong and being sort of disruptive jerk in conversations, great. That'd be going a long way toward seeming like you're here for the community and not just to nuh-uh at people who disagree with you.

But if your vision of Metafilter is a straight-up debate club and you consider a compromise of that a dealbreaker, the deal was already broken before you got here and you need to not subject the rest of the site to your dissatisfaction with the mismatch between your imaginary version of this website and the more complicated, less designed-specifically-to-accommodate-your-clumsy-Nazi-analogies reality the rest of us have been working with and trying to grow and improve for the last decade and a half.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:37 AM on May 23, 2015 [40 favorites]

The way localroger interrogated the comments of other posters about their feelings watching Game of Thrones was skeptical and disrespectful to their statements about their own feelings about the scene.

I want to second this problem. While I don't watch Game of Thrones, I did skim parts of that thread after seeing it mentioned here and found it to be the sort of shitshow I avoid even when I'm interested in the subject. But I've gotten exactly that kind of pushback about my own comments about things in various media (sometimes Marvel) properties that I've found gross and offensive for sexism. If I say it's not all right, it's not all right for me, and just because some man (or woman, but it's usually men who pull out this kind of disrespectful behavior) keeps coming back to tell me I'm wrong with a side order of implicit STFU doesn't make it all right. Sometimes it makes me shut up and go away, so the man has "won the conversation", but the view that has changed is not my view of the movie, but my view of the commenter and the site.
posted by immlass at 8:40 AM on May 23, 2015 [14 favorites]

so asking why a particular act was too much is a natural question.

No, actually it's not.

Saying, "I'm surprised at finding people who find this act is too much, given the other things in Game of Thrones - huh - it looks like this scene really bothers people" is one thing.

Using previous Game of Thrones events as some kind of gotcha - like AHA! You tolerated defenestration, how can you POSSIBLY object to rape? in a thread where lots of women are talking about their experiences with rape - is not actually a natural question. It's an asshole question.
posted by corb at 8:46 AM on May 23, 2015 [13 favorites]

Using previous Game of Thrones events as some kind of gotcha - like AHA! You tolerated defenestration, how can you POSSIBLY object to rape? in a thread where lots of women are talking about their experiences with rape - is not actually a natural question. It's an asshole question.

Yeah, really not getting why that's an asshole question or agreeing with your framing of as some sort of gotcha. It seems to come down to different perspectives.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:54 AM on May 23, 2015

As we're on localroger's deleted comment: I could do without the word "boobage" at the best of times, but dropping it into the middle of a "let me tell you why this rape scene is not upsetting by describing it in detail" mansplain felt really leery.

(I did read the comment before it was deleted, and noped out of the thread; should have flagged it, glad other people did.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:54 AM on May 23, 2015 [9 favorites]

corb: "AHA! You tolerated defenestration, how can you POSSIBLY object to rape? "

It sounds way, way too similar to tropes like "But you liked it when HE did it" and various others which I'm sure I do not have to list here.
Ugh.

(Brandon Blatcher, maybe this helps?)
posted by Too-Ticky at 8:56 AM on May 23, 2015 [4 favorites]

Yeah, really not getting why that's an asshole question or agreeing with your framing of as some sort of gotcha. It seems to come down to different perspectives.

It doesn't matter whether people understand why it's an asshole question or not. It would just be awesome if people accepted that it was and stopped doing it.
posted by immlass at 8:56 AM on May 23, 2015 [14 favorites]

It actually reminds me of arguments we have had here over the years about street harassment or just general treating women as publicly available behavior: "You didn't get mad the first time someone catcalled/grabbed your butt/interrupted your reading to force you into conversation, so why do you get mad the 20th time?"

We put up with a lot of bullshit every single day because it's expected of us as women, and it's sometimes totally necessary to get along in society and, for instance, enjoy otherwise enjoyable media. But we are allowed to draw lines and say we have had enough bullshit.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:57 AM on May 23, 2015 [22 favorites]

The "you handled defenestration" question is already most excellently answered by imnotasquirrel's comment in the original thread.

(And restless_nomad already asked that the GoT but-WHY-are-you-upset-by-this-rape argument not be rehashed here.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:58 AM on May 23, 2015 [6 favorites]

b33j just said something wonderful and inspiring that made this whole thing worth following. Could her comment go in the sidebar? Can we start a fund and send her a crown or a trophy or a lifetime supply of ice cream or low-maintenance but attractive houseplants? Thank you, b33j. As far as I'm concerned your comment wins the internet yesterday, today, and tomorrow. You're the tops.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:00 AM on May 23, 2015 [15 favorites]

It doesn't matter whether people understand why it's an asshole question or not. It would just be awesome if people accepted that it was and stopped doing it.

One can't stop doing supposedly asshole behavior if doesn't understand or think it's asshole behavior. It's like saying "stop doing that thing that's terrible" when you don't know or agree its terrible. It doesn't sound like anything productive will come of it other than one side getting what they want and the other just going away made or hurt.

Which I expect many people are just fine with, but it doesn't sound like a great thing to be occurring, IMO.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:03 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, really not getting why that's an asshole question or agreeing with your framing of as some sort of gotcha. It seems to come

Maybe, to broaden out corb's example, there is a difference between adding something to a discussion (eg "given beviors A, B, and C, doesn't that just make D part of the progression?"), which while getting close to the Paradox of the Heap, can be productive and good-faith, and trying to score points (eg "Ha! You accepted A, B, and C, now you have a problem with D, you are WRONG!"). The one, even if misguided, is way less disruptive than the latter.

It's signaling intent to engage or battle, I suppose.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:05 AM on May 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

One can't stop doing supposedly asshole behavior if doesn't understand or think it's asshole behavior. It's like saying "stop doing that thing that's terrible" when you don't know or agree its terrible. It doesn't sound like anything productive will come of it other than one side getting what they want and the other just going away made or hurt.

The question "why do you feel that way about [x]?" doesn't deserve an answer and the idea that it does is entitled bullshit. People feel how they feel about media properties: how I feel about Avengers movies or how corb feels about Game of Thrones doesn't require public justification. What are you gonna do, say "oh" and learn? Because my experience is that men here are going to say "no, your feelings aren't justified because [y]" and THAT is the gotcha.

I can say I find something sexist/gross/the straw that breaks the camel's back without it needing any validation. How a man feels about something has zero bearing on how I feel about it. His feelings are not inherently more right and expressing that they are, implicitly or explicitly, is sexist asshole behavior.
posted by immlass at 9:16 AM on May 23, 2015 [26 favorites]

Why is a derail that began as a literal reiteration of localroger's moderated JAQ derail being allowed? Is my flagging button broken, or is this not as obvious an instadelete as it seems?

Quadruple-moderated in full context, I'd like to point out. Possibly quintuple-moderated? I think there may have been a deletion or two in here that I missed between him going aggro at taz for the deletion and being given a time out. His initial post literally came in the face of an already double-moderated thread, with mod interventions on exactly the subject he initially came in to be gross about.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 9:18 AM on May 23, 2015

Is my flagging button broken, or is this not as obvious an instadelete as it seems?

We aren't actually robots and it's kinda early on a Saturday morning here - please don't assume because we haven't gotten to a thing in twenty minutes that we're endorsing it.

That said, Brandon Blatcher, this is absolutely not the place to be rehashing this argument, and if you can't see that, perhaps you can take some time elsewhere to think about it.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 9:18 AM on May 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm chuffed and surprised to the reaction to my (non-sidebar worthy) post (thank you) but I'm not the hero here. It's all the folk who keep wading into the shit and explaining it so well over and over. I selfishly don't want you giving up, because I have so much to learn from you.
posted by b33j at 9:18 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Brandon, I love you man, but holy shit please back up off of this one and just read what people have already said like 8 times in answer to your question.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 9:19 AM on May 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

(Ack, sorry r_n...)
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 9:19 AM on May 23, 2015

Sorry, r_n, I was trying to talk about this as a site behavior and not as a specific rehash of GOT. I'll hush now.
posted by immlass at 9:21 AM on May 23, 2015

cortex/r_n/any applicable mods, would it be cool for me to post a brief run down of that whole chain of events, just so that if the debate team tries to bring this up again, there's at least something to point to without having to re-explain it all once again? Strictly free of any kind of specific argumentation about GoT or rehashing, just from a this-is-what-happened-from-a-site-and-user-interactions kind of POV?
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 9:22 AM on May 23, 2015

I don't think that's necessary. We have an entire thread on the blue discussing it, plus various comments here that cover the subject, and if someone needs to be pointed to them that can be arranged.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 9:26 AM on May 23, 2015

In that case, yeah, to BB and anyone who wants to ask that question yet again, please just read that thread. Read the articles, then read the whole thread, read the mod notes. What you are trying to suggest happened is not actually what happened.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 9:30 AM on May 23, 2015

I have had many experiences in life where I hurt people with things I did or said and I never managed to fully understand why they were hurt. In discussion with my therapist about this she said "Sometimes you don't need to understand it. If you want to continue a relationship with this person than you need to respect their wishes about this subject.". So, that's what I try to do and then just get on with life.
posted by josher71 at 9:33 AM on May 23, 2015 [26 favorites]

she said "Sometimes you don't need to understand it. If you want to continue a relationship with this person than you need to respect their wishes about this subject.".

and strangely, after some time has passed, I sometimes find that I have grown to understand.
posted by philip-random at 9:48 AM on May 23, 2015 [12 favorites]

would it be cool for me to post a brief run down of that whole chain of events, just so that if the debate team tries to bring this up again, there's at least something to point to without having to re-explain it all once again?

You could also use the wiki for this. Adding a "these are the facts of what happened" post to this thread is unlikely to have the result you are seeking.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 9:51 AM on May 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

TMaMM, I think you might be making a mistake in general by thinking that creating a resource to answer JAQ-off questions, here or in the wiki or wherever else, because if someone wants to waste time in a thread like this, they will. They already aren't reading the thread, why would they read the wiki? The reason that you can all the derails in this thread is because there are a lot of men on this site who fundamentally do not put any value on making the site less sexist and/or don't respect or value women's voices, and so they'll pretty much do that anyway.

It might be a useful reference for other reasons, but I think it'd be a bit naive to assume it would help stop the sexist derails.
posted by NoraReed at 9:58 AM on May 23, 2015 [6 favorites]

No wiki could possibly anticipate my game-changingly hot takes
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:10 AM on May 23, 2015 [15 favorites]

TMaMM, I think you might be making a mistake in general by thinking that creating a resource to answer JAQ-off questions, here or in the wiki or wherever else, because if someone wants to waste time in a thread like this, they will.

Oh, I know, that's not what I'm going for at all. I know it's not going to stop shit. I'm not in any way looking to re-argue either the specific positions of the GoT thread, or whether such questions can ever be appropriate at all, or even the gendered implications of why it keeps being brought up in this thread.

It's just every time it comes up, it feels over-simplified, and leads me to want to say "okay, here is where that question was brought up and answered (from one perspective) in an article very OP of the GoT thread. Here is the first time a user came into the thread to ask that question without having read the article and demanded people explain it. Here is the first time someone explained their own reasons. Here is the first time someone explained why they think that question is problematic in the first place. Here is someone ignoring the article in the OP and the arguments already in the thread to repeat the question. Here's the second, third, fourth", and on and on and on.

Really, I guess the main point I'm trying to make is that people who keep bringing this particular case up are condensing and eliding a fairly long chain of events across two already very long threads, in order to make much more simple narrative that fits a hypothetical situation they want to argue against.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 10:20 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

...asking why a particular act was too much is a natural question...
...One can't stop doing supposedly asshole behavior if doesn't understand or think it's asshole behavior....

I want to address this to be clear if anyone's confused about what counted as bad behavior here. I said this above but will say it again.

First, the gross overly-descriptive stuff, I hope everybody can see why that's a problem.

Second, this question was asked and answered early in the thread, and it's literally what the article is about. Having this thought occur to you, reasonable (IMO). Asking it in the thread over and over and over: not reasonable. (I count 8 times for localroger asking this question in the original thread, including a couple deleted ones.) It demonstrates that you're not reading the article, you're not taking on board what people are saying, you're not registering the increasing signs that your comments on an obviously-sensitive subject are bothering people, and you're aggressively insisting that the conversation turn to what you want anyway. It's bad behavior. It makes conversation suck. It has been a pattern with localroger in other threads too, and we could and should have intervened sooner.

We've been asked to step in earlier to (among other things) stop that kind of repetitious, not-listening, can't-let-it-go conversation-killing thing, and we're starting to do that.

Speaking only for myself, I've been not as pro-active as I could have been on some of these longtime individual behavior problems, and this thread has been a good spur to get more serious about those things. Again, if people have in mind someone who's a problem in these ways, drop us a quick note -- they may not be on our radar, and it's just good to hear candidly from people as we think about this.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:52 AM on May 23, 2015 [25 favorites]

Wait, respectfully, I don't understand why Brandon Blatcher is being blamed for the GoT redux. The question of whether LR's question was originally in bad faith was asked by puddledork, not Brandon, and then the whole conversation was contributed to by Too-Ticky, immlass, corb, We had a deal, Kyle, hydropsyche, and GenjiandProust. I'm not blaming these other people, either, I'm just saying he didn't start it and he was by far not the only person involved.

I'm just so confused. I understand that he was explaining the other side, but not in any detail, and he was not trying to frustrate or annoy anyone, just explain. I'm afraid to post this comment to even say that he was just trying to explain!

MetaFilter has become such a huge part of my life and had such an effect on it because I met my husband here at a meetup back in the day. But I'm so sincerely upset and depressed about what is going down in this thread that I've been shaking and crying over it for two days. I do not think that some of the men who are coming into this thread to try to explain their thoughts or offer different perspectives are being treated fairly. Maybe it doesn't matter whether or not I button, because it sounds like another round of bannings are in the works and I know I'm already on some important users' radar from my comments here.

So, MetaFilter, I guess that's something you are losing with a tougher moderation policy. You are losing people like me.

My husband reminded me today that Matt used to say, in difficult threads, "it's just a website." Honestly, though, this thread has broken my heart.
posted by onlyconnect at 1:37 PM on May 23, 2015 [18 favorites]

I have had many experiences in life where I hurt people with things I did or said and I never managed to fully understand why they were hurt. In discussion with my therapist about this she said "Sometimes you don't need to understand it. If you want to continue a relationship with this person than you need to respect their wishes about this subject.". So, that's what I try to do and then just get on with life.

This is why seeing metafilter as simply a debate club is a serious non-starter. It's so obvious that there are other interrelatoinal dynamics going on here that are beyond simply trying to make sure propositional content matches up with real world facts. We do discuss serious issues, but we do it in a context in which we care about people and how they feel. I don't mind at all comparing it to family dynamics in which, if everything were a debate, you'd be posting a lot of questions to AskMe about whether you should DTMFA and the answer would be a resounding YES because real life isn't about always doing something to be a better thinker, but also being someone who can be present with others in non confrontational ways in our inherently valuable-yet-imperfect selves.

With that background, then, one of the most important things I've learned of late is that it's okay to apologize for doing something that may be triggering to someone else, even if I'm not sure if that emotion should have happened in the first place in an ideal world. That is, if we distinguish between feelings and emotions (where feelings are properly basic mental/biological states, and emotions are the things towards which those feelings are directed), we don't have to always go around asking whether or not someone's emotional reaction is their feelings being connected to the world in the right kind of way (there's a proper place for that in most people's lives, but we here are rarely the arbiters for when that should be happening for others). For all of us, sometimes our feelings do and sometimes they do not find their proper objects. For example, I can direct a negative feeling towards something that is not directly related the original cause of the feeling. I might be triggered about past trauma by a particular kind of event, even though the event itself isn't morally culpable for me feeling that way. However, we should be in the habit of being more gracious than not when this happens, not second guessing people's noetic/affect structure and make that subservient to my right to say whatever I want.

So when these things come up in which people are having a particularity emotional state, it's kind of being a jerk to second guess these things and tell people they shouldn't feel a certain way. Even if those feelings are landing on the wrong object (we need to zap that from our way of thinking about things). And the best example I can use is that we don't always apologize because we are in the wrong, we apologize because we unintentionally hurt someone and we feel bad. I do this if I accidentally cause someone physical pain (even at times if it wasn't entirely my fault), and I apologize if I say something to my significant other that opens an old wound, even if she were to admit it's stuff from her childhood that makes her feel a bit vulnerable in that regard and working on it in counseling. I'm a jerk to say that she needs more counseling and I should be able to talk however I want until then knowing that it hurts, rather than saying let me be careful not to unintentionally poke at that in the same way again because I care about you as a person.

I think that rather it being a limitation of free speech to take other peoples feeling/triggers into account, it's actually an issue in which we can freely choose to engage in speech in a different way, of our own volition, to take into account the fact that we don't want to intentionally or unintentionally hurt people. This is why we have discussions about language and labeling and how words change, etc. So when people let me know about these things now, I don't like to say well, that's your issue, I prefer to say how can I, of my own free volition, be a better neighbor/friend/mefite to you?
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:40 PM on May 23, 2015 [12 favorites]

onlyconnect, please don't go.

Or, if you must go, please come back when you can.
posted by anotherpanacea at 1:44 PM on May 23, 2015 [9 favorites]

I really don't know which way is up anymore. Like, ok, sometimes well-meaning people say stupid things. I know I have, and getting called out on it really stung, because I'm human and contain multitudes. My first reaction was confused anger, but I sat on it, reflected, and realized I really did say something unintentionally awful, so I apologized. Because, my bad. I don't think anyone in this thread has called for instabanning due to one off crap comments. When someone says something crappy, gets called out, and then proceeds to double down with absolutely no self-reflection, well, that's the problem. There have been so many people who wrote about how MeFi opened their eyes to things they couldn't see because privilege, and that's awesome. But for every person who learns something, there's a person who refuses to engage in a meaningful conversation. If that latter group eventually gets banned, because they refuse to acknowledge any other POV than their own, then I think that's fair.
posted by Ruki at 2:04 PM on May 23, 2015 [9 favorites]

onlyconnect has disabled her account.
posted by anotherpanacea at 2:08 PM on May 23, 2015

Maybe it doesn't matter whether or not I button, because it sounds like another round of bannings are in the works and I know I'm already on some important users' radar from my comments here.

This comment sounds a wee bit paranoid. I may not have agreed with everything she said but this characterization seems extreme.
posted by futz at 2:12 PM on May 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm sorry this thread upset onlyconnect so much. I hope she comes back when she's ready. I wouldn't worry too much about the "being on someone's radar" part, her objections to the changes preceded that and seemed to come from a much deeper place.
posted by tigrrrlily at 2:24 PM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

There's nothing wrong with taking a break when you need to. Lots of us have done so.
posted by Miko at 2:26 PM on May 23, 2015 [8 favorites]

I also hope onlyconnect is able to come back at some point. From old threads I know she was a big supporter of making this a better place for women, so as someone who joined long after the big Boyzone wars I owe her and others a massive debt.
posted by billiebee at 2:28 PM on May 23, 2015 [23 favorites]

Metafilter has been instrumental in changing my own attitudes about gender issues and seeing my own privilege (which are still evolving, honestly, I'm trying to be better). I too hope onlyconnect comes back.
posted by JHarris at 5:13 PM on May 23, 2015 [7 favorites]

It would be nice to see some reflection on why onlyconnect felt compelled to leave. I'm also sorry she left and hope it's not forever, but merely saying "well, I hope she comes back" -- if this is someone you've respected for years -- doesn't seem like enough.
posted by uosuaq at 5:54 PM on May 23, 2015

> It would be nice to see some reflection on why onlyconnect felt compelled to leave.

No, it would not. It is always counterproductive to speculate on why people choose to leave, and it is entirely respectful to wish them well and hope they come back.
posted by languagehat at 6:04 PM on May 23, 2015 [36 favorites]

Besides, she used her own words to explain how she was feeling. That doesn't need to be up for debate.
posted by h00py at 6:11 PM on May 23, 2015 [17 favorites]

FWIW, onlyconnect, there is nothing you have contributed in this thread that would even warrant a shoulder tap, let alone a stampede to the contact form to call for you to be B&. Some of us disagree on how you've read some of the guys who've come into this thread with their input, and you've disagreed with how some of us have responded to them, but that's not only entirely OK, it's also welcome. Disagreeing has always been fine. This discussion has never been about trying to achieve some orthodoxy of opinions (though it seems there is relative consensus that even includes our Free Speech Warriors that some "opinions" are hateful and have no place here) but an examination of behaviors, i.e., how people are interacting with the community. And speaking for myself, your voice is more than welcome in that discussion.

That said, if you've been shaking and crying for two days over this thread, I can completely understand the desire to step away, for however long that is. Take care, and be well.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:21 PM on May 23, 2015 [24 favorites]

Okay, never mind then. I didn't say anything about speculation -- as mentioned above, she was fairly clear about her reasons for leaving. I meant that if a well-liked member says "this thread has broken my heart", and has mentioned the reasons, then in my opinion it could be worth thinking about those reasons and whether they're things that need to be addressed. The consensus seems to be that it's better to move on, so I'll let it be.
posted by uosuaq at 7:14 PM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Wait, respectfully, I don't understand why Brandon Blatcher is being blamed for the GoT redux. The question of whether LR's question was originally in bad faith was asked by puddledork, not Brandon, and then the whole conversation was contributed to by Too-Ticky, immlass, corb, We had a deal, Kyle, hydropsyche, and GenjiandProust. I'm not blaming these other people, either, I'm just saying he didn't start it and he was by far not the only person involved."

Because he was digging in, in a way that pissed people off.

I dunno, I love BB, but his questions had been answered again and again, and they weren't really things where they needed, like, a group referendum where every person had to answer — the line of argument was already addressed multiple times in multiple places. You can disagree over e.g. whether it's worth it to you to stop watching GoT, but that's a question of taste, and you can't argue against the "straw that broke the camel's back" for someone else.

Pile-ons are ugly to watch in general, even if you agree with the people piling on. I think that's especially true when you know the people getting lumped on and doubly so when they seem unnecessary — answering someone astute once or twice should be enough. But that's weighed against all the previous answers that should have obviated the question, and the dam breaks because there's a sense that goddamnit we already told you 50 times so we gotta get louder.

You're right that he didn't start it, though in terms of ending the pile-on, he was the one keeping it going. From the perspective of the most efficient, pragmatic end to it, it's telling him to knock it off even if he wasn't the one who started it — like coming in halfway through the moving and being all, "Who with the what now?" he's gonna get sharply shushed, even if "How does that kid know Bruce Willis?" is kinda a legit thing to ask.

I don't think it's necessarily a great dynamic, but it strikes me as qualitatively different than some of the situations that prompted other comments from you in this thread.

I hope you come back; I've been bugged by the rhetorical escalation and assumptions of bad faith too, especially because they made me worry that folks like you would leave over them. I don't think BB was posting in bad faith, but I do think that it was something that was an oblivious, predictable pattern that's been mentioned as something specifically to have mods be more attentive to.
posted by klangklangston at 7:26 PM on May 23, 2015 [10 favorites]

I feel like BB is pretty comfortable with venturing certain stuff and knowing it won't always be met with rose garlands. He seems like a generally pretty hardy fellow.
posted by Miko at 7:45 PM on May 23, 2015 [4 favorites]

Yes, I was condescending. That is the effect of being blunt, like I said. winna made a personal attack at a comment that I wrote yesterday. How is this fair?

Saying "I think you're making this too complicated, people should just stop being assholes" is not a personal attack unless you are unable to handle disagreement with your opinions.

Additionally, bluntness and condescension do not go hand-in-hand, and to think one necessarily leads to the other says more about your communication abilities than anything else. You were effectively telling people they didn't like your comment because they weren't smart enough to understand it. That is not bluntness, that's an actual personal attack.
posted by Anonymous at 8:10 PM on May 23, 2015

Saying "I think you're making this too complicated, people should just stop being assholes" is not a personal attack unless you are unable to handle disagreement with your opinions.

That was not what was stated. It is possible that I have misread. But what was stated was a likening of my contribution to that of "own gross little treehouse with their dad's Playboys and empty Dew cans scattered all over the place."

You don't get to say that this wasn't part of the message, that OH it was a reference to THOSE assholes, not me or my ideas.

It was an insinuated, personal attack that was off base. I am not white. I am not heterosexual. I am an immigrant. When a picture [of socioeconomically privileged white straight male suburbian rite of passage] is painted of an experience that I in my adolescence would have been halfway around the world to remotely even have connection to, can you begin to imagine the imagery running through my head when I read that line? I don't want to argue this issue any further. If you don't get it you don't get it.
posted by polymodus at 8:19 PM on May 23, 2015

You were effectively

Just stop. Please.
posted by polymodus at 8:26 PM on May 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

I don't want to argue this issue any further.

Excellent outcome.
posted by Miko at 8:33 PM on May 23, 2015 [7 favorites]

It's a case of multiple misreads. polymodus, you suggested a way to screen out clown comments and winna responded that instead it would be better if clowns self-regulated so that we didn't have clown comments in the first place. No one thought you were acting like a clown, yourself--that's a misread. Also, I, and I think a few other people, misread your comments to be all about technological fixes to change the way conversations happen in threads, but after your clarifications, it looks like you're also thinking about ways to analyze long threads like this one to make them easier/faster to parse and learn from. I think that idea is really neat. I don't know how it would work, but if it did work, it would be highly useful to people who would benefit from the developments that have been happening here but who can't devote a full week of life to monitoring a single metatalk thread. This idea is obviously worth talking about, but it would do better in a thread of its own. Here it's off topic and pretty much guaranteed to be read as noise.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:09 PM on May 23, 2015 [8 favorites]

I don't think BB was posting in bad faith, but I do think that it was something that was an oblivious, predictable pattern that's been mentioned as something specifically to have mods be more attentive to.

I had a variant on this same discussion with BB and some other folks on the blue about Avengers 1 and that's, what, 2 or 3 years ago? That's part of why I brought up the pattern--because it is a recurring theme in discussions here, that women's judgement about material they find sexist is questioned and argued about is not just asked about but questioned and found wanting. It's something I wanted to draw the mods' attention to.

I'm sorry that upset onlyconnect, but I've stayed away from discussions on the blue and purple of media I've wanted to discuss because of the pushback I get when I talk about sexist stuff that bothers me. It's been a factor in me taking site breaks. I didn't mean to pile onto BB, but he and GOT are not the issue, just the current iteration of an ongoing problem on the site.
posted by immlass at 9:31 PM on May 23, 2015 [18 favorites]

I want to back pedal and apologize for using the phrase "bad faith" in a non site standard way. Or just in a messed up wrong way.

I was trying to make a meta comment about dismissiveness, particularly of women's stated feelings and used localroger's GoT comment as an example. (And since I knew that he was gone, I was probably not as respectful of his feelings as I should have been.) I wanted to make the general case that quickly contradicting someone else's feelings is a failure to give that person's comments the benefit of the doubt. It's kind of biased and rude. The case I was trying to make before the Supreme Court (the mods) is that stricter moderation of some kinds of aggro comments is not an enlargement of the rules because the rules already tell us to extend the benefit of the doubt to each other, and "nuh-uh" type comments aren't very accepting.

I wanted make a meta comment about a general pattern where there seems to be an absence of good faith (toward feelings) and where benefit of doubt seems to not be there. What I'm talking about is much less severe than posting in bad faith, and I regret using the words "bad faith" because what I should have said was "Hey, where's the good faith here? Why the disbelief?

Where I see rapid dismissiveness I don't see careful weighing of the other person's argument and giving them the benefit of the doubt.
posted by puddledork at 9:39 PM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

"That was not what was stated. It is possible that I have misread. But what was stated was a likening of my contribution to that of "own gross little treehouse with their dad's Playboys and empty Dew cans scattered all over the place.""

From where I sit, that's not a personal attack. It's snark, but she didn't say anything about you — She read you like we had a problem of people shitting on the floor and you said, "We could get a roomba!" Then winna replied, "Or people could stop shitting on the floor." That's not a personal attack even if you're one of the people who shit on the floor.

She didn't call you any names, even if it was clear she didn't think much of your comment.

"It was an insinuated, personal attack that was off base. I am not white. I am not heterosexual. I am an immigrant. When a picture [of socioeconomically privileged white straight male suburbian rite of passage] is painted of an experience that I in my adolescence would have been halfway around the world to remotely even have connection to, can you begin to imagine the imagery running through my head when I read that line? I don't want to argue this issue any further. If you don't get it you don't get it."

The imagery? Of the Dew and Playboys? I guess I don't get it, then, because if she's saying that people should stop treating it like an experience that's alien to you, why would you think you were one of the people she was talking about?

You've had smart communication comments in other MeTas about the same topics; not getting the benefit of the doubt is often galling. But you might assume better of her too.
posted by klangklangston at 12:08 AM on May 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

"'I don't feel that way, why should you?' and then argue about how someone else says they felt?"

Wow, this is really common and although men do this a lot, it's not exclusive to men. To be sure, I think that very often we state our feelings and reactions to something in terms that are also assertions about objective qualities of that thing, and insofar as that's the case, it's something we perhaps ought to be more mindful about and/or be more receptive to interrogation in consequence. But the reciprocal of this tendency is the one that denies other people's subjectivity. If sometimes we objectify our subjectivity, we also tend to deny other people's subjectivity.

For me, for like sixteen years, example #1 of this was the argument about The Blair Witch Project where a lot of people didn't find the movie frightening and they were weirdly offended that other people did and, amazingly, aggressively argued that those other people couldn't possibly have actually been frightened. Or that their fright was invalid. Or something.

I was surprised at amphortist's unfortunate mention of Arendt, because just yesterday I started to write a comment in this thread about how fascinating, valuable, and relevant to this discussion I found that article was with regard to Kant's Critique of Judgment and its influence on Arendt. Kant was writing about aesthetics, but Arendt felt that this analysis was relevant to ethics, too. And thus her focus on one his maxims in the work -- to think from the standpoint of everyone else -- and how it's likely that this illuminated her understanding of Eichmann, and how his failure to do this explained a lot of his psychology and behavior.

Odd as it may seem, there very much is a direct line between arguments about aesthetic judgments and arguments about sexism in artistic works and arguments about sexism and sexist patterns in discourse. Ethics requires a recognition of subjectivity and, especially, the sort of empathy that is built around that recognition and which leverages it as ethically important.

One thing I see generally, but especially so in the behavior we've been discussing, is this presumption by a certain sort of person that, when having these discussions, everyone else should do all the hard work. "Explain to me, justify your perspective! Until you convince me, I will assume you're wrong." And this even though everyone else has been explaining themselves, with eloquence, all along. A certain kind of person mistakes their own failure to listen with other's people failure to speak. They don't "think from the standpoint of everyone else" and so they're cognitively blind to the things that they're demanding others prove to them.

This plays out in various and often subtle ways, but there's nothing more blatant and fundamental than simply denying the reality of someone else's attested subjective experience. It's the most overt and aggressive example of this vice.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:11 AM on May 24, 2015 [15 favorites]

Yeah, but Ivan, there's a difference between two movie fans disagreeing about a movie, and a man disagreeing with a woman about whether a particular thing is sexist. I'm sure you will agree that the latter carries a bit more weight, yes?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:26 AM on May 24, 2015 [5 favorites]

Of course -- but there's an underlying psychology that's the same. I didn't elaborate it, but there's a strong gendered component to this because men are socialized into objectifying their subjectivity while, in contrast, women are socialized to do something like the reverse. This is just my impression, but even with something like my TBWP example, I feel pretty sure that it was more men than woman who insisted that the movie is not frightening because they personally weren't frightened. These biases are generally a problem, but they're greatly compounded when they combine -- as when men and women talk about sexism. Men don't listen to women's attested experiences -- they tend to just weirdly deny them. They ignore what women say and, if they do engage at all, they will argue at length that somehow women don't experience what they say they experience and that, if they're forced to admit otherwise, there's still something invalid about that experience. It's a pattern.

I think all people are prone to doing this to some degree, that's why so many arguments about art are these confused assertions that mix attested subjective experience and objective assertions of fact. But, again, there's this whole sexist context where men are actively encouraged to think in terms that confuse their subjective experience with objective reality. In contrast, women are encouraged to always doubt that their subjective experience corresponds to objective reality -- I think b33j very eloquently described some of her own experience of this.

Again, this kind of thing is something that people generally do, to greater and less degrees -- I've personally been gaslighted (a lot) by a partner because she was just that kind of person. But, even so, I think it's notably more common for men to gaslight women than the reverse. In relationships, in the workplace, in general. So we get this kind of horrible dynamic where a guy insists, repeatedly, on explaining how it's just not possible that a woman would only now decide that she didn't want to watch GoT because of that rape scene. No, you didn't have the experience you say you had, this isn't what you think and what you feel, you must think and feel something else. It's unbelievably arrogant, but it's also amazingly common.

I didn't intend to compare the severity and importance of that sexist crap with arguing about a movie. But that I think it's helpful to think generally about this (because I think it's destructive to discourse) with regard to the psychology that's operative and that it's specifically helpful in understanding that men are especially prone to doing this and what's going on when they do. Not that we need to understand it, exactly, to have no tolerance for it. I guess, though, that implicit in what I'm saying is that it's almost impossible to argue with someone in that attitude. They're blind. They may be willfully blind, they may just lack self-criticism and empathy, they may be highly socialized this way -- whatever it is, their coupled assertion that you don't know your own mind with the demand that you convince them otherwise is a trap, it's impossible.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:33 AM on May 24, 2015 [22 favorites]

It does seem like men are more emotionally attached to their arguments, especially if they conceived of it themselves, or no one else agrees. Too bad context and empathy often aren't considered when turning it into a comment. Anger over people refusing to address a commenter's subjective logic is nothing compared to the effort, care, and emotion MeFites have put into making threads welcoming.

Thank you for telling us your deeply personal feelings, NoraReed.
posted by halifix at 2:55 AM on May 24, 2015

Nerd aesthetics arguments fall into a general dilemma about aesthetics: there's no disputing taste because our judgments aren't tractable, they don't respond to reasons... but each of us experiences art as objectively beautiful or ugly or transcendent, such that we can't help but feel that others ought to agree.

Add misogyny to this antinomy and you get a world where only men's judgments are treated as objective, and arguments for women's judgments are treated as failing to respond to men's reasons or persuade men. That's why taste is so closely associated with discrimination: to be discriminating is to prefer those things that people in power prefer, to have luckily or through training learned that some fashion brands are timeless and others gauche, that Proust is better than Woolf, and that Lolita isn't creepy pedophile wank material, it's an incisive comment on self-deception.

^this is basically the plot of Kant's Critique of Judgment^
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:09 AM on May 24, 2015 [5 favorites]

My peculiar experience watching The Blair Witch Project makes that the perfect example of this phenomenon for me. At the crucial moment I was saved from a tragic state of not-getting-it by my friend Paul, who was sitting next to me. I was thinking (spoiler alert), "Yet more bumbling in the dark. This movie is baffling. Oh, look at that, that guy sure picked a weird time to take a leak. Must be he has prostate probl-" when Paul suddenly and violently recoiled in his seat, grabbed my arm, and yelled, "OH MY GOD!" Paul's figuring this scene out loudly right next to me saved the movie for me. I was able to re-think what I was seeing and understand, just in time to be properly terrified by what happened next. If not for Paul, I wouldn't have lost sleep for the next week or so because of that movie. Thanks to Paul, I experienced it properly.

I haven't seen a single frame of Game of Thrones, but I saw Breaking the Waves and had this fight then. Both the makers of rape entertainment and the fans with their fingers their ears going "Lalalaaaaa, I can't heeeeear you" over criticism of rape entertainment seem to me to be deliberately cleaving unto a "there's a guy peeing" interpretation because a full understanding of the horror they're making/liking would wreck the fun for them.
posted by Don Pepino at 5:33 AM on May 24, 2015 [5 favorites]

....maybe I just woke up, but what scene are you talking about where you thought it was someone peeing?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:37 AM on May 24, 2015

Here: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=blair+witch+project+guy+in+the+corner&iax=1&ia=images

Snurk! It still looks exactly like what I first thought it was all these years later.
posted by Don Pepino at 5:44 AM on May 24, 2015

Oh right. Gotcha.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:50 AM on May 24, 2015

Proust is better than Woolf

*is mortified*
posted by Wolof at 6:02 AM on May 24, 2015 [4 favorites]

Breaking the Waves

A million times, this. Or almost any movie by Lars. NB: I do not want to debate whether my take is the right one; I am just using this as an example of this "let me tell you why your visceral reaction is wrong" phenom that goes on. Anyway:

When I watch a von Trier film, all I see is "Hey there, watch me slowly torture this woman for the next two hours, because she's naive, crazy, or possibly evil". But I don't raise this interpretation anymore to my (mostly male) friends who love von Trier, because they will proceed to explain to me that no, see, what von Trier is doing here is [amazing philosophical acrobatics ahoy]. One friend is also fond of the take that what we're seeing is von Trier tormenting his own anima. So it's OK, because he's only torturing and degrading the woman inside him.

I have given Lars many chances, but my physical reaction is almost always the same (with the exception of Melancholia, which I thought was painfully beautiful): bowel-shuddering fear, nausea, and the urge to cry. Maybe that's what he's going for, I dunno. But I got so weary of having it explained to me that if only I looked at von Trier's body of work from the right angle, my ridiculous visceral response to his films would magically disappear, and I am not only depriving myself of high art by not doing so; I am being unfair to poor Lars.

So yeah, fuck that. I don't lecture people on their sense of humor if they didn't find the movie Freaked to be the greatest comedy ever made, precisely because I don't like to be lectured about how my response to rape and torture in film is shallow and pedestrian.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:48 AM on May 24, 2015 [22 favorites]

That was not what was stated. It is possible that I have misread. But what was stated was a likening of my contribution to that of "own gross little treehouse with their dad's Playboys and empty Dew cans scattered all over the place.

Yes, you misread my comment so badly, and took it so personally, that it's quite clear to me there's no productive way to have this conversation with you.

I honestly think it's instructive how offended you were about your misinterpretation of my comment versus how women have been repeatedly scolded about being insufficiently nice in this thread. As a reminder, this thread originally started out as a discussion of why a post about tattoos turned into a gross display of misogyny and has apparently become a thread about how rude people are.
posted by winna at 7:13 AM on May 24, 2015 [23 favorites]

Oh please. This had been a great thread for sorting out how mods handle misogyny but I agree with only connect and bb that some of the comments crossed the line. I didn't like your comment winna and didn't like a lot of tm&mm comments but so what? We're allowed to state the comments we find over the top. Overall this thread was great for mods getting a sense of stopping details sooner.
posted by biggreenplant at 7:59 AM on May 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't know, man. Starting off a comment with "Oh please" is not exactly bending over backwards to see the other person's POV. Also, "had been great?" "Was great?" Nice try. You'll end this thread when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
posted by Don Pepino at 8:20 AM on May 24, 2015 [8 favorites]

"Is this 911? I have an emergency. Women are failing to be nice."
posted by Miko at 8:25 AM on May 24, 2015 [63 favorites]

"SIR. SIR. Have you tried condescendingly explaining the importance of niceness and civility twenty thousand million times?"
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:30 AM on May 24, 2015 [45 favorites]

Sorry not trying to end the thread. I meant the past tense only for the mods saying they would step in earlier to stop sexist derails which they had stated earlier. I came in to give my opinion so really hadn't meant to be implying the thread was over but that is how my comment seemed.
posted by biggreenplant at 9:37 AM on May 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

"SIR. Before I can help you, I'm going to need you to get ANGRY. I can't help you if you won't get angry"
posted by tigrrrlily at 2:16 PM on May 24, 2015 [7 favorites]

Can the sir crap stop? I'm female. Look I get it. I brought my exasperation up in a moment of anger and that's fine that people push back. Also that was my first comment in this thread so ilunfortunately it came as yet another attack on women. I haven't had a chance to comment with the fast moving threads and was mainly just favouriting comments so I namely applaud the same people I've annoyed but that said, I do see a lot of merit in onlyconnects comments and also I see bb as a valued ally and didn't like the comment. However the way I brought it up and the fact that I hadn't posted anything to push back against the misogyny in the thread earlier is a mistake on my part. Not to say that people can't dislike/resent my opinion anyhow , as has been made clear. Fair enough
posted by biggreenplant at 3:28 PM on May 24, 2015 [11 favorites]

Biggreenplant, I think people reacted to Brandon Blatcher's post with such vehemence partially because he seemed to be steering this thread down the same unhelpful road that several others had tried to push it toward and so there was a lot of frustration, but also because he has a history of comments that are unhelpful (to put it charitably) in these sorts of threads. He seems to have been better lately, but it's always hard to tell if people are learning where the lines are drawn on what kind of behavior is allowed on MetaTalk and standing just on the non-actionable side or if they are actually changing the way they participate. I think that he's really worn down what benefit of the doubt people may have had for him, and since that stuff tends to grow back pretty slowly, people are a lot less willing to cut him slack than people who don't have that kind of history.
posted by NoraReed at 4:00 PM on May 24, 2015 [25 favorites]

Okay thanks NoraReed for that. Much appreciated for explanation of what seemed to me as over the top hostility. Thanks again.
posted by biggreenplant at 4:56 PM on May 24, 2015 [4 favorites]

Also, while it is, theoretically, an "innocent question," it's also one that a) has been answered, b) has been the subject of mod action, and has already caused a derail in this MeTa. It's extremely unreasonable to chide people for being less than supremely polite to what is going to be seen as a provocation to anyone not bending over backwards to be "fair."

Which is, since women are the ones who get told continuously to be "fair" and "nice," kind of the problem this thread is supposed to be addressing rather than promoting.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:27 PM on May 24, 2015 [28 favorites]

I'm sorry about the SIR stuff, to me it was a comfortable and familiar routine to express frustration at a behavior, not at anyone in particular. I didn't actually have any user in mind when I jumped on the tail end of it. I apologize.
posted by tigrrrlily at 7:31 PM on May 24, 2015 [6 favorites]

Debate club thing:

So, as debaters, on the negative side we would have this 'global thermonuclear war' arg that was kind of a laugh because we would be all "your plan for gun control' would lead to GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR' and your "your plan for aid to family farms would lead to GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR'" and it was basically a thing we would use when we didn't have any better arguments or we were spreading and because we were talking like auctioneers we could get like seven big arguments wedged into our eight minutes or whatever.

So, my boyfriend is a member of the NRA. He is a member of the NRA because they do gun safety stuff along with all of the evil shit that they do. My boyfriend supports gun control, has the gun safe and all that. He thinks that the NRA legislative efforts are garbage and Wayne LaPierre is garbage but the NRA gun safety stuff has a real world benefit for him, and so he is a member.

But it still irritates me because, honestly, the day Wayne LaPierre dies, I will have a smile on his face because I think he is an evil fucker. And so one day I tried the "GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR" tactic on my boyfriend and said:

"Do you know that your NRA membership means that you are complicit in killing children?"

Now, I believe that, that NRA existing means more dead kids. So as a debate point, I don't think that it was invalid.

What did matter is that it hurt the fuck out of my boyfriend when I said this. Gun safety and responsible gun ownership with him is HUGE and he embraces these concepts to the hilt. He has a kid, and he drills these gun safety tips into his kid.

So when I said what did, without any preface or suggestion that I was going to suggest something that would hurt him, it was essentially throwing sand into his eyes. And it really hurt him.

This is hard for me to grok, because I hate the NRA so much. It's like, shit, why not go all YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR when one is talking about the fucking NRA.

But as a non-debater, as a person and even more as a person who loves my partner and does not want to hurt him ever, what the fuck was I doing trying to win debate points? And that's all I was doing.

Because I nope out of rape threads (these days) I don't do the hard work that others are doing of explaining, patiently, repeatedly of why this thing said really hurts. Thanks to those people who are doing the hard work. And no, this is not a debate club and as much as I loved debating, the principles involved in debate club don't belong, I would argue, anywhere but maybe court and politics.

Otherwise, being a debater is just obnoxious shit. I wish it hadn't been the NRA thing that had gotten me to see that, because I hate the fucking NRA. But my hate doesn't mean that GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR has a place in a compassionate dialogue about the fucking NRA.
posted by angrycat at 7:46 PM on May 24, 2015 [22 favorites]

I started it with my flip comment, so I take responsibility. I'm not going to apologize for it, exactly - I think it is a decent point to ask whether it's the sense of a comment, or its presentation, that's being objected to, and when it's presentation, to ask if the standards by which it's being judged are unfairly gendered. Maybe in this case, some would say "no. Treehouse comment was unacceptably offensive regardless of who made it." But it's not a bad idea to raise the question.

Also, I think it's fair to be a bit contingent with comments by BB, and I think unless you've been around for the past six months or so in MetaTalk, it might be hard to know that. I think that might be a factor in onlyconnect's concerns: comments are being evaluated in light of recent personal histories, not just for their immediate content in this thread. If I hadn't tracked much of that participation, I'd probably be coming down on the "innocent question!" side too. But I think there has a been a little bit of a stirring-the-pot trajectory on the part of that particular user, and though I get the sense that he is reining it in and he is certainly a longtime user with much to contribute, it is not unreasonable to handle his comments somewhat tentatively until intent is clearer.
posted by Miko at 7:54 PM on May 24, 2015 [6 favorites]

Brandon Blatcher is like Link in The Legend of Zelda: 99% awesome, but every now and then dropping bombs and fleeing in the hopes he can get Dodongo to eat them and explode. MetaFilter is Dodongo.

And yes, I made this comment primarily for the Dodongo reference.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:00 PM on May 24, 2015 [17 favorites]

I do feel that it's important to see the difference between asking the question again, and asking why that question shouldn't be asked. Asking a question and talking about that question are two very different animals.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:10 AM on May 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I personally am curious as to why 'BB asking about the same shit' gets 'why no benefit of the doubt' type defence but there's no assumption of good faith for the posters saying 'ffs get off it' to him?

As in, why is it that the 'oh I'm just stumbling into this thread and asking an inane question' (that's been answered and modded out and explained and talked about at length) cause for an assumption of good faith, but the pushback isn't? The pushback comes from a place of experience and knowledge, surely that implies there should be good faith for that too? The pushback isn't coming out of nowhere, right?

I think it's a wider tendency to keep assuming and wanting to assume and insisting on good faith and slates wiped clean, while the responders aren't supposed to see patterns. And it absolutely is gendered. At the moment I'm struggling with it in real life - pointing out that is isn't just a certain person 'being a dick sometimes' or 'me being too upset' it's an absolutely trackable pattern of behaviour that I've been expected to give leeway and benefit of the doubt and so so so much good faith to, at the expense of my comfort, my abilities, my own good faith in myself, and when I do pushback, it's unfair. Because slates wiped clean and why am I bringing that thing from years ago up.

Abusers and assholes want the slate wiped clean, they want to pretend each moment is all new and shiny, and they sure as shit don't want you to look at their behaviour over lengthy periods of time.
posted by geek anachronism at 2:20 AM on May 25, 2015 [37 favorites]

Asking a question and talking about that question are two very different animals.

In theory, yes, and I think we are all of sufficient intellect to understand that, but not if the 'new' question is an attempt to once again raise and relitigate the question itself. I'd be more inclined to agree if it had looked something like "I don't understand why the question was deleted," and stayed on a meta level like that. It didn't. The re-raised question contained further content in the premise that amounted to a furtherance of the argument. In addition, the larger context (it had already been discussed and fairly well settled as unwanted in this thread) matters.
posted by Miko at 7:21 AM on May 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

On a more positive note, a user (with a history of this) posted a crappy comment over in the gamer/swatting thread, and in the time it took me to think about flagging versus replying, Cortex not only deleted it but left a "don't do this" comment, exactly as has been discussed here.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:30 AM on May 25, 2015 [14 favorites]

i got a couple extra "I Helped Flag That Comment" stickers if anyone wants one.
posted by twist my arm at 7:35 AM on May 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I didn't flag it, I just need a sticker... :-( Are they scratch-and-sniff?
posted by tigrrrlily at 1:22 PM on May 25, 2015

A comment deleted - NortonDC, I'm not sure what your connection is to onlyconnect but it's not appropriate to use another member's personal info as a rhetorical bludgeon regardless.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 6:19 PM on May 25, 2015 [4 favorites]

You should know. And you made a mistake.
posted by NortonDC at 6:33 PM on May 25, 2015 [8 favorites]

I think that comment should stay. Traditionally Metatalk is where most comments are not deleted unless they are blatant fuck you's, and we can hardly accuse NortonDC of doxing his wife.

There are how many Metafilter marriages? Losing onlyconnect means we've got to remove them from the wiki.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:39 PM on May 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

I think that comment should stay. Traditionally Metatalk is where most comments are not deleted unless they are blatant fuck you's, and we can hardly accuse NortonDC of doxing his wife.

It's still a derail regardless. Most of these "but politeness!" tangents are ultimately derails. This thread is about how to fix the problem of the boyzone, not "whether the boyzone is a problem that should be fixed", no matter how many false equivalencies are made to obfuscate that issue.

There's also no way that actually engaging with that comment isn't going to come down to people debating the worth of an individual commenter's presence on MeFi, so it's essentially either an invitation to something uncomfortable close to personal attacks (not that it stops anyone on the "side" that supposedly cares so much about civility), or it just can't really be responded to at all without personalizing a discussion that really doesn't need to be personalized, again from the side that likes to talk so much about how they care about open discourse. It may not be a blatant "fuck you" to an individual person, but it's certainly a blatant fuck you to the on-going discussion.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 7:06 PM on May 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think that was a good deletion. It's weird to use personal info that way, especially if the point being made is that Metafilter is going to drive feminists away by pushing back against misogyny (which does not make sense to me). And if it was a "mistake" to ask men not to, eg, speculate about what sexual positions women like based on their tattoos, or ask them not to keep pestering women about their feelings on rape, then I fail to see how that is a mistake. Onlyconnect isn't here to elaborate on that, so instead we're getting strange insinuations on her behalf about how we "made a mistake." That feels gross to me.
posted by Frobenius Twist at 7:08 PM on May 25, 2015 [16 favorites]

People have every right to step back from Metafilter when it's upsetting them, or when they find the site no longer meets their needs. A dynamic that comes up when that happens in a visible way in a contentious MeTa is that the user's personal decision gets turned into a talking point for one - or, often, several - positions in the debate, and that's neither a healthy way to discuss site issues nor fair to the user who isn't here to engage in the discussion of their own choices. If onlyconnect wants to come back and re-engage on this subject, she's welcome to - but until that time, she's left the room and it's impolite at best to focus the discussion on her.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 7:22 PM on May 25, 2015 [14 favorites]

> I think that comment should stay. Traditionally Metatalk is where most comments are not deleted unless they are blatant fuck you's, and we can hardly accuse NortonDC of doxing his wife.

That tradition has been changing, and that's to the good. The comment was still, to my mind, inappropriate. What purpose did it serve? Do we need to start debating who really deserves to feel bad enough to walk away, and who among the remaining should feel bad or righteous for playing a role in that (or not)? People leave for all kinds of reasons, temporarily and not.
posted by rtha at 7:26 PM on May 25, 2015 [13 favorites]

I think that comment should be restored - it was right to delete, thinking it was doxxing, but if it's her spouse who made the comment, I think it should stand.
posted by corb at 7:28 PM on May 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

I dunno, scolding by proxy or of his own initiative the comment serves no purpose and is pretty much noise.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 7:32 PM on May 25, 2015 [12 favorites]

Maybe if you're looking at how to drive away or just plain delete the assholes, and you wind up driving off someone who is patently *not* one, it's worth a little thought. Doesn't have to be about 'oo murdered 'oo. It *would* be about the reasons (temporary or not), though.
posted by uosuaq at 7:35 PM on May 25, 2015 [7 favorites]

But she already stated her reasons for leaving and isn't here to discuss it anyway.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 7:40 PM on May 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

> Maybe if you're looking at how to drive away or just plain delete the assholes, and you wind up driving off someone who is patently *not* one, it's worth a little thought.

Because we haven't been having a 1700+ comment thread discussing this? We've been....doing something else? We have been doing almost nothing else for two weeks but talk and think about who gets chased out of threads (like the fpp that started this meTa) or feels the need to remove themselves, and how and why.
posted by rtha at 7:41 PM on May 25, 2015 [14 favorites]

I get that NortonDC wants us to understand the friend we've lost, and is eulogizing her and condemning us at the same time. I sympathize with all of those impulses, and I also understand that they feel there is a "new Metafilter" that is no longer a home for her. But I'm not sure whether those things merit keeping the comment.
posted by gingerest at 7:49 PM on May 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

And if the thread is about how tolerating frozen peaches drives off good people, and the thread *itself* drives off a good person...I don't get why that doesn't count as something worth more than a cursory "feel better! come back soon!"

Aya, I don't really get your comment. I think we're all aware that she's not here, and that she stated her reasons for leaving. I don't think that once a reason has been put forward, that's where thinking about it has to end. This probably won't turn into any kind of useful discussion, though (by saying which I don't mean to cut you off).
posted by uosuaq at 7:51 PM on May 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I wish I had read the comment.
posted by Drinky Die at 7:53 PM on May 25, 2015

As lalex noted, NortonDC preserved it on his profile page.
posted by uosuaq at 7:55 PM on May 25, 2015

Hmm. I think the comment was odd, and the whole incident feels somewhat bizarrely fraught, but maybe it should have been left to stand because now it's become an odd sideways attempt to influence discourse that you have to run down in search in order to understand. At this point we're all talking about it, so it may as well have stayed. In fact it's tinged with more passive aggression than it probably originally had because he had no choice other than to use his profile for it, if he wanted it to be seen. We've now already made more of it than it demanded, which seems opposite to the intended effect of a deletion.

As far as the content, I think it's a bid for us to get hung up on individual factors. MetaFilter has lost of a lot of great people, and many we never even know about and never hear why - we just see their names shaded out on our contact lists. Others let us know why, and here we know why. But that seems like enough. I could also write a comment about what kind of upbringing I had, my educational and professional achievements, and my contributions to MetaFilter, and I think they are pretty good in general as well and not dissimilar to what we read from NortonDC about onlyconnect. So, those things are great. But I really don't think they're germane here to a discussion about what overall site tone is. I can say that I'd not plan to stay around a MetaFilter that doesn't make real changes in this regard; I buttoned for about a year just to avoid distraction, but was dismayed when I came back at how much backsliding had happened, so it does seem to me reasonable to continue calling out the attempts to roll things back. And while some may button because they think things have gone "too far," others will do so and have done so because they've still been exposed to too much exhausting microaggression, and for them, things still haven't gone far enough. So, short of going down a 1:1 path of figuring out who leaves under which system, I think we have to keep squarely focused on site as a whole, on participation an aggregate phenomenon, and not on individual responses and choices.
posted by Miko at 7:58 PM on May 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

And if the thread is about how tolerating frozen peaches drives off good people, and the thread *itself* drives off a good person...I don't get why that doesn't count as something worth more than a cursory "feel better! come back soon!"

Because it's possible to accept her reasons and feelings as totally valid from her perspective, yet not a perspective one shares and agrees with, and from that perspective, not particularly concerning.

I think you're confusing people not particularly being interested in yelling at someone as they leave a room where people are having a discussion, whether they're leaving in anger or sadness, with agreeing with the reasons that they choose to leave in the first place. To take the metaphor further, you can leave the door open and accept them if they come back into the discussion, without trying to shout up the stairs at them.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 8:04 PM on May 25, 2015 [7 favorites]

Aya, I don't really get your comment.

You don't? Alright, onlyconnect gave her reasons for leaving, which we're all aware of, and has now left. Any kind of discussion on that would then be either a) redundant or b) speculative exercises that are actually pretty unfair to her as she isn't here to participate.

Further, I don't think it's really cool to drop in to pretty much shame everyone here and bounce out. That's over the line, as much as I totally understand the impulse. Especially long, long after plenty of folks responded in a totally reasonable manner to respecting and even sympathizing with her decision.

Digging further into this feels like an extended tone argument and a waste of time. Sorry. I hope we can get back to the actual subject instead of how we don't feel bad enough about someone leaving and how awful we all are.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:06 PM on May 25, 2015 [11 favorites]

I read the comment.

Thing is, just about anyone who's left the site could have such a glowing eulogy written about them too. So the only reason Norton posted it was to make the rest of us feel guilty for being such meanies, and I ain't got time for that kind of passive-aggressive scolding any more.

So, yeah, only connect is a great person and everything, but she chose to leave - so if you think it's a bad thing she left, scold HER, not us.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:08 PM on May 25, 2015 [16 favorites]

I think the reason for deleting was perfectly sound, given what restless_nomad understood at the time.
And it's nice to find a point of agreement with TM&MM -- obviously if people didn't agree with the things onlyconnect said, they'd simply be sorry to see her go. I thought quite highly of her comments but may be overestimating her stature in the community.
posted by uosuaq at 8:10 PM on May 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Overestimating her stature?! Some of us have more stature than others? Nice to know benson.
posted by futz at 8:13 PM on May 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Norton might also feel badly about his wife being upset, Empress. No reason to drag him in when I'm the one being tiresome. I'll try to slow my roll now.
posted by uosuaq at 8:14 PM on May 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I thought quite highly of her comments but may be overestimating her stature in the community.

Oh man. Did you miss the farewell, I get you though we disagree, hope-you-come-back comments from other people here?
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:14 PM on May 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Actually I take that back. I get we're not sufficiently repentant to you. This is intractable.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:20 PM on May 25, 2015

I think that sharing that kind of personal information for another user, however well-meant or honest, was crossing a line a should have been deleted. It will save trouble in future cases of less benign sharing to have a clear precedent.

I am sad that, instead of talking about addressing misogyny on the side, we are once more derailing over user drama. I feel bad about onlyconnect, but I don't want this to be the onlyconnect show. I want it to be a discussion of responses to misogyny on this site, which is a real and pressing problem.

I am beginning to suspect that some people would rather discuss anything else.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:21 PM on May 25, 2015 [19 favorites]

Yeeah, uosneq, I'm not sure what more you're looking to squeeze out of onlyconnect's departure. I'm sorry to see her go. I certainly don't think anyone in this thread should bear individual or collective responsibility for it, nor do I have any ashes handy.
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:21 PM on May 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

overestimating her stature in the community.

Huh? Stature? That's just another way of trying to understand things in terms of status. As I tried to say above, I don't think moderation decisions should be made on individual factors (whatever you call them) and I suspect that's pretty widespread. We don't want a MeFi that says "Oh, User XYZ is in the Stature Top 100! Let's be sure they are hunky-dory with everything in moderation policy!" Nor do we want one that says "Change this policy or I, High Stature User, leave!" I don't think we have a site that works that way. You've got a wicked ancient account; is "stature" your sense of how site standards are developed?

I'm with GenjiandProust...let's move on and focus on what remains of the issue the thread is addressing.
posted by Miko at 8:30 PM on May 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think the reason for deleting was perfectly sound, given what restless_nomad understood at the time.
And it's nice to find a point of agreement with TM&MM -- obviously if people didn't agree with the things onlyconnect said, they'd simply be sorry to see her go. I thought quite highly of her comments but may be overestimating her stature in the community.

This comment strikes me as a masterwork of passive-aggression, although I might be misreading some of your points. Regardless, you're being kind of a dick, in that you seem to be assuming if people just reflected on why onlyconnect chose to leave, they'd... what, change their minds? Feel very very sorry? Change their positions on boyzone-vs-"civility" and where the balance should be weighed? You're rejecting the possibility that people have considered what you want them to consider and still don't agree or don't think it indicates something that needs to change in how they want the site to operate.

People leave the site all the time, for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes, I'm happy, more often I'm sad, most of the time I don't even notice. Personally, I'm aggressively-anti-boyzone because I think it sucks, in and of itself, not as a proxy for anything else. Certainly, there are users who are big contributors to that atmosphere, and if they leave I'm happy to see them go, but I'd be just as happy to see them finally get it and stop being assholes. Likewise, I'm sad if an awesome user leaves because he or she just can't take the misogyny or whatever else, but I'd also be just as sad if the same user left because they got a new job working in the remote Amazonian jungle and they only have internet access once a month for an hour they use to spend on more important things than MeFi. Likewise, I'm sure there are plenty of users I'd say left for reasons of not being able to be misogynist assholes without consequence anymore, while I'm sure they'd say something about echo chambers and free speech or mod cabals or whatever. My feelings about their departure are independent from their given reasons for leaving.

This whole derail is based around a false equivalence, not to mention many other false things besides. Just because "we" (used super loosely) often point out that the boyzone causes some awesome users to leave doesn't mean it's the only reason "we" think the boyzone is bad. Furthermore, I don't feel a need to hammer out site policy in a way that's going to give the pretense of universal agreement, in part because if that agreement was genuine, you wouldn't need any kind of policy or moderation in the first place.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 8:37 PM on May 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

TM&MM, you said:
You're rejecting the possibility that people have considered what you want them to consider and still don't agree or don't think it indicates something that needs to change in how they want the site to operate.

in direct response to what I'd said:
obviously if people didn't agree with the things onlyconnect said, they'd simply be sorry to see her go.

In other words, when I was trying to concede precisely your point (and said I was agreeing with you). It seems like a good place to leave off.
posted by uosuaq at 9:01 PM on May 25, 2015

Uosuaq, for someone who thought this thread should have ended hundreds of comments ago, you sure have had a lot to say. "Slow your roll" doesn't seem to be something you can adhere to.
posted by futz at 9:08 PM on May 25, 2015 [4 favorites]

This thread is largely a call for more banning and shorter fuses. The idea is that it will reduce the amount of misogyny on the site. As I have stated earlier, I agree with that goal and think it is past time for those changes.

But we should be aware if some people who are steadfast opponents of misogyny leave the site over it, we should listen to why and listen to what they bring to the site if other mefites want to bring it up in violation of no site policy. Doesn't hurt anything to listen to genuine views on the topic. But hey, it's deleted and we all know to look at the profile now if we want to see it. No need to make it a bigger deal.
posted by Drinky Die at 10:08 PM on May 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

If I had dropped a note in the thread that caused me to leave, it would have been disruptive and antithetical to the conversation.

Only if you are on some other site where the people who read it and disagree with your choices are anti-ethical to even the tiniest whisper of dissenting views. That isn't the Metafilter community though, feel free to let people know why you feel you have to leave if it ever comes to that. It's not the end of the world for anybody involved. It happens all the time here.
posted by Drinky Die at 12:17 AM on May 26, 2015

This thread is largely a call for more banning and shorter fuses.

Also for swifter, more merciless deletion of shitty comments, and, on the user side, for heavier use of flagging and contact forms. And it's a call to everyone, most importantly, to point out the constant drone of sexist bullshit so we hear it instead of treating it as white noise. "A call for more banning" leaves out a lot of the most important points made here.
posted by gingerest at 1:07 AM on May 26, 2015 [24 favorites]

I understand that we have changed the policy on deletion on Metafilter, and I've praised it. But have we also changed the policy here on Metatalk?

Traditionally there have been different thresholds here and there: I once had to endure an entire Metatalk thread on my right to be a parent, for instance, which would never fly in Metafilter. It was only closed when I came in to say "fuck you."

I don't know that we should have different standards in Metatalk: that's a tradition but that's not an argument. I'd be happy if there was the same standard for misogynistic comments here and on Metatalk: that seems right. But for other stuff, I don't know: there seemed to be good reasons to allow, for instance, new issues and derails in Metatalk while that would get removed in Metafilter. In any case, NortonDC's comment wasn't misogynistic, so it seems like it could be deleted as doxing (r_n's given reason) but not if the relationship is one that warrants it (Greg Nog is not doxing likeatoaster by posting about her in their wedding thread.)
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:10 AM on May 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Earlier in the thread, The Master and Margarita Mix misrepresented the views expressed by a large number of users, with several other users jumping in. From what she said, onlyconnect apparently believed that any user designated by another user as "sealion" or MRA troll, including her, would be automatically banned. I think this is a misunderstanding. I also think The Master and Margarita Mix and NoraReed's attacks on her were completely unfair.

> And if it was a "mistake" to ask men not to, eg, speculate about what sexual positions women like based on their tattoos, or ask them not to keep pestering women about their feelings on rape, then I fail to see how that is a mistake.

onlyconnect did not at any time in this thread say it was a "'mistake' to ask men not to ... speculate about what sexual positions women like based on their tattoos". She, like a lot of other people here, asked the moderators to get tougher about deleting stuff like this. If we're going to get back to talking about the topic of the thread, we need people like you stop doing this.
posted by nangar at 3:18 AM on May 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

That MetaTalk thread happened before queuing. (And to be fair, it was one guy being a complete asshole to you and ninety responses of "this MeTa, you're kidding right?" and "wow, what an asshole.")
I don't think it's going to be a regular thing to delete comments in MeTa for derailing. I doubt it would change much to reinstate NortonDC's comment, since it's clearly not doxxing, but I don't think it's a harbinger of sitewide change, because the deletion comes at comment 1800 or something, and it's a case that's unlikely to be repeated.
posted by gingerest at 3:39 AM on May 26, 2015

I don't think it's going to be a regular thing to delete comments in MeTa for derailing.

So that's the question, isn't it? A lot of other people seem to think that derails ought to be deleted here too.

Here's one argument for deleting derails: their basically sidestepping the queue. We've already seen what happens when this becomes the GoT proxy Metatalk.
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:52 AM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think that comment should stay. Traditionally Metatalk is where most comments are not deleted unless they are blatant fuck you's, and we can hardly accuse NortonDC of doxing his wife.

As an aside, this and corb's

I think that comment should be restored - it was right to delete, thinking it was doxxing, but if it's her spouse who made the comment, I think it should stand.

Seem to me to be pretty fundamentally unsafe. In the absence of onlyconnect's opinion, it's possibly germane to the thread topic if we assume that a husband has the right to share a wife's personal information without any sign from the wife that she is OK with that.

MetaFilter has strong protections against the sharing of personal information about users by other users without their explicit consent. Consent is not abrogated by marriage - I don't think people should be seen as having to power to give that consent on behalf of spouses without explicit permission.
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:08 AM on May 26, 2015 [20 favorites]

Explicit consent? Are you asking for Greg Nog's Metatalk to be deleted?
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:17 AM on May 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

This is veering far off track.
posted by h00py at 4:23 AM on May 26, 2015 [11 favorites]

If you really think that NortonDC is doxing his wife, then it's not enough to delete the comment: he must be required to change his userpage to remove the doxing information. I favor consent, too, but I think something like implicit consent is at work here.

I posted some details of a friend's son's birth in Metatalk. Now, I asked permission first, but the mods don't know that.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:27 AM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

toot toot derail horn toot
posted by NoraReed at 4:38 AM on May 26, 2015 [12 favorites]

Hmmm. It's an interesting point. I am generally suspicious of implicit consent, TBH. And, to get back on topic, especially when consent is taken to be implicit when a husband is making decisions on behalf of a wife. That's an ingrained historical bias which may or may not be relevant case by case, but does demonstrably exist in some cases.

On the other hand, this risks being a meta-detail about standards of evidence for announcements of happy events, and whether they differ from standards of evidence for rhetorical gambits in the middle of heated exchanges. (I would say yes, but it's not a slam-dunk...). The original NortonDC post was both personal information and a derail, and moddable as either or both.
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:38 AM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

There's another issue here of turning the thread into a referendum on a particular user. restless_nomad's aleady spelled this out pretty clearly:

People have every right to step back from Metafilter when it's upsetting them ... A dynamic that comes up when that happens in a visible way in a contentious MeTa is that the user's personal decision gets turned into a talking point for one - or, often, several - positions in the debate, and that's neither a healthy way to discuss site issues nor fair to the user who isn't here to engage in the discussion of their own choices ... she's left the room and it's impolite at best to focus the discussion on her.

I think arguing about this deletion is a derail.
posted by nangar at 4:42 AM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

It's not a derail if NortonDC is being accused of abusing his wife's consent. That's pretty much textbook misogyny. I don't think anyone really believes that, though.

I'd still like to hear from the mods about whether the standards for deletion in Metatalk have changed. I see good reasons on either side, but ultimately it's a policy decision that the moderators should make explicit.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:44 AM on May 26, 2015

Not to mention, for the past few years, the mods have been cracking down on debates about people buttoning when the subject isn't here to participate.
posted by zarq at 4:45 AM on May 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'd still like to hear from the mods about whether the standards for deletion in Metatalk have changed. I see good reasons on either side, but ultimately it's a policy decision that the moderators should make explicit.

I predict the answer is going to be "Mod's Call." Meaning that no policies have officially changed, no explicit bright line will be drawn, the comment was delete-worthy for several reasons and the official 'case by case basis' policy remains in effect.
posted by zarq at 4:51 AM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

Anotherpanacea, you can make a new Metatalk post if you'd like (though this has been sort of a serious wringer for us, and it might be merciful to hold off *just a bit*).

And I think we need to look seriously at what more we can realistically accomplish here. This thread is closing in on 2,000 comments, and it's demanding a huge amount of moderator attention and is even basically becoming counterproductive to its goal at this point, since the more time we spend here is less time to do some of the analysis and discussion on our end that we need to be able to spend some time with.

I'm feeling like it might be better to let it wind down and come back to it fresh a little later. Either way, we seriously cannot handle this becoming a free-zone for arguing about All The Things, and we're sort of running on fumes at the moment.
posted by taz (staff) at 4:54 AM on May 26, 2015 [8 favorites]

I hope not. Personally, I think the mods should extend the explicit policy on deleting shitty misogyny to Metatalk too.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:55 AM on May 26, 2015

Sorry for kicking off that new derail, Taz...
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:55 AM on May 26, 2015

Ack. Okay, sorry.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:56 AM on May 26, 2015

And I think we need to look seriously at what more we can realistically accomplish here. This thread is closing in on 2,000 comments, and it's demanding a huge amount of moderator attention and is even basically becoming counterproductive to its goal at this point, since the more time we spend here is less time to do some of the analysis and discussion on our end that we need to be able to spend some time with.

I think the discussion could continue just fine and with less need for mod attention if we scrap the entire tedious derail over onlyconnect's departure and talk instead about the actual subject. I feel like the few voices who have been clamoring to shut this down since hundreds of comments ago are using it as a cudgel to make that happen. OTOH, I can't even load this thread on my phone anymore, so if there's a need to start a Part Deux headed in the OP by the major points covered thus far, that'd be fine to my mind, too.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:15 AM on May 26, 2015 [7 favorites]

if there's a need to start a Part Deux headed in the OP by the major points covered thus far, that'd be fine to my mind, too.

For whatever it's worth, my personal sense is that we've arrived at a plateau, having secured some new agreements amongst ourselves (see gingerest's comment above), and that the only way to determine whether it's working as intended is to sit back and let things unfold normally for a while. Closing the thread while we do that seems fine, because it is just sitting here sort of inviting new levels of sniping and reopening of old argument threads. I don't mean for this to be construed as a demand or a sly way to end an argument. Just seems like a good time to test our new commitments in practice, knowing we can always re-open discussion.
posted by Miko at 5:37 AM on May 26, 2015 [21 favorites]

Agreed, Miko.
posted by nangar at 5:44 AM on May 26, 2015

If the moderators have made the requested changes, what would be discussed in a new thread? One possibility is that we ought to have new standards for moderation in Metatalk, too. But taz has specifically asked us to table that question for a little while.

An advantage of a new thread is that it could be queued and then the moderators could wait until they've had a chance to catch their breath.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:00 AM on May 26, 2015

I could see this thread being useful for pointing out how threads on this kind of stuff are going, but if it takes up so much mod attention that it ends up being detrimental to those threads, seems wiser to close it.
posted by NoraReed at 6:10 AM on May 26, 2015

Well, if we think there's a need for a "so how's it going" thread, we could just plan ahead to open a new one in, say, 3-4 weeks to take stock. I was reflecting that it's unfortunate how these threads end up being posted at somewhat unpredictable intervals, because they are essentially reactive (something bad happened and someone wants to talk about it) instead of proactive (taking-the-temperature, evaluation, no crisis right now, just discussion). I don't think MeTa actually has a ton of experience with the latter. I can see ways in which it could be good or could be bad, depending on how users interact with that opportunity to weigh in and lend a critical eye to, say, the past month's interaction, bringing in things that hadn't risen to "Immediate MeTa!" level.
posted by Miko at 6:21 AM on May 26, 2015 [7 favorites]

I think that would be a good idea, but I'm concerned about people using it as a "HEY I SEE THIS IS THE META FOR YELLING" thing where people just treat a MeTa with lots of comments as the current place for "I'VE GOT A BONE TO PICK". I guess that tighter moderation here could help with that though.
posted by NoraReed at 6:26 AM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

My bet is that in 3 or 4 weeks time no one will have any meaningful complaints about the new policy, actually. For the most part the few, paltry objections have been of the sort that object more to the idea of a new policy (for misplaced censorship reasons) than the actual fact of it. The few deletions people have discussed here have all seemed pretty awesome to me, and the timeouts have all seemed pretty reasonable too though I haven't paid as close attention there.

Another possibility is that it's valuable to have a thread open on women's issues and experiences while the policy is being enacted. I tend to prefer that Metatalk threads either articulate and achieve an objective or turn into playful longboat threads, but that seems like an important and worthy goal.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:31 AM on May 26, 2015

I'm concerned about people using it as a "HEY I SEE THIS IS THE META FOR YELLING"

My concern would be that it could prompt people to go combing the site for examples of things that might be deletable but would not otherwise have risen to that level of attention. But that's probably a misplaced concern.

My bet is that in 3 or 4 weeks time no one will have any meaningful complaints about the new policy, actually.

That would be fabulous. I feel like individually, we could make the call on whether a thread is needed round about then. I don't feel I personally need an ongoing open thread on women's experience - and I think visibility and action are better when a conversation is new and more people are involved than what we're down to here - but I might be an outlier.
posted by Miko at 6:43 AM on May 26, 2015

Could the mods put together some guidelines as to what is supposed to be changing? I for one am struggling to pick the bones out of the above despite making efforts to keep up.

r_n: We aren't actually robots

And could we do something about this? Its perhaps the most disappointing thing ever said on Metafilter. pb or cortex would make lovely cyborgs as part of a gradual shift.
posted by biffa at 6:58 AM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

I wanted to slip in one somewhat derail-y comment because I have something positive to say.

Before I logged off last night I used control F to review what was happening in the thread at the time onlyconnect buttoned. (I had missed some of the who said what to whom upthread from that.)

And what penetrated my skull and my heart a couple of hours later was that while it is frustrating to be misunderstood in online discussion, it's flat out hugely painful to be * mischaracterized *.

I've heard people cry out before that they are not the kind of demon they are being painted as being in comment replies, but lots of it rolled off me. This time, because onlyconnect showed her pain rather than covering it with anger, on the reread I was able to get a feel for what she felt. I hope this will prompt me to be more understanding to any person who is at the bottom of a dogpile.
posted by puddledork at 7:19 AM on May 26, 2015 [8 favorites]

I am disheartened how completely and consistently this thread was derailed. I favor shutting it down, because I think it will be impossible to get any further work done here.

I would like the moderators to give some thought to how the "precision derail squad" might be addressed, though. This is hardly the first time that MeTas on misogyny (and transphobia and etc) have been thoroughly mired, and it's depressing as hell.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:27 AM on May 26, 2015 [14 favorites]

Miko: I think visibility and action are better when a conversation is new and more people are involved than what we're down to here - but I might be an outlier.

I think it's worth keeping in mind that every single time a new conversation thread on this topic begins in metatalk, the protestors who want to preserve the status quo and protect their right to be assholes come out of the woodwork. They snipe at those who complain, work hard to diminish or dismiss concerns, make ad hominem or tone arguments, and/or do their best to completely derail the discussion. The reason these threads are tiring for the mods is metafilter has a problem, which has not to date been adequately dealt with or addressed. It's improved from what it was, but not fixed. Perhaps it's unsolveable, I don't know. But I get the feeling we can still do better.

Threads about metafilter's ongoing boyzone problems tend to lead to bans and people closing their accounts. They also have a quiet, invisible effect: they tend to discourage some women and perhaps male allies from speaking out. And when we open a new boyzone thread it's often exhausting for the folks who are involved and invested. A clear, unambiguous summary of what has been decided here would be nice to see before it's closed.
posted by zarq at 7:32 AM on May 26, 2015 [24 favorites]

Yeah, it definitely did get derailed a LOT, and though it was nice to not have it be derailed by people being explicitly unrepentant misogynists and just by JAQing off and concern trolling this time, it's clearly just people figuring out how to abuse the new, stricter MeTa.

On preview, zarq has a good point.
posted by NoraReed at 7:35 AM on May 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

"A call for more banning" leaves out a lot of the most important points made here.

Fair point, sorry. I need to work on not being so pithy and leaving out important things.
posted by Drinky Die at 7:35 AM on May 26, 2015

This thread discusses a potential new site policy. Discussing the cost of that site policy, measured in the loss of the people it has alienated and their contributions, is as far from a derail as it gets. In fact, it's required to make a fully informed decision.

Those advocating the new policy may not want the attention on the loss it entails, but that does not make it into a derail.
posted by NortonDC at 7:52 AM on May 26, 2015 [13 favorites]

This thread discusses a potential new site policy. Discussing the cost of that site policy, measured in the loss of the people it has alienated and their contributions, is as far from a derail as it gets. In fact, it's required to make a fully informed decision.

I appreciate that you are trying to come to the defense of someone very close to you, but I somehow doubt that the departure of one person, no matter how super-boffo-fantastic that one person may be, is actually going to be a strong enough argument to convince people "oooh, wait, let's think about this".

Especially when we've already lost countless other equally-super-boffo-fantastic people before that new site policy was in place.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:58 AM on May 26, 2015 [14 favorites]

NortonDC: Discussing the cost of that site policy, measured in the loss of the people it has alienated and their contributions, is as far from a derail as it gets.

It is perfectly possible that I am misreading the situation, but my impression is:

The policy being discussed is whether and how the mods should change the way they're handling comments, behavior and posters that express misogyny.

The concern about whether you have somehow doxxed onlyconnect (since that was the first of two reasons given for the deletion of your comments) and whether your comment should have been deleted on those grounds, is a different policy discussion. It's also a derail.
posted by zarq at 8:03 AM on May 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

It would be great if we could get a quick-and-dirty mod summary of what specific new policies they're adopting, or considering adopting, as a result of this thread. As far as I can tell, the "onlyconnect derail" started when onlyconnect said she was concerned that the barrier to entry in this thread was too high, a problem which a summary from the staff could address.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:04 AM on May 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

NortonDC, I think the derail was about whether your comment should have been deleted, not its content. (That is, about whether there was some violation of consent there.) For my part, I don't think the comment itself was truly derailing, but I do think that onlyconnect was wrong to think she would be targeted by the moderators for banning.

It seemed more that she left--and this is speculating on her motives, but you can correct me--because she felt like people were piling on her and other users uncharitably. That is, this has been a space for venting a little bit--quite reasonably given the stuff that sometimes goes down--and she got vented at and very few people stood up to that. (I include myself here as someone who failed to speak up.)

But if we disconnect user behavior from moderator behavior, here, I wonder if there's really anything in the new policy that would make onlyconnect uncomfortable: faster deletions for misogyny, quicker escalations to timeouts for repeat offenders, and banning some marginal folks who continue past the timeout phase.

Is that a policy that your wife opposes? I don't think so, from her comments here, but only you can report on her views now. Nor would she ever run afoul of it, given her history. So it seems that she more objected to the way things went down here than the specific policy change that went down.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:12 AM on May 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

She explicitly said she was leaving because of the "tougher moderation policy."
posted by zarq at 8:14 AM on May 26, 2015

taz is right that this thread (like contentious MetaTalks generally) take up an outsize portion of our attention and can prevent us dealing with other stuff on the site. I think it was very positive to have this thread and good changes are coming out of it, but I also think there are severely diminishing returns at this point.

Very briefly, what I see changing -- acting more firmly on clear-cut stuff (like "sluts" etc) which we nominally should have been doing already; acting at an earlier point on gray-area stuff, both comments and individual patterns of behavior, as those things are pointed out to us. Being more willing to give people a day off for stuff, and a ban for longstanding problems. Improving some of our handover stuff on the back end especially to try to pass along a sense of individual behavior patterns in long threads. Users can help by telling us about what they're seeing via flag and contact form.

We won't always agree on interpretation of a comment/situation, we won't always act at the first point when a person would like us to -- but may at the second or third point, or may reconsider not-intervening, or may just put the situation/person on our radar for next time, etc. But all the feedback is useful. All these decisions are case-by-case, and we're thinking it over as we go; changing the thresholds is also a matter of case-by-case stuff.

It sounds to me like onlyconnect was (in part) worried about a new policy of banning people only because of the opinions of a few members, for inadequate reasons. To me, that wasn't the policy on the table. The changes we're talking about, as I understand them, are incremental threshold-adjustey changes, and I see them affecting mainly (a) obvious stuff like the doggy style comment; and (b) repeated "this question has been answered but let me just ask it again", and (c) been-there-done-that kind of predictable conversational loops, especially in women-related threads.

I appreciate onlyconnect's voice and I hope she'll feel after a while that the changes-as-implemented are sane and that she can come back.

About MetaTalk, we've said that we're trying to draw lines on not allowing MetaTalks to get super personal, and negotiating exactly what that means is a work in progress. Of course, there isn't a Meta-Metatalk where we can refer issues like this, about what's happened in a MeTa thread. So I don't blame the people who want to talk about those meta-conversational or MetaTalk-modding questions in here, since there isn't an obvious court of appeals for this stuff -- I don't think it's an attempt at malicious derailing, especially since I think the main question of the thread has been long settled. But I do think those meta issues are better handled in a separate MetaTalk thread, in a while, once people have had time to cool off from this one.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:22 AM on May 26, 2015 [34 favorites]

zarq, that's true, but before the line you quote she claims to believe she might be soon banned (which was unrealistic.) So if she really closed her account because of the tougher moderation policy, it was likely because of an erroneous impression of what that policy was. The fact that most of her other comments were more about rhetorical issues, and the indeed her defense of Brandon Blatcher was mostly about the rhetoric used against him and not any specific moderator action, suggests that it wasn't precisely the moderation policy as the balance of rhetoric, which also targeted her at times.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:26 AM on May 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

Very briefly, what I see changing

This is a pretty great summary. Seriously: is there even a single detail here that anyone would disagree with? This sound entirely like: "We figured out how to mod better, so we're totally gonna level up our modding powers and work smarter not harder."
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:33 AM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

zarq, that's true, but before the line you quote she claims to believe she might be soon banned (which was unrealistic.)

Yep.

So if she really closed her account because of the tougher moderation policy, it was likely because of an erroneous impression of what that policy was.

Oh, I totally think she didn't understand how "tougher moderation standards" were being applied.

The fact that most of her other comments were more about rhetorical issues, and the indeed her defense of Brandon Blatcher was mostly about the rhetoric used against him and not any specific moderator action, suggests that it wasn't precisely the moderation policy as the balance of rhetoric, which also targeted her at times.

Agreed.
posted by zarq at 8:35 AM on May 26, 2015

Thank you, Lobstermitten.
posted by zarq at 8:55 AM on May 26, 2015

I think it was very positive to have this thread and good changes are coming out of it, but I also think there are severely diminishing returns at this point.

Probably yeah. It's unfortunate we're wrapping things up on this note though I totally get doing so. Either way it's been a real learning experience for me, that's for sure. I trust that the changes to moderation policy you eloquently outlined here will not only come to greater fruition; in fact I've already seen them being put more into practice, which is much appreciated.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:55 AM on May 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

I will probably have the shakes for a few days because the whole structure of my life has revolved around checking this thread every ten to fifteen minutes.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:12 AM on May 26, 2015 [12 favorites]

> It's unfortunate we're wrapping things up on this note though I totally get doing so. Either way it's been a real learning experience for me, that's for sure. I trust that the changes to moderation policy you eloquently outlined here will not only come to greater fruition; in fact I've already seen them being put more into practice, which is much appreciated.

I agree on all counts, and (as always) I deeply appreciate the patience and goodwill of the mods in these incredibly difficult situations.
posted by languagehat at 9:12 AM on May 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Thanks for the summary, it's a useful note to end on (assuming we are ending).

Also, this thread is so long my phone can barely cope.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:13 AM on May 26, 2015

Hoping for a peaceful and welcoming MeFi in the weeks to come.
posted by Miko at 9:18 AM on May 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

ALLOW MY INNER TECHNICAL WRITER TO INTERVENE AND ...

Very briefly, what I see changing:

1. acting more firmly on clear-cut stuff (like "sluts" etc) which we nominally should have been doing already;

2. acting at an earlier point on gray-area stuff, both comments and individual patterns of behavior, as those things are pointed out to us.

3. being more willing to give people a day off for stuff, and a ban for longstanding problems.

4. improving some of our handover stuff on the back end especially to try to pass along a sense of individual behavior patterns in long threads. Users can help by telling us about what they're seeing via flag and contact form.

We won't always agree on interpretation of a comment/situation, we won't always act at the first point when a person would like us to -- but may at the second or third point, or may reconsider not-intervening, or may just put the situation/person on our radar for next time, etc. But all the feedback is useful. All these decisions are case-by-case, and we're thinking it over as we go; changing the thresholds is also a matter of case-by-case stuff.

The changes we're talking about [...] are incremental threshold-adjustey changes, and I see them affecting mainly:

(a) obvious stuff like the doggy style comment;

(b) repeated "this question has been answered but let me just ask it again";

(c) been-there-done-that kind of predictable conversational loops, especially in women-related threads.

About MetaTalk:

We've said that we're trying to draw lines on not allowing MetaTalks to get super personal, and negotiating exactly what that means is a work in progress. Of course, there isn't a Meta-Metatalk where we can refer issues like this, about what's happened in a MeTa thread. So I don't blame the people who want to talk about those meta-conversational or MetaTalk-modding questions in here, since there isn't an obvious court of appeals for this stuff -- I don't think it's an attempt at malicious derailing, especially since I think the main question of the thread has been long settled. But I do think those meta issues are better handled in a separate MetaTalk thread, in a while, once people have had time to cool off from this one.

(all these words are LobsterMitten's -- I've only really removed any direct mentions of onlyconnect and otherwise thrown in a few numbers/linebreaks. I did this because I know how bad I can be at picking out key points from big blocks of text. I will take no offense if it gets deleted. )
posted by philip-random at 9:24 AM on May 26, 2015 [11 favorites]

I appreciate that you are trying to come to the defense of someone very close to you, but I somehow doubt that the departure of one person, no matter how super-boffo-fantastic that one person may be, is actually going to be a strong enough argument to convince people "oooh, wait, let's think about this".

I think that you're doing a thing where you agree with the policy so think that in this case, it's not a strong argument against it that one super-boffo-fantastic person has left. And that may be true! But I think as a general rule, seeing who is leaving based on new policy or lack thereof is actually a really important part of MetaTalk. It is a really important datapoint and shows how things are resonating. For example, in this very thread and even in that comment, you talk about women who left because of lack of the policy. That stuff is important and needs to be discussed out!
posted by corb at 9:43 AM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ha, phillip-random, no, that's fine. Although I should caution: enumerating things like that can make it seem more like a black-and-white ruleset, when it isn't that.

Like, there will undoubtedly be problem behaviors that I've forgotten to include here that will also be acted on, and there will undoubtedly be cases of the things I've mentioned that won't get acted on (right away, or publicly, or whatever).... and I don't want people to have the incorrect impression that somehow this is an exact science and we're laying down a set of Policies for what's ok and what's not. Instead this is a nudging of the thresholds for an interrelated fuzzily-defined set of behaviors and argument-tropes and so on, and that's inescapably going to involve variable human judgment on specific cases, and people will disagree with what we do in some cases, both on the too-permissive and the too-restrictive sides, and we'll roll with that and talk it over when it happens, as we always have. (I think most people are on board with that general approach, but just wanted to make it explicit.)
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:45 AM on May 26, 2015 [8 favorites]

going to memail, corb.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:45 AM on May 26, 2015

Ok, it sounds like folks are ok with closing this, so I'll close it up. Thank you to everyone who's been engaging here to help improve the site.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:46 AM on May 26, 2015 [16 favorites]