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   Ricky (ricky@pmth.us)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 08:12:22 JST Ricky

   in reply to

   • Andy

   @pixel@desu.social The reality is that nothing "works." Everything is gray. There is no winning strategy. I'm just optimizing for fewest reports possible so that the quality of the average report is higher. Of course, if things could be 100% absolute, we could have a machine run things. Alas, there is always going to be the human element.
   
   This is an integral anomaly I seek to reduce.

   • ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Ricky (ricky@pmth.us)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 08:12:24 JST Ricky

     in reply to

     • Andy

     @pixel@desu.social
     
     It is not my strategy to increase rules and reduce enforcement. It's my strategy to reduce rules and make them absolute. Allowing them to report anything they want then placing myself as the judge and jury is not a power I want to have.
     
     I am a very direct person. Not everybody appreciates that. Luckily, I am willing to shoot myself in booth feet and still stand strong. I don't mind their lashing out against me, it has been highly entertaining. My goal is not to attract the most users, but to have the system work long-term.

   • Embed this notice
     Andy (pixel@desu.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 08:12:24 JST Andy

     in reply to

     @ricky absolute rules don't work in a social setting, that'll just lead to users leaving when the people that "play by the rules" take over.

   • Embed this notice
     Andy (pixel@desu.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 08:12:26 JST Andy

     in reply to

     @ricky regarding the ToS, they might have been indeed outdated, some stuff like the "noncompete" thing even being from a time where RS wasn't even open source.

     However, leaving the terms as vague as this allows freedom in moderation.

     You can be hyper-specific and still shoot yourself in the foot.

     If someone can't take an opinion, you don't act on the report. And that's why you also don't make yourself known as staff, because then people can't complain to you and that anger will subdue quickly

   • Embed this notice
     Ricky (ricky@pmth.us)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 08:12:27 JST Ricky

     in reply to

     • Andy

     @pixel@desu.social @Erpel@hai.z0ne.social
     
     I never said I wouldn't moderate harassment. I removed the part of the TOS that says "Is intended to harass, scare or upset anyone." I mean come on, I can't ban every instance of someone upsetting other people, can I? If that text was left as written, then it could very easily be interpreted in such a way that users think they can report everything they don't like. But I also removed the part that says "competes with the business of Retrospring." Am I expected to ban people every time they mention Frag or Neospring? It's undeniable that the TOS as written needed adjusting.
     
     And this is where the problem started. It didn't start with me egging things on, nor did it start with the impression I made on them. I do not deny that I exacerbated the problem: I'm learning to deal with an extremely passionate culture that I am not a member of. But I know what happened and when things turned. It was because I changed the TOS. At that point, the smear campaign began and they started doxxing me, calling me a nazi, etc. And I said that oh-so-bad "n word" because I had a bunch of people in a group chat screaming at me "SAY THE N WORD! SAY THE N WORD!" Okay, the joke didn't land.
     
     But I am merely stating a fact: When they left, so did the harassment. That's it. Once the Rentry people were gone, the reports dropped to 0 (except for the "shipper" community reporting Rentry users coming in demanding they leave the site). After they left, there was no more racism, transphobia, or any sort of cyber bullying.
     
     As for harassment, that has a definition in US law. I'm not a free speech extremist. I don't support harassment. But I'm not going to encourage reporting of users simply because they say something another user doesn't like. If you think that's a bad take... well, I support your right to say so! But if it crosses the line and becomes something that could be a legal problem, it will result in a ban. That has always been the case and I have banned users for death threats and telling people to kill themselves from day 1.
     
     But the community only highlighted the negative side of things. Nobody gave me any credit for the obviously positive work.

   • Embed this notice
     Andy (pixel@desu.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 08:12:27 JST Andy

     in reply to

     @ricky You are getting off the wrong foot entirely in the first place. They never read the ToS, and you told them "I adjusted this and removed the paragraphs that forbid x and y" prompting their responses.

     You could have just left it with "I adjusted the ToS to be more fitting to the community and moderation needs" and you wouldn't have gotten some people testing the waters.

   • Embed this notice
     Andy (pixel@desu.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 08:12:28 JST Andy

     in reply to

     @ricky @Erpel not moderating harassment is a genuinely bad take.

     what you can skip out on moderating is opinions and stuff that isn't happening on your very own website.

     you yourself egged on with the community quite early and immature as the others are they did that bad stuff, not to be excused. But people left because of the impression you made on them, some because of either things or because of said moderation ruling, they didn't go elsewhere and took their harassment with them.

   • Embed this notice
     Ricky (ricky@pmth.us)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 08:12:29 JST Ricky

     in reply to

     • Andy

     @pixel@desu.social @Erpel@hai.z0ne.social
     
     I'll add my two cents:
     
     I created Revospring.net with my team and the Rentry people became extremely hostile toward us (doxxing me, slandering me, raiding the site with spam/false reports, harassing existing users telling them to leave, etc.). But I have no attachments to any particular group of people. We don't have a pre-existing community. There are a few competing non-Rentry communities that have always co-existed on Retrospring and some of them are at Revospring. Whoever uses Revospring, it will survive because we have an extremely resilient longterm strategy.
     
     Primarily, our approach is to reduce the TOS to bare minimum legalities and let the users duke it out amongst themselves rather than weaponizing the moderation team against each other. Ironically, choosing not to ban racism/transphobia/cyber bullying resulted in all racism/transphobia/cyber bullying to leave the site and go to Frag. Something I demonstrated to their community on Discord multiple times is that the very people who were trying to destroy the site for not banning that material were exactly the ones posting it (anonymously, of course).
     
     As long as the content stays within the realm of that which is legal (we are hosted in America and our internet speech laws are more resilient), I have no problem letting them trash each other like they always do. Revospring will survive.

   • Embed this notice
     Andy (pixel@desu.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 08:12:30 JST Andy

     @Erpel Honestly, both sides were egging this on, this wasn't just the Rentry people.

     I've looked at Fragsturztaube since the shutdown and it's very obvious that people are kinda aggreviated when they get hit with "look at these normies" and other things.