Emotional_Series7814

Yeah, was it the run-on sentences that made my post confusing? It’s something I’ve been noticing more and more often in my own posting.

Or was it the unhinged and disconnected copy of a lot of nasty things people say about those who choose to stay on Reddit? I didn’t try to make those too sensible and understandable. I typed the post you replied to in a fit of emotion and it was a big mistake. I’m getting better at not posting when angry, but I’m still not perfect. I get really frustrated.

People say “kbin is so nice” but then there’s the same namecalling of people you don’t like instead of an attempt to understand and sympathize with them. To be clear, when I talk about people not understanding and sympathizing, I’m talking about namecalling mods here. It happens in this very thread, unironically, not like me doing it as a mocking callout of people who do that (and I really shouldn’t have resorted to that, I don’t like being able to truthfully say I’ve mocked people). There has been an influx of alt-right types here which is definitely not nice, and I want to clarify that I am not asking people to sympathize with alt-right perspectives. (It’d be nice for people to understand how regular humans might end up there though. Not everyone supporting the alt-right started out that way, and it would be great to get people out of the alt-right.)

My perspective is also likely borne out of my own personal experience. I usually stay in my small niche communities and have never experienced a power-tripping mod. (The only reason I’m here is because kbin does not respect the fact that I asked my default view to be Subscribed. It shows me All upon login. I logged in. This post was in All. I clicked it. Bad choice, always leads to me getting angry.) This may be why I react strongly to “all mods are power trippers” or “most mods are power trippers.” In my experience, mods have always been people taking on the necessary but unpleasant duty of removing hate, harassment, and NSFL images. People doing something I, an oversensitive person, would never want to do because I do not want to see it in the first place. I’m grateful for this. I also just get very upset when I see namecalling. I was never raised to talk like that, and nobody I talk to resorts to it when we have conversations. I’m also lucky enough to never have been bullied. So I haven’t ever had to develop a “thick skin” against it. I’ve never been treated that way and do not see why other people should have to get treated that way either.

I understand intellectually my experience may not be the dominant one, but surely not every community others have interacted with had a power-tripping mod? I think the good ones tend to be invisible. They do their work behind the scenes and don’t stir up any controversy, so you don’t notice them. You just browse the community and talk in it. You usually don’t get your posts and comments removed either, and so you have no interaction with the mods. The bad ones receive a lot of publicity, and humans tend to remember negative events more than positive events, so they make more of an impression on you. Now every mod seems to be a power-tripper, because you don’t remember the good ones.

But didn’t you know unpaid labor, they’re suckers, “jannies” (as if doing a necessary service nobody else wants to do is insult-worthy instead of commendable), free labor they are so pathetic!11 I’m certainly not going to subject myself to being the first line of defense against trolls spamming NSFL of, so I’m grateful people are willing to do that to make a nice space for people like me. Not disdainful.

Nevermind some communities are like /r/canning where you probably want to avoid legitimately harmful disinformation. It’s definitely a person on a power trip who won’t abandon being a dirty jannie for a taste of power. Fucking bootlicker, living with the reality that people will continue to go to Reddit for information and continuing to remove disinformation instead of letting all the people who still oh my god, use Reddit get misinformed and die from bad preservation techniques. Why not just write a post about leaving and leave Reddit, then? Because a pinned post about where they left for is almost certainly going to be unpinned and deleted by a new moderator that Reddit installs. Also, if it’s unpinned but not deleted, not everyone is going to scroll back far enough to read “hey, we all left Reddit”. Yes, I know, double check your sources when your life could be at risk. Would still rather not be a bad source.

I just wish people could stop with the namecalling. Yes, powertripping mods exist. Not everyone who stayed on Reddit is an awful person.

on r/longhair:

No thanks, I would like the old mods back. Installing new mods runs the risk of fetishists or otherwise bad actors getting control of the sub and turning it into yet another fetish subreddit. We already have enough trouble with sexual harassment, idk why you would do this.

(warning for Reddit link, the front end I used to use to deny them hits no longer works)

Stuff like this is why some mods stayed in instead of going private. r/longhair stayed private instead of giving in and got their entire mod team removed. I respect their dedication but I think you can see why some people would want to stay on instead of getting removed: knowing they can avoid letting bad actors in as a consequence of getting replaced by someone who doesn’t care and will do nothing about users getting harassing PMs or comments, or actively wants to, say, turn r/longhair into a fetish community or some sub for a marginalized community into a place for porn of them.

I do not agree with her, I think this is overly optimistic. I don’t think Spez is going to try to actually fix the problems after Reddit becomes profitable. I think if Spez’s motivations were more money for more employees he would have actually said so. I think we’re just going down the usual path of enshittification and squeezing users for as much money as possible without anything for us down the line. But I do think that she should be able to at least post disagreement on this topic instead of staying quiet because it doesn’t match the general sentiment on the site. She seems to be posting in good faith.

As a person in a world where some people honestly believe crazy things like that the Earth is flat, it’s entirely reasonable for non-disabled people to have trouble telling sarcasm from a genuine reply too! Some time ago, a long screed on why the Earth is flat would be taken as sarcasm because it’s so outlandish, but nowadays I need the /s tag to determine whether you’re joking or if you’re a flat-Earther genuinely holding this belief. Remember Poe’s Law (warning for TVTropes link): satire of extreme views becomes indistinguishable from genuinely holding extreme views.

As an autistic person, I will admit that I can usually pick up on sarcasm, both in real life and online. But a good deal of us struggle with that, so it’s disheartening to see people calling others idiots for needing an /s tag. And I’m sure most people who can usually detect sarcasm have still encountered situations where it’s ambiguous. Clarification is always nice.

If I interpret a post as sarcastic, the addition or omission of an /s does nothing for me. Doesn’t make it less funny if I already knew it was sarcastic. I guess I’ll personally never see how including the /s makes it less funny, but given so many attest to it as a reason why they won’t use /s I figure it’s a real phenomenon.

I don’t use /s unless I think it might be ambiguous to most people as to whether I am being sarcastic or not. I’m fine with people who do use it and don’t use it. My only objection is to passing judgment on those who want an /s or use one. Some people are disabled. Some people are learning English as a second language. Some peoples’ sarcasm is incredibly ambiguous. Some people rely on tone of voice, body language, and context to determine sarcasm; and we lose the first two in online communication. Sometimes the context you post in is not enough to make it clear you are being sarcastic. People who use /s may have these people in mind, and prefer being clear to potentially being misunderstood. Not sure how clarifying your intention is an indicator of any kind of bad trait, such as cowardice. At most, I’ll it means you aren’t well-versed enough in communication or English to let your words speak for themselves without an explicit statement of intent.