I have a couple of examples of bad moderation/illicit community behavior. I’m not sure whether the problem is in the autoflagging system since i believe i was told posts are being automatically hidden if enough people flag them, but regardless:
I think it’s safe to say this forum has a community moderation problem. In this example, the person in question got offended by the mere usage of a word “kek” and “woke“ and mass flagged my replies. Or simply because of the fact i was arguing with him, i’m honestly not sure.
People are obviously power tripping. My general point is that this policing attitude towards conversations alienates people from the forum. People are often hiding posts under the pretext of offensive language while silencing their critics. I’m obviously bad at politics and have decided to quit instead of trying to do something about it.
I remember being done with this forum after i asked some posters to stop recommending to an Iranian guy to try using Wireguard back in January, before the shutdown. People came in and started recommending silly things like trying to use known to be blocked protocols and censorship evasion strategies and i calmly replied to them explaining how they were wrong until one poster told a guy to try to connect using Wireguard, which would’ve provably lead to authoritarian attention towards an Iranian citizen.
I explained to him how his post was very harmful, and that he should rethink his attitude towards engaging in topics he doesn’t know much about since in this example it led to him giving an awful advice.
Mods removed my “heated“ reply and left the harmful post i was replying to. At this point, even if you avoid engaging in topics with people claiming to be offended by the usage of kek and lol, your post will get flagged because you told somebody to be mindful and not post for seemingly just social score points.
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Mods aren’t capable of moderating technical conversations and shouldn’t be expected to. Mods shouldn’t police heated conversations. Heated conversation on technical topics are OK.
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People should see the whole chains of thoughts. Problematic, controversial replies shouldn’t be hidden just because they rub some people the wrong way. I’m fine with disinformation staying as long as a thread has a qualified reply somewhere in it. Silencing speech is why posting here has become miserable. I can admit to logging in a few times a just to reply to egregious and ragebaiting stuff because of the fact no good conversation survived.
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Move the politics and news to the activism category. Prohibit people from signaling their politics in threads with technical topics since it would inevitably lead to politics leaking into the main forum.
I really dislike the attitude of some people and their tendency to mass flag replies and i think that the moderation team should review the past usage of the community flags.