- 0 Posts
- 14 Comments
Always be suspicious if someone OUTSIDE of you–someone who is NOT you–is trying to tell you what you feel.
I have never found a case where that outside person was correct.
And they are often *especially * wrong when they try to “reverse” what you feel. Like, if you feel something good, and they say it is bad. Or if you feel something bad, and they say no, the thing that makes you feel that way is good. There’s usually ulterior motivations here. (And not necessarily well-thought-out evil mastermind ones…some people are very manipulative in a “cunning” or “canny” way, where they’ve learned such things work, but don’t actually think out their plans or motivations…they manipulate on instinct.)
I’ve always had much more success figuring out my emotions when I looked within and slowly picked apart what I felt and WHY I felt it, even if that way was much slower than listening to someone else trying to tell me what to think and feel.
Also–I’ve never personally been able to identify any difference between “true” love and other forms of love. As far as I can tell, love is love, and it’s very common for people who grew up with abusive family to later seek out “found family”, where people regardless of their blood kinship have proven they are safe for you to be around by their benign or benevolent actions towards you.
Spoken like someone who hasn’t grown up with tons of trauma that makes you question every little thing you feel because you honestly don’t know what’s normal or “good” or “right”. Bad people–especially abusive family–are VERY good at making you question natural inclinations, esp. if they are jealous that you might be finding something good that they haven’t managed to grasp.
I hope you understand–because I am telling you, right now–what sort of damage your comment can do to people who were not lucky enough to grow up with a solid, loving foundation at home.
The thing I liked about Twitter was following:
- Writers
- Academics and scientists
- Artists
Basically, following INTERESTING content creators was my jam. As someone who never made it all the way through college, but is basically a big nerd anyhow, Twitter was basically my only exposure to academic nerds who had a lot of interesting things to talk about. YouTube makes you sit through videos (which is nice sometimes, but too long other times for a fast reader like me), and people’s websites are never updated, and science papers I may or may not have the background to follow, but on Twitter, even academics had to learn how to convey their ideas in an understandable concise way. It was able to expose me to knowledge and social circles I never would have crossed in real life.
Reddit (now Lemmy) gives the same fix, but from anonymous people who contribute knowledge to a general pool instead of being a singular person to follow for a given topic.
That’s how I framed it to a fandom friend.
I said… imagine back to when there were the two main fourms for our favorite author? Now imagine if you could sign up as a user for one… but the forums can talk to one another so you can post on the other too, but your username will reflect the domain of the one you made your username on.
And defederation is when the two factions of fandom get into some fandom drama and decide not to let members of the other board talk to them anymore, lol.
It’s like one part forum, one part irc with distinct chat rooms around a topic, and one part signing up for a new email address, where the place you do it becomes part of your email address.
I’m glad it was helpful–I know sometimes people go TL;DR and get annoyed at long posts, lol.
And yeah, re: Minecraft–been there, done that with the genuinely clueless user who just constantly doesn’t get it. I ran into it with WoW guilds. It’s hard to deal with, esp. when their behavior looks genuinely not-with-it instead of malicious. Like, if you have a player that is a kid (or who hasn’t matured mentally) who is always begging for help or gold or items. Esp. if they’re being nice or saying sorry or being cute about it–verbal veneers that try to manipulate you into being soft on them (even if they are not consciously trying to be manipulative). It’s hard being the one putting your foot down.
Anyway. I honestly don’t see a television broadcasting sub with tech nerds inviting too much trouble. (Or anything along those lines…I know you weren’t fully specific about niche.) I would guess the most likely routes of bullshit would be straight-up spam bots, or people inappropriately advertising some sort of object or service and clogging up the page with drivel nobody cares about. I guess “low effort posts” might be a thing, too.
You MIGHT see some drama if like…it comes out some CEO or manager or something who is known in the industry is being a dickwad. Or like if an industry professional is let go, fairly or unfairly…lots of hot drama and speculation can come up. Might be worth it to look at existing forums for your niche and see if you can find the past drama, and see what shape it took previously. Might help you prepare a way to deal with it, put rules in place beforehand.
Edit: Had a thought. Are discussions about “censorship” common in this niche? Censorship as it pertains to broadcast television. If so, you might get drama around that, and might need to plan for it sometimes raising its head.
I haven’t moderated in a very long time, but the one thing that sticks out for me from my phpbb forum days is the paradox of tolerance.
Basically–you generally don’t want to be a jerk. You do want to be fair and tolerant to the best of your ability.
However, if you let THAT GUY run around doing shitty things, your community will end up polluted and toxic and it will drive away the people who would/could’ve made your community a nice place.
So be kind–but not so kind it allows losers to rampage unchecked.
It can really feel shitty to use the banhammer, but sometimes it’s important to pull the trigger for the sake of the community. If you don’t, the good people will leave, and the fuckwads will stay and fuck around.
The best-moderated community I’ve seen in recent memory is actually the Raised by Narcissists sub on Reddit. Probably because the mods there are all trauma survivors and have hawk-eyes for ALL the weasly shit verbally-manipulative people can get up to. So they lay out the rules plainly and fairly–but they also don’t fuck around when things need to be shut down. Most of the time the troll/drama posts don’t even get out of New.
I don’t know what sort of sub you’re moderating here, it’s possible it won’t attract the same BS that THAT sub attracts by its very nature, but as a mod (if you want to be a good/fair one) you’ll start to develop a second sense for when someone is using outwardly-reasonable words to try to defend what they’re doing, while continuing to shit-stir below the surface. You’ll get an eye for overall patterns.
Trust your gut–if you feel something’s wrong but can’t put a finger on why because everyone’s using polite words, ponder it for a while and see if you can figure out what’s up. Often where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
But yeah. Don’t be a dick, explain your rules clearly, but when someone’s fucking around on your sub? Let 'em find out.
Oh…and if you have been modding for a while, but find yourself getting stressed as fuck or angry and snappish in real life? It’s totally cool to step back from a modding job. I don’t mod anymore even though I know “how” to because I have C-PTSD and sub drama puts me into legit raging flashbacks. It’s terrible for my health, and not fun for others if my temper slips, so I don’t do it anymore.
Two spaces after a period is my eccentricity as a writer.
It’s not even legitimately gained by being that old…I had a crush on this science teacher and HE was old enough to use two spaces. So I did. And 20 years later I still haven’t shaken it.
The only good thing is that nothing else legitimately uses a double space, so find and replace is quite easy.
I went into my preferences to change it to Top 6 Hours.
So far, after the change, I’m getting an experience closer to the old reddit (before they messed with the sorting to keep actually interesting things from getting to the top too quickly.)
This also is exposing me to smaller but not dead communities I can subscribe to.
Edit: Although, I suspect there might be a bug with Top 6 Hours in that it tries to do that too when I go to my own profile to see my recent comments. I don’t suppose anyone knows where I’d look to see if there’s an existing bug report for that? I’d expect, when looking at my own comments, to see ALL of them without the sorting applying to that page. Instead, that page works funky until I set my preferences back to Hot or Top or whatever.
Internet Explorer tried real hard to do that. Pages were literally built only to run “properly” in IE.
Curious what round 2 would look like.