To be fair, there was a lot of insults aimed at male posters like myself for even daring to speak about the subject or offer suggestions, as if we had no right to participate. Hell, there were instances of telling other women they should get out of the thread because they defended what some men were saying or offered differing opinions. That isn’t reasonable, adult or defensible.
At no point was I trying to ‘shut you down’, no matter what you might want to claim on the subject. :rolleyes: Without doing an audit, I’d bet most of what you think were attempts to shut you down were nothing of the kind.
This isn’t your support circle. This is a public message board where anyone who wants to can participate and they get to hold differing opinions on a subject without you taking it all personally.
And Jesus Fucking Christ, some of you are too triggered by the word ‘ignore’ and got far too enraged over it. :smack:
If Bob is a co-worker or a member of your social circle and you’re merely told to ignore his skeevy comments, you might have a point. But putting people on Ignore on a message board is more like kicking Bob out of your company or social circle and having nothing further to do with him. You’re not going to hear his shit unless someone tells you what he said or quotes him on a board.
The contrast can’t be starker. It’s not like two mods weren’t reading and responding as so-called posters in that thread. It’s not like multiple people did not post, in good faith and with empathy, the SAME solutions. What’s met with vitriol there is met with obsequiousness here. :dubious:
One of the things held up in that thread in an anti-male manner and to shut down opposing opinions was the idea that Skald had been repeatedly reported and nothing had ever been done about him. We now know this wasn’t true.
And I suggest that if a mod doesn’t have the time to be at least passingly familiar with what goes on regularly in his or her forum, he or she doesn’t have time to be a mod.
Each one of us brings our own experiences. I don’t know what it’s like to be gay, or black, lover of birds, or a cop in today’s society and my fellow mods help with those perspectives. Similarly, they might not have direct experience in this arena but they listen and each one, to a person, wants to do the right thing for the posters and the board as a whole.
This isn’t wagon circling. They all know I’m ready and willing to be critical if need be. But everyone of these folks really does care and wants the best.
Our mods are volunteers. They’re not paid for this shit. Raising the bar on their participation and insisting on more work out of them or they’re out is counter-productive.
Reporting threads or posts, as explained above, is how it pretty much works everywhere.
Well, I’ve written you off too, sunshine. You dismiss people who disagree with you with crap explanations like that rather than explaining why you disagree or how you think they’re wrong and you seemingly refuse to accept that men can make arguments in good faith.
Ignoring a difficult poster is A solution but it’s not the ONLY solution. Sometimes we need individual solutions (like ignoring a problem) and sometimes we need systemic solutions (like applying board policies in a directed and specific manner).
But when we’re discussing the need for a systemic solution, repeatedly requesting only an individual solution is not helpful and it is dismissive, IMHO. It does not recognize the responsibility (if any) of the board as a whole in addressing problems.
I know that. But the issue of ignoring the threads in question is being talked to death here and I’m trying to explain why it’s a problem in a discussion about a systemic solution.
Bro, don’t even talk to me. You are continually trying to push back against the voices of the multiple women who have spoken up about this issue, for reasons that are entirely your own, and I no longer have any time for it. Nor should anyone else, in my opinion, but that’s entirely up to them.
I understand, but attacking the idea as being ‘tone deaf’ and ‘you’ll never understand’ is to ignore that it is a solution but certainly not the only one. I spent a lot of that thread and this one discussing and accepting various other solutions.
Unfortunately, the false claim that Skald had been frequently reported and nothing was done by the male moderation staff other than gleefully jump to his assistance tended to poison the well as far as the discussion of that option.
No, reacting only when a sizable chunk of your members finally get pissed off enough to talk seriously about leaving is counter-productive. If you’re running a restaurant, you walk the floor and talk to the diners and get a feel for how the place is running so you can anticipate problems before the shitty Yelp reviews start coming in: it’s no good saying afterwards to the empty tables, “Well, if the forks were always dirty there was a complaints procedure”.
For what it’s worth, I’m entirely on-board with solutions like requiring trigger warnings before sexual violence is brought up in threads, especially when it’s not central to the thread itself.
For what it’s worth, I know I don’t have much of a dog in this fight, so I’m more interested in what others say than in telling others what to think.
And for what it’s worth, that Pit thread was a clusterfuck as Chimera described. I know for sure that I was silenced and driven out of the thread by people who were patently misrepresenting what I said, ignoring explicit and all-caps claims to the contrary, to summarize me in contemptible and dismissive fashion. It may be true that “some man’s hurt feefees” aren’t important, and okay–but the silencing and dismissing of opposing opinions was going in more than one direction.