Lolno. God, lawful-neutrals and their damn rules.

If you do that, they get to play the dictionary-definitions game and well-ackchewally at you indefinitely and demand you provide sources for the word ‘the’, while creating endless reports demanding people be banned because technically that’s not paedophilia that’s ephebepholia… or whatever the fuck.

It’s a game to them; all they care about is making a disruptive and unpleasant environment.

The only way to win is to not play.

When you recognise the pattern, you short-circuit the whole damn thing and just boot them out.

But you’re taking ‘don’t make us ban you’ off the table for the mods.

“Oh no, I’m not attacking trans people, I’m just saying that children deserve protection. Surely you’ll agree there’s no rule against that?”

Sealioning. JAQing off. Ragebait. That very specific, slightly-too-formal dialect of trollspeak. Shitty edgeplay designed to taunt and demoralise without ever quite stepping over any well-defined line, and a bat-signal to like-minded sociopaths that the dog is chained up.

Hell, bluesky has been infested with LLM debate-bots recently that fucking automate the process.

I suspect that you’re mistaking the symptoms for the problem: it’s not that mods are too quick on the button and need to learn to tolerate a little raw chicken in the mayo, it’s that some of them have been captured by corporate / PAC / generally-unsavoury interests, and use the button as a weapon.

And to those people, there’s only one thing you need to say.

Look, I respect the intent, but as someone who’s been on forums since the freaking 90s, I can say with confidence that that’s a toxic meltdown waiting to happen.

You need at least two bitter jaded cybersec experts and at least one game theory person on your team to stand a chance with this kind of thing.

Can you provide supporting documents that disprove :nasty insinuation about you:? Of course not. Do you want to have to keep being required to? No.

Can people provide supporting documents disproving :nasty insinuation about :demographic::? Also no. And they don’t want to have to keep being required to.

So there’s the constant tide of exhaustion of people being constantly undermined and dehumanised, and being forced to either respond to yet another argument that :demographic: don’t really count as people, or to just let it ride and try to ignore it. And then the wreckers use it as rage-bait to get people angry to the point of getting banned, and others walk off in disgust, more trolls smell blood in the water and the whole thing spirals.

It’s the damn nazi-bar problem: even ‘just a few’ nazis smirking in the corner create a hostile and unpleasant environment that other people don’t want to be in. And so they drive the good posters off, reducing the opposition - and within a depressingly short time, you’ve got yourself an alt-right shithole full of trolls and sociopaths that just love being able to exert that kind of power.

I’ve seen it approximately three bajillion times so far, and god dammit why won’t you youngins learn.

Yes, powermods and power-tripping mods are a problem. But the approach to it you’ve chosen was gamed out and defeated in detail probably before you were even alive.

And oh god, if you try to parse a rule about what categories of opinions and statements are covered by this, the rules lawyers are going to clown-shibari the entire damn site.

The only two rules I’ve ever seen be effective over time are:

• Don’t make us ban you
• Don’t make us de-mod you

and probably hard-cap the number of communities one person can mod.

Have other stuff on top of that, but they’re load-bearing and non-optional.

And I get that the site is trying to be a neutral platform that’s insulated from the content, but honestly I don’t think that’s feasible. Sometimes you need to just throw people out of your bar regardless of the exact phrasing of the terms and conditions, and that means picking a side.

Also can we have a better markdown parser that doesn’t turn angle brackets into failed html markup sometime please

This seems oddly timed with the whole meta thing going on.

Are people going to be forced to accept ‘a small amount’ of, ferinstance, asserting that homosexuality is a mental illness?

Actually it’s an effective cloud-based password manager that doesn’t rely on local storage or weird plugins or backups.

That’s what keeps me using chrome. I could lose everything in a house fire, pick up any device, log in and have access to all my stuff without any further action on my part, right out of the box.

That’s the only feature I care about, and chrome is the only browser I’ve seen that provides it.

Get me that in firefox, and I’ll switch today.