policy question!

The intent is "if we're taking actions that change things, we'll try to announce them", whether the actions are policy or just a thing we're doing for the moment or what. But memory is a fickle mistress.

 

So, what happened was that I was poking at buttons and found that I could stick the thread I was mediating on moderation, and decided to do that by fiat (this, folks, is why you have a choice in who you ask to mediate). We talked about 'ooh science' in private, and then a small group of people ended up informed because Seebs mentioned doing subforum science in still-a-small-group chat. And all of us online at the moment were hellaciously busy, mostly with stuff relating to discussing this. And this was before Spock and ReAlyssa. So we ended up with the 'inform other people' box ticked based on faulty heuristics that went unexamined because we had a lot going on.

And this is why we now have Spock and ReAlyssa. Amazingly, we do try to improve even when not being actively yelled at.

 

... Wait, you can set a specific thread on moderation?

I tried to find that once and couldn't. I wonder if that's because I have a couple of moderation-related permissions turned off so I can be on post mod.

 

Yep, I have a little ticky box in the 'thread tools' dropdown.

 

It was in the recent "policy questions" thread, where you referred to the mods "~forgetting~" to post an announcement, and I was unfamiliar with the typographical convention and not sure how I should be interpreting that.

 

Wouldn't you know it, the mods for a site mostly made up of people living with various mental illnesses and histories of abuse, neglect, and bullying have themselves the same kinds of histories and issues.

 

It's almost like accusing us lying about ~forgetting~ a thing that we already apologized for was cruel. The hope was that you'd done something else and the problem was a misunderstanding.

 

Being confused and hurt isn't an excuse for treating people poorly without an apology.

This is the wrong thread anyway, I'm sorry it got dragged here.

 

Two observations:

First, not everything is exclusively about you. I might care about things that are not, at this particular moment, what you are most interested in.

Second, I don't think it has "absolutely nothing" to do with it. Your comment here was based on an uncharitable reading of a comment someone made about accessibility of various ways to communicate with moderators about their reasoning for decisions. And that is why I was reminded of a previous apparent example of you interpreting things in uncharitable ways.

The problem with conveying disbelief of a person's direct statements about their own internal state is that it is an accusation of lying, and accusations of lying are typically sorta rude.

And for fuck's sake. I have hired a person to remind me to eat, because I do not always remember. I have severe ADHD. Yes, I forget things. I forget lots of things. This is exactly why PTSD or related symptoms are so common in people with ADHD (some researchers claim >70% incidence). Because you think that how important something is has some kind of impact on how likely people are to remember it. But it doesn't work that way for a lot of us! Yes, I'm aware that there are a lot of people around here who might be upset about things, so I try to build protocols and procedures to improve the chances of things getting mentioned when they need to, but it doesn't always work.

Yes, we forgot. Yes, I noticed you were implying that we were lying about this, rather than recognizing that, hey, we're not necessarily totally on top of things. Which we keep telling you. It's not a secret or anything that I'm basically chronically incapable of managing common daily tasks for most people. It's something I've been aware of for a long time now, and you know what would totally help? Random people being insulting assholes about it. Yeah, that would help.

You say "flippant", I say "acknowledging that, yeah, we have a problem there, but it's not necessarily one that's actually fixable with medical technology where it is today". You're also getting the chronology entirely wrong; this wasn't "on the heels of" anything, it happened long before that. It's just that no one noticed until Michi and tA both tried to reply to the thread and both promptly contacted me or other mods to ask whether they were in trouble. At which point, we realized that while we'd made the change some time previously, we had never mentioned it. I don't know whether anyone mentioned it to grim, Thera had never used the forum before and wouldn't have known it was a change, Chiomi knew the change had been made. And no one else was using the forum, so no one noticed.

If you were thinking of this as a change we made after all that other excitement, and forgot to notice, I could see why that would seem weird... But honestly, the fact is, no amount of "it is important not to forget this" has any measurable impact on things. Yes, it is a known issue that (1) I can't remember shit, (2) I won't always think about whether other people will be affected by a thing unless someone asks me. Totally a thing, but not a thing that should, at this point, be even a tiny bit surprising.

Yes. But again, this isn't all about your needs. This is also about you being an ableist asshole to a bunch of people with various mixes of trauma and disabilities who are doing their best and being really upfront about the fact that "their best" does not include a lot of the things that you might otherwise expect from much more efficient and organized forum admin people. And you may not have wanted to continue discussing it, but possibly the people you had been really insulting to feel differently.

And, to respond to later comments: The sarcastic/rolleyes/whatever is an accusation of lying. If you want to express surprise without accusing people of lying, maybe say something that doesn't just express the disbelief and stop there.

 

I was just coming in here to say, I don't think that @Lerxst was out here trying to be an "ableist asshole" because I feel like there is intent implied in there, and he explained what was up and apologized.

I really appreciate your continued effort to make things right too, Lerxst. Thank you.

I also think that even delayed alarm/hurt is valid. If I saw that someone threw away my wedding dress I'd be super hurt. I'd also possibly not notice for months or even years. It's still important!

It can also feel like a precursor to gaslighting to have subtle, unannounced changes. Even if we didn't go "oh it's always been that way, why are you upset all of a sudden" it's still alarming. That's not what we were doing, but upset and hurt were still triggered.

I think it's important to find a line where mods aren't punching bags AND people feel safe expressing hurt and anger. Veering too hard to either side is abusive, and no one should have to suffer abuse.

[Edited to correct pronoun usage.]

 

Yeah, I can see why it'd be surprising.

What about the non-mods?

Because anyone who forgets things a lot, for any reason, is likely gonna be pretty hurt by the concept of "~forgetting~" used to imply that obviously someone couldn't actually have legitimately not thought of a thing without it being some kind of bad intent or not caring or whatever.

It doesn't matter what the reason is for being concerned about the lack of announcement. You implicitly accused people with trauma and/or disabilities of claiming to have forgotten when it was obviously impossible that they would actually have forgotten something so important. You reinforced the widespread belief that if people just cared, or just tried, they would never, ever, forget to do an important thing. And that is fucking ableist, and it hurts a lot of people, and it is a thing that is not adequately addressed by "sorry for wording". That you would advance that idea, at all, without a hell of a lot better specific evidence that deceptiveness was realistically on the table, is actually a pretty nasty thing to do which is the direct precursor to the major underlying trauma wrecking the lives of at least a dozen people I know.

I don't see how this can be a question of poor phrasing. Any of sarcasm, rolleyes, jazzhands, etcetera, all communicate the same basic thing: "Either you're lying about forgetting, or you only forgot because you don't really care about things." And that thing is actually fucked up. It's not a question of how you phrase it; it's that the entire line of analysis is fundamentally fucked up. So... It really does feel like being ableist in a way that's pretty consistently very damaging. So apologizing for the wording does not come close to addressing the thing I am concerned about, which is you need to look real closely at why you would ever think that was an okay idea to float at people, or conversational tactic, and fix the thing.

... But on thinking about it, it occurs to me that if you do not spend quite as much time as I do talking with people about ADHD, the reasons for which it's harmful wouldn't be as obvious. So while I maintain that the harm was real and more fundamental than I think has been communicated, I also understand that it's not a thing that would necessarily be intentional or considered in advance. So I apologize for jumping on you so hard for it without first being more clear about why I thought this was a problem.

I do recognize that the lack of clear announcements is a problem. You will note that I absolutely don't claim that these things aren't changes, or that they shouldn't have been announced. I'm not going to claim that it's not a problem that needs to be recognized and acknowledged. I'm not sure it can be fixed, but we can certainly mitigate it a lot by making it clear that while we'll probably screw up and make some "policy" changes without remembering to announce them, we will not lie about it. We'll say "yup, here's when we made the change".