Alix is out, for now

I'm just going to slip in with a quick rephrasing of a point before I go to sleep. I could be reading this wrong, but this is something I'm hearing people say that might not quite be clicking with seebs?

It's been a consistent point on the site since the beginning that Seebs wants this to be a place where people don't have to worry that struggling with control/explosions/etc will get them kicked out. And that's a point that Seebs is reiterating now, and it's a stance that I think lots of people on the site do support.

But what I'm also hearing people say is that they feel like it's... the primary/only concern right now, being sure people don't worry about being kicked out.

Again, I'm possibly reading this very wrong, work has been crazy and I'm so very tired, but I feel like Seebs might be hitting this point hard because bans don't happen often, and they're wanting to reinforce that bans are still going to be the exception rather than the rule.

I think people are getting frustrated because that's not a point they're really worried about. I'm not going to say that nobody is worried about 'what if I'm next', but I don't think it's much of a concern for the people posting in this conversation. The people in here are asking about a different angle of the issue, but when Seebs goes back around to the 'what if I'm next', they feel ignored (and maybe like shades of when alix was hurting people and those people she hurt felt ignored/neglected)

I don't think that the 'what if I'm next' is a bad point to reinforce, but I get the impression that people are feeling like... Seebs is talking about A, then people ask 'okay, now what about B', and Seebs responds with 'anyways, A'

 

So, I do hear it, and I think it's a valid concern. But if I absolutely have to pick, I'll usually pick "letting people stay that I dislike", for one simple reason: There are already a ton of places doing a pretty good job of providing a safe space where abusers aren't allowed at all. This isn't the only option for people who want a place where abusers aren't welcome.

The people who would be thinking "shit I'm going to get banned there's no point in trying" and giving up or whatever don't have another place to go that will tell them that they're allowed to stay. The people who are afraid of them usually have lots of other options that might be better for them, and that will at the very least accept them.

This doesn't mean I don't think it's important to do better, but when it comes right down to it, yes, I'm aware that this is not an approach which is to the net benefit of the most possible users. It's an approach which is specifically intended to provide support for a category of users who can't just casually go somewhere else. And that sometimes means it works really badly for people that I like, who are good people, who aren't doing anything wrong. And that sorta sucks, and I'm not happy about it... But I can't figure out a way to change it that doesn't break it for people who haven't got any other options.

 

i’ll be asleep by then, so feel free to ponder it overnight.

 

I don't disagree with this.

 

(and to slip in with one last baby conversation-debugging post, I think that this is the thing that's frustrating people. They get that philosophy, and understand that's why you're making this your main priority. But within that existing framework, I think they're asking if you have ideas or a philosophy for mitigating harm that people who abuse the system (like alix) can do. Saying that you don't know or that it's something you're thinking about would be a legitimate answer to that question, but I think they don't feel like that question is being heard or acknowledged to begin with)

 

I don't have a coherent plan. Part of this is, I'm still viewing this, not in terms of "how bad Alix is", but in terms of whether or not I think there's any comprehensible way to communicate about progress, or evidence that she's trying to make progress. If it were possible for me to make a complaint about her behavior, and get confirmation that she understood the complaint, I'd be a lot more hesitant about this. I would quite possibly still be at least closing the door for the summer, though, given her specific and direct claims that she is doing fine everywhere but here and cannot change her behavior while she's in a bad environment.

One of the things that really drove this home to me was that thing about the people in sneerclub "disagreeing" with me. She showed them responding to positions which are pretty much the opposite of my position. She appears to be completely incapable of considering the actual specific complaint I made, which isn't "they disagreed with me", or "they were hostile to me", but "the thing they were complaining about is not even a little like a thing I said". If they were saying that the things I actually said were stupid, whatever, that's fine, I can accept hostility from random internet strangers. But if they're complaining about things that are basically the opposite of what I said, that suggests strongly to me that Alix misrepresented something about the conversation. And she simply could not retain that distinction. Not for long enough to write a sentence or two in response to it. She edited what I said into something she wanted to argue with.

Another example is the Dumbass Disability Post. There was this stupid tumblr post which said "if you're disabled, you can't get married without losing health coverage", and went on from there. And that's... Not really very accurate. If you're on SSI disability, and your partner isn't, and you get married, and this makes you too rich to qualify, you might lose the SSI health coverage, but you might also now have different health coverage. But most disabled people, even people who genuinely can't work, don't qualify for SSI. And Alix just completely fucking lost it on this one. This is the one over which she sent most of the death threats, and announced intent to try to get Cedar's SSI permanently taken away, and so on, and so forth. At one point, she responded to me pointing out the large number of disabled people who don't even get that much support with "we're not talking about autistics with six-figure incomes", which is pretty fucking stupid. And the thing is, we finally talked it through, I got definite direct answers from multiple people who are on SSI as to what actually happens when they hit $2,000 of savings, and so on, and Alix finally agreed that, just maybe, it was more complicated than she thought. SSI lets people have houses. And cars. And it lets them have money briefly and then spend it. Or have savings accounts, and so on. And... A bit later, she was completely back to where she was before. Still just as mad about it. Still just as convinced that she was acting perfectly reasonably in making death threats to try to get people to listen.

It's not possible to get information to her and have her retain that information, if it's contrary to Being Mad. That's what moves this from merely "well gosh that sure is fucking awful behavior" to "there is no actual way to communicate here".

 

It's certainly not deliberate, but I see your point, and it's a good point.

I think it might make sense to have something closer to "we'll keep trying as long as anyone feels like keeping trying", but that has this worrying connotation that people who don't get good initial sympathy ratings will get pushed away quickly. But if you keep in mind how much many of the people involved tend to feel like keeping trying even if they maybe don't personally like a person, it's not a bad approximate guideline. If we are out of mods willing to put up with your shit, we are done moderating you. Since someone has to be able to moderate you for you to be present on the forum...

And yeah, to clarify, you absolutely get to prioritize your own health and well being, and set your own boundaries. I'm not talking about a policy on when anyone else has to interact with an asshole.

Hmm. I think, to clarify: The object-level atrocious behavior was not, I think, as big a problem as the aggressive boundry-violation-for-its-own-sake. I think I need to be a lot firmer on that one in the future, because the fact is, it's not a recurring problem. It's a single-user problem. None of the other problem users did that, and I think I'm gonna move significantly in the direction of "no, that's not optional, if you keep fucking around with this, we stop spending time on it".

Because the biggest problem wasn't "Alix sends death threats", but "you can't just avoid Alix".

So, vague sense of where I'm leaning: (1) If we run out of mods willing to put up with your shit, and you want to be around doing stuff, it had better be stuff that does not require mod interactions. (2) If you can't at least approximately follow boundaries within the approximate scope provided by stuff like post mod, that is beyond our power to fix.

Basically: I'm not willing to kick people out just for being assholes. My conclusion, historically, was that since the boundary-violation stuff was Being An Asshole, kicking Alix out for it would be kicking her out for being an asshole. But I'm starting to think that, given that she is literally the only person in our history who has ever had that problem to anything like that extent, maybe the solution is to just say "sure, you can be an asshole, if you are not going around trampling boundaries just to prove that you can." It's not as though we have any shortage of people who are horrible assholes, but who can accept "this behavior is really fucking annoying so don't do it here" or "leave that person alone". And honestly, Alix has demonstrated adequately that she can, she just doesn't want to.

 

Think about it this way:

This is a communications medium.

If we can't communicate, there is no fucking point.

To clarify: I wouldn't ban someone for that reason alone, because there'd be no reason to. But the reason we put up with shitty behavior from people is that we're trying to engage with them. That there is some hope that we are communicating with them, that we're able to exchange information with them, so they can improve their behavior. And if we can't communicate with them, that's gone.

This isn't the only reason I'd ever think about it, but it's a very simple and streamlined decision tree. Is any kind of benefit from this interaction even conceptually possible? No. Is it very harmful? Yes. We're done.

If there's some kind of reliable communication going on, then I want to talk about benefits and accommodations and stuff, but all of that can be discarded if there's no underlying possibility of reliable communication.

 

I am absolutely not talking about the average user. I'm talking about the people who would almost certainly be banned basically anywhere else I've ever been.