wild1145

wild1145, 1 year ago

This site has never been a place where we've been willing to make a home for those that are here to upset / target / harass / discriminate against others and it's been personally difficult seeing people believe that of both the site or me personally.

I've been very fortunate to have some very close friends and family that have sadly been the victims of discrimination, and there is ultimately no place for such behaviour here and that much has always been true since we started this site.

wild1145, 1 year ago

What I fucked up and mis-explained through trying to be responsive to people blowing up my mentions while I was busy with my life outside of this site (I work full time and this is my lunch break now writing this post). The balance we are desperately trying to strike is to be a place people can be safe to ask questions, have civil discussion and have a healthy debate, but without others being targeted / discriminated against. We also need folks expectations to be set sensibly.

wild1145, 1 year ago

We are a small team of 5 and for the most part that works really well. We don't have the resources or feel it's right to try to check everyone that joins this instance, there are instances out there that will though and for some of you those might well be a better home.

What we will do is where we're made aware of individuals that have a history of targeting individuals and are causing them to not feel safe on our site, we will remove those causing the issues.

wild1145, 1 year ago

I will also be honest when we made mistakes, and the last 24 hours we made a series of them, primarily down to my lack of understanding of some of the issues folks have faced on other platforms.

I missed people alerting me in my mentions to problematic users, and where they were in my mentions the wider mod team also missed these early warning signs. We're going to be making it more clear how people can report those that pose a threat to the community when the in-site reporting isnt suitable.

wild1145, 1 year ago

We also dropped the ball when most of our moderation team mismanaged a report we received. We didn't fully understand when we were reading something which was transphobic because it wasn't big shouty and screamy tansphobic. It wasn't until later yesterday when one of our other moderators pointed out how deeply offensive some of the post was that we took action to remove the content and suspend the account. I'm disappointed that we fucked up like that, and we need to change how we operate.

wild1145, 1 year ago

We also suffered a massive amount of abuse yesterday (My mentions were full of it) and it made it really difficult for those that were trying to communicate with me and the team to explain why our original stance wasn't really practical or safe for the community. My huge thanks to the 3 or so people that reached out yesterday and helped educate me and others on different view points which helped us to re-visit our position on moderating users for their historic behaviour elsewhere.

wild1145, 1 year ago

We've been going here for just over a week, and have been fortunate that up until the last 24 hours you have all been fucking delightful people to engage with. Up until that point our original stance of "What happens elsewhere isn't our issue" made a lot of sense, but now that we're starting to see influxes in people who want to use this platform as a place to spread hate, we need to take a more assertive position on reports about users being inappropriate elsewhere.