I’ve seen a lot of instances of people on Lemmy saying you can get banned from Blahaj for forgetting someone’s pronouns. And then Ada has to come in and explain why they’re wrong in their interpretation of the rules. These people were banned for good reasons, they’re transphobes. But I think they misunderstand the rules of Blahaj for a legitimate reason.
It’s because Blahaj doesn’t have rules. It has two guidelines. Very subjective ones. People want to know what will get them banned, so they try to understand the rules of that subjectivity. The rules for what Ada considers to be empathy and inclusion. The rules of Ada’s psychology. Because like it or not, with highly subjective guidelines, Ada’s interpretation and understanding of that subjectivity is the rules.
And Ada didn’t write the rules of her psychology in the sidebar. So people have to speculate. And people are speculating wrong, and starting arguments about it.
I think a ruleset should be a transparent explanation of how a mod team thinks about acceptable behaviour. By not having rules, Blahaj is being opaque about how the mod team thinks. And the only way for people to deal with that is to practice amateur psychoanalysis. Which is unpleasant and creates division.
If people understood how trans people think about acceptable behaviour, they wouldn’t be transphobes. So the result of this system is that everyone who is banned for transphobia doesn’t understand why and needs it personally explained to them. If the sidebar explained acceptable behaviour in a way everyone can understand, they wouldn’t misunderstand it so often.
I think the current system is creating pointless drama.
To be honest this sounds similar to a critique that general laws are weak because they rely on the subjective evaluation of judges.
For example, the famous quote “I know it when I see it” by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice on the threshold of what is obscenity.
Just as we rely on judges to interpret laws and apply them fairly and reasonably, we rely on moderators to be reasonable in how they enforce the rules.
Like obscenity, it is hard to capture a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that can define transphobia or homophobia.
Even if we tried to come up with a long list of rules to create more transparency, there is a principle of good legislation that “hard cases make bad law,” meaning laws should intentionally be written in a general way aimed at the average case, and not written based on exceptional cases.
While it might feel more transparent to engage in making many explicit rules to cover every case of what is transphobic and bannable, it might also just make a mess and add no clarity.
In our case we would not want to write rules that cover every exceptional way that transphobes might behave that might get them banned, especially if doing so makes it harder for moderators to ban transphobes.
Instead it is better to have a single, simple rule that bans transphobia and let the moderators make judgements about what counts.
That said, I understand the desire for transparency - I wouldn’t mind if there were something separate from the rules that illustrate some examples of behavior that would be considered rule violations, much like how famous cases help set precedent and create a kind of record of how judgements have happened in the past and so you can get a sense of how the rules will be applied to future behavior.
But I believe the moderator logs are already open, and it sounds like you already knew the people who were banned and were complaining were transphobes - which I assume you know by looking at the modlogs or by their behavior.
So, is the issue that the transphobes were not obviously transphobes to others (so they pulled the wool over the eyes of others)? Is the idea that making more salient what they were banned for would help with this situation?
Examples are listed in sidebar too!
Ah, good point - I don’t really feel your rules are too ambiguous. I can somewhat understand a rigid mindset for rule-following (which is maybe unrelated to OP’s concerns, and is more about how I am relating to their request), so admittedly what I had in mind was more like a list of very specific examples of violations, maybe links to modlogs where users were banned for what they said, that act as examples for each category of violation.
It’s overkill and probably not that helpful, but it is one way I could imagine a way of creating the kind of transparency OP wants without creating a bunch of very specific and rigid rules. That said, it sounds like OP could come up with their own list of those things themselves - AFAIK modlogs are public, so anyone could comb through them and build a kind of taxonomy of rule violations that way.