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.
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.