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.
When I first joined I didn’t think much of “rules vs principles.” But this thread did give me some perspective of using more principles, rather then specific rules. It just makes it easier to moderate, and not having to worry about forgetting to list something specific in the rules when taking down bad posts and banning hateful users. If you used rules, and a user did a bad thing and wasn’t covered, or even hinted at as being covered they could claim something negative against the enforcers. For enforcing rules not written. (seems like what they are wanting.)
Principles with some examples of what might be covered, is better. I wasn’t thinking anything about it personally, when just joining the instance and reading them. One of the first posts I seen on here was this one, and I was like, "hey op, you are trying to sound like you’re trying to making sense, like saying ‘hey we need more rules.’ But just looking through the server, seems peacefully as is, no complaints as a new user. Not as familiar with longer term activity on the server.
You might maybe want to add some principles that basically say, don’t break laws in the instance’s hosted country, which might be reasonable idk, but that’s probably the only thing if anything I would suggest to add ontop of the principles, just to cover yourself legally, but probably won’t even have to do that as the community seems to do good on its own managing itself. Which suggests that this approach is actually working, and it stops the trolls.