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.
What you’re describing here isn’t empathy in the context of the community guidelines. Broadly, what the guideline means is “think about the impact your words will have on others, and try to minimise the harm they cause”.
And more broadly, it means that if someones words are clearly designed to hurt or upset others, they can be acted on.
Which is to say, it’s not so much about trying to guess what other people are thinking or feeling. That is still part of bigger picture of what makes up empathy, and it helps with assessing whether your own actions are hurting folk, but it’s not at the core of what the guideline is addressing.
Drag took a message I had sent to drag, and shared it in public, without my permission and without notification that drag was going to do so. Drag was also the target of an almost endless amount of hate and abuse over drags pronouns, and for a long time, drag was not banned because I did not want to empower the bigots who were behind those attacks, despite many of drags actions warranting a ban. The sharing of private messages without permission was a “final strike”
Without empathy, drag would have been banned much much earlier. Empathy for the harassment drag was receiving was the reason it took so long for the ban to arrive.
As long as you are not trying to hurt others with your words you’ll be ok
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Your motives are clearer now, and have little to do with the clarity of codified rules. Codification of the rules wouldn’t have changed the outcome of those events.