Time for another lesson from my days fighting in the Mod Wars in one of Twitch's more famous and busy channels
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Time for another lesson from my days fighting in the Mod Wars in one of Twitch's more famous and busy channels
A few years ago, the channel began showing the pronouns of presenters and guests on stream. And toxic gamer types complained incessantly, often in very overtly transphobic ways, regardless of whether anyone on-stream was trans. We banned every single last person who complained. I personally banned hundreds, it must have been a few thousand all together. Anyone who DM'd the mods to apologize/explain it was a misunderstanding got unbanned, but that was a tiny fraction of them; there were more than a few bonus-transphobia parting shot DMs, often aimed at me because I was the first mod alphabetically.
And after a few weeks of this slaughter... the chat became a civil paradise. It was a much healthier environment than before we began showing the pronouns and causing all the most toxic people to volunteer their identity at once. People who are really gross on one axis tend to be unpleasant on all of them.
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S. G. Tallentyre (🤨 ┻━┻)replied to abadidea last edited by
I actually have a ton experience modding for small streamers, and by that I mean that the biggest streamer I've ever modded for had, at that time, an average of ~40–50 concurrent viewers by my estimate. I can't imagine modding for any of the big streamers.
Anyway, I love this story.
I usually have the pronouns extension installed (the only reason why I don't at the moment is because I've been highly experimental with web browsers recently, lol). I don't add my own pronouns, if only for the entirely petty reason that my name on Twitch is already so long that merely putting "He/Him" behind it is, in a lot of cases, all it takes to push part of it but not all of it onto the next line—which looks ridiculous. I still like being able to see other peoples' pronouns, though. Pronouns in English have always been somewhat awkward because English is very awkward. That's no one's fault, though, and I don't think that's what most if any of the people who outed themselves were complaining about. I can picture exactly the kind of person who would protest something like that.
It really makes me wonder how many people are prejudice to that effect as well, but who are also smart and/or self aware enough to keep that to keep that to themselves in the presence of those who would not agree. Surely—the number of people who actively hide prejudice in plain sight, who actually exist and not only in theory, is non-zero. It has to be.
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GwenTheKween :neofox_flag_trans:replied to S. G. Tallentyre (🤨 ┻━┻) last edited by
@StephenTallentyre @0xabad1dea
> The number of people who house prejudice in plain sight, who actually exist and not only in their, is non-zero.I don't know that they have to exist. At least not for long. Prejudice is built on not knowing the people you're prejudiced against, only knowing the Boogeyman stories and the scares. If someone is able to hold their prejudice in long enough to be in the community where those folks are welcome, they will learn that they're bigotry is based on lies and grow out of it.
I say because I was one of these people, grew up in a pretty bad environment and just by being silent around people that I didn't know, I learned enough to start becoming a better person
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Steven Bodzin bike & subscribereplied to abadidea last edited by
@0xabad1dea the broken windows theory but for human decency
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@0xabad1dea
ROFLMAO: toxic users identifying themselves! That's a brilliant perspective.
Must have taken a huge amount of work though. Huge kudos! -
@0xabad1dea I believe it's called 'grossness magnetism'. Or 'crankiness magnetism', if you don't mind the risk of confusing it with 'crank magnetism'.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Steven Bodzin bike & subscribe last edited by
@stevenbodzin No, the broken windows theory is bullshit. Human indecency really is generally multifaceted.
@0xabad1dea -
@Giselle Just imagine putting up a nice sticky post saying "If you would like to be banned, just say "I object to pronouns!", and wait for the nearest mod to take care of you."
@0xabad1dea -
@riley @stevenbodzin @0xabad1dea
The Nazi Bar Problem, then.
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@cavyherd Well, not all human indendency is of the Nazi kind. But we are unfortunate too live in an Interesting Time when the Nazi sort of indecent behaviour happens to dominate among badly behaving adults.
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@riley @stevenbodzin @0xabad1dea
And the Nazi variety of bad behavior is certainly a strong predictor of other sorts.
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@cavyherd Sometimes I suspect that congregations of Nazis outside places where Nazis have political power happen out of kids who do not like anybody seeking out other kids who do not like anybody, not as much for companionship but for predictability.
The *chan culture, unfortunately, looks a lot like exactly that sort of proto-Nazi congregation, with the main difference being that it tries to attract not as much kids who don't like anybody, but kids who believe that nobody likes them, and see public displays of dislike as a form of "honesty".
(As an aside, in alt-right parlance, "honesty" generally means "saying things appearing to affirm the Party Line". Used in a sentence: "Be honest!", by Melon Lusk, in the sense of "No, don't say that, say what the Party Line calls for".)
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@riley @stevenbodzin @0xabad1dea
I have spent zero time in spaces that cultivate that kind of vibe (thank all the gods of Time & Space), but from what I gather, the *chan to Nazi pipeline is essentially a four-lane highway.
Exile culture fortress mentality would certainly seem like a plausible attitude to take on, in that space, being, as it seems to be, basically fear-based.
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@cavyherd The thorny ethical issue then becomes: how much effort is reasonable to expend in pulling a patron away from a Nazi bar in the hope that he doesn't have a Nazi soul, just an empty soul attracted to a Nazi bar?
The answers are probably different for a single publican and a society as a whole, the difference taking a very strange form of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
