Women have heard this argument again and again, and we have remained the reliable base of a party that has elected and elevated to positions of greater power anti-choice Democrats including Harry Reid, Joe Biden, Tim Kaine, and Bob Casey. In fact, it’s hard not to feel that it’s because of the dedication of women, and particularly women of color, to the Democratic Party — where else are they going to go? — that party leaders feel freer to take them for granted and trade their fundamental rights in obsessive pursuit of the great white male. This is how Dems always imagine that they can make inroads in red states. It’s third-way centrist bullshit.
… In the midst of one of the most activated, energized, ground-up movements in modern Democratic political history — where the energy is coming from women who remain underrepresented in state and federal legislatures — the Unity Tour, with its two men making pronouncements about what the party should do next, felt exceedingly out of touch. And the dynamic — the women doing the labor of organizing and protesting and campaigning, knocking on doors and making calls and sending postcards, while guys speak from the microphones about the need to compromise on their rights — is depressingly retro.
Most of my friends have been on the internet, and I’ve spent many years as part of various internet communities, many of which I have moderated as either part of the mod team or the sole creator.
There’s a pattern that inevitably emerges, something like this:
Community forms based off of a common interest, personality, value set, etc. We’ll describe “people who strongly share the interest/personality/value” as Opossums: people who like talking to specific people. These people have nothing against anybody, they just only feel a strong sense of community from really specific sorts of people, and tend to actively seek out and form niche or cultivated communities. To them, “friendly and welcoming” community isn’t enough to give them a sense of belonging.
This community becomes successful and fun
Community starts attracting
Otters: People who like talking to most people. They can find a way to get along with anybody, they don’t have specific standards that cause them to enjoy someone’s company. They’re mostly ok with whatever sort of community comes their way, as long as it’s friendly and welcoming. These Otters see the Opossum community and happily enter, delighted to find all these fine lovely folk and their interesting subculture. (e.g., in a christian server, otters would be atheists who want to discuss religion; in a rationality server, it would be members who don’t practice rationality but like talking with rationalists)
Community grows to have more and more otters, as they invite their friends. Gradually the community grows diluted until some otters start entering who don’t share the opossum goals even a little bit – or even start inviting opossums with rival goals. (e.g., members who actively dislike rationality practices in the rationality server).
Opossums realize the community culture is not what it used to be and not what they wanted, so they try to moderate. Sometimes a constitution, laws, and removal process, usually involving voting, is formed after way too much discussion about it, and mostly because the mods are too scared to make everybody as angry as they are threatening to be. This just staves off the problem. Alternatively, the mods just outright kick and ban who they don’t like, which leads us to:
The Otters like each other, and kicking an Otter makes all of the other Otters members really unhappy. There are long debates about whether or not what the (opossum) moderator did was the Right Thing and whether the laws or constitution are working correctly or whether they should split off and form their own chat room
The new chat room is formed, usually by Otters. Some of the members join both chats, but the majority are split, as the aforementioned debates generated a lot of hostility
Rinse and repeat
—
One problem is when Otters misinterpret Opossum ideology. It takes a lot of people very unhappy to get Otters to kick people out, and so when they see Opossums doing kicking, they assume all of the Opossums are very unhappy too, and take it personally.
Otters and Opossums tend to get into the “is elitism good” discussion – Otters will generally say things like “I want an inclusive and tolerant environment” and “I don’t want people to have to watch their every step” and “The thought of testing or filtering people for being good enough for admission here makes me really uncomfortable.”
Opossums are on the other side, saying “but you can’t just have a free for all,” or “this community is here for a specific purpose and it’s ok to get rid of people who don’t want it” and “I like having strict admission standards.”
I think at the core of this is Otters interpreting Opossum censorship as something personal, because their standard for feeling a sense of belonging is just ‘human decency’, and it’s difficult for them to empathize with a motivation of exclusion based on other things.
–
I don’t really have a point with this, but I am interested in methods we can take to help preemptively solve this inevitable Otter vs. Opossum clash and the dilution of group members. One idea is to have a periodic ‘chat splitting,’ where every 3-6 months (or when membership hits a certain number) there is a new forum/chatroom made, and people have to choose which group to join. This would help separate the Otters from the Opossums in a way that is inevitable and hopefully creates no hard feelings.
Also, possibly normalizing the social differences between Otters and Opossums and loudly labeling chatrooms by their spectrum on the Otter-Opossum scale. That way, if someone knows they’re stepping foot into an Opossum room, they know that being kicked is more likely, and it’s also probably not personal at all.
There’s also lots of ways to try to filter out Otters from joining in the first place, like tests for entry, interviews, and trial periods.
If you have any more proposed methods for avoiding culture dilution, I’d love to hear them!
This is fascinating. We’ve been having forum drama recently, and honestly, kicking people out was not one of things that would have occurred to me. I guess we did sorta do the “here’s what we’re trying to do” thing, which is sorta like the “Constitution” described, but the idea of trying to “enforce” it strikes me as really weird.
every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same).
Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion.
(I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)
ding ding ding ding.
Ao3 requires you to police your own consumption of content. Ao3 won’t let you destroy someone’s online presence simply because you don’t like it. Ao3 won’t let you impose your own morality on other without cause.
If you have issues with this, and the fact that Ao3 requires you to have responsibility and agency, then you seriously need to sit down and have a damned good long hard look at yourself.
The question I usually fail to see being answered when people bitch about the content on AO3 is – so who gets to decide?
You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?
Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?
The world is complex and there are no easy answers.
The impossibility of creating a censorship board that curates based on content is a great reason why those things don’t exist, and shouldn’t.
Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.
Antis can’t take control of it. And because control-freakdom is at the heart of their “movement,” this drives them into frenzies. Good. It motivated me to dig a little deeper into my pocket to donate on the last drive. For all the pleasure AO3 has given me over the years, that’s money well spent.
The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers.
Preach it loud and hard!
I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”
The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic – victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.
And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.
The mentality is one and the same – “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.
And when these bozos find an environment or situation where they’re unable or not allowed to bully people into silence and submission, they stomp their feet and pitch a tantrum and claim that they’re the ones being oppressed. Identical shit, different pile, and it’s the exact same infantile, schoolyard rubbish no matter which side it’s coming from.
This was a really interesting read. The last poster in particular but all of it.
AO3 was literally created to give fan creators a place where they would never be controlled by the whims of those using the so-called protection of the vulnerable as their excuse for bullshit control and attack tactics.
I and some colleagues were talking about how we wish everyone could see the safety videos that our company was showing us, because I don’t think most people understand how traffic works in a truck. So here’s some things we wish everyone on the road knew.
– we’re not kidding about tailgating. If you’re right behind us on a straight highway? Chances are we have NO IDEA you’re there, which means we can’t anticipate any of your movements. Plus slowing down takes multiple downshifts, so we might start decreasing speed way earlier than you expect.
– We’re not kidding about any of our blind spots. WE CAN’T SEE YOU, GUYS.
– That bit about slowing down taking a while? The same goes for when you’re in front of us. Don’t cut off a truck. Oh god, PLEASE don’t cut off a truck. If you cut me off, I’m not irritated, I’m terrified. For YOU. It can take 7 to 9 seconds for us to stop. DON’T CUT OFF TRUCKS.
– Before you get mad about how slow we’re going on the highway, keep in mind that many companies govern their vehicles so they literally CAN’T go over 60 or 65. This is a good thing, I promise. Because…
– Do you know what happens when a car meets a truck in an accident? The car gets totaled and the truck needs a new coat of paint. You will not win this fight. I know nobody likes getting stuck behind a big dumb truck, but it’s not worth your life.
We are trying our best to protect you from our 80,000 pound death machines. Please help us out.
This information is actually useful. Thanks for posting.
also don’t get inside their turn radius.
in this diagram, you can see the moment when it looks like you have space to pull up to the intersection on the truck’s right. and you can see how in the next moment, the trailer slams into the driver’s side of your car. hang back, for god’s sake.
has anyone else noticed there’s a very specific way women interrupt each other in conversation that’s quite distinct from the way men interrupt women in conversation? like, women seem to interject a lot more– not as a silencing tactic, but to show their enthusiasm or agreement, cause they perceive a conversation as kind of collaborative, organic exercise. but i feel like men get really annoyed if you excitedly interject when they’re saying something (most specifically in a debate/discussion context) because they perceive conversation as something combative or competitive and see an interjection as a threat or a challenge. i’ve also noticed men dismiss women’s way of talking as being sort of incomprehensible and nonsensical because of this habit we have of seeming to butt in or finish each others sentences excitably.
Read this. Even if you hate eggs and perky diet blogs. Read through Wednesday at the very least. My bet is if you get to Wednesday, you’ll want to read the rest.
just moving along like everyone else 