I view it as mostly vocal people who have more perceived power than they actually hold, due to the overprevalence of social media making them look bigger than they are. The real threats come from elected officials making actual decisions to appease one side or another then rapidly backing off as reality slaps them hard in the face (like Durkan playing off the CHAZ until protesters showed up at her house behind a city council member).
If you're wasting time getting into the weeds with nobodies who are mostly on social media trying to look important, you are ignoring the people with actual power to affect you and your family's life. Let these lunatics look more insane every day, and learn to shine a light on it when people ask "Why the hell is half of Minneapolis on fire? I thought that was supposed to be peaceful protesting?"
Don't stop your enemy from making a mistake that will cost them in the bigger picture. Know your goal, know your target, and know how you plan to get there. Don't just lash out in response to something someone else did, all that does is tire you out and keep you fighting with people who can't actually do anything beyond wear you down over time.
MovieBob is a morbidly obese SJW most notorious for saying "no such thing as a bad tactic, only bad targets", which effectively encompasses the SJW approach to dealing with people they disagree with, and shows a complete lack of principles, morals, or empathy for other human beings.
Edit - not saying you have that lack, saying MovieBob does, just for clarity.
See, that's the problem with trying to read intent in something. You will almost always get it wrong. There was no snark in that, but I sure as fuck was tired when I wrote it, as I had just dealt with nearly 12 hours straight of getting this site up and running, dealing with the fallout of the admin sitewide decision, making sure people who had to do their parts to get this site functional had done their parts, all while getting a ton of PMs/DMs from folks worried about retroactive enforcement by the admins in regards to the rule change.
but most members of KiA2 are there because of a non-inflamatory preference for their moderation style
No, that is certainly a part of the community there, but you cannot say "most" when most of the population there, especially the increased active users, are folks who came in well after the split and have had little or no participation on KiA itself.
You are making a critical error in assuming I am saying "don't fight back" when attacked. I am saying don't start fights you have no reason to be in in the first place.
Not don't use their tactics.
Dancing a line towards MovieBob status with that wording, there.
Rules have been adjusted initially, and will be adjusted further, as we don't have many of the restrictions from above to worry about here for things like email campaigns making a comeback. The key thing, though, is finding worthwhile campaigns to fire up that remain within our focus. We aren't here to play political tribes, and we aren't here to go after nobodies who have no power to actually do anything.
Wait, I thought being aggressive, getting tired of shit, and calling out things you don't like were the enemies' rules.
Eventually AOV let power go to his head and forced "troll" flairs on users who deviated from the groupthink
I'll admit we have done a handful of "troll" type flairs on some people in the past, albeit most often on people that everyone could easily see was only trolling, but we never pulled the "you must keep your flair on or you will be banned" thing that Antonio did.
I'll just suggest taking a day to go through Dom's userpage, and look at the number of comments he removes for echo-posting, or a wide variety of other things that caused us to take the stance that KiA2 had an actual problem with the extreme end of /pol/ cutting loose to understand why we took the view that KiA2 had a problem. Part of the issue with the entirety of it is that everyone is playing telephone, taking "there is a problem with this here" as "the entire sub is nazis". While I could easily name a dozen KiA2 regulars who regularly crossed that line, at the same time I could easily name a dozen KiA2 regulars who actively fought against it.
KiA mods did spend a time calling the users over at KiA2 nazi's white supremacists etc. for awhile
That has mostly gotten under control in the last few months, as Antonio has cracked down harder. I think BloodAndSeed finally got suspended by the admins for all his stormfront-tier posting.
I made an "olive branch" post to KiA2 on reddit, which went about as well as I expected because people want to eat sleep and breathe outrage rather than see what I was actually saying. We are not banning anyone from there preemptively, including people who had been banned on KiA reddit previously. Everyone gets amnesty, they just have to not be dicks about it when they come here. Funnily enough there are at least two people in this very thread who had been banned (temp or perma) from KiA that are being chill right now.
We have banned exactly one KiA2 user so far, who went full retard in his first comment here, making a "Hitler did nothing wrong" comment. I don't care where anyone is from, that kind of shit does not fly here, and would probably have been removed and the user banned on KiA2 reddit, too.
It's a difference of holding to absolute principles regarding how to approach the "war", vs being willing to adopt the tactics the "enemy" uses to use against them.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I have no desire to be MovieBob.
Not removing this, but I am going to point out the misinterpretations and outright falsehoods in that top reply, since it keeps getting quoted around on TD itself, and elsewhere.
It is impossible to oppose these things without opposing leftism itself. Virtually all bad journalism and censorship is coming from the left.
False, it's just easier to find this shit coming from the left because the left has a larger mainstream presence. Censorship runs rampant on the right, too - just look at what Saidit, Gab and Parler have been adding to their list of things they consider censor-worthy after claiming to be homes for free speech.
The mods leaned more left
At last tally, our mod team was about 1/3 right wing, 1/3 left wing, and 1/3 yuropoors of various leanings. That may have actually drifted more right in recent months, as one of our lefties has decided he's probably voting Trump this year for various reasons.
they became obsessed with making sure the sub did not become "another T_D". So they implemented a ridiculously vague rule of "no unrelated politics". They then used this rule to remove content that was absolutely relevant but supported conservativism.
"No Unrelated Politics" was originally offered up and voted on by the userbase to be added as a rule because of a wave of spam from the folks at /r/Sanders4President, back at the end of 2015. We recognized we had a broad political mix of users from all across the spectrum, and didn't want to alienate any of them including the right wingers at the time that were getting annoyed at the leftie spam. Part of the issue was that political posts that had absolutely nothing to do with gaming, journalism ethics, or similar were being posted that nearly every time turned into tribal shit flinging between different political factions over things that had nothing to do with KiA itself. We implemented the rule to curtail that kind of thing before it happened. There's an old saying that if you want to keep your friends, you don't talk politics, religion or sex at the dinner table - that was the theory we have been operating around.
At one point, the mods actually put the rules to a vote. The users overwhelmingly opposed the absurd content removals.
Another misrepresentation. The vote was originally between three options intended to cut back on some wildly tangential posts that kept on causing the tribal fighting I mentioned in the last point. A last minute decision was made by the then-head mod (I had retired for almost a year before coming back, this was during that timeframe) to add a fourth option "no further changes" with it being made clear in the replies that there may be a need for changes later if this did not resolve the issues that were attempting to be fixed.
The mods didn't care. They ignored the results of the vote and continued arbitrarily removing content.
The mods stuck with the vote result of "make no further changes" for about two months, until the issues that were trying to be addressed erupted to the point that either something had to be done, or they were going to be forced to ban dozens of users for breaking Rule 1 (don't be a dick) due to that same unrelated political tribal shit flinging causing people to constantly attack each other over things that had - at their core - nothing to do with KiA.
On a related note: the Kia mods lost their shit when users started talking trash about polyamory. I can't imagine the mods would have behaved this way unless one or more of them were engaged in the polyamorous lifestyle. We might have been dealing with literal cucks.
Only bringing this one in because it's something that parts of the KiA2 crowd love to mention so they can pretend that they have any idea what goes on in the personal lives of mods here. One of our mods had been involved in poly stuff in the past... as the bull in a relationship. But recognizing that possibility would shatter any attempt at painting the KiA mods as "evil sjw cucks".
Kotakuinaction2 was created as a lifeboat for those who abandoned the increasingly garbage moderation of Kia.
We actually encouraged the split when it happened, in part because it meant most of the users causing the biggest tribal-based issues attacking other users would have a place they could vent on that we would no longer have to warn/ban them or the people they picked fights with for breaking Rule 1. It became a self-selecting containment sub. There were some users who went over that had legitimate concerns about parts of Rule 3 (our posting guidelines), and we felt the need to address that to the point where we actually hired on one of those critics from KiA2 as part of our mod team (and another critic who stayed on KiA without making the jump to 2) to help revamp Rule 3 dramatically, to permit a lot of content that had been inadvertently caught and blocked that should have been allowed to get through. That was about 8 months ago we hired them on, and we made the Rule 3 revamp around 6 months ago. We also intend to thin it down a bit more over the next few weeks here, as we get this site more fully functional and get settled in.
kia2 mods are stridently free speech (to the extent that Reddit permits
The great irony there is that KiA2 on reddit actually censored more than we did, making several words forbidden, regardless of context. We may have slapped people for being anti-semitic shitheads using echoes, but we never banned the use of words like "faggot" or "tranny".
Possibly. When it was just thedonald being blocked, they could claim it was to prevent ban evasion. The issue here is that we have never been banned or quarantined, and our .win name does not even mention TD. Even my original lifeboat announcement only mentioned them as communities.win, my only naming of TD in any form was where I mentioned they had been banned alongside Chapo.
Anything resembling details on what this is even supposed to be, beyond a ton of cross-hashtag spam?
Yes, and I have to remove your comment because of it.
Despite what some people want to pretend, we completely stripped out the old point system half a year ago, and replaced it with something simpler - whitelist/blacklist (sorry, list of color). That opened up a whole lot of additional content which had been getting blocked that should not have been under the older ruleset.
Do you know how long it took to iron that out with mods who wanted to see it changed, while still maintaining the blocks that needed to stay in place, alongside stress-testing to make sure things that should fail still failed, and things that should pass but did not before were actually able to pass? Two months.
I say a week or two for the revisions here because I need to make certain all mods are on the same page for what that enforcement change will be - to prevent someone enforcing on the older system or misunderstanding parts of the changes. I also say that long because we have people tied up with getting the technical back end of this site up and running properly, between everyone having IRL obligations like work, family, etc.
This is not something that can be "done in an hour" without managing to have half the mod team fuck it up because nobody is on the same page, combined with having to make a half dozen re-revisions as different people notice different things being missed, or things failing to get through that should under the newer lighter ruleset.
a reputation for being a fuckup and a liar
Maybe take a few to ask yourself who painted up that reputation, and whether all the people trying to maintain that narrative are actually being honest about why they got banned, or whether they even got banned, as half of them hide on new accounts, making claims to victimhood because they could never have done anything wrong, it must totally be the fault of the evil oppressive mods. Don't be a lazy shit while playing listen-and-believe, fucking well verify shit where you can. We maintained public mod logs for the last 4, almost 5 years on KiA, and it takes little effort to show that I was one of the vocal people calling for that transparency back before I was hired on as a mod, and I have kept that in place despite needing to go through multiple different public mod log options. We will have those active here, too, in the near future.
Did you miss the statement where we I said at the top of this very chain that we were going to be revising and thinning down Rule 3, which is the part you are complaining about right now?
Not sure if we are able to edit that without more CSS fuckery. I've passed the request along to our folks handling that.
Sidebar is still under construction as we bring our old CSS online and functional with all the new/different setup here. Not sure I can easily say "we will link to all other communities" as more come online, but I don't see any issue with us adding a "we are part of communities.win, so check out the main hub to see what other sites are part of the network" kind of link.
We will see. The temp blacklist for that expires on the... 7th I think. We may let it run out, see how things look for a few days or a week, then vote on if it needs to be reimplemented more permanently, or allowed to die off. The main issue we had was the flood of riot-posting, followed by every company under the sun doing their BLM virtue signal dance on twitter, which got way too spammy.
We had some weekly posts cycling around with that kind of thing for recommendations/"what are you playing" kind of discussion. We will be bringing that back here, it may take us a week or so before we can get it back in effect due to all the technical issues we are still sorting out first.
Mods here actively call each other faggot all the time (out of love), so as long as it's clear you're not intending it in an identity politics based attack on someone else, we will likely let it slide.
You are aware there are some sitewide rules here in play, right? Like "no linking to dox" because, as pointed out by TD admins, doxing violates federal law in some cases. We have dialed back on some of our older reddit rules, and will be making further adjustment to them as we go. That does not mean we will grant free rein for people to freely shit on each other.
We are serious about our mission statement, including the very last line:
We hold ourselves to be politically neutral ground, not forcing anyone to conform in their opinions, and permitting a wide variety of viewpoints to express themselves in a civil manner.
Civility has to be enforced, otherwise you're just setting fire to your own house as people shit in the floor and blame each other for it.
I think we are actually the one they have to be scared about seeing make the jump, more than others, as we worked within the reddit rules better than most subs actively, and our taking this step despite not even being quarantined shows a hard vote of No Confidence in the reddit admins.
There were no demands for apologies, no "you must bow down" or any of that kind of shit. Just my pointing out that we were not importing bans over, and that meant for everyone, including Antonio, who has gone out of his way at every opportunity to play up his victimhood over his being banned from KiA reddit. There were certainly demands that I bow down, apologize and grovel from folks there. I will do no such thing, because I expect no such thing from anyone who chooses to take advantage of not being banned from here.