For projects, it slows progress.

Your example of toxicity is linux maintainers resisting a newer programming language, not wanting to maintain additional bindings, and being stubborn about it? People decide whether to work & agree with each other, so what’s your definition of toxicity here? How’s moderation supposed to solve that: force people to agree & work together unwillingly? Seems rather authoritarian. People should only put words & images on a screen that someone approves? More authoritarian. And look at those imaginary problems we can solve!

This goes back to the grandiose conceit I wrote about earlier: some people can’t get over themselves, take these words & images on a screen a bit too seriously, and feel they know better than others the right words & images to put on a screen, because of course they do. The rest of us know it’s just a bunch of self-important crap that doesn’t matter unless we make it matter, and we can ignore it or put our own words & images on a screen or go outside.

I think that it’s just words & images on a screen that we could easily ignore like people did before, and people are indulging a grandiose conceit by thinking that moderation is that important or serves any greater cause than the interests of moderators. On social media that seems to be to serve the consumers, by which I mean the advertisers & commercial interests who pay for the attention of users. While the old internet approach of ignoring, gawking at the freakshow, or ridiculing/flaming toxic & hateful shit worked fine then resulting in many people disengaging, ragequitting, or going outside to do something better, that’s not great for advertisers protecting their brand & wanting to keep people pliant & unchallenged as they stay engaged in their uncritical filter bubbles & echo chambers.

With old internet, safety wasn’t an internet nanny, thought police shit, and “stop burning my virgin eyes & ears”. It was an anonymous handle, not revealing personally identifying information (a/s/l?), not falling for scams & giving out payment information (unless you’re into that kinky shit). Glad to see newer social media returning to some of that.

Not friendica, which seems an obvious facebook alternative.

Also, I think they’re onto something with their fuck it approach that every social media platform would benefit from. The internet was mostly that before. Content moderation primarily serves advertisers, it was never really for the people. Old internet anarchy was chaotic fun.