in what ways do you think kbin should strive to be different from Reddit?

  • An automod which deletes comments with words that are not allowed with zero human review.

    I ran into issues using words like “kill” for example, which I understand isn‘t good in the context of calling for violence and should then be modded, but I only used it in a way that should be accepted. Like reacting to a headline which is about people being killed by a government, I should be able to use the word kill in a sentence that criticises that.

    Probably why this stupid word unalive now exists is how common it seems to be to censor the word kill entirely, like… sure, you don‘t want people to incite violence or talk about hurting themselves, that’s reasonable—but it ain‘t going to happen by making a word a taboo!

    People just make up new words to say the same thing or use framings like “an action which ends a life” etc so hopefully if this stays small we can have actual human decisions which include context when it comes to censoring.

    • I understand not liking overzealous filters but I would like a feature to allow blacklisting words in magazines, otherwise you’re going to get people shouting slurs at others and getting away with it until a moderator comes to clean it up.

    • Oh man this was the worst. Even game subs like Call of Duty the mods would not allow anyone to talk about Skill Based Matchmaking (SBMM) so they just auto-modded every single thread about it. These same mods pretty much run every CoD sub so they were all unfortunately power-tripped the same way. If a community is upset about something they should be able to speak their mind, not hide it all because it might look bad for a company.

      • Well the automod message said they had set it up that way on account of the admins telling them to or get the sub banned.

        Either way, as far as I understand the fediverse that can‘t happen here, if an instance turns too restrictive for my tastes I can move on and there is no overarching admin who would ban the instance out of existence, it would just get defederated.

        So for example if kbin bans the word kill and instructs an automod to delete all comments that contain it and I get annoyed by that, I could make my own version of kbin or join some other version where we can still say it.

        • Sounds like they’re just making excuses. The admins came out and said that encouraging or supporting violence/death was bannable and could lead to subs being quarantined. They never said they had to filter the word kill. Plenty of subs have the word kill appearing in comments every day.