what it means to have an individual in a position of power who repeatedly behaves in a way which contradicts the expectations of conduct you have of your regular users.

EDIT: for posterity/transparency reasons I’m not going to remove this, but I’m crossing it out because it didn’t land right and is something I clearly need to workshop more and reconsider how to respond.

I think perhaps the biggest issue I have is that these kinds of conversations are already happening yet the total amount of times it has happened as a function of the total amount of comments on the website or even interactions with moderators are often blown out of proportion.

We have a propensity on the internet (and as humans) to hyperfocus on the negative and often to not do so with adequate reflection. A single instance of behavior which annoys someone or rubs them the wrong way is often the starting point for endless discussion and hypothesizing about what is acceptable and whether someone stepped over the line. It’s often an act of grandstanding or virtue signaling that people are unaware that they are doing. In the best of cases it’s a philosophical discussion or one aimed at providing clarity around rules and behavior, but even in these cases the harm these conversations can cause in terms of morale and the negative energy directed at the person in question are not taken into consideration.

If you need an analogous example, take a look at individuals on the left who have been vilified or canceled over a single misstep. Even in cases of profuse apology and serious steps towards rectifying their behavior, it’s practically impossible to discuss these individuals on the internet without someone entering the discussion to grandstand or redirect discussion towards the perceived harm. It’s a distraction tactic, one that made discussions about topics like gamer gate practically unapproachable and toxic and shifted the discussion away from it’s intent (serious sexism in gaming) and instead towards what was essentially tone policing and questioning whether the motives behind the movement were sound in the first place.

While this is a long route to get back to my initial point, I want to point out this propensity because it’s something we need to collectively move past as a society and on the internet. There are endless bad actors and we often end up acting very much like bad actors because this exploitation often ends up so mainstream that we internalize their value sets without questioning them. Starting a private conversation with the individual in question, with other moderators, or with admins to understand how they feel about the situation (or bringing this up via other avenues like matrix or discord) may be a better way to address concerns than airing them publicly and potentially starting a witch hunt over a single isolated incident. Even when you suspect there’s a pattern (we’ve identified a whole two times this has happened, both of which I was aware of and one of which I was directly involved in) you need to consider the pros and cons of having this discussion in public and how it might affect the opinions of others.

Finally, I’d suggest to yourself and others listening in on this conversation to take a step back and self-evaluate. If there was a scale which rests on an axis that goes from “I absolutely hate this person” to “I love this person” where would you rate the admins and moderators on this website. Why do you have that rating? How much do you know these people? Are you willing to change your opinion? What would change your opinion? Is it fair to rate someone so far down in either direction on the scale based on how much you know and have interacted with them? Think about some people you know in real life, people that you’ve interacted with a lot, and ask yourself where they sit on that scale and how much information is behind that decision. Have they moved on this scale over time based on how they’ve acted or things they’ve said? I think on the internet we have the propensity to polarize people, to flatten them down to one dimensional axes and to make snap judgements about their character and in general to be unwilling to question that judgement or allow that judgement to move. It’s often a function of necessity to keep us mentally sane on large websites like twitter and reddit where toxicity are rampant. We need to challenge these behaviors and do our best to avoid them on Beehaw if we wish for this place to end up different.