@Felthry we really like the argument someone made that CW stuff is community-norms stuff

like, there's also a competing-access-needs situation, but, like ... we Packbats, as part of our community, try to CW heavily and limit boosts of un-CWed material*, but we don't get to make that call for people outside our community

(* we ... could probably limit un-CWed boosts more, but we don't have the spoons to add CWs to very much...)

we try to spread the word about things worth CWing as general policy, but unless we have some kind of relationship with a somebody, we don't ask them for CWs

(to be continued...)

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@packbat yeah we also never ask people outside our community to cw stuff unless it's one of the really basic cws like nsfw or gore or something

@Felthry I mean, if it's one of the really basic ones, we'd probably check their instance rules first? idk, that just makes us feel more comfortable saying something, if we confirm that they're not on a "yeah we post unCWed porn here" instance

idk

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@Felthry we're

uncomfortable

with the degree to which people push the "asking for CWs is suppressing speech" narrative

CWs are, like image descriptions, an additional labor on posters, and the inherent politics of ... /everything/ mean that the 'politics needs to be CWed' rule creates a gray area where racism can absolutely take over - but CWs genuinely do slow the spread of inflammatory posts and thereby reduce the evolutionary selection pressure to make everything as angering as possible

and the people who push back against CWs seem to go pretty hard on the making-posts-angering track

and we mostly don't talk about this stuff because we don't want them turning that anger on us

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@packbat yeah i don't think that things should be angering and I don't think asking for cws is suppressing speech, but I do think that what people are talking about now seems to be that people are asking black folks to cw anything related to being black, which is *definitely* not something that should be done

@packbat though, of course, you are more of an authority than us on this sort of thing so do tell us if we say anything that makes you uncomfortable or you think is just wrong

@packbat (as an aside, I do realize that it's probably at least a little problematic that the whole conversation was between white people but there aren't really a lot of black people on fedi apparently (which is itself symptomatic of the problem i guess) and i guess we kinda do need to teach each other and not go ask black people for input all the time, that would get really annoying)

@Felthry you haven't been obtrusive and we're not overburdened with people getting up in our grills

we also don't actually know a lot - to use local geographic knowledge as a metaphor: we've lived our entire life in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC, but we don't actually know our way around beyond the handful of places we go or went regularly

we can frequently tell when something set in the DC Metro was filmed somewhere else and we can recognize most of the really popular anti-black arguments but we couldn't find the White House without a map and we wouldn't know what to say if we went there

...that went long

we mostly don't have anything to add because nobody's been getting up in our grill

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@packbat yeah it sounds like a lot of the other black people on fedi have been getting a lot of really unpleasant stuff directed at them is all

I definitely understand what you mean though. Do let us know if we ever say anything that is wrong or otherwise a problem. 💚

@Felthry @packbat People are asking that? Wow.

..huh.

@IceWolf @packbat that is, at least, what we've been told.