the cw stuff
am I in the wrong to want cws for our own mental health, even if we do open almost every one?
just, not being given a chance to mentally prepare for stuff, and not being able to close it after reading, makes it way harder on us
we still read the stuff. but it's wearing on our mental health and i really do *not* want to have to use keyword mutes
i want to retain our ability to engage with this stuff
i want to have cws not to silence people but so that we *don't have to* silence people
re: the cw stuff
like, we're not black. we can't fully understand what it's like to be black. but i want to be able to read things and help where we can and not having cws is eventually going to lead to us needing to mute stuff so we don't go into a depression/panic spiral
i don't know what the right answer is here
personal re: the cw stuff
@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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personal and meta re: the cw stuff
@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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re: personal and meta re: the cw stuff
@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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re: personal and meta re: the cw stuff
@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. 💚
re: personal and meta re: the cw stuff
@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)