I’ve taken a year to think about this, because it’s a huge topic with too much nuance for one person.<\/p>\n
Guys, it’s time I tell you.<\/p>\n
I disagreed with my dad’s moderation style.<\/p>\n
My dad was a centrist socially, to the point where it was a point of contention between us. I watched what it did to his site, and his friendships, and his life, and I grew my own opinions.<\/p>\n
He was a people-pleaser at his core and he wasn’t one for disagreements or conflict, to the point of his detriment. He was untreated for a lot of mental health problems for the entirety of his life, and would often be the first to say he was at the mercy of ‘caveman brain’.<\/p>\n
I will always wish I had gotten to meet him medicated.<\/p>\n
He was too busy fighting his own demons to discern anything further than ‘aggression’ and ‘not-aggression’. He couldn’t think about the complexities of what people were saying, and if it was hateful or not. As long as they were calm and not saying anything that triggered him<\/em> it was fine.<\/p>\n He had some trauma (I’ll never know entirely what) that centered around feminists. The topic made his blood boil, and he could go on forever ranting about man-hating bitches. I don’t think the guy that ranted that stuff was fully my dad. I think that was scared, unmedicated, caveman brain talking. Without saying too much, I’ve got a family member with the exact same symptoms my dad had when I was growing up, who, in the last few years got medicated for the ADHD, bipolar cocktail that runs in our family. Guys, it’s night and day. The paranoia, the anger, the weird triggers and lash-outs, the massively disordered sleeping…just a whole new person. A person who looks back on their behavior and is able to fully see it for the first time. Someone reasonable, and thoughtful, and capable of rational thought in tense situations.<\/p>\n This shit makes me weep. I will forever wonder if I ever really<\/em> got to meet my dad.<\/p>\n I always said that in my dad’s quest to raise anything but feminists, he guaranteed I’d be one. Although ‘man-hating’ I am not.<\/p>\n When I was eleven, a man tried to follow me home. I took a few sharp turns and hid in a used car lot until he was gone. I was scared, and a kid. When I told my dad, expecting comfort and anger on my behalf (his usual mix). I instead got reprimanded for making assumptions, and interrogated on why I ‘thought’ this man was following me.<\/p>\n I think he had a little voice in the back of his head telling him that everything and everyone thought he was a predator. He wasn’t defending the man who tried to follow his eleven year old home, he was defending himself. But either way it clouded his judgement, so his automatic response wasn’t to protect his kid, it was to defend a stranger. That taught me everything I needed to know about his lessons that feminists were bad. My dad wasn’t infallible, and he was too angry to see things as they were. He chanted ‘not all men’ like it was some sort of nervous tick whenever anyone said anything to the negative, to the point where he couldn’t listen properly because he was too busy being on the defense.<\/p>\n So, moderation.<\/p>\n This has taken a lot of thinking, as I said, because my dad’s legacy is something I want to keep. His moderation style was something he was willing to lose friends to, that’s a pretty big deal. I was friends with the Spoiler Warning crew too. That…sucked. They still cared about him, but had to step away for everyone’s sakes, that situation isn’t good for anyone.<\/p>\n His moderation style meant everything to him, and is a core of how he ran this place, but it’s also…not good for my mental health. The two points of maintaining the site are his legacy and my mental health, so those are sort of…at odds. I’d like to think he’d want his kid to do what was best for them, but honestly, I have no idea… His track record was\u00a0 mixed on that regard, and mostly had to do with how well he was sleeping.<\/p>\n I think his particular brand of neurodivergence made the idea of moderating with anything other than hard rules feel gross. He didn’t like ‘squishy’ rules, he liked ‘don’t cuss people out’. Unfortunately, ‘don’t cuss people out’ doesn’t cover things like rampant sexism, manipulative types, and ‘oh honey’ language. Moderation is more than being a machine and just flagging cuss words. I am a human being, and I am capable of spotting little digs and rude language more complex than ‘go fuck yourself’. So I’m going to use that skill.<\/p>\n It’s not ‘being a police state’ to kick people out of your bar for being disorderly. This site is not the government. And freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences in a private environment. If you’re a sexist tool at work, you can get fired. It would be a ‘freedom of speech’ issue if you could then be arrested, but being fired is just a natural consequence.<\/p>\n So here’s what we’re going to do.<\/p>\n Think of TwentySided as a gaming store. If you’re a jackass, I maintain the right to give you a gentle warning. If you react to that gentle warning…like a jackass, you will be asked to leave. But, in the back is the old zone where you can say whatever you like, provided you’re not cursing anyone out.<\/p>\n Any of Dad’s content will keep his moderation rules. (With a little note that you can’t be just reading one of my posts, and then going to say what you really think on one of his. That would get gross really fast. Keep the topic relevant to the old content.)<\/p>\n I hope that this combination keeps his legacy, without sacrificing my well-being. I lived in deep west Texas long enough to know you can tell someone to go fuck themselves without ever uttering a rude word. Don’t make me go back there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve taken a year to think about this, because it’s a huge topic with too much nuance for one person. Guys, it’s time I tell you. I disagreed with my dad’s moderation style.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[618],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epilogue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55691"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55695,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55691\/revisions\/55695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}