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This post is wrecking, we should ban you immediately /s

I've had a post about how socially isolated people get a ton of undeserved insults thrown our way sitting in my head for about a year, but haven't gotten around to posting it because I don't want to deal with the fallout that would come from posting it. I assume there are other people in similar positions with other issues that they haven't posted about due to fear of how it would effect them, and I think that accepting sincerity would probably help people get these issues into the open instead of letting them fester in the background.

100% agreed. It's unproductive in trying to resolve issues when people feel as though they're walking on eggshells.

not OP, but one example that has come up before when this subject has been brought up: an autistic person who is very literal/direct and is asking a lot of frank clarification questions can (especially online) be hard to distinguish from a bad faith troll who is "just asking questions "

leads to a lot of ND users catching strays.

Bad jacketing in general is unproductive and, as you say, thought terminating. Even if you think someone might be insincere, why not engage sincerely and find out? If you assume insincerity and jump right to bad jacketing, is that not itself insincere and harmful to proper communication in the community?

I have an exact example of this today. When discussing the far-right win in Chile, people pointed out that he used a lot of anti-venezuelan rhetoric, essentially characterizing all venezuelan migrants as gang members. And then there was a comment characterizing people who fled Venezuela as all gusanos and criminals that obviously escaped because they fear solidarity and socialist spirit.

It felt so yucky because It was agreeing with the obviously xenophobic framing of "Venezuelan migrant gangs", but also denying all agency or personal reasons for Venezuelans going through the hardship of the embargo and the shortages to leave. I have personally known Venezuelans who migrated in the early 2010s, who were neither criminals nor gusanos whose sugarcane plantation was expropriated by Chavez. The majority of the millions of people who have exited Venezuela are regular working class folks escaping material precarity, the same way people going into the US or Europe are.

Just like any uprising is automatically a color revolution.

The NED is paying me to meta-post.

But yes, this can also be similarly thought-terminating. Usually even color revolutions start from real issues. We need to analyze these things thoroughly and properly.

I might be able to provide some context, speaking as someone who’s no longer involved with site moderation or administration, hasn’t been for a long time, but was very involved in the beginning.

But I think this shows that the accusation of wrecking has really been used as a quick explanation for many things here, from the very beginning, and it's harmful to the community in the long term. We've created (actually this has been lessening in recent times, thankfully) a strange culture of suspicion around the idea of "wreckers".

We were aware this was a tradeoff we were making at the time. Or at least it was a thing that was discussed and I personally saw it as a tradeoff. We tried for a long time to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who asked for it. We had people dedicated to play devil’s advocate and tried to keep with the clock in, clock out attitude of moderation at the advice of some very helpful folks. It ended up being the root of a lot of unnecessary struggle seeded by a small group of bad faith actors. And I’m not just talking about the Kerries, though they were a big chunk of it. There were two relevant problems with these people:

1. They had every motivation to blur the line between acceptable and unacceptable conduct in both themselves and in others
2. They were constantly looking for avenues of effort asymmetry where they could cost us large amounts of effort with little effort on their part

Important to the topic is that point number 2 costs you a lot of effort when you’re trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. If I’d known what I know now, we would have handled things differently in some ways, but other ways were kind of materially constrained. The paranoia is a cultural hangover from a time when we had valid things to be paranoid about. And it’s not like we have nothing to be concerned about now either. But we certainly made mistakes and even knew that mistakes were inevitable. I find the site much more inhabitable now and have no way of knowing how much it’s legitimately mellowed out vs how much is just me being more distant from the turmoil.

I think that after many struggle sessions and bans we've been conditioned to overreact, it gets tiring when every day there's a struggle session, and mods ban on sight, it's a trait we kept from Reddit me thinks