The world we live in isn't just dystopic, it isn't just stupid, trying to describe all the ways it sucks just makes for a really boring story.
Oh come on with this "minimizing political content" nonsense, y'all are a science community and science is being hunted down and destroyed systematically and your response is to try to become less political?
Are you just giving up then?
Or is this place run by scientists foolish enough to be politically conservative and they are being snowflakes about having to hear challenging opinions?
Science is political.
I did not decide it was so, those who want to destroy science did.
The instance has had this policy for over 4 years. The sidebar reads:
The main focus of this instance is the natural sciences, and the scope encompasses all of the STEM fields.
Please keep politics to a minimum. When science is the focus, intersection with politics may be tolerated as long as the discussion is constructive and science remains the focus. As a general rule, political content posted directly to the instance’s local communities is discouraged and may be removed. You can of course engage in political discussions in non-local communities.
The goal when creating this instance was to a place to discuss about scientific discoveries, post pictures of nature, and have a set of communities for this while avoiding polarizing content. If someone wants to discuss politics they can click on 'All' and go right to it. The scope is explicitly anti-politics because I do not want to moderate a politically charged or polarizing environment, and I know that many people with interests like mine will also appreciate such a space existing because they see enough pictures of Donald Trump and polarizing discussions elsewhere.
y’all are a science community and science is being hunted down and destroyed systematically and your response is to try to become less political?
I do not disagree with you broadly, and that is to an extent why I use common sense and do not enforce the "no politics" rule religiously. There is quite a bit politics that gets through. Although I do prefer to offer users of this instance a politics free experience, if no one complains I usually let it go.
In this case: I have noticed posts in the front page that have nothing to do with science lately, and they came from this specific community. I then saw some US politics characters attached to articles that had nothing to do with science. I looked through the community and most of it is off-topic, so it makes more sense to lock the community.
I'm sorry this upsets you, I should have removed the community as soon as it was created, but I did not realize what it was.
I'm with this instance for as long as you keep it running. I think you take a good approach.
I should have removed the community as soon as it was created, but I did not realize what it was.
I think it's fine to give communities a chance. If it was moderated I might even advocate giving the community a warning. There are ways this community could have been both science and politics even with the boring dystopia theme - a tough intersection, but we have other niche communities. The way submitters didn't played by the rules, and no one was putting an effort into moderating it, so it's left mander's scope. I like that you generally take a lenient approach -- I think that's important for building communities. It's also important to have and enforce some structure that actually maintains the larger community of the instance.
I think you handled it well.
The scope is explicitly anti-politics because I do not want to moderate a politically charged or polarizing environment
We aren't the ones that made science politically charged or polarizing, the coordinated global movement of rightwing extremists did.
What are you going to do when conservatives force science further into the realm of politics? Stay silent about it here until all the science funding is cut and climate change discussion is barred from public discourse?
Peter, let’s jump right in. The usual stance of scientists is to remain publicly neutral, especially when it comes to political issues. In light of the rising tide of anti-science, do you believe this must now change?
I think it will have to because the attacks are so partisan. No one in science wants to talk about politics, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, red and blue states. Our training says we should be politically neutral, and I support that. But what do you do when the 200,000 needless deaths due to refusing Covid vaccinations overwhelmingly occur in red states? In addition, as the data show: the redder the county, the lower the immunization rate, and the higher the death rate.
You can have a look at some communities that often have content where science intersects politics:
https://mander.xyz/c/academia https://mander.xyz/c/earthscience https://mander.xyz/c/publichealth
Minimizing politics does not strictly mean being extreme about enforcing the no-politics rule. Posts that are about the interaction between politics and science generally contain enough overlap with science that it is acceptable. But that is not the case in this community, it is mostly general topics and politics.
This is an unsustainable moderation policy and philosophy for a community ostensibly about promoting science and scientific discussion.
If anything a hazy acceptance of sommeeeee political content is worse than an attempt at not allowing any at all, which is also not a sustainable moderation policy for a community centered on science.
I don't think you understand, you either fight this head on or you accept that you have lost and science will continue to be dismantled globally and you seem to be stuck in the middle thinking there is another option.
Sal is quite lenient, but you -- and I have noticed you're the main submitter to this community -- flaunt your violation of the rules. We talk science politics all across this instance (academia, public health, even labrats has more politics than I'd like and I'm the only poster). The posts on this community are pure chest-beating tribal politics though.
I bet I could even get away with making a community on voting theory and explaining how the math of different voting systems and statistics all play together. I wouldn't personally want to put the work into moderating such a community, but the scope of science stuff is extremely broad. Not even a token effort was made to fit the scope, so the community got removed. That's perfectly fair.
The posts on this community are pure chest-beating tribal politics though.
What do you mean exactly by that?
What do you mean by "tribal"? Why are you using "tribal" in a derogatory fashion?
Do you think I am passionate about politics because I see this like sports teams and I am just really passionate about my team winning?
Do you think I talk about politics because I see this like sports teams or something and I am really passionate about my team winning?
Pretty much, yeah.
It is difficult for me to comprehend loving science and betraying it by artificially blinding yourself to the reality that science is political and is under existential threat from coordinated, intentional actions by rightwing movements all over the world, but then again people betray the people and things they love all the time I guess.
My loyalty to science first is why I'm on this instance. It's not hard to understand that social drama distracts from and often undermines science. Calling a politician stupid gets us no closer doing more science. It doesn't help get us funding or logistics. It doesn't have anything to do with the science itself. It might well be true, but it amounts to useless whining. It's increased noise for people who are looking for technically interesting things.
Additionally, science being politicized is not a justification to further politicize science. When people push and pull science to one side or another it makes it harder to build the broad coalitions and broad consensus required to fund things and solve problems. The moment people start thinking in ists and isms they stop thinking about how to solve problems. At the end of the day, Ideologies are social constructs. They sorta exists, but they'll always be less important the physical reality and practical mechanisms.
Additionally, science being politicized is not a justification to further politicize science.
This mindset is exactly the kind of toothless reaction that the people politicizing science in the first place are counting on, congratulations.
When people push and pull science to one side or another it makes it harder to build the broad coalitions and broad consensus required to fund things and solve problems.
You are equating why I am passionate about politics and science as essentially the same motivations as people who are explicitly bigoted and anti--intellectual which even if you were right, which you are not, misses a very important difference between me and those people you are intepreting I am having mud slinging fights with because it is fun.
I am not bigoted and hostile at a fundamental level to science like the people I am trying to point out are who are actively lighting everything on fire.
You don't seem to comprehend you are playing an essential part in the ratchet mechanism here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect
Yet the erosion of public trust in science has significance that goes well beyond any particular policy decision or agency budget. The functioning of modern societies depends on what the English sociologist Anthony Giddens termed “abstract systems”: networks of institutions that use technical expertise to “organise large areas of the material and social environments in which we live.” From this point of view, the stark polarization of American politics around trust in science not only threatens the legitimacy of particular expert institutions, but also has potentially destabilizing consequences for society as a whole.
...
The idea that distrust in science is due simply to ignorance—or a “deficit” of information—has been especially alluring to many members of scientific, educational, and media institutions because it presupposes that what needs fixing lies not with those institutions but rather with ignorant others. Although this framing has long been discredited by scholars, it persists in part because these same institutions are uniquely well-positioned to supply more information. Yet distrust is a relational concept—it calls for repair, not more information. Efforts to fill the void left by distrust with more information are therefore unlikely to succeed; they also run the risk of aggravating the underlying cause of distrust.
Another explanation for distrust of science, highly influential in the scholarly literature, rejects the deficit model but instead blames conservatives’ hostility to government. As historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway put it, “contemporary conservative distrust of science is not really about science. It is collateral damage, a spillover effect of distrust in government,” traceable to the anti-government, “neoliberal” ideology of the Reagan era.
Omg, accept the loss. Also, diplomatic tip accusing people of being part of the problem or otherwise setting up with-us or against-us dilemmas never makes you friends. Shielding my communities from people who want to use us as political pawns doesn't mean I'm siding with one side or another. If you can't make people wanting to be left alone to your advantage, get better at politics and debate -- and get better at it with people who actually want to interact with you.
I'm sorry you feel like you've lost something. As outlined in the post there are alternative versions of the community -- they'll grow more rapidly now than ever. Maybe try diversifying.
Not posting from my sopuli account but I've always appreciated that mander has been a flagship example of what a curated niche instance can be long before any reddit exodus took place.
There are plenty of other spaces for such content, happy to to see you take the time to curate and te effort to keep the instance running.
Thanks! :)
You should probably pin this post in the community.
Ok! done
Who downvotes this???
Be Nice to sal, they're a good admin.
It’s possible it doesn’t meet your needs since I don’t think it prevents comments on old posts, but you can restrict comms to mod posts only. Probably need to mod yourself first?
If you also lock all the posts, it’d be effectively locked., though that’d take many more clicks (or a script) than just locking down posts.
Oooh, you are right! I actually did not know I had that toggle available. Thank you 😅
Strange, I can't make my own user a mod, so I had to create a new account for this
