I've seen a lot of instances of people on Lemmy saying you can get banned from Blahaj for forgetting someone's pronouns. And then Ada has to come in and explain why they're wrong in their interpretation of the rules. These people were banned for good reasons, they're transphobes. But I think they misunderstand the rules of Blahaj for a legitimate reason.
It's because Blahaj doesn't have rules. It has two guidelines. Very subjective ones. People want to know what will get them banned, so they try to understand the rules of that subjectivity. The rules for what Ada considers to be empathy and inclusion. The rules of Ada's psychology. Because like it or not, with highly subjective guidelines, Ada's interpretation and understanding of that subjectivity is the rules.
And Ada didn't write the rules of her psychology in the sidebar. So people have to speculate. And people are speculating wrong, and starting arguments about it.
I think a ruleset should be a transparent explanation of how a mod team thinks about acceptable behaviour. By not having rules, Blahaj is being opaque about how the mod team thinks. And the only way for people to deal with that is to practice amateur psychoanalysis. Which is unpleasant and creates division.
If people understood how trans people think about acceptable behaviour, they wouldn't be transphobes. So the result of this system is that everyone who is banned for transphobia doesn't understand why and needs it personally explained to them. If the sidebar explained acceptable behaviour in a way everyone can understand, they wouldn't misunderstand it so often.
I think the current system is creating pointless drama.
Well it's mostly about the empathy guideline.
Another user in this thread was pointing more empathy my way than I was comfortable with. She didn't know much about me, so she was mistaking my intentions, and that made me feel uncomfortable. I wish she hadn't tried to use so much cognitive empathy on me, she didn't have enough context to use it right. The guidelines say you should have a lot of empathy for other people, but I disagree. Sometimes we just shouldn't guess at other people's motivations, because we're going to misunderstand them. We should control our empathy.
Like when you banned Dragon Rider. I read what both of you had to say about the leaked messages, and drag was saying drag's intention wasn't what you thought it was and apologizing. It seemed like you jumped to conclusions because you used too much empathy. Yeah, we're a social species who evolved a limited ability to read minds, but we shouldn't use it all the time. Especially not for important stuff. Sometimes we should just ask other people what they're thinking instead.
When I first started using Lemmy, I wouldn't have thought about empathy that way, but I had to adjust my mental model of empathy to be more like how Blahaj uses it, after seeing that whole situation, so I could understand what happened. And if empathy means guessing at other people's motivations without asking them, I think empathy should require a bit more caution and consent. Reading minds isn't always nice.
As for PugJesus, that guy uses far too little empathy. He never bothers to think about why other people are doing what they do. But I think there's got to be a happy medium in between treating others like black boxes, and assuming you know everything about them. I don't think more empathy is always good.