And I don't think it had any actual impact on how people viewed the community in general. It's just people being terminally online and blowing things way out of proportion.

I agree the interview was bad, but it's also one of the most inconsequential parts about it. That's the tiniest most petty reason I've ever seen a community tear itself apart over. It was like a bunch of mindless chickens pecking one to death because they saw a spot of blood. Definitely on brand for reddit though.

[–] li10@lemmy.ml 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It was doomed from the start, and yet they went on anyway.

tbh I think they’d put a bad case forward even if they were given a favorable interview, considering they gave Fox more ammunition than they could ever ask for.

The misgendering and harassment is wrong, but I honestly think it’s right for the anti work community to call out how awful that interview was and distance themselves from it as much as possible. imo it did actively harm the public perception of the movement.

[–] LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.dbzer0.com -5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

it did actively harm the public perception of the movement

Again, this is greatly exaggerating the nature of the situation. Even if it did, it was so minor that it could have easily recovered. It's not like irreparable harm was caused.

[–] phdepressed@sh.itjust.works 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Fox is not a small-time, they have more primetime viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. If people's first exposure to a movement is something like that interview...Several other news outlets also rehosted clips and wrote stories about just how terrible it was. That creates a strong barrier to anyone labeled as being "with" that person to overcome in order to be taken seriously. Whereas if you discovered the community where there were memes/conversations around workers rights and how they're getting fucked the perception is much different.

It also was directly against the wishes of a community vote and mod discussion of doing a fox interview. A very good way to tell supporters of a movement that a purported "leader" doesn't actually care about what they're saying. To say that it was minor damage really underplays how it affected perception and unity of the community.

[–] LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.dbzer0.com -3 points 9 months ago

Hard disagree. Again, you're blowing this way out of proportion. A movement isn't one mod. It's pretty clear that users were more interested in jerking their hate boners than in the movement itself.

It's telling that even after these years, you're still unable to gain a little healthy perspective on this. It's really hard to admit that you were wrong, especially if you actively contributed to what was essentially a targeted harassment campaign.

This is like talking to Gamers about why death threats to devs are wrong lol