So, I have autism and also very bad social anxiety, so I don't have a massive amount of social interactions, so it is easy for me to remember pretty much all of them. This also means that I spend way too much time obsessing over any significant interactions I have, particularly negative ones, which then just make me feel more upset and anxious than I was at the time and sometimes leads to a breakdown. I am also completely unable to deal with conflict
For whatever reason this website, unlike the original subreddit is way more invested in dunking on each other imo. This site has a very hostile atmosphere where it feels like everyone is constantly at each others throats and it makes me just not want to come here at all.
I also want to take exception to some of the recent posts by @TransComrade69 about the Beyond Pink or Blue book, particularly the part in the original post about it only being like 170 pages, so you could read it in like 3 days, so if you don't, it is reactionary. No, one of the symptoms of autism is executive function issues, which I suffer from quite significantly. I could read that book, but it would require me using a lot of energy and necessetitate me neglecting other parts of my life. I struggle hard enough to read books necessary for classes, if I were to try and read that book, it would take months, if not over a year for me to complete it. So, while I understand why @TransComrade69 wants people to read the book and is pushing it, as I am sure there is lots of valuable information within it, I do not at all appreciate the tone that was taken in parts of the original post.
Anyway, I've deleted this account twice already, and I'm doing it for the 3rd and probably final time after this. Social media in general is bad for a lot of these things, but this site kind of takes it to another level.
I'm not going to dig up all the 1000s of threads I've read in the past month or two. I could start keeping a running track, if the extra and redundant labor really meant that much to you.
Whenever someone who's been posting for 3+ months, sometimes even since the beginning of the site, gets suddenly banned, it also makes you wonder why it took so long to reach that decision. Like, if someone is a reactionary or a wrecker or whatever, how could they go on for months and months without being spotted? Or did they just start being problematic all of a sudden? Surely they weren't hiding their true colors for that long... unless it's just a matter of how vindictive a mod was feeling that day. Occam's Razor suggests that the power tripping is real, that to a mod with a banhammer, everything looks like a nail.
I'll say this even in defense of banned users whom I felt levelled sectarian tensions against me. They too made this site a richer place.
I'm not talking about the 1-day-old accounts made en masse that did nothing but spam and directly harass people. Good riddance to those; the ban was the indisputably correct decision there. I'm talking about posters like myself who migrated from the sub, hoping to find a positive and stable space in which to reach other anti-capitalists, develop memetics, share news, and break down the anxiety and loneliness that engulfs this alienated hellscape. Seeing posters I appreciate get banned, without clearly highlighting what their offending material was, creates a chilling effect; I feel less welcome here. I took a day or two off from checking this site, and while I didn't get the daily pulse that I'm accustomed to, the sense of environmental hostility was absent for that time.
When your first line of defense is expulsion, you create a culture of defeatism and paranoia. I think that has certainly happened here, though I'll stop short of drawing any historical parallels.
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Specific for people with 5 digits on each hand, using a base-ten system? Definitely more than 10 and possibly less than 20, idk. I just realized I could dig through the ban logs and find people I'd recognized.
Granted.
I don't like the line of thinking that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
It doesn't apply here as much as it does to a state, but as long as there are laws, they are implemented by fallible humans and arbitrary to at least some extent, and we are all potentially rule-breakers to the perspective of rule-makers. Everyone's a potential criminal. On the sub there was a strong current of "mods = cops" (albeit somewhat tongue-in-cheek); that doesn't exist on this site.
I have seen mods banning users for not being deferrent enough; this is automatically a problem.
There are lots of ways to promote an inclusive community. Heavy-handed banning isn't one of them.