Concerned Users of Derpibooru

@Lisboeta
 
@Muridae
 
These are nice moderate posts that completely ignore the fact a staff assistant and Parasprite themselves disagreed hard with the thread, the former to the point of publicly resigning.
 
Not much room for interpretation there.

@Background Pony #BA40
 
With respect, you’re not quite right there. The staff assistant could well have also gotten the wrong idea; while they were clearly upset, it was not clear what about the post they were reacting to, and I would not be surprised if theirs is as much an overreaction as the folks shouting that things have gotten reverted. Similarly, Parasprite posted twice, and the big things that were expressed in those posts were not disagreement but instead exasperation and exhaustion. They were stressed and upset by the unfolding drama, but while you and others (again understandably) assumed this was because they disagreed or felt betrayed that is also not in evidence, at least not on this forum.

@Muridae
 
I honestly don’t know what to say to you if you think there’s room to say either of them just ‘got the wrong idea’  
And even if they did, it flies completely in the face of Parasprite’s previous claims towards working towards mod transparency and then on top of that Blossomforth posted it instead of Parasprite, when the former was supposedly the new head admin.

@Background Pony #BA40  
I see no point in discussing whodunnit, if derpi is to be salvaged admins will sort it out between themslves, I do not see what good public pressure will do (at leas public pressure on particular deeds by particular admin as opposed to having a implementing a good policy).
 
As regards “nice moderate post” you should probably count your reaction as a weak evidence for miscommunication amongst moderators. You see, I did not intend to write nice and moderate post, I intended to write hopeless and miserable post.

@Background Pony #BA40
 
I explained my reasoning; there is indeed “room for interpretation”. You are welcome to think otherwise, and you are welcome to address the specific points I raised, but (with continued respect) an incredulous “I don’t know how you can think X” doesn’t really do much to rebut what I’ve said.
 
Dealing with transparency, you appear to be neglecting Blossomforth’s further comments (including one on the new thread this morning) which clarify that they’re not making rules changes without further discussion with the community. I am not going to blame Blossom for at least trying to clarify while Parasprite was indisposed, and without the details of the assistant’s claimed “yelling” and what they were taking umbrage to misunderstanding rather than maliciousness still seems likely.
 
(Aside, I think you mean “latter”; “former” is the first of the options mentioned while “latter” means the last. As written, you’ve said that Blossom is head admin.)

@Muridae  
The problem is that the promise of having “discussion with the community” rings extremely hollow after this entire month. Sure, maybe they’ll manage to not, you know, do exact same thing they did even for their own post (fail to discuss it with Parasprite - they had seven hours and seven minutes to do it). But evidence points to “there won’t be a discussion, that is just said to placate people”.
 
Also. Define “community” that the “discussion” will be applying to. It’s not immune to being cherry-picked.

@Background Pony #19F4  
Have any links to these tweets?
 

 
@Darkest Lunar Flower  
What I am more conserned about is if words such as “retard” and “fag”, or if bans apply to entire works deemed offensive.  
 
As I’ve been saying, such will have far reaching implications if the case.
 
 
If they blanket ban works that are deemed offensive that would probably get stuff like pony.mov, maybe even Friendship is Witchcraft. It isn’t something that would surprise me if they try to cover for people uploading innocuous things from offensive works as a trolling tactic and I could totally see some in the pro-censorship side demanding at least some of that be purged.
 
@Barhandar  
It’ll be really interesting to see, as their is a fair bit of people who just want Nazi stuff banned and nothing else. I wonder how many will push for stuff like above being banned?

@Barhandar  
Oh, cherry-picking isn’t the only potential issue; you and other folks (from both “sides” of this thing) have voiced concern about outside influences being loud on behalf of one position or the other. There remain open questions dealing with exactly how this is going to shake down, and that hasn’t yet changed. What I’m saying in a nutshell is still the same despite:
 

 
Blossom, notably in their replies on the big thread, reinforced the idea that they don’t intend mass censorship. They haven’t gone around deleting piles of things while we slept, and what was said strikes me as more clarifying than contradicting Parasprite’s position. And again, I won’t blame Blossom for acting in answer to the anti-nazi DNPs while Para was indisposed. I am not a mod and not involved in mod communication; I do not know the details of where everyone was last night and how they were communicating. I’m not going to jump to conclusions, that’s all.
 
By all means you can remain concerned; this is an issue that clearly matters to you quite a bit - and that’s good. If you want to keep a close eye on this, please do. But you seem to be taking the least-charitable view possible of last night’s posts, up to and including simply distrusting anything said, and I don’t think that serves anything but further umbrage. I’m not going to tell you not to voice your distrust, but if you wind up misrepresenting them rather than being skeptical that’s just going to needlessly ruffle feathers.

@Datte-Before-Dawn  
This, why tf do we allow politics on this damn site.

@Muridae  
To be honest manipulation/brigading from the twitter crowd (which are the majority of pro-censorship side) is fairly low on my list of concerns, given that they’d rather keep stewing over there than come here, and how very much not friendly Derpi community (or anything outside “safe spaces”, really) is to anyone who only comes here to act all pretentious and try to claim moral high ground off of a badly built pile of soapboxes.
 
While I see plenty of reason for distrust, it’s true that we can’t do anything (here, at least) but wait for further clarification, which is MIGHTILY ANNOYING.
 
@doloresbridge  

Everyone who doesn’t want to stop at just Nazi stuff.
 
I think you can actually determine how far they’ve got entangled in the “everyone I don’t like is a Nazi” ideology via this; if they want just nazis banned, like seemingly Aponty does as they’re defending “fetishes”, they still share conventional meaning of “nazi” (NSDAP/Germany’s government from 1933 to 1945, and people who share the same ideology of Aryan supremacism, anti-communism, and antisemitism. Oh, and anti-porn, can’t forget anti-porn.).  
Meanwhile if they’re going “I have submitted my takedown, have fun, Nazis!” they’ve probably downed the entire glass of kool-aid, and will keep seeing nazis everywhere = will keep censoring everything they’ve decided is “offensive”.

@Tacky3663  
My go-to example of Politics and Religion are Banned is “Giant in the Playground” forums. It’s reasonably welcoming but it’s fucking weird. It’s also achievable by a heavy-handed moderation - imagine if you’ve banned images of EVERY extant country EVERY extant political and religious movement, and also non-extant from the XXth century. This how they get their mostly non-political discussion (and because author\owner allows himself to speak about his “personal” politics as opposed to electoral it also poisons a well a little bit).

@Barhandar  

 
And on that, you have my full and enthusiastic agreement. Here’s to annoyance! Here’s to patience!

@Muridae  
They had several hours to hash things out between them, ‘They’ and ‘them’ being the staff.  
In that time, they failed to reach an understanding so drastically that two members of site staff declared their public disagreement with it, including one that was declared the new ‘Head’ less than 12 hours ago.  
More importantly, there was no time limit.  
It took them five days to respond to the anti-censorship crowd, yet less than half a day to respond to the anti-nazi crowd.  
The rules have NOT been reverted as previously stated by Parasprite, but instead are being ‘tightened’ in a vague manner.  
The nazi and criticism-of-blm were described as an extension of rule 0’s existing harassment clauses by staff members.  
The later replies that ‘clarify’ matters do none of the sort as they describe what they ‘plan’ to do, which has proven over the course of this month to be about as certain as asking a magic 8-ball.  
Parasprite also ‘planned’ to have more inter-moderator transparency and look how that turned out.
 
Furthermore, you have Derpy saying in THIS thread that “Reversing the rules was a mistake.” in response to the anti-nazi censorship  
https://derpibooru.org/forums/meta/topics/the-anti-nazi-dnp-pledge?post_id=4848574#post_4848574  
I have asked him for clarification on that, but he hasnt responded.  
Taking that statement at face value, either Blossomforth is lying and the rules regarding nazism are still in force and extended towards other idealogies, or you have Derpy mod lying and the rules have been reverted to their pre-june status.  
I would dearly love to be proven wrong, but my trust in the site staff is currently below rock bottom and digging further.

@Background Pony #19F4
 
That’s not even how that law works. You can’t attack software for not complying with GDPR. Software doesn’t have to. Websites of companies that conduct any operations inside the EU has to.
 
Websites of private individuals is legally untested, and would likely cause a shitstorm if the EU was dumb enough to try it without an extremely sympathetic case. Websites of private individuals offering services to friends and family are explicitly exempted. This means if you spun up a Philomena as like your family’s private imgur photo album, GPDR is codified irrelevant.
 
Either way, there is no legal mechanism for “reporting” a software repository for containing software that doesn’t have GPDR compliance boilerplate.

@Plumage  
@WyrmSpawN  
I sincerely feel for her, and I respect and appreciate what she did. It’s just awful what happened to her afterward.

Here’s my two cents. Go ahead, censor the site. I don’t care anymore. I’m just going to wait for the alt boorus to get a bit more functionality and give up on this site. I’ve defended this place for years now and I feel like I’ve wasted my time doing so. They were all right when they said that this would happen.
 
I feel like we’ve passed the rubicon and that there’s no going back to what would be sane and sensible for an archival site.

@Harmonio  
What happened to her afterwards?

@Background Pony #5259  
After her announcement building rapport, another admin came and made a different announcement while she was away. These are her first and second posts in that thread.  
Overall she’s been through a lot during this debacle, yet she strives to keep the community unified despite it.

Maybe I’m showing my age here but… when did it become so bloody objectionable for a site to have rules on what can and can’t be posted? And when did it become even more fashionable to cry “censorship” at the drop of a hat? Yeah, time was you didn’t have to make rules about posting content like this but time was the far-right wasn’t on the rise across the globe and people weren’t trying to fool others with feeble excuses like ‘it’s just a joke’, as if we have to pretend we can’t see what’s going on.
 
There’ve been rules on what content can be posted here for years but suddenly this is what sends people into fits? I don’t know; if the banning of Nazi imagery is what gets your goat then maybe examine why you were fine with other content being prohibited, first.
 
I’m not going to lose any sleep if the site’s owners decide to allow it but at this point, given all the attention its brought, I’d worry that certain kinds of people are going to feel emboldened. The box has been opened, all that’s left is to minimise the damage. I just think some people here are being more than a bit naïve if they think it’s all just jokes and no one could possibly be an actual neo-Nazi.

@Benzene  
The only things i know of banned here currently are things illegal to have where the servers are located and art actively violent towards real people. And those are reasonable.
 
it’s not just what they elected to ban(mostly harmless content), but the entire motivation behind it. Accusations from some hack who interviewed an asshole.
 
And if you honestly think the far-right is on the rise, you should be looking at what things are running amok and pushing people that way, because i guarantee it doesn’t have shit to do with a pony with a swastika.

@Benzene  
>There’ve been rules on what content can be posted here for years but suddenly this is what sends people into fits?
 
If you call the anti-censorship response “fits”, wait until you see the colossal toddler tantrum the supposed “leftists” have thrown on twitter the moment something didn’t go how they wanted, and how many paragraphs of “I feel so unsafe and uncomfortable due to a boogeyman that I was conveniently not even aware of before Atlantic ragticle. I demand this boogeyman be fought at all costs. Also, you’re all this boogeyman. Also you’re bigots.” they’ve written in response.
 
Oh, and by the way? Being banned from only the images of certain propaganda because you’ve downvoted single digits of them is absolutely censorship.

@WyrmSpawN
 
I never said any of the content on this site was pushing anyone to the far-right, that was obviously not my point. The reasons for that are varied but share certain commonalities like scapegoating of minority groups (who lack any real political power to do anything about it) and economic downturn. I don’t accept that it has anything to do with some terminally outraged loopers getting angry on the internet, before anyone thinks to bring that up. Most people are precisely just that - ordinary people, who don’t bother with such things.
 
My point was simply to establish that we accept that certain content can be prohibited. Whether you agree with the reasons behind that is less important, the fact is that no one is crying “censorship” over it. Or if they are, they’re so few in number that they can safely be ignored.
 
Have you ever heard the saying, “a man is known by the company he keeps”? Some people aren’t happy to share the site with some who are, undoubtedly, actual real neo-Nazis. And so they’re agitating to change that. Point being, it’s not novel to want to ban certain content from the site; both because it’s already done here and because it’s been done for decades before.
 
Now, you can argue that some people are being unfairly targeted but I don’t accept that there are literally no neo-Nazis capitalising on this. And if we can accept that some are, I think there’d be a chance to move forward rather than digging in to bitter recriminations.
 
 
@Barhandar
 
Look, I’ve been around long enough to be able to say that yes, these absolutely are fits. I’ve seen it all before and so the cries of “censorship” don’t move or impress me. Believe me. I was a bratty teenager once, too. I threw a wobbler because I truly believed in the absolutist approach of freedom of speech, we’ve all been there.
 
But I was younger and more naïve then. I was of the mindset that I should just hide who I was because it was better to conform and be ignored than draw attention and abuse. So I didn’t really understand that it’s no way to live a life. One of the delights of being an adult is you start to care less about what people think of you. The point of that anecdote being: I once firmly, truly believed in the kind of idealism that preaches free speech absolutism. I knew less of the world and truly how cruel it could be. I don’t want to say I’m jaded or cynical, just more ‘worldly’ for lack of a better word.
 
So I know, one of the worries people have is that if it starts with this, where will it stop? “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” and all that jazz. But no set of rules can ever be perfect, inevitably you have to come down on being overly harsh or overly lenient, to some degree. I’ve always enjoyed my time on Derpibooru but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t noticed a rather nasty undercurrent surfacing in the last few years. You don’t maintain a positive, friendly community by giving in to the goons and the wind-up-merchants, the extremists and the bigots.
 
If Nazi imagery and iconography is what has to be sacrificed for that, well, I’d say it’s a very small price to pay indeed.
 
I can’t speak to Twitter because I don’t use it, nor the article because it’s only today I even found out this has all been going on in the fora here. If there was some kind of outside interference going on, I’d expect one of the admins or other site staff to be able to comment on it.
 
And please, don’t think I said any of that to patronise you. That’s absolutely not my intent. But neither am I willing, these days, to not say anything. I’ve seen both sides of this, I’ve seen good sites go to absolute shite because they’ve allowed every goon with a grievance a place to air which drives away the ordinary people and leads to a horrible spiral downward.
 
I don’t want to see that happen here.

@Benzene  
In this day and age, you give an inch, they take a mile, and if you somehow stop the mile, they go for the fucking throat.
 
To use the same logic, the sacrifice of a few, loud, deliberately malicious users and folks who literally don’t do pony anymore, it’s a very small price to pay indeed.

@Benzene  
Taking into account that the side arguing for censorship spent the entire mess trying to falseflag in every conversation in every site, that they tried to boycott derpi’s relationship with patreon, and talked about spamming derpibooru with bullshit legal lawsuits, that one of them doxxed someone in a thread?  
No, taking all that into account, I don’t trust these people to be rational, nor do I want them having any power to decide where the site goes.

@Benzene  

Irony.  
For reference, this is the anti-censorship thread and this is the pro-censorship thread. And this is how someone who “stands against brownie nutsees” sounds like.