Loyalty and brain cells

[branchandroot]

Having once again witnessed LJ's own Patriot Act Squad in action, on an LJ news post, I am, once again, disgusted and saddened.

And I hope that attitude never, ever, ever sets in here at Dreamwidth.

It's exactly the same attitude that leads US citizens to insist that patriotism means unquestioning acceptance and, indeed, adulation of all aspects of one's country, and that criticism or the desire to change things invalidates one's citizenship and identity as a countrymember. This, of course, brings out in me a mighty need to beat them over the head with copies of Franklin and Jefferson until the typeface actually makes contact with their brains in one way or another.

Let us never, please, never fall into that trap of insisting that no one can stay who has any criticism. That's wrong. Worse, that's the kiss of death to an open source project of any kind. "Love it or leave it" is the counsel of fear, and I want my new home to stay braver than that.

Comments

[denise]

I think we'll have a small advantage in that we won't have the kind of antagonistic culture in news comments that LJ's developed, which only shows up slowly and over time. Some people will be coming in with that kind of mindset already firmly set (from their experiences on LJ), but a little bit of heavyhanded moderating whenever anyone confronts anyone else (ie, not us) with antagonism and I think it'll drop off quickly enough.

I have "write out official commenting policy on all dw_* journals" as one of my to-do list items (it's a depressingly long to-do list, sigh), but the long and the short of it is going to be: while you are commenting in a dw official journal, you will treat others with courtesy and respect, and we will have zero problems in screening comments, freezing threads, and banning people to enforce it. Another part of the problem with news comments on LJ is that no one ever moderates them, which comes out of brad's original freewheeling anything-goes policy and set in as, well, what it eventually turned into. I personally don't see any inconsistency between "we as a service will never place restrictions on your expression in your space" and "while you are commenting in official journals, you will behave with civility towards others" -- I'm sure we'll take some heat for it, but for four years it was my job to be the one to read every single comment in news, and ... just a world of no.

[branchandroot]

*nodnod* I think it's perfectly reasonable to set boundaries of behavior in official space. When LJ was an "all in the family" sort of thing, maybe it seemed reasonable to let the community consensus take care of that, but it seems really unprofessional at this point.

[denise]

And I've often found, in various projects here and there, that the people behaving most badly in any situation are not one's critics, but one's supporters, who are so upset that someone's criticizing something they take so personally. Mark and I have tried to be really, really clear about the fact that we'd like for our supporters to hold themselves to the same level of professional and courteous conduct that we hold ourselves to, and people have been fabulous so far about complying.