#moderation

[pixelguzzler]

Update: r/PixelArt mods are abusing power and permabanning artists who speak out.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

In praise of (some) compartmentalization

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/14/compartments/#flow

If there's one FAQ I get Q'ed most F'ly, it's this: "How do you get so much done?" The short answer is, "I write when I'm anxious (which is how I came to write nine books during lockdown)." The long answer is more complicated.

The first complication to understand is that I have lifelong, degenerating chronic pain that makes me hurt from the base of my skull to the soles of my feet – my whole posterior chain. On a good day, it hurts. On a bad day, it hurts so bad that it's all I can think about.

Unless…I work. If I can find my way into a creative project, the rest of the world just kind of fades back, including my physical body. Sometimes I can get there through entertainment, too – a really good book or movie, say, but more often I find myself squirming and needing to get up and stretch or use a theragun after a couple hours in a movie theater seat, even the kind that reclines. A good conversation can do it, too, and is better than a movie or a book. The challenge and engagement of an intense conversation – preferably one with a chewy, productive and interesting disagreement – can take me out of things.

There's a degree to which ignoring my body is the right thing to do. I've come to understand a lot of my pain as being a phantom, a pathological failure of my nervous system to terminate a pain signal after it fires. Instead of fading away, my pain messages bounce back and forth, getting amplified rather than attenuated, until all my nerves are screaming at me. Where pain has no physiological correlate – in other words, where the ache is just an ache, without a strain or a tear or a bruise – it makes sense to ignore it. It's actually healthy to ignore it, because paying attention to pain is one of the things that can amplify it (though not always).

But this only gets me so far, because some of my pain does have a physiological correlate. My biomechanics suck, thanks to congenital hip defects that screwed up the way I walked and sat and lay and moved for most of my life, until eventually my wonky hips wore out and I swapped 'em for a titanium set. By that point, it was too late, because I'd made a mess of my posterior chain, all the way from my skull to my feet, and years of diligent physio, swimming, yoga, occupational therapy and physiotherapy have barely made a dent. So when I sit or stand or lie down, I'm always straining something, and I really do need to get up and move around and stretch and whatnot, or sure as hell I will pay the price later. So if I get too distracted, then I start ignoring the pain I need to be paying attention to, and that's at least as bad as paying attention to the pain I should be ignoring.

Which brings me to anxiety. These are anxious times. I don't know anyone who feels good right now. Particularly this week, as the Strait of Epstein emergency gets progressively worse, and there's this January 2020 sense of the crisis on the horizon, hitting one country after another. Last week, Australia got its last shipment of fossil fuels. This week, restaurants in India are all shuttered because of gas rationing. People who understand these things better than I do tell me that even if Trump strokes out tonight and Hegseth overdoes the autoerotic asphyxiation, it'll be months, possibly years, before things get back to "normal" ("normal!").

Any time I think about this stuff for even a few minutes, I start to feel that covid-a-comin', early-2020 feeling, only it's worse this time around, because I literally couldn't imagine what covid would mean when it got here, and now I know.

When I start to feel those feelings, I can just sit down and start thinking with my fingers, working on a book or a blog-post. Or working on an illustration to go with one of these posts, which is the most delicious distraction, leaving me with just enough capacity to mull over the structure of the argument that will accompany it.

I can't do anything about the impending energy catastrophe, apart from being part of a network of mutual aid and political organizing, so it makes sense not to fixate on it. But there are things that upset me – problems my friends and loved ones are having – where there's such a thing as too much compartmentalization. It's one thing to lose myself in work until the heat of emotion cools so I can think rationally about an issue that's got me seeing red, and another to use work as a way to neglect a loved one who needs attention in the hope that the moment will pass before I have to do any difficult emotional labor.

Compartmentalization, in other words, but not too much compartmentalization. During the lockdown years, I transformed myself into a machine for turning Talking Heads bootlegs into science fiction novels and technology criticism, and that was better than spending that time boozing or scrolling or fighting – but in retrospect, there's probably more I could have done during those hard months to support the people around me. In my defense – in all our defenses – that was an unprecedented situation and we all did the best we could.

Creative work takes me away from my pain – both physical and emotional – because creative work takes me into a "flow" state. This useful word comes to us from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term in the 1960s while he was investigating a seeming paradox: how was it that we modern people had mastered so many of the useful arts and sciences, and yet we seemed no happier than the ancients? How could we make so much progress in so many fields, and so little progress in being happy?

In his fieldwork, Csikszentmihalyi found that people reported the most happiness while they were doing difficult things well – when your "body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." He called this state "flow."

As Derek Thompson says, the word "flow" implies an effortlessness, but really, it's the effort – just enough, not too much – that defines flow-states. We aren't happiest in a frictionless world, but rather, in a world of "achievable challenges":

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/how-zombie-flow-took-over-culture

Thompson relates this to "the law of familiar surprises," an idea he developed in his book Hit Makers, which investigated why some media, ideas and people found fame, while others languished. A "familiar surprise" is something that's "familiar but not too familiar."

He thinks that the Hollywood mania for sequels and reboots is the result of media execs chasing "familiar surprises." I think there's something to this, but we shouldn't discount the effect that monopolization has on the media: as companies get larger and larger, they end up committing to larger and larger projects, and you just don't take the kinds of risks with a $500m movie that you can take with a $5m one. If you're spending $500m, you want to hedge that investment with as many safe bets as you can find – big name stars, successful IP, and familiar narrative structures. If the movie still tanks, at least no one will get fired for taking a big, bold risk.

Today, we're living in a world of extremely familiar, and progressively less surprising culture. AI slop is the epitome of familiarity, since by definition, AI tries to make a future that is similar to the past, because all it can do is extrapolate from previous data. That's a fundamentally conservative, uncreative way to think about the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/14/everybody-poops/#homeostatic-mechanism

The tracks the Spotify algorithm picks out of the catalog are going to be as similar to the ones you've played in the past as it can make them – and the royalty-free slop tracks that Spotify generates with AI or commissions from no-name artists will be even more insipidly unsurprising:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Thompson cites Shishi Wu's dissertation on "Passive Flow," a term she coined to describe how teens fall into social media scroll-trances:

https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2104&context=doctoral_dissertations

Wu says it's a mistake to attribute the regretted hours of scrolling to addiction or a failure of self-control. Rather, the user is falling into "passive flow," a condition arising from three factors:

I. Engagement without a clear goal;

II. A loss of self-awareness – of your body and your mental state;

III. Losing track of time.

I instantly recognize II. and III. – they're the hallmarks of the flow states that abstract me away from my own pain when I'm working. The big difference here is I. – I go to work with the clearest of goals, while "passive flow" is undirected (Thompson also cites psychologist Paul Bloom, who calls the scroll-trance "shitty flow." In shitty flow, you lose track of the world and its sensations – but in a way that you later regret.)

Thompson has his own name for this phenomenon of algorithmically induced, regret-inducing flow: he calls it "zombie flow." It's flow that "recapitulates the goal of flow while evacuating the purpose."

Zombie flow is "progress without pleasure" – it's frictionless, and so it gives us nothing except that sense of the world going away, and when it stops, the world is still there. The trick is to find a way of compartmentalizing that rewards attention with some kind of productive residue that you can look back on with pride and pleasure.

I wouldn't call myself a happy person. I don't think I know any happy people right now. But I'm an extremely hopeful person, because I can see so many ways that we can make things better (an admittedly very low bar), and I have mastered the trick of harnessing my unhappiness to the pursuit of things that might make the world better, and I'm gradually learning when to stop escaping the pain and confront it.

Image: marsupium photography (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2.8_hours_later_-_Zombie_Apocalypse_(14315382305).jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[unspeakablearchives]

hey what do you think of the tumblr's recent bans of transfem & Black people from perspective of sensorship?

So, for starters, I didn't know anything about these recent events cuz I'm an idiot 😅

But hey screw it, I'm here for a good time, not an accurate time:

This is a surprisingly complicated issue, and it's closer to actual illegal censorship than you might suspect.

That's because in the US companies are NOT allowed to OFFICIALLY discriminate based on gender, sexual orientation, or race. But you can probably already see the problem: as long as your don't have an official rule that explicitly targets a protect groups, it's incredibly hard to prove discrimination. Because there's two distinct possibilities:

Historically, this sort of selective enforcement has been a convenient workaround that allows companies to continue de-facto discriminating against protected groups they don't want around.

However, it's probably much more common for this sort of thing to happen due to unconscious biases.

In other words, people will see a photo of a transgender woman, and they legitimately, sincerely, will think it is overly sexual and breaks the rules - even if a similar photo of a cis woman would raise no alarms.

Now, there are many potential solutions that companies can take to combat this:

More transparency for moderation decisions - like, I don't know, maybe explaining who the fuck is doing the moderating and how? I mean however stupid Reddit might be with moderation, you have to admit that it lets you see exactly who is doing the moderating and you can contact them directly. Nothing like that exists here.

More diverse people doing the moderating

Training to explain what to watch out for, so that people can more easily notice when they might be experiencing unconscious bias

Having a neutral, outside organization that can provide some oversight is probably the gold-standard, in my opinion. They could audit practices and look at samples of who have been removed and why.

This is going to shock you, but Tumblr is just not going to want to do any of those things on their own. They assume that they can do whatever they want and people will just put up with it.

Interesting theory on their part, considering how unsuccessful this site is doing overall. Interesting theory considering how crucial queer people and a variety of minority groups are to propping up this failing site. Imagine what the site's gonna be like once they leave:

Users can apply their own pressure to the company in hopes of changing policies, but I'm not very optimistic about that. After all, Tumblr has been banning vast swaths of people with little explanation for years and years, and stunningly the site has been having less and less users. WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED THAT!?

My guess is that the swarm of feral weasels responsible for running Tumblr will postpone any sort of changes until this site has lost enough users to be past the point of no return. It's a shame, but hey, if they want to destroy their company, capitalism gives them that right I guess?

Sorry, that was a bit of a long rant over something I know little about lol

[acrosscenturiesandgenerations]

▪︎ Allegory of self-control (Moderation).

Date: 1859

Artist: Karl von Blaas (1815, Nauders-1894, Wien)

Medium: Oil on canvas

[thexphial]

I feel like I have come to a point with Tumblr that I need to make a post about the way they have handled (or rather, not handled) moderation. At approximately 3am on Saturday, February 11, 2023, my wife was informed that her Tumblr account had been terminated. This came with no other information. She was not given details as to why her account was terminated and the only recourse she had was to use the "contact support" form to ask why her account was terminated and ask for how she could restore it. As of today, Feb 21, 2023, she has heard back nothing from the moderation team, just an acknowledgement that her emails have been received. We are looking at 10 days with zero communication.

My wife's account was used for fandom, for political commentary, and to discuss queer issues. She was active for years, and should not have been flagged as a bot based on her activity. If she was reported or has broken a rule, we do not know what it could have been. If this could happen to her, it could happen to you, to anyone. She used her account as a primary way of connecting with others and its loss has been a serious blow to her mental health. I have written to support myself and received a response but it was simply to tell me that she should contact them, which she has already done.

It's clear that they are not responding to her for reason or reasons unknown, given the fact that I got a response in 24 hrs but she has gotten nothing at all in 10 days. There seems to be no way to contact the moderation team outside of the support form, which has been ineffective. I feel I have no recourse but to make this issue public. Again, if this could happen to my wife, it could happen to anyone. I am half expecting to be terminated just for writing this post. I am going to try to blaze this, but I doubt they will allow it. If you see it, could you pass it on?

Thank you!

[philosophybits]

Even in the desire for knowledge you should show moderation so that things known won’t be badly known.

Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

[transformativeworks]

A new comment moderation policy applies to OTW and AO3 news posts. We encourage readers to comment but want to share what content and behavior will be drawing the attention of our moderators. Read more by visiting https://otw-news.org/mr3mbdhe or through any of the language links below.

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