Hey Folks, Technology Mod here. We're aware of the reports that this post has gathered. I recognize that this is probably fake and that the source is suspect.

While we don't have any source requirements in the sidebar for this community, in general better sources would be preferred. However, the post has generated enough discussion that I hesitate to remove it. Unfortunately, Lemmy doesn't provide many tools for us to deal with situations like this, such as pinning comments, editing titles, or adding flair. For now, I'll be leaving the post up, but I'll continue to watch the discussion to see if other actions might need to be taken.

Thanks for your patience, folks.

I saw this headline and expected something very different than what I got, and I'm really glad. I think the last decade has made me really cynical about technology and the internet, for some good reasons, to the point where a story like this is almost surprising. I found myself a little caught off guard by how emotional I got while reading it. Thank you for posting this.

We've removed some of the comments in this thread for expressing the exact racist sentiments which would warrant this type of post and for arguing in bad faith. This is a perfectly salient conversation to be having in this community so we will be leaving this thread up, but as a reminder, please engage in good faith and be nice. If you don't want to have conversations about anti-racism in Technology then I suggest you unsubscribe from this community and others on Beehaw.

On a personal note: I would be absolutely thrilled to see more, better discussions of the intersections of areas like race, gender, and sexuality with technology, and fewer arguments about which Linux distro is better.

From my memory, folks were hanging out in the discord (the discord came before the website as a group of folks who wanted to start a different kind of community) and were talking about possibilities for the site. Early on there was talk of developing something from scratch (in fact, I think a working prototype was developed before it was decided to pivot to lemmy) and the admins needed something to name the github repo. As I recall somebody stuck their head in and just said the word "beehaw" and it stuck. I could be mixing things up, the timeline is a bit fuzzy and it's possible there were other discussions happening that I wasn't aware of. But as far as I remember it pretty much came out of nowhere and everybody just kinda shrugged and said, "that's the one".

Honestly it's kind of hard to know how to respond to this.

We recognize that "I was just joking" isn't a universal defense, otherwise people wouldn't have had an issue with minstrel shows. But as a society we've come to recognize that humor can be persuasive and can inform people's beliefs about what others are like. It's similar to how sites like 4chan that started out with cultures that were drenched in ironic racism eventually were just actually racist.

I don't know why you're trying to start drama.

The Vice article was a news article that was reporting on this leak, but it didn't name any names and didn't link to the leaked database. The post in question also wasn't a beehaw post, it was a federated post from lemmy.ml. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how federation works, but I would expect lemmy.ml's mods to handle moderating those posts.

And, frankly, I'm not sure I disagree with the screenshot you posted elsewhere in this thread. I don't think it was wrong for a person to leak the IronMarch forum database a few years ago, which exposed a bunch of Atomwaffen members in the US and neo-nazis elsewhere, and I'm not sure I think it's wrong for someone to have leaked this db either.

This isn't "it's okay to dox people you disagree with" or calling people with different political opinions nazis. These are actual nazis.

I'm sorry if it's frustrating to you to have megathreads like this. I'm not enthused about the extra effort in redirecting posts to the Megathread, either, but I'm not aware of a better way to handle topics that are flooding a community other than gathering them up in a thread like this. It annoys users (and mods) when dozens of articles about the same topic are dominating a community, so we'd like to do something to alleviate that when possible. I've seen similar concepts used in a number of different places (old-school forums, reddit alternatives like Tildes) because, as far as I've seen, there's not a better alternative for wrangling topics that might otherwise clutter the feed.

If you have any ideas about better ways to handle this type of thing in the future, I'd love to hear them (and I genuinely mean that - I think we're open to suggestions if a better way exists).

I don't really mind. I created an alt on a larger lemmy instance a while back to subscribe to meme communities, and to be quite honest the comments are really bad, frequently as bad or worse than Reddit. I think Beehaw is just aiming for something different than other instances. Then again, I'm old enough to have been part of forums where the pace of discussions was much slower than most aggregator style sites are today so it doesn't really bother me.

I've noticed this as well, and I have no idea where it's coming from. If you see this on Beehaw, please report it, though, we're definitely not okay with slurs of any kind.

Do these people have any dignity?

Hey, I don't know if you mean it that way but this is a pretty unkind thing to say. I suspect that a lot of these mods are folks that have spent a good bit of time and effort trying to build up communities that they care about.

You may think that the platform that they've chosen to do that on is working against them (and I agree), but I don't think that what they are feeling is contemptible in any way.

To quote Julia Serrano's excellent writeup on GAC for adolescents:

The “experimental” label is most regularly levied against puberty blockers, probably because the average person isn’t familiar with them. However, they’ve been used to treat precocious puberty since the 1980s (Comite et al., 1981; Mancuso et al., 1989) and to stave off unwanted endogenous puberties in trans youth since the mid-to-late-1990s (Cohen-Kettenis & van Goozen, 1998; van der Loos et al., 2023). For anyone interested in learning more about them, I’d recommend Giordano & Holm’s 2020 accessibly written scientific review “Is puberty delaying treatment ‘experimental treatment’?” as it answers the most commonly asked questions about the method, its efficacy, potential side effects, and so on.

Giordano & Holm’s review also addresses another common claim levied against gender-affirming care, namely, that there aren’t any “high quality studies.” In actuality, there are many high-quality studies: sound methodologies, significant sample sizes, published in well-respected journals, etcetera. When trans-skeptical people argue this, what they really mean is that there aren’t any randomized controlled studies — where neither the doctor nor patient know whether they’ve received the medicine in question or whether they’ve received a placebo. While this certainly is the “gold standard” for medical trials, it is not logistically possible in cases such as this, as both doctors and patients would quickly surmise which group they were assigned to based upon the changes (or lack thereof) in their bodies. The review also delves into ethical issues regarding withholding this treatment that make controlled studies impossible.

The second paragraph delves into the claim that there are no quality studies on the effects of delayed puberty. We actually have a good number of high quality studies, what we don't have are double blind, randomized controlled studies because of the practical and ethical difficulties of doing so. This, of course, gets twisted into labeling puberty blockers as having no evidence or for being "experimental".

Hi skeptomatic, Beehaw Technology mod here. To be clear, this community is not only for the uncritical admiration technological development or the tech sector. It is a community for discussion of Technology in general, which will likely include discussion of the effects of technology on society. Those topics very well may include discussions of how and when those technologies, the environment they are developed in, or the systems they enable are harmful to human flourishing.

You are absolutely welcome to defend generative AI as a useful or positive development - I personally think it's a really interesting technology with some major potential (although I think we're probably in a hype cycle and it's being applied in all kinds of ways that don't really make sense), but I also recognize that there are potential social pitfalls in it's development and deployment. Those ideas are worth discussing in a kind, civil manner.

Lastly, when you comment here on Beehaw, please remember our rule: Be(e) Nice.

Just a reminder to everyone in the comments to be kind. Folks feel very strongly about this subject, and for very good reasons, but we can have empathy and compassion for one another even while disagreeing. Please remember that you are interacting with other humans here.

There have been some questions about the quality of the source posted in this topic - Mediabiasfactcheck.com has them at a "Poor" factual reporting level. There are, however, a few more reliable sources reporting on this, such as this article in the New Republic

I agree completely. We do work hard to keep things inclusive and nice™ on Beehaw, but Technology is our largest and most active community by a fair margin, and sometimes folks don't respect the vibe on the instance when they comment - either because they don't realize what instance the post is on, or because they don't understand or maybe don't care to understand the ethos of the instance.

We've done some cleanup in the thread, but removals can take time to federate (if they federate at all, which is not guaranteed in my experience. Hopefully the discussion from here out will be more inclusive, but we'll be keeping a closer eye on the thread in any case.

Hey folks - Just want to note that the !Technology mod team is aware of the reports on this post. After some discussion we decided to leave the thread up, since it had already generated a decent amount of good discussion despite the problems with the article itself. However, I do want to make it clear that we do not condone intentionally misgendering people.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reply here or DM me.

Hi @satan@r.nf, please remember Beehaw's primary founding principal when commenting here: Be(e) Nice.

It is possible to disagree with someone without using abusive language. If you think they are wrong, attack their arguments (civilly), not the person.

Yeah, it's named after this guy from celtic folklore.

Alien Weaponry! They're a Maori metal band and a lot of their songs are written/sung in Maori.

Hatupatu and Kai Tangata are two of their songs that I really enjoyed.

I think one of the community mods from another community on beehaw is Kiwi so they might be familiar with some others as well.

It's a CYA thing for copyright infringement. Linking is fine, but hosting (we think) puts us on shakier legal ground, at least from what I understand.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, but please remember:

1. Be Nice. You might think your cranky comment isn't a big deal, but when there are dozens of them it can get pretty overwhelming. The dogpile is real.
2. Technology@Beehaw.org is not a "free speech zone". I think Beehaw admins have been pretty clear on this, but our overriding concern is community building and creating a corner of the internet where people are good to one another, not creating yet another site where people can say whatever they like regardless of the harm it might cause others. I understand this might clash with what some see as a fundamental philosophy of the fediverse, but we disagree. This isn't the place to re-litigate those disagreements.

I was reminded of the trend of Milkshaking a few years ago. That wikipedia article includes a quote from a Vice Article on the trend that refers back to Serbian resistance as well.

But there's a method to all this dairy-based madness. Milkshaking can be seen within a tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience known as "dilemma action". A term coined by Serbian activists in the 1990s, dilemma action creates a lose-lose situation for the opposition. It’s a genius move reserved for some of the absolute worst people in our society, because there’s no good way to respond to a milkshaking: do nothing and you look like a twat, or fight back and look like you're overreacting. Plus, a milkshake will really mess up your suit. Still, that's not to say you should go out and do it, unless you want to risk arrest: the guy who milkshaked Farage has since been charged with assault, after all.

Hey, !technology mod here. We mostly get tech news and articles, but personally I have no issues with questions or self posts that promote discussion. Some communities do have more guidelines about how and what to post but !technology is fairly lax as long as the post is tech related and not spammy.

All that to say, please feel welcome to post your question there and see what folks recommend.

Hi @hedge@beehaw.org, we're starting to ask users not to paste full articles in the description or comments, there have been some concerns about this practice and we just want to try and head it off. I have no issues at all with linking to one of the several archive sites that will allow users to bypass paywalls, though.

Now you can have two stickers.

I think bots can have a place, but I prefer ones that have to be intentionally invoked. I'm thinking of ones like MTGCardFetcher on the Magic the Gathering subreddit, which would post links to the card on Scryfall if you formatted the card name in double brackets in your comment.

It's a pretty incredible phrase.

Please don't deadname trans people, folks can figure out from context if you just say "Emily from LTT came out as trans".

"It's a legitimate strategy!!!"

Seriously though, camping a weapon drop or a busy corner and spawn camping are different beasts. Spawn camping sucks because there's not really much if any counter play, it's more on the devs to make spawning less predictable and exploitable. Other types of camping can be played around by being aware of the map.

I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but Houston's approach to homelessness is considered by some to be one of the most successful in the nation, and one of the components as I understand is to coordinate care for the homeless through a central agency, which then refers individuals to other programs and agencies. The idea is that it reduces duplication of effort. I'm not sure if this ordinance is related, though.

Hi, if you see any examples of this, please report them. I can't promise that we'll always take action, but we do try to. The mods here are all volunteers and don't always have the ability to pick up on this type of thing - we rely on reports to draw our attention to things that might need action on our part.

Another difficulty is that Lemmy offers a very limited set of tools when it comes to something like this. I can't tag or flair an article as having a deceptive headline - there's no tag/flair feature. Mods can't edit post titles, and we can't even sticky a comment within a post; only posts can be stickied. Our only tools are commenting or messaging the OP asking them to change the title (and if it's a federated post there no guarantee that the edit would federate in a reasonable amount of time, if ever) or remove the post. Often when we get reports there is already a good discussion in the comments about why the headline is bad, and personally I am always reluctant to remove posts that have good, ongoing discussion in them (as long as no one is being harmed anyway).

In the end of the day I agree that we should moderate titles more. I think we ought to moderate a few things more closely. But Beehaw's mods are just normal users who, in their spare time, do their best to try and keep things nice. In particular, !Technology is our largest and most active community, and it is essentially impossible for us to stay on top of every post and evaluate it for accuracy, even if we might like to.

Sorry for the early morning ramble. I'm not disagreeing at all with your comment, just trying to give some perspective on why it might be a bigger ask than you realize.

I honestly don't intend to be rude, so please don't take this the wrong way. But this is a very minor detail that was featured in prelaunch marketing and went heavily viral. I understand not wanting to encounter spoilers about important events in a game, but this is not that.

I think that "power mods" are more of a perception than a reality even on Reddit. There are a handful of examples that people tend to bring up, but I'd wager that the vast majority of reddit users never had any issues with power mods (or if they did there's a decent chance that there's more than one side to the story), and I know that in a few of the examples people like to repeat there's more to the story.

I agree that Lemmy really needs a site mod role. Right now, only the Admins can issue sitewide bans or purge users posts or post contents. That means that admins have to step in any time a user is a problem in more than one community (and if they're a problem in one place they are more than likely going to be a problem in more than one) or if illegal content is posted (I haven't really encountered this, I know it has happened).

Locking this thread to clean up the mess. Come on, ya'll, we can do better than this.

Edit: I've unlocked the comments in here. We've removed some comments in this thread for being inflammatory or for not adhering to Beehaw's one (and only) sitewide rule: Be(e) Nice.

To elaborate a bit on what that means in !politics:

Be(e) Nice doesn't mean you have to always be positive or happy. It doesn't mean you always have to agree. It does, however, that at all times we have to remember the human on the other side of the screen. We can disagree and still be kind to each other and try to assume that others are operating in good faith. I get it - politics are messy and complicated and the issues are big and for many existential. But we can talk to each other and disagree with one another without resorting to personal attacks or escalating the discussion into an all out flame war.

And to reiterate - that doesn't mean that we will tolerate hate speech, JAQing off, sealioning, or other ways of engaging in bad faith. If you see these things, please report them to the mods.

I think I saw you had commented this on the discord a while back, and I still had not made the connection just now that they had gotten a cowboy bee tattoo before suggesting the name.

Hi, @jemorgan and @unpopular, this thread is getting pretty tense, I think it is time to disengage from the discussion. Further responses like these (personal attacks, insults) will be removed. When interacting with other users on this instance in the future, please keep in mind Beehaw's one rule: Be(e) Nice

You can't reduce all of society's problems to one source. We need to improve the lives of everyone, and we don't do that by ignoring the plight of minority groups. We can accomplish more than one good at a time.

We've started asking users not to do this. No issues with posting an archive link, though.

It isn't, but I think this probably fits. Enshittification is when a company provides useful, good services to gain users, then once those users are locked in they start degrading those service or removing features to cut costs, right? That seems like a pretty close analogy to what's going on here, I'd think.

Yeah, considering the compounding problems of transportation and food deserts in the US I think this could be helpful for a lot of people, but on the other hand I'm not wild about a company like Uber extracting profit from public assistance. Feels a little exploitative.