Hey all,

Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I'd learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it's run.

This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.

Beehaw is a community of individuals and therefore does not have any specific political affiliation. At this point in time, we do not know what the political leanings of most of our users are. I would suspect that many of them would identify as progressive because we are explicitly a safe space for minorities. What we stand for and the space that we're trying to make is compatible with many forms of politics. Unfortunately some political groups build themselves around and choose to elevate or tolerate hate speech. These are the only political groups that we are incompatible with. If any of it was unclear in any of the other posts, I will restate it all here. Beehaw does not tolerate hate speech. Beehaw is an explicitly safe space. We center and promote kindness because that is what we see and love in the world.

Some of the instances that we have chosen to defederate with have explicit political stances and ideologies. Their political stance and ideology had nothing to do with the choice to defederate. The choice to defederate was based on the amount of hate speech present on the instance and/or explicitly endorsing it. Since hate speech is not controlled on the instances that these users come from, we cannot expect them to change their behavior when participating on our instance. While users may exist on some of these platforms who do not spread hate speech, the choice to defederate is made to reduce the burden on our moderators and admins. Occasionally these instances or users from these instances will point their fingers at Beehaw and make claims about our political leanings or whether certain kinds of politics are banned. To be explicitly clear, the only kind of politics that are banned here are those which enable hate speech such as fascism.

Politics on the internet ---

Many, if not most discussions of politics on the internet are poisoned by virtue signaling. When they are not poisoned by virtue signaling, discussions are often just ways to vent emotions. I believe the reason for this is the platforms themselves and the incentives to engage online. On the internet I can adjust my level of anonymity. An adjustable level of anonymity allows me to change how I speak to others while simultaneously mitigating or removing any consequences to myself. This of course varies based on the platform and what I'm attempting to accomplish, but in the context of speaking with others on the internet, I can be relatively consequence free to say whatever I want on most major platforms. Particularly negative or hateful behavior might cause me to be banned off of a platform, but through the use of technology or other means, I can simply create another account (or migrate to another platform) and continue the same speech. In malicious terms, I do not have to worry about managing someone else's emotions or my connection to them.

In real life, on the other hand, it is not as easy to pass myself off as someone else. I must be much more aware of how I speak to others because consequences can be much more dire. When discussing politics with others, I may alienate them or myself and so I may choose to be more open to listen rather than soapboxing. The people I'm interacting with may be a regular part of my life and may be people I have come to respect. Understanding how they think might be vitally important to maintaining or improving our connection.

I am presenting the internet and real life as two ends of a spectrum but it is more complicated than that. There are people who are very visible and tied to their identities on the internet just as there are people in real life who use false identities created to mask their true identity. Interactions vary in level of connection, platform, and who happens to know who we are in other spaces on the internet. There are plenty of people who talk on the internet about politics with the explicit goal of changing the minds of others. Some of these individuals are not using this as an outlet to manage their own emotions. These generalizations are presented in this way because I need to talk about these patterns in the context of the platform Lemmy. I'm asking everyone on this platform to be wary of anyone who focuses on politics but is unable to explain the issues themselves. They are probably trying to deceive you, are virtue signaling, or projecting their own insecurities and you should be skeptical of their approach.

I would encourage all of you to think about incentives when presented with political drama online. It is easy to get engaged because politics has a direct and often scary effect on our lives. In this community, it is not difficult to find individuals who are regularly marginalized by politicians. Especially for these minorities, it is completely valid to get emotionally invested in politics and I would personally encourage doing so on some level, but we need to think carefully about the other parties present in a conversation and whether they are willing to listen or incentivized to do so. For the people who are hiding behind anonymity and posting to vent their emotional frustrations with the system they are likely not invested in the community we are growing here and it may be appropriate and healthy to ignore or disengage with these folks.

Forking ---

It is in this political context that forking from the main Lemmy development has been presented. People are quick to point to potential upsides of forking, but the upsides are an after thought presented as a means to bolster or justify forking. These justifications are for what is ultimately a moral issue. The question at hand is whether it is moral to use a platform developed by someone who has committed acts which one deems immoral. To anyone posing this question, I would ask them to consider what other technology they use every day and to trace the roots back to each invention along the path to today's day and age. The world has a colonialist history, rife with violence and immoral behavior. Unless you retreat the woods and recreate technologies yourself from scratch, it's impossible to live in a modern society without benefiting from technology built on countless dead bodies in history.

We do not have the technical expertise to create a new tool from scratch - all we can do is leverage tools that already exist to create communities like this. At the time we created this instance, the service we decided on was Lemmy. We did so with awareness of discussions around the politics of the main instance and developers. I think we've done a decent job outlining what we intend to do with this instance and explicitly made strong stances against hate speech and other behavior we do not agree with, including where we disagree with them. When taken in the context of computing in general, these political leanings are also not unique in their social and political harm as compared to some of the tech giants out there. The same is true in comparison to some of the famous tech inventors and innovators; in comparison to the history of computer technology; in comparison to the exploitation and problematic mining of rare earth minerals used in technology; in comparison to the damages we cause to the earth to create the energy used to power our servers. We can follow this path of thinking back all that we want to, and ultimately it's just not a particularly fruitful discussion to zero in on whether the political leaning of the main developers and instance are in perfect alignment with what we want to accomplish. We are not explicitly endorsing their viewpoint by using their software and we are not tied to using this software forever.

I cannot stress enough how much bandwidth has been taken up by these discussions in recent days. It been brought up as frequently as every few hours across Discord, Matrix, inbox replies, comment replies, new threads, and other forms of communication. We're currently dealing with a lot of other issues like keeping the server running, expanding to add more communities, moderating the communities amidst a huge influx of users posting and reply content from other instances, managing expenses, optimizing our server, planning for the future, and so much more. We cannot entertain philosophical discussions on all of the wonderful things we 'could do' when we're struggling to keep up with what we're already currently doing. We have not yet received a serious proposal for a fork which details operational needs when it comes to the maintenance, support, and resources needed to accomplish and maintain it. Simply put we do not believe a fork is necessary at this time.

A few quick notes on discussions the administrator team has had, since we've fielded a lot of questions in these particular fields. We're posting this both for transparency and to help us limit the load of having to respond to each of you individually.

• We would like to become an official nonprofit at some point, but there is a cost associated with this, we are not lawyers, and we might need to change where/how we collect donations to do so.
• We've upgraded the server approximately 7 times now. We're trying to balance fiscal responsibility with server costs. We are aware that digital ocean isn't the cheapest server and we are trying to be conservative with estimates and give ourselves extra runtime at whatever tier we are on. We're also hoping that the upcoming lemmy version will solve a lot of our CPU-bound issues.

We are aware of the following bugs:

• the "report created" indicator flashes in the bottom left corner for some users randomly, even non-moderator users
• sometimes, briefly or without a refresh, the username in the top corner will not be your own; as far as we can tell this is purely cosmetic and is not a security issue
• sometimes the post you're in changes to another post for no clear reason

Hey everyone

We recently discovered that the end-user experience around denied applications is a bit confusing and perhaps in need of some work. As best as we can tell, if we deny an application there is no notification nor a reason displayed to the person who's been denied. We don't want this experience happening to anyone we deny (it's not particularly nice to ghost people!) and we expect that many of the denied applications are great people who are just in a hurry and not writing enough for us to assess if they're a fit for our ethos, so we wanted to make this post for anyone who tried to register and is confused about what happened or anyone still yet to register.

When registering, please answer the questions in full as it helps us to understand if you'd be a good fit here. We created a post in lemmy support to get some clarification on this issue, but we're not sure how long it will take to resolve or what changes we may need to do to our process.

We've been fielding a lot of questions about the design and layout of the site, and like the previous philosophy posts, I think it's time again to detail our thoughts and explain why we do some things a bit differently than the rest of Lemmy.

This is not a reddit replacement --- This is not and is not meant to be a Reddit replacement. The original community here has decided to carve out a space for itself because we grew increasingly upset with modern social media. Modern social media has become a breeding ground for hate speech, for trolls, and for bad behavior. We don't want to recreate that environment. We want to explicitly make a nice little corner of the internet where we can hide from racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, and other forms of hateful speech. We want a space where people encourage each other, are nice to each other, are supportive and exploratory and playful. We think this can incorporate many wonderful features and aspects that made Reddit and other link aggregator and discussion based communities popular on the internet but it is not meant to be a replacement- we are and want to do something different. If you're looking for a straight Reddit replacement you should look elsewhere. If you happen to register on another instance you're still more than welcome to participate in our communities but we will hold you to the standards we're looking for, namely that you're nice when you're participating here.

Communities --- We may be the only instance on Lemmy that has community creation restricted to admins. One of the big first discussions we had about communities was whether we should allow porn or certain kinds of NSFW content. In short, legally speaking, this is an incredibly risky move. We're not a VC with a bunch of capital and lawyers on retention and we're not particularly interested in taking on any of that headache. NSFW spaces on the internet inherently break a lot of social norms. I'm not sure the diversity of behavior seen in NSFW spaces can be easily moderated or is particularly compatible with our core ethos - creating an explicitly nice and safe space. If it is compatible, it involves answering a lot of complicated questions about acceptable behavior that I don't think any of us have the time or energy for.

Another reason why we've locked down community creation also has to do with creating an explicitly nice and safe space here. One such suggestion we've seen discussed many times since our inception is a space on mental health. As many of you have rightly pointed out, these spaces often invite trouble for a number of reasons. To be perfectly clear we all take mental health very seriously. I've been in and out of therapy my entire life (diagnosed depression in the 3rd grade being my first introduction to mental health) and I'm extremely supportive of destigmatizing mental health. I can't speak for all the admins, but I highly suspect they hold similar opinions on the importance of mental health. None of us are mental health professionals and ultimately if you're seeking mental health care, we highly suggest that you speak with a professional. Communities like mental health often require users to be willing to hold the proper and healthy amount of space for someone to work through a problem (as working through these problems can surface strong emotions) and ultimately become a better person. Unfortunately, this can run counter to the need for members in the community to feel respected, to be treated nicely, and to be safe from feeling any need to carry anyone else's emotional burden. Mental health is often an emotionally charged subject and even though we're all human and want to hold space to allow this kind of healing, a dedicated community would be inviting the need for a lot of moderation to make it successful and compatible with our ethos and guiding principles.

Mental health isn't the only community where we might potentially run into the issue of playing nicely with our only rule, to be(e) nice. Sometimes our hesitation comes from how we've seen communities focused on a particular subject play out across the rest of the internet. A few examples of this that you're probably familiar with are incel and men's rights communities (often misogynistic), free speech communities and platforms (often allow a lot of hate speech), and certain kinds of communities focused on taking pictures of humans (often becoming dominated by thirst traps). We don't want our communities falling into any of these traps or creating a non-nice space on Beehaw, so this may be the reason behind a hesitancy towards creating certain highly requested communities.

In my experience, small communities on the internet need to reach a level of activity to sustain itself. People are typically not willing to eternally refresh and revisit a website that is not receiving a ton of traffic or populated on a reasonable cadence with content. Small communities remain dormant for a very long time until some kind of viral attention brings enough content to sustain the community on an ongoing basis. This is part of the reason that we have not split out communities such as gaming into tabletop gaming, specific platform gaming, or even genres of gaming. This will likely happen at some point in the future as the example of gaming is a rather popular community but it’s the reason behind our encouragement to post related content in the most appropriate existing community. I personally think that there is a lot of benefit to not getting hyper specific with communities, because too much granularity can lead to people not discovering related content organically (imagine communities only existing at the level of each video game, rather than at the level of platform gaming, video gaming, or gaming as a whole). However, this needs to be balanced against overall activity and the ability to interact with and comment on posts. If a community gets too large and the majority of the community is focused on a particular kind of content (such as just video games in the gaming community), then it warrants splitting the community or creating more granular communities so that people can find the content that they're looking for rather than getting lost in the noise.

Hitting a character limit, post continued here.

Is there a matrix channel or something for instance owners to chat with each other? We've had a small amount of growing pains in the last few days and being able to quickly talk with people running other instances could be useful to crowdsource knowledge. Does such a space exist?

If you haven't had a chance to review the two posts on the sidebar and can find time to do it, please do.

In as short a message as possible, the guiding principle here is to be(e) nice to each other. This is explicitly a safe space for all, a kind space for all, and a nice space for all. If you see behavior that is not nice to you or doesn't seem in line with this ethos, please let us know by hitting the report button!

I expect the next few weeks there will be some level of adjustment to all the new activity and that there will be a decent number of people here that just don't fit in well to our community. A little bit of patience and a little bit of help will go a long way to making sure we keep this place a nice little refuge from the rest of the internet.

From the early stages of conceptualization of what we wanted to do differently, up through the feedback we've been getting as Beehaw has been growing, there's been a consistent narrative and push back from certain individuals about how we've decided to run things here. To be clear, these are the individuals whom are either on the fence, those who are not enthusiastic about our mission and voice it elsewhere, and to a lesser extent comprise of some of the individuals we have since banned from our platform. The narrative typically takes the side of 'open/free speech' is tantamount and that any suppression of said speech is unwelcome (typically said in a much more hostile way). As I've experienced this push back, I've slowly gathered my thoughts and realized what I believe is a fundamental disconnect between those who have earnestly and openly adopted our platform and those who fight against it.

Beehaw is a community. Communities are organic. As a community grows and shrinks, everything about the community fundamentally changes. Most online social spaces don't operate as communities on the same level that communities do offline. When communities are run in a way that the members of the community do not like, the community often splinters, or leaders are ousted. Websites tend to have much stronger incentives to stay on a platform and leaders (platforms) are much more resistant to this kind of natural control by the members of the platform (you can't exactly overthrow Facebook). However, communities still need to have some kind of rules, and because the size of a community is much more amorphous online (in general also much larger), the default state we're used to online is one of semi-authoritarianism with explicit rules.

If you've ever spent some time deeply involved in an offline community, especially if you've done so as an organizer or otherwise involved in the management or running of a community, you're probably at least somewhat aware of the kinds of discussions that communities regularly need, in order to keep them running. Communities are not perfectly homogeneous, and many communities value diversity. However, get enough humans together and there will always be disconnects of values, boundaries, wants, and needs. Navigating these disconnects can be as simple as ensuring that two people don't sit near each other at an event or as difficult as engaging the majority of the community in a discussion about what kinds of behavior are acceptable and what aren't. Discussions happen at all kinds of different levels and involve different groups of people to reflect where the disconnect happened and involve the parties necessary to resolve the disconnect as well as to manage the emotions, needs, wants, values, or boundaries of people who were hurt when this disconnect happened.

If you're not familiar with running communities, you're probably at least aware of this from simply living with other humans. It's rare that two people both desire everything the same- disconnects over how clean a house should be, where to place objects such as kitchen utensils, how to interact with or ask for permission to use objects owned by another person or that are for shared use, and other such disconnects are commonly discussed when cohabitating with another human. These discussions can be as simple as asking your housemate to clean their dishes within a day of using them to allow for the space you like in a kitchen when cooking or may be as complicated as months or years of discussions, debates, or fights and can cause a serious strain on the relationships between the involved parties. Many children are often ecstatic to move away from their parents because they've been strained by these kinds of disconnects and the often inadequate resolution of conflict.

While there are some limitations with regards to governance and some design considerations on the kind of community we would like to grow here, ultimately Beehaw is a community and at the core of that community is the desire for a stronger community experience. One thing that offline communities do a much better job at, is navigating these discussions. Online communities often operate at a scale which being cold is the only feasible way to operate a platform, and thus explicit rules enhance the ability to scale moderation and enforce behavior. Unfortunately, this kind of framework results in pushing out minority individuals, reinforcing an echo chamber and in some cases promoting some very not nice behavior. Our goal is to create a platform in which nice people will want to stick around so that the experience is less toxic than other websites and because of such it needs to resemble an offline community - the rules must be more open to interpretation and the way the rules are interpreted needs to be a community effort.

Which brings me to the reason I'm writing this post in the first place - many free speech advocates and others who've pushed against the lax rules have offered suggestions of making the rules more explicit, of weakening the need for community discussions. Many individuals who've participated on this website and received bans have explicitly resisted having a discussion about whether their behavior was acceptable or not. These are both incompatible with the vision of this website. We want this to be a community - this means that discussions about behavior should organically arise. When someone violates a rule they aren't banned immediately, but rather reminded that they need to behave appropriately. In the offline world, this might resemble a friend asking you about how you treated their friend, a pastor pulling you aside and talking to you about how you've seemed on edge lately, or security asking you not to vape inside their establishment. What this resembles depends on the severity of the behavior, who's around to witness the behavior, how others react to and respond to said behavior, and a variety of other factors. The more severe the behavior, the more severe the reaction. Extreme measures are reserved for the most heinous of actions and the analogous behavior online (preemptive banning from our platform, de-federation, etc.) is treated with the hesitancy and respect it deserves. Someone being banned from an establishment they've never attended doesn't happen out of the ether - it happens because people in the community express this wish and it involves a serious enough crime for it to be justified (such as a history of domestic abuse, sexual assault, or other heinous acts).

If you're worried about how our rules are explicitly open to interpretation, that's on purpose and I hope the text above helps to clarify the vision that I have (and others of the community share) around how I'd like to see this community evolve and what we'd like to think we're doing differently on this website. I'm not banning people for no reason or simply because they don't agree with me. I want people to disagree with me. I want diverse opinions in here. But I also need this place to be nice and members of the community need to be willing to hold each other accountable in creating that kind of space. Of note, I've never banned a single person without openly discussing what happened with other individuals who participate in this community and asking for their input. I can't promise this will always be the case, but I can promise that I'll be open to having a discussion with any community member who feels that something unjust happened with another user or to themselves.

First off, I wanted to say hi to all the new members we've had join in the past month. Thank you for joining us here at Beehaw. A community doesn't exist without its members, and it's exciting watching this instance grow.

I've always been a proponent of keeping explanations as simple as possible and allowing discussions to clarify the finer points, but I've noticed that I've been repeating myself a lot recently with the influx of new users and lot of fantastic questions about what we are, what we're doing, and why we're different.

This is to be the first post of a series in which I'm going to share my own thoughts on the vision of Beehaw and how I hope it can be brought to fruition. It's also a place for me to share my thoughts on what's wrong with other social media platforms, such as some of the major pitfalls of most moderation systems. To be clear, I don't speak on behalf of everyone who's been involved in starting this instance and I certainly don't speak on behalf of everyone here, so this isn't meant to be a manifesto, or a set of rules etched into stone tablets for you to obey. I will try to frame ideas that I hold through my own eyes (I), and ideas which I believe the establishing community holds through the lens of our eyes (we).

A condensed history of the formation of Beehaw

---

The group of users who created Beehaw used to exist on another platform. Many of us came to that platform from many other platforms before it. We were sold on the idea that it was a different platform, where discussion would be encouraged, and things would be different. While the platform was still small, there was a much higher feeling of cohesion and community and users being aggressive or hateful to each other was incredibly rare. When they were mean, it was often over emotionally charged issues and typically resolved itself with apologies or slight changes in who interacted with who. Over time this platform, like many others before it, got infested with a group of people I like to refer to as rationalists.

I'm simplifying their mindset to that of the rationalist, because rationalism touts itself as a belief that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge, rather than belief or emotional response, and they often touted such ideals. While I agree that beliefs and emotional responses can get in the way of important work, the kind of rationalist that I take qualms with is someone who doesn't understand that their own beliefs or emotions are clouding their judgement. At times they repeat racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted narratives because they are not as learned as they think. They often end up causing a lot of harm to minority individuals who already struggle to get society to listen to them because bigoted notions dominate the common narratives found in society.

On this platform I attempted to address this emerging problem of rationalism. To be clear I do not view these people as bad people. I simply think they are misled or unintentionally ignorant. When I was younger, I found myself in possession of many of the thoughts they discuss because I was also taught them through the lens of a colonial oppressive system. It took a lot of work to undo some of the brainwashing that I had gone through and to realize the harm that I was causing by 'debating' these issues online.

Unfortunately for me my attempts to address this problem on said platform were met with ire by the creator of said website, and I was told in no uncertain terms that I should cease these meta-discussions altogether. That message and that final thread that I had created on the matter lead to a discussion on an informal community for the website where likeminded individuals began to lay the groundwork for what we felt was wrong with this system of moderation and the problems we saw in modern social media platforms.

The spirit of Beehaw

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The issue as I see it with modern social media is the way in which rules are enforced. There are many good reasons to itemize specific behavior which is not allowed, but the downside is that extremely specific rules are easy to maneuver around. We've all experienced someone who's a real jerk on the internet but manages to never get banned because they never explicitly violate any rules. I'm not sexist, they'll claim, but happen to post a lot of articles calling into question modern feminism or criticize the wage gap.

I think many people today would agree that someone 'debating' the benefits of phrenology in the open would constitute racist behavior, but there was a time and place in the world where it was considered real science, despite many scientists distancing themselves from this field very early on and critics writing scathing commentaries on this emerging field. This same guise of civility is frequently exercised by bigots, with modern examples of sexism, homophobia and transphobia being easily found on nearly any major social media platform.

Humans are pretty good at figuring out when someone is being a dick online, even if they are acting within the defined rules, and one solution to this problem is to recenter humans in our online social platforms. The idea of not having a ton of explicit rules, and instead having simple rules like "Be(e) nice" is a startling one for most, because it upends what we've come to know and expect from the internet. However, by keeping the rules simple and instead attempting to enforce the spirit behind the rules, we're able to deal more effectively with problematic individuals and create a space in which you aren't worried about whether you're going to have explain to someone why you're a human and why you shouldn't be subject to incessant bigotry online.

What is (and isn't) Beehaw

---

That brings us to the fundamental question of what Beehaw is and isn't. Beehaw is a social media platform. So, we do want you coming here and sharing links to news articles, websites you find, starting discussions, connecting with others, and in general doing what you see on other social media websites. We want you to do this while being nice to each other. If you aren't nice, we'll remind you to be nice. If you continue to be problematic, we'll escalate from there, but it's going to be on a case-by-case basis. If your first reply when we ask you to be nice to each other is to fuck off, I'm going to respond in kind. I also understand that being emotional is a normal part of being a human and that some of us struggle with anger more than others, and I'd like for this to be a community which is open to the idea of reversing actions, such as bans, if you're willing to talk with the community about why you think it should be reversed. Of note, we simply do not tolerate intolerant behavior. Being explicitly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or bigoted in any other fashion is not tolerated here.

But how might one determine when it's okay to be intolerant towards people you believe are being intolerant or who are being intolerant but doing so because they are uneducated or have not spent time deconstructing their own privilege? Many philosophers have written extensively about this subject, and I simply don't have time to write an entire manifesto. In simple terms, I am not advocating for tone policing. I believe that being outraged and angry at people who are destroying our society is a good thing to do. When the supreme court removes protections for abortion, it's okay to be outraged and to take action into your own hands - they have done something intolerant. When someone advocates online that you don't have the right to your own body, it's okay to tell them to fuck off. In fact, I greatly encourage it. This is being intolerant to the intolerant.

However, when someone online shares an opinion and it feels like they might be intolerant and you jump to the conclusion that they are intolerant and you launch into a tirade at them, this is not nice behavior. You didn't check if they have the opinion you think they have, and that's simply not nice to someone which you don't know.

It gets even more complicated when you consider someone who is sharing an opinion they have which is actively harmful to many individuals in the world, but it's due to their ignorance. I personally believe that so long as this person is not actively spreading this intolerant viewpoint and are working on themselves to become a better person, that it would not be particularly productive to launch into a tirade against them. I understand, however, how someone could be quite rude in response to such intolerance and I agree that this person may desperately need to be educated appropriately, but there is no way for that discussion to happen on this platform in a productive manner while lobbing insults at each other. I can understand why, at first brush, some might consider this tone policing. However, I disapprove of the intolerant viewpoint, and I approve of it being corrected, but I also approve of the intolerant person attempting to become a better person.

The only way for a platform which is hoping to exist as an explicitly nice place online to avoid taking sides in a situation like this is to withdraw from the quandary entirely. This kind of nuanced political and philosophical discussion is just simply not meant for Beehaw. I'd like to think that I'm aware and learned enough to avoid 'debating' things like phrenology, which are obviously racist, but I'm also smart enough to realize that there's likely some ideas which I've internalized or been taught by a colonialist western society which are harmful to other minorities. I want to be able to learn about how everything I was taught was wrong, and to be corrected, and that space can only exist when we don't let users berate each other over ideas they project on others (whether that projection happens to be correct or not).