General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: It is not about the swimsuit issue it is about basic respect for women [View all]LittleBlue
(10,362 posts)I saw 700 replies in that thread. It was an important discussion on objectification.
Skinner has made it clear in ATA: He generally relies on juries, the community itself, to judge whether this content is appropriate for GD. He has given us far more tools than I've ever seen on a forum to avoid seeing what we don't want: juries, hosts, ignore user, trash thread and hide keyword. I would wager if you put "swimsuit" in the hide keyword feature, or trashed a few threads, you wouldn't have to see these threads again. So it leads me to believe that those who participate want to participate, and those who see want to see. You can say that they don't want to see these things, but that's not very convincing given all the tools that make it very simple to avoid seeing these threads.
At a glance, I have dozens of users and threads on trash/ignore because I don't want to read what they write. There are some topics I don't like, some users I can't stand and some keywords that bore me to tears. I don't see them. I'd advise that you do the same.
Here is Skinner's opinion:
Unfortunately, we're getting mixed messages here. We are told that juries are failing by allowing certain posts to stay. But we have the juries themselves who are rendering their own best judgment -- serving as a proxy for the community as a whole -- and deciding that those posts are within bounds. The admins know exactly who serves on these juries, we see how they vote, we know their histories. They are not trolls. They are for the most part long-term DU members in good standing -- men and women. I have alerted on some of these Swimsuit Issue posts myself, and often found my alerts voted down -- by people whose usernames I can see, and whom I know quite well from years on this website. One juror, a woman whose judgment I respect very much, wrote in her jury comments that if I didn't like a post I should use the trash thread function, and said the alerting on DU was "getting absurd." So whose judgment should I defer to?
I want DU to be a welcoming place for everyone. I also want DU to be an honest and open reflection of itself. And more than anything, I don't want to go back to the days where I was the dictator (benevolent or otherwise). I believe that talking is better than not talking. If the members of DU are genuinely getting sick of all this, we have the power to end it though our jury vote. And yet people consistently decline to do so -- even people who I have seen elsewhere expressing their disapproval of such behavior. So we're genuinely conflicted. Do we lay down the law, or do we trust the community?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12595046
That's really the long and short of it. Use your powers of persuasion to convince juries.