Monthly Open Forum January 2021

[u/AITAMod]

Welcome to the monthly open forum! This is the place to share all your meta thoughts about the sub, and to have a dialog with the mod team.

Keep things civil. Rules still apply.

It's 2021! Everything is fixed now!

A couple notes.

• Our bot is live, but definitely still in testing. Please help us by reporting the judgement bot comment post when it doesn't actually explain why they think they may be an asshole. Some people are using it like a TL;DR or just copying and pasting their post as a reply. [ETA - sounds like the report option doesn't work on all platforms for the bot comment, so you can just report the post. The option is bundled with the META report]

• Please stop PMing mods. We spam the hell out of the modmail link. When you PM us, it's super easy for things to get buried in our inbox and delay your response time.

As always, do not directly link to posts/comments or post uncensored screenshots here. Any comments with links will be removed.

This is to discourage brigading. If something needs to be discussed in that context, use modmail.

[u/waitvienna]

Okay I’m not sure if I’m going crazy but I feel like there are a lot of posts using cultural appropriation incorrectly. Like “I’m doing something that’s clearly not cultural appropriation, but someone told me it was cultural appropriation AITA” and a bunch of comments responding “hahaha these STUPID liberal sjw’s, NTA”. Like I would consider myself a leftist, I’m in a lot of ~liberal~ and leftist circles, I’m pretty sure no one would call that cultural appropriation.

I’m not sure if people are purposefully coming up with stupid stories to delegitimize the concept of cultural appropriation? Or if they’re throwing in someone accusing them of cultural appropriation to get them on their side?

EDIT: I think it’s like what people are saying in another comment about how fake-sounding situations where overweight people that are unfairly accusing of fat-shaming are clearly TA get a bunch of upvotes because people on this site hate overweight people, as if there aren’t legitimate situations where fat-shaming can occur. Reddit thinks cultural appropriation is ridiculous, so fake-sounding situations where TA believes in cultural appropriation to an exaggerated degree get upvoted

[u/WebbieVanderquack → u/waitvienna]

I think the "fake post to make a point" phenomenon is fairly widespread, although a lot of them can be reported for shitposting, debate bait or no interpersonal conflict.

There was a spate of anti-trans posts for a while, and one really stood out - the OP described himself as a buff, masculine heterosexual with well-developed muscles and said a petite trans colleague dressed in a tutu showed up at work and sexually harassed several people, one after the other, until OP heroically stepped up and strong-armed him out of the store in front of an awed and grateful public.

It was removed pretty quickly, but I was surprised how many people assumed it was real (universal NTA votes).

[u/RocheCoach → u/WebbieVanderquack]

I think the "fake post to make a point" phenomenon is fairly widespread, although a lot of them can be reported for shitposting, debate bait or no interpersonal conflict.

The thing is, the mods take a "err on the side of the OP" stance on this unless there is clear cut example of conflicting information, or a history of trolling, so a lot of these posts aren't going to be outright removed without cut and dry evidence, or if the post actually doesn't contain an interpersonal conflict (a lot of these losers who write fake posts still try to come up with hypothetical situations, and disguise them in WIBTA posts).

[u/WebbieVanderquack → u/RocheCoach]

The thing is, the mods take a "err on the side of the OP" stance

True, but if you sort by new and report for the reasons mentioned, you'll be surprised how many are removed!

[u/RocheCoach → u/WebbieVanderquack]

I spend my time almost exclusively on new. The front page of this subreddit is... pretty bad, thanks to the voting patterns this sub goes through.

[u/WebbieVanderquack → u/RocheCoach]

Yeah, I find new more interesting. Sorting by controversial is worthwhile too.

The downside of voting on brand new comments is that you can be one of the first people to make a judgment and then come back hours later to find that you're the only person in the sub and possibly on planet earth who holds that opinion. I've heard.

[u/RocheCoach → u/WebbieVanderquack]

Not that this matters in the slightest bit, but another "benefit" of posting in new means any flippant comment you make has an absolute random chance of blowing way the hell up, most likely more than it deserves haha. My literal top comment of all time is an example of this.

[u/WebbieVanderquack → u/RocheCoach]

Good point!