Call me what you want, that’s your business 🤷

Mod posted a response: https://lemmy.world/post/52564578

I have recently received some feedback about including sexuality as a topic for dad jokes. Although it was not the most constructive of feedback, some points were made. Sex as a topic is not the same as sexuality, and I apologize for not making that distinction clearer. I was basing my moderating on what was being reported and sex being a topic as understood for children closer to puberty, although sexuality such as LGBTQ+ parents/partners/people can be understood much earlier. While I stand by still keeping actual sexual themes (anatomy, sex positions, etc.) as an off-limits topic for the community, sexuality seems reasonable to include.

This community is not static; I want to do my best to maintain a place that can grow with the community while staying true as a place for humor in a world that has plenty of unpleasant things. I am not a bot, and am indeed a person that is open to having respectful discussions.

Tell me what you think should and should not be included as “off limits topics.” Should profanity be allowed, or possibly only certain words? Are there other suggestions you have? I will try to look at the common themes from any feedback and apply them over the next two weeks or so.

As far as mod responses go, that's pretty dang good. For as much as we complain about bad mods we should applaud the good.

As I said, it’s an established term. There’s another option that’s not just chaos: descriptivism. If it’s used to successfully communicate among people, it’s language. If it’s understood by a community of English speakers to be an English word, it is, even if it’s not widely known.

not just chaos

🤭

If it’s understood by a community of English speakers to be an English word, it is, even if it’s not widely known.

ture enuf. demo, yar’s gat ta hav a prescrapt whan ta ba anderstaad, aterwais ya gat gabbarash ta ba rad.

And more over, if the child would want explanation and go to it's guardian for explanation, it would be a perfect opportunity to explain these things. Relying on he education system to explain it to them when they are 15 is just bad parenting.

Fully agree. It's a great example of how to respond to criticism constructively. The Piefed developers should take notes, lol.

rare admission of guilt.
hopefully that community learns to read reports, and the actual contents before hitting the «Remove Post/Comment»

Generally, I find communicating with the reported on gets better intersection and solidarity than outright deletion. (Good faith moderation vs Report->Remove)

The given reason is whack but it’s not a dad joke. It’s not a pun or play on words. It’s just a standard set up and observational joke

I posted a response in the thread 🙂

I'm not going to go as far as PTB. There's no out of scale action, the removal was in good faith, and the mod has been consistent in their moderation.

This is, however, clueless mod territory. It's bad application of a rule done in ignorance. It isn't okay, it shouldn't have been removed.

No power trip, just a bad decision, and there is a difference between the two

Having seen the mod's reply post in the community, I'm inclined to agree with you on all points tbh..

Just don't try to instigate brigades peeps. Keep things nice an stick to discussing their mod action.

One of the posting guidelines is literally:

Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?

So, if OP already figured it out, then I think it's fine to mention. But I'm actually not 100% sure why there is a rule against deobfuscating the modlog in the first place. I'm typically for more transparency rather than less. I think @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com would have written the original rule, so I'm sure he can explain it better than me :)

See my comment above yours in the thread.

I hate so much when sections of Lemmy moderate as if they still have corporate masters to answer to and advertiser-friendliness to worry about.

On further discovery, that doesn't seem to be the case with this particular decision but generally?

Same reason why showing gay relationships or drag on TV makes "christians" go nuts. They equate it to adult sexual behavior in order to silence it and keep it away from "family communities."

Also, I’m not sure where the 3-6 year old comes in in the first place. The best “dad jokes” are something that a teenager would groan at. Little kids don’t understand shitty puns either, and those are the best.

One thing that everyone should learn in sex ed is the Kinsey scale 0-6, and bisexual is 1-5 on the scale, so that's most of the scale. Most people don't know this and if they do, most won't admit the same gender attraction. Even in generally decent marriages to the opposite gender, they never know each other fully. Some might confuse that as choosing to be "straight" but they are still Kinsey 4 or whatever, and should not be resentful of people who chose both ways or not marriage. They should support equal rights too. It's all good whatever number people are, be free!

not to mention, dads can still dad-joke with their adult children!

Yeah, I've often thought we were a bit off. Ask someone why they are against gay people and they almost always find a way to be bothered by what's going on in the bedroom. But if you start asking them about their heterosexual bedroom activities they clam up and seem offended that you asked. And they still don't get why they are wrong

Now that you mention it: if we get married, my partner will totally be able to tell people "I'm not straight but my husband is" if anyone asks her. She'd love that and so would I 😄🥰

That’s a wild dialect you’ve got there, I bet it sounds pretty cool

If the mod is obvious then you can talk about them. If it's not, then refer to the "community mods".

So, you play the same playbook as the fascists do. Here, my favourite quote just for you:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

I have to rescind my previous comment. In this specific case we are dealing with someone who uses the same playbook as the fascists, probably because they are one on top of being a homophobe, see my comment comment chain with @finjaminpoach@lemmy.world above. He isn't even doing the part great where he plays with language, probably because of being an uneducated redneck.

meh, its combo of middle english and rural pronunciation.
so long as you comprehend there’s nuance to discourse, 大丈夫

Nuance? Huh? Naw, we should either rework words to fit our understandings of etymology or use any form of language we have access to to try and communicate in English… right?

English is still a prescriptivist language.

Glad we don't enforce it in threadie… right?

Oh, I don’t speak British Academic Scientific International and Commercial English, though I’m pretty sure I could understand it, maybe that’s the issue?

I think we are getting lost.
What do you mean by prescriptivism?
I am using threadiverse’s grammar-authoritarianism as Q.E.D. that threadiverse, and it's usage of BASIC is prescriptvist. While you and I vary our use of English dialects, & can communicate efficiently, threadiverse refuses to budge, as most are indoctrinated, and do not want to engage in other Yīngyǔ dialects.
tis why I propose sitelen pona earlier, because threadie hates nuance. (not us)

Do we know what mod made this very homophobic decision, because I would like to know that they've been banned for this.

Isn't that scale pretty limited though, it doesn't consider the difference between romantic and sexual attraction. Eg, desperately want to guzzle cock but can only love a woman. Basically the stereotype of republican conferences crashing grindr.

Only american christians really. In the UK it really isn't a problem.

TL;DR: fuck everyone’s grammar authoritarianism. Language exists to communicate: successful, natural communication is correct language use, regardless of grammar rules.

Well, my linguistic work is completely unrelated to the fediverse, so my self identification as a descriptivist is also totally independent of any conventions here. I don’t really care what others use, and if somehow my instance were to insist that I communicate exclusively in Basic English, I would ignore it and/or switch instances, depending on how reasonably they presented the case to use only Basic English. If the whole fediverse banded together to enforce that, I’d be very surprised that all of the non-anglophone instances agreed (especially the francophone / Zangendeutsch speaking ones, can you imagine?) and ignore it unless and until it became obvious that I was hampering communication and fucking the vibe up for people.

By descriptivism, I mean that I’m interested in grammar as it is (successfully, for communication purposes) used, not the rules listed in a grammar book. My professional focus is on the transmission of grammar to adult second and foreign language learners, which is why I jump to grammar as an example, but spelling, word choice, or other aspects of language can certainly also be approached from a descriptivist perspective (accepting “ur” for “your/you’re“ and responding to the question “can I go to the bathroom?” without insisting that the asker say “may I go to the bathroom?” would be examples of descriptivist approaches in those categories).

The most common comparison to descriptivism is prescriptivism, which leads you to sentences like “that is something, up with which I will not put.” There’s also, I guess, mixing elements of multiple together and hoping that it will work, but I wouldn’t consider it a lect if it’s not a system that can be used to accurately and consistently communicate with others… how many others is a very interesting question that we could discuss for hours, but it’s not my area.

I am personally very interested in
grammar (obviously) and etymology, but I find the exclusion of dialects that are perfectly understandable to most local English speakers or insistence on following arcane rules, especially in informal situations, pretty fucked up, to be honest.

Of course if you’re from Glasgow talking to someone from Baton Rouge, one or both of you may need to tailor your speech to make communication work, but that’s a momentary adjustment and doesn’t imply that either speaker is wrong or making errors in their speech. My native dialect pronounces “internet” without any [t]: the first is completely elided and the second is replaced by a glottal stop. I’m not forgetting to say the t or mixing up the word, I’m speaking in the way that people around where I grew up do. When I’m speaking formally (as in, giving a lecture, not just talking to the doctor or anything), I’ll pronounce the first t, and if I’m speaking on the phone or with someone from a very different place, I’ll pronounce both, but those pronunciations are not more correct in my opinion, just more widely understood.

fuck everyone’s grammar authoritarianism

🤝🤝🤝🤝

my instance were to insist that I communicate exclusively in Basic English, I would ignore it and/or switch instances,

Make an alt here then sib. .world is one of those AmeEigoAuth grammarian instances. If you don't follow their gweiloyu, they mark all you posts as «Spam» and ban you.

responding to the question “can I go to the bathroom?” without insisting that the asker say “may I go to the bathroom?” would be examples of descriptivist approaches in those categories).

ic ic.

but those pronunciations are not more correct in my opinion, just more widely understood.

💮

We’ll probably agree in a lot of things too. I got extreme slack from threadie for calling language a tool, especially when endangered linguists decide to collectively end it. It felt like faux-concern, or how gen Z calls it now “concerned trolling.” If they didn't want the language to die, they wouldn't have let it rot, or Rosetta stone graph it. Language is only as good as people use it. Conlang et al..

"Of course their gonna know what intercourse is by the time they hit fourth grade, they got the discovery channel, don't they?". In most situations like this, pre-internet, your older cousins would say "You'll find out when you're older".

Only mentally.

A reasonable reason to remove it was because it's not a dad joke. A funny joke, but not a dad joke

I guess I’m currently in the ignoring it phase then, given that this is the first I’m hearing of it. Quokk is on my list of next instances, but ideally I’m holding out for a German language instance that accepts criticism of Israel (I can dream). If I get banned from world before that happens, I’ll check quokk out. My main concern about it has been time zones, because I get stressed out when I feel like I should have responded more quickly - is most of the traffic in line with Australian times?

I’ve got accounts on a bunch of instances though, and while I do absolutely get the criticisms of .world, I just don’t use it for my more radical ideas; it’s mostly the memes instance for me (I definitely do check up on the memes I get on my .ml/beehaw frontpage, but I find them too depressing/aware to be my main source of memes).

faux-concern

Pragmatically, I’ll grant them that moderation and administration are voluntary positions, and if they can’t find any volunteers who speak a given language, it’s near impossible to moderate posts and comments in that language, and if user X insists user Y is being abusive, it can be incredibly difficult to determine if it’s actually the case, and then you run the risk of either ignoring the abuse of user X or enabling X’s abuse of user Y through the report button.

That said, .world is big enough that if smaller (international) instances can moderate in a given language, they should be able to do the same.

Clean jokes only please. If you cannot tell this joke to a 5-year-old and they can understand, you probably shouldn’t post it here. Please post edgier jokes to: !unclejokes@lemmy.world

I suppose this is the rule the mod refers to.

And well, I feel like there is a bit of a mix up going on here because the rule implies filthy jokes as well as jokes that go over the head of a 5 year old, which are two different things, but here are treated as the same.

In this case, I completely agree that your joke more than likely would go over the head of a five year old because the concept of bisexuality might not be somethingt a five year old has been exposed to yet and even if they have, they may not understand the punchline as it is a bit high brow for their age group.

However, it's not a flithy joke and the implications of this rule is super unfortunate.

I also think that if I had been the mod in this instance, I would've not given a single fuck that you made a joke that was a bit more high brow than the average dad joke. If I may pretend for a second, that was a particularly nitpicky mod, I would have made a comment mentioning this rule and started a discussion with you and the other users to find out whether or not the joke was too clever for a five year old or if other people in the comments could attest to their five year olds being able to get the joke or not. That way it becomes a productive community discussion rather than a shut down.

I think that would have been a much better approach, tbh, rather than deleting it. No matter what the subject matter is, if it is this harmless, I don't think it's appropriate for a mod to start deleting things. It creates a bad atmosphere and insecurity in a community when people can't express themselves in good faith without getting punished.

Your joke should not have been deleted imo.

but ideally I’m holding out for a German language instance that accepts criticism of Israel (I can dream)

Def. create the community here then. Quokk.au was forked for anti-genocide & anti-apartheid praxis. We were there when .world was defending Zionism. When they merged into Zion camp, many users emigrated.

time zones, because I get stressed out when I feel like I should have responded more quickly

don't be. threadiverse as a whole is very understanding that everyone is different, and can only allot so much time to engaging with others. Everyone here that I am aware of treats threadie like email: “we will respond when its convenient.”

is most of the traffic in line with Australian times?

originally. I slowly turning to Ame times, then European. It all depends on syndicates.

moderation and administration are voluntary positions

not in piefed, .ml, and FHF😅. They have paid moderation. pylova, our fork of piefed, is not financially independent to hire moderation at the moment, but we would appreciate the mutual aid if viable.

so a teenager's dad cannot crack dad jokes anymore?

Sex as a topic is not the same as sexuality

So much willful ignorance around this by people who just want to virtue signal to their peers.

. If I may pretend for a second, that was a particularly nitpicky mod, I would have made a comment mentioning this rule and started a discussion with you and the other users to find out whether or not the joke was too clever for a five year old or if other people in the comments could attest to their five year olds being able to get the joke or not. That way it becomes a productive community discussion rather than a shut down.

I agree, and that's actually what the mod did after seeing the post (it's the announcement pinned to the top of !dadjokes@lemmy.world). Turns out they were much more reasonable than I gave them credit for and also restored the post after the community agreed that it shouldn't have been deleted 😁

, I don't think it's appropriate for a mod to start deleting things. It creates a bad atmosphere and insecurity in a community when people can't express themselves in good faith without getting punished.

I agree. Speaking of which, do you know if mods and/or admins have the ability to move posts to other communities? I've had so many posts deleted due to mods thinking another community is a better fit and would much rather they move it lol

I bet a lot of teenagers going through the "my parents are the most cringetastic creatures in existence" phase would love for that to be the case 😁

Exactly.

The paradigm this sets up is that the parent/guardian has the opporunity to make their own response to a kid asking about it.

I'll tell you when you're older

or

Well timmy, some girls like boys, some boys like girls... etc

Its a delicate topic, theres no one size fits all solution for all different kids, and giving the parent/guardian the responsibility and ability to direct how that goes is far superior to just a censor deciding no children nor parents are capable of handling this.