you said something in your take on the latest debacle thats been rooting around my head like a feral hog.
this is a total paraphrase but
"moderation is not to prevent bullies from hurting people its to keep a nice paint coat of politeness"
i'd like to see you elaborate on that tbh, as like, critique of existing systems of moderation and what could be done better.
what you think moderation Should be

jv:

Let me answer with a real example that happened to me. Early 2023, someone on here sent me a DM to point me to an asshole who was spamming some popular anime fandom tag with TERF shit (basically, taking pictures of characters from that anime and making them into anti-trans memes, totally unrelated with the actual fandom, just pictures and basic shit like “trans women are men” in white all-caps text, etc). I wasn’t a mod, so I couldn’t do anything myself, but I could report it using the special staff fast-lane (basically, go to the mods team channel in slack, point them to what was going on).

A super nice rank-and-file person from the ToS team got the posts removed ASAP and all was good. Until a few hours later, when her boss got into the slack thread where we had been talking about those posts to tell her that it was a mistake to remove them, because they didn’t go against the rules: the posts wasn’t addressing anyone in particular (so no harassment rule violation) and legally wouldn’t be considered hate speech (so no hate speech rule violation).

That’s what I mean. The person on the team who removed the posts cared about preventing bullies from hurting people: She saw someone being a little shit to others in tumblr and said “not on my watch, you fucker”.

On the other side, her boss cared about keeping the coat of politeness: Legally speaking, the TERF wasn’t doing anything that could get them in problems, so for the boss, it wasn’t anything tumblr mods should be involved with.

What I think moderation should be? I think moderation should be opinionated. I think people should be banned for the intend, not for the words. The context matters: A trans person punching up and wishing a comically cartoonish death to a billionaire is way less harmful than a random people posting casual transphobic content on unrelated tags. But to evaluate that, you need to have an opinionated moderation, not some rules trying to establish some level of ‘fair-play’ between equally-valid opinions.