Vollerei
3mo ago
As someone who has massively struggled with how I look in a non-trans way;
On the other hand when your desires clash with who you actually are in reality and you for instance end up with body dysphoria, we are told that if you think people should be themselves, you are a horrible reactionary bigot and paradoxically get accused of not letting people be themselves.
This could not be less true for me and my experiences. If you have problems with yourself aesthetically, you are roundly shamed for trying to get help in fixing them. Vanity is bad! And vanity operations and cosmetic surgery are superfluous! And shameful! You need to go to therapy to have some boring middle aged woman who could not be more removed from current culture talk at you until you agree there's nothing wrong with you just to make her shut up!
Becoming okay with being your ugly self is the ONLY option presented to you if you have non-trans related dysmorphia. Anything else and you're being shallow, you're being vain. And nobody cares what you look like! (This is the biggest lie of all time, I get treated MUCH MUCH better by randos ever since I fixed myself up and became beautiful.)
I dislike trans healthcare because if I had claimed to be trans, I would have been immediately shuttled off down a route of all the surgery and other interventions I wanted. But because I don't want to grow fried-egg man-tits and cut my dick off, I got nothing but being told to make peace with an ugly body I despised.
Vollerei
3mo ago
Most things are a negotiation between you, reality, and the rest of society.
You can have limitless belief in the fact that you're smart. You can truly believe it in the deepest recesses of your soul. You can proclaim yourself a genius and fully believe you aren't lying. But if you have an IQ of 85... are you a genius?
Or for a more subjective example, you can truly believe that you're the most gorgeous creature on planet Earth. You can be completely in love with yourself, and carry yourself with limitless confidence. But if nobody else is actually attracted to you... are you actually attractive? (This works in reverse, too, you can believe you're hideous, but if everyone wants to fuck you, nobody is going to believe you saying you're ugly.)
You can't give yourself a nickname, you can't decide that you're cool. Some things have to be bestowed by others. Most things require tacit agreements from others.
Trans activists actually do recognise this, which is why they push so hard on enforcing your validation of their beliefs. A trans activist that truly believed that internal ID was all that mattered would not care what pronouns others used.
I sort of feel like you're just reverse engineering the old Invision PowerBoards days of the internet, when every website would have its own cheaply hosted forum made on the same software with varying levels of CSS editing. And I'd like that, because that was a genuinely better state of the internet.
Subreddits aren't a million miles from this concept, save for the huge catch of all being governed by reddit's rancid piece of shit admin team and their global rules. Which is a lot of the problem with reddit, honestly. Most of the rest of it being the type of moderators who will thrive within those global rules. Getting rid of the name thing will help, because it removes the prestige of having the "official" subreddit for something, and therefore discourages such mods who are only out for control. Having control of the names might invite accusations of bias as to who you rename and who you don't; you could maybe just maintain control of a front-page directory of sorts, a dewey decimal system of forums, and de-list ones which drift too far from their stated purpose.
You're going to get accused of being a witch-lover, and hard. Since the main communities who would make use of this at first are going to be those who cannot exist on reddit without falling foul of the global rules and the tranny jannies. You will be accused of providing a place for nazis to collaborate on terrorism.
But assuming you have factored that in, what you probably want to do is come up with a customisable experience to fit the needs and whims of the communities who might use it. I'm just going to throw a couple of completely not thought out at all things that might make such a system stand out and offer something people might actually take a look at for being different;
Ability to change between forums-style strict chronological comment ordering with quotes, and reddit-style cascading comments section. God I fucking hate reddit comments sections. Wading through all the cruft I already read is tedious. Though I can envision this causing issues as people try to crosstalk between different preferred layouts and miss responses... but with ping replies I don't see it being a big issue.
Topic tags, sort of like flairs on subreddits, except that one topic could have multiple tags, and you can maybe separate them into sections, a curated list of admin-defined ones for easy after the fact searching, and then user defined ones like the way steam game tags work, with topic creator given the chance to add theirs on topic creation.
The ability to replace or remove up/downvotes. I actually like the kiwifarms thing where they have a ton of reacts for a comment. Helpful, funny, and so on. Functionally up and downvotes basically equate to likes and dislikes. This is just adding more options. Here in particular I can see potential for people to rate things as "dislike" but also "informative". Further to this, you can let people set their own filters to auto-collapse or highlight comments that get more than X reactions of a particular type, search the topic for the comment with the most reacts of a certain type ("helpful" when dealing with tech issues...) or what have you.
Public moderation logs. Which mod removed which comment? Which mod changed which tag? which mod banned which user? Well, now you know. If someone is abusing their power, it will be there in black and white. Ideally this would be enforced, data collected by your forum software and sent to your servers, and the mod logs for any forum should be available by plugging the ID into some page you maintain. Mods should not be able to hide this. Maybe you can let them buy you out if you want. You can have the software and none of the oversight... for a fee.
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