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This place is a bit delete happy
One of my threads was getting discussion and I gave it the background that was available, but it was deleted for "lack of context."
There's a lot of shushing go on here, tbh. If it's not perfect, a post has to be disappeared. Not even moved, or not even asked for more info if appropriate.
It's very frustrating to be in one of the few feminist spaces and getting deleted for this or that small thing. I've seen more posts by probable men and posters that don't even really believe in the principles of radical feminism that slide through. But somehow I get tightly patrolled.
Mine was on the picture of a cop in 1969 in drag "under cover." The look on the faces of the women walking by summed up the preposterousness of it. Nothing else is known about the picture and I said that. But it was still worth the conversation.
Please don't ban me for this criticism, take it or leave it as you wish. But I do think Ovarit could take a look at how much patrolling goes on and who gets patrolled. New members that read like men? Yes please. "Lack of context?" Well.....you didn't offered any context for that deletion.
Yeah, I just wish the mods would say why they deleted something, because I usually have no clue. I've read the circle rules, seems like a fit, and then deletion, and they just say "circle rules." Or they say nothing at all. I'd rather be educated about what the problem is since I can't see the problem.
BTW, I saw that post of yours about the cop photo and liked it.
I’ve noticed over the past couple of days that several post I’ve commented on, including your post about the undercover cop, have been deleted and I couldn’t figure out why. I used to see deleted post where the mod at least says that it was in the wrong circle and which circle it should be reposed in, but it seems like so many are being deleted without explanation lately. I’m curious to know why that is.
I have to agree. Some things get removed for the most bizarre reasons. Like if an admin doesn't personally understand a meme, they'll delete it for being confusing to them. I've also had posts removed that didn't violate any rules, but due to the title, it lead an admin to make that assumption without actually reading the post or looking at the photo.
I think it could be improved if all admins were reminded to actually look at posts before removing them and providing adequate reasons for deletion or asking questions before posts are deleted if they are confused by them.
I’m not admin, I’m a mod. Sometimes memes fall flat, it’s not the end of the world. If I leave “confusing” or “doesn’t land” that means it’s been reported a tonne and fell flat. I read every post btw but it’s not my place to explain your meme to others. Good memes don’t need to be explained anyways. If I left up every meme my circle would be flooded with low quality content and y’all would be mad at that too. You’ve posted 102 posts to my Radfemmery n 42 to my TransLogic, I’ve barely removed 1% of those. It’s a delicate line to walk but mods have to walk it.
Of course you can moderate in any way you wish, but there's always room for improvement. I'm not upset about any removals I've gotten.
I love Ovarit and I don't want people to start giving up on this place because it's too hard to post. It could be my imagination but I do see fewer new posts, along with fewer responses, on the Beta page. To me that looks like people are using Ovarit less.
I really hope that's not the case. I don't have access to any statistics and it may also be my imagination but I have also noticed less engagement. I kinda doubt that the reason would be that it's too hard to post, but we really don't know. Hopefully I'm wrong because I adore this community and website. I don't know what I would do without it!
I don't have access to any statistics
They get posted monthly on o/Ovarit. For example, the latest:
All the other months are hyperlinked in that post.
Yeah I've noticed the same thing. In o/GenderCritical I posted a link to a TRA site that was encouraging castration surgery as a "viable and very effective (though irreversible) treatment for gender dysphoric pre-pubertal boys." I knew people wouldn't want to scroll through the site to find the offending statement, so I made a comment on the post with the offending quote available for anyone who bothered to check. But it got deleted for "not being relevant" or something like that? I think a TRA website that blatantly encourages permanent surgical castration for children is pretty relevant to o/GenderCritical, especially considering a big TRA talking point is "you TERFs are crazy, no one ever says children should be getting surgery."
(NSFW here is the site in question if anyone is curious NSFW)
I guess they're being strict because they don't want TRAs to look at Ovarit and say "a TERF posted something that doesn't make sense!!" That could potentially hurt the community. But at the same time, if you moderate with a heavy hand, it will also hurt the community. It's never a good feeling when you put time and effort into a post just for it to be deleted.
I understand moderating is a thankless unpair job and sometimes it's tough to know what call to make. And obviously the moderation here is going to be a little different from Reddit, because Reddit is massive and Ovarit is small. And I do appreciate them trying to keep up the quality level. But in general, I would offer the mods the suggestion that a light touch is usually best when it comes to moderation. People have an extremely low tolerance for moderator intervention. It's always better to try addressing something with discussion, or even just a downvote if the value of a post isn't immediately obvious but it doesn't appear to break any rules.
Your post wasn't relevant to the circle. o/GenderCritical isn't for posts about gawking at pictures of men, whether they are wearing dresses or whatever. We also don't want image content in that circle in general.
Moderators get to set the boundaries for their circles. You can try to change their minds on what the boundaries should be by sending them a message (wait until modmail is added) but by no means do they have to.
Communities here are moderated communities, it's a very different site model from websites where individuals subscribe to other individuals. Here individuals subscribe to communities, and posting to communities gives you an instant audience for your content, but moderators remove content that doesn't meet the community standards. No one is entitled to posting anything here. There isn't a place for every kind of content.
We won't add a post-moving feature because it doesn't make sense with the model of the site. Users can repost content to an appropriate circle if it's removed, but posters and commenters get to decide where they participate, so we will not being opting posters and commenters into participating into other communities against their will by moving posts to different communities.
Users shouldn't get preferential treatment based on their presumed feminist status or how old their accounts are. The rules are just the rules. Just so you know, some circles are feminist circles and some are not political at all. You may want to read the sticky post on the front page of the site.
Could we get a circle like "For everything else" -- for things that would probably be deleted from established circles, but we'd just like to share them, including things that we vent over and have nowhere else to share them?
You could warn people "this circle has light moderation" (no porn or such) and we could look if we wanted to, without breaking rules on established circles.
That's /o/women
Not exactly. /o/Women does have rules and we don't want every or any kind of topic. But it is a place for women to talk about most topics that don't belong elsewhere.
Every place needs rules honestly. Especially with this being a controversial site, a rule free space would be taken over by trolls very quickly. /o/women states "as long as you're a woman it's all free to go here." So if there are topics that aren't allowed, they haven't been disclosed to users and there doesn't appear to be any circle specific rules other than the sitewide rules and guidelines as opposed to other circles that state specific rules that apply just to that circle plus the sitewide rules. But that's all just from what I can view as a user.
The rules are here and in the sidebar: https://ovarit.com/o/Women/23344/welcome-to-o-women-info-rules-chat-room-update
Yes that's what I was referring to.
Where did your quote come from? As far as I can tell it came from this paragraph but you removed it from the context which provides a great deal more clarification. The rest of the text provides further rules.
My mistake, I meant that there aren't many rules. Like I said, I'm opposed to completely rule-free spaces.
Gotcha!
It's just that I've gotten deleted more times than when I was on Reddit. I'm not sure it's in the favor of feminist discussion to be controlling. I'm not the only one who has noticed it. I'm not sure why a post-moving feature "doesn't make sense" with the model of the site. It would certainly be better than deleting everything.
I'm not asking for preferential status, though I've noticed kind of an imbalance of things that were verboten before that are suddenly passable now, while other things are tightly controlled. This super-strong "mind your p's and q's" is not that helpful to feminist discourse. We're tightly controlled enough as it is.
My circle is women only, if a post got moved into my circle that had males commenting on it, my circle becomes compromised. I don't want random posts moved into my circle with male commenters. A similar issue would be if a user who has been banned in one circle but then suddenly a post they have commented on gets moved to that circle. Moving posts around would cause all kinds of trouble and mess for mods and prevent us from maintaining the boundaries of our circles and make it so that male free circles would be impossible.
While we're here- I though Ovarit was supposed to be woman only. It's a bummer they're here, because now we have more restrictive rules to keep them in some places and not others, in ways that affect the women here. My post was not "lack of context" btw, since I explained the info available with it. That other picture of Dr. Rachel Levine has no context other than his toes are pointing out. I still think there was healthy discussion about how that meme made no sense.
From you comments, I am grokking that you are under the impression that mods and circle rules are fungible. They are NOT. Different women moderate different circles.
I don't mod the circle your post was removed from, so you asking me about the mod decisions for another circle, like your question about moving posts, implies to me that you are still operating under the assumption that Ovarit is something like tumblr and the circles are like hashtags and that the mods and circles are interchangeable.
On the contrary, Ovarit is NOT set up that way. It is set up to cultivate different semi-autonomus communities for specific and different topics and discussions and populations.
The mods of each individual circle have the right to make boundaries for their circles, both to keep their circles on topic and so they can choose who they want to participate. This is is not an accident, it is a feature and it is what keeps the different circles autonomous and is why and how I have the right to make different boundaries on my circle to keep my circle on topic, foster sensitivite discussion and keep men out.
In fact, the existence of other circles on Ovarit where men are allowed even helps me keep men out of my circle because I can keep track of them when they inevitably say "as a man" somewhere else on the site.
By complaining to me, the a mod of a completely different circle about the circle rules in a circle that I don't mod all that shows that you don't understand (or don't respect?) the boundaries and work done by the mods of our different circles to keep our circles on topic and limit participation in our circles to specific demographics.
So to clarify: Every circle is a different community with different rules made by different mods made to cultivate different types of discussions. And mods of each circle have the right to set what kind of content is on topic for that circle and what content is a derail and who they allow to participate in their circle.
Some circles are set up for memes, some for videos, some for support, some for debate and news. Some circles are open to everyone, some are women only, some are for specific populations of women, like /o/lesbians is only for lesbians.
The mods of each circle have volunteered their time to maintain circles only for the discussions they feel comfortable and educated enough to moderate. And other mods from other circles don't have the ability break the autonomous nature of other circles by shoehorning posts they don't want in their circles into another random circle they don't mod, as that would completely destroy the ability of mods to keep their circles boundaries intact by destroying the structural autonomy of individual circles.
So for example keeping non lesbians out of /o/lesbians or keeping men out of /o/WomensHealthLounge would not be possible if full-fledged posts filled with comments from large unbounded circles could just be shoved into more closely bounded circles when they got deleted somewhere else.
I hope that clarifies. I know its frustrating to have a post deleted. But mods being able to randomly move posts from circle to circle would destroy the semi-autonomus structure of the site and completely prevent circle mods from the enforcing boundaries and rules to our specific circles.
I understand everything that you're saying here, but if we have to have all this tightness, I would rather men just no be on Ovarit at all. It's starting to affect women with more mod patrolling, which I'd like to see less of, not more of. And I don't want circles to be all about the mods, rather, the posters in them. Otherwise it's going to devolve into "MY treehouse! MY club!" thinking down the road. Not consciously, but it will. It's alienating to be deleted repeatedly, often with an icy or snippy or vague response. (Yep, that matters too). And as another person already said, the reasons given are often cloudy, and read like the mod didn't look at the thread.
Like I said, I've been deleted here more often than I was on Reddit. I'd like to see more priority on the discussion itself than for labyrinthine infractions.
I just think the mods ought to coordinate a little more, sending a DM once in a while, to try to keep discussion going. Rather than when in doubt, nuke it practices.
And maybe rethink allowing men in, if it increases rules for women.
You seem to be misunderstanding statements. Allowing men on the site is not increasing the rules on the site. Even if men weren't allowed on the site we would still never add a post moving feature because it doesn't make sense with the model of the site, as I explained.
o/GenderCritical has fewer rules and way, way fewer removals than r/GenderCritical did. That's just a fact.
PLEASE read the sticky announcement post on the front of the site. This thread is rehashing the information in the post about what and how the site is. This site is not GenderCritical made into a site. It's a platform for several communities lead in different ways by different teams.