This is what I'm getting at, too. When racist asshats dominate everything, it makes it preeeetty fuckin' clear to POC that this looks just like reddit. I've been racking my brain for a week about what better things we can do to moderate out scum, I've been picking the brains of other users, I was talking to mk today, and the few ideas I have will piss off a number of people no matter what. I find it worth fighting for though, so I'll push ahead as much as I can, but then again I'm not asked to defend my stances on race relations every single day. Oh wait, a racist asshat made sure there's been a thread in my feed every day for a week to tell me white privilege don't real. He must be right.
piggybacking off that, 8bit isn't just being required to defend his stance on race relations... he's being asked to defend his own existence.
I'm pretty sure the answer is "stop engaging," and I'm pretty sure not enough people get that for it to be effective. If we all decided a shitty user was shitty and no longer fed that user attention, there wouldn't be such a problem. To be honest I've had that one we've been talking about all day triple-modded for so long that when people started to post about him, I had to go looking to figure out what the issue was. Yes you should stand up against someone's racism. No you should not make a habit of giving a racist an audience.
What if you didn't have to stop the asshat from being an asshat, but their comments were rendered invisible to you? Almost as if they were muttering to themselves…
It's a great idea that I like a lot, along with a block feature that mk and b_b were talking of earlier. My bigger issue is the image that is put out. The asshat we're talking about has made himself present in every post recently, so new users first experience is going to be... a vitriolic racist red piller. It would still be great, because as users will go on, they'll see that people have applied the Mutter option to him so much he never gets responses.... except from new users who don't know yet. Imperfect, but it's still a step that would do a lot.
Posts highly-muted people make are hidden from global, comments on others' posts are not though. But then again, false positives in posts on global are only slightly bothersome. False positives on highly-muted people having their comments would be a lot worse (and easily abusable).