I did a similar post on Slops community, asking for feedback regarding how specifically their comm is moderated, I did not ask for their overall sentiments of Hexbear at large. “Slop” is not a clear demographic though.
This comm is different though, as the demographic is clearer. From your perspective as people who are more covid/health aware, what are your concerns with not only how this comm is moderated, but the site in general?
What do you do when the “help” is unwanted? At best, we can do agitation, and I have been barking up this tree IRL and online since the early years. People won’t change. They don’t want to change. If they do, they are an outlier, and I have not met a single one of them. The only time any of them did anything was when it was policy and under threat of consequences—visible consequences that they can’t wave away like degrading health. We won’t get there again without it. Even then, not everyone would abide. People were on their deathbeds decrying the existence of COVID. All I, a human being of “the community”, have succeeded in doing is burning myself out while no one listens and the party outside goes on unimpeded. What then? As someone else here put it, someone needs to be COVID Stalin to shape the discourse. It will not happen for our part. We have no authority, a fact that is easily confirmed by trying to talk to anyone about COVID whatsoever.
I’m firmly convinced at this point that most people aren’t going to care about this until their lives are ruined by it in some manner of fashion. I admittedly agree with every one of your points. All I was trying to say is while most of us have given up IRL, given that we have nowhere left to go in leftist spaces, we can at least try to advocate here instead of relying on mods to clean up the random jerkoffs when they pop up.
No one has any authority. I can make the same covid post as I can about peaceful protests. Neither one of them will mean a good god damn in the end. I can only hope that the covid post will have a smaller chance of getting someone to think about altering their behavior.
Yeah I try to push for it irl. Whenever some casual acquaintance mentions “oh I dropped off the face of the planet for a couple weeks because I got covid, I’m doing better now (cough cough cough)” I just nod and say sympathetically “damn that sucks, hope you’re feeling better. I’ve never had it because” points to face “I get these bomb-ass respirators from China and wear them indoors”. People will nod and say “that’s smart of you” and then continue to never touch a mask.
Close friends and family I have struggle sessioned about it with and their conclusion was basically “getting covid once or twice a year is worth the price of not having to wear a mask” and when it comes to the topic of protecting the vulnerable they just throw up their hands in despair and go “well nobody’s masking anymore, what can I do? The vulnerable will have to just wear masks themselves. No I’m not vulnerable even though I have all these risk factors. No I’m not old I’m only in my 60s.”
Underneath it all is this: They do not want to wear a mask. They just don’t want to, and will rationalize to protect that feeling. Maybe they don’t have the ability to cope with living life as if there’s a dangerous disease going around that could disable them at any moment — after all, a lot of people handle uncomfortable feelings by just engaging in straight up denial. I don’t know, but I know nothing has gotten through to a single person I know irl.