Disclaimer: I don’t run any, and mods are free to do what they want with their communities. But I have noticed some tendencies that make me want to hear discussion about how one would handle them appropriately. Trying to deal with my frustration in a constructive manner.

I like to look at !nicememes@sopuli.xyz and !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social, communities with rules against posting politics, and that I at least imagine have a bent towards wholesome/neutral content.

I’ve also noticed a tendency (general online one? a human one? a Fediverse one? not sure but it happens a lot) for someone to post negativity on a positive post.

I recognize that might actually be necessary sometimes. If you are posting misinformation (whether intentionally or unintentionally—vetting everything ever is tiresome and sometimes we use heuristics or just trust and let something bad through on accident) with a positive tone, someone should probably correct that misinformation, even if that means raining on a parade.

I also think people are posting negativity when it is not necessary. I’d love to provide examples but also am uninterested in the internet doing its thing and having the OP getting dogpiled for daring to not match my personal ideas of what’s a good post, or a flood of sympathy in the OP’s inbox about how I complained about their well-earned and justified cynicism (because yeah, I do agree with the points even if it brings me down—I specifically subscribe to the positivity places to counteract that kind of negative talk since I too am a lot more cynical in today’s day and age. Maybe I’m just projecting my desire to escape the negativity and snark on everyone else but the reality is everyone else is fine with it?). So I’ll just say you can easily find your own examples of snark and replies about how the world sucks within positivity communities that I believe (maybe I’m wrong) are more appropriate to the many left-leaning complaining communities (or the many communities intended for a purpose besides politics that end up with many outrage-y and political posts, albeit in a way that is still on-topic to the original purpose) than communities centered on positivity. Sometimes it feels like I’m in one of those monkey’s paw thread games, where you post a wish and someone else needs to find a way to twist it to be bad.

What should a person do about this to curate a positive space without ending up slippery-sloping themselves into power tripping (or well-intentioned moves that are not intended to exert power for your own satisfaction at all, but still upset a bunch of users)? And is my operating premise that we should figure out how to reduce negativity in positive spaces bad, and we should allow people to air their well-earned frustration?

But if it’s not a broken premise… do you leave the negativity up as long as it is not personally attacking someone? Remove it? Try to call out the behavior in the comments but not remove, as a sort of way to work in the framework of “you have the right to say it and no government mod/admin should remove it, but people have the right to tell you they don’t enjoy hearing that kind of talk in the community and would prefer if you stopped”?

This also brings up the tone policing problem, which is its own can of worms. But is removing negativity from a positivity community along the same lines as removing pictures of cacti from a community dedicated to cats—something off-topic that doesn’t go here? Or is it inappropriately censoring peoples’ righteous anger on a post at least somewhat relevant to it? (e.g. someone posts something neutral/positive about an interaction with their boss, someone replies “I’m glad you’re lucky enough to have a good experience, but” and then three paragraphs about their own bad experience where their boss treated them badly, and caps it off with a short statement about how the OP was lucky their boss ignored the competing class interests to be a decent person. I’ve seen both this type and the type that has someone being generically pessimistic about if the positive thing someone is posting about will be allowed to last because a bad actor will kill it, but with no story of their own/someone else’s suffering.) Is it okay to wall off a space from discussing depressing, outraging things? Can you do it without making people chafe against it and without inappropriate censorship? Can you decide that you can’t leave a negative top-level comment but if you have a longer conversation and the conversation turns towards expressions of negativity in maybe the fourth reply it’s just part of an organic conversation that is okay to leave up?

I can imagine leaving up “It doesn’t seem amazing that the society around the person who needed healthcare put them in the position of having such a big medical bill they needed to rely on a single individual’s ample generosity,” but not something like in this post even though they both have very similar points and goals. But that probably is entirely because I do not like the tone of the image I embedded—i.e. tone policing. But I also think it’s worth curating a sincere space instead of one with the snarky put-downs and one-liners that are so common online, and that these positive communities are not the place for it. Of course, I have my own biases talking…

And speaking of that negative post, when is pointing out how something might not be as positive as you think it is appropriate correction/addition of information, and when does it cross the line into being a killjoy? Is it appropriate to remove killjoy comments from positivity communities? (My idea of one that should be removed is telling me that my birthday picture is not positive because I’m sitting on a chair in it and that chair was probably made with slave labor somewhere down the line—but I might accept that same comment if worded a certain way or if I knew the intent was to educate someone who did not actually know about the points “no ethical consumption under capitalism” is meant to sum up.) This circles back into tone policing and tone as a signifier of intent and when you can remove comments and judge bad faith versus overstepping into inappropriate censorship.

TL;DR: how does one maintain a positive community when people want to be negative online without overstepping yourself into 1984?