... You realise that that's because a forum moderator has no meaningful amount of actual power, right?
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
If they don't have meaningful power, then neither do people who would abuse any space they're in, rendering moderating wholly pointless. But people sure don't like that idea.
Mommy and daddy keep going on about horizontalism but then they make me go to bed even when I don't want to >:(
I think that's more the nature of social media than anything else.
it's the nature of people.
they love to dog pile on the 'outsider'. and they also love to circle up the wagons over a perceived threat.
so what happens is outsiders form their own little tightly knit and hostile tribes. social media greatly expanded the specificity by which people identify themselves. so you have raw milk nutjobs jerking each other off over their 'pasturization is an evil conspiracy to ruin our immune systems' inside their little bubbles and feeling like big smart geniuses because everyone else is an dumb sheep who has been duped by Louis Pasteur's evil invention.
I mean this may be decentralized but its still social media. Its gonna be a cesspool by nature of social media.
the shit always rises to the top.
and to find the good stuff you have to wade through it.
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Are you really comparing a completely optional forum to a society where people can and will point guns at you?
"They don't let me spread transphobic rhetoric in this optional community online, literally 1984!"
The same people who rage against authority and advocate prison abolition seem to love becoming "dungeon masters."
Anybody who sees Authority as a responsability is naturally averse to having it because they would feel the weight of it and would feel bad if, whilst holding Authority, they made a mistake and others got in some way hurt because of that.
Those who see Authority as power to advance something (be it their own personal upsides or some idea they believe in) with little or no feeling of responsability towards others (be it not all directly or they've suppressed it by convincing themselves their actions are somehow "for the greater good" hence any bad they do with the authority has that grand excuse to salve their conscience), have no such aversion to holding authority.
That posture towards authority of people of the second kind applies more broadly to all manner of things which serve to pressure, convince or manipulate others (Authority is generally power force something on others) so of course they also have no aversion to using other such tools, including using ideology to manipulate others, and sometimes that means passing themselves as somebody who holds a certain ideology, and that includes Anarchism.
So yeah, you're going to find that certain people who parrot Anarchist talk aren't in fact people whose Principles mean they're naturally Anarchist but rather people being Performative Anarchists in order to fit-in and manipulate others driven by entirelly different Principles, and such people are absolutelly pro-Authority as long as they're in control of it.
In summary, there are two types of people who seem Anarchist:
- Those whose personal principles means they are averse to people controlling other people. There are naturally against any form of Authority.
- Those who want to control other people and are in a specific situation where Theatre Of Anarchism can advance their objectives. These are against forms of Authority which hinder their objectives but are in favor of forms of Authority which advance their objectives.
IMHO, the best way to spot the second kind from the first is to look for the often repetition of common slogans and having a superficial level of ideology with no actual tracing back to personal principles since they learned the ideology at an intellectual level rather than being drived by their Principles - i.e. what feels Right and what feels Wrong - to finding that formal ideology as something that fits them.
By the way, this method to identify the real ones from the performers also works for all other ideologies and even things like Faith - start paying attention and you'll spot all manner of teatrics around ideologies all across the entire political spectrum as well as in people professing some faith or other.
Just wanted to say this is a fantastic take. 100% agree.
Too many people want to argue in the sense they are a 'greater' authority than you, to try to force you into agreement with them. And generally lack any ability to genuinely reflect on themselves, their actions, or the flaws/contradictions often inherent in their ideology. So ultimately they just fall back on slogans as self-evident truths that must be preached and obeyed.
That's very different than actually reading the source material of an ideology. How many Anarchists have read Bakunin? Anytime someone claims to be anarchist I love asking them that and looking at the total look of confusion on their face...
No one is making you be here. You can click a button and start your own community or even spin up your own server and if your modding policies are that much better people will switch. ...or none or very few of the users like what you say and the mod just happens to be the one responsible for telling you.
Is it frustrating to be part of the outgroup? Sure. Is it frustrating to have an opinion people dislike or don't think is worth leaving their ingroup for? Sure. But that's just called being a weirdo. Lots of people are weirdos. I'm a weirdo. In fact it's often hard for me to get certain things done or find certain products. Bigelow doesn't stock my favorite flavor in most stores because it's not popular enough. That's not oppression that's just being unpopular.
Being a weirdo isn't for the faint of heart. Dialectal behavior therapy changed my life and teaches four ways to approach a problem. 1. Stop seeing it as a problem. 2. Fix the problem (conform). 3. Accept the problem. 4. Stay whiny. I tend to vacillate between 1 and 3 (sigh sadly and order my tea online) but I spend little time engaging in #4 (bitching online about how it's other people's fault).
I'm not even going to look into your specific ideology. With people who say these things I often regret finding out.
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