So, I want to preface this by saying I do not write well. My thoughts rarely form paragraphs with beginnings, middles, and ends. I get off on tangents and forget my original point. I’m sure a lot of others here are similar, but this disclaimer is more for the neurotypical readers whom I am hoping will see this.
The tone of this entire post is honest and earnest unless otherwise specified.
Tone indicators get a lot of flak for being “cringe” in some circles, and I’m sad to have seen that that mindset apparently pervades here. Trying to put myself in the shoes of a NT person who does not understand the struggles of ND people, I can see why they might have that perspective. Tone indicators can seem unnecessary to someone who implicitly understands tone, and who assumes that it’s a skill everyone has.
But not everyone has the skill to recognize and understand tone. In verbal dialogue some ND people may have had enough experience to build up a reference of what sarcastic or joking voices sound like and file those away for later use, but online there are no such indicators – a problem that tone indicators attempt to fix.
So while to a NT reader a joke comment about, I don’t know, literally wanting to fuck my mom or something, might be immediately obvious, because “of course” a person online from another continent who has never seen her before probably doesn’t want to fuck my mom, this is not always evident to ND people. Neurodiversity is classified as a disability (and while I acknowledge the push back against this idea as inherently ableist by many in the community, bear with me,) and for many of us, one of the abilities we may lack is one which NT people take for granted: the ability to parse tone. To some of us, that flippant joke someone made might be confusing, or hurtful.
And while I don’t expect everyone to indicate tone online all of the time, what I do think should be expected from users on Hexbear, as a space that strives to be inclusive and uplifting to marginalized groups, is that if they are asked to clarify tone, they should. And I’d like to thank the user who made a thread on that topic. This should be the absolute bare minimum.
Now, some of our NT readers might be thinking “but I put a meme face image after my statement! It should make it obvious its tone!” But I don’t think that is sufficient to indicate tone. Tone indicators are numerous, but the list is somewhat short. I know of: sarcastic, joking, half joking, honest, confused, and a few others. This is not much to memorize, and their meanings are easily looked up. Meme images… not so much. There are hundreds here on Hexbear, many of which have no documentation like “mainstream”^★ memes do, so their meanings can be even more confusing than your jokes.
So try to put yourself in the shoes of a ND person who has trouble with tone, especially online. They are trying to understand your joke and get in on the fun. They want to be a part of the group. They’re having a little trouble understanding, so they ask you to clarify. Do you want to be inclusive and simply clarify your tone, or do you want to continue to uphold the paradigm of ND exclusion that pervades other spaces?
Speaking of exclusionary spaces, this leads me to point two. Intent.
I have already had an experience here, and seen many other such moments, where someone immediately jumped to hostility when they didn’t understand another user. I understand that that’s just the way online life is now, but again, shouldn’t we be trying to be better?
When you read a comment here and immediately jump to the conclusion that a user is bad-faith and start to dress them down, consider that on the other side of the screen might be a ND person with a different communication style than you, or a user whose native language isn’t the same as yours^†, who may have not communicated their thoughts in a way that best connected with you but who certainly doesn’t deserve to be immediately attacked over it.
ND people already have to put up with so much of this kind of thing in real life. It’s exhausting to be excluded or attacked for using language slightly differently, or for trying but failing to mimic our peers, or for talking about things in a “round about way,” et cetera. When it happens in a space like this that purports to be inclusive, it’s especially harmful.
Does it really harm you so much to ask a clarifying question to determine if you understood correctly before jumping to attacking a user’s message? There’s a good chance that there was a communication failure between you, and if so then 1) you stand to harm the other person needlessly by attacking them and 2) you waste energy breaking down an idea that was not even real – it was merely your mistaken interpretation of what the idea was.
And speaking of attacks, let’s move on to point three: slurs.
Ableism is so normalized in society that the vast majority of our personal attacks attempt to degrade someone’s intelligence or sanity in some way. Here’s a non-exhaustive list off the top of my head:
ableist terms
idiot, dumb, stupid, insane, crazy, lunatic, loon(e)y, nuts, “are you blind??”, “deaf to [an idea]”, lame
Plenty of the terms on this list are alive and well on Hexbear. Please consider how you make ND comrades feel when you use these terms as attacks – not just on ND comrades, but also on takes you think are bad in the Dunk Tank. These are terms a lot of us have been called all our lives. They carry a lot of pain. And by continuing to use them in the way you are, you’re upholding normalized ableism by equating neurodiversity with badness.
They’re not even good insults, very low effort. Liberals don’t inherently lack intelligence – and even if they did this wouldn’t be what makes their takes bad. They are willfully ignorant, and it’s the willfulness that makes it especially bad. People who are just ignorant have a chance to learn.
Speaking of ignorance and chances to learn, neurotypicals: this space is not actually as inclusive as you might think it is. I am calling you out on it. What are you going to do to get better?
★ Honestly, the assumption that everyone from everywhere in the world is going to understand your screenshots from western television shows kind of strikes me as a sort of western cultural hegemony anyway.
† Oh wow there’s that anglosphere cultural hegemony again
I always got banned on reddit because they always thought I was trolling, and a dozen other obscure forums and discord servers, then I got placed into a group that kept me but then I realized later they also thought I was trolling but they found me funny which caused me to leave.
I often get accused of trolling when I call out ableism or talk about something else that’s very outside of the scope of what the dominant group has had to think about. It’s really painful, I feel for you. :(
I got banned a bunch in reddit for glib call outs of neoliberal horseshit. I never swore, I never called names, they just hated my tone.
Bonus thoughts that got lost in the original composition process:
Tone indicators being used by ND people can be a defense mechanism against being misunderstood, because so often people misunderstand our words and then ridicule or attack us for it, so many of us will go to great lengths to avoid being misunderstood again. I hope you can see how calling that cringe is harmful.
I don’t like the “haha you didn’t spot the le clever bit you must be stupid and bad”
pissing contest some people keep trying to push on the rest of us. Full stop.wtf how did we effort post at the exact same time
Our neurotypes synced up, evidently /j
good post comrade, reads a lot better than my one probably did.
Did you start writing yours at 4 AM too?/j
Nah, I wrote it while having breakfast. My best rants always come to me in the morning when everyone else I know is asleep so there are no distractions.
Serious: I think this would help prevent a lot of arguments in general. The less time hexbears spend misunderstanding one another the better.
I’m not necessarily anti-tone indicators (and I’d certainly not call them cringe) but I feel like they’re often not amazing at actually solving the problems they intend to solve. You can certainly put a /s after something to indicate sarcasm, which might help a little, but knowing that what was said wasn’t meant literally doesn’t necessarily help to know what actually was meant. Sarcasm can have some pretty different intended implications which aren’t conveyed by a single indicator. In the case of /hj it’s even more ambiguous, because something being ‘half a joke’ could mean many different things. It can be that it’s somehow kind of exaggerated but at its core somehow true, that an unspecified part of what was said was a joke, or even that it’s literally true or a genuine statement but presented as a joke or entirely a joke but someone judges it’s funnier to imply part of it isn’t somehow, and probably many more things.
Does it really harm you so much to ask a clarifying question to determine if you understood correctly before jumping to attacking a user’s message?
Certainly not, but I don’t think this is really where the problem lies. If I genuinely don’t understand someone’s message I will ask what they mean and I think most people do so as well. It’s when you think that you know you’ve understood the message and that it’s worth attacking that you attack them. In theory I guess you could do that literally all of the time, but it’s still possible your clarifying question isn’t interpreted as you intended it for many of the same reasons you may have misinterpreted theirs in the first place, and people who are acting in bad faith are unlikely to respond in good faith. It’s also just seems kind of tedious to have to respond to every bad take by basically echoing the bad take back to them to hope they respond and tell me they indeed have this take so I can actually respond to it, and it gives people acting in bad faith a lot of breathing room.
If I genuinely don’t understand someone’s message I will ask what they mean
Best way forward as long as people answer honestly imo
(I'm still listening to people's takes and figuring out what I think, if your feelings differ from mine PLEASE feel free to share with me)Even NT people do not get every joke. I think instead of requiring all jokes make sense to everyone, which might stifle our humor culture, we should normalize asking for clarification. And users should respond with patience and warmth when asked, and that patience and warmth should come from a place of understanding and compassion toward ND people. We might even normalize something analogous to captions for the blind, where in the comments under a bit post there might be a spoilered comment explaining the bit for people who are confused.
speaking of which, maybe we should also have captions for the blind
but requiring posters to write their own captions might result in fewer posts, so maybe instead there should be volunteers, or just a site culture of commenters seeing “oh, no one has written a caption yet, I’ll do it this time” and adding one.
Are tone indicators just stuff like /j for joke, or /s for sarcasm?
That’s literally just new punctuation marks made on the Internet. People think that’s cringe? Do these people also think exclamation and question marks are cringe? Because if you think that about the former, you have to think that about the latter two. They also indicate tone.
i think it would be impossible to get people to use them and I don’t want to learn or have to remember them myself despite probably being someone such a scheme would be intended to benefit.
i also find them distracting, like poorly timed subtitles.
I’ve seem some comment threads in the past where there some heat about using an elipsis (…) being cringe or boomer or something. So, while kinda rare, it has happened.
I will try my best to consider any assumed tone in my posts.
Honestly question, how do I say
spoiler
that someone is stupid?
All words I know seem to be ableist.
deleted by creator
Thanks comrade!
I’ve found that excising a word from my vocabulary rarely involves finding a drop-in replacement that will always work. To take an example that’s seen as more extreme,
discussion of ableist slurs
the r word has gone from being colloquially acceptable to being seen as a slur over the past 20 years. Most people I know took one word that was ableist and replaced it with other ableist language that is just perceived as less aggressive.
The problem there is that you’re not changing the underlying thought patterns.
When you’re about to call someone an ableist word, stop yourself and think, “what actually bothered me about what this person did?” You may find that, without these generic catch-all words that literally mean “similar to a disabled person in a way that I don’t like”, you can’t quite pin it down. The feeling is there. You can feel that you’re annoyed at the behavior. But articulating why you don’t like it is a skill that in many of us has atrophied due to lack of practice.
I just call them a Redditor. It gets the message across.
The fundamental problem is that people, by and large, do wish to refer to people being incapable of or having difficulty with arriving at a correct conclusion, with understanding a situation, being unfit for a task or position, or otherwise not competent, within certain contexts, as a bad thing.
There isn’t that much difference between calling something unwise, calling it stupid, or using less accepted language.
I personally largely avoid referring to people with any of this and prefer to refer to actions, statements, or other behaviors, because at least then you’re putting some separation between a bad behavior and someone’s inalienable self. But that’s not really solving the core issue either.
ignorant or foolish
Fool does feel ableist now that I’ve seen the list
Are they incompetent at everything or at a particular thing?
Stupid indicates that they are stupid at everything.
It’s definitely a problem I have especially in daily speech when I have to catch myself. The people I am with wouldn’t mind and that’s not why I don’t want to do it, I’d really like to be able to adjust my language so in the event there is someone who may find it offensive or hurtful, the frequency of such events is as close to zero as possible.
That said I think for people being a jerk, I tend to use physical body parts or excrement. Like poo-face or something. I get that it doesn’t work in more formal situations and it’s a bit childish, I figure no one is going to defend excrement as it is sorta seen as something most people don’t like. I also say the cruder version of butthole for the same reason.
Braindead? The medical roots is that someone’s essentially inanimate so there’s no person to be hurt by the statement I’d think.
No judgement here. Emoticons in general came about because early BBS users on isolated university systems had a lot of trouble assessing tone and intent. Can’t imagine that gets any less complex once you’re dealing with worldwide networks which could hypothetically see users of any lingual background you could name.
The OG’s
:) :( :P :O
I do think this is a pretty good idea. My thoughts a little bit, I guess ‘ahead’ of yours because I’ve been in some communities where this is more normalized, so I want to clarify that it’s not an attempt to disagree with your post. An issue I have had with the way tone indicators are implemented is that it requires people to learn a new language of shortenings whose meaning isn’t very obvious (for instance, (/gen) can be a shortening of both ‘genuine’ and ‘general’). I usually prefer it when people write out the full word to describe what they’re thinking about. I do know this can be impractical, and even still I guess that stuff like /s is pretty ubiquitous so
I guess like I think it’s still kinda fine to use the shortened tone indicators.Something that’s more in line with your original post is that I personally tend to put emojis at the end of my sentence to indicate that I’m not being serious? But of course now that I actually look at my texting habits (and post history here!) to confirm this I don’t exactly do that, soo I guess people could still probably benefit from them.
Also, another thought that I had was that I honestly hadn’t seen a proper critique of ableist slurs/terms that you mentioned in this post, but having read yours I can see that it’s definitely something I should work on.
I want nothing but to support neurodiverse people. As one and speaking as someone surrounded by others in daily life, that struggle isn’t lost on me.
That said, I disagree 100% with the op.
In English, nuance can either be enumerated precisely over dozens of pages of text or in a line with tone.
Taking a line that requires deprecating tone in favor of precise text is opening people up to an entirely new angle of abuse at a time when we’ve been exposed to abuse as an attack very recently.
Even requiring that someone characterize a possibly complex reply as some number of fixed tones isn’t gonna work. People don’t often have a strong grasp on the particular tone they’re using and even if they did there’s nothing compelling them to respond. So having the expectation that someone will go deep on a flippant two line throwaway comment will just act to shut down conversations, since they will either spend hours researching and writing a reply or just not do anything. (but it would be interesting to try just to see if there’s other ways it breaks down)
As for the ablest language the op wants to get rid of, it’s been brought up before and there’s always someone throwing their account on the line to post the single line reply “That’s dumb.” It won’t be me, but when that person appears, consider the perfection of their sentiment in this conversation as opposed to immediately assuming they’re a reactionary.
I didn’t say that we had to do away with tone, though? I’m confused.
with respect, your reply is a perfect, chefs kiss example of what im worried about.
I didn’t intend to suggest you said we had to do away with tone.
I didn’t intend to suggest that there would be these specific consequences if we do away with tone.
I did say that if we expect users to rely on tone secondary to precise language and fulfill requests to specify tone it would lead to abuse and shut down conversations.
the reason i suggest it would lead to abuse is that currently we are federated with other instances whose userbase is primarily redditors. one of the worst traits of redditors is their reliance on precise language and weaponization of it to abuse and harass other people. no one wants to fight on that terrain, so using tone is important to keeping people as safe as possible in their federated interactions.
the reason i suggest it would shut down conversations is that it will. consider what would happen to our fledgling conversation if i hadn’t had the time to explain in greater detail. i usually don’t. most people usually don’t, that’s one of the reasons we use slang, shorthand and tone to convey those ideas.
i said in the DroneRights sister thread that federation is incompatible with safe spaces. that’s not an original thought, it was inspired by someone on another instance lamenting that federation isn’t compatible with their unique culture. that person was right. if part of our site’s culture is being a safe space we can’t reach its’ full potential until we either defederate entirely or impress our values on the rest of the fediverse.
all the points you raise are valid and legitimate and i want to get there with you, but i don’t see how they can be addressed until one of those two outcomes have arrived.
I was surprised by how much of a kneejerk reaction “consider trying to not use ‘minor’ ableist terms” gets on here sometimes. I get it’s hard to drop immediately irl but it shouldn’t be that hard when typing it out. Like you said they are basically useless in conversation anyways. How do you feel about the word cringe itself? A lot of the original cringe comp videos was just making fun of nd people i think, right?
Same thing that happened back in the old days with the transphobia.
Clarifying tone upon request should be a pretty easy thing to do most of the time.
I also think that assuming ill-intent and using that as a license to be a jackass is a pervasive problem on this site and I’d be happy to see that change.
It’s not just an issue of tone. NTs love ambiguity in their statements. This is why in circlejerk communities, they have things like /hj (half-joke?, half-jerk?), where the statement is taken to mean “I may or may not be joking, and that’s for me to know and you to find out.” For NDs who suck at reading tone, every statement functionally has a /hj after it, so for NTs to explicitly end statements with an /hj is to reintroduce the problem that tone indicators attempted to solve.
For this to work, the basic rules of engagement would have to be:
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Any statement without a /s after is taken to be sincere with no exception.
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Any statement with a /s after is taken to be sarcastic or insincere with no exception.
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Any statement has to either be unambiguously sincere or unambiguously sarcastic with no exception.
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/s cannot be used ironically or recursively.
More rules would have to be fleshed out over what extends other sitewide rules would be applied to sarcastic statements as well. For example, most garden variety reactionary statements should be allowed if they’re clearly delineated to be sarcastic, but I don’t want to see sarcastic use of slurs or sarcastic misgendering.
I don’t think NTs would like this since they value ambiguity over clarity from my experience. This is how autistic people get the reputation of “sounding like robots.”
I love ambiguity, and would be unlikely to use tone indicators like /s for that reason. I mean most of my posts are some flavor of irony. I don’t think they’re cringe or anything, just that I wouldn’t be able to express myself in the way that feels the most genuine.
But from what I’m reading above, OP is asking more about tone clarification, where if someone asks in sincerity for someone to clarify their tone then they would do it as a basic courtesy. Which I would, in fact, do as a matter of course. I think that’s both a reasonable accomodation and a straightforwardly comradely thing to do
hell i’m ND and that would be exhausting
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