#request for comment

I want to know what Americans with no particular relevant expertise should do in order to achieve the policy goals of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. I'm offering a $1,000 bounty (payable directly to you or to a charity of your choice) to whoever provides the analysis on this question that I find most informative in answering this question.

For any given proposed recommended action, I want to know *which* policy goals it will help achieve, *how* it will help achieve them, and *why* it should be expected to do so—bearing in mind that most political interventions do not achieve their intended outcomes, so the burden is on the proponents of any given intervention to explain why it is worthwhile.

The analysis to beat is Chloe Cockburn's from the Open Philanthropy Project (part 1; part 2). If nobody offers an analysis that I find more informative than that one, the bounty will not be awarded. (Note, though, that I'm not expecting anything nearly as long or comprehensive as that document! If you offer one single recommendation, and successfully answer the above questions about it, that's better than a long list of things without a clear bottom line or clear justifications.)

The deadline is Sunday, July 5. I will judge the submissions in my sole discretion. I may additionally award smaller bounties to non-winners who nonetheless end up influencing my thoughts on what should be done, or on how to judge the submissions. Please don't hesitate to submit something just because you don't think it's worth $1,000.

Thank you Witcher Rarepair Friend for an excellent question! You are correct - when you are adding additional tags to your prompts, you can only add tags that were nominated during the tag nomination period. The full tag set is here. This is why it is so important to nominate tags early and often for a fic event that is run through the AO3 platform.

Basically, as a secondary set of APIs, I think Masto servers should be able to report "this is the link preview info for page X," given any arbitrary URL  X. That should be cached. This way, if you trust an instance you're federating with, you can immediately get the link preview info for them. Otherwise, you can ask some large instance that you trust and stampede _them_ instead.

This way you can still federate with people who you suspect might use bad link previews to defame people not on your instance. This is not something anyone explicitly wants to do, but seems likely to happen by accident if you have a policy of federating with small instances by default  -- which Masto does.

Instances that don't want to be stampeded can refuse to publish this service. That being said, the thing they're caching is much smaller than whole web pages and they can probably do everything with a single hit from cache.

Instances who know that they're the caching proxy for a bunch of other instances would ideally use a different user agent that still matches the (.*Mastodon.*) family of regexes: that way, people who intended to block old!Masto also block new!Masto, but people who know the difference can unblock them manually.

Overall, this seems to me like it would prevent stampedes while also having better performance for literally anyone running a Fedi instance. It requires basically no additional work from webmasters. (but unfortunately, significant extra work from Fedi developers)

This is still less efficient than just federating link preview info by default. The real solution is to not federate with people who lie about link previews, and to defederate with them if you find out you were wrong -- I just think it's good to limit harm in the case where people are too lazy to do this, because Masto is designed in a way that inherently leads to transitive trust-style problems.

[Note: I am difficult to trigger, have never had cause to avoid triggers, and have never participated in a discussion group that used trigger warnings. This is purely theoretical.]

I’ve been thinking about how trigger warnings can be incorporated into irl discussion groups without seriously limiting the range of discussion or the ability of various people to participate. I don’t really have any experience in this area, but here are the norms that came to mind when I considered the problem.

Firstly, the members of the discussion group are polled to find out if any of them experience serious distress upon hearing about certain topics. The group compiles a list of these topics (without names of participants attached).

The day (or a few days) before the actual meeting is held, an email is circulated about the topic. For example: “Tomorrow we will be discussing limits to development in Sub-Saharan Africa. We will be considering subproblems such as...”. This email also lists which triggers the conversation will likely involve (eg: war & contagious disease) and which ones it won’t (eg: rape, suicide, spiders, & involuntary confinement).

Anyone who wants to avoid discussions about war and germs can do so. If they generally hate talking about those things, but feel up to it that day, they can still show up. No one ever has to say why they didn’t show up to a given meeting.

Assuming a two hour meeting: for the first hour, everyone discusses the topic as they see fit, but avoids the excluded triggers (in this case: rape, suicide, spiders, & involuntary confinement). After an hour, everyone takes a break for a few minutes. Anyone who wants to leave for any reason can do so. After the break, discussion resumes, but now no one needs to avoid the second set of triggers. Maybe the people who are triggered by rape and involuntary confinement leave during the break, while the ones who are triggered by suicide and spiders decide to stay. It’s wholly up to them.

I think this does a reasonable job of finding a middle ground between restricting conversation too much to be worthwhile and excluding people who can’t function around triggering conversations.

On the one hand, people who are triggered by things tangential to the topic at hand are able to participate without the fear that conversation will accidentally veer in the direction of something they can’t deal with. On the other, if anyone finds during the first hour that, yes, rape is relevant and important to this discussion, they can bring it up during the second half. Conversation space can be fully explored. Additionally, it acknowledges that some triggers are unavoidable if you want a constructive discussion of certain topics. The example topic couldn’t be discussed without mentioning war, so anyone who was triggered by that had the option of not showing up to begin with.

There are other features of this I also find important. Firstly, it’s explicit. No one has to wonder during the discussion whether mentioning a deadly accident will trigger someone and then second-guess doing so: The list is right there. Secondly, it’s confidential. Someone who has extreme arachnophobia might be embarrassed to admit it, because it’s not considered “real” or “serious”. Without the option of confidentiality, they might decide to just not join the discussion group, losing valuable perspectives. Finally, it’s tailored to the needs of the group. If no one is triggered by deadly accidents, they don’t go on the list. If someone is triggered by involuntary confinement, it does go on the list. The group warns for exactly what its members need.