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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
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AskACanadian
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A place to ask Canadians questions and get answers. The most obvious questions would be about Canada, but you can ask about pretty much anything; news, current events, society, etc
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I think you might want to distinguish between rules and bureaucracy.
Often, rules/laws become excessively vague to allow inconsistent enforcement. Bureaucracy becomes byzantine to prevent easily changing the results of the initial enforcement action.
I think a more realistic example would be:
Written rule: no bigotry.
Appeals process: message the appeals mod (not listed) on Friday the 13th under a full moon on a good day and include your face scan, ID and credit card number.
The rule itself seems perfectly innocent and good, even, but is intentionally extremely vague, allowing power to arbitrarily decide what constitutes "bigotry". Questioning that decision is also, technically, possible.
Yes but the phenomena I am specifically trying to underline is the way in which a community of conversations can be silenced by simply applying overly restrictive categorization "THIS isn't the place for THAT" type moderation rules to communities.
This both makes it so that people who hold a view that is in conflict with the architects (not necessarily the majority) are forced to attempt to create new alternative communities and try to get them off the ground and it also allows narratives to be silenced through selective moderation according to a byzantine set of rules that you are pretty much always breaking (and nobody cares 99% of the time).
The censorship is spatial, it is never complete, it is like being told by your parents to ask the other parent for permission in an endless ping pong that doesn't ever provide a space for a conversation to happen while simultaneously leaving you nowhere specific to point your finger and blame.
This is a very similar phenomena to society making so many things illegal that the average person can be assumed to be breaking the law by law enforcement and thus law enforcement is able to enact biased policing policies under the guise of unbiased enforcement of byzantine and impossible rulesystems....
...which again is precisely why absurdist theater and literature plays so much with these patterns and motifs as a form of wholistic resistance.
edit To be clear I am not arguing that "this isn't the place for that" isn't needed to some healthy degree, but people don't think about what happens when you don't monitor the growth of that tendency like how in Jurassic Park they assumed the dinosaurs couldn't reproduce so why have the capacity to count any more than they started with...? It is dangerous in a way people assume is benign.
Lemmy.world I am afraid is a great example of this.
That works in real life, but not on the internet. Too many artists that will in fact read the rules in their entirety. That's why they keep them vague.