As a Contrapoints fan, I think she has a point (as usual, it's pretty complex), but I don't think it means the open letter was any stronger.

I would say more there is a social instinct to scrum against a perceived Bad Person, which the internet strengthens. It can be used justly or unjustly, on various principles (harm, propriety, hierarchy), and directed upward or downward. It's not at all new: I remember reportage about this more than 10 years on the Chinese internet against people who had behaved badly on camera; going further back, the mass cancellation of Atlantic subscriptions in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's allegations against Lord Byron in its pages. So yeah, it can sometimes get concerning even when it comes from progressive people and in progressive clothes. (I think Natilo has talked about it happening more informally offline in social groups.)

I'm not sure that when it goes sour, there's anything in particular in progressive culture that makes it worse or less flexible. Moral outrage is a strong motivator no matter what flavor those morals take - see the Dixie Chicks. The internet certainly makes the consequences worse.

The Harper's letter couched everything vaguely so signers could think of it as referring to whatever egregious thing they had come across. But the letter's initiators have in fact encouraged the same kinds of campaigns against people they see as going against them. So I think it's still correct to say that their main objection in context was that the playing field has been leveled somewhat, they are no longer insulated by their positions in the same way.

And there is still a need to figure out how these campaigns can be made more grounded and less prone to jump from "worth criticizing" to "cancelled", but without devaluing the benefit that they can bring.

And if you change enough factors in how and why the scrum happens, you can bring it around to the 80's chain faxes about Procter & Gamble being overtly Satanist. So we're talking about a wide range of societal phenomena.

Lord Byron was kind of a shit though, right? I don't remember exactly why.

There are some layers that need to be distinguished. There's the completely inane Twitter culture of going to maximum outrage on minimal evidence. There's how it leaks into the real world (pick your example of a firing/resignation that seems pretty flimsy), and there's what I notice in my own workplace (which is super woke; in some ways good, in some ways not) where folks are very reluctant to push back on some of the...excesses of wokeness. Maybe because the last affects me personally, it seems like the more widespread and pernicious, because it usually passes in silence among sympatico people, whereas the other examples get plenty of vocal disagreement.

I don't agree with all of this, but the notion of this kind of leftism as a guild is a really interesting way to think about it, particularly the bit about how, unlike other guilds, there's an implicit claim that every job should belong to this one.

I hear you about the general social instinct, but I really do think there's something new, or newish, or that's grown more intense, and that's particular to the left (the right is generally worse and crazier on everything, including on destroying people's careers for stepping out of line, and always has been, but the particular style of interaction I'm talking about that feels new to me is more of a left thing.) The Harpers letter completely failed to identify this particular thing, and had all sorts of problems, so I don't think it did anyone any good.

5 to 1.

Thanks for posting this. I was also reading that CrookedTimber thread and found the Contrapoints essay interesting -- and I posted a couple of comments in that thread trying to work though why I believed both (1) the Harper's letter is useless and (2) that the contrapoints essays is a much better starting point for a worthwhile conversation -- in part because it _doesn't_ try to frame the issue in terms of free speech; which I think is an unhelpful way to approach the issue.

Maybe because the last affects me personally, it seems like the more widespread and pernicious, because it usually passes in silence among sympatico people, whereas the other examples get plenty of vocal disagreement.

This. I find myself not getting into conversations because I can see they're going to go badly and I'm going to make people angry who are basically on my side. This is a new experience for me over the last few years -- god knows I'm not conflict averse generally, but it feels as though arguing over a point of disagreement risks seriously offending people in a way that didn't used to be the case.

I don't agree with all of this, but the notion of this kind of leftism as a guild is a really interesting way to think about it, particularly the bit about how, unlike other guilds, there's an implicit claim that every job should belong to this one.

That piece is interesting, well-written, and deeply aggravating, in that I don't think it offers a very good explanation of what is happening or why it is happening, it just wants (on some level) to trivialize it. It is, perhaps, a demonstration of the wisdom of the analogy ban.

The anti-cancel culture group(s) seem as chock full of charlatans* as Righteous Struggle Session Twitter.

* Clue: Hectoring the rest of us sheep about what rebellious rebelling rebels they are.

I'm not conflict averse generally, but it feels as though arguing over a point of disagreement risks seriously offending people in a way that didn't used to be the case.

I am conflict averse, but I've definitely had that experience as well.

Side note, I'm just reading Adam Gopnick's latest book and it's very satisfying. A sort of polemic in favor of reasonableness.

Do people here regularly interact with people who are to the left of people here? It's really not an issue in my life.

13: yeah, this is me too. (Except I do interact with people significantly to the left on me on both racial justice and immigration issues.) I'm following this thread because I know and trust you guys, and I certainly think LB is a reliable narrator, but what's being described is not remotely in my experience. I have zero IRL examples of anyone in my world ever being "too woke" or canceling someone inappropriately, and approximately nine million examples of people not facing consequences (even the most mild of consequences!) for genuinely lousy behavior.

13: yeah, this is me too. (Except I do interact with people significantly to the left on me on both racial justice and immigration issues.) I'm following this thread because I know and trust you guys, and I certainly think LB is a reliable narrator, but what's being described is not remotely in my experience. I have zero IRL examples of anyone in my world ever being "too woke" or canceling someone inappropriately, and approximately nine million examples of people not facing consequences (even the most mild of consequences!) for genuinely lousy behavior.

I guess it depends on how you define "left," but in any colloquial sense, I have to admit the trans anarchists are to my left. Not that folks really talk politics in the work Slack, but they recommend books and such.

I once spent like a week worried that I mis-gendered a barista. But maybe then the next time I went in, he had a nametag with "He/Him/His" on it and I felt that I was unusually perceptive for like a month. Then I stopped going to Starbucks. Then I stopped going anywhere.

-maybe

I googled "Was Lord Byron a shit" and found a Toast page and I've been reading that since.

Anyway, I don't seriously expect I'll ever had to deal with an excess of wokeness and figure ogged probably deserves it for something in the past years.

While there are certainly people who are definitely to my left, the conversations I've found myself avoiding have been with people who probably weren't globally way left of me -- the feeling isn't "I'm sensibly left wing, but those anarcho-hippie trans activists go too far!" It's been people who are within shouting distance of my own politics, where I've got a point of disagreement, or at least not definite agreement, about how bad something they're upset about is, or whether it happened at all.

I'm what the kids call subtweeting here rather than being precise about specific points of disagreement I've avoided fighting over, but things like the Alex Morse story before it got debunked (and on this one I didn't actually interact with anyone I knew I thought was behaving badly, this was just seeing things on Twitter.)Someone who thinks that a politician and academic using his position of power to abuse and sexually exploit students is very bad isn't to my left because of that belief, that's a belief I agree with. But people who reacted to the initial accusations with wanting to nitpick their way through who exactly was saying Alex Morse had done exactly what got hit with a lot of "it's really telling watching who feels the need to defend a powerful man who sexually exploits vulnerable people." And I think the people who responded along those lines were sincere, rather than part of the ratfucking plot, they just sincerely believed that questioning an accusation of abuse of power was a genuinely wrong thing to do.

I have zero IRL examples of anyone in my world ever being "too woke" or canceling someone inappropriately, and approximately nine million examples of people not facing consequences (even the most mild of consequences!) for genuinely lousy behavior.

Yes, I should clarify, that I also don't have an RL examples of anything I'd call "cancel culture" (which I think of as primarily behavior online or by people who are extremely online. I said above that I've had experiences of conversation that feel like they got more fraught than I would have expected for reasons that are adjacent to these topics, but it isn't common -- just a description that I recognize.

Also, I'm resisting the temptation to copy my comments from the CT thread, but I will link to them (and they are not completely worked out, but I'm proud of some of the connections I make). First, second, third, final.

Another example, and here I am genuinely worried that I'm going to offend someone here by bringing this up (and if I am offending someone, please talk me through why you're offended and give me a chance to figure out if I need to apologize.)

There's this terrific knitting website, Ravelry.com founded and run by a married couple, one of whom is a trans woman, Cassidy; it's one of those weird things that started as almost a little hobby for the founders and was so useful and well run that it got huge. They just did a total redesign of the site this spring.

After the redesign, some people said that it gave them migraines/seizures, and asked Ravelry to do something about it. They were unhappy with Cassidy's reaction, and she's now no longer speaking publicly on behalf of the site, and people are organizing a boycott of the site on twitter: the hashtag is #ravelryaccessibility.

And I believe websites should be accessible, and that people asking for accessibility should be treated respectfully. But... it's a perfectly ordinary looking website. I'm not saying it couldn't give you a migraine, I don't know what gives people migraines. But if that gives you a migraine, I can't see how you could use the internet at all. Descriptions of what the problem with it is are really vague -- overly high contrast somehow?

I don't think of people who care about accessibility as way out to my left -- that's an issue where I think I generally agree with the activist types, I just don't pay as much attention as I should. But this seems to be a situation where people are bullshitting about accessibility in the service of some beef they have with Ravelry that I don't understand, and because what they're saying is framed as disability activism they can respond to having the validity of their complaints questioned with indignant hostility.

See, that's the kind of thing I would never hear about except through somebody here.

If you'd just learn to knit, you'd be exposed to all the interesting politics.

I did learn to knit, just poorly. I made a square of knitted stuff, but legally you can't call it a potholder because it required the needles to stay together.

I have to admit the trans anarchists are to my left.

Really? The trans anarchists in my town are on the right.

Progressivism turning into a loyalty-based clique in SF. Hopefully this isn't a vision of the future, but SF is rarely representative of anything.

Rich old people are like that.

For another example where it's not clear to me who's on whose left, my neighborhood is being rezoned in a way that will allow housing, some but not all of which will be affordable, to be built on some currently industrial parcels. Activists who you could call anti-gentrification or you could call NIMBY have sued to stop the rezoning, they won at the trial level and just lost their first-level appeal.

I've got a neighbor who I like quite a lot, who's very politically involved in the anti-rezoning movement. I'd love to talk through this with her, because while I disagree with her I mostly don't understand why she thinks what she does, but I can't without offending her: my not accepting that building more housing in the neighborhood is definitely going to lead to the displacement of vulnerable tenants without an explanation of how the causality works comes off to her as my wanting to clear poor people out of the neighborhood, and the conversation is impossibly tense before it goes anywhere. So we don't talk about it.

I feel kind of bad about being entertained, in the moment, by the Justine Sacco thing.

And anecdote by anecdote, this is all "Sure, people are unreasonable sometimes, what do you expect?" The subjective judgment call is whether there's something that's changed about the expectations of how good-willed at-least-kinda-left-wing people talk to each other in the last five years or so that makes it systematically easier to be unreasonable in some kind of ways, and systematically harder to push back against it. I think that's happened to some extent, but god knows I can't prove it.

27: Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

3, and partially 1 also: "History is littered with the canceled corpses of the people who have tried to cancel Lord Byron"

https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/1193010593482956801

3. "Mad, bad and dangerous to know."

Byron was the template for the worst kind of 70s rock star. Also a great poet and a useful idiot for the Greek independence movement.

Wouldn't it be nice if people were easy to categorise.

35: I am really not sure that Byron was a great poet. Or, rather, he was a great poet who did not actually write any great poetry.

I like Don Juan a lot. More since I found out how "Juan" is pronounced and the scansion started working better.

32: It's definitely a case of "how many individual instances do you need before you can call it a pattern?" situation. I'm on team "yes this is definitely a real thing" and am glad that more people are openly talking about it now.

It's largely a twitter thing, but that matters because journalists are the world's worst twitter addicts.

the hashtag is #ravelryaccessibility

This is such a great example. From website redesign to enemy of the people in...one step. If I were going for the cynical take, it would be that these accusations have a lot of power, and people just can't resist wielding that power. You give everyone guns, some folks are going to use them when they shouldn't.

Hasn't that kind of fighting always been a stereotype applied to activists on the left? Judean People's Front vs. People's Front of Judea, Bolshevik vs. Menshevik, etc.

Hasn't that kind of fighting always been a stereotype applied to activists on the left?

Of course, but social media has given it a lot more reach than it used to have.

You give everyone guns, some folks are going to use them when they shouldn't.

Right. Every set of social mores can potentially be exploited by bad actors. I think part of what's happening now is that the emerging social codes are so new that no immune system against this kind of exploitation exists yet. And so you get crazy stories of weirdos who are able to cause outsized amounts of damage and occasionally blow up whole communities.

Here is an especially fun example.

It has been, and that makes it hard to talk about whether there's anything new or more going on. Unreasonable people have always been unreasonable, sure. What feels different to me is that, I think maybe as a result of systematic pushback against faux-reasonable right wing trolling (which is something that should be pushed back against! That pushback is fundamentally good, but I think it's maybe had bad side effects), genuinely mostly reasonable people have become much less likely to point out when something unreasonable is happening, and less likely to support people who do point out when something unreasonable is happening.

Maybe Knitters are especially fractious? My neighborhood used to have two yarn stores which everyone I knew called "the nice one" and "the mean one." The mean one closed years ago and the nice one more recently.

I'm getting a whiff of something Shakesville about this Ravelry dust-up

I remember vaguely that there was a Shakesville imbroglio, but not anything about it. Remind me of why it seems similar to you?

Yeah it feels like there's something going on.

I wonder if some of the vitriol comes from the powerlessness of the response. For all that cancel culture is a huge thing on social media, it has less effect "IRL". I'm thinking here of academic cancel culture where there have been a few high profile cancellings but any student is likely to interact with at least one unwoke prof in their undergrad career. Who have suffered nothing.

There's a whole thing in ornithology now about renaming species who were named after sexists, racists, and/or colonizers. One species was renamed (now the Thick-billed Longspur after being named after a confederate general). The AOU(?) meeting notes have a lot of negative comments, Instagram and Twitter are pissed, and none of those guys care or are on social media. The only ones getting hurt are the social media workers at AOU, Wilson's, SCO etc.

So much to say on this, but I'll limit myself to the obvious observation that the structure of social media fuels most of the problem with canceling. It encourages all of the worst instincts of mobbing, and there's no way to shut it down once it starts. So what might seem reasonable - hey, this website I love now gives me migraines, can we tag the owners and let them know - takes on a life of its own.

Saying "hey, Sacco made a joke in poor taste but the charitable interpretation is that she's making fun of racist white people; let's give her a chance to clarify" doesn't get as many eyeballs as #HasJustineLandedYet.

My suggestion: Thicc Long Spur.

Maybe Knitters are especially fractious?

I doubt it, to be honest - at least if by Knitters you mean people who like knitting.

But it's like "people who own guns" and "Gun Owners". The people who make "I am a Knitter" a big part of their identity may in many cases do it because there isn't much else fun going on in their lives. They may not get out much, for various reasons - possibly including disability or chronic pain, which will make anyone a bit grumpy at best. And the ones who are Extremely Online Knitters will be like that or more so. The vast majority of knitters will just be people who like making socks or sweaters or whatever, and so will the vast majority of Ravelry users. But the Extremely Online Knitters have chronic and intractable medical conditions (notice how much of this is about migraines, and how much the language of disability rights is being used) and not much else to do, so that's where the anger goes.

Plus 47.1.

48: In my heart

Without reading the thread yet, I will say that since I discovered Unfogged in 2005, I've felt that this was one of the very few places on earth where you could have an interesting conversation about the nuances and shortcomings of things on the left, without it calling your purity as a Progressive into question.

Also, extreme opinions spread better on social media. Look at this loon.
https://twitter.com/jemelehill/status/1297633435377270785

This woman writes for the Atlantic. She may not be very intelligent - she probably isn't - but she should still know better than to say: "Been reading Isabel Wilkerson's new book, "Caste," and if you were of the opinion that the United States wasn't nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, how wrong you are."
But the incentives are for her to say things that are stupid and offensive, because that spreads further.

My local experience is much more like Witt's, and online I miss most of these events.

It's hard not to come to the conclusion that ideological purity needs an opponent. When you've got Republicans around, it's easy to stay focused on the real enemy. If you aren't interacting with the real enemy, you maybe redirect that energy inappropriately.

Mature people try not to be such dumb purists about everything. But these are heady times.

The thing that troubles me about this discourse about the discourse, is that at the levels of generality, it's too hard to distinguish between justified and unjustified cancellations. Over the weekend, that kid running for the Kansas legislature got cancelled. OK, sure, it's a symptom of the end of civilization that I know of, and have an opinion about, this episode. On the other hand 'my victims should just get over it; God knows I have' was never going to be acceptable, and that he thought it might be, shows him to be unsuited for public life. Somehow, the ordinary systems for working this out before he won the nomination had failed. Is it because the thing didn't go viral, even withing the district, until he won? If that's true, I can totally get that: you're a victim of some guy who did something some years ago, you get to decide whether you want to raise it now, or maybe wait to see if his immaturity doesn't get him bounced without you having to relive the whole thing. And have a bunch of people who don't know you minimizing what happened to you.

Professionally I have only seen consequences for cut and dried examples of sexual harassment no different from the sexual harassment that was punished 20 years ago. No hysteria of any kind.

Since I'm not part of the red-hot circular firing squad of professional writers or humanities, I only see "cancelling" in the sense of the original cancellation, "Cancel Colbert", which didn't work but I think did lead to people finding it normal to think "Even if the offense is small and isolated, why should he have a right to be wealthy and famous? Someone else should have a turn." So on social media people are constantly updating each other on the status of which science fiction writers or TV showrunners or cookbook authors are "problematic" or "done shady stuff" or tweeted Truly Tasteless Jokes in 2012 or did cultural appropriation. The exceptions are if someone's work is too big/beloved to fail (J.K. Rowling, David Bowie) or do an incredibly good apology (Dan Harmon). Old jokes are also usually forgiven if the person's entire career consists of making jokes.

The difference from the past is that for more people the notion of "separating the artist from the art" is out. The artist is bad, the art is bad. Don't spend money on it. It goes in the garbage. Our identities are as consumers, so people want to do praxis by only consuming content from creators with certain moral qualities. Like when people announce that they are going to try to only read books by women and people of color for a while.

Does this apply to any of the Tara Reade business? I feel like in the mainstream it's widely disbelieved, but I definitely know people online (mostly male, come to think of it, and one male PoC, in fact) who are all about Believe Women and consider attempts to see if the Tara Reade story makes sense to be illegitimate and basically defense-of-rapist material.

54 makes a good point. What feels like the difference to me was that it was pretty easy to find out exactly what was going on in the situation wit the Kansas kid -- judging the primary merits of the situation was available, so you could have an opinion one way or the other based on your own judgment. The situations I don't like are the ones where it's hard to get the details on the original offense, and the real problem is how ungracefully the offender handled it somehow.

I think 23 is better on this topic than the linked article, which describes a phenomenon better labeled as "haters gonna hate." The linked piece is about people who express themselves publicly, and who therefore expose themselves to public praise, opprobrium and abuse. That's not really "cancel culture." That's just people being wrong on the internet. Or people treating other people badly on the Internet. Or people correctly criticizing other people on the internet.

Also: Twitter is a cancer on society. The author in the linked piece seems to want Twitter not to suck. You might as well wish that our president not be an asshole. The actual solution -- to the extent that there is one -- is to get rid of both. That, too, is not about "cancel culture." My motto: Cancel Twitter.

But LB's 23 identifies something real and distinct that I think is reasonably labeled as a byproduct of cancel culture. You might also call this a variant of political correctness. And it's a good thing. We need more of it.

The universal human tendency is to discount problems that we ourselves don't have. LB finds the #ravelryaccessibility thing incomprehensible, but is really, really reluctant to ridicule these concerns. That's good! It's inconvenient to worry about the problems of other people. Too bad!

In the end, hypochondriacs exist, and people are going to create problems where there are none. But a small number of people, LB among them, are moving toward an attitude of giving people the benefit of the doubt even when their problems make no sense to us. More people should do that.

Specifically on the Ravelry thing, do you think there's a real accessibility problem and the abuse the founders of the site are taking for not fixing it is fair, or do you think that even if the problems aren't real, the abuse they're taking is acceptable collateral damage in the interests of bending over backwards to take disability concerns seriously?

To be clear, I am hesitant to say it, because I don't want to minimize genuine disability concerns, but on the Ravelry thing specifically, the complaints seem to me to be in bad faith and to be weaponizing your generally commendable attitude (which I would like to share but don't completely) that all such complaints should be taken seriously without critique or pushback.

58.last: This is all true, but there's worse than hypochondriacs out there - there are people that are simply operating in bad faith for selfish motives. For example, my understanding is that the whole P&G are satanists thing was propagated by Amway (that's what Slacktivist says, and he seems believable) . Is the anti-Ravelry movement really about migraines or is it a plot by a rival knitting site? It's irresponsible not to speculate!

61 Mostly pwned by LB, but if I stopped to preview my comments, I would never post anything and wouldn't that just be the most horrible thing ever?

Yeah, possible motivations for bad faith attacks on Ravelry are out there. Straightforward anti-trans harassment isn't impossible, Cassidy came out/transitioned fairly recently. And there was a flap where they banned explicitly pro-Trump patterns or message-board groups, which could have people out for revenge.

That seems very likely.

do you think there's a real accessibility problem

There are lots of free tools that will scan a site and tell you what the accessibility concerns are. Just note, as you read the results, that almost every site has some violations. At a first pass, I'm inclined to think complaints that any given, not-obviously-insane site design is uniquely prone to causing migraines are bullshit.

Also seizures.

58:

I disagree that more benefit of the doubt is a good idea just now.

Since you mentioned how awful twitter is, you must be aware that people on twitter just shamelessly make shit up all the time. I think if a person is not going to take the (possibly considerable) time to find out what's really going on in a given situation, it's better to just keep quite than to support, even in a minor way, the side that *appears* to be the good guys. In any given instance, the chance that you'll actually be supporting a sociopath is not all that small.

Dear Sir or Madam,

Your recent site redesign is the cause of my erectile dysfunction. In the attached photo, please note that I am viewing your site, and that my member is flaccid.

Thank you in advance for your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Diminishing Returns

'Believe Women' is a great bumper sticker slogan. And describes an appropriate remedy for a whole lot of injustice. Prosecutors are still going to have to prove cases beyond reasonable doubt, and so they're still going to have to seek out and weigh the evidence both pro and con.

I'm not an expert in this sort of thing, and this is basically ex recto, but I wonder if 'they didn't believe her' isn't an overly broad description of at least three several different things: (a) they think it's a fabrication; (b) they think the context is too ambiguous for an arrest or conviction; (c) they think she doesn't matter, because of her caste, the caste of the perpetrator, or some combination of the two. Obviously, in a civilized society (c) is unacceptable. It's not really about belief -- did people really doubt that H Weinstein acted as women said he did? -- so much as systemic misogyny. The bar should be pretty high, it seems to me, for (a). Whether has been treated this way or not, I really don't know, because the anecdotes that come to my mind are more of the nature of (b) than (a).

52: Anyone who doesn't look at the history of Nazi Germany and the history of the United States and conclude that the atrocities of each are easily comparable is deluding themselves. Jemele isn't getting flak for making a dumb or offensive comparison, she's getting flak because people have never fully grappled with what chattel slavery and native extermination really looked like, and/or how the Nazi genocide was effected.

65: Right. It's plausible to think that being on the Internet could be a migraine trigger. It's not particularly plausible that Ravelry is unusual in that regard.

On "cancel culture" more broadly, the only thing that's in any way new is that some institutions are jumping to conclusions and taking ill-considered actions based on perceived or actual pressure from the left, where they used to only do that for pressure from the right.

I agree that personal discussions can be more fraught in our times, but this is a direct result of the contradictions having been heightened and the consequences so dire and inhumane. This will only get worse as crises pile up.

68: Dear Mr. Ogged, thank you for your recent email regarding issues you have encountered while interacting with our website. While we do welcome customer feedback and are constantly looking for ways to better serve our customer base, we believe that perhaps you have misunderstood the reasons we developed bonerkiller.com in the first place.

Dear bonerkiller.com,

My sincerest apologies. My message was intended for killerboner.com.

Begging your pardon,

Ogged

70. There are surely lots of people in denial about US history. That said, the soaring if empty Enlightenment rhetoric from the founding has proven, and remains, useful in the struggle to improve. The rhetoric surrounding the founding of Nazi Germany is widely understood, especially in Germany, as having no redeeming value.

People are free to argue that we are as bad as we've ever been, amd that all progress made in tje last century and a half is just an illusion. Maybe someday this will be tje prevailing virw. It isn't now, so folks espousing it can expect pushback.

Okay - I'm catching up, and will deal with you lot in one, excessively long comment:

59: Specifically on the Ravelry thing, do you think there's a real accessibility problem and the abuse the founders of the site are taking for not fixing it is fair

The key here is that I don't know -- and I took that to be your point also, even though you obviously know a lot more about it than I do. You are uncomfortable giving the benefit of the doubt to people who look like nuts. Me too! The lesson here is the one that you have learned: Don't be dismissive of problems you don't understand. Look at how you broached the topic here:

if I am offending someone, please talk me through why you're offended and give me a chance to figure out if I need to apologize

That's good and correct -- even politically correct. And it places a genuine burden on you -- it's the same burden that folks feel when they have to accommodate the seemingly (to them) irrational feelings of non-binary folks. Boys are boys and girls are girls! How can it be any different? These people are nuts!

So yeah, the Ravelry folks may correctly feel that they are being treated unfairly by irrational folks, but if so, this isn't "cancel culture." It's "Q" or Hillary's murder of Vince Foster or whatever. Marginalized folks aren't immune from irrationality, and the only thing that makes it "cancel culture" is that they are the ones engaged in it. When rightwingers do it, they call it a Wall Street Journal editorial.

Regarding 60, it seems to me that you fear is pushback to your pushback -- of being unfairly accused of insensitivity. Me, I tend not to engage this sort of thing at all for this reason. Part of this is a willingness to listen; part of it is me taking advantage of a collective action problem -- I know other people will supply the necessary pushback. My guess (from a place of no actual knowledge whatsoever) is that the Knitting-American Community will be able to take care of this issue, and that the only people Ravelry will lose are those who hate looking at the web site. (Or, on preview, I see that maybe they will also lose the bigots. That's a problem for non-bigots, but it ain't cancel culture.)

Regarding 61: I'm making a very limited point that is consistent with your view. Amway's (alleged) treatment of P&G sucks, but it ain't cancel culture.

To 67: Since you mentioned how awful twitter is, you must be aware that people on twitter just shamelessly make shit up all the time. Right-o. This is endemic to Twitter (and other social media), and doesn't (as best as I can reckon) tell us anything about "cancel culture."

To 69: I think your "b" is a real thing -- but also that acknowledging "context" in a discussion of sexual assault tends to discount the trauma of victims. This can be difficult to navigate, but in a general sense, I think "society" (whatever that is) has done a surprisingly astute job. People actually understand that Joe Biden's case is different from Aziz Ansari's, who isn't guilty of the same thing as Al Franken, who isn't the monster that Harvey Weinstein is.

45 I can't remember all of the details but something about a tight-knit (har har) community ripping itself to shreds because of the founder's thick-headed behavior.

There's a whole thing in ornithology now about renaming species who were named after sexists, racists, and/or colonizers.

That's pretty mesmerizing. Do they change the Latin names too? Can it possibly be fewer than 75% of species named after people, period?

I'm definitely in favor of renaming, say, Audubon's warbler to something a little more descriptive. According to rules previously established here, Harris's hawks should be renamed after the coolest Harris. Who is the coolest Harris, mineshaft?

Kamala.

76: I'm not meaning to be disagreeable, just to disagree. But can I summarize that comment as:

_The thing you see happening, where new norms of intra-left engagement make it harder to keep unreasonable events from getting out of control, is not actually happening. Where unreasonable things happen, they are unrelated to such new norms._

I can't establish that I'm right (see my 32), this is a subjective impression about fuzzy stuff. But I still do hold that same impression.

76 last -- the Bumper Sticker is intended to move where people draw these lines, by rhetorically erasing them. The lines needed and still need to be moved. Erasing them is nuts, because it ignores the existence of weaponized bad faith -- which is probably going to be more common with famous people, but then I suppose you could ask a family lawyer how often he or she had heard allegations of abusive behavior too weakly supported to credit.
'

78: Not sure about Latin names but I'd guess that yes, they'll be pushed to be changed. I'm not actually sure they can be changed since the nomenclature folks are pretty strict.

Descriptive names are pretty common in birds and English names are 'officialized' so we def have it easier than other taxa. Unfortunately the new descriptive names so far are, honestly, pretty dull - Long-tailed Duck (an older PC change (thank goodness)) and Thick-billed Longspur? How about like Ice Duck and Prairie Longspur or Nunavut Duck and Bluestem Longspur? I mean Black-throated Green Warbler and Black-throated Blue Warbler need new names first so I have no hope.

I don't know anything about Steller, but don't nobody go messing with his jay. (I think the collective name for a flock of then should be a 'galaxy.')

82: It's definitely Ice Duck to me from this point on.

79: I admit that one 5-minute video of Kamala Harris doing a falconry demo with a Harris's hawk would make me very tempted to forgive all her trespasses. I'm only human.

I have pretty much nothing to say to the OP, except to throw this well-circulated Twitter thread on the "culture" part of "cancel culture" into the mix. I agree that using the word "culture" is implying some strong claims about what's going on, though I don't necessarily agree with the whole thread.

I agree with 51. Honestly, the worst thing about discussing progressive politics has always been the people who love to police boundaries, and I like that here you are allowed to basically think out loud about confusing issues.

In general I think that left-wing political discussion has gotten a lot dumber over the last four years. To be fair, the discussion of everything has gotten a lot dumber. QAnon makes me long for the days in which people claimed that leading politicians were secretly lizard people. I think it's because social media naturally leads to everyone being in a bubble. I'm in a bubble of middle-aged progressives who all hate Trump and in all inter-left fights their goal is to keep up with their doctors' advice to keep their blood pressure down. Other people are in bubbles that egg on extremism and inflexible stances. I have a friend who lives in a Bay Area progressive bubble, where if she tries to argue about the practicality of Sanders' Medicare-for-All or something she gets shouted down, and she has to rely on me to let her know that these people aren't the whole world. (She's enthused about Kamala Harris, a fact that she basically has to keep secret if she doesn't want to get yelled at.)

84.3:

The thing is, I've personally seen examples that exactly fit that thread's idea of "culture".

A while back I heard someone use the name X in the following way: "Well, if X is in favor of this, then we know it must be bullshit." And this was said with great conviction, as though X had been a personal enemy of the speaker for years.

Since I was vaguely aware of X and and unaware of what made him so objectionable I asked for clarification from the speaker. After a bit it came out that the speaker had no idea who X was or why he was supposed to be bad. It's just they had heard people in their circles talking this way. After all, people wouldn't be trash talking X without a reason, right?

This seems to be an example of just what that thread was referring to by "culture", and it's not all that uncommon.

The US as worse than Nazi Germany is so stupid. I mean on a evil scale of 1-10 the US is at least a 6 or 7, arguably 8; whereas Nazi Germany goes all the way to 11.

78.last Richard, obvs.

He really wasn't a good Dumbledore. Playing a wizard is how you tell the good British actors from the great ones.

Julie Harris was very good in The Haunting.

89 So sad if this is how he'll be remembered. For shame.

It's better to have been Dumbledore and be outshined by Michael Gambon than never to have been Dumbledore at all.

91: No need to worry about that. JK Rowling has been cancelled. Those movies don't even exist anymore.

Wow, the subthread about Ravelry is upsetting and disappointing.

Disabled people are marginalized and excluded from nearly every subset of every realm of society on a daily basis, despite 30 plus years of laws intended to remedy that. Checking a website redesign for basic accessibility before launching it is simple, cheap, and should be a fundamental, automatic step. The fact that it isn't is insulting and discouraging.

"Just note, as you read the results, that almost every site has some violations. At a first pass, I'm inclined to think complaints that any given, not-obviously-insane site design is uniquely prone to causing migraines are bullshit."

What the actual fuck? Nothing is accessible!!! Therefore how dare you complain that any particular website is inaccessible in a particular way?!?

This blog post, which I found by googling "ravelry accessibility" and reading for 30 seconds, explains what the specific aspects of the redesign are that increased migraine and seizure issues.

https://amberley.blog/2020-07-04-ravelry-an-a11y-case-study/

Disabled people do not spend their time, as a group, trolling the world for false examples of inaccessibility and complaining falsely that something causes them to have migraines or seizures. There are plenty of in situ examples of all these things in the wild. When we find places that are accessible, we use them, and when they redesign themselves (virtually or in realty) to suddenly be inaccessible, we notice.

The Harris subthread reminds me of a proposal a few years ago to deal with any american schools, parks, highways & etc. named for Lee by simply declaring that they are actually named for either Bruce Lee or Christopher Lee. Local referenda would be held to decide which.

94: From your link, this is the description of what about the new site causes problems:

I have seen reports of around eight users experiencing seizures, as well as widespread feedback about the overall design update causing eye strain, migraines and headaches. It seems to be a combination of animation (especially on the homepage / login screen, which is now still), the overall effect of the application of the new brand palette, the thinner font, and usage of pure black text on a pure white background. (The classic design also had pure black text on a pure white background, but the updated palette seems to be exaggerating this effect enormously -- users report that the site appears significantly brighter, and I would agree).

The complaints are animations, something about the color palette, a thinner font, and the same black text on white that the old site had. None of that makes any sense to me as a plausible trigger for migraines or seizures at any level different from websites generally. Is there any reference you could point me at that would explain what about an ordinary looking website makes it unusually harmful?

Part of what's going on is that immediately after the the first complaints were made, an option was added to let users revert to the old look. This was not accepted as solving the problem on any level. If the issue was genuinely about usability of the website, this response makes no sense to me.

I don't believe that disabled people as a group go around making false complaints. But I do believe that it's possible for people to use false complaints of disability in bad faith -- people are going around the country refusing to wear masks because of bullshit claims that they can't for health reasons. It's an area, like almost anything else, where bullshit is possible.

94: Yeah, I was coming to say something similar. I'm not on twitter, but I saw the comments about accessibility on instagram and they were initially coming directly from disabled crafters. I found the redesign twee and visually annoying Strobes and similar light changes (bright light through a ceiling fan, flickering fluorescents) can trigger migraines for me and it's always frustrating to have that pop up unexpectedly, though I'm generally able to close my eyes and hang my head and get away from it. I haven't followed the ravelry redesign in a lot of detail, but the latest official response from the site and specifically from trans coder Cassidy's wife and co-founder was that Cassidy had been sending unauthorized and inappropriate (I think from context in tone rather than harassing in content) messages to critics of the redesign, which presumably also amplified the criticisms.

80.2: You characterize my view of your perspective thusly:

The thing you see happening ... is not actually happening

I am, in fact, agreeing that there is something new here. Formerly voiceless people are now more empowered, and some of them are assholes or morons or delusional. But, as I think the Bible says, the assholes you shall always have with you. The difference these days -- the new norm -- is who gets to be an asshole. As you and any long-time denizen of Unfogged could guess, I have spent a lifetime being an asshole with impunity. Now I have to share that privilege with others.

But there's another problem here, and it's much more important to the point I'm making. If I were inclined to dismiss your view as unjustified or incoherent or imaginary -- if I thought the thing you see happening was not actually happening -- I hope I would shut up about it. If I thought you were making no sense, my first obligation would be to listen long enough to see if we had a basis for a conversation at all -- to, at most, ask nonjudgmental questions.

So your behavior in this thread (and your description of your behavior outside this thread) seems to be exactly what I'd describe as appropriate. This denial on your part is unnecessary:

I'm not meaning to be disagreeable, just to disagree.

78 last. Eddie.

83. Is the Steller of the jay the same as the guy with the sea cow (giant manatee hunted to extinction in the 18th century?)

86 -- but I'm not sure "culture" is the same as in-group/out-group dynamics: to me, that sounds like a person very invested in being part of the in-group and denouncing the out-group, rather than the expression of "a set of customs, beliefs, symbols, & habits associated with a given social group" as such.

"When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my yarn."

And I guess I've been kind of canceled by DSA people from opposite tendencies, which seems to be what happens to the people processing grievances in many chapters and certainly not just mine. My own life and the girls' health needs already had meant that I wasn't going to be particularly involved once my term ended, but it's annoying that this is how it worked out. I think everyone complaining about me would claim to be farther left, but I don't think that's true but also think whatever. I realize this is a kind of stupid comment and also is just going to make people think more bad things about socialists and leftists, but we as an online community have also seen that people self-exile in situations where cancellations/bans/censures don't happen. I'm very sad about some of the communities I've left especially when it was just one person I couldn't tolerate who drove me out, but maybe that's just how it works for me and others have the tenacity to either fight more or tolerate longer. I've been trying to decide whether to dip back in and try again but should probably just buckle down with the life I have even though I'm cut off from pretty much all my friend groups at this point.

If I were inclined to dismiss your view as unjustified or incoherent or imaginary -- if I thought the thing you see happening was not actually happening -- I hope I would shut up about it.

Why? I don't get that reaction at all. If someone is in a conversation that I think has any value at all, saying things that are untrue, why would shutting up about it be a good thing to do?

I don't know anything about Steller

He was the naturalist for Bering. Interesting guy.

And yes, also the sea cow guy.

The complaints are animations, something about the color palette, a thinner font, and the same black text on white that the old site had. None of that makes any sense to me as a plausible trigger for migraines or seizures at any level different from websites generally.

Is there a reason you are unwilling to take other peoples' word for it that those things trigger migraines and seizures, or do you just assume you know more about migraine and seizure triggers than the people who experience them?

I feel confident in your ability to find some of the MANY resources and explanations that are online about what specifically makes websites inaccessible for various groups of people, if you are interested in this topic. If you are more interested in dismissing the expertise of other people telling you about it, I don't think looking up AMA articles or Intro to Web Accessibilty (or whatever you have in mind) is a good use of my time.

Rightwing assholes are using spurious disability claims because they don't want to wear masks because wearing masks has been turned into a political statement by their unbelievably evil leaders. Are you implying that rightwing knitters are infiltrating Ravelry in order to destroy it by complaining about a redesign for some reason?

The blog I linked also included the information that Ravelry prides and advertises itself on being especially inclusive. I think this is ample justification for the fact that people were not satisfied with "oh, whoops I guess, okay fine use the old one". The redesign should have included active thought towards accessibility, and it didn't. The redesign should have made the website better for disabled users, and instead made it worse for at least some. The community that ostensibly is actively inclusive of disabled members completely ignored their existence. "Whatever, I don't see how that could cause problems so they're probably making it up", from people who aren't affected by the issues and don't have other expertise in accessibillty/disability studies, is a pervasive problem.

Wait, at the time they didn't know Alaska was part of North America?!?

"Abled people lie about disabilities all the time to sneak their untrained dogs into restaurants" is true, and infuriating, and does not mean that no service dogs are real. It is not actually hard to tell real service dogs from untrained pets, any more than it is hard to tell people making legitimate complaints about web accessibility from people who (hypothetically, for unknown reasons) lie about websites being inaccessible or about having seizures.

Are you implying that rightwing knitters are infiltrating Ravelry in order to destroy it by complaining about a redesign for some reason?

If true, the reason isn't a mystery. Ravelry banned Trump stuff.

I feel confident in your ability to find some of the MANY resources and explanations that are online about what specifically makes websites inaccessible for various groups of people, if you are interested in this topic.

Seriously, I'm fairly bright, and I got interested in this, and I've been looking for a couple of weeks off and on and I have not found anything on principles of accessible website design that makes this make sense to me. Strobes or flashing lights can cause seizures, yes, but the site didn't have any flashing lights. It is possible there's something out there I could that explains what's wrong with the Ravelry redesign, but a few hours of reading doesn't get me there.

I'm not sure if you've poked around through what's been said about the redesign, or if this thread is the first you've seen it. But it's really peculiar. People are complaining that now the old site, when you change back to it, is subtly different in a way that makes the old site harmful now too.

As an example of something that probably seems unrealistic to you, I have a hard time walking past open-construction fences in bright sunlight. The strong pattern of alternating bright and shadow causes me to become extremely dizzy and neurologists say is a potential seizure trigger. "but how do you live in the world!? There are fences like that everywhere!" Correct. I either face an increased risk of seizure or stay away from those places.

To revisit this "None of that makes any sense to me as a plausible trigger for migraines or seizures at any level different from websites generally."

Websites generally are inaccessible to many people. This increases the impact of a redesign of a previously-more-accessible website. If only one restaurant in town has a ramp, and they redesign the ramp to be 10% steeper, and now 8 people who could get in before can't get in, that is a significant and upsetting turn of events. For one thing, fewer people have access to a public good, but for another thing, everyone is reminded that once again disability access was not even an afterthought. No one remembered that we were part of the group, and no one thought about the impact on people who are already extremely restricted in their ability to participate fully in society.

The new site has animations at all. My understanding is that any moving images on a computer can produce the strobe-y effect (possibly dependent on the computer showing it), so animations are just bad across the board. The details of the animation don't matter very much. The fact that you have to go through the site with an animation to get back to the one that doesn't have one is also bad.

(I see calls from some folks I know with this kind of sensitivity for a browser control to disallow all animations everywhere, but the browser vendors aren't super interested and the way the platform works makes it hard to stop some of them without breaking everything else).

112: Right, they removed the animation from the login screen after the complaints. That doesn't seem to have helped anything. That's a big part of what makes it all seem so odd, that responsiveness to complaints doesn't seem to have helped.

What E. Messily said. That it was ever there at all is evidence that they didn't care enough in the first place. It's a rookie mistake at something they claimed was important. Clearly it wasn't important.

something that's changed about the expectations of how good-willed at-least-kinda-left-wing people talk to each other in the last five years or so that makes it systematically easier to be unreasonable

I'm skipping ahead to write this up while I'm thinking it. What changed is the 2016 Trump election! For two reasons:

1. The new structure is (and I do somewhat believe this) 'if you voted for Trump (loosely affiliated action), you are revealed as a bad person inside (revealed truth of their inner soul) and now I want nothing to do with you'. We learned that in 2017 and it is getting overapplied.

2. Everything's dialed up to 11 because the Indivisible/Resistance playbook right after the election was go local, go hard. (Which I don't disagree with.) Not long after the election, a new strident parent and a teacher at the daycare were thisclose to striking/organizing/filing complaints over the rat problem while the daycare board was all 'but the appointment for the exterminator is next week, couldn't you have given us a week? Or asked us before organizing against us?'. So they're doing that. Looking close to home and pulling every lever. That doesn't entirely explain the prospective ill will before the conversation but people are fired up.

A bonus third reason is that we're (me) coming more to see people as integrated bad people. I used to think, well, dude's a grabber, but his financial plan for the organization could be sound. But it isn't coming out like that, especially after MeToo. One assault is pretty good evidence that there's lots, and being an assaulter seems to correlate pretty well with embezzling, carelessness, general extraction. The Universal Shitty Person rule is turning out to be a pretty good rule.

Those things together could totally lead to what you're describing. I think it is real, and recently learned, and came straight from Trump reaction.

Now I'll go back up and read more.

If you hit the play button, the little dog and sheep-carrying balloons move.

108: The dogs are easy to tell apart because you're in person and see the dog. When it's all imaginary people on the internet I have no idea how you tell the difference. Which is why you generally have to give people the benefit doubt, but then sometimes it gets real weird and trolls can obviously abuse that. Especially on giant social media sites where you don't know who is a troll and who isn't.

Sorry 117 was me.

For one thing, fewer people have access to a public good, but for another thing, everyone is reminded that once again disability access was not even an afterthought. No one remembered that we were part of the group, and no one thought about the impact on people who are already extremely restricted in their ability to participate fully in society.

From Ravelry's public statements, the redesign was intended to enhance accessibility -- in a June 26 blog post they reference improvement in their Google Lighthouse Accessibility audit score. They may have failed in some respects, but it doesn't seem accurate to say that accessibility issues were ignored.

I understand that font shape/contrast do not cause migraines or seizures for you, and that you don't understand why they would cause them in other people. I'm saying, it's problematic that you assume that they don't actually cause these symptoms, even though people who are directly affected by them are telling you otherwise.

Different fonts and different color palettes cause eyes and brains to receive different series of contrasting amounts of light. In some people, this has a similar effect to a strobe light. Some fonts are worse than others. Some color palettes are worse than others. There are ways to mitigate or avoid these factors so that even people who find most websites inaccessible are able to use SOME websites. Ravelry redesigned its website from inaccessible to even more inaccessible. People who were excluded, and their allies, were upset by this- both by being excluded and by the process that led to it which made it obvious that accessibility had not been considered as a factor during the redesign.

Entirely endorse 94. If you are redesigning a site with a million users, getting an accessibility pro to check it in development is not optional, it's fundamental.

I am not and never have been an accessibility expert but basic education is enough for me to know that default animation is a minefield. The fact that when the problems with the new design were pointed out, they put the revert option behind the animated log on screen tells me that they were basically clueless and didn't understand what was going on; wherefore they should have passed the whole project to someone who did. Not to do so was not malicious, but it was culpable.

Did they include any disabled users in the group given the beta? Question expecting the answer, no.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/Seizure_disorders

95: This is van Cleef erasure and I, like the great Col. Douglas Mortimer, will not stand for it.

Stellar also has an eider. The many Stellars led to an amusing misunderstanding for me and my friends once upon a time. The person who thought sea cow was most disappointed.

What I keep on getting stuck on is the unfixability of the problems. The site lets you change the font. It lets you freeze animations. It lets you use the old look. None of this helps. Doesn't it seem as though some of that should help?

If you have a seizure every time you go to the website, you don't have the option of changing the font or freezing the animations or switching to the old look.

If you have a seizure one time when you go to the website, you will not go to the website again unless the website has been fixed so that it will not trigger a seizure.

Requiring people to use an inaccessible website in order to reach an accessible website does not actually provide people with access to any website.

I think 115 gets a lot right. There used to be a clearer rule where you banned Nazis but allowed Republicans, but when it turns out the Republicans are all basically Nazis (which is an opinion I agree with, not disagree with), it gets hard to know what level of disagreement is allowable.

There's a separate issue where we've moved to a position on the left where questioning someone's experience is largely verboten, which is coming up in this Ravelry discussion. On the whole this is a change for the better, but can go horribly wrong in corner cases. It's also an approach that becomes really hard to manage when there's conflicts between people with different experiences, especially when both belong to marginalized groups. An example I'm passingly familiar with which caused a huge problem was navigating issues around autistic boys making girls uncomfortable. Being welcoming to autistic kids and being welcoming to girls are often in tension, and it's a very tricky situation. Sometimes excessive attention really is harassment and you have to take serious action even if disability was a contributing factor, and sometimes there really are misunderstandings around social cues being read differently by those on the autism spectrum. But it's become nearly impossible to discuss or manage that tension without huge blowups, when you have to treat everyone's subjective experience as though it's 100% right (even when those subjective experiences are in conflict).

The restaurant is totally accessible! As soon as you get up the stairs in front, we designed it to be completely wheelchair-friendly.

The animation on the login page has been frozen by default since the complaints started. While there may be other animations on the site, there's nothing I saw between the now-still login page and where you can adjust your settings (immediately after you login). That doesn't seem to have helped.

He really wasn't a good Dumbledore

This is the worst take! Harris was a million times better than Gambon as Dumbledore. If you haven't read the books, maybe Gambon seems more...something? But Gambon utterly fails to capture the sly playfulness of Dumbledore, which is what makes him charming, and what Harris understands. Also, Harris is manifestly literally dying in the second movie (and he's still way better than Gambon).

I great actor wouldn't be dying until the 6th book.

Stupid phone.

Wait, at the time they didn't know Alaska was part of North America?!?

Well, it's not like they had followed the whole coast down. Even after Bering's first voyage they weren't even 100% sure Asia and North America weren't connected.

133: It makes sense, I just hadn't thought to think about it.

1. the animation was a problem and an insult because it was an obvious and well known problem. They fixed the problem. The insult stands.

2. the color palette and font have remained

3. instead of apologizing, listening to the people who were impacted (they are saying they would like the default main page to be the old design, or better, a MORE accessible version of it) and fixing the website, Ravelry is arguing about it and dismissing complaints.

4. Instead of accepting that there are seizure triggers you don't know about, you decided that everyone is complaining for fun and lying about whether or not the problem has been solved.

5. I have literally said everything I have to say about this, mostly more than once, and other people have chimed in to further agree. I am pretty confused that you just keep repeating "but they FIXED it already, why is everyone still upset?" a. they didn't fix all of it b. people are upset that it had to be fixed.

What the actual fuck? Nothing is accessible!!! Therefore how dare you complain that any particular website is inaccessible in a particular way?!?

Thanks for this charitable reading. You're gonna love Twitter.

My teams has spent the past few weeks bringing a site up to spec on accessibility, and I was warning a layperson that if they're moved to test a site, the presence of any warnings doesn't make it ipso facto inaccessible; there are gradations. In fact, there are competing standards, and levels within those standards.

On Ravelry, about which I know nothing, it seems to me that LB's point isn't that websites can't cause seizures, or headaches, or migraines, but that it seems unlikely that a site that doesn't look particularly unusual nevertheless is particularly unusually afflicting. Maybe it is! But then it's also the case that any given site might trigger some number of people. This is not something that can be easily designed against, and (animations aside) doesn't seem like evidence that the site doesn't care about accessibility.

117: Does it really matter if any one person is (hypothetically, again- I do not believe this actually happens in any significant way) lying about being impacted by a lack of accessibility, if the lack of accessibility is well-known and possible to fix?

Can hearing people complain when videos aren't captioned? Can sighted people complain when images aren't described? The only impact I see of people ostensibly pretending to be impacted by inaccessible websites is that more websites are more accessible to more people. I don't understand what nefarious purpose (or negative outcome) someone might have in order to be counted as a "troll" who was engaged in "abuse" of disability access.

When out of all the sites with similar levels of use, the one that gets attacked is the one run by a transwoman and that banned Trump-related content, yes. There's more paid ratfuckers than knitters with that level of photosensitivity.

Twitter is full of disability activists who talk about web accessiblity all the time, and I have learned quite a bit from detailed discussions and personal accounts of people who have disabilities that I don't have. You should try it!

"Other websites are also inaccessible" is not the slam dunk comeback you guys seem to think it is.

I get that the Ravelry website (and others) looks normal and accessible TO YOU. I get that you find it "unlikely" that assorted things you were not aware of can trigger migraines and seizures. I don't get why you are so resistant to the concept that you aren't experts on this matter, that other people are, and that it is possible to design a website that is better than the one Ravelry came up with.

why would shutting up about it be a good thing to do?

By "shutting up" I mean "listening." And I'm prepared to make a strong claim on this: I expend some effort, especially online, to listen to Trump supporters. They know something that I don't.

This thread has taken a turn that was unexpected (to me) with the contributions from Thorn and E. Messily. But I anticipated this possibility in 58, as did LB in 23. From my 58:

The universal human tendency is to discount problems that we ourselves don't have. LB finds the #ravelryaccessibility thing incomprehensible, but is really, really reluctant to ridicule these concerns. That's good!

Regarding Ravelry, about which I am completely ignorant, I will now "shut up" and "listen."

138: That's possible, but I don't see why you think you know it to be a fact. I personally know a lot of photosensitive knitters. People with serious photosensitivity can't spend a lot of time watching television or surfing the internet or playing video games or (sometimes) reading books. Many of them knit instead. There's a community, it's an activity that does not trigger anything (and can be done with any or no amount of light), and it is attractive to people who are unable to access many other types of recreation.

But the tone of the conversations I saw about it before the debunking happened seemed to me to be the sort of thing that bothers me: once the accusation had been made, a lot of assumption that inquiry into the exact particulars of the wrongdoing was by definition in bad faith.

Agreed.

The point that was made a lot recently about "cancel culture"--that it's meaningless because it's almost always aimed at people who don't meaningfully suffer because they're in the position of power/wealth, cf. Ellen Degeneres who is still REALLY RICH--misses something that bothers me a lot.

This is that even if what is ostensibly my side stands no chance of diminishing the status of the person we are railing against, I do think how we act matters, and I don't think the standard issue cancel pile-on, as I've seen it happen, is really excused by "well, Alison Roman is still famous so who cares if people were vicious to her in a way that wasn't necessarily fair and was probably horrible to experience because thousands of people suddenly deciding you're the devil and it's their duty to come up with the most contagiously destructive thing to say about you is scary."

Discourse that has built-in dismissals of any possible rebuttal is not something I'm thrilled to be near, even if the targets are worthy/impervious. It gets so absolutist. One evening I foolishly got into it with people about Ellen Degeneres in particular. I basically said oh hey, she sounds like a very shitty boss but meanwhile can we factor in at all that she nuked a promising career 25 years ago because she understood the vital importance of visibility to the minority she was a member of? The responses were about what you'd guess.

141: I googled that the prevalence of photosensitivity epilepsy is 300 per million and figured I was safe.

Yeah. More of them per capita knit than in the general population because knitting is a more accessible pastime than most of the ones the general population does.

I think more than 100,000 people are paid ratfuckers, broadly speaking.

I think listening to disabled people about accessibility and providing accessible spaces for them is more important than refusing to provide access on the premise that some of the people requesting it don't really need it.

The other thing that Ogged alluded to is that it's not clear to me that even when there are design decisions that are a genuine problem for some people, that there's an unambiguous "more accessible" choice in all or most cases, as opposed to alternatives which are better for some people and worse for others. Taking Ravelry's blog at face value, they did consider and attempt to improve accessibility in the redesign, and they do say that they believe the new site is more accessible to more users than the old.

I'm not clear that any remaining problems with the site (given that the default animation on the login page is gone) have a better-for-everyone fix, rather than being the sort of thing that it makes sense to handle, the way they have, with letting people choose the appearance they want.

Oh hey Barbara Harris was a good Harris. She was Annabelle Andrews' mom in Freaky Friday and is very good on the OCR of the very wtf musical On a Clear Day, You Can See Forever. And she won an Oscar for I think basically one scene in Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?.

Wait maybe she was just nominated....

You are not correct. There are well-established guidelines for creating maximally accessible websites. Ravelry's attempt was inadequate and there are easy fixes that would solve the remaining problems without decreasing accessibility for people with other disabilities. Having a landing page without triggers (and allowing people to opt in to the triggery one, rather than requiring photosensitive people to opt out) is not impossible or weird or problematic or unreasonable.

Only nominated for an Oscar.

I looked because I didn't recognize the name.

150: Can you point me at the guidelines you're talking about? I had read the page you link in 122 and didn't see it as applicable because it talks about flashing or flickering lights and striped patterns, neither of which are part of the site's design -- I hadn't understood that any animated component could produce a flashing effect. But given that there is currently no animation on the login page or the page you get immediately after login, what are the other guidelines the landing page is violating?

LB, here's one tool. Put a URL in there and it'll annotate the page with violations.

The link in 122 includes extensive discussion of colors, contrast, and best practices. The link in 94 ends with a numbered list of remedies.

The site I linked also has some high level principles.

And if you want way more technical and detailed guidelines, here you go.

The link in 94 ends with a numbered list of remedies.

I appreciate you taking a strong position on this, and making clear that accessibility concerns shouldn't be hand-waved away and that site developers should have an organized plan for dealing with them. I'm also aware that it isn't simple and, for example, the company I work for doesn't have enough expertise to address accessibility concerns in an organized way. From that perspective, the number list is not exactly helpful.

1. Roll back to classic, by default, now.
2. Bring in an accessibility professional.
3. Engage with a professional group that can connect you with users with disabilities to do actual user testing and provide audit services.

Good advice, but not something that explains what's actually required.

* About 15 years ago I worked on an accessibility update for a site and it was not easy, and I have not kept up since then.

155: I don't see what in 122 applies to the current Ravelry landing page. It talks about flashing/flickering lights, animations, striped patterns, particularly in bright contrasting colors -- I don't see any of that on the Ravelry page I'm looking at. What am I missing?

The numbered list of remedies in 94 is 1, go back to the old site, 2, hire a consultant, 3, hire one of two named companies to do testing. It doesn't say what's wrong with the current landing page that makes it unambiguously worse than the old site. Again, what am I missing?

When I was a kid my parents explained to me that Democrats are for poor people and minorities, while Republicans are for the rich. It seems like we're having a party-wide debate now about how much to weight the "for poor people" part vs. the "for minorities" part.

Personally I find it annoying when things that would make the world slightly better for a large majority of people get blocked because they'd make the world much worse for a small minority, though of course the small minority has a right to complain.

156, 157: It's interesting, I don't think I looked at that same site before when I was reading around trying to figure out what was going on, but somewhere I saw a very similar, down to I think at least some text was precisely the same, set of principles. And they really don't talk about the kinds of issues that are being raised as issues here. Most of it is focused on making the information on the page accessible to people using text readers, or high enough contrast for people with visual disabilities. The only discussion I see of the kind of sensory issues that are relevant here is an instruction to avoid flashing lights.

Reading that kind of thing is what left me confused in the way I described in 110.

Personally I find it annoying when things that would make the world slightly better for a large majority of people get blocked because they'd make the world much worse for a small minority, though of course the small minority has a right to complain.

Personally I find it annoying when substantial harm to oppressed minorities is seen as less important than minor improvements for a relatively privileged majority. Or, to phrase it another way, when a substantial improvement in access to an extremely disenfranchised minority is seen as less important than avoiding a minor inconvenience for the majority.

At a certain level, these are business decisions. Developer time costs money, and making sites accessible is work. Folks are going to prioritize certain things. You want perfect accessibility scores, check out modern government sites, like the CDC, to pick an example at random. Some people might recall the Dominoes flap a year or two ago where Dominoes basically said, fuck it, we're not going anything for accessibility until there's a legal standard. I'm sympathetic to the motivation for this: if your accessibility standard is "someone says it gives them a headache," that's a road to chaos. There needs to be a national, legal standard, and maybe we say sites that have more than n users, or that fall into certain categories of service, have to meet it or pay a fine.

Yeah, I know the ADA applies to websites, but without a clear set of standards that doesn't mean much.

LB, I don't think you are missing anything. Other than the animation issue that has been fixed, there's no known specific issue. But if there is an issue even if you don't know what is causing it, you can try to fix it. And the animation issue shows that they didn't approach this using best practices in the first place. Of course if you go through with testing, then you can figure out what's actually happening (i.e. whether it's reproducible and fixable, or not). I'm a bit confused about why Messily is insisting that it's clear what edits they should make (the post she linked though long is extremely vague outside of the animation issue), but I don't think it's critical to any of the main points of what they should do moving forward. In particular, a big part of the point is that it's not the users responsibility to do the work to fix the problem.

I don't know specifically what edits they should make. I think they should obviously return to the old site while they figure it out. (That is what I meant by a clear remedy- I'm not a web designer and this is not my area of expertise for accessibility. But what people are requesting is very clear: a return to the classic version as a landing site while they figure out what is going on with the new one.)

At a certain level, these are business decisions.

Yes and, as I say, my experience is that they can potentially take a lot of developer time. However . . . I remember a conversation with a friend (circa '99-00) in which he was saying that it was better to us HTML as a markup language and not assume that you were specifying exactly how it would display (IIRC his example was that the default behavior for the <strong> tag is to display as bold text but, in theory, somebody could set their own browser preferences to display it as purple text, and there wouldn't be anything wrong with that.

That wasn't a practical description of how the web worked, even at that point, but it has continued to evolve further and further in the direction of sites wanting to specify exactly what the browser should do (not just in terms of visual presentation but all of the various scripts for tracking and serving ads). I remember the point in the late 90s in which it was no longer practical to surf the web with images turned off by default. These days the vast majority of sites aren't navigable without javascript.

If companies want to control the user experience they should also be responsible for making it accessible.

[Large companies specifically; small companies should still be able to do whatever they can get away with . . . at least until I retire.]

The current landing site is causing seizures and migraines for some people, who have requested a landing site that is designed not to cause seizures or migraines. They are requesting a different font and a different color scheme because the new font and new color scheme have made the landing page inaccessible to them.

If an organization does not have the expertise to do this in-house, hire someone who does have the expertise. I don't understand why "change it back and then redesign it with the help of professionals" is not helpful advice. I don't know how to design websites. I do know that many people have large amounts of expertise in this area and that they are able to design accessible websites. Accessible websites exist. The old one was better than the new one. The new one could be altered so that it is also better.

Option A: Dismiss the complaints of the community members who are affected and let them decide whether to leave the community or tolerate the risk

Option B: Work with the community members and whatever web design professionals are necessary to ensure that all members of the community are able to access the website safely

Don "Sugarcane" Harris was pretty cool. But I'm leaving it up to you.

What about members of the community who find the new website more accessible than the old? If there's no obvious characteristic of the new website that can be identified as causing the problems (now that the animation is gone) aren't we back to the possibility that it's better for some people and worse for others?

Selling clients on accessibility is tough. When I develop sites I'm constantly having to shoot down bad accessibility ideas. Sometimes the client believes me and sometimes they seem to think I am just being difficult and they decide they want the feature anyway. We end up going 14 rounds on why website text should not be justified.

And nothing gets a mid-level vice-executive muck-a-muck's blood running like animations. I try to keep mine relatively small and subtle, but if you go too far with that your site design gets dinged for being "not dynamic enough."

170: Those people don't have a hashtag, so they're less important.

Those people can opt in to the new look.

(Assuming those people exist. I have not actually seen anyone claim that the new version is more accessible for them.)

On the subject of Harrises, one word: Franco.

Doesn't Richard Harris' turn as the 'duck of death' in Unforgiven earn him some ornithology cred?

By the way, all of you arguing with E are cancelled.

Part of what makes me believe that at least some of the Ravelry complaints are in bad faith is that some of the people complaining of injury from the new site are now also complaining of injury from the old site when they revert to it. That is, they're not limiting the issue causing problems to the one-time switchover back to the old site, using the old site gives them migraines now, although it didn't before the new site was introduced. (There isn't a specific hashtag for this, but it shows up under #ravelryaccessibilty as well.)

Once that's the nature of the complaints, it seems unlikely that reverting the default site is going to resolve the situation at all.

The obvious difference I can see between the old site and the new one is that all of the headings in the new version are in larger, bolder font, with more space between them.

The header/footer bars are also darker, increasing the amount of overall strong dark/light stripes.

Many community members on Twitter are also saying that the classic-version toggle does not actually toggle to the classic version, but to the new version with a "classic" skin on it. They are claiming that this impacts the contrast patterns as well.

High-contrast stripe effects, even when static, are among the very first things discussed in the link in 122.

Many people with severe photosensitiity use their browsers in "dark mode", which they also found were not applying to the new site fully.

I haven't tried it myself, but 178.3 - that the button for "reverting" doesn't actually go back to the old way, but just something maybe styled a bit more that way - would be completely unsurprising. So that adds an element of bad faith on the part of Ravelry themselves - their "go to the old way" is just the Classic Coke spin, not actually the original.

They provided links to the code saying it was the same: https://blog.ravelry.com/a-letter-from-jessica/

If you cannot use the new design right now, Classic Ravelry is still available to you, and you can switch your account to the Classic site through a toggle in your Profile drop-down menu. We have made no changes to Classic Ravelry (which you can verify by comparing the CSS files as they appeared on June 15: part 1 and part 2), and will not be adding new features or making changes to it, so it will remain the familiar site that you are used to.

It could still be an elaborate hoax, but it's pretty elaborate if it is.

Great. In your scenario, using the old site as a landing page both solves the accessibility issues for the genuinely photosensitive users and identifies the liars. "Some people are lying about being impacted by this problem, and the proof is that if we solve the problem they will still complain" is not a good reason not to solve the problem, particularly if you know that some people are actually impacted by the problem.

FWIW, I don't think most people saying the "old version" still causes problems are lying as such. The ones who are Trumpers (which is at least one of the major critics is) probably are, but the rest probably have migraines a lot and spend a lot of time on Ravelry and the causality is difficult to work out. (See also the popularity of snake-oil MLMs with a large swath of the knitting community.)

Sure. And there's a bandwagon to jump on, and being angry about the problems is a socially bonding activity, so there's plausibly some sincere but kind of motivated reasoning leading them to attribute anything they're feeling to wrongdoing on Ravelry's part. They don't have to be lying to be drawing connections that don't exist.

The problems exist, though. There was wrongdoing on Ravelry's part, and it is ongoing.

This whole conversation is a canonical example of what "cancel culture" actually is. Someone (Ravelry, and the leadership, in this particular example) with relative privilege is ignorant and dismissive and (often accidentally, but not always) offensive or oppressive in some way to a marginalized group (photosensitive knitters). The marginalized group objects. Twitter allows the widespread knowledge of the situation. Other members of the marginalized group, and their allies, add support (or "pile on", if you disagree with them). The original offender digs in to their position, insists that the marginalized group is lying or exaggerating or unreasonably upset. A bunch of other relatively privileged people, also ignorant and/or dismissive of the marginalized group and their complaints, pile on (or "demand unfettered conversation") and start whining about Cancel Culture and Free Speech.

What is different in the past few years is that the marginalized groups stopped just sitting back and shutting up and taking what they (we) were given. Instead we announce "that hurt me, please don't do/say that." We would like to be treated as important members of society.

If Some Person accidentally offends someone in a conversation because they were uninformed about some other perspective or movement or community or problem, and then they listen to what the new information is and apologize, and make an effort to be more inclusive in the future, no one even thinks about "cancelling" them. There are a lot of groups of people who have been dismissed and oppressed by The Left for years and are tired of it. They have started pointing out their exclusion when it occurs. The correct response is to recognize the marginalization and try to do better.

But very few people do that. You (LB) are not doing that. You're not treating the complaints of the marginalized group as valid, and your knee-jerk reaction is to believe everything Ravelry says and dismiss the things the complainers are saying. If the Privileged Offender gets defensive and stubborn and insists that they should not have been expected to know about whatever the thing is, and insists that they did not make any mistakes, and insists that the offended people are wrong to be offended, THAT is when the "cancelling" happens. And nobody actually gets cancelled. They just lose the support of whatever group they have insulted and dismissed. People are allowed to complain about it when they are treated as inferior or unimportant or nonexistant. People are allowed to stop supporting groups or individuals who do not treat them (or their friends) well.

Assume that a person is telling the truth about being photosensitive and about the new website triggering seizures or migraines. You don't have to understand the mechanism. Suspend your disbelief and imagine the perspective of this person.

What do you think a correct response to the sudden inaccessibility would be? To quietly stop using Ravelry and find other venues for their craft? To continue using the website even though it causes extreme discomfort? Stop interacting with the community? Find another hobby?

Give them a few months is what I'd do if they were taking some steps in the first direction (such as they seem to be doing with freezing the front page and allowing the revert to old school). Per the link in 94, they have a history of inclusiveness, there are only six people that run the thing, and this is their first redesign in 13 years of existence. They were already under a twitter harassment campaign from the Trump people when this started. None of that is a recipe for taking criticism in a constructive spirit and you give people time to adjust if you trust them from other things.

Oh, well, maybe they'll let me in later, my feelings are definitely not hurt by the fact that I am obviously not considered a significant member of the group. It makes total sense that no one thought about my accessibility needs going into this project- people can't be expected to think about everyone's accessibility needs! I'll just wait and smile and hope for the best. Everyone always works hard to make things accessible as soon as they are informed of a problem, I'm sure I'll be able to use it again soon and I'll be very grateful for the effort because it was really above and beyond! It's so generous and kind when people make things accessible.

That's always worked better for me than Twitter harassment campaigns, thought to be fair, I don't have many followers.

To be clear, I personally was not a member of this community and am not affected by the new website.

However, I have been both preemptively excluded and also suddenly rejected by many groups and organizations because they failed to make their venue or website accessible. Sometimes I make a fuss about it. Sometimes I just move on to something else. But the stance that [taking accessibilty into consideration from the beginning is an unreasonable expectation and disabled people should not get upset when things are inaccessible] is the root of the problem. That's also what Ravelry believes. That's why everyone is still upset about it.

Being completely ignored by people you thought were your community is painful and isolating and happens over and over again to us. Most things are not accessible. Losing an important source of social/financial support because it suddenly becomes inaccessible is awful. Constantly having accessibilty treated like an optional afterthought is dehumanizing.

You (LB) are not doing that

She's just asking for and reading accessibility guidelines to try to understand the issue, because...she's tricky that way?

This whole conversation is a canonical example of what "cancel culture" actually is

Yeah, but maybe not the way you think: because what they're saying is framed as disability activism they can respond to having the validity of their complaints questioned with indignant hostility

The blog post you linked is very nearly content-free when it comes to what Ravelry has actually done wrong.

It seems to be a combination of animation (especially on the homepage / login screen, which is now still), the overall effect of the application of the new brand palette, the thinner font, and usage of pure black text on a pure white background. (The classic design also had pure black text on a pure white background, but the updated palette seems to be exaggerating this effect enormously -- users report that the site appears significantly brighter, and I would agree).

animation: Resolved. Also, there's a browser extension specifically to help epileptics deal with this problem.
the overall effect of the application of the brand palette: This is just hand-waving.
the thinner font: At this moment, as I'm looking at ravelry.com, the font is set to the system font; which is the font the user is looking at all day in the operating system. And any modern browser gives you the option of using your own fonts. Surely people who have their epilepsy triggered by thin fonts know this?
pure black text on a pure white background: This is another setting that's extremely easy to override; some browsers let you pick your own colors, and tools like f.lux can intelligently dim the screen. Something like Stylish lets you override the entire styling of any site. This is a free extension.
the site appears significantly brighter: Turn down the brightness on your monitor? Use f.lux? Use Stylish?

I'm sorry, but this all sounds like bullshit. People who have web-triggered epilepsy are bouncing willy-nilly around the internet without the benefit of any tools that I found in five minutes of googling? This sounds a lot like what I was describing upthread: people using the language of oppression to exert power for its own sake. More charitably (maybe?) it's people with very little power using a lever that gives them just a little bit more. I'm going to concern-troll you now: this website redesign has only the thinnest connection to any real accessibility issues, about which and about the importance of which you know a fuck ton more than I do. I get that you want people to understand how important accessibility is and how often it's not available, but these complaints about this site only make it seem ridiculous.

Now that I've written that out--and this my first real internet argument in many years--I have very different feelings that I used to have when I did this before. I don't want to make your day worse by virtue of having engaged here. You either die a hero or live long enough to become a little bitch, I guess. Love ya, Messily. I'd put it in a big <blink> tag if I could.

I understand that it very much does happen, but I don't think it's fair to leap from what happened in this case to "taking accessibility into consideration from the beginning is an unreasonable expectation" or that they they believe disabled people shouldn't get upset. They have restored the old version and from the twitter thread people are complaining that the old version is giving them migraines when it nobody reported it before the new version came out and they have the code to show the old version hasn't changed. What do you do with that but think that maybe some of the people complaining are trying to destroy you instead of get access?

More charitably (maybe?) it's people with very little power using a lever that gives them just a little bit more.

That doesn't really seem charitable.

Yes, people who have web-triggered seizures and migraines use the internet. They generally are careful about what websites they visit and how long they spend on them. Different people are triggered by different things. Brains are not well understood. A sudden redesign without warning or prior input could easily be an unexpected trigger for some people.

Our fundamental disagreement is that you think the symptoms people are reporting are not real, and that the people are lying or exaggerating in order to stir up trouble. I think that people are experiencing real symptoms, and that the reason they are angry about the situation is that Ravelry (a) did not take the issue into consideration from the beginning and (b) has neither fixed the technical problem nor made the excluded people feel better.

Dismissal and disbelief of disabled people's descriptions of their disabilities happens constantly and overwhelmingly. I'm not surprised that you are unable to give them the benefit of the doubt. Most abled people can't/won't.

I maintain that I'm less of a monster than LB and ogged.

Or at least ogged.

I'm agnostic about the safety of the current website setup and the accessibility of the log-in-choose-old-version process. Maybe people are making up problems, maybe they aren't.

But the overall Hashtag Ravelry Accessibilty to-do is not an example of unjustified "cancel culture". It is an example of an organization ignoring an accessibility issue that is very important to a large number of people, and disabled people complaining about both the accessibility issue that affected them and the fact that they were ignored.

I've also been engaged in multiple extended battles to get several deaf children the services they need as well as an ongoing struggle involving lack of interpreter access for me and the world is especially inaccessible, generally, right now because I can't see anyone's face.
So I feel less friendly about this topic than usual. (Which isn't that friendly, really, but it is friendlER.)

Dismissing disabled peoples' requests for access out of hand is a bad look. Even if this turns out to be a huge hoax (on the part of secret right-wing moles with factitious seizure/migraine havers), Ravelry responded rudely and badly and dismissively in a way that told the disability community we are not a priority on the agenda.

Anyway. I doubt I can say anything else that will change anyone's mind. Carry on with your doubts! Try not to post any memes making fun of people standing up from wheelchairs or using an iphone while blind.

Unfortunately I don't think any of you are monsters. Just regular people with regular attitudes.

LB: Are you sure you wrote 23.1?

EM: Thanks for sharing your perspective.

The dynamic here, it seems to me, is priveleged people who want extra credit points for trying/caring even a little and/or want acknowledgment that they've got some colorable arguments on their side and aren't entirely Bad People vs marginalized people who are Fucking. Over. It. You can't exactly blame the priveleged people for not wanting to be judged/canceled but on the other hand they could just say they're sorry and let it go.

Having established my bona fide a I'll say something in defense of the Bad People: As a software person, pushing an update that you can't fully roll back without forcing people through the wonky new login flow sounds super plausible. It could easily be unfortunate engineering. I'd guess they could fully roll back to the exact old code but badly don't want to, probably for not-entirely-good "tech" reasons.

Out of curiousity, I dug into the Wayback machine to look at the CSS of the initial rollout redesign, the one with the infamous auto-play animations. Of note (I think?) is that there's an appropriate media selector in there for "prefers-reduced-motion" that does indeed quell all the animation if the relevant OS or browser preference is set. That's from day one, AFAICT, not added later. Make of that what you will, but I think it says a couple of things, like:

1. The redesign team *was* thinking about accessibility for people with visual triggers during that process. Did they always make the right design decisions there? Probably not, but I really don't think you can argue that they weren't at least trying. (Masking a default-on animation with an OS setting like that is arguably just following the 'best practices' set by the major browser and toolkit vendors -- including the mozilla page linked above. The setting is called "prefers-reduced-motion" not "prefers-motion", after all. Motion isn't just fluff. It can have usability benefits. Maybe *that's* not the right call either, but it is where the industry is at. FWIW, I design websites, with animation, and *I've* never remembered to include a prefers-reduced-motion selector. The fact these folks did does say something about their commitment to at least take a stab at inclusiveness.)

2. That sort of CSS selector is just one little example of exactly the kind of reasons you'd want to embark on a redesign in the first place, and the reason that Ravelry -- probably quite rightly -- think the new site is overall much more usable and accessible than the old one. Design and accessibility features on the web have come a long way in the past 10 or 15 years, and there are a hundred little features like prefers-reduced-motion that can help make things better on various axes. But a lot of that stuff is going to be difficult or impossible to retrofit onto a hoary old code infrastructure that breaks when you breathe on it wrong. On the other hand, a fresh start is probably going to bring a bunch of accessibility features along for free from the get go. And any oversights are going to be much easier to fix in the cleaner code base -- especially for a small team.

This is also why the calls to "just revert to the old version, dummy" are pretty obviously misguided. It is *eminently* plausible that the new site is indeed at least marginally better on a whole host of accessibility and usability dimensions. You'd have to work pretty hard to convince me otherwise.

For example, the old login page looks pretty painful on phones and tablets. That leaves a whole host of users -- able bodied and otherwise -- with a lot of difficulties on touch devices. Is being able to login more comfortably with an ipad from your wheelchair somehow less of an accessibility issue than being able to change the fonts to avoid migraines?

And of course, those problematically crisp, high contrast letters and layout boxes are likely *better* for some vision-impaired users. Obviously one would hope there's a happy medium to be found there, where low-vision users can find their way around, and optically sensitive ones aren't getting seizures, but the place to experiment and find that balance is in the new code base, not the old one.

Also: If the only evidence that Ravelry's commitment to accessibility for everyone in the community is empty is that a major design rollout featured a couple of oversights, for which workarounds were quickly provided and further fixes are promised, and the only evidence of their bad faith is a dastardly sincere belief that the new site they worked so hard on is kinda better than the old one.... Well, maybe that's not actually evidence of anything at all?

Are you implying that rightwing knitters are infiltrating Ravelry in order to destroy it by complaining about a redesign for some reason?

I mean, the idea that right-wing online nuts might have some sort of grudge against a website run by a left-ish openly trans person (are trans people said to be "out"? Anyway, a trans person who has made their status publicly known, whatever the appropriate term is for that), and which specifically banned pro-Trump material, isn't prima facie ridiculous.
Nor is the idea that right-wing online nuts might make stuff up in order to address such a grudge.

196-197: Y'all can't hold a candle to me in monsterdom.

204: as far as I can tell, the consensus of opinion is that deliberate trolling doesn't exist so long as you yourself are not currently being targeted, in which case it does and is the worst thing in the world. Similarly, everyone is basically aware that spam, phishing, deniable propaganda, all kinds of bad-faith activity is rife, that you can literally buy it as a service for cash and point it at anyone you want, but a lot of people like to deny this very vigorously right up to the point they're the target. This is completely insane, but look at the thread we've just had.

148: Oh hey Barbara Harris was a good Harris. She was Annabelle Andrews' mom in Freaky Friday and is very good on the OCR of the very wtf musical On a Clear Day, You Can See Forever. And she won an Oscar for I think basically one scene in Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?.

Ha. I always thought it was nominated (or maybe won) for basically one scene in Nashville but it turns out that was "nominated for a Golden Globe for basically one scene in Nashville." Also excellent in A Thousand Clowns (and nominated for a Golden Globe for that).

It was trivial to find someone on Twitter who I have every reason to believe is actually affected and not a troll or ratfucker (account over a decade old, mutual with my mutuals, has talked about knitting & Ravelry for years, very non-American) and has been vigorously complaining about this for months. Disability needs need to be taken into account--especially when disabled people are saying they're being harmed. To the extent that ratfuckery is going on, it's sad and I'm sorry the Ravelry folks have to deal with that. They should still fix the actual issues. The existence of ratfuckers don't make disabled people not exist, or count for less. Fixing the actual issues might be difficult because Code Is Hard To Do Right, especially for small, underfunded teams, and I massively empathize with that. I've been there. More generally, making a codebase that isn't accessible accessible is both not fun and necessary.

We're pretty bad at intersectional stuff here, and it's always disappointing when we so clearly draw the limits of who we empathize with.

One can consistently hold that Ravelry acted badly, that some users were badly affected by the redesign, and that an opportunistic Trumper with a grudge (who exists, not hypothetical!) who is currently rallying the knitters is using disability activism in bad faith.

208: For the person you're talking about, can you figure out from what she's said why the option to do a one-time setting change to revert the site so she never needs to see the new site again, even if she logs in and out on the same device, doesn't help her?

That is, a big part of what's throwing me about this is why providing that option doesn't seem to be perceived as helpful at all.

208: I'm not commenting, because I know nothing about the particular situation. I had never heard of Ravelry before this thread.

I'm with moby in not knowing a lot of super lefty people and don't entirely understand the concept of "woke". I'm generally very pro accommodating people with disabilities, but I'm *totally* uninformed on this topic and don't feel competent to comment. Silence here doesn't necessarily mean I don't empathize.

very non-American

Sigh. I would like to argue that this isn't a valid heuristic for assessing credibility, but what could I say?

A heuristic for not being caught up in current American electoral politics, rather than for credibility generally?

This is the person I'm talking about. I don't know her personally but as I said I have reason to believe she's real. (There are a bunch of other people who look very much real based on dates, how they post, etc. but don't pass the is-a-friend-of-friends test, and I'm running out of time to investigate further.) Going through what she's said and linked to, with the caveat that I'm not clear that it's really the old site--which, like, there's a lot of bad (but understandable) ways you can engineer stuff so that it'd be very hard to revert back--she seems to agree with what E. said: it isn't the old site by default. You have to go through an inaccessible zone to get to the settings page so you can then enter the accessible zone. This is mildly harmful in itself; in June she talked about how difficult it was to even fill out a survey saying how bad it was, she had to take frequent breaks to finish it. E. has made analogy to how that wouldn't be accepted as a reasonable accommodation for a physical disability. It's insulting, especially after the long period of not being responded to. It also gives her reason to believe she's not appreciated in that community and she's trying to take her knitting stuff elsewhere--why should she think old-Ravelry will continue to be accessible?

So it has intrinsic issues, but it's compounded by a path-dependency issue of it being at the tail end of a bad response. Furthermore, it seems like they did user testing, were told there were issues, and rolled out with the new version anyway. That's really bad--why did they have to roll out then? Are there some market forces I'm not seeing?

212/213: Yeah, basically what LB said. My prior is that a ratfucker would probably not have strong opinions about Fine Gael, or even know where to put the fadas. It'd be extra effort to create this as a character when you could just make Jane From Maine, so that barrier to entry makes her more believable relative to the alternative hypothesis of her being an American fake.

201: ...on the other hand they could just say they're sorry and let it go.

Sorry for what though? That seems like it's often the tricky part.

I stepped on my cat's tail the other day. She was understandably very *over* that kind of abuse, especially since it was the second time that day. She probably would have liked me to apologize for what was obviously a vicious act of attempted murder. And I couldn't really fault her for that. I sympathized. And yet... the only thing I could -- and did -- sincerely apologize for was accidentally stepping on her. And only for the second time, at that. (Bc the first one wasn't even me.)

I think Ravelry could honestly apologize for, say, making some insufficiently-baked design decisions, not seeking out enough testing feedback before the rollout, and failing to live up to their own aspirations of inclusiveness in this instance. Maybe they already have.

What happens if that apology doesn't match the grievances of the aggrieved, though? Some of the accusations leveled seem much stronger, after all. And I'm not sure you can reasonably ask them to apologize for, say, making statements about inclusiveness they don't believe in (because in all likelihood, those are sincerely held principles), for making their website worse (a subjective opinion that, again, they probably sincerely disagree with), for not caring about people with seizure disorders (a hyperbolic cheap shot), etc.

I think that's more or less the dynamic Contrapoints talks about in her 'Cancel Culture' video too. There are certainly people who've been badly wronged and unfairly burdened. And like just about every human being, she's done some of the wronging, or at least some pouring of salt in old wounds. For which meas should be and are deservedly culpaed. But sometimes there are also other wrongs and hurts, that either weren't hers, weren't wrong, or just weren't. I don't see how you can ask someone to apologize for any of the latter. Certainly not if you want the apology to actually mean something.

Reconciliation, if that is anyone's goal, is hard work. It's certainly not fair when that extra burden is put upon people that are already working pretty hard, but it's not necessarily a burden that can be redistributed either.

214: Okay, reading that she isn't one of the people having trouble with the old site, and she doesn't say anything about the one-time process of having switched back to the old site being onerous for her. As far as I can tell, the availability of the old site fixed her usability problem.

The survey issue, it's hard to tell what's going on. That is, if you're surveying people on "does looking at this page make you feel ill" it seems inevitable that any useful set of answers is going to have some people made to feel ill by the survey.

I think there are two additional issues here that have only been briefly mentioned. First, it sounds as though. Cassidy, one of the founders and the person who recently publicized her transition, sent hostile emails to some of the people who complained. That almost certainly poisoned the atmosphere such that efforts to fix the problem are still going to have an uphill battle restoring trust and community. Ravelry squandered their store of benefit of the doubt, and the fact that they're delaying complaint threats and turning off comments, while it might make sense from their perspective, doesn't help them get that trust back.

Second, while I know LB is familiar with Ravelry, others in this discussion might not know that that knitters and crocheters also use it to sell patterns they've designed, and some of the people complaining about the redesign have been harmed not just by the inaccessibility of a social space (which is itself a real problem), but the inaccessibility of what is essentially their work space. That's a huge issue, especially in the current climate.

I admit that not all of my teaching materials are accessible. I've been trying to use universal design principles when creating new stuff, but it's all basically self-taught and takes a ton of time, so I've prioritized fully meeting the needs of students who request accommodations through our campus disabilities office. The pivot online has been really rough, and last semester I ended up personally printing out all of the web material and driving it to the house of a student with chronic migraines because the disabilities office was as thrown by all the changes as everyone else and couldn't offer a solution.

216: She linked to somebody else describing the process as onerous, saying that that was a great summary of the issues. I admit that that is not her saying as such.

As for the survey issue, not necessarily, since the survey doesn't have to be in the webpage. Just use Survey Monkey or whatever. Unless your survey is to ask you if the survey makes you ill (but if so, presumably you're a mid-century logician and shouldn't be doing accessibility research).

Doesn't the survey have to be "does the survey make you ill" to be any use? If it's limited to "do you have problems with the new site" it wouldn't, but if it's asking questions about what would be an improvement, I don't see how you do that without showing people the possible options.

This seems to be a subtle problem, not something where there's an obvious fix like removing the flashing elements or the OpArt green-on-red striped background, so if there is an option out there that bothers no one, it seems unlikely that there's a way to find it without showing possibilities to people.

That is fair. Given that this was an after-the-fact survey, I assumed the former. What you're suggesting is consistent with the evidence, but I would expect that to be done more in private user testing. But this was damage control, so I dunno.

217: The biggest plus of the pandemic is the massive leveling up of captioning software. I have taught online with videos, and ideally the videos need to be captioned. The problem is that the university's interpretation of ADA (or what ADA says) is that they need to care only about public-facing design. It doesn't apply to classes, which are behind the paywall so to speak, because students can avail themselves of the disability office for accommodations. They've done great work in the past providing ASL translators and transcribers, but of course optimally the course just is accessible for the hard of hearing, Deaf, etc. Trouble is, there is *no* support for faculty doing this. I asked and I was told the office wouldn't help unless I had a student who requested it.

I had my own purchased copy of Camtasia (on my own laptop as my "work" "computer" doesn't have a webcam, mic, and I think is running Windows 8 but I wouldn't know because I will never have enough time for it to boot up.) and doing captions took roughly four times the length of the video.

Best practices nationwide? Um, upload it to YouTube and then edit the autocaptions. But eight hours a week *just on captions* had me seriously thinking that if I did a shitty job in the class and provided no interactive content at all, my life would be a lot easier.

Now our in-house software is captioning me at 95% accuracy with punctuation and capitalization. This is a massive change since April. Machine learning FTW!

Cala, is your in-house software basically a version of Kaltura?

Kaltura it is indeed.

Transcription software in general is now really amazingly good. The biggest thing I have to do is edit the transcript to show who's talking; the text itself is I would say 99% correct in most cases.

Just tried looking at the transcript for my very first recorded class. It's ok, but certainly nothing close to 99% accurate. Most of the errors are little words.

It did seem to me like Kaltura puts up way too little text a given time. It's constantly changing, rather than giving you a whole sentence or two. This means you have to look at the transcription all the time, and don't have a chance to look at the actual slides. Might be less of a problem for subjects that aren't math, i.e. where what the person is saying is more important than what is written on the board, but seems pretty tricky to use for math.

Going way back upthread (bc I'm not engaging with knitting).

41: And so you get crazy stories of weirdos who are able to cause outsized amounts of damage and occasionally blow up whole communities.

Years ago I mentioned that I was a regular at a Pirates blog that had a remarkably healthy commenting section. Far from perfect on any metric, but mostly smart and lively and, while overwhelmingly white and male, possessed of very few of the flaws one would associate with the group "white male sports fans". In particular it had a strict anti-homophobia culture (ie not even kidding-on-the-square was acceptable), and when one member transitioned MtF, they were broadly supported w/o hesitation.

OTOH, there was definitely some sexism, mostly in the form of a picture of a swimsuit model in pirate garb that was posted after team victories and very occasional subthreads about some model or actress or whatever. Gross, but neither endemic nor particularly coarse. Anyway, at one point a couple years ago, during the winter doldrums, an abortion discussion happened. I don't think I was even aware of it at the time, but it was pretty reasonable--certainly not the shitshow you might expect.

One of the few women regulars didn't like it and I guess said something to the moderator. She didn't like his response, so she escalated it to the supervisors (this was an SBNation site, so under the Vox umbrella, but essentially volunteer-run, not professional). Management came down like a ton of bricks, firing all existing moderators, banning commenters who complained, and hiring new staff.

Hilariously, the first guy they hired was a right wing pastor who'd been fired by his congregation (which he inherited from his Bircher dad) and who ended up fired within 2-3 days, with all his posts deleted. Management reappeared to tell the commenters that they were awful and that the banning would continue until morale improved. The next site manager was a Yankees fan. 90% of commenters left, and the site continues in Deadspin-like zombiedom.

I just want to emphasize that I've been participating in online communities for 30 years, almost to the day, and this was one of the 3 best, not measured by mental whateverness, but by decency, towards both community members and IRL outsiders. That Vox people would come in and destroy it over an out-of-character discussion (there was a pretty strict no-politics policy) that wasn't especially problematic... seems indicative of something.

Realistically, a Pirates forum that doesn't suck isn't in the spirit of the franchise.

Heh. It is true that it was tending in that direction due to widespread crankiness (honestly I think it's the reason the abortion subthread even happened).

My boss is a big Pirates fan and I don't get to make fun of them because it's one thing to point out they suck in passing, but setting up a Zoom meeting for it seems mean-spirited.

"The banning would continue until morale improved" reminds me of the whole SE/Monica melt-down from last year. Very roughly SE put in some policies related to trans-inclusivity that were weirdly phrased, discussion on the private moderator-only discussion board over whether writing in a gender neutral way would remain acceptable somehow resulted in a well-loved and not trans-phobic moderator getting banned, which eventually lead to all of the long-time community moderators all being fired. SE has a lot of huge sexism problems and plenty of trans-phobia, but the people fired and banned weren't the problem, and the corporate response was so bizarre and heavy-handed.

What's SE? I'm guessing Stack Exchange, but I could be wrong.

Yes, Stack Exchange.

Stonks!

I was assuming Square-Enix and Monica of contra Brandy fame.

I think, and it's all very confusing (especially because the private moderator board is private), that SE was trying to write a policy where if someone asked you to use a specific pronoun and you conspicuously refused to use that person's pronouns that was against the Code of Conduct. This is perfectly reasonable and good. But the way that they wrote the rule was very confusing and seemed to also ban people from writing in a way that avoids pronouns even if it's inconspicuous and is their regular writing habit, and is in no way targeting trans or non-binary people. (This also lead to lots of really stupid complaints about "mindcrimes" and "positive" and "negative" requirements, that was all kinda stupid, but also what you expect on a big internet site.) But instead of finding a way to clarify the point they were making, they just started banning people and escalated and escalated and basically said anyone even remotely unhappy about all the bannings was toxic and the site would be better without them. Meanwhile, if you ask any question that even touches on gender, sexist trolls from all over the network show up to be terrible, and the SE management doesn't notice or care. So why do they care so much about the phrasing of one part of one rule? It's so weird.

Oh hey Barbara Harris was a good Harris. She was Annabelle Andrews' mom in Freaky Friday

Many years ago I found myself in a hospital room in Las Vegas with a much older roommate, who periodically recited to me, in her smoker's rasp, poems about Elvis in rhyming couplets. The TV was always on, and one day it was playing Freaky Friday. After we'd watched listlessly for a while, the roommate turned to me and observed: "She seems more drunk than young."

(Also I had a moment of wondering how optical character recognition works with musicals; then I figured it out.)

Short story premise?

I read like 50 comment threads on the SE/Monica thing, and I'm still not 100% clear on what happened or why she got fired.

Maybe its a mistake the blogosphere went corporate.

It's been downhill since geocities passed.

238: Which just goes to show that you Walt are part of the problem.

239 What, and deprive us of the likes of Vox?

I just read a couple of pages describing it -- it seems dumb but I think I get it. If I understand what happened, the new rule being proposed was, roughly "no misgendering, use people's correct pronouns." Monica spoke up saying that in order to avoid misgendering people, she's developed a writing style where she naturally avoids using pronouns at all, would that be all right? Management didn't answer and later fired her.

There's a thing where anti-trans people who are uncomfortable with using the right pronouns for someone who's transitioned will dodge pronoun use like that, and if it's conspicuous it can be offensive. Here I'm theorizing, but I bet management thought she was stating an intention to do that, and fired her because they believed she was going to be difficult about trans people. This seems very stupid and hairtrigger to me, but it's a comprehensible thought process.

Zir was in a bad spot.

237: I've thought a lot about writing a memoir about that whole summer of my life. I get stymied by my inability to show any compassion for my past self; the portrait would be so repulsive that no one could make it through more than a page.

Actually, earnest question for everyone: do you know of books where this is done well? That is, someone is writing about having been a complete asshole but there's still some value in reading the story, either because they've genuinely been reformed and see their past selves clearly and draw appropriate lessons from it, or because... they carefully avoid centering the story too much on themselves? The prose is blindingly beautiful? They model self-forgiveness in a compelling way? It's brutal black comedy?

This is mildly on topic for a "cancel culture" thread...

Right 243 is what happened, the whole thing is about the word "conspicuous" being missing and failing to clarify that point. This question and its top answer basically covers how to fix the whole issue. And yet, instead of adding the word conspicuous, SE thought it was better to malign her in the press, escalate to firing multiple employees they thought of as too sympathetic to her, and tell all the regular user base that they're terrible people. All to convince venture capitalists that they were doing something about their reputation of being unwelcoming. The bigger the fight the better the show for the billionaires.

245.1: Before I even got to your 2nd paragraph this reminded me of a passage I just read in Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood's memoir. She's writing about Flannery O'Connor, and she's wondering where the mercy in her stories comes from -- and the answer(if understood correctly) is that the mercy comes from the reader.

247: the hedging parenthesis is supposed to read "if I understood correctly".

The TV was always on, and one day it was playing Freaky Friday. After we'd watched listlessly for a while, the roommate turned to me and observed: "She seems more drunk than young."

Probably accurate for the 2003 remake, too.

242: Vox's podcasts are pretty good, in a way that wouldn't have naturally grown out of a free blogosphere.

Woke Twitter is taking their act live in D.C.

https://twitter.com/KunkleFredrick/status/1298344285079838720

Someone else just sent me the link in 250. Is Stuff White People Like still active? I have a new entry...

White people are broken. Sorry.

251: Yes, everyone's mom and dad and idiot co-worker has seen that on Facebook today.

I'm thinking of quitting Facebook, but all the pictures of my nieces and nephew are there.

Yeah, I have a couple of things/people that almost exclusively use it.

The Pirates thing sounds like a result of the fact that the damage that can be done by something going wrong on a social media site - reputational damage and even physical harm - is far, far greater than the financial value of almost every social media site. They are basically small nuclear reactors. So as soon as something looks like it might blow up, why not pull the plug in an incredibly heavy-handed way?