Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

Five types of movement disruptors

In any radical movement or project, you're eventually going to run into *disruptors* - people who may not necessarily *intend* to sabotage your movement, but you can't say for certain either, and they're certainly having that effect. The exact dynamics vary from case to case, but a common factor among them is that they are often privileged folks who are unwilling to reflect, and often resort to abuser tactics as a defense response when criticized.

They can be difficult to moderate, because many people do not recognize their behaviour as being *overtly* abusive. Nevertheless, it's important to moderate such people, because if left unmoderated, they will destroy your movement from the inside. Crucially, their *original intention* doesn't matter here - if they are unwilling to reflect and change their behaviour, then they will cause damage regardless of whether it is intentional, and that is why moderation is needed.

So let's talk about a few such cases (and one person may exhibit more than one of them!) - this is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully it'll help to recognize these problems early in your movement.

THE GROWTH SEEKER

The growth seeker only seems to care about scale. They'll constantly focus on recruitment, expansion and growth, even if it comes at the expense of everything (and everybody) else. They will rarely stop to ask "can we actually handle this scale yet?", and generally won't have a plan for actually *dealing* with the growth - or when they do, their plan won't consider the needs of vulnerable and marginalized participants in the movement.

They generally will not recognize the validity of smaller-scale approaches, subprojects, or subgroups, and continuously insist on expanding their scope or group size. They may reject solutions to problems that do not immediately work for everybody everywhere, even if they would materially improve things for some people without downsides for anyone else.

Leaving them unmoderated will cause your movement to blow up; you will get overrun by people who barely understand the goals of your movement, and you will not have the capacity to deal with that. The growth seeker, if they refuse to accept that growth is not everything, should be removed from your community.

THE BUMBLER

They frequently end up saying harmful things or taking harmful actions, and don't seem to quite understand why they're harmful... but they also never seem very interested in learning about it, either - instead choosing to insist that "that wasn't their intention" and "they didn't mean it that way". They might argue that they can't be expected to know this because of their background.

They might superficially apologize, but show no real understanding of the problem, and likely reoffend soon after in a slightly different way - with a slightly different comment, harming a slightly different group of people, and so on. They're usually privileged (cis, white, men, etc.) and don't really recognize that privilege; often subscribing to a view that "everybody is equal" as if it's already established fact. Considering themselves "racially color-blind" is a variation on this theme.

Leaving them untouched in your movement will lead to marginalized folks burning out from the constant harm; and the bumbler will likely become angry if you keep subtly calling out their behaviour. If a direct confrontation on the subject doesn't help to change their behaviour, you should remove them from your community.

An "apology" that ends with an accusation is not an apology

Why does it always go the same way?

A bunch of people carefully build up a community or project with sustainable growth through a lot of hard work...

Then someone (generally not part of that group) gets impatient, declares that "it will never work this way", starts adding and inviting everything that people don't want into the community to "grow faster"

... and in the process wrecks the whole thing, and then usually the next step is for people to loudly declare "see, that one guy was right after all, it didn't work", and zero thought is given to how "that one guy" actually *caused* it to fail, and instead the original group is blamed, the people who put in all the hard work

I am so, so tired of this dynamic

This subtoot was about the Universeodon admin, of course, but something tells me that it's a bit of an evergreen among mediocre scalability bros