Ultimately, I don't believe these things have anything to do with labor. I feel that a significant number of people in these communities just like having a pillory to throw things at. They just couch it in progressive language to make it seem like there's a more noble reason.

Anyway, I guess I'm not going anywhere with this except "online abuse bad," but it's a thing I think about a lot.

The complaints kept coming. Paragraphs upon paragraphs of text sent to this woman for something she'd already been educated on. A lot of it was polite, but lengthy and repetitive. A lot of it was NOT polite. People started DMing her to harass her.

Eventually she deleted the post, which got her kicked out of the group. That was against the rules... you needed to ask admin permission before deleting. Because how dare you delete all that hard work people put into educating you?

Somebody was talking about a project she did with her kids that involved building a teepee in the backyard. It was, admittedly, pretty problematic. But it was the kind of activity my teachers in elementary school would have done thinking they were fostering cultural respect and understanding.

Some people pointed out the problems. She immediately said, oh, I didn't think about it that way, you're right, this is kind of problematic isn't it.

It should have ended there.

But what happens fairly often is that somebody will do or say something that any normal person would think was an honest mistake, but that a chronically online SJW thinks is a horrible sin and that they could not possibly have not known better. And they get completely piled on by people who are "educating" them by treating them like garbage.

There's a particular example I think of, which is catalogued in my brain as "The Teepee Incident."

The stated reasons they don't want things deleted do make sense on paper, they want to prevent people from saying inflammatory shit just delete it after having riled everyone up.

One line I've seen over and over again is essentially that deleting a post after a bunch of people have put in the emotional labor to educate you is bad for some nebulous variety of reasons.

And yeah, I get it, if you write several paragraphs of well-thought-out response to something, it sucks to have that deleted.