A blanket 'bigoted artists' rule is ripe for banning based on someone's entire history, like firing James Gunn for bad jokes in old tweets.

Instead I would prefer to ban individual artists based on their art. So I fully support banning Jago comics because all the ones I remember are based on anti LGBTQ+ or sexist stereotypes. Not because they are bigoted, but because their content is. No idea who stonetoss is, but if their content is similar then I would also favor banning them.

No purity tests though.

Either way the community goes on this, I'd really like it if there were a rule that each post needs to include the artist's name in the title. That way, we could have a basis for filtering out artists we don't personally care for. Not saying this should happen instead of any kind of ban on specific artists or content, but rather in addition to.

any rule should be voted on to ban specific artists, and additions to the list should require their own vote. "no hate content" is a simple enough rule to enforce with minimal context but "no history of hate content" is way too broad.

I woke up this morning and there's three Stonetosses back to back in my feed.

If we could go ahead and throw them on the ban list, that would be pretty groovy

I would also vote in that direction.

I get the concept, it's basically the same issues in like Harry Potter or Five nights at freddies. IE a lot of LGBT people like these works, but it's also unquestionable that the profits that the works make, are used to bolster hate against these groups, even if the works themselves are not harmful to them.

So yes I also go with this camp, platforming non-hateful work made by hateful people still supports hateful creators and allows them to amplify the hateful message.

That said this is lemmy. We have the means here. If lemmy world comic strips want an open door "as long as the comics posted themselves aren't hateful it's allowed". Perhaps someone should make a Comic Strips on a different instance, and lemmy users can vote with their feet.

promoting hate is suppose to be TOS, unless you make a nazi platform, they can make thier own instances for it. but then right wing propaganda cant flourish in thier own echo chambers , since they need engagement, cant have that if everyone agrees with you.

Hate should never be tolerated.

I was going to point out that comics like that should already be covered by the rules against discrimination... But reading the sidebar it doesn't look like we have rules like that. We have a full paragraph detailing how an exposed nipple should be tagged, but nothing saying "hey, don't be a homophobic sexist bigot". Probably worth adding something to the rules like:

Discrimination such as homophobia, transphobia, sexism and racism are not welcome here. This applies both in comments and posted comics. Likewise, artists who have a large history of posting discriminatory content such as Stonetoss and Jago are similarly not allowed here.

Nazi bars form by exploiting moderators who are too afraid to say no and actively kick out a culture of hate.

So would we ban posting Dilbert comics because Adams went wacko when he got older? Do we ban artists from the 50s because some of them were racist, even if we're not posting those ones?

I think it makes sense to not allow hateful and bigoted comics, for sure. And that rule would get rid of jago.

Ultimately I agree, I think, but I see a lot of it both ways. On the one hand, I hate that crap and it would be nice to never see it. But I don't even block people I dislike unless they're just trolls - I don't want to bubble myself. On the other hand, this is a federated platform. If people want to, they can run their own community without banned artists, and the people who really value that exposure can just go there periodically. But then, if the community really hates the Jago shit, then it seems like a culture can emerge of just shaming and not upvoting such posts. But on the other hand, the community probably won't attain that level of responsibility long term.

I think there's a lot of bad things and good things that come out of banning specific artists. And I think there was enough debate in your first post that it's not quite accurate for you to say "this is what we want". Although ironically I end up in agreement between you so maybe I'm just wanting unrealistic consensus :)

I feel like we already have the mechanism of downvotes for dealing with bad content. You'll always have artists with generally bad takes, artists with generally good takes but some bad ones, etc... So you're NEVER gonna reach a state where shitty stupid stuff isn't posted. And its not like we're gonna start to discuss banning some unknown random artist based on one comic that contains transphobia or something - it's just not worth the effort and clutter unless its a widespread, frequently posted, prolific artist like Jago. In those cases, we should downvote and move on.

I think what makes it complex for me is:

What I REALLY want is a community that is principled and conscientious enough about what they upvote that we don't need moderators and banlists to caretake the content for us. I want a community that can let a few Jagoposts through in case a good discussion pops up, or people are having fun ragging on it, and that still absolutely crushes these posts under downvotes and eventually organically scares off the kinds of dumbasses who really like it. I prefer this because it limits moderator power scope, it limits community meta debates like this one, and ultimately because a principled and conscientious population is awesome to have. The best communities I've ever been in online are essentially self-moderating. There are always mods or at least admins, but they have very little to do and it's usually bland custodial things (deleting duplicate posts, etc.)

But I understand that in reality, we probably won't have a such a principled and conscientious community, and therefore we probably do need to offload some of that curation responsibility that really should lie on the users, to the moderators - in the form of ban lists.

Ultimately I think I agree with banning artists in a way that is:

1. Not preemptive
2. As determined on an individual basis by community discussion in meta posts like this
3. Limited in scope only to artists whose comics that are actually annoying the community

I'm just disappointed that it means admitting the community cannot effectively self-moderate on a post-by-post basis. But I think as long as it's still up to community discussion what goes on the ban list, that's pretty reasonable since it allows us to only need to think about the provenance and context of an artist every once in awhile rather than on every post. It's really a more efficient way to go about it and makes a more psychologically relaxed experience in general. Kind of like going to an organic grocery store is nice because you no longer need to check every product label for artificial coloring.