a postscript to Cohost So White

this is an unstructured post which serves as a bookend to my feelings on Cohost and its whiteness issues. (maybe one day i'll more formally write these feelings up but, functionally, i already did what amounted to a sort of "consulting report" on Cohost's racist outcomes for free.¹ it's a lot of work) to a degree, these also reflect my feelings and worries about the Website League.

perhaps the most thing to acknowledge is: Cohost was always incredibly white, and even granting valiant efforts i doubt it ever could have definitively solved this problem. the founding community was almost monolithically white; the people they invited, likewise, were almost monolithically white. network effect decided this, at least, early. it has always been almost inconceivable to imagine a Cohost with a large visible minority community, and now it will stay that way.

a small visible minority community took hold, nevertheless. for this we suffered many ignominies and digital discomforts, and collectively the feeling is bittersweet. Cohost was always better to some degree about racism than other websites, but simultaneously this is a bar that is subterranean. with hindsight much of the anti-racism seems hollow, or at least performative, given the many people who were driven off the website. one of my visible minority Cohorts put it best: "[Cohost's community] felt barren, and worse than that, it felt fake, as those who remained just kept going with their usual lives, as if the lack of protesting meant everything was fixed."

the cultural notion shared by many of those closest to the founding community to simply "curate your experience" or to imply that having a bad time on Cohost was a self-imposed problem perhaps emphasizes that perceived hollowness and performativity. one obvious example: i (and others) did not opt into being harassed by having anonymous asks open—why should it be incumbent on me to change my behavior because others abuse the feature? and how are you supposed to have a good time on Cohost if speaking up about your experiences with serious, real-world subjects makes you the center of a month-long racist harassment campaign? why was there—why is there—a notion that the visible minorities were the missing stairs for speaking up about their feelings and experiences, rather than the people creating those experiences for others on Cohost? there was a parasociality—a protectiveness—that went beyond acknowledging the limitations of staff. it would not be unreasonable to say that at times people actively victim blamed users for their bad experiences and criticisms of the site. and they still do, because that's the nature of investment in things on the internet now.

(all of these proposed solutions did not work, in any case. and it annoys the fuck out of me that people seriously suggest the issue was ever "seeking out problems" or "exaggerating issues to get mad at". you are shadowboxing; real people were hurt by all of this and they very much did not seek any of it out!)

history, of course, will never be able to judge what the efforts to address these would have done at the end of Cohost's life. maybe it would have gotten better, felt better, felt safer to more fully participate in—more likely the cake was baked early, the damage done after the repeated moderation failures. one of the epitaphs of Cohost will probably be that infamous comment symbolizing that failure—"the topic was extremely controversial and we were afraid to take action on anything due to the vitriol we would inevitably face if we seemed like we were censoring or controlling the conversation." it's a bitter pill to read now. it's also bitter to have seen bad actors boomerang into full-blown problems because of a lack of action. i don't know if it's responsible to adjudicate blame—and certainly it's not productive—so i won't. failures are frequently systemic, not individual, in any case. maybe having one mod was a broken, unworkable system from the start.

my fellow Beehaw admin Gaywallet notes in our community documents for that site: "We also need to be hyper aware of minorities which are relatively rare due to the law of large numbers. [...]let’s say only 1 in 100 people are trans - we now have an equal amount of trans people and jerks on the internet. If even 1 of these trans folks don’t want to engage with a jerk, a single bad actor can quickly drive all transgender people off a platform like this one." i think it is reasonable to conclude this is what happened with Cohost.

many have spoken to the fact that Cohost's anti-harassment measures were not useful and failed from first principles; i think i agree. the issue was more abstracted and hidden, yes, but still apparent. this was especially the case with the aforementioned anonymous asks. i will maintain to my grave that a feature which cannot be enjoyed by everyone should probably be scrapped. i've been through a lot of bad experiences so i am willing to put up with a lot. but i still think about several of the incredibly invasive, deeply fucked up asks i got through this feature before i had to turn it off. there were other issues too: persistent notifications, for one, even if you blocked a person; the lack of persistence of blocking across subpages; the inability to see your post's propagation; the fact that if a person adds to your post and you block them, their followers can still see your post, etc. most of these were noted well in advance of being problematic for visible minority users.

maybe all of those would have been fixed with infinite time and money; they were not, so you live with what was. but this rendered many of the insinuated benefits of Cohost—the things that enabled its lack of harassment—purely cultural. and culture is malleable. it can fail too, and it can create outgroups. in many respects it did fail, creating an outgroup of anyone who did not at least superficially resemble the fabled Founding Cohoster in demography. visible minorities naturally got the worst of this: the worst of any backlash, the worst of any harassment, the worst of absent moderation. so it goes.

there have always swirled rumors of favoritism among moderation. i cannot speak for this. but it would never surprise me. given the problems: would it surprise you?

and you might say to yourself: none of this is Cohost exclusive—and this is true. most of it is also worse elsewhere than it was on Cohost. but i expect this elsewhere and bake it all in; there's only so many times you can be told to kill yourself on Tumblr, or report someone on Twitter for calling you a nigger and watch them not get banned before that washes over you as a cost of doing business. i reached that point when i was probably 13 years old. i have been harassed, stalked, called approximately every mean thing and told to do every horrible thing to myself in the book. my family has been harassed at times too, and my information is likely irrevocably public for reasons entirely out of my control. obviously it's all traumatic. but it also is what it is.

but i didn't bake these in on Cohost because Cohost asked me to imagine that a better social media was possible (certainly for people like myself who are fatalistic about the internet)—and i did so. i had faith that if i did my job, staff would do theirs. sometimes this was true, and i'm glad it was. many times though, and for many people besides myself, it was not. is it our fault for having high expectations if someone sets those for us?

an aside about the Website League

all of this is of course stuff i think about with Website League too. the community is mostly Cohost's, with many of the early users of Cohost. we set high expectations for ourselves and what this looks like, and we ask people to be optimistic about what we're doing because what else is there to ask? are we making the mistakes Cohost did by being this way—are we setting ourselves up for failure before we launch? i don't know. maybe you can't know before it's too late. the future has a way of being opaque until it's clear and crashes into you like a great wave. or maybe the analogy should be Hunter S. Thompson's: that with the right kind of eyes you can almost see a high-water mark of optimism in a project—the place where the wave of momentum finally breaks and rolls back toward reality.

maybe Cohost should have expected what came of its early choices; maybe the consequences of these choices were realized too late; maybe they were swallowed by that optimistic wave, the sense that a better world was channeled through the site. i have no definitive answers and i think it improbable anyone does either. but there is much to be learned from it—much to be avoided, much to be done—for us who build after it. all of these questions and more are the ones we should be asking as the sun sets on the Fourth Website. Cohost was so White, but post-Cohost doesn't have to be.

notes

¹ donations ensured i made minimum wage back on this, for what little that's worth.