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posted ago by akai_ferret ago by akai_ferret +76 / -0

So I'm a lurker in a hobby group.

Like most technical hobbies there are not a lot of women.
The only person I know that identifies as female is transgender.

Nobody is excluding women. No one is even bringing gender up at all. Half the community could be women and you wouldn't know it because nobody is talking about that stuff. (But since it's a nerdy hobby that requires a lot of technical skill you know it's going to be almost all men.)

There's also no discussion of race. Very few users have ever appeared on camera and it's not like anyone is bringing up their race out of the blue. So we also would have no way of knowing what race 95% of the users are

There's no politics. There's no banter.
Nothing controversial is ever discussed.
It's all perfectly on topic or topic adjacent.
It's 80% technical talk, 10% movies/games/media, and 10% small talk.


Well the community recently ran a survey of users to get a grasp on skill level, tools, interests, and desires of the community and I bet you can see where I'm going with this ...

In the survey results were a whole lot of "suggestions" that are blatant attempts at woke entryism.
(I've got a suspicion they're all from the same person or small group of people.)

  • Calls to improve the diversity of the community.
    (Where we know almost no-one's race, and no-one cares what anyone else's race is.)

  • Calls to make the community more open and inviting.
    (It's open to everyone who doesn't act like a jerk. You don't even have to be a skilled builder to participate people are fully welcome to just spectate and chat. It couldn't possibly get more open.)

  • Calls to make the community more friendly to women.
    (It's not unfriendly to women, or friendly to men. Your gender literally doesn't matter in the community.)

  • Calls to start doing more feminine projects and activities to make the community more interesting to women.
    (Again, this group is for a very specific, gender irrelevant, hobby. Only way to introduce feminine projects would be to make it about something else.)

I'm not privy to the discussions of the small mod team, but I'm pretty sure someone has already approached them (or will soon) about adding a "female", diversity focused, moderator with power to make changes to the community to improve diversity and appeal to women.

And as we know all too well, that's when things start to go downhill, fast.