I first encountered 'hate speech' as a wide eyed teenager in the 1990s on a gaming IRC room that I hung out in. Somehow my ethnic background came out, and it was bizarre: the entire room either turned against me with racist hate speech, adding that they knew where I lived based on my ip (didn't think this was possible, but then didn't know anyone to ask if it was) and would come beat me up or worse. Or they just went silent and wouldn't stand up for me. I asked the moderators to help and I don't think they ever replied; certainly they never did anything. It was terrifying, and it made me clock out of IRC and online gaming communities for good.

So I wonder, to those who downvote someone asking about moderating (posts on your own blog!) or just consider hate speech as a term to be 'tedius' : have you ever experienced it yourself?

I didn't downvote and i'm certainly in favor of strong moderation. However automated filters worry me as they have shown time and time again that regexes aren't as sharp as human moderators.

For recent discussions about that on Lemmy, a federated Reddit replacement based on ActivityPub: https://lemmy.ml/post/55323 https://lemmy.ml/post/55143

Why? I think it's quite a useful term that's worthy of discussion from philosophical and legal perspectives. It pretty quickly identifies a range of related behaviors. But I am interested if you have less 'tedious' terms that describe the same thing.