There is a decent argument historically that communism and other left movements are extremist, racist, and anti-lgbtq. When you start banning concepts, you open your communities up to several things.
Group think
Banning of other radical ideologies that you may agree with
You alienate those people from exposure to better concepts
You jump start compaction cycles for large scale propaganda organizations that could lead to actual violence
I provided four reasons why this was relevant and you jumped from communism to whataboutism? Talk about being intellectually lazy (Or a state-sponsored account)
Left-leaning radical ideologies are banned all the time and usually use the same laws set up to ban far-right movements. I am not begging the question but feel free to continue spouting off the names of logical fallacies. I almost have a bingo.
I deal with propaganda and strategic messaging professionally, so by all means attempt to lecture.
There is a decent argument historically that communism and other left movements are extremist, racist, and anti-lgbtq.
We’re talking about today. On a relatively new community. Frankly, I see no reason to tolerate the bigots you’re so keen on coddling until they take over and make this another version of reddit’s the_donald, complete with organizing nazi rallies. Particularly not with the vague and spurious “there is a decent argument” hand wavy FUD that you didn’t explain as a justification. Are a lot of people saying it?
Moving onto your 4 points, let’s look at how they worked so well over at reddit, with all the virtuous acceptance of intolerance and nazi-coddling they’ve done, shall we?
Group think
No, reddit has never had groupthink. Not for an instant. Thank god they let the bigots in otherwise they’d have groupthink!
Banning of other radical ideologies that you may agree with
Post anything on conservative even slightly counter to their bigoted orthodoxy and see how that goes. Hell, suggest that fascism is not amenable to reason and must be opposed with force anywhere on reddit and see how that goes.
You alienate those people from exposure to better concepts
They had abundant exposure to better concepts on reddit. Look how well that’s worked so far. Clearly the answer is to let them spread their shit all over lemmy.
You jump start compaction cycles for large scale propaganda organizations that could lead to actual violence
the_donald literally promoted and helped organize a nazi rally where Heather Heyer was run over and killed by a nazi’s car. On lovely ol’ bigot-coddling reddit. The sub was not banned for years afterwards. I do not want that for lemmy. I left reddit the instant an alternative that didn’t welcome bigotry got enough users.
Not everywhere has to entertain bigots. There’s already too many places that do. A community that welcomes bigots is unwelcoming to everyone but bigots. But holy shit, does it ever drive engagement.
Yes, I started with the reasons why left-leaning movements have been restricted historically right out of the gate. It is not coddling bigots. It is providing context on why any form of radical idea is restricted, including ideas that we tend to celebrate in these communities. Communist propaganda has historically put fourth that anything that is not communist is inherently fascist. Is that your definition of fascism? Are folks allowed to talk about the French protests? To many they are based in fascism.
In my opinion, you are literally promoting groupthink and closing yourself off to ideas by attempting to ban content that you disagree with based on your own definitions. Life is a little more nuanced when you are not talking about specific issues by which you know the full context.
Also, is it a relatively new community or is it an established one that you want to preserve the culture of? I am getting very mixed messages from you.
Asking for proof of this is like asking for proof that the Constitution exists. It’s a very common thing I referenced. Western anarchism has a more positive history but largely linked to furtherment of the cause over actual progression of liberties.
My point in bringing it up is that it’s extremely easy to craft a narrative that starts including relatively positive forms of speech in with the banning. That includes these little forums and your approach is exactly what happened on Reddit eventually leading to the current influx of members here now. The second you start restricting speech is when the forum starts consolidating power.
Donald Trump was elected president primarily because he could control his messaging and direct different narratives to different demographics. He was unable to do that as president so he lost the next election. By encouraging the siloing of information sources, you enable that behavior.
I don’t want Nazis but the best way to turn them is not by sending them into a forum where they are left unchecked.
Asking for proof of this is like asking for proof that the Constitution exists. It’s a very common thing I referenced. Western anarchism has a more positive history but largely linked to furtherment of the cause over actual progression of liberties.
So you’re using historical examples of dictatorial communist regimes to tar the entire modern left as permanently and irredeemably bigoted. Got what you meant from the very beginning in its entirety in perfect crystal clarity. Meanwhile, the bigots are talking about eradicating trans people right now.
My point in bringing it up is that it’s extremely easy to craft a narrative that starts including relatively positive forms of speech in with the banning.
Your point is that because some communist dictatorships were bigoted, we should tolerate bigotry from fascists right now in new communities. No. For starters, bigots are still perfectly welcome on reddit and twitter and facebook and 4chan and stormfront and so on. Not everywhere has to be welcoming to bigots. Not everywhere has to be a high minded polyannish naive community where no one locks their doors and if we just engage with bigots on their terms everything will be hunky dory and they’ll stop wanting to genocide my friends. Not everywhere needs to be a complicit platform for hate.
your approach is exactly what happened on Reddit eventually leading to the current influx of members here now
reddit welcomed bigots since day one. Lemmy needn’t.
I don’t want Nazis but the best way to turn them is not by sending them into a forum where they are left unchecked.
Do they not already have enough recruiting grounds already for your liking? Why let them have this one too? Why should people on lemmy have to deal with all the hate against minorities? Why must bigots be welcome just to make others unwelcome?
My point here is not that I am. My point is that others would. The fact that you still do not understand that after reiterating it repeatedly in every single reply indicates to me that you are either not reading my replies or not in this discussion in good faith. You are what this community should leave behind. There was way too much of this on Reddit.
This is my #1 also. So many people "just asking questions"
I also hate the circlejerk of people going "I cannot possibly comprehend being gay/trans/disabled/whatever but I let them do what they want!" They're not aliens, you can listen to them explain what they are going through and have empathy. It's not very complicated.
Oh don’t get me started on the sealioning from the bigots! “But we need to have more Valuable Discussion™ about my horseshit that’s been debunked a million times already!”
I think it’s a good attitude to serve as a stepping stone away from bigotry, it appeals to the bigots by offering some common ground while giving them a path to becoming less outwardly bigoted. Social progress takes time, especially with attitudes engrained as much as homophobia used to be.
Agreed, I grew up in a very conservative area and was pretty homophobic when I started college.
"They can do whatever they want, just don't ask me to like it" was an important stepping stone towards "oh shit, love is love" and finally actually listening to the experience of gay people.
Ultimately "live and let live" is all we can ask of anyone. If that is their attitude then they aren't a bigot. People are expecting too much of other people now - not embracing someone does not make someone a bigot.
Your starting position to me is honestly enough but unfortunately many people are way away from that. As a gay guy, I'd be happy with people just saying "do whatever you want want, just don't ask me to like it". The problem is too many people claim that with words but then actually act differently.
Don't understand why you stereotyped people and basically insulted them and then wondered why people are offended? Yea? No one wants to see your fucking junk either. No, just because you're not gay doesn't make you any more or less likely to do what you are accusing them of.
reddit never functioned as a stepping stone away from bigotry. A lot of mods were content to offer their subs and users to serve as stepping stones for bigots to walk all over, though.
Their moderation policy basically allowed any abhorrent view as long as it was expressed in a “civil” manner.
Trolls and racists could say things like “well, in my humble opinion, black people are just inherently violent and unintelligent” and anyone who got irate and called them out would get a warning and/or banned.
This may be an unpopular option since I’ve already seen it across lemmy, but the ____porn communities. I’d like to browse pictures of nice landscapes or exotic cars without worry about someone around me noticing “PORN” on my screen.
At this point it seems very old internet, something that made sense when those communities were established, but now is unnecessary gratuitous and not socially acceptable.
Couldn't agree more. It sucks to try to bring someone to a new platform and go "you love decorating right? Then check /r/roomporn! No no, it's not porn I swear... Sigh"
Damn, I had forgotten how obnoxious that was on Reddit. Blocked all of those years ago because it was just unnecessary and a gross way to qualify otherwise unremarkable photos.
I agree, but I also think that porn should still be welcome here. The issue is there needs to be better control over it entering the feeds, not that the communities themselves should be abolished.
I don't think porn should be welcome here. In far too many cases, porn equals abuse and/or human trafficking. I haven't got anything against looking at nekkid people, but there's way too much shittiness going on in the porn industry.
Oh duh I always hated the names of those subs. The only thing worse are subs like InterestingAsFuck and NextFuckingLevel which always gave the same vibes as a Watchmojo video.
Nothing like someone peaking over your shoulder and seeing you’re browsing r/AnimalPorn…
I totally agree with you. Hopefully lemmy can be a little more mature with community names. (Yeah, yeah… I know the hypocrisy of my username… It’s my gamertag)
Indeed. I like ‘Earthporn’ too, but I think it should be all nature pictures that look like genitalia and suchlike. Rocks or trees that look like penises for example.
What a wild site that was, some real loons were on it, but I did appreciate the fact it wasn’t so overly moderated. At the end though it just felt like a sanctuary of hate that had driven out most of the sane people.
racism/sexism/any sort of hatred really, including hate based on culture (assuming no one is being harmed—but criticism should be rooted in compassion and justice for victims not hatred of perpetrators) or nationality. Many redditors just want an “approved” target for their hatred and aren’t trying to actually advocate for any victims. Oftentimes, they don’t even have any personal stake in the matter which raises the question of why they’re so invested in hating their target, like bringing it up on unrelated threads.
“Happy cake day”
Treating social media apps/sites as if they’re religions
I agree with you in principle, but personally it drives me nuts whenever I see "could of", "I could care less", "nucelar", etc. But I admit that it's a personal thing and don't correct anyone. That said, whenever I do see them corrected by others, it feels very cathartic. Also, I'd rather someone correct me when I make mistakes like this.
I'd like to say that I've seen comment of yours about language before and I want to say I really respect this. I know for me some words are harder to say in English (like rural - though I have practiced! But atm when I say sounds a bit like roool lol) and before seeing on Reddit, I wouldn't have thought that conversate isn't considered a word by so many! It doesn't seem so wrong to me. And it helps to know there are people in the world like you who wouldn't just be disgusted by the difference.
AAVE is a good example of this. Despite being branded as "street talk" or even "black people are too dumb to speak proper English" by racists, a lot of the so-called "mistakes" are actually just following grammar rules consistent with a variety of African languages, that held over after slaves were forced to speak English.
One thing I've been wondering about is that since English is the main language used on the Internet and in international communication, and the replacement rate of wealthier white people in countries like the US and Canada is a lot lower than poorer Spanish, Chinese, etc. speaking immigrants, will English eventually end up like Latin where it splits and evolves into many separate languages while the original thing is only really used in formal/intellectual settings?
That's completely different from speaking bad English. For example, "I could care less" isn't cultural language, it's stupid. It means the opposite of what you're trying to say.
How the fuck do you think language evolves? People say what sounds better or is more convenient. If they didn't we would still be speaking like Shakespeare or have a dozen different conjugations for every use of a word.
My god yes, also people who make horrible bots that interrupt the conversation just to push their owners' spelling or punctuation preferences.
It's prescriptivist, elitist, and even ableist. Also, social media by nature is colloquial, not formal - it feels like being told off for not wearing a business suit at home on the weekend.
Unfortunately this might not be something from Reddit. It could be universal to all human communities. People want to feel that they are in the right but not be questioned, when countering opposing arguments is the way to truth.
This was a really frustrating part. Just the intensity of which people defended their beliefs because they suited their internal narratives, rather than those beliefs being based in truths.
Its one thing to argue that the grass is green due to chlorophyll; it’s an entirely other thing to argue the grass is blue because it makes you feel good about yourself, and your (fart) echoing chamber agrees with you
It’s most noticeable when the topic being discussed is your area of expertise. Then you clearly see what kind of grossly oversimplified or even blatantly false comments get made with so much confidence and upvoted.
I tried to keep this in mind while reading stuff that I’m not an expert in, but that’s hard.
Then you come out facts swinging, and despite possessing vastly more knowledge on the subject and presenting factual/cited corrections to their claims, you are the one downvoted because the userbase has already decided the false claim is more fun to believe.
Let them continue to devolve in their cesspool. They can have it… They deserve it…
A lot of people would just upvote the first bozo to reply with a confident answer and never bother to check for the full story. Scrolling 3 comments down you’d find someone who actually knows their stuff. I learned to at least read most of the comments before committing any Reddit info to memory as fact.
As if posting from a mobile device somehow prevents you from using paragraphs and punctuation? Give me a break. You either can't be bothered, which means you're not worth interacting with; or you had to repeat at least a high school English class or two growing up. Either way you need to stop blaming your fucking phone.
There's not a good reason for anyone to blame their phone anymore, but mobile formatting used to be a real issue. Different apps required different amounts of blank lines to actually make a separate paragraph, so people often got giant blocks of text instead on accident, or paragraphs with two lines in between them.
When someone would ask a good question that you also wanna know the answer to, but then all the "answers" were just jokes bc everyone wanna get upvotes. I dont really mind jokes but those times it was a bit sad, then sometimes no one would answer for real bc i guess they see 10 replies and assume surely one of them is real already.
Also repost bots.
And apple vs samsung feuds.
And sometimes looked like whenever some people try to organize action or protests, comments just spamming that "protests do nothing" or "voting does nothing," or "what is this gonna do," not suggesting any other solution either, almost like trying to encourage apathy? Or discourage action. Sometimes i wondered if those were bots.
Also the r/wooosh when someone didn't understand a joke. .-.
Comprehension skills are severely lacking in a significant number of Americans. We know it based on the typical adult American reading level being so pathetically low. We know it from the interactions we see and have online with other Americans.
I firmly believe that comprehension gap is why people go hunting for perceived slights. Everywhere they turn is an opportunity for a new fight.
And it seems even worse with teens if we take Tiktok into account. The adults there aren’t much better. It is all really an indictment of the American education system.
Lemmy’s few hurdles are seemingly enough to keep these people out (for the most part). There also isn’t the critical mass of people to spark that mob mentality, at least that’s how I feel about it. People here are mostly chill overall and it truly reminds me of Reddit 15+ years ago.
That is inevitably going to change, for the worse, as apps refine the sign up and usage processes. That is inevitably going to change as bad actors, like Meta, are allowed to federate and push their low quality into our spaces along with advertisements disguised as posts and comments. We all know this is going to happen; threads will be used to run influence campaigns. That’s what happens with all of their properties, and with Reddit.
And people influential in Lemmy are signing NDAs with bad actors to allow it to happen.
Holy hell I absolutely hated seeing an interesting post or something an expert could chime in on to explain only for the entire comment section to be flooded with YouTube comments tier jokes
The Apple vs Android feuding has been done to death but man did Redditors love it and having used both extensively, I can say most of them are arguing over absolutely nothing.
They’re a different means to the same end result. No, dog piling on someone with a personal preference doesn’t make you “correct” just because the hive-mind resonates with your insults and rage.
Now I’m seeing the same shit with new Linux users buying Steam Decks. On the subreddit it’s basically asking for mass downvotes to say anything positive about Windows.
Just let people enjoy things however they want to, damn.
Nothing enrages me more when you have a very specific problem and the only result is a reddit thread that’s filled with jokes, irrelevant information, and no solution.
I remember the days when on reddit, the most insightful and genuine answers would get upvoted, because an upvote was related to the quality of the post, and not the “Meme”.
I hope that the mod-user relationship will be healthier here. (Bias, I was a reddit moderator.)
Some reddit mods were crap, this is true. Powermods and sub collectors were real. They did shit up a few communities.
But these people were a very small proportion of all moderators. Most moderators I met were chill, and just wanted to chip in to their respective communities to give back, in a way. Volunteering for internet janitor duty, because no matter how much people use the term as an insult it turns out public spaces need janitors - or they get filled with shit, trash, graffiti (and not the cool kind either, mostly badly drawn swastikas). It’s not a position that should be glorified, or anything, because that’s weird, but I hope that some semblance of basic respect can be maintained here on Lemmy - both ways, meaning no powermods but also no defaulting to assuming mods suck.
Pretty much everybody I ever saw complain about mods was people who cant read the room, and think their opinion is so important or so novel that they should be allowed to voice it in places they clearly weren’t wanted.
I was on reddit for 12 years. Voiced some unpopular opinions. Only had one comment removed that I can remember. I somehow managed to move on with my life
I say this with the best of intentions so bear with me, but I think most of the disdain towards moderators on Reddit came from locking threads due to “excessive trolling” or “y’all can’t behave” etc. It was so visible and immediately shut down conversation which was frustrating for average users. In my opinion excessive trolling isn’t a reason to shut a thread. The only things that would really need to be shut down would be things that are straight up illegal. Obviously people saying offensive things or trolling is an issue but, again in my opinion, that’s what the whole upvote downvote system is for, and moderators can step in for things that are blatantly out of line.
I don’t approve of comments that try to make fun of the userbase while removing their ability to respond, to be clear. But here is the alternative perspective as to why threads would be locked:
When I moderated r/polls, we would occasionally lock threads because we literally couldn’t keep up. If it was a topic that particularly drew out the bigots in force, they would pile in faster than we could ban them. A thread like this could get over a thousand comments if it was one of the top ones that day. The solutions were then either:
Allow bigotry to fester in the thread for extended periods of time
Have one or more moderators camp on the thread in real time trawling through new comments, perhaps for hours on end
Lock the thread
This was on a sub of about 200,000 users, with 5-8 mods. There are subreddits with many times this amount of subscribers, so I can only imagine they might have an even lower threshold for locking.
Allow bigotry to fester in the thread for extended periods of time
I know this will be a controversial opinion but I just don’t see this being a big deal. Those comments inevitably get downvoted and kicked to the bottom of the list, and if you expand a comment that’s -10 karma you probably know what you’re getting into. I created and modded a sub that now has over 2mil subs and never once have I locked a thread (granted, it’s one that’s non political but we got our fair share of weirdly bigoted comments)
Allowing bigots a platform leaves the possibility that they band together, upvote each other, and normalize their opinions on your community gradually until people stop questioning it.
Add on to that the fact the OP on reddit directly receives each comment on their post as a notification by default.
It's a necessary "evil", if you can even call it that. Sure, you could go make your own sub or whatever where people have free reign over the stuff they post in the comments. With proper size you would realize relatively quickly what a fun idea that would be if you were responsible for it.
I could understand it for those who spam emojis after every other word, or write entire messages in emojis (not counting single emoji responses). That is annoying and migraine inducing to read.
But adding something to convey how the text was meant to be read sure helps alleve some ambiguity of not having a face to face interaction.
If I recall correctly, it wasn’t about appending an emoji to the end of your comment like you just did, but rather about the type of comments that would be 50% or more emojis, that for some reason are very prolific on the Internet.
And I would say there were two good reasons for this. First, these comments rarely conveyed much meaning, the emojis were used to exaggerate the emotional message, but little else.
The second (and more serious one) was the decline in English proficiency among native speakers (especially youth) that was ascribed to use of emojis and emoticons.
Google commissioned a study back in 2018 that showed, that most adults are not confident in their own spelling, and blame the emojis for it.
If I see a comment with an emoji or two, I could care less. If I see a comment that is just agreement and emojis, I downvote the hell out of it.
Just upvote and move on. Don’t clutter up comments with useless emojis. That just suppresses relevant discussion. It’s as useless and dumb as the comments that simply say “This.”
That’s not to say I’m downvoting due to emojis, but rather due to irrelevant discussion. But I will admit if I see a comment that is filled with them (but still has relevant discussion) I downvote because I’d rather not have comments devolve into FB mom quality emoji-laden garbage.
Power Mad Mods. The ones in r/StarTrek were horrible, banning people for any “negativity” and actually banning people for what they said in other subreddits.
Also megathreads on r/hardware during things like new GPU launches were nice. I don't want to have to check 2 dozen different threads just to see who did a review and decide which ones are worth looking at (90% of them basically the exact same). Only problem was megathreads got stickied and then depending on what you were using to view reddit might mean it gets hidden (official mobile app being one of those IIRC).
the black and white mindset… you’re either with the hivemind or against. no room for nuanced opinions. someone posts a stupid strawman argument pro abortion/anti billionaire/etc… you can’t point out the flaw in the logic without being called a sexist racist Nazi.
example: some post about how billionaires should pay 35% tax on their net worth, you point out that people are taxed on their income, not possessions, you’re a bootlicker
Down bad with this. You tell people about the concept of unrealized gains and how if it is applied to the rich mofos, it will be surely applied to us poor mofos and everyone downvotes in mass.
Also telling the “eat the rich” crowd that, if their yearly income is 40k or above then they are in fact richer and wealthier than 97% of the world’s population save therefore much deserving of being “eaten” and they flip the fuck out
Add comment