this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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It's amazing how much casually nicer lemmy and the greater fediverse is. You still see some bad habits leaking over from the rest of the web, but then people actually apologizing! and asking others to be nice! And it actually works!
Well outside of some thorny political issues, but that's just human nature.
it's more like the old internet or like old reddit.
As an old Reddit user, that’s why I came here. Just gotta get up the wherewithal to start/ recruit some of the niche subs I enjoyed most now.
I mostly agree but with the caveat that it really depends on the topic and the community. Some communities handle (at least what seems like good faith!) disagreement far worse than others.
Even if it’s not yelling at each other, downvotes are quickly becoming a “I disagree” button and not a “this comment provides no value” button. Not limited to politics either.
Upvotes and downvotes have always been agree and disagree buttons. Reddit trying to pretend they were ever anything else was folly.
Hell, even calling them upvote and downvotes is a misnomer if all you're trying to do is promote discussion. Even then, it's silly to think that most up or downvoted to oblivion comments aren't there for a reason. More often than not it just tells you what that community's and parent comments biases are lol.
Yeah, I've noticed any "capitalism vs communism" comment or post gets a TON of engagement, and it almost always goes down a negative slippery slope. I guess that's why a lot of people prefer to filter out politics related stuff.
That being said, even the worst arguments I've seen here are nothing like I've seen on other platforms, where you think it might spill into someone getting hurt in real life.
I'm useing liftoff and blocking sub lemmets still doesn't work
Don’t leave me hanging bud.
Fewer people, more tightly connected communities... In old Reddit there was a point over which the sub was getting mainstream and then you would get gallowboob and other assorted jerks ruining everything
Totally disagree. If there was a way to disable comments about Elon Musk, Windows and Trump that would be great. I mean yeah I get it. Lemmy users don't like those topics but it seems like it's just constantly force fed to you on this platform. At least on Reddit you could filter certain subreddits out but here it seems to be everywhere.
From my perspective, most of the things I am seeing related to those topics seem to be what can pass for news. Many of them are being linked from reputable sources and it is genuinely important to keep up on details regarding the world. Especially when it is shit and going to hell. How else are the patient men going to run out of it? (yes, John Dryden had it right. Beware the fury of the patient man.)
I can say that I am abidingly patient, but I am running out very quickly knowing what the shitlords are doing.
That's not been my experience. I keep getting baited by ml power users and then banned for daring to question their orthodoxy. It seems intentional.
The downvote button is still abused as a "I don't agree with your opinion" button though...
"I don't agree" -> "the content of this comment is false, because it doesn't agree with what I believe to be true" -> "this comment provides no value, because its content is lies". There's no way you can prevent that chain of reasoning, especially since it's largely unconscious for most people.
That's unfortunately true 😕
I suppose it'd probably be pretty hard to sell people on lies being good, on the basis of lies being good ground for refutation of those lies, huh?
But then I dunno, I'd take like 30 comments of people all disagreeing with some premise in some similar way, compared to like, a 10 comment long reference getting 30 gorillion upvotes, because everyone has to be god's gift to comedy.
yeah I don't really know how we can improve on that
A "I don't agree with that" button?
What would it do? If it didn't do anything, people would just use the downvote button
I think lesswrong has an "agree/disagree" vote as well as a "this comment is/is not high quality and relevant button"
You remove the downvote button. Or maybe instead of points you only allow stickers/emoticon reactions.
You should only get so many downvotes to use per day. Maybe 3.
Ironically gets downvoted by people who disagree
Yup, perfect example of the problem. An on-topic comment adding to the discussion. Sure maybe not the ultimate solution but a valid point to consider.
This is a nice idea that I've seen before, but also one that sort of needs a centralized platform to work well
That's a good point.
That's similar to how slashdot modpoints worked, although both upvotes and downvotes were limited. IMO it was one of the better self moderation systems I've seen.
I do personally wish people were a bit more thoughtful before downvoting, and making them a limited resource could help with that. It could also encourage sock-puppeting if not implemented very carefully, though.
I was thinking about slashdot modpoints too - it did seem to result in better discussion, but maybe everything was better in those days/in my rose-tinted spectacles. (And at this point I cba going back to check...)
There were some oddnesses - I remember someone's signature was "The difference between 'Interesting' and 'Insightful' is whether you agree" which always rang very true to me. Separating upvotes for "funny", "I agree" and "I find this interesting" is already pretty handy though.
I think there's no way to prevent people from downvoting what they disagree with - but maybe if you provided downvotes for "this is wrong" and "this is trolling" people could have an option to ignore the "this is wrong" downvotes and get more diverse opinions.
That's what people not on reddit say about people on reddit, and probably so on for all sorts of social media.
Less flippantly, bits of reddit definitely are domains of trolls and edgelords, and when slashdot was at its height, being edgy was way more popular across the entire internet. In addition there is a fundamental tension between preventing groupthink and preventing trolls: in a diverse community there will be people who so vehemently disagree with others that they interpret their good-faith comments as trolling and so will use whatever tools are available to suppress it, leading to groupthink. (I mention groupthink in this context because of the point of "sharing ideas and getting at the truth" if that wasn't obvious.)
So I don't remember much about the comments the last time I checked in there but I am a bit skeptical.
In addition there is a fundamental tension between preventing groupthink and preventing trolls: in a diverse community there will be people who so vehemently disagree with others that they interpret their good-faith comments as trolling and so will use whatever tools are available to suppress itThere is only a fundamental tension between preventing groupthink and preventing trolls when communities and moderation are defined by large monolithic entities that have to square the circle of trying to cater to everyone. That isn’t the case on the fediverse. A summation of communities with differing moderation policies, demographics, sizes, governing styles and cultural norms is fundamentally different than a monolithic single community administered by one group of people in power with one vision that makes decisions to exclude people from 99% of the online sphere of that social medium/platform. Even if the average of all the moderation policies of many small communities averages out to roughly the same moderation policy of one massive social network, the fundamental mechanics of how that play out are way different.
With a single community the edge cases become flashpoints of exploitation and trolling but with many communities the different definitions of what is unacceptable behavior and how edge cases are dealt with tends to filter out the trolls more naturally because trying to find a controversial line to tiptoe justtttt behind is useless when every community draws their red lines slightly differently (even if in spirit they are similar) and every community has different stakeholders actually enforcing and enacting the moderation. Instead of finding a line to tip toe safe just on the other side while dog whistling, trolls experience a progressive, smooth ramp up of rejection from more and more communities the more toxically they behave.
The groupthink on reddit is not imposed by the monolithic entity in charge of reddit; it's imposed by the average of redditors and by subreddit moderators. The fediverse may support a better diversity of participation such that the average is less representative, but I think if Lemmy (say) got larger - let's say at least as large as reddit was 10 years ago when there was plenty of groupthink and toxicity - you would see major Lemmy communities take on similar characteristics to major subreddits. I think what you're saying is that you'd get various communities with overlapping areas of interest and different moderation policies and groupthinks, allowing for more diversity. But I think that network effects provide a strong opposing pressure to that kind of diversity, and even where more than one community can survive, I think you're more likely to see the equivalent of
/r/politicsand/r/conservativeemerge than/r/leftofcentreand/r/rightofcentreor something. So you still have groupthink, people are still liable to get downvoted into oblivion or banned for expressing the wrong opinion.I'm not really sure what you're getting at with the trolling aspect though: I don't really see why diverse moderation policies would discourage genuine trolls as I don't see how that "smooth ramp" would be any discouragement. Maybe you reckon it would be too much admin to keep track of where the line lies in each different community?
I'm new to Lemmy (I am assuming it will be better than reddit for a long time due to being smaller and the userbase having a different average, and federation meaning other influence from a monolithic controlling entity won't affect it) and very interested in this though so do share what you think.
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at with the trolling aspect though: I don’t really see why diverse moderation policies would discourage genuine trolls as I don’t see how that “smooth ramp” would be any discouragement. Maybe you reckon it would be too much admin to keep track of where the line lies in each different community?That could be one impact, there are many differences that have significant impacts in my opinion. One of the biggest is that trolling and more importantly the identity of trolling relies on standing justttt behind specific lines within specific communities and projecting toxicity through thinly veiled language/behavior that just barely keeps a troll from crossing the line (or just crossing it to see if anyone is going to do anything). Trolls form huge chunks of their identity around those lines, with shitty memes and dog whistling as basic forms of creating said identity. The worst trolls basically form their entire identity around this and try to spread it to others by making memes/jokes about transgressing those lines (looking for the other edgey-boy losers who will validate them).
If every community has different lines and enforcement that doesn’t meant there won’t be trolls but it does mean that they aren’t given an easy place to gather and forge identities around like they are with monolithic communities with one moderation policy. You end up with a lot of losers getting kicked out of many different communities instead of a group of trolls who have come together based on the identity of pushing the lines of a specific large community.
Obviously I am generalizing, and I am not saying I am 100% confident I am right but in my experience this hypothesis fits my experiences on and off the fediverse.
There's a lot more bad content than 3 per day, though. Also, downvotes have essentially no effect, so the whole mechanism is a bit pointless. Better than nothing, still.
Lemmy already has a huge alt/brigade problem. That would just make it worse.
What the hell is "alt/brigade"?? I mean, as a German I know I'm getting old, you don't have to rub it in...but I don't think that's the meaning of this
That reminds me, I once made my first political post on reddit and that got downvoted to oblivion. I would like to see how that exact same post would perform here on Lemmy.