Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don’t help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

We’re back! Instead of putting a neutral topic in the introduction, I’m placing a bit of opinion on an issue to see if it helps spur discussion. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you’d like to help out.

This week, I’d like to discuss something that’s been a bit of an issue for me personally.

Lemmy (and Reddit before it) appears to have a problem with overly-aggressive bannings for perceived slights. In the topic linked above there were people permanently banning users from multiple communities (any they moderate - dozens in some cases) for single downvotes, 4 downvotes across a ten-month period, and bannings because a moderator thought they maybe sorta kinda read that a user may have had a negative thought about their pet issue.

I’ve personally been banned from Communities (and sent some pretty vile PMs) for posting in our weekly threads here playing devil’s advocate where I state hard questions that I do not necessarily feel are correct. They think they’ve discovered some secret agenda by finding posts I’ve made here and use them as “receipts” in order to dismiss anything they think they’re reading that may be contrary to their opinion. Any context provided for the post falls on deaf ears.

I’m someone who operates on the idea of “If you can not defend an opinion from scrutiny, you should probably not hold that opinion.”

To quote myself:

It’s pretty tragic that people can’t handle opposing opinions. I think the activist nature of Lemmy is kind of a self-destructive spiral and people need to learn how to live with each other again. But I guess that’s the issue with modern social media as a whole… Nobody has any idea how to convince anyone else, only to yell at them louder.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

  • Are niche Communities correct for banning anyone who downvotes?
  • Do downvotes represent a “disagree” button for you (this Community notwithstanding)?
  • Most importantly, what would it take to change this?
  • Does it help build the Community? What about the platform as a whole?
  • Is there a way to build a “safe space” without building an echo chamber online? Is that even a valuable thing to build?
  • Canconda@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    The semantics of “devils advocate” aside, what I’m saying is, if the audience doesn’t like what you’re saying, they’re going to rightfully downvote/ban you. I genuinely think that those are valid and valuable options for both the community and you as a speaker.

    Is business communications we learned about “rhetoric” in terms of ethos, logos, and pathos. Socratic reasoning, Devils advocate, etc… those are all logic based communications. But you have no pathos(credibility), cuz they don’t know you, and the emotional appear (ethos) is likely not in your favour.

    I got downvoted yesterday for speculating the direction AI is going. People don’t like AI so they downvote me cuz they don’t want it to be true. Wrong audience for that discussion.

    On reddit I got banned from r/WNBA, cuz I commented on a post that went to /all, saying gameplay with CC in it was fundamentally more interesting to watch (and that without her it was boring -that’s probs what caught be mod hammer). Wrong audience for that discussion.

    If you want to go into a community and change their views on a consensus they’ve formed, than you need more than just logos. It usually takes a known community member (pathos) appealing to the community intrinsically (ethos) to shift these kinds of community consensus.

    Perhaps that’s not where you’re coming from with this topic. But I’m here to push back on the allegation there is a banning issue. IMO downvotes and bans are good things. 50% when I’m downvoted I’m saying something wrong… the other half I’m talking to the wrong people.