Rule #2 is possibly our most important one:
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
Learn to disagree without being rude or disrespectful.
It can be difficult sometimes, since western social media thrives on collective outrage, and they knowingly ingrain this into us for years. But please do adhere to this rule, and it will make this place much more enjoyable.
We will not hesitate to issue temp bans (usually a day or two) for those who make everyone’s experience unpleasant.Hit the report button if you see this behavior.
Thanks!
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Good advice for life outside in the real world as well whenever possible. You can disagree without going thrermonuclear.
Could we also have a rule saying that downvotes should not be used for disagreements? Downvotes should be meant for off-topic, or factually incorrect content. Disagreements should be debated in the comments, respectfully of course.
While I personally never downvote anyone for disagreeing, I don’t think it’s possible, or desirable, to try to create rules around how people use their preference buttons.
But I def suggest going into your settings and hiding vote scores, as that’s psychologically better for most people.
I was a big fan of seeing both the upvote and downvote numbers, just to know that there was someone out there who agreed with you even if your comment was unpopular to the particular community you were posting to. When Reddit removed that feature, I think it drove a lot more people crazy.
I don’t think it’s possible, or desirable, to try to create rules around how people use their preference buttons.
I also don’t think it’s possible to actually end mean-spirited disagreement in internet comment sections, but it’s a valuable thing to strive for as a value and emphasize, like you did in this post.
I think the same can be said for group-downvoting and stalking threads to downvote people based on what side they take without engaging with the substance of what is said. Minority viewpoints that add information are probably the most needed thing, and if anything I would say group downvoting is worse here than reddit on certain topics, unfortunately.
I think the attention spans are better here, and many/most things are better here but this is a sore spot.
We’ve kind of grown used to having terrible interactions on the internet, mainly because US big tech companies tacitly encourage it. They love rage-inducing content, because it keeps their users engaged, and spending more time on the site. We can def do better :)
I hope that’s a default. Is it default off?
Ya its off by default.
Maybe not rules, but I think it is desirable to change how people think about it through UX.
Currently the downvote button is equivalent to upvote, just a casual thing you can do. If it’s meant to have a different meaning, it should look different.
no but you censor and go even back in history to remove traces of an approved and upvoted comment to give a certain portrait of a user.
why are you actually providing this instance, really?
Beehaw just removes the downvote button entirely, so there is a community for that.
I can get behind this, because upvotes/downvote serve a purpose of telling the website “more people should see this”. But we don’t need to know what needs to be seen less. Upvotes will, on their own, already tell us what’s the top content and sort things out things. Late, Average and Middling posts aren’t really going to be seen by most people and are fine with a lesser rating accuracy.
But what about de-constructive comments? What if something TRULY deserves to be seen less? Well, here’s a stance I don’t particularly believe everyone would get behind but has some merit: People should post their reasoning why their post was not very good as a response. As that not just generates discussion points, but also informs other onlookers of their rationale. And if a response gathers upvotes (ratio’d), then that signals a better message than a simple downvote ever would. Yeah, that means the only response to a troll is actually responding, and that may make a community appear less welcoming, but overall I don’t know if that’s a big issue in practice.
This is why I’m personally not a fan of removing downvotes. No one really has been able to answer why upvotes need no comment to back them up, but downvotes for some reason always need a justification.
Many trolling comments, or some comments we just disagree staunchly with, should be downvoted, and no one should be required to write an explanation for that.
The other reason, is that all the big tech companies (except for reddit), have removed the dislike button. To me that signals that they don’t want it to be known that some positions are wildly unpopular.
On twitter the only indicator of “dislike” now, is being “ratio’d”: having more comments than favorites, which of course they prefer because it drives up engagement, since no one can just downvote and move on. It also makes some reactionary positions (like being anti-trans for instance), seem much more popular than they really are.
I do understand and agree with the rest of the post. By all means, downvotes do have value with dealing with immature or agenda’d posters if that is problematic to a community.
But I did state why it can be fine and how there’s a reason why upvotes require no reasoning while downvotes do - they have an immediate, positive effect on the usability of the site (everyone sees top posts), while downvotes have a less immediate one (only a subset scrolls to see bottom posts). Upvotes are just inherently more valuable to the community on the whole and shouldn’t be put to equal questioning. Downvotes are more useful to contain undesirables.
On this note, there’s somewhat of a tangential discussion to all of this, which is “should posts that go below a threshold (like -10 points) be hidden from users by default?”. I personally would opt to keep posts visible to myself, because I want to know what was said that earned the shunning. But I can’t think of a reason why a system that has downvotes shouldn’t do that filtering, after all, it basically empowers downvotes to do their job better, and stops trolls from latching to top posts.
What you say about upvotes vs downvotes flies against how hierarchy inherently works. If you push something upward everything else moves downward relative to that. If you push something downward everything else moves upward relative to it.
I agree. I made a post earlier to promote discussion, and it was downvoted more than I expected because people did not agree with the question I guess?
I would still argue that if a post or comment provides useful discourse, it should be upvoted or at the very least, not downvoted.
Hmm you raise an interesting point. I do agree that it’s helpful to explain to someone why they’re being downvoted.
An experimental feature might be to allow downvotes only if you reply, or else you can choose to down vote a comment if you also upvote a response to the downvoted comment.
Never heard this idea before. Some food for thought, indeed. Simply for its unique approach, people should keep this idea in mind when talking about down votes.
I think this idea is absolutely brilliant. I would love a platform that would force some level of accountability on those who put down other people’s perspectives.
Now there’s an interesting approach, will have to check out Beehaw I guess.
It’s quite a nice place :)
this only works for your own instance. someone from another instance can still downvote you
Yes, nothing prevents them from hitting the button. But the downvote wouldn’t be federated. Beehaw would never know if everyone else was downvoting them.
hm. Seems you’re right. The original score doesn’t get updated if you downvote. Only the score on your own instance. Why even show the button on this one comment if it’s inconsistent like that?
Yes because having that rule worked so well for reddit over the years. It’s unfortunately an unenforceable rule so therefore etiquette at best.
If you have a disagreement with someone, and they make a good argument, that’s worth an upvote.
Right. And if they have a bad argument, regardless whether you agree with it or not, it’s worth a downvote. But if it is an opinion without an argument, I think it is fine to up- or downvote depending on whether you agree or disagree.
I don’t really get why. A well reasoned position I disagree with might discourage me to downvote, because I would like the reasoning itself. But why would downvoting something you disagree with be bad?
Personal experience ofc, but a lot of people argue in bad faith. Knowingly (or unknowingly) invoke logical fallacies, whataboutisms and straw man arguments. With how ideologically volatile the internet has turned in recent years, you can’t really have a reasonable argument any more without it becoming just a name calling session.
Yesterday I noticed just how much reddit had jaded me. Had a bbq with some friends and a guy I knew was very much in the right, q anon stuff and all, asked me about my position on polarizing topics. I’m anarcho syndicalist. Expected it to get heated. Dude just genuinely asked questions and that was it. No trying to prod holes into the ideology or show the superiority of his ideology. It was kinda eye opening and showed me I just spent too much time in toxic areas of the internet. Though he seemed to have a bone to pick with the stereotypical city dweller lib. Had I had those positions he probably would’ve unloaded with quotes from the usual suspect talking heads.
It helps prevent hivemind mentality and keeps us growing. Unpopular opinions often have ideas worth examining or could be outright correct despite common wisdom saying otherwise, and forums like these are one of the best places for us to engage with those facts. There’s also times when an opinion we like dislike is misinformed, and rather than send it to the bottom, it’s good to explain how it’s wrong for both our own sake (refining our arguments) and bystanders that haven’t given the topic much thought.
But if someone left a turd, send that stank to the bottom!
undefined> But if someone left a turd, send that stank to the bottom!
This is the crux of it though, where is the distinction between opposing viewpoint and absurdist argument? How would you combat people trolling, i.e. intentionally posting inflammatory things to cause disruption/argument?
Am I trolling you right now? Or am I arguing in good faith? :-)
Schrodinger’s troll!
Judgement is best left to the reader :)
“YOU” are not your argument. Disagreement is not an attack on you as an individual and should not be taken as such.
Why do you hate me and attack me so ruthlessly 😭
First thing I read on Lemmy and it’s like I’ve found emotionally intelligent people finally.
I saw the same thing on Mastadon, just normal people capable of handling their emotions.
Western social media (and television) is promoting the worst in people and it can make users believe everyone is insane. So it’s very nice to see this being posted.
Thanks!
I really like the fediverse. I made a Mastodon account after Elon bought Twitter, because it was pretty clear he was disingenuous. On one hand, he said he wanted to “promote free speech” but on the other hand it seemed like he was focusing on one particular kind of speech (i.e. bigotry). It’s nice to see posts like this saying that lemmy hopes to be a different form of social media.
But… I can’t help but feel like there may be a similar disingenuous story going on, as much as I hate to say it. I want the fediverse to grow into a safe place for anyone to express themselves. And it’s hard to see that happening when the developers (and moderators of the original instance, lemmy.ml) are unapologetic authoritarians. When they say they want people to be respectful, there seems to be a double meaning. After all, banning people for talking about human rights violations doesn’t seem to be conducive to an open, honest platform where people can express themselves. The developers of lemmy are, sadly, committed to the ideas of old-school authoritarian governments. And I worry that’s going to be a damaging force in what could have otherwise been a wonderful platform. Just my two cents.
May I add:
- “disagreeing is not hating”
Even ChatGPT can get this.
Except when it’s about THAT topic, of course…
You mean racism, sexism, and homo/transphobia? Yeah. I hear ya on that!
Only one of those is called in otherwise entirely sane situations
…huh?
It’s nice to have a place where I can ask genuine questions without being called a complete idiot just for asking.
I am like a veteran to this site because i joined 3 years before new people moved to here
I agree with this post and I think that its important to have a post like this to remind people.
this! I hope we stay such a friendly and open-minded community where one doesn’t have to fear to say/write their thoughts.
Good luck with that. Knowing were the exodus has come from. We can start vetting the new users but this is not proven effective.
Malicious reporting can also become a problem if we start being trigger happy on banning users.
That is of course quiet a difficult task. And will be very much in the hands of the moderators. Just like the countless mods that voluntarily keept reddit running. I’am quiet positive that we cant accomplish that even better here.
Sounds pretty fascist to me /s
Lots of redditors are coming out of echo-chambers. In fact most of reddit has become one starting from a suffocating top-down control.
They’ve forgotten how Reddit used to be and so are astounded at how “uncomfortable” Lemmy is given its NON-pyramid like structure.
The discomfort is how the world and free speech needs to be and I’m a non-white Muslim typing this.
None of us is 100% right so we should always be exposed to other POVs and question ourselves to keep ourselves in check and evolve in objective ways.
I hope Lemmy keeps it this way and the money doesn’t corrupt things as it always does. Believe you me, advertisers and nefarious actors are already reaching out to Lemmy authors to do exactly that.
I’ve encountered some people who are not so… respectful with disagreements. I’ve made use of the report feature, however, it doesn’t seem to be of much use.
This. Stick it instancewide forever
I don’t agree with this but I respect your opinion
Tone policing is classist and is the reason I stopped using this instance. It’ll be popular with the liberals who will weaponise it against those saying things they dislike but it’ll cause situation after situation where leftists get punished ultimately driving away the base of people that supported the site and platforming up to this point.
More power to ya. I like the ruleset here, but that’s the glorious thing about Lemmy: don’t like the rules of your instance? Go to one that works better for you.
Yeah that’s why I spend almost all my time on Hexbear instead.
Tone policing is classist
Apologies if this is something that you think should be obvious to anyone, but I’m genuinely curious what you mean by “classist” here.
I occasionally encounter assholes from all walks of life and prefer to avoid them all the same. I’m actively in favor of reasonable moderation on social media sites to filter assholes out because it’s better for my mental health.
Nobody’s saying we can’t have differences of opinion and disagreements. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we should be expected to engage respectfully or not at all. This is a standard that should be applied equally to all. It’s difficult to do, but we should also strive to hold people we otherwise generally agree with on principle accountable if they’re being aggressive/hostile/antagonistic because, at best, they’re being a bad advocate of our own positions and, at worst, they’re being an asshole.
Alright I’ll bite.
As you move down the wealth ladder you eventually reach a point at which there is a culture change. There are significant differences in the culture of the average middle-income anglo with guilt about their privilege compared to the people who are really, genuinely struggling. Once you cross a certain threshold, I’ll call it the poverty threshold for the sake of this reply but it’s not really a strict line but more of a broadly intersecting spectrum where there are many people who can blend into both groups, you reach a behavioural change point. This behavioural change, both in speech and in attitudes, is generally driven by those of us below a certain income level genuinely not giving a single fuck about how someone speaks but rather what they are saying.
Take for example my home of Liverpool. If I go down the council flats I’ll find myself hundreds of people who will speak in ways that the middle-income liberals of america would find abhorrent. They will cuss you for a minor thing that makes it seem like you just killed their dog. This is normalised culture for them, and among their peers it is perfectly fine behaviour - but to the sheltered middle income person who sees it as an overreaction? It’s shocking, and they don’t like it.
This trend occurs towards the lower income groups because frankly their is less and less incentive to ruin relationships with people over social policing. Far more is put up with and accepted because everyone’s got it rough and nobody’s interested in making someone’s life harder by getting overly emotional about a few swearsies.
I fit into one of the blending people, seamlessly transitioning between the two and speaking both ways. I grew up in squats, but I also got a very fortunate break that led to me getting an education in what many would regard as the ruling class side of our education system, which is split between schools for the workers vs schools for the bourgeoisie.
Anyway. The point is that the tone policing has the effect of shutting out these people from participation. The reason you don’t see the majority of these people in participation online isn’t because they don’t have access, it’s because they’ve had the experience of getting banned everywhere for not speaking like a cultured middle income liberal, and they’ve frankly got bigger priorities in their lives than learning how to speak like the people they fucking despise.
It is classism because it explicitly shuts out this class of people from participation. Almost everywhere online the tone policing functions as a tool of class discrimination that bends internet culture towards privileged middle-income groups over the poor. It’s not explicitly intended to do this, but it is the outcome of it. Much like for example having a “no hoodies” rule in a shop doesn’t function to keep out middle-income people but keeps out the “chavs”, if you’ll forgive my use of a classist slur for effect.
You wanna get aggressive and go at it? Go ahead. Do it. How something is expressed is not important compared to what is actually being said. The issue with this form of classism is that a section of society goes completely unrepresented online because of it, people whose politics almost always align with my own socialist views once they’re well educated in what their interests are.
Thank you for responding thoughtfully and giving me things to consider I hadn’t thought about much previously.
This seems like a tricky problem to me because, while I understand that there are inherent issues with deplatforming people who are simply edgier and more coarse in their dialog, whether it’s due to their culture, socioeconomic status, or otherwise, I also feel like I have a right not to tolerate undue abuse in my online discourse. You mention your own ability to context switch with your use of language and I understand and appreciate that’s a luxury and ability many people don’t have in life. I guess I don’t really see a great solution to the problem you’ve described other than flattening wealth inequality and getting people to mingle more amongst cultures starting at a young age.
As far as dealing with adults goes right now, though, I’m willing to have conversations with anyone who will genuinely consider my viewpoint and express why they agree or disagree rather than simply attack my character and offer nothing of substance. I’ll engage even if they come back in a more hostile tone than I’d normally appreciate. You have not attacked my character and you’ve replied thoughtfully, so this exchange has been productive (at least for me) 🙂
Circling back to some of my previous thoughts, I think regardless of culture/class one general problem I see is that when we talk amongst our various in-groups, we don’t have a direct contrarian viewpoint to challenge. This lets us get lazy in our internal discussions, accept as fact the ideas others would challenge, leave unexplained the concepts that our in-group just tends to know already, and worst of all vilify dissenting viewpoints to a dehumanizing extent. I see it in all groups, but specifically I see it first hand in liberal groups I’m in and I realize that it can be seductive to talk about conservativism (for example) as simply evil. Hell, I often see fellow liberals tearing apart their own if someone doesn’t live up to a 100% purity standard they’ve created.
When I start hearing my liberal in-groups parrot such talking points, I take a step back and remind myself this is emotional, not rational, discourse and is not a productive way to discuss sociopolitical issues with others. Unfortunately, I don’t think enough people do this, so we ultimately get shouting matches when different ideologies bump into each other. Thus, my impassioned plea is that we all try to moderate ourselves and our own in-groups to the extent we are able. We can downvote people we might otherwise agree with if they’re being assholes, for example. It will make intersectional dialog more enjoyable for everyone.
but specifically I see it first hand in liberal groups I’m in and I realize that it can be seductive to talk about conservativism (for example) as simply evil. Hell, I often see fellow liberals tearing apart their own if someone doesn’t live up to a 100% purity standard they’ve created.
Liberal groups are squeezed because the middle is disappearing under the steadily tightening contradictions. You only have to walk the streets for a day or two to see the results of liberalism, certainly it has created great productivity but the production is not going to the majority of people. When the soviet union fell the liberal ruling class (which I include conservatives in, they are two halves of liberalism, the political ideology of capitalism) went into overdrive taking away every single benefit given to the people in pursuit of competition with a real threat that sought to improve people’s standard of living worldwide.
As such, liberals are radicalising in much the same way that many pushed to the left (communists/anarchists under the umbrella of socialism) are and as much as many pushed to the fascist right are. It was the liberals in the SDP that killed Rosa Luxembourg to prevent the would-have-been sparticist German revolution which then probably led to the nazis taking power, liberals aren’t incapable of being “extremist” in their own sense. As they get threatened more and more between the rising far left and the rising far right they themselves become just as radical about maintaining the status quo, this in turn causes them to shut us socialists out of their spaces. And why do they do that? Because they really don’t want people like you talking to people like me, because when people like you talk to people like me you come away from the interaction just a little bit more red than you were yesterday. They see that happening everywhere, and the only method they have to deal with it is to prevent the mixing of groups.
When I start hearing my liberal in-groups parrot such talking points, I take a step back and remind myself this is emotional, not rational, discourse and is not a productive way to discuss sociopolitical issues with others.
This is precisely when someone sometimes needs a verbal slap. One of the only tools we have for moving people in the online space is creating discomfort, and if creating discomfort in someone over the way one interaction occurs brings them towards behaving differently in a future interaction then it is a valid and useful tool to have available. Some people need a dressing down before they open up. Some people do not.
I disagree. Reading content online is inherently different from listening to someone speaking out loud. Internet discourse must be different in order for us to better understand each other. Tone and emotion do not come off well in text posts so we adjust our way of communicating accordingly.
I don’t know why I bother though, you clearly have a problem with a large portion of society that has done nothing to harm you. The average person is not out to get you. Your anger at the middle class is exactly what the super rich want.
Disagree. I don’t give a shit.
that has done nothing to harm you
Yeah sure thing, except exploit the fuck out of people, enslave everyone, commit mass genocide and destroy the planet. Done absolutely NOTHING to harm me my ass.
Your anger at the middle class is exactly what the super rich want.
The middle class are aspiring bourgeoisie, there’s a reason they’re officially called the petit-bourgeoisie. This is not a conversation about the middle-class, it is a conversation about middle-income people, which are two entirely different things.
There is zero value in having a conversation with anyone that names themselves chromosome though, definitely a totally normal name to choose.
Right I forgot the main Lemmy instance is filled with degenerate tankies. Go write more fan fiction about Lenin’s (2nd btw) cat since you want to call out usernames so much lmfao
Can you define tankie for me? The definition seems to change every time I talk to someone saying it. Right now all you know about me is that I read Lenin? Is reading Lenin supposed to be a bad thing?
yes sir 👍
