this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
95 points (77.5% liked)

Asklemmy

43807 readers
874 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I 'upvote' more or less all posts I interact with (sometimes I forget to vote). I feel like we should bring back open dialogues and heavily dissuade people from simply disregarding someone's entire belief system or ideals based on 200 characters of text (an example).

Think about one person in your life who you first thought was a complete asshole and once you got to know them they were pretty cool, maybe you became best friends with them. The point is, judging a person based on a minute snippet in time is a fool's errand, and your own state of mind contributes a lot to your own judgement of people. Your next thought might be, well they have a history of x, y AND z, so they deserve every bit of judgement coming their way! I would ask you, why? Are you not simply fueling further hatred, vitriol and division? So instead of stopping for a moment and thinking about the world from someone else's perspective, you'd rather just spit out some more hatred and move on like that person doesn't exist?

I would love to see some solution to the shitty state of the Internet. I only say Internet because for the most part this doesn't happen in real life in my experience. I think it has to do with consequences and social sigma and so on. I reckon it would be pretty awesome if there was something like the following:

  • all upvotes are free range, people can give out upvotes like they were candy
  • downvotes come at a "cost", whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

In an ideal world, and setup, this would help raise positivity in the world and have people at the very least have a second thought before being negative.

Yes I understand there would be flaws, I've worked with and used computers for a long time, I know. I chose not to delve deep into those as I feel that would defeat the purpose of the message I'm trying to convey. And, you know, lead by example.

What do ya'll think? Any suggestions to boost positivity in the world, I'm all ears, smash them and any other thoughts in the comments.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I think a bigger issue is the acceptance of logical falicies leading to arguments that are nothing more than insult wars.

I can think of several instances but one that comes to the top was a long well reasoned argument for FM on phones. The writer put a great deal of effort into it then ended it with "do you know how stupid you sound [for taking the other position]." I made the mistake of pointing this out and was met with downvotes and told it was a very reddit thing to say.

I would love to see a platform where fallacious arguments were excluded until resubmitted or at least flagged. They do not encourage reasoned discourse.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Seconded. Every community demanding "civility" needs to enforce good faith ten times harder than they enforce mere politeness. I am completely okay with someone being rude... if they're right, and they can prove it. A conversational "that's dumb, here's why--" is infinitely better than leaving nonsense unchallenged because an interested party said a no-no word.

And if someone's wrong in a way that's not excusable as a mere mistake, telling them to quit their shit is a necessary part of dealing with trolling and disinformation. Treating bad faith as good faith is what trolls want. It is a key component what trolling is. Any moderator scolding people for being blunt with an obvious bullshitter is building a community primarily for bullshitters.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Nobody likes to be made to feel stupid. A person without knowledge isn't stupid on the face of it, they're just a person without knowledge. I think the moment you start insulting someone the argument or whatever is already over at that point. At that point it's not a discussion it's the beginning of a mud slinging match.