Casual Conversation

Language is contextual, hanging out with your buddies, telling them the fuck off is perfectly fine. They can lean on your shared history, your colocated activities, and the relationship is stronger than just the language.

Online, everyone is a stranger, so the hostility in the communication is the entirety of the context. Moderators, famously, don't want hostile places that people don't want to be in. Allowing open hostility, just encourages drive by hate and brigading. Not a constructive dialogue, which is what most of us are actually here for. Human interaction.

So- fuck you, go to 4chan if you want to yell at people, and externalize your self hate.

What? Yes you can. Observe:

Go fuck yourself, OP.

It's also not like getting banned for petty reasons is anything new. Forum ops, chat admins, moderators, etc all create and control the communities regardless of any corporate entities who own the website as a whole wanting to keep things PG for advertisers. Many of them do so because they themselves got kicked out of somewhere else. If you go into Big Jim's forum and post a bunch of hate about Big Jim, expect Big Jim to ban your ass.

Thankfully so.

It's a simple solution; don't hate. If you disagree, find a more creative way to express it besides "fuck off".

Try this one: say "I hope the rest of your day is as pleasant as you are"

You should have said this in the unpopular opinion community, honestly.

I don't encourage insulting, but the most durable ones (and, by some peoples' definitions, more tolerable, often because they appeal to some kind of truth) are usually the oddly creative/specific ones. For example, there's the famous Shakespeare line "I'd engage a battle of wits with you, but I see you're unarmed". Basically what Dirty Harry and Sgt Hartman do. In contrast, you have things like the "F you" and the "a**hole" which just seem like you're throwing what you can find.

Why do you feel entitled to express anger or hatred toward people?

I was writing something like "I understand but here's why it has to be this way", but then I read comments about not wanting to take the high road and how being nice gets you nowhere. So instead: when I was a young adult in the 2000's, angrily telling someone to "go f themselves" face-to-face might get you punched in the mouth. Someone who started swearing at everyone whenever they were angry was labelled an asshole. It's not like I spent those years in a weak, no-confrontation, "let's hug instead" environment either - my friends and I just didn't put up with regular disrespect. I'll stop there because I don't want to glorify violence - there are better ways to deal with insults and we didn't fight often. Most of the time jackasses just didn't get invited anymore.

My point: online, anonymous communication removed a lot of social and physical consequences of confrontation, but that doesn't make being nasty alright. You may say, "It's just a f you", but your comments make me think that being nasty is the intent. Not trying to shame you but if I'm right about hurting others being the goal then: yeah, admittedly that's not rare anymore but you can do better.

Also you say being nice doesn't get you anywhere. I'd ask: when was the last time you told someone to f themselves and they were like, "Oh, I never considered that. You've won me over." Trading insults online leaves everyone angry and encourages inventive cruelty so the other person is hurt more. Anger is natural - we all feel it and I need to self-censor all the damn time. But there are better ways to deal with being angry, and even to reduce the amount of time you spend angry.

What a mystery. Abuse upsets people, and upset people leave businesses where they get upset. And those businesses ban the abusers?

What. A. Shock.

Let's pretend this isn't online space and is, instead, say, the local deli. People go there to get food and see that a fellow customer likes to abuse people. The staff of the deli do nothing about it. So now people stop going to that deli and go somewhere else. (Note: not just the people being abused, but people who witness the abuse going unchallenged by the owner.)

So let's go over the decision-making process:

1. Say "meh" and let the abuser drive off multiple customers. (Lost customers: >> 1)
2. Ban the abuser from the premises. (Lost customers: 1)

Which is the approach that doesn't kill the business?

Now jack up the paint job, insert an online space, lower the paint job. Do you think the calculus is any different?

And in case you think people don't leave because of this kind of abuse, I dropped Twitter (loooooooooooooooong before Apartheid Manchild was its owner!) despite only rarely being the recipient of abuse. It was the culture of abuse that was everywhere, in practically every thread, that made me decide Twitter was a festering shitpile. (Again, even before the Manchild took it over.) Sure the abusers were a minority, but they were basically in any thread that was in any way public. And that just wasn't the vibe I was interested in.

Average lemmy user.