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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.nettoNew Communities@lemmy.worldCivility in New Communities
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    16 days ago

    I’d like to apologize for my part in this toxicity. I think I could have approached that thread in a more civil manner.

    But maybe you can give me some advice for the future. What got me fired up was statements by people defending or advocating for indiscriminate mass murder. To me this seems beyond a mere ideological disagreement and it feels wrong to leave this kind of content unchallenged. But would it have been better to just report it and move on? I considered this but wasn’t sure if it constituted rule-breaking content per se. And I was wary of reporting something that might not be against the rules.

    What is the best way to respond to this type of content which I unfortunately see all too often on Lemmy?






  • I don’t have anything against .ml users as a whole. As you say, every instance has its bad apples.

    But .ml has the most hostile and heavy-handed admins of any instance I know of. It makes it impossible to have real conversations because talking about certain topics will get you instantly banned from the whole instance. It’s not about socialism either. In fact that’s part of the problem—I’m a leftist myself who would like to discuss leftism there and I used to enjoy doing so, but at this point that’s only possible if you follow the admin’s ideological beliefs on practically everything to a tee. It’s a toxic environment where real conversations can’t take place.







  • I’m not sure I agree. For comparison, here’s a recent article on Gaza from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/blinken-warns-israel-hamas-best-last-chance-end-gaza-war-2024-08-19/

    Yes, it’s written from a western perspective, but there’s a clear attempt to include opposing perspectives including Hamas and ordinary Gazans. You see no such attempts from the Cradle’s reporting.

    It’s true that all media is biased but that does not mean it’s equally biased. There is a big difference between the unavoidable bias of your own unconscious views on a topic and actively spreading misinformation. I am not very familiar with the cradle beyond these few articles but they appear to fit the latter category while Reuters and similar publications fit into the former.

    Overall I think the assessment by the bias ranking seems fair, and the post removal even encouraged you to post another source on the same topic, so it’s not saying that this issue cannot be discussed. While I don’t necessarily agree with the mod’s action, it doesn’t seem like it’s an attempt to silence Palestinian voices either.




  • Yes, the complexity is certainly one of the downsides to what I’m proposing, which is one reason why I was curious if people thought the complexity would be manageable. Sounds like you think not?

    Just to clarify, my thought is to leave this up to users/admins to choose their own algorithm, which would transparently describe how things are weighted. For me, I would like to weigh factual information most highly, then kindness, with raw popularity at the bottom. But others might feel differently, especially if there were even more types of reactions than the three main categories I described.

    For new users or those who don’t understand the system, it would be fine to have a default sort, maybe configurable by your instance. It could be as simple as just adding up the positive and negative votes, which would make it identical to the current system, or we could just guess at some different weights. Let me people try them out—not everyone will engage but I hope enough would to help iron out the wrinkles and see what works best.


  • The reason I included the negative reactions is to help distinguish between unpopular but constructive content, which I believe is very valuable in disrupting the echo-chamber effect, and content that is actually just bad, rude, insulting etc. and not contributing to anything.

    Often, when there are guidelines on how to vote in platforms or communities they instruct people not to downvote for mere disagreement but people do it anyway. So by separating the disagree downvote from the “this is just objectively bad” vote, I think this can help curate a more positive environment. The goal is that if a comment or post is getting more than a few of those reactions, it should be hidden or maybe even flagged for moderation. But posts that are merely unpopular can stay as long as they are factual and polite.