so if you haven’t come across it, see here , here , here and here .

in short, one side says sources are pro-imperialist, the other side believes they’re legitimate sources. then there is one user thinking we have been targeted by troll farms, one accusing others of being conspiracy theorists and stuff like that. it’s one of the most unproductive arguements I’ve seen on Lemmy, something that looks like one those downvoted-to-oblivian threads on reddit. it’s just a mess.

I think we can do a few things to prevent such pointless fights in the future:

  1. my favoriate response would be creating a community of fact-checker Lemmurs. it’ll function similar to a wikipedia talk page, anyone can request a trial for an article shared on c/worldnews , then they will present evidence and sources to challenge the article, while the other side attempts to do the same. personal attacks, accusing of being a troll, asking for a call on jitsi to debate face to face (like seriously?!?!) will be forbidden. both sides will debate untill they reach an agreement. trying to go off-topic, bad faith arguements etc will be forbidden as well.

each time we reach a conclusion, a positive or negative point will be assigned to news source and to the person who posted it. best contributers who show the least bias will get a point as well. overtime it will help us to see if a source is really good or not.

  1. a much easier approch would be to let downvotes and upvotes decide the fate of each post. I understand that this is the whole point of lemmy and similar platforms, but right now we have the problem of each side using downvotes and upvotes like it’s a battle. posts about internet censoreship and tiny pigs are being downvoted because the person who posts them trusts the Guardian and other news outlets.

  2. we can limit the number of posts on c/worldnews to minimize the amount of personal attacks and arguements.

so what do you think? I personally think as more users come to lemmy, we’ll be dealling with more diverse opinions, and people might just engage in behaviors that harms the platform and benefits no one. this will be a real problem considering that Lemmy leans far-left. in my opinion having a fact-checking community will be neccessary if we don’t want fact-based communities turn into battlefields.

ps: am I going too far and overreacting? to be honest I don’t know xD I just think there’s no chance for productive political arguements if we can’t agree on the facts, and i see no point in what’s happening on c/worldnews right now.

  • Jeffrey
    12·
    3 years ago

    I’m really glad you started this discussion, I saw the heated exchanges and I was disappointed and put off by the lack of civility.

    Honestly, I don’t think Lemmy or Reddit are proper forms for controversial discussions like news and I’d be in favor of removing c/worldnews and similar divisive communities until a more effective trust-building and conflict-resolving system can be implemented; upvotes and downvotes will not suffice. Conflict is inevitable, but to promote civility the platform itself must be structured to foster trust between users, by promoting more engaging interactions between people .

    I’ve been brainstorming about a Lemmy-wide community calendar system that would allow users to schedule events. e.g. any subscriber of gaming@lemmy.ml could schedule that they will be playing Veloren at 1500 UTC, then any Lemmy user could see that event and choose to join. Kind of like combining meetup.com and Lemmy in order to form communities on Lemmy that promote far more meaningful interactions between users than the inevitably superficial interactions of an asynchronous comments section.

    It might seem like an unrelated fix, but users will not be so impulsive with their comments if they are forming genuine relationships with one another, and with deeper community connections comes a sense of stewardship in the users.