Yeah, I think the critics want to focus on the easiest examples to pick apart, and it’s not coming from a place of trying to be fair or trying to understand.

I agree that it’s bad, and should be reacted to in proportion, and as I said, there’s a lot of context that suggests that people were taking a legitimately bad thing but nevertheless taking it out of proportion for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with the offense.

I think one of the weird only on the internet style biases that gets exploited by angry mobs is i the nability to take stock of things in proportion to their relative merit.

I like this! I think, like you say, it’s not easy to do, and I think federating/de-federating or subscribing/unsubscribing is an imperfect proxy to your suggestion. What does suck, though is when a community becomes “too big” and, due to a large audience base the cost of mass migration is substantial.

I think of the drift of a place like /r/IAMA - which used to have the slogan " I Am A, where the mundane becomes fascinating and the outrageous suddenly seems normal." It was more about the anything part than anything else.

But it has sense become a promotion platform for celebrities, having almost entirely left behind its original identity.

Or the drift into racist co-opting of half of the joke subreddits. But in those cases they transform and it’s hard to solve by snipping out the mods.

I thought I was gonna end with a clear takeaway here, but I guess not really. Maybe it’s this: insofar as you can stop it by sniping out bad actor mods, there’s a positive there, especially if it can be done without open voting which can be dominated by angry mobs.

I think that little episode sucked, but it wasn’t sufficient reason to bring on the amount of hate it did, and it was kind of opportunistically used by angry mobs.

The background context was that mods were bringing down the hammer on places like /r/thedonald and /r/fatpeoplehate, (my timeline may be a bit off and those are just illustrative, stand-in examples). The spez thing was weaponized opportunistically by people looking for anything to put reddit mods on the defensive. They wanted to do that because reddit mods were taking action against toxic behavior of terrible communities.

His response? “Yeh, but more than one more person might answer it, meaning it would be a list of answers”.

If that sounds as dumb to you as it does to me, then you can see why I’m a little reluctant to thinking that democracy will fix online moderation.

That sounds stupid and bad. What’s frustrating there is people not exposed to accountability (paradoxically happens in “democratic” elections of mods), people can just be confidently wrong and contemptuous. I do like the idea of mods having some accountability (though I also thing there’s a right wing troll thing about always complaining about mods that makes me hesitant to follow that sentiment too far), but some other way than votes to elect mods is probably for the best.

There is no “if”. Should Lemmy grow even 1/100th as well as its founders hope, then it will become inevitable that such people join. The probability approaches 1 the larger it gets.

I’m having a lot of “yes but no” feelings in this thread, and here is another one.

I think the beginning culture of a community has a big influence on what happens downstream, and choices you make in the early days can have long term ripple effects. I also think the structure and features and user experience on a platform have an impact on how people behave on it, and I think there’s a whole grab bag of incentives and disincentives - removing then re-adding karma for text-only posts, disabling downvoting from a user’s comment page, etc. The very existence of upvotes and downvotes, or the way disocverability works, and on and on.

I don’t think that lowest common demoninator is necessarily inevitable, or that if you believe it is that you should use it as a rationale for not doing anything to make it as good a platform as possible. But I also agree with you, that resorting to votes gamifies, and exposes the irrationality of online mobs, which are some unintended consequences.

I guess I think there really are things that can be done (e.g. strong modding, community norms and rules that set a cultural tone), maybe some structural things, but I also believe in the structure as it is now. But I don’t think the democraticizing thing would work as intended.

Are you talking about forking the entire project or federating? If federating, I agree. If forking, I think that’s not practical for most people. I think some mastodon drama had people saying stuff like “don’t like it, then go fork it!” which I think effectively was a way of brushing off criticism without meaningfully engaging.

This led me to think that Lemmy is currently vulnerable to the same problem. I’m wondering if it would make sense to brainstorm some ideas to address this vulnerability in the future.

I think yes and no to this. Yes because Lemmy as it currently exists kind of has the same thing going on. People who create the communities are the creators and that’s that.

But no, because federating is supposed to be a mitigation here. I know that mastodon.social and pixelfed have sometimes shut down signups to purposely spread the userbase across other servers, and perhaps some rebalancing across credible servers can help here.

That would be my first idea.

I think I would veer away from elections because that could have unintended cultural effects. They could be gamed, create inward looking drama that makes no sense to people on the outside, etc.

I like the brainstorming here though, and I agree that your suggestion would help avoid that problem, but its at the cost I think of bringing on some unintended consequences. If we can lean into existing features that would be my option A.

Agree - you can’t get more of a contrast between (legitimate) but disorganized energy of antiwork and focused goal on improving the condition of laborers. The same amount of energy side by side, but one channeled toward constructive reform.

removed by mod

I also like old.reddit.com, even for your mobile browser.

People are saying they all have seen this but… I’m on reddit mobile all the time and this is new to me. At least this way of doing it.

What I normally see is “reddit is better in the app” and two buttons, asking you to try the app or if you want to stay in the browser. It was presented kind of as a choice. Now it looks like a demand!

Why the questions about banning (makes it seem like a ban-evasion)? Also, why the antivax/freedom example?

I feel that this is a recognizable and common type of troll. The “just asking questions” and just “wanting to understand” troll. What they do is ask what is allowed and use that as a tone in which to elevate a range of troll subjects, like antivax, freezepeach, half-joking nazi references, to try and make those subjects more visible and more normalized.

It’s the way trolling is done as of 2022.

Thank you! Good to know.

I think Lemmy is just not formatted the same way as StackOverflow.

I think we need an activitypub-style project that aims to replicate the functionality of stackoverflow for that to work. But I 1000% agree that StackOverflow is a great example of something that could live just fine on the fediverse.

I think you should pick a good desktop OS like Linux Mint, and install it and just put it in front of her.

I would avoid complex presentations about what Linux is and stuff like that because that can introduce all kinds of nuances that aren’t strictly necessary to know, which can scare people away.

You’re a crank and should be banned, and your performative claims of being “dehumanized” and insisting I need to “calm down” are indisputably in bad faith.

President, head of CDC, head of NIAID didn’t say on tv it would prevent infection? Was that memory holed already?

Vaccines are one of a number of causal forces at play in the fight to prevent covid. Vaccines are an input that does indeed prevent infection. However, people have to be vaccinated, and have to coordinate effectively to mask, avoid gatherings, and resist the spread of misinformation. Instead we had poor coordination, and open defiance of mandates.

Instead of acknowledging the positive and negative roles played by independent forces, you merge them all together and use it to suggest vaccines themselves don’t prevent infection. Instead of looking at studies proving the efficacy of vaccines, you attribute unsourced vague claims that aren’t specifically about vaccine efficacy in order to imply they’re not effective. That’s bad faith.

So you misrepresented an article about vaccine efficacy, referenced a website’s research that didn’t agree that ivermectin is a replacement for vaccines, made vague references to non-existent quotes to falsely suggest vaccines are ineffective, and like any typical troll, are trying to insulate yourself from criticism with grandiose claims of rights to free speech and not being dehumanized. You’re a crank and you should be banned.

Nope, you’re still an antivax crank, and invoking broad claims of dehumanization are rhetorical devices to insulate yourself from legitimate criticism of your verifiably false claims. Telling me to “calm down” over a “difference of opinion” is obnoxious trolling. I’m sure you know the stakes of covid misinformation perfectly well, and questions of research are more than matters of opinion.

That wasn’t the point

uh-huh, lol. It was the point of the parent commenter, you praised ivermectin without qualification while criticizing getting additional shots based on misinterpretation of an article, and only after pointing out that the website doesn’t recommend it as a replacement do you acknowledge it. If this were reddit you’d be sent to /r/quityourbullshit over this one alone.

Fair point, they do say less effective.

This is a fundamental misconception you are bringing to this thread. The article affirms that it protects, but to a lesser degree than previous shots and you falsely claimed without qualification that it is “ineffective” (oops), and you erroneously concluded it shouldn’t be administered, *and *made an incorrect bad faith interpretation about “claims” associated with the promises of the vaccine that aren’t attributed to real people or based on an honest accounting of cause and effect of which forces really drove the pandemic. And you did that to insinuate that vaccines weren’t effective.

If it’s three strikes and you’re out, you’re at like seven strikes. You’re a crank and you should be banned.

Ivermectin has small but severe incidences of side effects, and the dosage at which it would need to be administered as a covid prophylatic make those more likely, and the totality of studies is mixed.

The website you cite with 75 studies does not recommend ivermectin as a replacement for vaccines.

The news article you cite, contrary to your claims, does not claim a 4th booster is “ineffective.” It says that it does indeed defend but not as effectively against omicron.

Your interpretation is “the narrative” is just a handful of vague claims being interpreted in bad faith, and ignores underlying context: there was a period when it was possible to keep the pandemic under control, and that opportunity slipped away due to a combination of antivax misinformation and public resistance, which is not the same thing as a vaccine not working.

You’re an antivax crank.

After some thinking, this is basically a perfect solution. Thank you :)