this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
339 points (89.7% liked)
World News
32303 readers
366 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's particularly upsetting because lemmy.ml is a major instance. IMO, moderation in this c/ is infrequent and underwhelming. I don't mean to hang the mods out to dry; it would take a big team to wade through this effluent and tame the trolls. The hostile "Here comes the Reddit refugees" and "OMG Tankie brigade" shit is just the easy stuff. A rule on lazy whataboutism would help the signal/noise ratio as well. This post is from RT, about Ukraine/Russia/Belarus but the biggest thread in here is rehashing the Iraq occupation. Can we just discuss the original topic? Is that so hard?
When your entire schtick is anti-westernism then yeah it is that hard. I really don't mind the comrades at lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, they generate some thought provoking content at times. However their blind, predictable, and endlessly repeated talking points are tiresome in the same way that an invasion of Fox News viewers would be.
This is why so many instances defederate from hexbear, they do this in every comment section. Just turn it into whataboutism against the US, and add nothing to the topic that's actually being discussed by the article. They're basically lemmygrad but brigade comment sections more often.
Yeah, hexbear is trashy authority propaganda.
Brigading is their entire purpose for existence on this site, they actively plot to harass and invade other instances to deny people a platform and talk about where to spread their "forces" next. They were taking bets on where they'll be defederated next. They were never on this platform to participate in good faith.
Instances defederate from hexbear because of emoji spam more than anything else.
Defederation because of political views is, frankly, dangerous for democracy.
Re: "dangerous for democracy". That's a little hyperbolic, don't ya think?
I don't support defederation. I think the calls for defederation strictly arise from political clashes that boil out of control and people that don't remember the Internet-that-was, before Reddit. "Free speech absolutist" wasn't a thing because no one pictured their little forum as mattering that much. Forum moderation wasn't about enforcing a specific world view or preserving an echo chamber, it was about preserving civil discourse. And since I'm typing this out I might as well add that I think if I was to dust off an early 90's or 2000's mod hat, I'd do the following:
What do people want this place to be? A place where all sides can meet (if they strictly behave)? An echo chamber? A raging angry gladiator pit? Like I said above, as a major Lemmy instance, this place should be downright boring and the extremists can retreat to other instances better suited to their anger.
This isn't about their political views in particular, this is about them brigading comment sections and derailing from the original topic and shouting down anybody who disagrees.
What? This is such a ridiculous claim I'm not even sure where to start. Federation does not equal democracy, and defederation from a shitty spammy instance has zero impact on democracy.
And also don't forget the mass spam of oversized emojis and pictures of pigs shitting.
Democracy is built on discourse of opposing views. If we just censor all opposing views, then what the fuck is even the point?
Yet, people with these political views do exist in our society. We need to find a way to integrate them into society, not isolate them.
Defederation is not censorship. All it means is that nobody on that instance wants to hear your bullshit, and are showing you the door. You're able to make an account on another federated instance if you wanted to hear those vitriolic, harmful people.
There's about as much discourse here as rival football hooligans having it out in the streets. A lot of violence but it doesn't really change the score. What's the point of talking when no one's listening?