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?

[–] Dee@lemmings.world 6 points 1 year ago (12 children)

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?

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.

[–] zephyreks@programming.dev -2 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Instances defederate from hexbear because of emoji spam more than anything else.

Defederation because of political views is, frankly, dangerous for democracy.

[–] steltek@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

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:

Referring to other commenters as reddit refugee/hexbear/liberal/grad/imperialist/shill/anti-westerner 's is a 3 day ban
Bringing up the Iraq War, Tienanmen Sq, etc is a 3 day ban. Not some conspiracy to bury the truth. It's because everyone's friggin' heard it already and we definitely don't need more of it.
Lazy whataboutism is a 1 day ban. This is vaguely defined for a purposeful chilling effect.
War Is Bad. When not the topic of the article, fantasizing about a US-Ruso conflict/popular uprising/Taiwan invasion/WW3 is a 1 day ban.

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.

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