Asklemmy

43908 readers

1020 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Do you think the Internet and websites with 'voting' systems encourage hivemind thinking and discourage any debate or discourse? Solutions? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 year ago by hiremenot_recruiter@discuss.tchncs.de to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

61 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I 'upvote' more or less all posts I interact with (sometimes I forget to vote). I feel like we should bring back open dialogues and heavily dissuade people from simply disregarding someone's entire belief system or ideals based on 200 characters of text (an example).

Think about one person in your life who you first thought was a complete asshole and once you got to know them they were pretty cool, maybe you became best friends with them. The point is, judging a person based on a minute snippet in time is a fool's errand, and your own state of mind contributes a lot to your own judgement of people. Your next thought might be, well they have a history of x, y AND z, so they deserve every bit of judgement coming their way! I would ask you, why? Are you not simply fueling further hatred, vitriol and division? So instead of stopping for a moment and thinking about the world from someone else's perspective, you'd rather just spit out some more hatred and move on like that person doesn't exist?

I would love to see some solution to the shitty state of the Internet. I only say Internet because for the most part this doesn't happen in real life in my experience. I think it has to do with consequences and social sigma and so on. I reckon it would be pretty awesome if there was something like the following:

all upvotes are free range, people can give out upvotes like they were candy
downvotes come at a "cost", whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

In an ideal world, and setup, this would help raise positivity in the world and have people at the very least have a second thought before being negative.

Yes I understand there would be flaws, I've worked with and used computers for a long time, I know. I chose not to delve deep into those as I feel that would defeat the purpose of the message I'm trying to convey. And, you know, lead by example.

What do ya'll think? Any suggestions to boost positivity in the world, I'm all ears, smash them and any other thoughts in the comments.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

God, no. Voting as a filter is soft moderation, and moderation is crucial.

Voting on a comment isn't sending someone to the cornfield. You can downvote a dumb post and upvote a good post from the same rando within the same minute. You might not even notice unless you pay attention to usernames.

Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes. Reddit, for all its many, many flaws, is probably the closest humanity has come to "the free marketplace of ideas" actually working as-advertised. Frauds and fascists had to retreat to their own miserable boltholes... until they started crying to the moderators that every detailed disproof of their entire worldview came with G-rated insults. Was their insular and irrational behavior besides that? Yeah, of course, it's a mass of humans. We suck in predictable ways. But on average we can make things work. All that's usually necessary is that decent people are allowed to help.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago

Also, reddit's revised blocking is the worst antifeature on social media. It stops you from seeing the person who blocked you. That is the polar opposite of what blocking is for. Reddit also stops you from replying anywhere in that subthread... even if you're the root comment, and other people keep piling on and asking why you won't respond to them. So as anyone who's bickered online would guess, people use it to get in the last word and then forcibly mute the other party. And now reddit straight-up lies to you, saying "something went wrong, try again later." Knowing full well it's working as designed and waiting will never work.