• mindbleach
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    3 months ago

    Reddit’s design is excellent. We left when the leadership betrayed the community.

    Reddit took off because it’s the only forum where negative pressure worked. Trolls sank to the bottom. It’s distributed soft moderation. And being soft, the high drama of ‘I’ll be downvoted for saying this!’ barely matters.

    In the absence of downvotes, you have to cross your fingers and hope for moderator intervention. Or: talk to the trolls, but avoid any intolerable no-no words, like… “troll.” Because inevitably every genius running an instance without downvotes is also in the cult of civility. Never ever say anything bad about another user! Just downvote and move on, oops, I mean shut up and take it.

    Twitter and Facebook are upvote-only sites. All possible interactions feed engagemagog, so even calling someone a bigoted asshole boosts them somehow. Big fuckin’ surprise those sites filled with bigoted assholes once they got big. That’s unlikely to happen to Blahaj specifically, even if it balloons, but:

    If you want that for Lemmy as a whole then we won’t magically escape the same systemic consequences. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes.

      • mindbleach
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        3 months ago

        T_D was the leadership betraying the community. Spez supported those assholes. That’s why they weren’t simply banned, very early on, for all of that abuse.

        And your systemic proposal is to give users even less ability to push back against a minority of noisy bigots.

          • mindbleach
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            3 months ago

            “Push back” means “stop dead,” right? Otherwise that’s not what I fucking said.

            We’re talking about tools and their impact. You even pointed out: accountability changes behavior. People seeing a negative number next to their shit takes has an impact. The same goes for outright bigotry, even if we’d both prefer that earn a moderator’s boot in the ass.

            Relying on a tiny minority of special users to do all the work and never be wrong has downsides. They can be overzealous. They can be inattentive. They can be apathetic. They can be outright Nazis. It is better when sites like this don’t need moderator intervention. Ideally - because nothing bad ever happens. But we don’t live in “ideally.”

              • mindbleach
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                3 months ago

                Then I don’t know why you wrote that.

                Meanwhile: the rest of the comment, please.

                  • mindbleach
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                    3 months ago

                    You’re the one who wants this to be the only interaction between users.

                    I am addressing the points you chose, in the words you used. When you misrepresent what I said - that’s not a “[your] logic and reasons” problem. You are lying to me, about me. I object.

                    And what I did with that objection was highlight your initial comment to try and connect that rationale with the reality of randos interacting on websites like this. You want accountability? Downvotes are it. Downvotes are a novel and effective means of shaping behavior. If you want to argue that just talking it out is better, don’t act offended when someone disagrees with you in detail.