While the [email protected] community has always been a little feisty, the flood of Redditors has turned much of any contentious subject into pure mud slinging. Take the recent post “Ukraine war: Kyiv claims its first victories of counter-offensive”. The discussion featured these insults:
- cia and nafo freaks
- I don’t think the person you’re responding to has the capacity to realize anything except their own delusions
- hasn’t achieved reading comprehension
- tankie
- fascist
- gargling Putin’s cock
- weasels
- So I sincerely ask you to either become a better person or just stfu.
- loonies
- Russian dick train
- willfully obtuse
And that’s just half of the page. Seems like it’s time to have at least some basic civility rules in place before this community is nothing but personal attacks.
This is what the voting system is for … upvoted comments become more visible. Downvoted comments disappear. The war inflames people in both sides … yesterday a Russian missile killed 11 civilians. So it’s understandable people will react like this. But I’d far prefer reading these kinds of comments than have some kind of behavior code. If they introduced that in a forum I’d be out very quickly.
While it’s understandable, that doesn’t mean that it’s productive. It also doesn’t mean that people can’t at least minimally restrain themselves.