I seriously cannot have any degree of nuanced conversation here.
Like I get it, we all know capitalism is bad, but it feels like every time I or anyone go towards discussing the steps that need to be taken to address current looming problems in the short term, someone has to jump in and shut it down with "capitalism bad >:[ " and tear down any idea presented because its not complete and total destruction of the current economic model.
The result just feels like an echo chamber where no actual solutions get presented other than someone posting whole ass dissertations on their 33-step (where 30/33 steps are about as vague as “we’ll just handle it”) plan to fully convert the world to an anarchist commune.
Edit: I still vastly prefer Lemmy and the fediverse and a whole, my complaint here is that many of you are TOO INTENSE. You blow up small scale discussion.
Welcome to the Internet? It’s not just Lemmy lol
Agree. Reddit was the same thing if not worse. Nuance is [apparently] dead and if you do not explain everything from the dawn of Man to cover your thought, people pick the comment apart like carrion as if you’ve never thought about anything deeply before. They might even gloss over things you did say and attempt to invalidate or discredit your post because only they hold the Truth of the Internet handed down from the Elders. It can be a bit frustrating.
Did you even consider vegans don’t eat decaying flesh? You cant just hold everyone to your standards. I’m not even going to bother reading the rest of what you wrote because you’re so fundamentally wrong already that I’m confident i can stop there and not miss anything of substance.
This is gold. Thank you!
Lolol!
Also happens all the time irl
Thats a great song, thanks for sharing!
IMO, it’s anywhere that has a voting system in place. Every forum has a hivemind, but the hivemind is especially reinforced when fake Internet points are at stake. That, and moderators yanking comments they don’t agree with.
Its not about the points, its about the weighted value.
Higher point posts go up higher snd are seen by more people. Lowering posts makes them less prominent.
You can go for a system of whoever posts first gets their comment to be first, leading to people rushing low quality crap to be at the top. Or most recent comment first, giving you a shit experience like browsing a discord for information. Or random post order, where high quality content gets buried under a sea of shit.
Ranked voting is the best option we’ve found that works online so far.
Personally I downvote shit all the time if i feel its not more worthy than other content. Everyone should be judging posts according to their own metric so we can average out content across a communities views.
The system was a lot more useful when it showed up votes and downvotes separately. I was stoked when Lemmy came out and that was the default display. Now they seem to have removed that even as a user config option, which is very disappointing. People perceive something with 20 downvotes very differently than they do something with 380 upvotes and 400 downvotes. Showing an average skews people’s perception and helps create a hive mind response approach. People don’t want to reply if their reply might be controversial, because it looks like they’re just being shouted down. And then people who agree don’t want to respond and say they agree, or they’re just jumping into the fire with the first person.
I still see separate counts in the web UI. And I agree that separate counts are essential information. I think the level of discourse on Reddit dropped significantly when they hid the separate up/down counts.
I think the config option is set per instance. Some of them have it, some of them don’t. And then a lot of the popular apps don’t support it, even if your instance has it.
There is no option like this, it was probably changed in the app you are using.
I checked the website too, and it was combined. I checked again just now and it’s not combined. Weird! I have instance hopped a few times, so it must have been whatever instance I was on at the time.
I 100% agree that this is how it should work, and it doe work in more objective communities, particularly tech-oriented ones such as troubleshooting. The issue lies in subjective conversations, where people are debating their opinions, especially politics.
If the vote counts were hidden, it likely wouldn’t be an issue. But in practice, it turns conversations into an opinion popularity contest if the topic is of a more subjective nature (I’m right, you’re wrong, yada yada).
The other important metric to this is that a significant number of people simply lurk with no interaction whatsoever. While participation is key to determine a proper weighting of content quality, it’s not like there’s a mechanism for forcing participation. And if there was, a good number of people probably wouldn’t even bother if there were such a requirement. Ultimately with link aggregators and microblogging, people just want to consume content (including comments) while keeping to themselves.
I was really hoping we’d leave that behind when we stopped totalling them up.
Both the web interface and various apps still have the functionality in place (though I think the individual user can disable it). I think that since a lot of Lemmy users are reddit refugees, the mentality carried over unfortunately. That said, hiveminds and echo chambers are kind of human nature, so it’s pretty hard to escape; ultimately it’s on the individual to either fall in line or ignore it.
The web ui shows your total karma?
Ah maybe not total but separated, still though, simple math. I’m on Voyager more than my desktop so I don’t really see the web UI very often.
simple math
Go ahead and try to add up my my comment karma lol.
ETA: if your app shows an aggregate this is because it wasn’t removed from the API. This is an oversight as noted on the github.
Karma is removed in 0.19, curious where you still see it. Anyway its impossible to calculate correctly for remote users, because there is no guarantee that the local instance has fetched all posts from that user, and all votes on those posts.
The Boost for Lemmy app still gives you your total “karma” score for some reason
It was removed from the web ui but was still left in the API.
dessalines:
Public karma counts and karma farming are one of the things we really don’t want to replicate from reddit, there was a discussion about it for lemmy-ui, and it was decided to stop showing them because of how psychologically harmful it is.
We should’ve removed these a long time ago from the API. As a substitute, you can show the post_count and comment_count instead of those scores.
I honestly forget it’s there most of the time as I don’t typically look up my own profile lol
You need some way to order stuff. How would you prefer to order content if not by votes? Isn’t votes at least a somewhat democratic way to do it? And much like democracy, it might not be great but I have no better ideas.
Traditionally, forums just sort by time. Doesn’t scale that well for big places obviously
And much like democracy, it might not be great but I have no better ideas.
Just make me godking of the universe and I’ll put it all right.
And as case in point, some dickhole already felt the need to apply one downvote to your very factual comment.
Lol yup, at which point I giggle and move on with my day
It is quite often that responses seem to come from school age children who just discovered [insert edgy counter-culture ideology], and all of their responses and world views revolve around a rudimentary desire for that ideological utopia, with very little consideration given to sociology or economics. I suppose that is actually who’s responding a lot of the time. All real world considerations are discarded, and any issues you identify are perceived as stupid/shill/Trumper/dummy/capitalist drivel with zero consideration given.
I do notice and kinda agree that some users here are great at arguing about theory, but can’t see beyond that for practical application.
Agreed, often if you check the post history of folks like that you’ll see that they’re still in school.
That’s precisely it. It’s manufactured outrage created by kids trying to look Worldly. The same about when on when I was in school- and it was every bit as cringy.
Makes sense. !askmenover30@lemm.ee is getting a bit more active lately, might be a community for that age range
Theres truth to this but I think the general sentiment is archaic and overblown to the point it’s almost anachronistic.
It used to be that cohorts would grow more conservative as they aged - trying to keep everything like they know, essentially. This was true when we built societies that allowed generations to prosper.
We don’t see that seismic shift in millennials or the older zoomers. We see the opposite. Millennials onward are actively moving further left, not just appearing further left because the Overton window has shifted. If anything, the window shifting, casting those in the center as “left”, hasn’t pulled the left to center, but the other way around. It’s pushed the center to be more open to the lefts ideas. The left still convulses at the centers ideas, trust me (like student loans).
This is one of those opinions that everyone likes to assume is part of the silent majority but there’s just not that as much evidence to back up the confidence in which it’s announced - which, remember this, is 100% the main tactic of those in the center. This is the “end of history”, everything’s figured out, inability to see beyond themselves that makes leftists say neoliberalism (the prevailing media world view, center-right) is a cult or that liberalism is a mental illness -the former I agree with, the latter I do not.
Once this tone is dropped, its a mine field of red flags representing the death of nuance, that we’ve reached the limits of their rationality and critical thinking.
Just like breaking thru the rights MAGA cult, breaking the centers techno authoritarianism is like explaining 3D to Flatlanders. And if that sounds like gobbledygook to you, you’ve either been completely sheltered (and in that case, buckle up, things are waaaay worse than you were told growing up) or you’re fully indoctrinated into either ideologue. Blinders on. Kamakazi away.
I find Lemmy significantly worse than reddit was in this regard. The number of times I’ve had my different (not unpopular outside of lemmy) opinion met immediately with personal insults is way higher here in the few months I’ve been here than my years with reddit.
I’ve just been learning not to engage on any of the lemmy propaganda areas, and that leaves me with a lot less active communities.
I agree, and attribute that to the kind of people who would boycott Reddit forever, where the largest part of the lemmy population seems to originate from.
As much as I roll my eyes at the overuse of the term, lemmy is mostly comprised of the "woke"est of the reddit population.
People who make their politics their personality appear at both ends of the spectrum.
I’ve found the same and sadly when I open Lemmy up I see the same half dozen articles still at the top of home. I’ve done back to Reddit on Mobile where there’s still a ton of new content.
I seem to have a knack for pissing off fanboys. There’s no use using logic and reason.
Lemmy is less ban happy than reddit, so I don’t mind throwing down in the comments. Do your part, fight against stupidity.
It’s not less ban happy at all.
Reddit will ban you from some subs just for commenting in other subs, no way it’s as bad here
Well, entire instances are banned (defederated), sometimes for barely any reasons. Sooo it’s even worse
Sure, but have you tried using Linux, going vegan and guillotining billionaires?
You forgot Firefox, you absolute monster!
And FOSS. Don’t forget FOSS
I do tend to forget to floss…
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as FOSS, is in fact, GNU/OSS, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Open Source Software. OSS is not freedom unto itself, but rather a less free component of a fully functioning GNU/OSS system made more free by the GNU GPL.
Many computer users run a restricted-freedom version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called FOSS, and many of its users are not aware that it is only free as far as it is GPL, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a GNU, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. GNU is core freedom: the program in the system that allocates copyleft in the legal system. Open source is an essential part of GNU software, but openness is useless by itself; it can only achieve freedom in the presence of copyleft. OSS is normally used in combination with the GNU software, or other GPL software, the whole system is basically GNU with OSS added, or GNU/OSS. All the so-called FOSS distributions are really distributions of GNU/OSS!
I feel like many people here are literally unreasonable. Any person with any faith at all is an idiot, all enlightened atheists are superior… FuckCars seems to be leaking and anyone who has to drive for their job is hated on… Linux is the only option, you should never, ever use Windows for anything… etc…
Like, not everything is black and white! The real world is shades of grey and often requires compromise. But the loudest voices here seem to be extremists that slap down any comment that isn’t 100% what they believe in. It’s exhausting…
I mean, to be fair, it is the internet.
a large portion of people on it are, in fact, idiots.
Thats the price we paid when the internet went from a nerd toy in the mid/late 90s, to essential utility in the aughts.
As a nerd who was on the internet in the 90s I can assure you that was no filter against idiots.
Of course. But they werent screaming about wayfare trafficing children for adrenochrome to liberal democrat pizza basements.
Their stupidity wasnt a threat to society. They were just, for the most part, honest dumb. and they were no where near as numerous as today.
Damn, you got me :(
internet, honestly, took a turn for the worse when social media came about and started game-ifying human interaction with dopamine driven addiction mechanisms like Likes and up/down votes. Which I blame for the starting us down the path of polarization… And not just polarization, but the encouragement of awful behavior in general, Like what you frequently hear about with tiktok “trends”.
Which is why I think the best thing that the internet can do is get the fuck rid of gamification mechanisms like up/down votes.
I agree. I miss the olden days… Forums and static pages with gifs and shit. The golden era. Corps didn’t know much about it and piracy was rampant, information flowed freely.
found new shit via others suggestions, or web rings, cause there was no search engines.
guest books, animated gifs, page hit counters… ah fuck now i’m all sad and nostalgic
I nearly forgot about web rings and guest books. Actually there’s still a comment I made on a webpage that is still active from like 1996
oh man, and geocities and angelfire and aol/irc chat rooms…
fuck I miss those days.
Lemmy is the other side of the same coin as reddit unfortunately. Im part of the problem myself, its hard not to vent here sometimes even though it is inappropriate.
Absolutely. At work I man a tech desk for a big box store (aka helping people who don’t or can’t understand what email is activate phones), and at home I share responsibility caring for two people who don’t have the mental capacity to shut the refrigerator door when they’re done finding food. That’s…a bigger can of worms than what we’re talking about here, but encountering open-and-shut thoughts on how things ought to be (on here) feels like whiplash compared to how I usually have to think through my actions in a day.
This. I’ve come across more than a few posts discussing solutions to various problems. Said solutions are shallower than a wading pool. Playing devil’s advocate and poking and prodding to invoke some critical thinking is met with downvotes and derision.
It just ain’t worth it.
Maybe try !casualconversation@lemmy.world ? It’s more laid back and nuanced
Thanks, I genuinely appreciate the suggestion! I know that’s how some browse, but not me. I look at what’s in my feed and comment on it. I don’t care if it’s !PaintChemistry@boring.org or !AlienSexualAdventures@fuck.zig.
Don’t you think this is kind of a black and white characterization? 😋
I think this is a problem with online social interactions everywhere. Maybe it stems from the lack of empathy people feel for the faceless internet strangers we are interacting with. It remains to be seen whether a large online community can be built around more positive kinds of interactions. If it exists, I have not found it yet.
I dunno man, I didn’t come here looking to contribute to or find a plan to fix the world. I came here to doom scroll and look at memes.
The memes here are fucking terrible. Like worse than Instagram tier shit.
I’ve poked around at the different sites. I see the same damn memes everywhere.
196 has most of the good ones in my experience
But also the worst of the bad ones.
Those are the best ones
It’s a mixed bag for sure
idk a lot of them get reposted to instagram though
Yeah that was my line of thinking. Even if someone did come up with a solution to all the world’s problems, it’s not like it’s going to lead to anything.
Fully aware I’m either the old man yelling at clouds, or at the choir. CAN’T STOP, WOLN’T STOP
This is my big problem with online spaces. Yes it’s great to demand that everything should be different, but I’ve spun on this planet for a few decades and all I can say is change happens slowly.
We’re still dealing with the fallout from slavery and it ended over a century ago. A decade ago I fought for gay marriage and I thought we won, but it’s still being contested.
Keep fighting for change, but know that we need to focus on small victories. Places like the US are not going to give up capitalism in the next year. Or the next decade. Or century. What we can do however is push for strong regulation, housing, and rights.
Nuance here is important, and I agree dropping the “everything bad is bad” talk is key. We all know it’s bad, but a country is a big ship, and a big ship takes a very long time to turn around.
I actually appreciate the flow of opinions and information from people with other viewpoints and political opinions. Yeah people can be too intense like you say. I’ve really enjoyed learning about politics from a communist’s perspective. I was sort of blown away by people who disliked liberals but their talking points weren’t those of the American right wing. They were leftist communists, and their viewpoints are really fascinating. I’ve really gone into the rabbit hole learning about class warfare and historical actions of communist countries. If people are trying to spread their viewpoints they should be able to make compelling arguments to support the things they advocate for. I’d be happy to digest more communist information/propaganda/marketing it’s really well thought out stuff.
Just keep in mind most of the people repeating this stuff are teenage edgelords. Every now and then you get a true intelligent person but it’s usually just a kid going through a phase.
Almost all of it just seems like contrarian meme bullshit. The same shit that gave rise to MAGA but for lefties.
I don’t think this has much to do with age. I guess it’s more because formulating actual arguments takes some effort.
I mean, from my experience their posting history almost always gives away that they’re still in high school or middle school.
That doesn’t make sense because Lemmy’s user base is probably almost entirely 40 or older
Sauce?
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In fact I agree with your “echo chamber” comments, by design the servers and communities foster a group of like-minded individuals and the moderation is enforcing the same kind of thinking and rules.
At the same time, I find it more possible to get nuanced takes, back and forth discussion that isn’t just troll bait or shouting matches here on Lemmy than elsewhere. People approach some topics with more curiousity, are a bit more willing to admit they are wrong/corrected about something and listen to each other’s perspectives. Productive communication is a two way street. There’s still a group of jerks, trolls and bad actors, but it’s a monumental effort to moderate them away and they’re virtually inevitable in any populated anonymous online space.
I don’t really mind if something is downvoted for being unpopular unless it’s an obvious troll/flamer. That includes people that talk about capitalism’s benefits. I know there are cases of missed references or sarcasm, I am a proponent of /s to avoid misunderstanding for that reason.
What sort of thing would you like to have a nuanced discussion on?
Really just the half steps and the means to make progress towards a better system that works for the benefit of the majority, y’know, socialism. It’s a bottom up discussion that always gets taken over by the top-down people who can only ever talk about the whole shebang.
There are no satisfactory “answers” on how to make progress. Because the only actual answers are painfully and slowly. By educating and convincing others. So it always boils down to impatient revolutionaries trying to do it by force. Fundamentally failing, and setting everyone back again and again.
Even Marx phrased it as “evolution” not revolution. And like you said it starts from the bottom up. Revolution has only made the educated and ignorant alike fearfully clutch to capitalism. Because the ideology of the revolutionaries is a lateral move. That wouldn’t actually make things better. And would see a lot of people needlessly killed.
The one, possibly best thing we could do. Is for interested, individuals to start pooling their money to buy land. Then build high density, communal housing and sustainable communities. Dedicated towards proving socialist/small c communist principles. Ideally with people able to help replicate such communities. Where there will be no Lords of any sort. And rent will be the cost of what is needed to maintain housing. Not someone’s luxury. The funds to get started would be the biggest hurdle. But once people see there’s nothing to actually fear. And for younger generations, lots to gain. You’d see a lot of people warm up to the idea.
capitalism bad >:[
i said “X bad”, now surely everyone must agree that i’m right and they’re wrong
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Just hexbear did the trick for me, although I also dont shy away from blocking users if I find nothing of value coming from their comments.
They will still be able to influence votes, I believe. Defederation is the only way to prevent that.
Lemmygrad certainly won’t downvote me they banned me in the first what three days of me making an account so they can’t see my comments. I wear the title “NATO apologist” with pride (even though I don’t like NATO), translated it means “Doesn’t want Ukraine invaded and argues so well that it might actually pull people away from our cult”.
They don’t ban you for simply going “tankies bad”, they thrive on that kind of easily dismissible stuff, fuels their victim complex and provides them, by downvoting, with a sense of agency and accomplishment they lack in the real world. Tons of threads that look very different when you’re looking at them from lemmygrad.
Lemmygrad certainly won’t downvote me
I’m not worried about them downvoting people. I’m worried about them upvoting whatever fits their agenda to the top of the front page.
Then they will also implicitly upvote the takedown comment that debunks it to smithereens, that they can’t see because they’ve long since banned everyone posting such comments.
If you tally votes by stance that might be an issue, but if you tally them by quality or impact the situation looks quite different. You’ll see, nay actually you do see (or at least I have), a +80-50 comment on the top, directly followed by a +50-0 one debunking it. Noone is going to take the first one seriously with that ratio. Even not being aware of lemmygrad, people would just assume that the first comment’s original upvotes were because the takedown hadn’t been written yet. Bonus: The first comment came from lemmygrad and its OP can’t even see the rebuttal and follow up with further bullshit, saving everyone lots of time.
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I have done this several weeks ago, and I agree it helps.
It’s just as bad on Lemmy.world.
Got people here literally rooting for the Houthis and Hamas, which are both part of nearly identical, extreme, right wing authoritarian ideologies.
I notice there is definitely a lot of bad faith discussions happening, but there’s also a lot of us who are autistic lol
It’s not a Lemmy thing, it’s an internet thing. People have become lazy and instead of discussing things will just vote and move on.
Makes for a very boring and stale world.
Agreed. I voted as soon as I saw the spelling mistake. We don’t applaud a tenor if he can’t clear his throat, as they say.
It’s to a greater intensity on Lemmy than anywhere else except right wing spaces.
Maybe it’s because a lot of Lemmy users came from reddit, where presumably only a minority of those accounts had a lot of karma. Seems somewhat plausible to me, because the inhibition threshold to leave reddit for Lemmy would be higher if you weren’t just a lurker.
That depends very heavily on how you engage with lemmy. Lemmy isn’t a monolith and different communities have very different energies. Some are toxic, many are not. My feed is not terribly toxic like many of you all describe.
If you don’t notice toxicity it means you have a very standard, milquetoast, agreeable personality with absolutely no controversial opinions.
Which is fine! I’m not knocking you!
But to give an example how this ruins it for you and everyone: Questions will get posted like “What’s a controversial opinion you have of…”
The top comment isn’t controversial at all. It’s hated by some big social ‘bogey man’, but it’s not controversial at all.
I made the mistake of commenting a REAL controversial opinion - most downvoted comment in the entire thread.
This results in echo chambers and low-effort jokes (because they’re inoffensive). Dissent is buried.
Some of the funniest shit I’ve ever read is from 4chan (green-texts and memes) cos they’re dripping in irony and sarcasm. They aren’t tying to be nice. 4chan is also the place I’ve had my views challenged the most and I love that!
I firmly believe (and practice) downvotes only for spam and irrelevant bullshit.
Is it not? Or is it just full of takes that you agree with?
I don’t see as much toxicity or general baiting in my feed.
I’ve tried an instance without downvotes for a few days, it’s interesting to see views that would otherwise be heavily downvoted
How are you finding it? I generally hide vote counts and other social metrics where I can, but that’s not the same
Pretty good so far, I might advocate for this more
I have a feeling the comments section here is going to be a case study in irony.
Whenever I have a broad vague discussion of the world that is subject to significant interpretations and assumptions it creates a lot of friction too. Contraversy is one place where Lemmy’s high response rates work against it.
To the people doing “capitalism bad” replies I implore you to check out socialist economists. Fleshed out descriptions of socialism and communism usually discuss emulating the successes of industrial capitalism while mitigating the failures. The idea of armed revolutionary communism is largely a mess that only ever worked in rural environments.
Armed revolutionary communism appeals to teenagers and simpletons, that’s why you see it brought up a lot on Lemmy.
Fleshed out descriptions of socialism and communism usually discuss emulating the successes of industrial capitalism while mitigating the failures.
This is true for socialism, but communist economics are traditionally moneyless.
Socialism is conceptualized as a transitional economic stage, so it makes a lot of sense it would share commonalities with capitalism.
Armed revolutionary communism is a bit of a misnomer, since it’s a part of that socialist transitional stage towards communism. If memory serves, it has basically only been done in rural/early industrial states.
Currency has always been a metaphor for energy and other resources to help alleviate the incongruities of a barter economy. A moneyless society is just a barter economy even if people’s needs are largely met.
A moneyless society is just a barter economy even if people’s needs are largely met.
I’m not even sure this is really true, but even if it was it would still be fundamentally different from industrial capitalism.
The point is not that its the same as capitalism, its just there are constraints on social reality as there are on physical resources. Money is a state intervention and one of the results are systems that skim money off the top of it. Its obvious that an effecient theoretical economy would be more efficient without money as it creates a lot of unwanted problems.
Can you clarify the intent and meaning of this original statement? Maybe i’ve misunderstood what you’re trying to say:
To the people doing “capitalism bad” replies I implore you to check out socialist economists. Fleshed out descriptions of socialism and communism usually discuss emulating the successes of industrial capitalism while mitigating the failures
