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.
Wow. This is spot on. Very interesting! Let me add my 2 cents: Capitalism is bad/eat the billionaires.
Thank you for this. Never saw it and he makes a great point.
Remember most people are teenagers.
I suspect most of Lemmy’s user base is 25+ if not 30+.
Doubt.
I discovered Lemmy and Hacker news at roughly the same time, and the difference in comment quality is striking. Obviously HN is a lot more mature platform, and more specialised, but still… People over there are lamenting the quality of their comments and saying they’re not what they used to be, but the majority are interesting and constructive
HN has its weird streaks. It’s a platform managed by a VC company so it’s full of startup people, and that skews perception a little bit.
There are also some very weird things HN seems to do that don’t have anything to do with tech. Any skepticism of yoga and meditation will get you downvoted to oblivion, for instance. Criticism of China is avoided, probably because it’s so easy to flag posts into disappearing.
The generally highly educated crowd also tends to believe they’re experts in whatever topic comes up. Covid had antivaxxers and horse dewormer defenders everywhere. People linked and discussed medical papers with no knowledge or experience in reading them, coming to absurd conclusions, only to get corrected by an expert hours later.
They’re also obsessed with anti aging drugs. I suppose I get it, a lot of startup people put their best years into a startup with the hopes to cash out and live the good life later, and the more you can stop aging, the less of a risky investment the burnout and working to exhaustion becomes, but they rarely seem to stop to think of the actual consequences of what they’re looking after.
Lemmy has its fair share of HN style commenters, but the people leaving Reddit over the API thing combined with the preexisting Fediverse crowd make for a weird mix.
It’s cool if you like to circle jerk with libertarian tech bros I suppose.
omg lyk dis iz wat op is tlkin abt!!!,
It’s obvious these people don’t enjoy this place, yet instead of leaving to find somewhere else they do enjoy or putting in a modicum of effort snd starting a community to foster likeminded peoples, they’d rather moan to feel validated.
Or in other words, they want a right wing discussion board and are upset people would rather engage in other topics.
People don’t like hearing, “Look, we just gotta suffer under capitalism for a while longer because the rich aren’t done having their fun.”
Capitalism bad. Cool cool. Totally. Now what? Or is that… it?
Idk man, give me all the shit you want. I don’t have answers, I’m just frustrated and feel like I’m dying every day but can’t afford to see a doctor so, fuck me I guess.
We’re all on the same team. I promise. I’m sorry you’re unwell. It’s just some of us want to talk about what we can DO. I don’t want to see the same goddam “capitalism bad” talking phrase on every thread. I promise you, we’ve all heard it long before we came to Lemmy. It’s time for the next chapter: what to do.
This sort of empty rhetoric is what OP is talking about.
Yes well everything you think is wrong and you should feel bad about it. We’ll never meet, but I oppose everything you’ll ever stand for, and as god as I’m witless, you’ll never succeed at anything as long as I draw breath.
But that’s not really important right now. How’s your day going? Are you drinking enough water?
No, just drinking the piss from lemmy piss posts mostly.
Edit: thanks for asking! CRANK THAT HOG, BROTHER.
Bingo
I think it’s that we’ve all been over this a million times, and we’re suffering while bickering about steps.
My conclusion: “People matter more than money, and without people money wouldn’t matter.”
If you want to get more nuanced please try. That’s about as bulletproof and simple as it gets.
Alright! You and me, we can have a nuanced discussion about the how to implement rent control or other means of combatting the housing crisis at a local level without a third person jumping on to talk about how this problem is bigger and we need to go right out to global revolution, which everyone jumps on and leaves the smaller scale discussion in the dust.
Of course I’m exaggerating a bit, but this is the general flow on Lemmy as I see it.
Yes.
But, that post has been downvoted enough that it is the lowest-ranked reply. The system is working.
how is that empty rhetoric? all this looks like to me is like you don’t want to acknowledge issues and prefer to push it under the rug because it makes you uncomfortable
you can’t just call things you don’t like “empty rhetoric” as if that means anything
Because it’s not intended to be persuasive. The point is to make the speaker feel good, and look good in the eyes of those that already agree. It’s fundamentally selfish, self serving, and dishonest.
Okay how do I persuade the rich to stop being rich because it’s unsustainable? Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
Thank you for your submission, but we already have an excellent example.
Nah, you have someone starting a dialogue. This is my comment you’ve branched off on so, don’t handwave me away like I’m another random voice chiming in.
I said in another comment here, “People matter more than money, and without people money doesn’t matter.”
This is literally the nuance you seem to want, a dialogue exploring the topic. If you are pro-capitalism, you must hold an awful lot of capital, if you hold a lot of capital, your arguments for you holding that capital are highly biased. If you are pro-capitalism and you don’t hold a lot of capital, why are you helping them and why is it so important to you that people like me suffer?
You’re so intent on defending your underlying point that you don’t seem to realize that your underlying point is not in fact the point here. It’s your technique, or lack thereof, in making your point that is being criticized.
Just ask them to point to a successful communist country.
Last I heard Vietnam was one and doing good, but that’s it.
That just adds to empty dialog, it doesn’t genuinely cultivate real discussion. So, I don’t see the point. I’ve seen this question asked time and again and never has it led to anything productive just more zingers back and forth. In fact I’ve seen the question posed in response to many comments that simply point out flaws in our current system rather than engaging on anything.
Perhaps because there are so many trolls we want to quickly establish which broad camp the other belongs to so we can choose whether to invest any significant additional time in responding.
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.
Welcome to the Internet? It’s not just Lemmy lol
Also happens all the time irl
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!
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
I just want to talk about Linux and make clever jokes.
You were literally complaining about women and how you prefer buying material possessions in life over valuing connections with people just a few hours ago.
Are you always so boringly literal?
No, sometimes I am also boringly figurative.
Did you forget to log out of your alt?
Somebody’s got to pluck the low-hanging fruit of joke replies and I didn’t know if he’d be back.
Irony is dead
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.
It’s a shame that this discussion so frequently centers around the political discussions, but this has definitely seeped into the broader discourse. Short, low-effort comments with no actual content are nearly always at the top. The only solution I can see is to create some heavily moderated spaces where low-effort comments will not fly, but we’ve seen time and time again that lemmy users are more anti-moderation than most.
It’s not necessarily about effort. I’ve seen people put a lot of effort into some absolute drivel.
There are heavily moderated spaces, but they seem dedicated to banning anyone who dissents rather than culling low quality posts.
Actual discussion on what?
You’ve said you do t like people being unhappy with the system they’re forced to live under, and that it annoys you that we talk about it? We have solutions, we have two centuries of theory and historical examples, its not our job to teach you all of this if you’re not willing to learn it yourself. Its not hard to find this information online, why should we always engage in intense debate? It was exhausting on reddit and 99% of the time it ends in bad faith arguments and you’ve wasted an hour of your time on someone who was worth more than a ‘k’ and moving on.
If you so desperately want to see other content, foster it yourself. You could start your own community or instance and put in the hard work to see what you want to on the Fediverse. Its no one else’s job to cater to you, you have the tools use them.
I completely agree. However, I also think its better than ‘most’ internet places.
There is a down-vote brigade around any kind of criticism of a knee jerk reaction people are having to a headline. I think because of the current political climate, nuance around responsibility for the state of things simply isn’t suffered, which I do understand the sentiment. However, I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at the number of 3+ deep comment threads, which seems to be about where the nuance appears.
Its really the knee jerk downvoters and one line commenters who do actually lack critical thinking skills, but this isn’t unique to lemmy. Its all over, hackernews has them too, there is simply a larger effort to ‘appear smart’ on hn than lemmy. Lemmy is more casual, which is fine. This is a space for casual discussion, and hot takes are fine and should be welcome.
I’ll use a political example, such as my concern around how much water carrying I see for groups like congressional Democrats. If you push back on something coming from NYT as being a ‘Democratic win’, you’ll be very quickly downvoted below 50%. However, I don’t think the lack of nuance is because of lemmy or the demographic here. I think its from a place of real fear around what might happen if the US loses its democracy to fascism that is generally palpable across the internet and offline as well. People are materially very afraid, and reacting without nuance right now, and I think the fear is justified. However, if we want to find solutions, we need to maintain a clear head and keep discussions happening. Its open forums like Lemmy where opinions are made and nuanced developed; there needs to be space for that.
This same point can be extended to issues around global war, climate change, the rise of global fascism, the usurping of generations of potential by the oligarchical class, any of the innumerable ills we are currently staring down the barrel of. Its a stressful time and people are rightfully scared and worried. Scared worried people don’t do nuance. They react. Up for things they think they agree with, down for things they don’t. No nuance.
Largely I agree with the point, but I don’t think its a lemmy thing in the current climate.
I like your point about a place of fear. I did an edit to clarify that I still think the Fediverse beats other social media and my complaint is a criticism coming from a place of love. It’s very hard to continue wanting to engage in low-level discussion around issue when I know someone is about to take it over with either some grand (in scale, not concept) statement about the issue, or abject defeatism.
If you block unhelpful people you improve the Internet for yourself.
While i agree with this and i do block people, regularly, if you aren’t paying attention this is exactly how you get echo chambers.
Not suggesting i have a good solution, because i don’t.
Best i can do is try to differentiate between “opinion that is not my own” and “flagrant arsehole”.
I like to think it’s the difference between good faith and bad faith arguments, but that still assumes i can tell the difference consistently.
Shit is hard yo.
But make it worse for others. Tragedy of the commons.
I have blocked a lot of users and communities. I don’t need to see a ton of stuff about <thing> and I don’t need to deal with people who lack critical thinking skills. The “permit all and block” strategy works better with Lemmy being small and federated to keep learning about new communities.
I’ve found the fediverse mostly better than reddit. Better than most of the big subs, worse than a lot of niche subs.
Facebook was probably the most nuanced for me, but that was because I only ever interacted with ~20 people I personally knew.
I think the fediverse is too broad to expect a lot of nuanced discussion in the comments, but not populated enough for niche communities with enough common ground that you start to see meaningful discussion.
I think this is a general problem with online discussion. You can have more productive discussion about capitalism/socialism/anarchism in a bar in the deep south than you can online. Online people tend to forget there’s another person with a brain on the other side of the conversation (if they even intended to be having a conversation, which people mostly don’t). We know from every day life that people don’t speak carefully in conversation—you really have to be constantly extending the benefit of the doubt. Online no one extends the benefit of the doubt even though we know most comments are off the cuff on the toilet.
There are some neat online tools for structuring discussions like Kialo that I think make some headway in diminishing the effect, but drinking a beer with someone while discussing still works better as far as having an interlocutor who is actually considering what you’re saying and who might actually be willing to shift their own view.
Internet is better equipped for quippy one liners and getting (bastardized) ideas into the zeitgeist.
I have a pet theory that the structure of comments on Reddit and Lemmy leads to low effort posting. As such, I have been looking for alternatives, so thank you for noting Kialo.
I don’t know what the fix for Lemmy is, or even if it is truly an issue as not all types of discourse should be presented in the same way.
