Lvxferre

Instant teleport is always a useful ability.

Besides the reasons already mentioned by others here: not all users are the same, and we’re better off if some of them remain in Reddit. And yet this sort of advertisement is bound to attract people who are at the very least completely clueless (otherwise they wouldn’t be seeing ads), if not worse.

Instead I think that a better approach is to simply use the platform. Create posts, insightful comments, use the voting buttons. Also, discourage people from derailing non-political threads with political content.

Renner: “give me my pretty boy and consider it done”

Moral of the episode: if you go to vacations, the world ends.

Okay, the gun thing made me laugh.

But perhaps you aren’t taking the analogy the wrong way?

A gun is usage of force. And the paradox of tolerance does prescribe the usage of force against “the intolerant”, in a few situations. Not everything is solved by, for example, letting fascists to hang with their friends in McDonald’s. (Except Mussolini. Upside down.)

I see two “deep” issues here.

One of them is that it’s damn hard to decide, in online communities, who should [not] be allowed to perform some action in a fair, transparent, and simple way. There’s always some way to circumvent it, and always someone who should perform it but gets locked out.

For example: what would prevent me from subscribing to a comm, downvoting everything there, and then unsubscribing from it? Or just subscribing to comms to vote-brigade them, while newbies legitimately interested on the comm are unable to vote in it?

I have no good solution for this issue.

The second one is that this sort of Reddit-like voting system doesn’t really work well. It’s at most bidimensional (score vs. controversy, or up vs. downvotes); and yet there are a thousand reasons why people vote, and a thousand pieces of info that they can retrieve (or falsely believe to retrieve) from them. And depending on those reasons, the vote might be completely fine or not.

There are also more practical concerns; I believe that @davel@lemmy.ml’s Hexbear example illustrates this well. If you anyhow hamper the ability to voice negative feedback through downvotes, people do it by noisier ways.

For this issue, perhaps a “reverse Slashdot” system would work better? Basically splitting the downvote (but not the upvote) into multiple categories (e.g. “disagree”, “this doesn’t contribute”, “this is factually wrong” etc.). It wouldn’t prevent this sort of voting brigade, but it would discourage it a tiiiny bit (you’d need more clicks per downvote), and make it more obvious.

Yup - it is, partially, Popper’s paradox of tolerance.

However there’s a second risk that I mentioned there, that Popper doesn’t talk about: that the mechanisms and procedures used to get rid of the intolerant might be abused and misused, to hunt the others.

I call this “witch hunting”, after the mediaeval practice - because the ones being thrown into the fire were rarely actual witches, they were mostly common people. You see this all the time in social media; specially in environments that value “trust” (i.e. gullibleness) and orthodoxy over rationality. Such as Twitter (cue to “the main character of the day”), Reddit (pitchfork emporium), and even here in Lemmy.

[from your other comment] There is another solution. Make it so witches cannot cause harm, everyone gives a little bit to make everything work for everyone.

It is trickier than it looks like. We might simplify them as “witches”, but we’re dealing with multiple groups. Some partially overlap (e.g. incels/misogynists vs. homophobic people), but some have almost nothing to do with each other, besides “they cause someone else harm”. So it’s actually a lot of work to prevent them from causing harm, to the point that it’s inviable.

It happens before the label. When you start seeing a witch flying on your sky every night, you’re already leaving.

In a few cases it is a matter of purity = orthodoxy, indeed. In some it’s simply stupidity: failure to realise that those things rely on a point of reference. And in some it was simply “it’s understood in the context anyway, so… meh”.

Still kind of amusing for outsiders.

For some people, if you reject Leninism you’re right wing.

It goes deeper: sometimes being Leninist is not enough.

I used to be part of a socialist party, split into many “tendencies” (sub-parties? Dunno how to translate it). The way that we often referred to the largest tendency? “The right-wing of the party”.

The main thing that made Lemmy succeed was structural: no matter how bad an admin team is, you can limit their impact on your experience, by picking another instance.

The main focus of the text is something else though. It’s what I call “the problem of the witches”.

Child-eating witches are bad, but so is witch hunting. People are bound to be falsely labelled as witches and create social paranoia, and somewhere down the road what should be considered witch behaviour will include silly things with barely anything to do with witchcraft - such as planting wheat:

• if you’re planting wheat you’ll harvest it.
• if you harvest wheat you get straw.
• if you get straw you can make a straw broom.
• if you make a straw broom you can fly on the sky
• conclusion: planting wheat is witchcraft activity.

However, once you say “we don’t burn witches here”, you aren’t just protecting the people falsely mislabelled as witches (a moral thing to do). You’re also protecting the actual witches - that’s immoral, and more importantly it’s bound to attract the witches, and make people who don’t want witches to go away.

In other words, no matter how much freedom of speech is important, once you advertise a site based on its freedom of speech you’ll get a handful of free speech idealists, and lots of people who want to use that freedom of speech to say things that shouldn’t be said for a good reason.

That harmed a lot of Reddit alternatives. Specially as Reddit was doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (getting rid of witches not due to moral reasons, or thinking about its userbase, but because the witches were bad rep). So you got a bunch of free witches eager to settle in whatever new platform you created.