Straight up bullshit and a completely half-baked, ill-considered, ill-conceived idea. Completely disconnected from reality.

Please do not enshittify please do not enshittify please do not enshittify... Oh well too late

We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

So basically you're saying people should be allowed to post blatant false information and everybody should try their best to tell them they're wrong rather than doing the sensible thing of stopping false information spreading in the first place.

People who would post that stuff would never argue with good intentions and would often argue in bad faith. What you're suggesting trolling should be allowed, moderators and community members need to waste their time engaging with controversial content nobody wants to see, and threads will have even more people fighting in them. Who decides when wrong info and propaganda posts are allowed to be removed? LW admins? You won't be able to keep up and are guaranteed to incite distrust in your community either way.

I'm with reducing echo chambers and taking action on bad moderators that abuse their positions, but making the blanket statement that basically translates to "flat earthers are now welcome here whether you like it or not, get ready to see posts unironically arguing about why flat earth is right in your feed" surely can ring some bells on why this is a bad idea.

This is like the third time LW tried to be front-and-center in deciding how conversations should happen on Lemmy. You are the most popular Lemmy instance and most content is on your instance. This isn't an experimental safe space instance to dictate how social media should work. Please understand that any weirdly aggressive stances you take affects everyone.

Do these "flat earth" opinions that we're meant to treat with unearned respect include bigoted opinions? Because this is dangerously close to being a "don't sass the nazis" policy.

they’re free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.

This just translates to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean or "reversion to mediocrity". Much like 🤬🤬🤬🤬it's /all, every time that mainstream spills into a community it ruins it and brings it closer to the mainstream.

In biology, you may recognize some of these phenomena from biochemistry: osmosis and diffusion. The demand to disable the "semi-permeable membrane" ends the purpose of the compartment.

Either the invading posts/comments get removed or the influx of participants (including voting) has to be rationed somehow. Doing neither is not a discussion about narratives, it's a mobbing. It's the opposite of promoting discourse, as that setup heavily favors the "mainstream" narrative, the status quo.

I should mention that I've been a moderator of internet communities since before Web 2.0 and I find the moderation tools for Lemmy type platforms to be terrible. If the expectation is to not have practical moderation, but instead to separate into fedi-islands and block the problematic networks, well, that would be a very blunt way to get to the same goals. Instead of having moderators individually ban users, you have admins ban entire networks of users.

There is no getting away from the need for moderators. Musk proved that again since he took over Twitter. Zuckerberg is proving it again now. You're not building a protopia by hampering moderation, you're building a cyber-wasteland. Any success with that will be temporary, like a pump and dump: you get a period of growth and a honeymoon, and then the critical mass of assholes is achieved and they turn everything to shit, and then most users have to start searching for greener ~~pastures~~ food forests to migrate to. Another term for that is unsustainable, it can't last.

The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so.

Rationality is much more complex than you think. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic should've taught you that already, first hand. The simple model of persuasion by presenting reasonable arguments and evidence is wrong. There's an entire field looking into cognitive biases that show how irrational humans are. How exactly do you plan to argue with people who believe in "alternative facts" and "post-truth"?

All I see in the article you posted is a lack of experience in dealing with bullshit, a lack of understanding of the viral or memetic nature of bullshit.

It’s harder to just dismiss that comment if it’s interrupting your fictional story that’s pretending to be real. “The moon is upside down in Australia” does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than “Nobody has crossed the ice wall” does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.

It's disheartening that you haven't learned yet that flateartherism is a variant of creationism, another religiously inspired pseudoscience.

Elon, Zuckerberg, whatever weirdos run Lemmy.world. The toadies are all lining up for Trump’s new world order, huh? Way to highlight the potential weak points of the fediverse when a server’s admins decide to jump on the big tech trend of forcing mods and users to accept disinformation cluttering their feed as if it’s equal to facts so long as it’s written politely. At least we know who’s the asshole at those companies. You sycophants are faceless.

This is my last post on this username. And I’ll never subscribe to another Lemmy.world community again. This server can no longer be trusted. At this point you people might as well just make spez an admin. Your administrative goals are in sync. Even your jargon like “respectful dissent™” is just a repackaging of Reddit’s “valuable discussion™“ excuse for allowing disinformation on their platform.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments.

In general I would agree, but if the community moderators decides to set some ground truths (aka an echo chamber), I don't think the admins should be involved.

Allowing these posts and comment despite these agreed upon ground truths (ex: the earth is round, vaccine works, eating animals is unethical, etc) is only going to generate noise by having to refute these again and again instead of fostering productive discussions.

I say let the communities handle their own affairs, and the admins should only intervene in severe cases.

I appreciate everything the .world admins do. As a mod of a community here, I also agree with the general concept of letting the community downvote posts that aren't actually harmful in terms of hate/abuse. That being said, I think it would be wise to reformulate and reduce down this post to a straightforward announcement: what events precipitated this policy change, what are going to be permitted kinds of content, and what is not allowed. This post is just a kind of wandering philosophy right now.

We're going to allow some "flat earth" comments. We're going to force some moderators to accept some "flat earth" comments. The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so.

I get that those are examples, and I am pretty sure I understand the problem this is trying to address. Like, I get that.

But, aside from the aforementioned "many root comments in every thread", where do we draw the line with regard to misinformation and/or trolling? Are we expected to refute every crackpot claim and leave misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the like on display? I feel like that's just a recipe for gish-galloping mods to death while opening the door to mis-information.

What if, to use the recent example from Meta, someone comes into a LGBT+ community and says they think being gay is a mental illness and /or link some quack study? Is that an attack on a group or is it "respectful dissent"? According to common sense and the LW TOS Section 1, it's the former. According to how this new policy is written, it seems to be the latter.

Again, I understand what this is trying to accomplish, but I feel the way it's being handled is not the best way to achieve that.

I don't have the time or desire to go around arguing with every tankie troll on the platform who says that the Ukraine war is the west's fault or that the Holomodor or the Uyghur genocide or Tienamen Square massacre didn't happen. They are too numerous and it accomplishes nothing.

I simply block them. Which leaves them to troll everyone else and spread more misinformation. Mods in communities should have every right to ban trolls as well, otherwise they will strangle said community and drive all sane people out.

I'm all for a good spirited conversation but that's not what they want. They just want to drown out all conversation with their narrative.

Why not add subscribable block lists like Bluesky has? Then it would be easier to accept such a policy.

What a real Steve Huffman post. Really impressive.

Let’s say every community allows one lunatic post. It’s downvoted to hell and thoroughly refuted in the comments.

Every time someone tries to say the same thing again under a different post, the comment gets a reply “[lunatic opinion] was refuted under [lunatic post link] - you may comment there” and then the stray lunatic comment is removed. Only the reply stays to inform other lunatics. Other comments saying the same lunatic opinion again are removed, because the canonical reply linking the canonical lunatic post is already in the comments. All discussion about the lunatic opinion will be contained under the canonical lunatic post.

Would this work?

I couldn't care less about flat earthers. It's the lack of moderation of hate speech that prompted me to leave Meta products. When the speech is specifically designed to harm others it's a huge difference from just harming themselves and their willing peers. Allowing spreading that LGBTQ+ people are mentally ill or that Autistic people need to be fixed rather than accepted, or that all immigrants are bad people, those things are not just bad science (though that's part of it). They are designed to have those people ostracized or murdered. That is not "respectful disagreement". That is pure hate-speech, even if the person saying it truly believes it. It is detrimental to the community and if that is allowed here like on Meta now, I'll happily leave as a proud LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent person among other things that current "political discourse" (i.e. acceptable hate) is being allowed to spread.

“The moon is upside down in Australia”

Is there some context that could help clarify what's led to this change?

Similarly, could you provide clearer examples, and how this is intended to fit into the existing Terms of Service/Rules? Despite the length of the post, the way in which it's written leaves this change too ambiguous to be easily understood, which I think is evident both from the voting and commenting patterns.

In my opinion, my questions should have already been addressed in the post, and I think may have helped reception of this change (supposing at minimum it's to curtail some abusive moderation practices).

Happy i migrated off of lemmy.world some months ago with the piracy mess.