Getting better at communication takes time and practice. Depending on where someone is in that journey, a post like this can make a big difference. And I think we can all use a reminder to be kind every so often. So, thanks for taking the time to write this out
Most people know this in some capacity, but it's not talked about enough: the shape of the platform massively shapes its culture. Every mechanism, intentional feature or not, is a factor in resulting user behavior and should be accounted for.
Reddit Karma was (shitty) reputation from the start, but Slashdot user IDs became one despite being mere sequential identifiers; negative user feedback such as downvotes can be harmful to communities (yet, users without an outlet may lash out in other ways e.g. reports); even how the platform communicates with users influences them; and so on.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be nice and incentivize others to do the same, but unless the system naturally leads to the desired behavior, you'll have a bad time in the long term because building culture by interactions doesn't scale. By the time you realize there's a shift, it's too late; interactions will compound and affect how the average user acts faster than you can try to course-correct.
I wish lemmy was more experimental, because by building a clone of reddit, we've copied too many of its faults. We've already got gatherings to complain about mods, and the one time devs considered changing a core component, discussion was killed by an onslaught of users. Problems with the current setup that were brought up then will likely never see that amount of people thinking about how to solve them.
Contrast with Mastodon, which gets crap for not being a faithful copy of twitter, but their reasoning for not including quote-reblogs is understandable. They're now putting a lot of thought into how to add them safely. Not ignoring functionality users want, but also not ignoring how it will affect culture, that's compromise.
I'd like it if we could talk more about how our platforms work and, particularly, how they affect us, because that's a big way we can build better platforms, right up there with being nice.
What if we had a tribunal instead of moderators? Actually just in the time it took me to write that out I could see it going terribly wrong LMAO
Great post.
To add to this, not resorting to calling others tankies or Russian bots when you have differing opinions, especially around politics.
1 billion percent agree, not everyone you disagree with is acting in bad faith
On Reddit, I once bragged about having universal healthcare and got called a Nazi and a communist at the same time.
This is what happens when Xbox kids that use the n-word grow up. They learn new "bad" words and throw them around out of context and contradictingly. They don't actually know what those things are, though, so it never makes sense.
I've been called a tankie here. I didn't know what it was and looked it up, just to discover it was the literal opposite of the things I was saying. I was very confused and just put it down to frustrated self-projection. At some point they had been called that, it upset them, so now they use it to upset people too but they still don't actually know what it is they're saying.
If I see someone defaulting to Russian bot or tankie, I've found another Xbox kid and it's in my best interests to just move on.
I arrived at LEMMY after what I think we very optimistically called the Reddit Collapse. We wish. And I had toe in LEMMY and a few others at Reddit.
Recently with their abusively patronizing redesigning and gamification and just ugly bullshit, I can’t stomach Reddit at all. So LEMMY grows increasingly important, not just to me but to folks who haven’t yet even heard of it.
So, I’ll just say thanks for your post here. I have, I confess, engaged with a couple bullies on LEMMY and I always try to say… I don’t like to do this on LEMMY— and I say that precisely for the reasons you mention.
And as you encourage: I will try to be kinder, even in when feeling… hmm… less than kind.
One my favorite ways to summarize this kind of thinking is with the Bill & Ted quote "Be Excellent To Each Other, and Party On Dudes" (mostly the first half applies to this post though). The part that applies to this post, Keanu Reeves said he interprets as follows:
I think that the sentiment of it is really just be the best person, the best human being you can be, and if you do that, then you can party on and live life to the fullest, but you’re gonna be safe... You’re going to be supported, you’re going to get the gift of giving, you’re going to get the gift of receiving, you’re going to get to the gift of sharing. We’re all just some humans on a rock in space, and so it’s kinda nice to kind of promote that idea of ‘give a little, get a lot’, kind of bring it in for a group hug."
Well I came here to chew bubblegum and talk shit, and I’m all out of bubblegum.
Unless you're a republican or other type of nazi. Then you can absolutely go all the way to hell.
Tolerance got us here.
Nazis can always join their own defederated server and have their little circle jerk, nothing is stopping them from going and joining exploding heads; they don't have a right to be part of federated fediverse and have their bullshit heard.
For that matter, nothing's stopping the people who disagree with me from creating their own nazi-friendly Lemmy instance. This is not the Nazi bar, and it's not going to be, so go ahead and open it yourselves. No need to let me know how it turns out, I'm pretty sure I've got a good guess.
Agreed, love it!
offtopic:
Test to see if from here it is possile to engage the friendica server of @utopiarte and @requeteche.
btw and ontopic:
Everyone's been really nice as long as I don't touch anything political - then it becomes a fart sniffing smug fest.
Unless I know the other person has the same intent to respectfully listen and try to understand rather than argue I won’t engage in any sort of political discussion. Polarizing opinions have been completely normalized online and it’s literally ruining society.
Love this
I disagree, yes being kind is very important but even more important is people engaging and upvoting comments.
Reddit was great because of what happened in the comment section, not the headliners, and I see very little voting engagement even in active posts.
Remember, it's free to do and it encourages others to engage as well. But yea be kind too
Kinda wish we could pin this post to the top of everyones feed for a while! 😅 Lemmy has been a great place so far but think we can do even better. Especially with the points you bring up.
Thanks for sharing 😊
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