Thanks! Appreciate learning something new!

Your and his age are gonna be major variables here. Conversations and relationships work very differently at different life stages.

You sound like you're maybe a teenager? Try asking interesting questions that require some thought to answer, but still leave room for your friend to give an easy thoughtless answer if they want to. Where do you think we'll be in X years? What's something you thought you wanted but as you've gotten okay have realised you actually don't? What do you think we do now thar future generations will think is crazy? Listen to his answers and ask followup questions.

Personally, I've always been most impressed by directness, honesty, intelligence and courage.

I very much agree with your take. I wish mature-thinkers had more influence on contemporary politics, instead of the populism and black-and-white moralising that seems to be dominating our world.

Also, the quality of discussion on lemmy is surprisingly good!

That sounds awful, I'm sorry you have to go through that. They have those extra leg room exit row seats, but they seem to allocate them at random instead of to tall people.

You say you stand up right away because you've been jammed into your seat for hours, so I'm wondering why you didn't stand up during the flight. Then you wouldn't be jammed in for hours...

Why not stand up during the flight?

Why didn't you just stand up during the flight?

Lol, ironic in thread about tolerance

Pretty sure both groups are doing that to each other...

If it were easy, there wouldn't be this much disagreement.

Fair enough, but that still doesn't address the problem for people who do want to be on a large server---full of many people who share their cat meme interests---and see mostly high quality content.

Wanting to be in a forum with thousands or millions of other enthusiasts is a legitimate use case for this kind of social media platform. In that use case, I don't know of any other way but voting to efficiently filter low quality content. "Just leave" avoids the problem rather than solving it, by denying people the opportunity to do the thing that most people go to Reddit for: to be part of huge communities and just see the good threads and comments.

Interesting perspective. Thanks for genuinely engaging, by the way.

I worry that the mechanisms you describe might not work as the number of users gets large. Check out "Eternal September" if you don't know about it already. Niche forums might be able to run like that just because they will never have too many members. For forums which many people are interested in (e.g., cat memes), this might not be possible. They may need a mechanism for high-grading content.