Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
view the rest of the comments
We are volunteers, with full-time jobs. We don't watch all the comments in our communities. We tend to only act on reported infractions. For example, you are reported often for rule violations (rule 2, mostly).
Okay, and can you see how this is messed up? People most often report "incivility" when someone is expressing a minority opinion. 🙄🙄
The point is that if you see things, report them. That's how we keep the community civil
That is how you keep a community peaceful, not civil.
In order to keep a community civil you have to understand when conflict is needed and also what types of people are usually silenced either by trolls or by selective enforcement of rules or community guidelines.
My point is that civility rules are oppressive. Allow people to be justifiably upset. The civility rules will always favor majority held opinions. Read the article I linked, do some of your own research. You're upholding a dumbass rule that will inevitably, and has been, inconsistently used.
another source
https://youtu.be/ezQa9MzJiBg?si=fkXKddpsGfuvxN4X
Hey fren, I may have mixed up my words but I was agreeing with you.
I guess I should have just said “no justice no peace” because that about sums it up right?
The absence of chaos does not equal civility or peace, order and uniformity imposed upon a living history of injustices, prejudices and systematic inequality does not create civility, this is why moderators need to be diverse and understand the context of the conversations they are moderating. There is no neutral, a moderation system is like a suspension system in car, it cannot eliminate the bumps in the road, it cannot eliminate the impulse from the car hitting those bumps, it can only react and moderate the resulting acceleration of the car’s chassis.
Car suspension is tuned to ideally behave like a critically damped system, the impulse hits, discomfort happens, but the springs provide a moderating force that returns the vehicle back to its normal ride height as quickly as possible without wild oscillations from underdamping but also crucially without overly suppressing the impulse either and causing overdampening where an impulse is never really resolved, or processed and the car doesn’t really return to its normal ride height for a long time.
No moderation creates wildly underdamped systems, but “everybody is equal and subject to the same precise rules no matter the context” moderation creates overdamped systems where pre-existing injustices and systematic prejudices are encoded into the dynamics of the system, departures from a stable norm are preserved and enlarged and while the suspension system may appear to behaving normally from the outside (no wild oscillations) it isn’t really functioning.
It isn’t easy, but I don’t think it is worth lamenting how hard moderation of communities is. It will until the end of time be one of the most difficult problems to solve long after we have spaceships and unlimited healthcare and cold fusion. That is just the way it is, and we have to do our best and we also have to be willing to say it how it is.
Which is all to say if a black person comes onto the fediverse and starts calling this white af space racist and isn’t being polite about it… well we should think long and hard before silencing that person shouldn’t we? People have a right to be upset when they have been hurt, and we don’t have a right to expect them to be polite about it after a certain point.
We do have a responsibility to understand the context though, and that can lead to understanding how someone who is very outwardly angry and confrontational is actually participating in harm reduction in a community by confronting the overdamped inequalities locking the system into an unnaturally depressed state.
Yes I heard your agreement the first time!! 💖 But this is extremely well articulated and I hope the moderation team reads it. These civility rules uphold some nasty power dynamics.
I have, as a trans person, experienced being on the blunt end of these civility rules for being "impolite" about my disagreement. Passion is not a crime, and at the end of the day, being called an asshole isn't really going to hurt anyone.
We should definitely moderate for slurs, but we don't even do that consistently. I remember seeing a thread filled with heavily upvoted sexist slurs against Hillary Clinton. She does suck, but when you're gleefully using words like "cunt" and "bitch" to articulate that, you're creating an environment that's kinda scary for women.