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Joined 5 months ago
Cake day: February 20th, 2025
  • thirtyfold8625@thebrainbin.orgtoFediverse@lemmy.world•Does the fediverse really have a civility problem and what can we do about it?
    1·
    1 day ago

    I don’t think that anyone should be “humiliated”. If someone expresses an idea, it’s likely that they are making use of that idea in their life (or that a reader might start using that idea in their life), so if you think their idea is harmful, it’s surely better to provide an alternative idea rather than only question their dignity. Expressing that someone should “come back when they are better educated” makes me think that you want people to stop making comments as frequently and to read comments more often than they did before. I think that reading more comments can be helpful, but suggesting that someone should avoid commenting deprives us of an opportunity to understand that person better, and if we want to cooperate with someone, it would be better to have a better understanding of them (and if we don’t cooperate with someone, we will probably have to compete with them: “When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”). The only reason I know of to stop engaging with someone is if they’re acting in bad faith: if someone is trying to distract you by trying to get you to make uninteresting comments instead of allowing your attention to be focused on something more productive, it’d be a help to other people to make that clear. In essence, this is “trolling”. Something like Bluesky lists might be useful in that situation. I don’t see how targeting someone to “dump on” is helpful: that seems like a distraction from more productive activities, which is probably exactly what a “troll” wants. I suspect that the best “consequence” in response to harm is to start ignoring someone and to make it easier for other people to ignore that person.

  • thirtyfold8625@thebrainbin.orgtoFediverse@lemmy.world•Does the fediverse really have a civility problem and what can we do about it?
    1·
    1 day ago

    I haven’t had any notably negative experiences while using the Fediverse. Even in cases when someone makes an “aggressive” reply to a comment of mine, if I ask a follow-up question, most people respond genuinely, so I often end up having a productive and enjoyable conversation. The situation is probably different when someone is really mad at you: if someone makes dozens of accounts to spam messages and downvotes, that would be really annoying and would make it more difficult to use the Fediverse productively, and I’ve seen reports of that happening to several people (and that might be what happened to the maintainer of Tesseract). Handling that situation would probably be harder to deal with than while using a centralized service since someone could use various servers to target one person, so there might not be one person who can handle all the spam. Reddit probably has a system to automatically block ingenuine downvotes and spam messages (especially if a particular person is receiving a lot of them), but I’m not sure that the Fediverse has an automatic system to achieve the same results, so it might be down to an administrator or a group of administrators to manually detect disruptive accounts/users. In consideration of how a typical person would view typical Fediverse comments, they would probably be put off by how they are probably more political and violent in nature when compared to those from other services. I’ve seen several comments that quite explicitly expressed “rich people should be killed”, and I’ve seen that at least one was removed by a moderator/administrator. Such comments surely do more harm than good: most people surely prefer to talk to people who aren’t calling for violence and are generally civil. To help with this, it’s probably good to report comments that are outright violent or that would be of interest to an administrator and to downvote “aggressive” comments so that people are more likely to be able to peruse comments without having a bad experience. In general, it’s surely a good thing to provide comments that engage with a post/comment in good faith so that people have something/someone that they can enjoy interacting with, but I don’t often have a thought that is coherent enough to be worth sharing, so I don’t expect this to happen very often.