When you do the metaphorical moderation equivalent of running somebody over with your car, just return to acting to normal, no one will care and everyone will quietly suspect the guy in the metaphorical hospital making accusations regardless of how much the metaphorical tire tracks match.
In every community I see this. There are always folks trying to narrow the community to some cut and dry descriptors—which for them are always obvious.
Sometimes the jab is perhaps intended as a joke. But to my reading it’s always a trope, namely the tired fallacy of taking a part as the whole.
Either way, it’s myopic. In any internet community, we’re always bound to narrowly see what’s happening. Because:
We can only see the posters, never the lurkers—which far exceed the former;
Posters, by virtue of taking the time to post, are most often than not highly opinionated;
Our reading is always selective. We’re either misguided by the way the comments are sorted, by our mood at the moment, by chance, or simply because we’re really bad at reading;
Our reading is always biased. Either by our mood, our current situation in life, our upbringing, our milieu, whatever;
the list goes on and on and on.
This results in a very reductive view that, although very teasing because very personal and idiosyncratic, is ultimately an exercise in futility. To those already biased, it simply supplies them with fodder to confirm what they already believed.
From afar, it’s just noise. Any view on what the community is is but a poor reflection of what the community ultimately is.
Use sentence case and periods. I’ve seen other communities where omitting periods was fine. Also, try not to use emojis but if you do, do it sparingly.
Don’t comment on anything related to any conflicts immediately East of the Mediterranean lest you wish to be in an ad hominem “debate”.
This problem drives valuable content away from the site, unless the lurkers up/down vote based on the value of a contribution (and not their personal opinion) or the mods step in, which is still seemingly rare.
As a (sometimes) lurker, when I see a comment on the middle east I say “wow even if I studied this conflict I would still have trouble having an opinion here” and skip over it+the replies. I also can’t tell if the person said something so ridiculous that the ad hom isn’t out of line.
I frequent Lemmy, Mastodon, and Threads. I feel like this is true in any of the three. Occasionally, I’ll wade in, but more often than not I regret it.
This is especially true on Threads where the algorithm sees you arguing with someone saying X and then says “hey, you must want to see more posts that say X.” I finally realized that all I was doing was feeding the algorithm and stopped replying.
Honestly, kinda true. Point out that someone is using a grifter with bad oversimplifications to support a political position you otherwise agree with? You’re on the other side and want children dead.
I think it’s way worse. At least on Reddit you can find smaller niche subs that are full of serious-minded, intelligent and well-informed users who have no time for pure amateur hour bullshit. R/askhistorians would be the premiere example, but there are a lot of others.
It’s only on the big lightly-moderated subreddits that your signal-to-noise ratio really goes to shit, whereas all of Lemmy seems to be awash in teenage level discourse.
Hopefully it gets better as its user sse expands and diversifies into more tightly-focused and heavily-moderated instances.
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