I’d like to be as transparent as I can with the rules. Rule 2 was added …due to recent events.

If anyone has any suggestions for preemptive rules or modification to existing rules I am open to any changes, please suggest them here.

  • TheBananaKing@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    3 months ago

    Sure, but a callout-thread forum is the most toxic environment imaginable. A self-post politics forum is going to be struglling with toxicity from the get-go; it doesn’t need any help with that.

    People definitely shouldn’t be silenced, but that’s the joy of the fediverse: there’s always other places to air your views.

    Is the problem of biased mods censoring viewpoints they don’t like always going to be a problem, especially wrt high-stakes topics like politics? You damn betcha. How best to deal with that? Honestly I don’t know, but offtopic sniping from the sub next door doesn’t seem productive. Should there be a bitch-about-the-mods forum per-server? Maybe. Are there better ideas? Doubtless. Come up with some, it’s a real problem that really needs solving.

    • HomerianSymphony@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      but offtopic sniping from the sub next door doesn’t seem productive. Should there be a bitch-about-the-mods forum per-server?

      If this is about the post I made (which OP calls “recent events”), I just want to say I wasn’t interested in discussing the mod, and indeed did not name the mod in question.

      I was interested in discussing a wider problem that exists on Lemmy.world (including in this sublemmy) and in Western political discourse generally. That problem is a trend of conspiracy theories that Russia is behind everything, and accusing people being Russian agents for very little reason.

      And I know that Russia does try to manipulate opinion and peddle disinformation, and I’m not denying that. But these claims are becoming ridiculous. Like that mod claiming that Russia single-handedly caused Brexit (and banning me for disagreeing).

      And almost any US politician who isn’t a Democrat gets regularly accused of being a Russian asset.

      A couple days ago, there was a comment in the World News sublemmy calling the Pope a Russian agent, and it was upvoted to +13. And it wasn’t a joke.

      Yesterday I saw a guy called a troll and downvoted to -70 because people thought he had a negative opinion about Bernie (he did not). And I was downvoted to -10 for saying there was no reason to think he was a troll.

      Obviously some awareness of the potential for foreign interference is good. But surely too much paranoia about foreign interference is detrimental to reasonable political discourse, isn’t it? And where can we draw the line?

      Anyway, that’s what I wanted to discuss, and I’m disappointed that people have characterized my post as me complaining about a mod. I’m wondering if maybe people stopped reading after the first couple sentences.

      • TheBananaKing@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        It’s true that the centre-right (the dems in the US, the labor party in Australia, etc) do use that tactic as a way of shutting down criticism.

        Candidate: If elected, I will fully fund children’s cancer research, and also promote puppy-stomping as a national sport.

        Progressives: We’re not voting for puppy-stomping, you sick bastard.

        Centrists: Oh, so you want children to die of cancer, we see how it is; all this virtue-signalling about puppies is just a smokescreen so you can get your jollies over tiny child coffins.

        But while that’s absolutely something that needs to be addressed - I’ve been around forums since the freaking 90s, and callout threads have never, ever ended well, either for themselves or for the place they’re posted in. They never have the effect you want, and borrowing far-right terms like ‘derangement syndrome’ doesn’t help either.

        If you come out swinging with a subject like ‘c/politics is a lost cause’ and a buch of hyperbolic-sounding statements - then whether or not they’re true or justified, the whole thing ends up with big handwritten-sign energy, the province of karen neighbours and paranoid nutjobs.

        And a community that rewards that kind of thing with attention rapidly turns into a toxic shithole of interpersonal drama and weird little cliques forming with their own little catch-phrases, and six months down the line it may as well be r/the_donald.

        Perhaps it shouldn’t happen, but I guarantee it always will.

        If you want to talk about shitty wedge politics, your best hope is a top-down approach: start with broad principles, and let the discussion filter down to specifics naturally.