Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative. Respectful disagreement should be allowed in a smaller proportion to the established narrative.
Humans are naturally inclined to believe a single narrative when they’re only presented with a single narrative. That’s the basis of how fiction works. You can’t tell someone a story if they’re questioning every paragraph. However, a well placed sentence questioning that narrative gives the reader the option to chose. They’re no longer in a story being told by one author, and they’re free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.
Unfortunately, some malicious actors are hijacking this natural tendency to be invested in fiction, and they’re using it to create absurd, cult-like trends in non-fiction. They’re using this for various nefarious ends, to turn us against each other, to generate profit, and to affect politics both domestically and internationally.
In a fully anonymous social media platform, we can’t counter this fully. But we can prune some of the most egregious echo chambers.
We’re aware that this policy is going to be subjective. It won’t be popular in all instances. We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments. The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so. One sentence that doesn’t jive with the overall narrative should be easily countered or ignored.
It’s harder to just dismiss that comment if it’s interrupting your fictional story that’s pretending to be real. “The moon is upside down in Australia” does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than “Nobody has crossed the ice wall” does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.
A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.
Of course this isn’t about marijuana. There’s a small handful of self-selected moderators who are very transparently looking to push their particular narrative. And they don’t want to allow discussion. They want to function as propaganda and an incubator. Our goal is to allow a few pinholes of light into the Truman show they wish to create. When those users’ pinholes are systematically shut down, we as admins can directly fix the issue.
We don’t expect this policy to be perfect. Admins are not aware of everything that happens on our instances and don’t expect to be. This is a tool that allows us to trim the most extreme of our communities and guide them to something more reasonable. This policy is the board that we point to when we see something obscene on [email protected] so that we can actually do something about it without being too authoritarian ourselves. We want to enable our users to counter the absolute BS, and be able to step in when self-selected moderators silence those reasonable people.
Some communities will receive an immediate notice with a link to this new policy. The most egregious communities will comply, or their moderators will be removed from those communities.
Moderators, if someone is responding to many root comments in every thread, that’s not “in a smaller proportion” and you’re free to do what you like about that. If their “counter” narrative posts are making up half of the posts to your community, you’re free to address that. If they’re belligerent or rude, of course you know what to do. If they’re just saying something you don’t like, respectfully, and they’re not spamming it, use your words instead of your moderation abilities.
Please do not enshittify please do not enshittify please do not enshittify… Oh well too late
A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.
So users should also be able to post about Flat Earth and Antivaxxing on science only channels, by that logic.
No thanks.
What absolutely cowardice. There are no “alternate facts”.
Edit *you actually admit you’re going to forced science communities to post flat Earth? Ok gg Lemmy, it wasn’t that good of run anyway but cya. Russians and flathearhers. Star trek memes aren’t worth enough for me to stay.
The purpose is to allow pinholes through echo chambers with the idea that the odd antivax comment is easier to deal with than the odd “Russia is waging a war of aggression” comment in a pro-Russia community.
One of those stances requires a black box with other ideas kept out or it collapses. That has recently been done with heavy, heavy moderation banning large numbers of people. That’s the kind of moderation we’re looking to rein in.
I’ve focused on the most controversial examples, because to some people (if they’re acting genuinely), that’s what it might look like to them. If you want a flat earth community, that’s fine, as long as you allow people to call it out as a joke once in a while.
The purpose is to encourage discussion where it’s most needed, usually where moderators are preventing it.
If you want a flat earth community, that’s fine, as long as you allow people to call it out as a joke once in a while.
That would be fine, because Flat Earth is a joke and that’s true. It would also be fine to mod it out if they want to have a community of loonies.
But you’re saying you will forcefully make sure that astronomy communities accept flat Earth, medical communities accept antivaxxing and drinking bleach for covid?
Have a think about this again ffs. And do it after you’ve come down from whatever you’ve been smoking.
We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
So basically you’re saying people should be allowed to post blatant false information and everybody should try their best to tell them they’re wrong rather than doing the sensible thing of stopping false information spreading in the first place.
People who would post that stuff would never argue with good intentions and would often argue in bad faith. What you’re suggesting trolling should be allowed, moderators and community members need to waste their time engaging with controversial content nobody wants to see, and threads will have even more people fighting in them. Who decides when wrong info and propaganda posts are allowed to be removed? LW admins? You won’t be able to keep up and are guaranteed to incite distrust in your community either way.
I’m with reducing echo chambers and taking action on bad moderators that abuse their positions, but making the blanket statement that basically translates to “flat earthers are now welcome here whether you like it or not, get ready to see posts unironically arguing about why flat earth is right in your feed” surely can ring some bells on why this is a bad idea.
This is like the third time LW tried to be front-and-center in deciding how conversations should happen on Lemmy. You are the most popular Lemmy instance and most content is on your instance. This isn’t an experimental safe space instance to dictate how social media should work. Please understand that any weirdly aggressive stances you take affects everyone.
This is refreshing to see, good on you for daring to do this. There is no reason to fear respectful debate in the absence of an agenda.
It’s really easy to disguise a campaign to wear out moderators as respectful debate, e.g. by sealioning, especially if you’re not working alone. The new rules don’t have any provision to distinguish between respectful debate and bad-faith posts, so it’s not unreasonable to worry that this change will do a lot more to promote bad-faith ‘debate’ than respectful debate.
I agree that it’s a difficult balancing act. Overall though, the role of a moderator is to facilitate conversation in accordance to the rules, not enforce their own narrative on the community. These steps are not perfect, but they are an attempt to try and get moderators to moderate more and dictate less.
Good on yall. See i knew I had faith in you for a reason
Do these “flat earth” opinions that we’re meant to treat with unearned respect include bigoted opinions? Because this is dangerously close to being a “don’t sass the nazis” policy.
No. The ToS still applies.
What a real Steve Huffman post. Really impressive.
Classic .world admins showing their constant incompetence
nice
Well, hopefully this will finally get saner instances to deferate .world as the disinformation hub it’s now openly admitting to intentionally be (and has always been, see the misinformation bot debacle for a previous example), so that’s good for lemmy as a whole, I suppose, in the long term (once .world communities have moved to other instances).
“The moon is upside down in Australia”
I appreciate everything the .world admins do. As a mod of a community here, I also agree with the general concept of letting the community downvote posts that aren’t actually harmful in terms of hate/abuse. That being said, I think it would be wise to reformulate and reduce down this post to a straightforward announcement: what events precipitated this policy change, what are going to be permitted kinds of content, and what is not allowed. This post is just a kind of wandering philosophy right now.
That being said, I think it would be wise to reformulate and reduce down this post to a straightforward announcement:
Indeed. I know what they mean and why they arrived at this decision, and I agree with it, but I got bored half-way through.
I don’t have the time or desire to go around arguing with every tankie troll on the platform who says that the Ukraine war is the west’s fault or that the Holomodor or the Uyghur genocide or Tienamen Square massacre didn’t happen. They are too numerous and it accomplishes nothing.
I simply block them. Which leaves them to troll everyone else and spread more misinformation. Mods in communities should have every right to ban trolls as well, otherwise they will strangle said community and drive all sane people out.
I’m all for a good spirited conversation but that’s not what they want. They just want to drown out all conversation with their narrative.
Why not add subscribable block lists like Bluesky has? Then it would be easier to accept such a policy.
Yep. Are the admins going to at least force mods on world to let me call them a tankie when they post tankie shit? Cause I got banned from a .world comm for exactly that.
Holomodor
Tienamen
At least learn to spell your Radio Free Europe/Asia propaganda before you try and position yourself as an educated person on it
I respectfully disagree with you being a tankie and an absolute shill for authoritarians and dictators.
Am I doing this right?
I respectfully disagree with you being a tankie
Well, don’t disagree with me being a tankie because I am a tankie.
You’re a shill for US imperialism by being against those who fought the hardest against it, and most if not all of your position on international policy falls in line with every guide point of the US Department of State. Using “tankie” as an insult you’re aligning yourself in the wrong side of the Korean war, in the wrong side of the Vietnam war, in the wrong side of the war in Afghanistan, in the wrong side of the invasion of Iraq… Am I doing this right?
What’s the difference between days and years? Putin said 3 year SMO right? To protect people in two specific regions? No wait it was to denazify Ukraine. No wait it was to prevent NATO expansion. No wait…
Is there some context that could help clarify what’s led to this change?
Similarly, could you provide clearer examples, and how this is intended to fit into the existing Terms of Service/Rules? Despite the length of the post, the way in which it’s written leaves this change too ambiguous to be easily understood, which I think is evident both from the voting and commenting patterns.
In my opinion, my questions should have already been addressed in the post, and I think may have helped reception of this change (supposing at minimum it’s to curtail some abusive moderation practices).
Happy i migrated off of lemmy.world some months ago with the piracy mess.
Same here. While I appreciate the work LW sysadmins do, this kind of decision just seems questionable
they’re free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.
This just translates to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean or “reversion to mediocrity”. Much like 🤬🤬🤬🤬it’s
/all, every time that mainstream spills into a community it ruins it and brings it closer to the mainstream.In biology, you may recognize some of these phenomena from biochemistry: osmosis and diffusion. The demand to disable the “semi-permeable membrane” ends the purpose of the compartment.
Either the invading posts/comments get removed or the influx of participants (including voting) has to be rationed somehow. Doing neither is not a discussion about narratives, it’s a mobbing. It’s the opposite of promoting discourse, as that setup heavily favors the “mainstream” narrative, the status quo.
I should mention that I’ve been a moderator of internet communities since before Web 2.0 and I find the moderation tools for Lemmy type platforms to be terrible. If the expectation is to not have practical moderation, but instead to separate into fedi-islands and block the problematic networks, well, that would be a very blunt way to get to the same goals. Instead of having moderators individually ban users, you have admins ban entire networks of users.
There is no getting away from the need for moderators. Musk proved that again since he took over Twitter. Zuckerberg is proving it again now. You’re not building a protopia by hampering moderation, you’re building a cyber-wasteland. Any success with that will be temporary, like a pump and dump: you get a period of growth and a honeymoon, and then the critical mass of assholes is achieved and they turn everything to shit, and then most users have to start searching for greener
pasturesfood forests to migrate to. Another term for that is unsustainable, it can’t last.The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so.
Rationality is much more complex than you think. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic should’ve taught you that already, first hand. The simple model of persuasion by presenting reasonable arguments and evidence is wrong. There’s an entire field looking into cognitive biases that show how irrational humans are. How exactly do you plan to argue with people who believe in “alternative facts” and “post-truth”?
All I see in the article you posted is a lack of experience in dealing with bullshit, a lack of understanding of the viral or memetic nature of bullshit.
It’s harder to just dismiss that comment if it’s interrupting your fictional story that’s pretending to be real. “The moon is upside down in Australia” does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than “Nobody has crossed the ice wall” does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.
It’s disheartening that you haven’t learned yet that flateartherism is a variant of creationism, another religiously inspired pseudoscience.
Well said the majority will often want to oppress the minority.
The phrase “common sense” is flawed as the majority have been wrong about certain topics in the past like lobotomies being used to “correct problematic behaviour”.
