I experience Lemmy as a reflection of many of the problems in the world; there seems to be little effort to understand and respect different viewpoints. Instead of being curious about opinions one disagrees with, the community often feels almost aggressive. People end up in their own trenches. What about trying to be more open and curious about our differences instead?
Apparently we believe in freedom of speech—so long as the speech is something we agree with…
More of a rant than a genuine question. Locking.
Have you considered that the reason the community isn’t curious about your opinion is because they’ve heard it dozens of times before? Or maybe your opinion is just rude, or maybe you’re posting it in a space that was never for you in the first place?
The entire internet is not and should not be an endless space for you to engage with the MArKetPLAcE OF idEaS. There are plenty of dedicated spaces for that in which every party has already consented to that kind of discussion.
Apparently we believe in freedom of speech—so long as the speech is something we agree with…
Apparently you believe in freedom of speech – so long as nobody says ‘aggressive’ things to you.
As long as you’re not frequently getting blocked or banned, nobody is trampling on your ‘freedom of speech’. You’re free to say what you want. And other people are free to say what they they want, even if they use that to say your speech sucks. ‘Freedom of speech’ doesn’t mean people have to be nice to you no matter what you say. It just means you can say it. And then other people get to say their part.
Personally attacking OP with strawmen accusations for calling out the platform for being hostile toward differing views is peak irony.
OP’s snarky reference to free speech is hypocritical on its face. The entire thesis of their post is to attack criticism, and criticism is a form of free speech.
Pointing out hypocrisy is not a strawman.
You’re not accurately representing their view neither. At no point have they taken issue with criticism.
This whole post is about OP taking issue with criticism.
No, it’s not - it’s about the seeming inability to disagree politely.
The opposite of strawmanning is steelmanning. It’s when you recite a person’s view back to them in a way that they agree is exactly what they think. Only after that do you move on to actually discussing the disagreement - now that you’re both on the same page instead of talking past each other.
I highly doubt OP would agree with your “steelmanning” of what they said.
Yes, I was never attempting to steelman OP’s argument. I was pointing out the flaws of the argument as it is given.
Steelmanning is a tool that is helpful in many situations, but that does not mean it is useful in every situation. Perhaps there is an ideal version of OP’s argument, a steelman, that I would agree with. But the actual argument that OP laid out is not ideal, it is hypocritical, and I am pointing that out.
A student who gets a poor grade on a paper does not get to go to the professor and ask them to “steelman” their argument for a better grade. The paper is judged as it is written.
No, you were just pointing out the flaws in your strawman interpretation of their argument.
Steelmanning doesn’t mean making their argument better for them or “giving them the benefit of the doubt.” It means making sure you’ve actually understood their point correctly before you start explaining why you disagree. If you can’t steelman your opponent’s view, then by definition you can’t argue against it either - because you haven’t grasped what claim you’re even trying to counter in the first place.
No, you don’t understand. When they do it it’s good, when you do it, it’s bad!
Not to mention, “freedom of speech” only applies to laws congress may make (even if they regularly ignore that). There is no “freedom of speech” law across the land that is some god-given right. Admins and mods are free to run their instances and communities as they wish; if you don’t like how they do it then you can leave. “Freeze peach” is always used by conservative snowflakes to cry about having their opinions called reprehensible.
Just because that’s what the USA first amendment regulates, it does not mean that is what the concept itself is.
Dont know how you got this impression but i think people are quite civil here. I guess people here have the tendency to be more left leaning. I guess if your opinions dont align with that i can imagine that a lot of people will disagree with you. But i guess this is the “curious about our differences” you talk about. They state their differences after you stated yours.
I’m a conservative and lemmy is still more welcoming and civil than reddit ever was.
I can’t help but be curious, what made you choose slrpnk.net - an instance for environmentalist anarchists - as a conservative? Did you misread conservationism or something?
I have questions about you being conservative. You seem too rational.
Welcome to
redditlemmyThe stupid karma scoring system doesn’t help matters. When Lemmy and the Fediverse began, I was hopeful that we’d be rid of such things. Sadly, people feel we need to still have them and look where that has gotten us. Are you trying to be Reddit or not trying to be Reddit? Because if you’re aiming for the latter, you’ve fundamentally failed.
I hear so many excuses why we have scoring systems, but none of them add up. People will upvote anything they feel fits their world view and downvote things they feel doesn’t. It creates artificial engagement. It does nothing for the ecosystem as a whole.
There are instances (such as mine) which have downvoting disabled, which helps somewhat.
I don’t think this is specific to lemmy. We generally like to hear people agree with us, and social media allows us to a) find spaces with like-minded people b) block people we don’t like from interacting with us
We put ourselves into echo chambers where our assumptions and opinions are never challenged. You might talk about people with different opinions, but rarely to them. Live in that environment long enough, and you stop to question your convictions, and become increasingly incapable of articulating why you hold them, or to consider the perspective of ‘the opponent’.
The issue though, now, is it goes even further.
We now live in an time when the very idea of of our assumptions and opinions being challenged is considered assault or violence, and thus justifies the use of force to prevent that from happening. They think any acknowledgement of the humanity or legitimacy of their opponent is also something that should be met with violence.
I hear 20 somethings now talk like my boomer parents… in that anytime their views are challenged or questioned they resort to violence and threats. I’ve also had those threats directed at me in the past few years in a way I haven’t encountered for most of my adult life until recently.
To your point, in the UK and Australia you can now literally get jail time for saying some pro-Palestinian slogans. So certainly there has a cultural and sometimes legal shift towards not tolerating opposing viewpoints and it is not healthy. That said this behaviour is not limited the right. The left is not very tolerant of opposing viewpoints either
Yeah, it’s a product of identity politics. One of the premises of identity politics is that speech in and of itself, is harmful and evil, and that we must use force, including the power of the state, to stop harmful speech.
So now we have this world where we are making laws and punishing people based on subjective perceptions of ‘harm’.
I can tolerate everything except racism, supporting genocide and settler colonialism
It’s the karma system. People stop talking to you and start performing for an audience instead. A good dunk never changed anyone’s mind - but it wasn’t intended to. They were just hoping for applause.
Then other people see what gets applause here and what gets booed, so they tweak their takes to match. Everyone likes applause and nobody wants to be booed. And that’s exactly how an echo chamber gets born.
very few instances have it enabled. calculating it from non-home instance is a bit pointless because heavily downvoted stuff tends to be moderated out and therefore inaccessible
if you mean downvotes in general, i think that’s a very good thing, because when you disagree with something, you can just downvote and move on, and when downvotes are out, it’s a shield for trolls and assholes, and additionally when disagreeing you feel compelled to comment instead and end up like hexbear
Post scores are visible for individual replies and that’s enough to signal to people what views are okay to share and which ones aren’t.
yeah people dogpile a lot. One person disagrees, very often with a snarky strawman and gets upvoted and people take that as a cue that it’s what they are supposed to think, instead of actually thinking for themselves (but they’re totes above groupthink)
Yeah and it’s a good signal about what each instance is like, and where to move to
Well I fundamentally disagree with that as I’ve explained above.
Also, very few people just hang on their own instance. You’re a sopuli user replying to feddit user in a lemmy.world thread. Anyone can up- and downvote you here. The choise of instance doesn’t make much of a difference.
Its a bad time at the moment. The world is experiencing significant turmoil and you’re seeing that reflected in people’s responses. People on Lemmy are generally pretty politically aware so they are feeling the despair more than average. In more peaceful times the community was very happy and friendly and I believe it will return to that once things chill.
Its also hard to write thoughtout responses to something everyone agrees with so there only really seems to be a discussion to be had if there is also a disagreement to be had.
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passionate is a polite way to acknowledge that they have delusional beliefs and inability to knowledge reality outside of their own head where anything they claim or think is perfect and good.
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I am only intolerant of intolerance.
If you’re saying intolerant bullshit, you don’t belong in human society.
The other day a guy posted a question about what AI is people using the most and it was downvoted to hell and piled on on the comments. Just because he asked a question. I get AI hate but people are shit
I don’t agree with the comment pile on, but downvoting content you don’t think fits in a community is exactly what that’s supposed to be used for.
It is fine to do both. If you have a point to make that hasn’t been made about a subject, you are allowed to make it.
But people should know that commenting on something should add something to the conversation, otherwise you should indeed just use your up votes. Like how supreme court uses concurrences. “I agree, but for different reasons.”
What have you found is not being tolerated?
Their post history includes anti-immigration views and comments in favor of AI copy-paste posts. I guess that answers it…
I didn’t even bother scrolling past that.
To the downvoters:
What makes you disagree? Did OP make some sort of clear point in a different post in their history, or what did I miss? Because right now by downvoting you’re just proving OP right. Downvoting without clear cause and interaction. The reply to this comment is a nothing burger.
op: lemmy is so intolerant against my views!
insert untitled goose with a knife chasing op: what views, fucker?
it’s not always like this, but it happens so often i’m not surprised
This accurately represents every time someone posted something like this and I saw it lol
there you go. we don’t tolerate fascism.
It’s always a persecution complex with them.
How dare you persecute me for encouraging the persecution of immigrants!!!
I actually did scroll past that.
You are the problem, and so are the people who upvoted you without at looking for themselves at all.
Speaking up for people wanting to cut back on their personal porn use.
Unless these people are mute they don’t need you to speak for them.
Exhibit A.
Gooning is a god-given right
And I don’t want to take that away from anyone. I just wish it didn’t affect my own life to the extent that it has for the past 20+ years.
No-fap and anti-fap communities have historically been breeding grounds (irony unintended) for right-wing ideology. That’s where a lot of the distaste for that kind of talk comes from; when someone starts moralizing about “porn addiction” it is so frequently followed by blatant misogyny and incel rhetoric that people have learned to immediately respond with derision.
But who’s moralizing about it here? The mere mention of struggling with compulsive porn use - or even just noting that others do - gets immediately met with vicious hostility and completely baseless accusations. It’s totally unreasonable to dump that massive pile of imagined baggage onto someone and then treat them as if it all applies to them.
You literally cannot get some people to acknowledge that there are tens of millions of (mostly) young men who genuinely struggle with this. It’s not about thinking porn or masturbation is bad. It’s about having taken it to such an extreme that it’s actively harming their life - and many of them seek help online. Unfortunately, these toxic communities are among the very few places available for advice and peer support.
It’s all guilt by association.
You can’t talk about anything here without some significant number of crackpots telling you how you are evil for acknowledging it’s existence, and how we must destroy anyone who says anything they find uncomfortable to acknowledge.
I mean… it’s fine to have a community for that. But don’t expect the rest of the site to not disagree with you.
But go start a community for that. Ban people who come into your community and are jerks.
Disagreement is perfectly fine as long as it’s civil and actually about what’s being said. That’s not what’s happening here - you instantly get accused of having malicious secret motives, as is demonstrated below. It’s just a way to shut down discussion instead of actually engaging with it.
why do you assume they want to engage with it?
they are shutting it down because they want to shut it down. they want to ridicule and belittle and harass.
get accused of having malicious secret motives
Pattern matching does that. And it’s unfortunate. But so many people in that community do have those motives. And as a member of that community, it’d be great if you could help shout them down (and if you already do, thanks!)
Not everyone struggling with compulsive porn use is part of the NoFap community.
I’m not, and I shouldn’t have to answer for the “crimes” of anyone else just because they’re dealing with a similar issue as I am. They don’t represent me, and I don’t represent them. It makes zero sense to take the views of the loud extremist minority and slap them onto the entire group. Most people who self-diagnose with the “porn addiction” label just want help sorting out their own life - they couldn’t care less what anyone else does with theirs.
Sorry to interject, I just want to check if I’m understanding this sub-thread correctly. I was skimming and didn’t immediately realize what you were talking about:
So someone asked what kind of discussion isn’t tolerated.
You brought up people discussing wanting to cut down their personal porn consumption.
You get downvoted and people imply you’re just some conservative wanting to preach about the evils of masturbation. Which is a complete mischaracterization of what you’re saying.
I don’t follow nofap discussions etc. as it’s thankfully not a problem for me personally but I know porn and masturbation addictions are very real and detrimental to one’s well-being. I’m a bit stunned to learn that you get this much flak for acknowledging it here. I’m sorry to hear this :/
The hostility toward anyone even talking about this caught me off guard too. I would’ve thought Lemmy would be the exact opposite - a place where people opening up about personal struggles get met with compassion. Boy was I wrong.
Here’s the thread where I discovered it yesterday, though I don’t recommend reading through it. It’s quite awful.
I call into question your claim that most aren’t like that. But even if most aren’t, it’s what the community is known for.
If you don’t like what the community is known for, you have options. You can try and fix the reputation, you can deal with being stereotyped, or you could just be a person who doesn’t masturbate, and not part of a specific community.
I don’t think there’s a fourth option where you get to be part of the community, which is known for being horrible, but everyone just magically knows you’re not one of those ones.
Personally, I’ve chosen option 3 for most of my proclivities. I don’t drink, but I’m not part of AA because of their religious craziness. I don’t eat meat, but I’m not out here supporting PETA.
I explicitly stated in my previous response that I’m not part of that community. I’m just an individual dealing with an issue, and I have compassion for all the other individuals facing the same thing - people who are too ashamed or afraid to seek help or even tell anyone about it. Seeing the response it gets here, even from folks who probably pride themselves on being empathetic and compassionate - yeah, I don’t blame those people for staying silent.
This isn’t about supporting a community or pushing some ideology. It’s about raising awareness that real people struggle with this stuff. It’s not sexual shaming or defying God - it’s about taking back control of their own lives. As with anything, the dose makes the poison. Nobody I’ve talked to about this thinks porn or masturbation is inherently bad - they’re just the kind of person who takes it too far, to the point it starts causing real harm in their life. They don’t have an agenda. They need help, and I feel for them.
If even a single person feels seen by my comment - the one that gets downvoted into oblivion by the haters - and gets even the tiniest sliver of help or hope from it, then it was 100% worth it.
There are 2 options here.
- Creating a community for likeminded people, kicking out badly behaved individuals. Noone objects this.
- Peddling the mindset of christofascists like Mike Johnson, soliciting the point in other communities. Get dunked on, because you deserve it.
Mention anything about veganism and watch the comments pile on. The Lemmy group mind is not a fan of anything that challenges their currently held viewpoints.
Veganism in particular is hard for some people, because it pokes holes in their current world view and it effectively says you could be doing more, for people who already view themselves as ethical and caring hearing some of those hard truths can feel like an attack.
And on Lemmy in particular people like to shut down dissenting viewpoints such as those.
And please don’t hit me with responses on why you think veganism is dumb, I’m merely making an observation as to what is not tolerated on this platform.
Vegans who treat it like a religion are difficult to be around. Vegans who treat it like a personal choice, are not.
That’s true of any life choice though. People get offended when other people don’t make the same choices or have the same beliefs, because they feel in attacks of invalidates them as a person.
I mean, I don’t cheat in relationships and I am monogamous. But for many people that’s a controversial statement that I have had a ton of pushback on because it makes them feel attacked if they are cheaters or polyamorous. Usually informing me how ‘ignorant’ I am, or how ‘judgemental’ I am… for simple express my own rules for myself.
Vegans who treat it like a religion are difficult to be around. Vegans who treat it like a personal choice, are not.
a lot of ppl think that when i say “i’m vegan”, i’m saying “u should be too”. i’ve never told anyone they should be vegan.
Maybe, but I’ve met plenty of vegans who scream in your face about it. And they give a bad name to everyone else, like any extremists do.
I also am biased because I dated a vegan woman for a year who constantly whined about it, and would eat meat, and then cry about what a bad awful vegan she was and if only I was vegan too I could show her the ‘way’. It was utterly bizarre.
So frankly, I kind of don’t want to deal with vegans in my life ever again given those experiences. Just like I don’t interact with people who have MBAs.
im sorry for ur experience :( we’re not all like that but obs ur not gonna hear about the ones that aren’t annoying… cuz they aren’t being annoying about it
Yep. I bet many people I have hung out with who are chill and cool are vegans. They just didn’t make it their entire life’s purpose and personality.
listen, veganism is inherently a criticsm of anyone who isn’t vegan. People pick up on that and don’t like it.
You’re just going to have to accept that if you’re a vegan. Moaning about it makes it worse.
pls be joke 😭
Discussion about anything spiritual. Mention the word and people automatically assume that you’re an extreme right-wing fundamentalist Christian ready to host a sermon about how much God hates homosexuals.
Oh no… People disagree with my opinion. I’m being oppressed.
Thanks for proving my point I guess.
Yes. If your point is that you want to have an opinion and not be teased or disagreed with, that is not a thing you can have. At least, I can’t imagine how that’d work.
There’s a world of difference between disagreeing with someone and mocking them. Especially if the mockery is based on a complete misrepresentation of what is being said.
Sure. And boy do I wish humans didn’t do that all the time. But they do. And so to expect otherwise seems silly to me.
Maybe I’m just more jaded than I should be.
Not saying if you should or should not be jaded but I would ask you: please, please don’t give into the jadedness.
I do understand the impulse and I used to be that way myself. But it’s something that eats at you more than it helps you. Online you can always step away from the strife and in the offline world you can find truly good and caring people who do listen to reason. I realize it might be easy for me to say but I really don’t want to see any more people turn to hopelessness and cynicism. It only helps people who would add more misery to the world.
I’m not the best person to say this and it’ll sound weird on this platform but I do mean it with all my heart. I hope you can find enough good in your life to protect it without despair.
Yeah. The anti-theism thing here is wild.
I usually just assume they are into healing crystals or yoga, but that’s my own bias.
People here love ot hate on bigotry, but are totally blind to their perpetuation of it themselves. Because when they massively overgeneralize anyone who is remotely religions or spiritual based on a tiny extremist minority… it’s good! It’s fighting injustice and bigotry! But if other people do it, it’s bad and evil, and wrong!
Hehe, the funny thing is that on me, your assumption would actually more correct than the fundie Christian assumption.
Very specific yoga philosophy, and “healing” crystals in the sense that I’m fine with people saying that looking at pretty rocks makes them feel better. Wouldn’t generalize that into a cancer cure though.
Discussion about anything spiritual.
As an atheist and a Bible-reading dude (as well as a few other ‘spirituality’ books, among many other types of books), the hate towards anything spirituality-related and religious around here was one of those things I almost immediately noticed after joining, it’s even worse regarding anything Christian. The worst for me was not that hate, it is the fact that almost all of it rely on nothing but a desire to do like the others. And very rarely on actual knowledge of what is being hated.
It is one of those things that made me question if I should stay, if the Fediverse was a place one could really expect to have enriching discussions, or merely the exact opposite of those corporate-owned social media platforms that are populated by right-winged haters: collectively-owned social media populated by left-winged haters. Hate is a poor choice. It doesn’t matter what one hates.
The one thing that made stay is that, thx to the tools available, it’s also very easy to filter out most of that hatred and to suddenly realize that, hidden under that now gone noise, there are indeed quite a few persons wanting to have civilized conversations and that are able to not hate on anyone they disagree with. Not a large crowd, but enough to make it worthwhile to stay and from time to time have an interesting discussion.
That option to filter out the hate, even if it’s not perfect, makes the Fediverse quite unique, imho.
Oh… You know the views.
I find lemmy a lot more tolerant than most other social media, myself.
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Give us an example what you’re referring to…your comment doesn’t mean a lot of without any context.
“Freedom of speech” is a fraught concept. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean one must accept the views of another, for example. Freedom of speech is also accepting reaction to your speech. Each speaker is “owed” whatever freedom you’re proposing.
Yeah, we’ve hand now hundreds, maybe even more low grade trolls butthurt here that they aren’t allowed to be racist sexist piles of shit and whine about free speech. No dudes, we have the right not to host your shit. Not saying OP is one of them, but I’ll throw a link at 90% of the people who post here about free speech are under that umbrella.
And every time I point it out I offer that they may start their own instance with all the hate they want. So far I have seen almost no one do that.
I’ll preface by repeating what you said: we don’t know what the OP is talking about.
But, yeah, very often when somebody is complaining about free speech…they don’t mean free speech. What they mean is that their opinion should be accepted without criticism or consequence.
What this outlook has resulted in, in many places in the contemporary western world (the world I’m familiar with), is that hate speech, aggressive speech and threatening speech are protected - even encouraged - while the speech of those functionally suppressed or intimidated is ignored or attacked.
My opinion is that conservative speech has become a huge problem. It’s ironically social media bubbles that make so-called conservatives believe that their once marginalized opinions are more popular or legitimate than they are. I believe that conservatives want everybody to be forced to listen to their opinions until they agree with them or face consequences if they don’t.
The tolerance paradox. If we let intolerant thoughts through, they quickly become domineering and push for exactly what we see. So, the only thing to be intolerant of is intolerance itself.
