this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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It was banned on Reddit because it is racist, hatefull and spread Conspiracies.

In my new community I expect the exclution of racist communities. It is easy now with defederation. Nazis can do whatever they want on their instances, but the instances I want to be part of should not amplify their shit and flush it into our timelines.

The instance-admin of [email protected] did not reply to my message. Big instances seem not to defederate with them.

The new TD may not be a success, the point is not to give Nazis a platform like it is happening now. Fans of TD are racists.

Where are the instances that show face against racism?

edit: to contact the admins: @donut @TheDude @smorks

edit2: @TheDude deleted the community :)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Relevant details: 1) the community was removed already, so I'll discuss the implications if it wasn't; 2) I'll quote things out of order; 3) there's a TL;DR: near the end.

By your meaningless definition of the word [...]

We both know what “laissez-faire” actually means

By "laissez faire" I do not mean the economic approach. I was using the expression more literally; roughly "let them handle it", or "you let do". This is clear by context, since the topic does not revolve around macroeconomics¹ ("market" this, "market" there). Context, use it.

The definition is not useless, as it's also clear that we were assigning different values to the expression. Words and expressions don't have "actual" (intrinsic, well-defined and immutable) meanings, they change per person and sometimes per utterance². Learn to handle this.

That said: onwards I'll call it OIAN (Only Intervene As Necessary), to avoid ambiguity, since you struggle with this sort of thing. The underlying reasoning stays the same no matter which words are used to convey it, be it laissez faire or OIAN or wug or waka-waka or gkfdshjs.

and I think the Gilded Age showed us what a shit approach it is.

After a quick check in Wikipedia: why do you assume that I know random historical events from random countries across the globe? I'm not from USA. Stop trying to build a digital wall, e-Trump style³.

With that out of the way:


“If necessary” is doing all of the work there.

Yet another assumption: that "all the work" won't change from instance to instance, and that you know exactly what is supposed to be.

Under an OIAN approach, confronting a Nazi who's "playing along" (for now) should be up to the community. If it's OIAN for the Nazi, it's OIAN for everyone else. Three things might happen:

  • The Nazi leaves on his own. Problem solved.
  • The Nazi starts breaking the rules of the place (including "don't promote hate"). They do it often when confronted enough. Then admin intervention is deserved and necessary (as non-admins can't ban.)
  • The Nazi neither leaves, nor break the local rules. He won't be able to bring new Nazi into the table, with the community battering him.

Under an "it's up to the admins to tie the shoes of the baby users" approach, the admins themselves should dictate the following:

  • That Donald support = hate, thus against the rules; or
  • That wearing a clear provocative username = trolling, thus against the rules⁴;
  • etc.

This kind of "we dictate this, we dictate that" piles up over time, leading to abuse of a strict approach. Plenty examples of that from Reddit⁵: user got a problem? "MODS, SOLVE IT FOR ME". Mod got a problem? "ADMINS, SOLVE IT FOR ME". It leads into powermods, rogue admins, huge lists of rules that got broken all the time (each to address a new tiny issue) and opening even more grey areas for selective enforcement. And guess what, you're empowering the admins in detriment of the users by that.

Yes, it is. I am quite familiar with how these dynamics work – I followed r/cth for about a year before it was quarantined. [...] and that transformation took maybe a month.

Emphasis mine - even if we disregard that this is a big "chrust me" (anecdotal evidence does not lead to meaningful conclusions - bring data or arguments, otherwise you're just calling your reader gullible/stupid with this sort of anecdote), there's a second issue here: it disregards that r/chapotraphouse was an already established community, full of people reinforcing each other's behaviour. The TD @ shitjustworks however had literally one active user.

If we got an actual gathering of people in TD @ shitjustworks, then perhaps the dynamic would be similar. Perhaps. I'm not too eager to be an assumer.

Now, unlike the Reddit admins, I won’t equivocate between TD and cth [...]

I believe that I get what you mean by mentioning CTH - it's an example for the dynamic. I won't assume crap like "than u think dat TD = CTH? lol"

If I had to take a guess, I think that the admins in Reddit didn't really equate TD=CTH. They banned CTH to throw a bone to the right-wing users, because they still wanted those users in their platform; they just didn't want that content due to the advertisers not liking it. That should not happen in the Lemmyverse, as those users themselves are undesirable.

Oh, it’s annoying is it? That’s such a shame, that it’s annoying. I’ll be sure to tell the minorities pushed out of the Nazi bar that preventative measures are possible but really should not be implemented because they would be annoying.

OK, now you're just distorting what I said, for the sake of yet other three fallacies: appeal to emotion, extended analogy, and strawman.

I'm not saying "don't kick out the Nazi". I'm saying "letting the users kick out the Nazi might be an option". Is the difference clear?

Think on the differences between the RL bar and a Lemmy instance, not just the similarities. I'll list three for you:

  • A bar is not a collective effort. It's a business, with a specific group of people being responsible for it. A lemmy instance however should not be seen as the admin's business, but as a collective effort.
  • The barman likely knew far better how his clients would [not] behave towards the Nazi, to decide that the action was actually necessary, after years working there. How old is the instance in question?
  • Someone can (and should) politicise an instance to not put up with Nazi. A bar cannot politicise its customers to do the same.

And there's a potential fourth difference that I brushed off in the other comment, but might as well address here: given that I give as many craps about USA internal politics as I do for the Mongolian ones - for the same reason - you gotta convince me that "TD supporter → certainly a Nazi". Otherwise we're dealing with a heuristic, not a confirmed fact⁶.

Please, give a stronger tell that you don’t give a shit for the people this more gravely impacts that you acknowledge how reversible this is and yet think that it’s still too much of a hassle because it’s annoying.

Please give me a stronger tell that I'm not dealing with a context-illiterate and an assumer, who's eager to churn out fallacies like there was no tomorrow, and eager to disingenuously (or worse, idiotically) assume words onto the others' mouths, as you consistently did across your comment.

Anyway, answering your request: the impact of that "community" with its sole active user posting crap there would be close to zero, even to the marginalised groups. There's a bigger issue in his username than the community itself, as that username would be seen outside the community. The actual concern would be if the user brought others like him there. That would only happen if nobody confronted him.

I hope that the above is already enough to show that I'm actually considering the impact on those people, when I'm saying that defederation and admin action might be unnecessary. Past that, your "prove that you aren't guilty of siding with the ants" is irrelevant.


TL;DR:

The admins are not your parents. "ADMINS, I CAN'T CONFRONT THE NAZI BY MYSELF" is not support to marginalised groups, it's to act like a Reddit baby. A kid sees the ant in the kitchen and says "MUM! I SAW AN ANT! KILL IT!"; the adult crushes it.

Also, stop dealing with marginalised groups as if they were "fragile little things, who can't defend themselves unless big admin patronises them". That's perverse incentive - you're disempowering them. You might have "good intentions" doing so but perhaps you should pave Hell with them.

If you don't want to be a burden in online communities, and a fucking waste of time for the other posters, then learn how to take context into account when interpreting what others say, and stop

Learn how to take context into account when interpreting what other people say, like a decent person would, and unlike a redditor.

  1. Nota bene: given that I follow Marxian economy I do not agree with "laissez faire economy".
  2. I can go further than that using Pragmatics and Semantics, but it would be off-topic and... frankly I don't think that you're able to follow it.
  3. That's one of the few things that I remember from that guy. It sounded so unfeasible that I don't really know if his supporters actually backed the idea up.
  4. Note that the only active poster there had an username mocking the left.
  5. Be careful with my conclusion here - there's an issue on the data that I'm using to back it up. Find which.
  6. The shitty consequences of dealing with people through heuristics should be rather obvious.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Footnotes first:

  1. It's hilarious to imagine what kind of Marxist retains the magnitude liberal brainworms you display there. Would you like to tell me what sect you identify with? I'm just fascinated to find out, since your line of reasoning is completely against ML ideology. Are you one of Richard Wolff's spawn, maybe?

  2. I'm sure you feel like a big boy but I'm familiar with the prescriptivism vs descriptivism debate, don't worry

  3. What the hell are you talking about here? The Gilded Age was a ~30 year period in America following the Civil War where the government went full classical liberal on its non-regulation of the economy, which produced all the famous robber barons like JP Morgan, from which we inherit the classic image of such figures, which went on to inform basically every political cartoon ever along with the mascot of Monopoly. It spawned or popularized immensely infamous practices such as "company towns" and "scrip", along with its own genre of literature (see Stephen Crane). It's fine to not be educated on such matters but it's literally the most well-known era in American history other than the Great Depression or a war (back when America's domestic society was even culturally involved in wars).

  4. N/A

  5. Whoops, no citation, not even a name. Don't give a shit. CTH moderated itself pretty well, the admins just hated it (and the neoliberal userbase of broader Reddit).

  6. I never called TD people Nazis. This is an irrelevant tangent, what I was talking about was the nature of reactionary cesspits in general, not Nazis specifically. I don't care what flavor of reactionary someone is, I don't like any of them.

Anyway, most of your post is just listing informal fallacies and I have no interest in entertaining high-school level bullshit when it's tediously rendered, so I'll just pick out a few more parts:

Just to clarify, my point of the laissez-faire comparison is not that using that term makes you a libertarian, but that it was interesting how it corresponded to the very libertarian-like ideology you expressed in your arguments. More on that later.

even if we disregard that this is a big “chrust me” (anecdotal evidence does not lead to meaningful conclusions - bring data or arguments, otherwise you’re just calling your reader gullible/stupid with this sort of anecdote)

It's ridiculous to dismiss cth out of hand as an "anecdote" when it represents years of interaction on the website with what was, for a period of a bit more than a year, the largest extremist community on the website and easily, easily the most active. Treating it as a though it were a single data point equivalent to other extremist subreddits would in fact be warping the information available against what would be a reasonable representation of its magnitude. TD is the only stronger example due to how long it was active unless you want to get into the old Reddit Lore of fatpeoplehate or whatever.

The admins are not your parents. “ADMINS, I CAN’T CONFRONT THE NAZI BY MYSELF” is not support to marginalised groups, it’s to act like a Reddit baby. A kid sees the ant in the kitchen and says “MUM! I SAW AN ANT! KILL IT!”; the adult crushes it.

Also, stop dealing with marginalised groups as if they were “fragile little things, who can’t defend themselves unless big admin patronises them”. That’s perverse incentive - you’re disempowering them. You might have “good intentions” doing so but perhaps you should pave Hell with them.

This -- and how you talked about the Nazi bar issue before -- is a strange case of equivocation that seems almost deliberately obfuscatory. If I could crush the mosquito myself, I would, but because this is a forum and I am merely a normal user, I cannot and the community cannot ban them. The admins are the only people who have that power, so the best course of action (since a poll would be open to manipulation and those fuckers at beehaw wouldn't even blink before doing so) is to have admins use their power with the consent of the governed and for the governed to become ungovernable if the admins act unilaterally against the popular consensus.

In a similar way, patrons running the Nazis out of the bar would be illegal on many levels. The owner is the only one who is legally protected in doing so because it is his property, so he can pick up his bat and say in so many words "Leave or I will consider you a trepasser and beat you to a pulp" where a patron would be easily charged with a crime for making such a threat. Now, could the patrons act illegally and take things in their own hands anyway? Sure, but just like the difference between real futball and a Fifa video game, breaking the law in reality is possible while breaking the rules in a "programmed space" generally isn't. I could hypothetically strike a Nazi with a hammer, cops be damned. I cannot ban a Nazi here if the site does not give me permission, it literally just can't be done.

I fully support arming minority communities in real life. There is no way to smuggle a banhammer to a non-mod.

Also, the idea that supporting minorities is "babying them" is just asinine. Sitting by as they are attacked is not an example of being an ally, and forcing them to fend for themselves in the interest of what may as well be "protecting their honor as warriors" doesn't do shit except consign them to miserable lives of fighting in their own defense no matter how successful they are. That is why, in civil society, the main thing social minorities typically fight for are legal protections that make it so they can avoid those fights or make them easier to win! Black people in general don't seek to repeal the 1968 Civil Rights Act because the concept of a hate crime is "patronizing" to their ability to ... what? Go catch racial aggressors on their own? Fuck off with that "the Democrats are the real racists" shit. The Democrats are indeed real racists, but so are Republicans.

By the way:

perverse incentive

Are you really going to tell me you're not some kind of Hayekian? Between your general lines of reasoning, your sophomoric list of wikipedia fallacies, and turns of phrase like this, you really, really seem to be a libertarian.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It’s hilarious to imagine what kind of Marxist retains the magnitude liberal brainworms

If you genuinely fail to spot the difference between what I said and what someone who [ipsis ungulis] "retains the magnitude liberal brainworms" would say, it means that you're such a failure at basic reading comprehension that you can be safely ignored as noise. (There's a second idiocy in the same excerpt, but I'll leave for the others to catch it.)