Asklemmy

First of all, thanks for making this thread, I think it is important to discuss these issues in the open, rather than developing grudges.

I think what you are mainly talking about are the comments by @[email protected] and @[email protected] which are relatively aggressive. We could probably consider them violations against rule 2 ("Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here"), which we havent enforced that much so far. So enforcing that rule more strictly could already be a step in the right direction, though I am unsure where to draw the line (suggestions welcome).

That said, I think it is important to allow everyone to voice their opinion, especially if they disagree. If everyone agrees from the start, that doesnt make for an interesting discussion. This is also why I dislike the idea of fact checkers, because it likely means that one side gets excluded from the discussion, and Lemmy turns into an echo-chamber.

On the technical side, we are working on a feature that will let users block communities (so you dont see their posts anymore). That should be useful for people who simply dont care about politics (or other topics).

Everyone should be allowed to post whatever they want as long as they respect the instances rules. If someone thinks an article is bullshit they are free to post their counterstatement or create their own politically correct community.

I came to Lemmy because I'm sick of the nonstop corporate interference in internet communications. I support open source and the movement towards decentralization. That's why I'm excited about this platform.

Like any community, we're going to have growing pains. But this site could easily descend into extremist echo chambers that many reddit alternatives have. Look how quickly a site like Voat turned into a Nazi / alt-right propaganda site. I don't believe it's civil to completely discredit an article because it's from a "Western" or "European" source without credible citations. A comment such as "Another pro-imperialist post I see!" is nothing more than a shitpost. An informative post that brings to light some hypocrisy is fine, sometimes a reality check is needed. But we should be civil.

I would support a fact based curation system, but I don't know how we could scale that. Not to mention you'd be in a "who watches the watchmen?" kind of situation.

Personally, I just gave up on c/worldnews. Yes, someone is posting in c/worldnews, yes, they're from western sources, but how exactly is an article on climate change causing increases in bacterial infection "pro-imperialist propaganda"? If it's science based, backed by a report by the CDC, then that's science. Not once has the primary person posting attempted to influence the conversation on posting. When folks are responding to the articles, the person posting states something like they agree with the post or they disagree with the post.

The problem with fact checkers, if they too can be biased and a lot of world news is going to be difficult to verify.

I just had this conversation about things like Snopes and mediabiasfactchecker. I was just told they weren't reputable sources, just because. There is almost no chain of trust with news sources it seems. At least not one that everyone will agree on, so what can we do?

If you block someone from posting, what's to stop them from creating new accounts and getting around it?

If you go by the community up/down votes, same thing.

Sadly this is a fact of life on the internet.

One thing we can attempt to do is attempt to be civilized and let's have an active discussion and not just "YOU'RE WRONG!" Ok... maybe I am wrong, let's have a discussion as to WHY I'm wrong and where are the sources?

I don't have an answer to this problem, so honestly I'm staying out of c/worldnews now, because it's not worth it. I'll just get my news elsewhere from Lemmy and that sucks, but if we're not going to have real conversations then this site and technology will just devolve into the absolute cesspool like other places.

And that's not to say all of other platforms are perfect or imperfect. There's beauty and ugliness in everything. The technology isn't implicitly good or evil. How we decide to use it is.

So can we just be grown ups and have real discussions or is this platform just going to turn into another awful place on the web? It's up to us.

I'm really glad you started this discussion, I saw the heated exchanges and I was disappointed and put off by the lack of civility.

Honestly, I don't think Lemmy or Reddit are proper forms for controversial discussions like news and I'd be in favor of removing c/worldnews and similar divisive communities until a more effective trust-building and conflict-resolving system can be implemented; upvotes and downvotes will not suffice. Conflict is inevitable, but to promote civility the platform itself must be structured to foster trust between users, by promoting more engaging interactions between people .

I've been brainstorming about a Lemmy-wide community calendar system that would allow users to schedule events. e.g. any subscriber of [email protected] could schedule that they will be playing Veloren at 1500 UTC, then any Lemmy user could see that event and choose to join. Kind of like combining meetup.com and Lemmy in order to form communities on Lemmy that promote far more meaningful interactions between users than the inevitably superficial interactions of an asynchronous comments section.

It might seem like an unrelated fix, but users will not be so impulsive with their comments if they are forming genuine relationships with one another, and with deeper community connections comes a sense of stewardship in the users.

I agree that maybe there's something that could be done.

Fact checking is tricky

As to fact-checking, I'm not really sure what to do. On one hand I worry the 'reputation' system would be too restrictive. On the other hand, in general (by which I mean that I haven't seen this crop up in Lemmy but I wouldn't like to see) I'd hate to see anti-vax, flat-earth, or otherwise blatant fake science showing up.

Nudging cognition and affect is as well, but seems more viable

But there is something that could be done regarding the way in which the Lemmy interface nudges our thoughts and feelings. The paradigmatic example in the Fediverse is Eunomia. I wonder (and don't doubt we could find) literature on these nudges to improve interactions.

The goal could be to avoid finger-pointing as well as aggression, and to incentivize thought/understanding, kindness, and, in general, positive emotions so that we're able to be both flexible and critical. Note that the positive emotions part is not me being hippy-dippy; by now it's well established that positive emotions enhance cognition and permit a much broader set of automatic thinking habits than negative emotions. In particular, negative emotions have no desirable characteristics that positive emotions can't deliver (make sure you read p.110 ¶2 sentences 4 and 5).

It would be great if we can find a way of changing interfaces in such a way as to nudge us towards positive emotions and critical thinking.

But until the heavy lifting for that is done (something that, once I feel comfortable with my CS training, I could attempt), I wonder if the minimal Democratic manifesto could be done with tricky situations like these in mind. In other words, make an explicit, clear, and widespread expectation that we're here to share, understand critically, and interact kindly.

The gold standard for me would be "adversarial collaboration" as described by Scott Alexander here and here. The first describes a conflict about psychic psi powers research. The amazing twist is that both sides wrote a paper together. The second article describes a similar collaboration about fact-checking. Essentially, this is "debate until they reach an agreement" with the additional requirement that they publish a joint statement afterwards.

So, if you are in an intense discussion with somebody, the best you can do is to write a blog post together. It requires both of you to present the evidence in a neutral way and derive conclusions such that you both agree with the reasoning. The process will make you work out where exactly you disagree (the quality of the sources? different values? missing knowledge?).

Is that realistic though? Such a collaboration is much more effort than a reply to a comment which triggers me. It is the best way to make progress in the overall debate.

Is that the goal here though? We don't care so much about the result or progress of a debate but only to keep it civilized so everybody feels welcome to continue. An "unproductive" discussion is ok as long as all participants are nice to each other.

I think the key here is reminding ourselves why we are on lemmy, as opposed to other social media sites. I'll speak for myself, having recently discovered lemmy on reddit while looking for alternatives to that site:

• Lack of corporation/state control (i.e. tencent buying a stake in reddit),

• Lack of censorship (while bearing in mind that individual communities can and should retain the right to enforce rules)

• Privacy (lightweight interface which doesn't sell your data to advertisers)

• A new start (ideally learning from mistakes of previous forum/social media endeauvours)

In my opinion structurally incentivising long form debate as opposed to hot takes in political/worldnews instances is one way of improving the discourse. I enjoy the r/geopolitics approach (though I am aware that many here will disagree with the political slant of that subreddit), in that submissions are heavily regulated and require an input from the OP as to why they are posting a given source.

One thing I would also say from my perspective, is that I am a novice in regards to the technical elements of lemmy as far as federalised platforms and struggle to participate in technology based privacy discussions.

Perhaps outreach from the more tech savvy elements of the lemmy community towards "tech novices" (among which I count myself) in regards to internet privacy and the privacy benifits of lemmy and other such endeauvours would be helpful here in retaining users. It should be easy to find a simple explanation on the advantages of lemmy vis a vis other (hopefully soon to be) obsolete (heh) platforms.

Some of these points don't directly attatch to the discussion of the OP, but I feel this thread has engendered much discussion in the wider community.

tl;dr: privacy, lack of massed external interference good, outreach to less tech savvy, but privacy interested users good, dispensing with a datascraping monetisation model very good, repeating mistakes of established platforms bad bad bad

Edit: Cleanup

each time we reach a conclusion, a positive or negative point will be assigned to news source and to the person who posted it. best contributers who show the least bias will get a point as well. overtime it will help us to see if a source is really good or not.

This sound like a karma-based system or the trust thingie Mastodon was planning to implement with https://eunomia.social/.

To prevent the mouse, hire a cat. Then to hinder the cat, hire a dog. To stop the dog, hire a lion. To stop the lion, hire a shotgun man. To prevent the shootings, bring in police. To protest against the police, create chaos.

To prevent the chaos, nip the problem in the bud.

The simplest solution would be not to post too much too fast.

I've been asked to join the discussion.

TBH I don't know what to really say.

Here is some context: I'm not saying stuff like inviting to a Jitsi chat just to random people. These are people who engage in every political and news related discussions and blasting it with their sources, graphics and alternative history to things. I've come to have a lengthy relationship with a lot of these people since I joined Lemmy for the first time.

I've been at odds with two of the developers about them not believing in current and historical genocides, like the cultural genocide of the Uighurs in China.

I remember trying to give some level headed information when the Israel and Palestine conflict, then (some of them are the actual developers of lemmy) blasted it with all their stuff, pushing for basically just crushing Israel. (I don't think I argued much with them about it in the thread, but I later reacted strongly when one of the developers of lemmy posted an article about "Israel needs to be defeated".

These people I repeatedly butt heads with. People who are beyond far left. And there is a lot of stuff I genuinely regard as grose, like the previously mentioned denial of current and historical genocides.

I could tone down my antagonizing against these people, but they are also the people who engage the most with my posts. I wouldn't be suprised if there is a thread for me out there discussing me among these people as well, or a group convo of some kind.

I think the #worldnews group or any Lemmy group is a pretty nice way for discovering content, so it's something I'd like to contribute to. TBH I have an itch to share stuff, and that itch gets scratched good on Lemmy.

But for solutions I have none. I might be a part of the problem.

I think things will likely be better if the community grows more, because I think the impact of people on #lemmygrad or me would be less loud if there were more other voices.

But yeah, most of my interactions on Lemmy are communists, anarcho communists or social stalinists or similar who call me like a far-right person even though I personally identity as a social democrat, which is kind of annoying.

Edit: A fact checking group could be fun, but it could go wrong as well.

@[email protected] also did a good post that I like.