One of the key features of an abusive relationship is shutting you down from people who can help you.
If someone's in the middle of a disaster, and Joe Biden's federal government comes and helps them out, it's a catastrophe for the Republicans. It brings the psychotic lies people have been told about the government into contact with the reality of the federal government in the real world, which is one of the few ways they might be able to break out of their elaborate propaganda-bubbles.
If, on the other hand, they're convinced that FEMA is now coming to kill them, but also their home has been washed away in a mudslide, then they might wind up fleeing the state, living with their family on their brother-in-law's couches, trying to scrape by, becoming more and more desperate, with no one to give them any substantive assistance of any kind. The desperation increases. The fear of anything governmental or democratic can continue, and increase.
And then, when their brother-in-law offers them a rifle and an invitation to come with a few people and shoot up the election office, or the Democratic organizer's home, because the government already tried to kill them once when they were at their lowest point, and they escaped only by the skin of their teeth, so it might as well be go time... well, they might accept the offer. Because why not?
By demonizing FEMA, the Republicans are turning what would have been a problem into a recruitment tool.
Anticolonialist, how'd you run across this story? Just reading up on Fox News like all the anticolonialists like to do, and you decided to share this story when you ran across it? Or some other way?
It never even occurred to me that carbon capture might be storing a giant tank of gaseous carbon dioxide. I assumed that it meant chemically reacting the carbon into some kind of solid material which was then discarded as waste, because trying to store huge chambers full of gaseous CO2 at a scale that can impact climate change is clinically insane.
This is a perfect example of the criminally underused word "sophomoric." Almost all teenagers and young male adults go through a phase of it. It's why second-year college students are "sophomores," because right at that age is where it usually hits is peak.
It means that you're smart enough to know that Elon Musk isn't the CEO of Twitter, which is significant. Congratulations! But you're also convinced that what you know is all a person would need to know, and other people being stupid is usually the explanation for things. You don't take time to read the article which is talking about Tesla and SpaceX, both of which he is the CEO of. Nope, you just see "Elon Musk" and "CEO" and you know that a lot of people aren't as well-informed as you, so you insert the word "Twitter" and spring to the races, convinced that you are right and this global media empire must just be full of idiots. You don't even need to read the article. After all, you're smarter than them.
Usually people grow out of it, eventually, as they contact the real world which contains other people who are also smart, and learn to think twice.
So it would delete people’s posts if they get downvoted a lot
No.
or if the poster tends to upvote heavily downvoted posts?
No.
You’ve automated the suppression of dissenting voices.
Am not.
It's a perfectly fair concern. I'm trying to be careful to make sure I'm not doing that. There's quite a lot of explanation in the FAQ, and some conversations you can look back over with people who were concerned, because they've had experience with exactly that happening to them.
At one point I tried to illustrate with data just how big a jerk you have to be before it starts banning you. If you're interested, I can start doing that again. Being a dissenting voice on its own is nowhere near enough to anger the bot. You can look over ![email protected] and see quite a few dissenting voices. I've also offered to delve, for any user who feels that this has happened to them, into the breakdown of why they're being ranked down, which almost always is because they're being a jerk about their "dissenting" opinion, and not the opinion itself.
Also, I think it's hilarious that someone coming from lemmy.ml is accusing me of trying to suppress dissenting voices. Lemmy.ml has been suppressing dissenting voices since its inception. The degree to which I'm bending over backwards not to suppress dissenting voices is something I think you should absorb and carry over to the lemmy.ml moderators as a good replacement for their current banhammer circus.
Most people don't want the bot to be there, because they don't agree with its opinion about what is "biased." It claims factually solid sources are non-factual if they don't agree with the author's biases, and it overlooks significant editing of the truth in sources that agree with the author's biases.
In addition, one level up the meta, opposition to the bot has become a fashionable way to rebel against the moderation, which is always a crowd pleaser. The fact that the politics moderators keep condescendingly explaining that they're just looking out for the best interests of the community, and the bot is obviously a good thing and the majority of the community that doesn't want it is getting their pretty little heads confused about things, instigates a lot of people to smash the downvote button reflexively whenever they see its posts.
I know! He came into office with strong sanctions being applied to Israel for their massacre policies, a decades-long established ban on the construction of new settlements, and an agreement which was undoing illegally constructed settlements and resettling Palestinian families back into their homes. Biden broke with all of that, gave Netanyahu a green light to start their apartheid policies again, and personally visited the West Bank and shot a few Gazans himself with a sniper rifle, just to emphasize the point.
In contrast, Trump is famous for protecting the rights of Arabs. Just like he is Hispanics and Chinese people. Why, the strong protections that all Palestinians enjoyed were partly his doing. They were part of the Iran / Muslim immigrant / asylum seeker reforms he enacted. Although, the main work was started by other Western politicians. I can't wait for Trump to get elected, and undo all the harm Biden's been doing, and finally set us on the road to lasting peace in the Middle East, and a world where the rights of vulnerable non-white people will finally be strongly protected in the halls of power.
This is the idea behind /c/[email protected]. The idea is, instead of using this platform to gripe at each other about "yes it is" "no it isn't" "yes it is", we can start to organize and make things better.
I propose that any time one of those awful "no one vote it definitely won't matter trust me" posts comes up, we make a thread underneath it with some links to productive positive things we're doing in addition to, obviously, voting for the guy who's not going to blow up the country and piss on the ashes. Turn the shilling into a reminder to get out and do something concrete.
Right after I get done typing this I'm going to go back to trying to figure out a way I can volunteer some time to the Biden campaign. I'm going to be honest, I feel a little corny even typing that out, but I think trying to make sure Trump doesn't win is for real the most effective thing that'll set us up for more positive change and less end-of-the-world disaster in the near future.
Sure. Here's you. Red is downvotes, blue is upvotes. The left-right axis is time, with the past on the left.
The bar right below the red/blue bar code is the key to what comments were in what posts.
One thing that jumps out at me is that almost all of your participation is in political threads, and the majority of it is getting downvoted. It would be different if you were just participating in Lemmy, and then also you had some views that were unpopular. That happens to a lot of people, and I've bent over backwards trying to preserve their right to do that when I've been making and tuning the bot. This isn't that. This is almost all just you going in and arguing with people.
One thing I say a lot when talking to people about this is, "It's not your opinion, it's your delivery." I'm going to be honest, when I read your first message here, it annoyed me. You're coming out of the gate hostile. Most people, when they receive that, are going to be hostile back. It's just how people work. You're not going to convince them of your point of view, you're not going to be able to fine-tune your own point of view to let them poke holes in any mistakes in it. You're just going to irritate everyone. That's a choice you're making in how you approach things, and I think it's completely fair for people to react to that choice by closing the door on you.
It's the difference between going to a party when you're in a fringe political party, and having conversations about it, versus showing up to the party with a bunch of flyers and handing one to every person and making almost every conversation over the course of the night revolve around your chosen fringe political party. The first one is fine, or should be, at a decent party. The second one, people are going to remove you from the party for. I think if you want to make an impact on people's thinking, you're going to need to recognize and respect that reality of human nature.
Having an unpopular political opinion is fine. Being a little bit combative with people is fine. Doing both at once is going to collect a tidal wave of downvotes, and also I think is going to make it harder for you to make any progress convincing anyone of anything.
I regularly get dozens of downvotes for such hot takes as “facilitating genocide hurts the dems chances of getting elected, we need them to stop that if we want them to win.”.
I'm going to stop you right there.
You're playing a little game where you claim you said one thing and got downvoted for it, when I can guarantee you actually said something different. You probably said that we need to not vote for the Democrats, because they're facilitating genocide. That's different. You can say that, sure. Someone might say back to you that not voting for the Democrats is going to make the genocide 20 times worse, and that's why they're voting for the Democrats. They can say that, too. That's progress, that's people talking to each other. Maybe one or the other of you will learn something from the exchange.
Where it gets difficult is where you go off into this alternate reality where they said, "I love genocide, and I love the Democrats, I'm going to give you downvotes because you don't support genocide which I love," and then you start arguing against that thing that they didn't say. That's not progress. That's just people shouting and trying to twist the conversation around so that they can "win." It only takes a little bit of that before people are going to stop talking to you.
I know you do that, because you did it to me in your first message in this conversation.
I looked over some of your posting history, and I think you've got some valuable things to say. I learned some things about how bad Liz Cheney was before she for some reason found her principles and broke with the Republican party over Trump. I saw some debates people were having with you about Russian and Chinese history, where I don't think you're right, but it didn't seem like any kind of badly intentioned thing.
I think if you built up the habit of always responding honestly to what people said, and telling the truth about your own views and the world outside the best way you can, the bot wouldn't treat you harshly, and you'd also make more progress in convincing people of what you're trying to say.
Try again: What's the last thing you said that got dozens of downvotes, and what did you actually say that got dozens of downvotes? What was the opposing side's core argument, honestly summarized?
The time for infighting is done. I don't see what complaining about the DNC accomplishes at this stage.
I think you can apply the same thing to anyone from the DNC who wants to talk about Latino or Arab voters who didn't vote for the Democrat. It's all just irrelevant at this point. It's solidarity and survival time. I don't care whether you think it's this person's fault or this other person's fault.
Post your recommended way to reform then. 100% unironically serious about that. All my previous posts were about "outside the establishment" venues, today's was the first that was within the establishment.
I completely agree with you on that. "Pleasant" might have been a misleading way for me to frame the community. As far as the bot is concerned, you're free to be as unfriendly to fascists as you want.
As a matter of fact, part of what I think is wrong with the current moderation model is the emphasis on "civility." I think you should be allowed to be unfriendly.
I'll give an example: I spent some time talking with existing moderators as I was tweaking and testing the bot, and we got in a discussion about two specific users. One of them, the bot was banning, and the other it wasn't. The moderator I was talking with pointed it out and said that my bot was getting it backwards, because the one user was fine, and the other user was getting in arguments and drawing a lot of user reports. I looked at what was going on, and pointed out that the first user was posting some disingenuous claims that were drawing tons of hate and disagreement from almost the entire rest of the community, that would start big arguments that didn't go anywhere. The second user was being rude sometimes, but it was a small issue from the point of view of the rest of the community, and usually I think the people they were being rude to were in the wrong anyway.
The current moderation model leaves the first user alone, even if they want to post their disingenuous stuff ten times a day, and dings the second user because they are "uncivil." I think that's backwards. Of course if someone's being hostile to everyone, that's a problem, but I think a lot of bad behavior that makes politics communities bad doesn't fit the existing categories for moderation very well, and relying on volunteer moderators who are short on time to make snap judgements about individual users and comments is not a good approach to applying the rules even as they are.
So come in and be impolite to the fascists. Go nuts. You don't have to be pleasant in that sense. In fact, I think you'll probably have more freedom to do that here than in other communities.
It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes
It all just suddenly clicked into place for me.
I think there's a strong possibility that you're right. It would explain all the tortured explanations for why the bot is necessary, coupled with the absolute determination to keep it regardless of how much negative feedback it's getting. Looking at it as a little ad included in every comments section makes the whole thing make sense in a way that, taken at face value, it doesn't.
Edit: Santa is a robot moderator I made for this community. That is necessary context for this comment, clearly.
Santa removed this comment, because you don't have a lot of recent participation, and you have some heavily downvoted comments. This is what I've been calling the "grey area," where Santa will judge accounts that it can't confidently assign scores to extra harshly, in order to protect against throwaway trolls. A couple dozen downvotes can put you into a category where your comments will be removed until you've built up a solid track record of comments that gather more of a normal or neutral reaction.
Looking over your history, that's clearly the wrong call. You don't have a ton of participation or upvotes, but you have a little collection of both. Definitely enough that a couple of comments that accrued some downvotes shouldn't exclude you from participating.
I restored the comment, and made Santa less aggressive about sniping comments from users in the grey area in the future. I'm still tweaking this part of the functionality, since it's hard to test in the abstract, and it only comes up a couple of times a month. Carry on. You're fine.
