96
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
96 points (69.2% liked)
No Stupid Questions
36182 readers
1401 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I'm not sure whether there can be an ideologically neutral social media platform at all. I think there will always be a significant proportion of users who are not interested in discussion, arguments and open minded exchange, but rather in seeing their world view confirmed by others or simply being part of a perceived in-group.
What's more, the sheer mass of content makes an attention economy necessary so that one can deal with this flood of information. In my opinion, the content that is easy to consume will always prevail over content that looks at a topic in all its complexity (hardly anyone is willing/has the time to read up on it). So it's often not about who has the better arguments or actually knows something about a topic, but about who sells their posts better. In this sense, it seems to me that social media in general is not really social, but to a large extent a competition for attention.
I am not aware of any platform that could solve these problems. In my opinion, this is not really the aim, as pretty much all platforms are not really about objective information, but rather about passing the time and entertainment. Of course, that doesn't mean that you can't find good discussions and serious information. But I think that this kind of content will never be the main focus of any social media plattform. The fediverse approach seems like a good try to me tho, because there can be "special interest instances" that can make their own rules to focus on whatever they are about.
I think there's a significant difference between "neutral" and "diverse".
For example, Reddit is big enough that if you find yourself holding an unpopular opinion in some particular subreddit and you're getting battered with downvotes, you can probably find some other similar subreddit that's more friendly to whatever view you've got that's drawing ire. People speak derisively of "bubbles" and "echo chambers", but really, why should I stick around and try to engage with people who just don't want you around? Communities naturally tend to segregate themselves along ideological lines like this.
Here on the Fediverse the population's too small to support quite so many diverse communities yet, unfortunately. So if you've got an unpopular minority view you can end up stuck with either routinely finding yourself serving as a punching bag or just not posting. That's no fun.
Yes, that's probably true. For me, however, neutrality presupposes diversity - at least to a certain degree. As in the maxim of quality journalism: the assumption here is that a journalist can never be truly objective. This is why an attempt is made to allow opposing perspectives on a topic to have their say, so that the reader or viewer can form their own opinion.
Of course, this principle does not work in an environment in which differing opinions or perspectives are generally unwelcome. This is probably the case with Lemmy and other Fediverse applications for some topics. But I think that this doesn't just apply to the Fediverse, but to social media in general. It seems to me just as you say: if you only encounter rejection on a platform, in a community or on an instance if you disagree with the majority, you will move elsewhere - which in turn will probably lead to you eventually finding yourself in an environment where the majority of others are of the same opinion.
Of course, it would be highly desirable if people were more open-minded, but I'm afraid that's a utopia. In any case, I don't have the impression that the advent of social media has fundamentally brought open exchange forward.
On the contrary, I have the impression that political discourse in many countries, for example, is now characterized by the very strategies that make social media posts successful: the abbreviated presentation of complex contexts, the invocation of enemy stereotypes, sometimes even straight-up trolling. But perhaps this is just a perception error on my part.