Original post here: https://hexbear.net/post/3856299?scrollToComments=false
I think we have a general path forward based on community feedback. "We see you, we hear you!"
I went ahead and unpinned the old post. I'm pinning this one for now and will edit this post when I wake up from eepy time. I had a very mid week and have no particular alarm set so be on look out. Love y'all and I'm amped for my first announcement post since coming back. :)
I never really liked the dunk tank and felt it at the very least fucked up my vibes. But I can block it!
Someone else might be really mad and just want to post a shit take into the void. You aren’t going to entirely stop people frying their brains by doomscrolling twitter by banning twitter screenshots.
Having fellow pinkos dunk along with you has two effects: it makes you feel less alone and less insane … but it also motivates you to dredge your snout through the absolute filthiest of dredge in order to find more slop for the slop machine so that number goes up. So I think we do have some social responsibility here. We could disable not only downvoting but also upvoting on dunk type comms?
I fear disabling upbears would just needlessly throttle engagement. People want to see the number go up so why take that away?
It would also make sort functions way worse. I don't want a web1.0 style forum, if I did then I'd go to one of the 1000s of dead forums with unsortable threads where random noise is weighted as highly as all other things
because it encourages doomscrolling in the worst possible way, searching for the dumbest take that will garner the highest upbear count
Then don’t upbear it or engage with the content. I don’t watch tv shows I don’t like because I actually don’t have to even though I know they exist
I simply wouldn’t allow myself to be manipulated by the architecture of the underlying techno-social system
Yeah that's all social media. Block the things that make your doomscrolling unenjoyable instead of having a narc mindset about people enjoying shitposts different from the shitposts you enjoy
i would argue scrolling through endless “peepee poopoo” has a profoundly different effect on the experience of doomerism than scrolling through endless “genocide is good actually”. rage bait has an inherent engagement advantage and we can counteract that.
Yeah I would argue scrolling thru mindless drivel instead of well-worded debunkings and people helping each other with finding flaws in the current system, which is what was on the tanks in large amounts, would have two different end results. <- We can phrame both things to sound like the "more bad" thing.
The thing is though, I'm not a narc that gets mad some people like to write about shit and piss and have a laugh about that, instead of my own treat
edit: sorry, I thought you were someone else.
Comrade, I think you make some good points, and I don’t mean to be dismissive, but the fact that you can’t keep track of who you’re replying to anymore is an invitation to log out a while. I’m disengaging.
Tbh you're right. Thank you
Exactly. That's what i did. Most of the time when i saw a post on here that made me think "i didn't need to see this", it was posted in tdt. Which is why i just blocked the comm after a while. But the material posted there absolutely and without a doubt is dunkworthy, should be countered by people who have the stomach for engaging with such things, and irreverent shitposting absolutely is an effective counterpropaganda strategy. It's what allows you to control online conversations. That doesn't mean there is no room for carefully thought-out debunking effortposts as well, these are needed for one part of the audience, but the core of counterpropaganda should be ridicule, mockery and never playing defense. That's how you stay on top of such conversations.
You literally just described where I'm at with the fakenews comm. I hate the comm, I deeply dislike its main moderator (I'm fairly certain I've gotten snipped at for voicing my dislike for that comm on my grad account by them before but my memory starts getting foggy going that far back), the vibes are rotten and as someone who values what few shards of non-state-controlled journalism still exists, I see that comm as little more than inconvenienced electrons that do the same job the Washington Post does-- but we have a community block function built into the site architecture!
So if comms are such a problem for people, why aren't they blocking more? I've had the whole of jlai blocked ever since I realized it was an instance full of french colonial-apologists; the people who take an issue with the burn ward can just block it the same way I do fakenews or jlai.