so if you haven’t come across it, see here , here , here and here .
in short, one side says sources are pro-imperialist, the other side believes they’re legitimate sources. then there is one user thinking we have been targeted by troll farms, one accusing others of being conspiracy theorists and stuff like that. it’s one of the most unproductive arguements I’ve seen on Lemmy, something that looks like one those downvoted-to-oblivian threads on reddit. it’s just a mess.
I think we can do a few things to prevent such pointless fights in the future:
- my favoriate response would be creating a community of fact-checker Lemmurs. it’ll function similar to a wikipedia talk page, anyone can request a trial for an article shared on c/worldnews , then they will present evidence and sources to challenge the article, while the other side attempts to do the same. personal attacks, accusing of being a troll, asking for a call on jitsi to debate face to face (like seriously?!?!) will be forbidden. both sides will debate untill they reach an agreement. trying to go off-topic, bad faith arguements etc will be forbidden as well.
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.
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a much easier approch would be to let downvotes and upvotes decide the fate of each post. I understand that this is the whole point of lemmy and similar platforms, but right now we have the problem of each side using downvotes and upvotes like it’s a battle. posts about internet censoreship and tiny pigs are being downvoted because the person who posts them trusts the Guardian and other news outlets.
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we can limit the number of posts on c/worldnews to minimize the amount of personal attacks and arguements.
so what do you think? I personally think as more users come to lemmy, we’ll be dealling with more diverse opinions, and people might just engage in behaviors that harms the platform and benefits no one. this will be a real problem considering that Lemmy leans far-left. in my opinion having a fact-checking community will be neccessary if we don’t want fact-based communities turn into battlefields.
ps: am I going too far and overreacting? to be honest I don’t know xD I just think there’s no chance for productive political arguements if we can’t agree on the facts, and i see no point in what’s happening on c/worldnews right now.
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.
thank you! adversarial collabration seems to be awesome.
well we can make rules to promote behavior, we just have to see if others agree. in my view, this is better than the current rules of c/worldnews.
good point. I agree that our main goal is to keep discussions welcoming, but I would say the right choice would be to prefer the more productive way, specially when it comes to politics, even if it means making some effort. some comments here talk about how the current system of platforms like Lemmy and reddit for discussing politics is broken, because everyone upvotes comments they agree with and downvote ones that triggers them. if we can fix it, why shouldn’t we?
in other words, wouldn’t it be irresponsible to make no attempt to fix a system that doesn’t work? shouldn’t we value productive political debate if we value our future? can’t we at least make an alternative community where the method of debate is adversarial collabration and see how it goes?
since you came up with it, would you make a new post suggesting it as an alternative to current state? that’d be great. Lemmy’s main developers actually care about the ethics of how their platform affects users, which is why I think it’s a good idea.
The question is how to turn it into a technical implementation.
We assume the situation is at least two people discussing and a moderator stepping in. Now the mod needs a button which makes the two write a shared conclusion. Lemmy could provide the means to write a “joint comment”, where both can edit and both need to sign it off. How to incentivize them though? The button probably needs to block the thread, post, or accounts until the joint comment is published.
I think we can do it manually for some time to see how it goes, if it succeeds developers can add it. we can also have the community discuss this in a new post, maybe we’ll need to create a new community like c/adversarialcollabration to see if it works.