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:

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  • acuteaesthesia@lemmy.ml
    101·
    3 years ago

    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 whom 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

    • pinknoise@lemmy.ml
      3·
      3 years ago

      The first two points aren’t solved by or even in the scope of Lemmy. Governments still have control over servers, services and their operators. Instance owners could still be motivated by financial or other incentives. I think it’s not a good idea to “sell” Lemmy by these points as it would be dishonest.

      imo: Those points may also attract difficult people from “free speech” crowds who complain about being banned (“censored”) by twitter, reddit or whatever despite having accepted their policies. There usually is a reason they got banned and the same reasoning might be applied by whatever Lemmy instance they sign up to which in turn would lead them to complain about Lemmy. If they think what they have to say is covered by “free speech” they should host their own, which they can with Lemmy, and this should be communicated like that.

      • acuteaesthesia@lemmy.ml
        2·
        3 years ago

        I will defer on the broader point due to my lack of expertise, but I would suggest (based on your explanation) that there exist different levels of explicit and implicit control.

        It is a win in itself to reduce overt interference and affirming the highest degree independence possible, even given deeper possibilities of interference i.e. servers as you describe (again I have no specific knowledge on that front).

        I would argue that we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, a reduction in control by specific large interests is a good thing and should be looked at comparatively and in a context of what is possible at a given point in time.

        “Selling” is an aggressive word I wouldn’t use either, I was more suggesting offering honest, clear, but most importantly easily digestible explanations to those who are already looking for alternatives.

        Edit: Cleanup

        Edit: On “censorship” and “free speech”

        I have practically no knowledge about how these far right echo chambers manifest themselves on established platforms or newly created ones. I do think it is essential to thread the needle between keeping an open platform and rejecting intentional manipulation by large cohorts of politically motivated internet activist groups.

        In my opinion a good forum caters to individuals and a free exchange of ideas among these (within reason). The brigading of a given instance by any organised community should be structurally disincentivised, as it destroys that principle.