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This weekly thread will focus on Helping Us Fix Weekly Topics. This Community seems to have a problem. I generally do my best to create open-ended topics that don’t lead the reader to respond in any specific way, all while providing what I think are interesting starters. I’ve purposely picked other moderators that do not think the same as I do on many topics, but have the skill to explain why they feel the way they do. Results of all of this seem to be extremely limited.
If I try and introduce some opinion in a topic for people to pick at (even if I don’t believe it), they tend to get very aggressive and seem to insult moreso than discuss. They focus on moral arguments instead of logical ones and abandon discussions when challenged which sort of defeats the purpose (and goes against the rules) of the entire Community to begin with.
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- Can we do anything with moderation or rules to help encourage you to respond more?
- Are there any format changes you’d like to see that may help?
- Do you ever feel that Lemmy is a more aggressive form of social media and therefore limit your discussion?
- Does the activist nature of Lemmy help or hurt further adoption?
- What topics would you like to see covered?
- Is Lemmy even a good platform for discussion to begin with?
- Would you like to be a mod and help out?
I actually saw a system once for dealing with that that I thought had serious potential. If you wanted to downvote someone, it cost you time. Every time you downvoted the system would pause you, rendering you unable to use it for a period of time. On your first downvote it was measured in milliseconds, but with every downvote you cast in a given time period (by default it was the day, I think?) the pause increased exponentially. So by your 20th downvote you were being frozen for a minute and by the time you hit your hundredth you were freezered for a week. (It was, actually, technically speaking, impossible to reach your hundredth as a result.)
The idea behind this was that the community could downvote you to perdition if you were a jackass (since it would be a miniscule freeze time for them), but if you tried to counter that by downvoting everybody who downvoted you, you’d rapidly be frozen out of the community.
Of course the problem with that was that it was based on the naive supposition that people wouldn’t coordinate downvoting circles; that you wouldn’t be able to arrange brigading and dogpiling. But I still think something interesting could be salvaged from the idea by people smarter than I am. After all the statistics are all there and it should be possible to identify voting circles, sock puppet accounts, and the like from statistical behaviour, no?
Huh. That’s actually a really good idea.
Or… and hear me out here… Maybe it could cost 10 cents to downvote someone. Not enough to be egregious, but the funds could be used to help keep the server afloat and would make you think twice about downvoting comments you only mildly disagree with.
Yeah, monetary costs work too. The idea is that it has to cost.
Though with monetary the costs would still have to go up exponentially so that you don’t have some deep-pocketed Apartheid Manchild literally nickel and diming a server to death.