Actual Discussion

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Are you tired of going into controversial threads and having people not discuss things, circlejerking, or using emotional responses in place of logic? Us too.

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For more casual conversation instead of competitive ranked conversation, try: !casualconversation@lemm.ee

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AceTKen@lemmy.ca

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(WEEKLY) Why are people so goddamn bad at discussion? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by AceTKen@lemmy.ca to c/actual_discussion@lemmy.ca

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Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on debate, discussion, and the lack thereof on social media (including Lemmy).

My apologies for "leading" a bit more than I try to normally in these weekly threads, however this is a topic that pisses me off in particular. Not only as a mod of a discussion-based community, but as someone who loves it when someone challenges me and proves me wrong / disproves my logic so I'd very much like to hear outside opinions on the topic. I can't even partially understand how people don't want to have a more cohesive / logically sound opinion.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

Do you feel that discussion is worse now? If so, what caused it? If not, where may others get this feeling from?
Is it potentially a platform issue, or does it happen everywhere?
Does discussion even matter any longer? Why or why not?
Do you feel that more could be done to encourage discussion with outside views or are we better off just "bubble"-ing ourselves and blocking everyone we disagree with?

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[–] AceTKen@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The reason this pissed me off in particular is that I've been running communities since I was 16 years old starting with a forum of an article-based site that I was the head writer (and main editor for contributors) for.

Some of those issues are persistent in Lemmy to this day and are things I tried to add rules against in the sidebar. Things like:

Calling someone dumb for bringing forth a logical opinion. No discussion, no "here's where things fall apart" or "here's why that isn't applicable to the situation", simply "lol fuck u, ur dum." Or as with modern social media, a drive-by downvote. Most often in the forum days, this would come from someone who you'd recognize as being very opinionated, but not intelligent or self-aware enough to articulate why they felt a certain way. We've got tons of threads on this community where bad logic is called out, then the person downvotes and doesn't comment further. My feeling is that this is because they don't want to be wrong, so they don't engage. They internalize the idea that their opponent must just be stupid, and walk away.
You can be right for the wrong reasons, and wrong for the right reasons. There are tons of examples. You do not have to disagree with someone in order to point out that their reasoning sucks.
Your morals are not an argument. You can use how you arrived at those morals, but not the morals themselves. Your morals are not logic and apply only to your outlook.
It's okay to be wrong. It's downright awesome to become smarter due to someone correcting you or providing newer / more accurate information. You shouldn't argue from a position of "I'm right, let me convince you." Instead we should approach things from "This is how I arrived at this position. Are you able to articulate why I'm incorrect in believing this?"

Things at present remind me of my high school days and that "shut up nerd" culture that the jocks were stereotyped to have. Everyone thinks they have the moral high ground. Everyone thinks their position is the most defensible. Everyone feels they are better than their out group.