Controversial - the place to discuss controversial topics

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Controversial - the community to discuss controversial topics.

Challenge others opinions and be challenged on your own.

This is not a safe space nor an echo-chamber, you come here to discuss in a civilized way, no flaming, no insults!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, "trust me bro" is not a valid argument.

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Hastur@sh.itjust.works

Calls for defederation - Is the idea of the open marketplace of ideas outdated? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Hastur@sh.itjust.works to c/controversial@sh.itjust.works

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Lately I see a lot of calls do have specific instances defederated for a particular subset of reasons:

Don't like their content
Dont like their political leaning
Dont like their free speech approach
General feeling of being offended
I want a safe space!
This instance if hurting vulnerable people

I personally find each and every one of these arguments invalid. Everybody has the right to live in an echo chamber, but mandating it for everyone else is something that goes a bit too far.

Has humanity really developed into a situation where words and thoughts are more hurtful than sticks and stones?

Edit: Original context https://slrpnk.net/post/554148

Controversial topic, feel free to discuss!

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[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If that counts as gene therapy, then the term becomes meaningless as the majority of medicine is now counted as gene therapy. They use it in this way to make it sound scary and dangerous. All medicine has side-affects and risks, but the vague use of scary language is the point.

Sure, I'm not the thought police and I'm never going to claim to be always right, all the time. That way leads to a complete and utter inability to engage with new information that challenges worldviews. Where that ends for me is judging people based on parentage and ethnicity. I have no interest talking to a person like that.

Debating a racist isn't normally a productive experience. You can't logic your way out of a position that you started believing for emotional reasons. Also, they normally don't treat words and arguments with the same care as their interlocutors. Consequently, if somebody wants to go engage with them and try and convince them they're wrong, I wish them all the luck in the world, I just think it's a waste of time most of the time. For me, I just want to share links and have conversations with people who don't think of me as sub-human or inherently evil.

[–] Hastur@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For me, I just want to share links and have conversations with people who don't think of me as sub-human or inherently evil.

Wholeheartedly agreed! And that is the point from where we can look at things we have in common despite, maybe, some opposing views:

We both want to read, share and comment on interesting stuff we expect to find here on Lemmy in the Fediverse.

It also seems that we're both interested in civilised exchange of views and arguments.

The only key difference I see, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that you wouldn't want to see/engage stuff you define as bigoted/racist or hateful, correct?

Which I can understand and even agree upon. The only thing that makes me doubt is: Is defederation and the call for authorities (admins) the right way to deal with this? Or should the recipient decide what the filters should be? Like in the email approach, the recipient decides if he wants to receive an email and even then it might get filtered out and land in spam.

A blacklist, to keep using the email protocol as example, is a tool used sparingly and only when other filtering methods are unsuccessful or when greater damage is prevented that way.

What do you think?

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Is defederation and the call for authorities (admins) the right way to deal with this? Or should the recipient decide what the filters should be? Like in the email approach, the recipient decides if he wants to receive an email and even then it might get filtered out and land in spam.

There's a key difference with email: that's opt-in communication. Generally speaking (outside of botspam which does get blacklisted) you have to sign up for a newsletter or ask someone to email you. It's opt-in, not opt-out. Lemmy/Kbin are by definition opt-out: a new user, browsing All, will see everything they haven't blocked.

An admin, attempting to make the kind of user that they want to see on their instance feel welcome, does have a duty to curate it. If the first post they see on their New feed is a screed calling for the death of all LGBTQ+ people (for example), do you think a brand new user will calmly block the community and move on, or decide that this instance isn't the one for them? And a user that agrees with that hateful message, they have now gotten the message that this instance is friendly to their worldview.

Curation determines userbase which determines content. I know which side of the coin I fall on there.

[–] Hastur@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

There's a key difference with email: that's opt-in communication. Generally speaking (outside of botspam which does get blacklisted) you have to sign up for a newsletter or ask someone to email you. It's opt-in, not opt-out. Lemmy/Kbin are by definition opt-out: a new user, browsing All, will see everything they haven't blocked.

Good point!

If the first post they see on their New feed is a screed calling for the death of all LGBTQ+ people (for example), do you think a brand new user will calmly block the instance and move on, or decide that this instance isn't the one for them? And a user that agrees with that hateful message, they have now gotten the message that this instance is friendly to their worldview.

And here I disagree with you. The world is a horrible, dangerous, wonderful, exciting , murderous, funny, sad, depressing, manic place. Hiding that some people hate gays will not change the fact that some people hate gays. It will also not make these people disappear. Isn't it better to know reality and accept it as it is, deal with it as it comes?

[–] phase_change@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 year ago

A blacklist, to keep using the email protocol as example, is a tool used sparingly and only when other filtering methods are unsuccessful or when greater damage is prevented that way.

Have you ever run a mail server? If so, have you looked at your logs? The RBL’s on the managed mail gateway for my work turns away 70% of the attempts. This is even before spam scoring kicks in on the 30% initially accepted. A significant percent of that is considered spam. Email has a complex set of automated tools to reject content without even viewing it.

I still think email, even though federated, is a poor analogy to make for Lemmy.