this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Give it time.
That is to say, to the extent that we can, let's be careful. We already see the same shit everyone criticizes Twitter for starting to show up on mastodon. It's often not the platform that causes problems, it's the people.
I think there needs to be a set of "commandments" for civil discourse on the internet. One specific rule I've made for myself but never heard anyone else mention is: don't dogpile on downvoted comments. I think everyone feels a pull to do it, they see a controversial post that they agree with, they see the top few comments are more of the same....so they scroll down to the lowest voted replies, expand them if they're hidden, get enraged by someone's stupid world view, and jump into a flame war.
Some might lump that in with "don't feed the trolls", but I'll counter with a second rule: it's better to just not reply to someone than to accuse them of being a troll or a bot. There exist people who live with a wildly different set of information from you, and thus often have wildly different worldviews. And that's ok. And if it turns out they actually are a troll or a bot, as long as you're replying, they're winning.
I agree. If someone makes an upsetting post, I ignore it. As far as my experience, engaging in it will only harm me. I see no value in responding. I even did a test. On RIF (it's possible this is sitewide on all apps), if a post was in the karma negatives, I would have to click on it to see it. About 95% of the time, I agreed that I did not need to read that garbage, so I chose to ignore without expanding them. I appreciated all the pioneers that had to read that garbage at first and downvote it.
Anyway, there's no sense in spending my leisure time becoming angry at internet strangers. I rather move on and engage in things that make me happy.
I do kind of think that if they're downvoted so you don't see them, I agree with you. But if no one ever challenges an idea, it easily appears as either consensus or maybe so obviously true no one can challenge it.