Answer questions if I can
This + I like to just give people answers. I find too often online somebody will ask a question and a lot of users will often try to be helpful but fail because they didn’t actually answer it.
Dumb example Q: “What’s the best Indian food in this city?” A: “There’s not a whole lot of Indian food but you might have luck with a burgeoning southeast Asian store”
If people would interact with others as they would do face to face. For whatever reason, we are so quick to forget the person at the other end. You’ll see people complain or discuss real people with literally no empathy and it can be mind boggling at times.
This is sadly so true. I think part of it too is that text is a poor medium for expression at times. For example, it’s harder to read sarcasm.
I find this to be less of a problem in less formal spaces. When typos, capitalization, and memes all get incorporated into the dialect, sarcasm and other nuance comes across much more readily. See also: Tumblr.
I suspect that sort of dialect wouldn’t be as comprehensible here though, because of the greater diversity in demographics here than Tumblr or my small closed group chats with friends. Here on Lemmy, I try to mitigate this by giving the benefit of the doubt and never ever feeding the trolls.
(Does downvoting a troll count as feeding it, because it gives them attention? I don’t want to risk it, so I usually pass them by, but I’m curious as to people’s consensus here.)
If people would interact with others as they would do face to face.
Man, I’d never say anything online if I did that.
Part of the challenge of social media is that it leads you to interact with many more people than you ever could in normal life.
While the vast majority of people are delightful, there are significant numbers of people with whom I wouldn’t want to interact, either face-to-face or online.
One thing I should get better at is avoiding engagement with those people online who I wouldn’t benefit from interacting with.
I don’t talk to the crazy person ranting on the street, why would I do it online?
Absolutely.
This is precisely the problem, yes. As a mod in my one sub, this is most often the only time I had to intervene – when the tone of the conversation got rude, insulting, disrespectful. I would always think to myself, “Is that how you’d talk to that guy in person??”. Mind boggling, indeed.
If i have something bad to say, i don’t.
Downvoted unkind discourse.
Upvote is for quality. No vote is for noise/disagreements. Downvote is for hate.
In theory, the lower a score, the less people see something. If I disagree with something that’s said (like a civil political opinion), then I won’t ‘like’ it. That takes away one potential point. But if someone is being unkind to others (mean, rude, trolling, etc) then I’ll downvote, which I see as removing two votes. The one they could have had from me, and one from someone else. Hopefully, that means they won’t get as much attention.
If it’s really bad, then I’ll also report
Upvote is for quality. No vote is for noise/disagreements. Downvote is for hate.
Yep. This, I think, “is the way”. The downvote for disagreement is not a good pattern and probably never was IMO. This is a good way of putting it. Another way someone else put it was essentially that the downvote is about the way in which something is said and the upvote is about whether you agree with it.
I honestly think separating them out in some way, so that we can still use the downvote as an effective tool of aggregating the quality of a post, but not in a way that is simply there to offset upvotes. Like, maybe two “scores”, number of upvotes and number of down votes with different filters for each? In a way, the “controversial” sort achieves something like this.
I block and never talk to the nazis.
- Report spam, scam, racism, hostility and clickbait
- Don’t engage trolls
- Don’t answer questions I’m not sure I have the correct answer for (or else point out that I’m just giving a “best guess” response)
- Try to be neutral or positive/affirming in replies. If I can’t, I’d rather not reply at all.
One thing I’ve started doing more than ever is blocking a ton of people. For example if I see someone making a post about twitter/elon/trump etc. I go to their profile and see if it’s just one time occurance or a patter and in the latter case I block them. If I see someone posting fuck this and fuck that and I hope this person dies etc. I block them without even viewing their post history.
There’s just so many users on a platform like this that I simply can’t pay attention to everything so by blocking the people commenting in bad faith is the least I can do. Some might say I’m creating an echo chamber and maybe so but this really isn’t about wether I agree with them or not but wether your comments bring any value to the conversations.
Over the long term this really does help keep your browsing experience enjoyable and your mind optimistic. Its way to common to get depressed from constantly seeing a torrent of bad news and negative posting.
It’s not a life hack, but I try to be polite and open with people to a reasonable extent. I turned around several internet arguments with this attitude, even when we had a different opinion at the end there was no toxicity.
There are always the unreasonable idiots and straight up crazies and of course the trolls. Well fuck those people, just block them 👍
Since switching to Lemmy I use my up/downvote in a different way than on reddit. Upvote now means I think the comment/post contributes something valuable while downvote means the comment/post is unnecessarily unfriendly or just not contributing anything constructive.
Typical Reddit voting v Lemmy voting
Reddit Lemmy I agree Upvote Upvote I disagree, but it contributes to the conversation Downvote Upvote Meh Downvote - Trolling and bad faith arguments Upvote Downvote This would be so much nicer place if everyone voted like this. It’s not uncommon to see objectional facts downvoted here and blatant lies upvoted.
This is the way. Maybe this should be shown to everyone who signs up and everyone should be reminded once in a while to keep up this system.
That’s what they were originally about on Reddit as well before its gradual decline. “Reddiquette” as they called it.
Unfortunately it turned into an “I agree” or “I disagree” button.
Yea … I said it above, but I think separating the up and down votes so that they don’t contribute to the same “score” might help. Make the downvote a separate process of basically softly and quickly reporting a post/comment for being out of line.
What I, at least in theory, try to do is upvote everyone I’m replying to even if I’m replying to disagree - because if I’ve replied then by definition it has contributed to the conversation. It gives your reply better visibility as well. It’s really hard to do sometimes though.
Curate my feeds so I mostly don’t see negatuve content (doomers, cynics, trolls, etc)
I do this, and employ frequent and rapid blocking on social media.
Instead of engaging, dick wads get blocked without comment.
When I see people going through something that resonates with me I acknowledge that its hard and encourage them to keep trying and that they will make it to the otherside.
I talked some dude out of suicide on 4chan once. Took like 4 hours.
That’s heavy man. You were the angel in his darkest hour
Good job, that can’t have been easy 👍
Log off occasionally.
Not feeding trolls.
Radical optimism. Hell yeah! Basically anti-doomerism.
I’m building a peer-to-peer search engine
