Expressing Your Opinion and Getting Digitally Lynched

It is consciousness that governs everything that happens in physical body.

 

No, it's not

EDIT. well, who knows....I'm not as confident as you are. TBH, that zingbat stuff has little to do with modern medicine....

 

I'm pleasantly surprised this is the direction the thread has taken

 

Do we insult you on a regular basis and pile on the likes? I try to avoid liking any post with an insult in it, even when the rest of the post is likeable. Maybe 2-3 times since I've posted here I succumbed to the dark side.

Who said minorities are inherently criminal? There's your example.

 

Must be tough being such a paragon of virtue...

 

recognize

 

Insults come, but I do not take them personally. I try not to like directly insulting posts.

I know I've called you hack before, maybe you can find worse in my frustration with you but alas I still read you.

 

Rereading this again and your tone seems very pointed right now, @Hygro

 

Uh-huh. /sarcastic disagreement

Some people have been around long enough to have established long-term patterns to their behavior that belie any claims they make to the contrary.

There's a thread from years ago in Site Feedback regarding reputation/karma systems on forums.

My former "forum home" was an RPG forum where I haven't been for the last 13+ years. It migrated to vBulletin in 2005 and the reputation system was enabled.

Things went okay at first... and then a particular clique - made up of some of the staff and their friends, no less - decided to get personal with people they didn't like. Considering that some parts of the forum were only accessible to people with a high enough post count, duration of forum membership, and high enough reputation score, this really screwed some people up.

Let's just say that those who were targeted were not amused, nor were their friends. When the other staff found out what was going on (somehow they hadn't noticed... and it took numerous complaints to get them to look into the situation), the ringleader was turfed from his admin position (there was one other thing he did that was also an egregious abuse of authority).

This particular forum feud made me realize that reputation systems on forums can become extremely toxic, and when some of us formed a breakaway forum, the members literally begged those of us on staff to never add a reputation system.

For this reason, I'm glad we don't have a downvote/negative option.


That said, it can be useful on other sites. The news site I post on recently disabled the downvote option, claiming that it would "promote better discussion".

Um, no. All it did was provoke more negativity, as people no longer have a means to register a quick and quiet disapproval of a post and have taken to writing scathing replies. It doesn't help that the moderators on that site are anonymous, unaccountable, and enforce the rules selectively.

I've seen that on FB. The upvotes are straightforward. The laughing-face reaction gives the impression that in most cases people use it to express contempt, not amusement.

There's a smiley for that...

There's a reason why I added the first and second paragraphs of my sig in 2019. Things got that bad that I could no longer stay silent about it.

In addition to "moderator action" it also includes "moderator inaction". In short, you not only can't talk about what the staff did, but also what they didn't do.

For further discussion, see the Site Feedback forum. There are several discussions on the issues surrounding PDMA.

They have, but were especially annoying for some people last year.

There are reasons why giving medical advice is frowned on, on this site. I think we've just seen one of them.

 

Didn't say it would benefit us. At least you're consistent anyway.

 

It is. I appreciate you rereading it.

I want to highlight this. I agree. It’s why I don’t “like” a lot of posts here, the tacked on insult. The crowd I am referring to likes quickly and as a crowd posts with insults. I really don’t think they know they are the dominant opinion here and instead of defending their fragile position they are hammering with aggression anything that triggers one of them. Because they have more faith in each other’s compressions and categorization than a literal read of a post. It makes them group think bullies. Talk to them individually and they’re all cool... some very cool. Some my friends. It’s why I let this slide for a year.

The effect is fatigue. If the goal is to fatigue, it’s bad. I’m down with you all vying to dominate the debate, but this is supposed to be fun. And sometimes if too many of you agree when you’re creating a group delusion separate the posts responded to, start liking insults, etc, it’s not glorious victory it’s toxic wear and tear. My phone tells me I game for hours every week, solely because I post on this site.

I don’t have a solution other than to ask you all get more experience in life and challenge yourself by finding ways to agree with things you’ve never agreed with before, at least as an exercise. Please don’t like posts that are insults and if someone posts an entertaining compression it might not be accurate and therefore your like is contributing to a group delusion and is at least rude to the target of the compression.

I can do the compression one liners too. I was wrecking this place 5 years ago too. I appreciate those who can do it, from the Trumpian confidence of cloud to the esoteric but meme friendly TF to one of my favorite posters who was super guilty of all of this, that super fiery kid from Californian two years back whose name I will remember later and post in the other thread. If you’re gonna do it, just be right. Not history is on your side right, but actually right like El Mac is gonna agree with you right, like Perfection is quietly agreeing, like Zelig will back you up. Like bootstoots thinks you added to his understanding of the universe.

Individually I’m good with you all, and some of you especially so. But as a group you’re too united and too wrong. You’ve trading crowd wisdom for herd power. And when I speak up on isolated element I get labeled the enemy of what I stand for and I guess it doesn’t matter but I know if it affects me, it is definitely affecting many others.

We have a couple of really insightful people way to the right of me (to the right of the centrist regulars who get labeled rightwingers) I’d like to hear more from, and they are so guarded I can barely get opinions out of them when I ask. We’ve lost our stalinists too, but they played the bad game so if they were here I’d be addressing them too.

I want the diversity back. The diversity of perspectives. The diversity of geography. We have wayyyyy better diversity in terms of women posters for example, so let’s not lose our progress. But I want people who disagree to be treated with respect. At the very least make sure the takedown is true. For God’s sake.

I’ll be reporting a lot of posts upcoming. Have fun and happy posting!

 

We need more diversity. Bring back RomanKing and Civver_764 so we can get death threats publicly posted again. Just try agreeing with them and see how it fits for size.

What a joke.

 

It wasn't a compliment.

 

How many likes is too many? Can one like a post if you only agree with half of it? If the goal is fun dialog, then how do "likes" diminish that? Are "likes" the problem or is it strident posts and bad arguments? How much of the problem lies in peoples' inability or unwillingness to be courteous and friendly? To what degree does unwillingness to answer asked questions play a part in bad faith dialog?

 

Very much depends on what the question is doesn't it.

 

To @Truthy ‘s point that it’s more than compressions and misreads, I wanted to add there’s definitely an attached problem of people trying to “win” on things that sound good, rather than on content. I would like to refer to all to Gorgias’s Fine Art.

When enough people start riffing on the rhetoric divorced from what’s true or of content, that’s bad.

 

OK, more serious reply: What diverse opinions offered on CFC in the past, say, year, do you think we should try agreeing with? What value do you think we'll derive from agreeing with these views if these views were previously almost universally rejected? Why do we want to be agreed with by El Mac, Perfection, Zelig, or Boots? (TBH I do think being agreed with by El Mac and Boots is nice, but I'd like it quantified why you think these specific people should be the gold standard, the intent, behind our interactions and appeals.)

Why can't we like posts? Why must we meet your standard for liking? Why are our standards lesser when compared to yours? How many people here can you actually say simply intend to win with no regard for substance?

 

You guys keep pulling this bait and switch. There are cases, like this one, where you have a real life insane fascist, claiming that at @bernie14 isn't an American because he was born in Spain (?). And if you look at the thread, I immediately was like "**** this guy. I don't care if I get infracted, I'm trolling this *****." But so much of the time, it's not that guy. Just like Hygro said, we have (and could have more) insightful people on the right, libertarians, centrists, and so on. And I would love to hear more from them. And if they're wrong, I'm more capable of figuring that out for myself. But people make it a pain in the ass for them to be here by not being respectful, by throwing around the word fascist at the drop of a hat, by dunking on them, by insulting them, and so on. So they go elsewhere and the insights and intellectualism that accompany a space that loves debate and discourse die little by little. And when people get called out for it, we get this classic switch and suddenly it's "oh no, no, we're just talking about RomanKing or JMA2286. You don't really want those people back, do you?"

Earlier today I was listening to a podcast with libertarian Tyler Cowen and communist public intellectual Zizek. It was a funny, insightful conversation. But at multiple points, I thought back to CFC and thought "lol, this conversation would never happen on CFC." Why? Cowen wouldn't deal with this place because we call blithely libertarians fascists. And Zizek would get trolled out of here for not being woke enough. That's the environment we're creating. A place that great public intellectuals would loathe.

 

thats okay