It can be totally tonally jarring. I swear all the time, but if I threw some swears in my comments from my history then the messages behind them would be weakened.
I mean, he said some blunt stuff about OJ being a murderer. It wasn’t really “controversial” but he was like, I don’t know, man… Okay, here’s the simplest way I can explain the whole thing - so I had this friend for a long time (he’s passed away at this point), and he always told this same story that I think of whenever people get upset with a comedian like Norm MacDonald. The story is about a moth, but the message inside is universal to anyone:
So a moth goes into a podiatrist’s office, and the podiatrist says, “What seems to be the problem, moth?” The moth says “What’s the problem? Where do I even begin, man? I go to work for this guy, Gregory Illinivich, and all day long I work. Honestly doc, I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t even know if Gregory Illinivich knows. He only knows that he has power over me, and that seems to bring him happiness. But I don’t know, I wake up in a malaise, and I walk here and there… at night I… I sometimes wake up and I turn to some old lady in my bed that’s on my arm. A lady that I once loved, doc. I don’t know where to turn to. My youngest, Alexendria, she fell in the…in the cold of last year. The cold took her down, as it did many of us. And my other boy, and this is the hardest pill to swallow, doc. My other boy, Gregarro Ivinalititavitch… I no longer love him. As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I… that I catch when I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror. If only I wasn’t such a coward, then perhaps… perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me and end this hellish facade once and for all…Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I’m a moth, just barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me. I’m not feeling good." And so the doctor says, “Moth, man, you’re troubled. But you should be seeing a psychiatrist. Why on earth did you come here?” And the moth says, “Cause the light was on."
Censorship/bad moderation wasn’t the main reason I left but it was a small factor…
A subreddit (wpt) implemented a rule banning linking to other communities or posts. I had a comment removed for that, I tried to ask for clarity on why and it took two back and forths to figure it out which rule I broke, when/where it was implemented because it wasn’t on their sidebar. I thought Reddit was all about linking to places so I was just surprised, not really upset…
I was mainly upset that Reddit was messing with 3rd party apps while the 1st party one remained a broken, data-grubby mess. The quality of major subreddits were heading way downhill and the bot-spam disguising as real commenters was getting on me too.
When Reddit broke .compact mode for the last time, I could already begin to feel in the wind I needed to jump ship soon. In mid-March, the API went down for some time on my 6th Reddit cake day, that was the day I signed up for this account and slowly began my 4 month transition to Lemmy, and haven’t posted or commented since July.
I dropped 95% of my activity on Reddit about when everyone else left earlier this summer.
This is not censorship but it’s similar, it’s the problems with Reddit’s automated moderation system. It’s not something unique to Reddit since lots of platforms have this issue, and it is a risk on Lemmy as well if we can’t figure out other ways to combat spam effectively once userbase grows
On Reddit, our university sub’s moderation team had nearly all of their accounts banned (including all the alts), because we shared a mod account to do basic mod actions (before Reddit had some of that functionality built-in). The mod account wasn’t the reason, but we assume that’s what the automated system used to decide we were all one person. It took a while to resolve, and our initial attempts to point out the issue resulted in automated messages saying we were wrong and that we couldn’t appeal anymore. Eventually we posted on mod-support and the only solution was to self-dox our alts to each other in order to get some of them reverted (the ones we didn’t feel comfortable sharing we never got back). It was a mess.
I think we also need to consider the flip side of this issue. Yes, some people are banned wrongfully from these platforms. However, sometimes people are banned for sharing content that also isn’t welcome here, and over time we WILL get more users like that showing up here because Lemmy will look like the next best thing for them. I’m not sure how that will work out and maybe the Fediverse will let those users find their place away from the rest of us, but it’s important to know that not all bans from other platforms are unjustified.
Had to call the police because some kids were vandalizing a subway station. While that was going on there was a dude on a bench quietly doing what I hope was stroking his pet banana in his pants. Yay society.
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