The word has different meanings in different contexts. That said, unless you’re a complete moron, it’s usually very easy to figure out what sense of “liberalism” is intended based on context.
What I have no patience for at all are the insufferable idiots who insist that only one definition is correct, and oh by the way, it just happens to be their definition.
Every thread against people not strictly aligning with Leftist politics will be boiled down to: “There are three types of people: reasonable people who agree with me, crazy fascists on the other side, and lily-livered wimps who can’t pick a side (and are also secretly fascists who just won’t admit it)!”
Anyone with passable writing skills will be downvoted because creating cogent arguments against them is hard, and heaven forbid anyone see a smart argument that doesn’t align with your views perfectly.
In a similar vein, people will use the downvote as a “fuck you” button without commenting or adding any value to the conversation whatsoever.
(Edit: Yes, yes. You’re all hilarious. I may not have a button to hit, but fuck you too.)
Leftists famously don’t have uniform views and bitterly disagree on important topics. Some leftists aren’t reasonable in my opinion, with many non leftists having better reasoning behind their beliefs. Too many leftists are purity testing assholes, treating leftism with the same elitism that people on Lemmy treat using Linux. I hate elitism, even if you want to limit how big a community is. It’s just an unpleasant attitude.
You summarised my feelings far more eloquently than I managed here yesterday.
Downvote for you!!
But seriously, lemmy feels like more of an echo chamber than reddit ever did to me (which is saying a lot), maybe that’s because it’s an echo chamber for views i don’t agree with and reddit was more aligned to my thinking so I notice it more here, but dear god it’s getting harder and harder to stick around.
Don’t worry, bud, ive got your right wing right here, despite not being right wing, an american, a frequent voter, or anything…I just apparently am to people so delusional they think a canadian style rational socialist is a fascist.
Well, no, I don’t vote ndp because I’m anti union and anti gun control. I’m perhaps center right and want the national health care fixed, not privatized.
You’re missing my point bud. Everything is hot compared to something at 0 kelvin.
Everyone is left compared to the most right wing person, everyone is right compared to the most left wing person. It’s why people here often claim reddit is right leaning, despite it heavily favouring the left.
Being the most anything is rarely good, extremes prevent people seeing the other side way too often and very few subjects are 100% anything, most have nuance.
Just making a joke about why someone might accuse you of being a fascist.
Re: the silent downvoting: IMHO, it’s childish and worse than toadying as it’s both inherently cowardly and lacks any real effort at all. If I thought it would constructively improve the platform, I’d suggest a daily rationing of them, but what’s the point?
edit: D’awww, the chickenshits took the time to click. That’s adorable.
Upvote/DownVote/Likes/Thumbs Up/Etc etc are all bullshit and have ruined online discourse by, for the majority of online interactions, gamifying and distilling it into whatever reaction the poster… on some subconscious if not conscious level, whatever will get them the most positive praise and trigger that dopamine dump in the brain.
And thats when its not just dogpiling people who are saying things that are true, but you just dont want to hear.
internet would be better if this shit never existed.
That’s a tough one, the dopamine hit is real and encourages engagement, which drives up the active userbase and makes for more opportunity for discussion.
They get abused too but a forum with none of it won’t grow in nearly the same way as one that makes use of it. People like to earn something (karma, upvotes, whatever) even if it has no tangible value.
Honestly, reddit kinda nailed it but then made it very hard to keep supporting them when they took a steaming shit on the mods and massively overpriced the api to ensure they had more control of the userbase.
Overall I don’t think they’re hurting too badly from it though and I’m sure the extra ad revenue they get from ensuring everyone uses their app helps to dry their tears. Probably a smart business decision (at least in the short to medium term), depressing as that might be.
It really is the embodiment of that old joke about people never wanting to hear other people’s opinions, and only wanting to hear their own opinion parroted back to them by someone passably eloquent.
Sorry, kiddo, but that’s not “how the system is designed to work” (you’d know this if you actually read the community guidelines, rather than just wandering in and assuming it was Reddit 2.0), and instead is simply finding a similar fate that etymological morphology suffers at the hands of illiteracy.
We’ve got a linguistic prescriptivist here! Everyone come and look at the guy who’s sick of stuff shifting over time in response to community sentiment!
Poe’e law states that there’s no such thing as satire, and that every post that could be considered a joke is actually a display of incredible stupidity
Not really. Poe’s Law just states that extremist positions are often impossible to distinguish from satire. It doesn’t say that there’s no such thing as satire.
That’s why I append my sarcastic posts with /s. It’s a habit I picked up on Reddit where you could easily see someone posting that same comment, but being 100% serious. The /s kind of ruins the joke, but I’d rather the joke be ruined than have people think I was serious when I said those kinds of things.
Honestly, kinda true. Point out that someone is using a grifter with bad oversimplifications to support a political position you otherwise agree with? You’re on the other side and want children dead.
I think it’s way worse. At least on Reddit you can find smaller niche subs that are full of serious-minded, intelligent and well-informed users who have no time for pure amateur hour bullshit. R/askhistorians would be the premiere example, but there are a lot of others.
It’s only on the big lightly-moderated subreddits that your signal-to-noise ratio really goes to shit, whereas all of Lemmy seems to be awash in teenage level discourse.
Hopefully it gets better as its user sse expands and diversifies into more tightly-focused and heavily-moderated instances.
Don’t comment on anything related to any conflicts immediately East of the Mediterranean lest you wish to be in an ad hominem “debate”.
This problem drives valuable content away from the site, unless the lurkers up/down vote based on the value of a contribution (and not their personal opinion) or the mods step in, which is still seemingly rare.
I frequent Lemmy, Mastodon, and Threads. I feel like this is true in any of the three. Occasionally, I’ll wade in, but more often than not I regret it.
This is especially true on Threads where the algorithm sees you arguing with someone saying X and then says “hey, you must want to see more posts that say X.” I finally realized that all I was doing was feeding the algorithm and stopped replying.
As a (sometimes) lurker, when I see a comment on the middle east I say “wow even if I studied this conflict I would still have trouble having an opinion here” and skip over it+the replies. I also can’t tell if the person said something so ridiculous that the ad hom isn’t out of line.
Use sentence case and periods. I’ve seen other communities where omitting periods was fine. Also, try not to use emojis but if you do, do it sparingly.
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