from moubliezpas@lemmy.world to fediverse@lemmy.world on 19 Sep 15:31
https://lemmy.world/post/36156569
Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn’t have more ‘toxic content’, harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.
But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn’t unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire ‘fediverse bad’ section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, ‘zoosadism’, and then pages with titles like ‘bad monkey’ that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.
I decided to stop using the internet for a while.
I’ve learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like ‘an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim’ should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.
I thought I’d learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.
It just makes me so angry that most people’s main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics’ are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.
threaded - newest
Skimmed through the article and something picked my attention, the numbers given in the "325000 posts analyzed". The way its given, it makes seem like big numbers, but if you calculate what is the percentage of the numbers given, it's less than 1%. Can't check the linked source, but it seems like a classical "lying with statistics".
And besides, text seems written in a way to give the impression site moderation for smaller sites is too stupid to block bad actors, and that only the paternalism of bigger sites can solve this implied issue.
The entire tone of the article feels… condescending? (not sure the exact feeling). It feels off in the way information is presented, like subtle disdain in the writing voice.
1.) This is part of the background narratives being pushed by the rich and powerful that we need AI and big tech to moderate us when the opposite is true, we need more humans involved in moderation who have a stake in their community.
2.) The prevailing winds in the tech journalism sphere have always been strangely blowing against the Fediverse since the beginning. The simplest possible explanation to me is there is a lot of money in writing off the Fediverse as a cool nerdy space that nonetheless is an unrealistic solution for everybody else and pushing the axiom that a Harvard MBA is needed to translate the Fediverse into a product the public can actually use.
You will NOT notice this same prevailing winds against for profit corporate social networks like Bluesky and Threads… and it is a curious thing isn’t it…
Having everything everyone ever interacts with channeled through the same four fucking websites obviously sucks and doesn’t currently–and likely never can–scale.
Reddit power Mod turning their attention to Wikipedia and abusing its TOS & users of that site as well now too?
Oh you mean like jordanlund?
Ex(?) Reddit power mod, current awful lemmy.world mod?
lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/53505862
I couldn’t say, as I’m not familiar with them.
Youn could follow that link and become pretty familiar with them.
i’m so fucking jealous
I will never understand why that person thinks Lemmy should be moderated like Reddit. Reddit’s moderation policy was at the behest of advertisers; we have no such masters to answer to here.
What happened to Wikipedia’s neutrality policy?
Nothing?
The 325,000 tells you it's 1%, plus the 1% is split into several categories already anyways. I don't see how these statistics are misleading.
This is ironically an inevitable consequence of Wikipedia’s centralization undermining its strategic objective of making knowledge free and accessible to all.
I am not arguing for the opposite extreme, rather pointing out that Wikipedia is simply too centralized to be a durable vehicle of truth.
Federated architecture provides differentiated redundancy and the possibility for existential conflicts to be preserved in splits between elements of that federation rather than require the leaders at the top to be perfectly lucid and uncorruptable by encompassing forces (state or private) or risk cementing problematic lies as truth.
I think this would be a thing worth organizing around, can we mass report (edit ok “report” is probably the wrong word, this is about a broader editorial tone on the fediverse not attacking the particular person) this person or their particular edits on the fediverse? I don’t mean a mindless spam wave, more like a well written consistent push from a large, disparate range of people that continually highlights that Wikipedia really doesn’t have an accurate picture of what the Fediverse is (to put it charitably for Wikipedia).
The problem of reporting specific cases is that it could become cancel culture all over again. First option, I think, would be to try to correct issues in the article. Then, if they denied, then start suspecting of the site itself. And if already suspecting, it adds up to the site's untrustworthiness.
What do you mean by cancel culture?
I feel like you are mistaking all acts of boycotting or mass comment submittal for “cancel culture”.
I am not arguing for DDOSing Wikipedia, to edit articles with a hostile intent, or of smearing Wikipedia people in public places…
…I am arguing for organizing a campaign to submit feedback on the articles about the Fediverse FROM people on the Fediverse that explain in their own words why they think the way Wikipedia describes the Fediverse is incomplete, problematic and misleading.
Those are two VERY different things and I see no danger in slipping into “Cancel Culture” because the basic objective isn’t to silence, hurt or destroy something it is to correct the narrative ABOUT US being pushed by a prominent source of information that should be beholden to people coming to it and saying “this isn’t right what you wrote about me”. They can disagree, but the more of us that argue the point in a genuine and substantiated way the harder it gets to ignore us and keep the distorted narrative intact.
I see. Sorry for jumping the gun.
Yeah, this needs to be brought to someone’s attention. It’s not just someone adding their personal opinion to the Fediverse article, but they’re also messing up a bunch of other articles, too. I’d almost call it vandalism. OP, maybe you could get together with some other editors and bring it up to an administrator / mods?
Oh god, I didn’t even look to see what changes they’d made to other articles.
Actually that should make things easier, there are processes for reporting repeated vandalism, and they’re much more efficient than ‘this person wrote one article badly’. I’ll have a look.
That sounds like a good idea! I thought this was just someone with a grudge until you started talking about the other articles they’d edited. I can’t say for sure if they’re all bad faith edits, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were others besides what they added to the Fediverse article.
Perhaps you’d be interested ^[1]^ in Ibis ^[2]^?
References
1. Type: Meta. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:22Z. - Ibis ^[2]^ was recommended because of their apparent negative opinion of Wikipedia’s alleged centralized structure. 2. Type: Repository. Title: “ibis”. Publisher: [“GitHub”. “Nutomic”]. Published: 2025-07-14T12:39:05.000Z. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:25Z. URI: github.com/Nutomic/ibis.
“Legal reform has also been proposed, most notably around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as well as proposed legal requirements for instance operators to engage in good-faith moderation of instance connections.”
The source for this is a a paper written in January 2024 by someone called Nikhil Mahadeva.
Lets be clear, any Section 230 discussion will never mention the Fediverse. That implies anyone who wants to erode even knows what the Fediverse is.
This article has been a source of so much frustration over the years. I honestly think it should be scrapped and entirely rewritten.
I haven't seen any of that shit on the fediverse except maybe conspiracy theories (which are way more prevalent on other websites), wtf are they talking about?
Dunno, someone finally got around to fixing the article, though.
That section is out of line with Wikipedia policies because it only relies upon scholarship that isn't meta-analysis, which Wikipedia considers primary sourcing (an idiosyncratic borrowing that ought to be called firsthand sourcing instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Scholarship), making it undue weight.
I am confused by these words, and do not understand their real meaning. I think I need to read.
A study of studies is a better source than a single study.
That makes sense actually.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a18e066b-d9fe-49a9-8062-bc02b3a2b73c.png">
The crappiness of this section has been noted
Someone put that on in the last 12 hours, and since then, some anonymous person just deleted the entire section lol.
I legit feel really grateful, I’d been going down a bit of a ‘either every source of information is corrupt and there’s no hope, or I’m losing my mind’ rabbit hole. I haven’t quite pulled the plug on Reddit yet, which may be contributing to that.
I prefer the whole ‘major additions and changes should be introduced in the talk section of a page so it can be discussed by the committee of reasonable good faith adults with lots of spare time and patience’ approach to Wikipedia editing, but in retrospect that may be a wee bit idealistic in current times. So the ‘one person complains and documents, another person flags, and another just deletes the entire thing’ is a process that may be a good compromise between The Way Things Should Be and how to edit Wikipedia with consensus and without being harassed by neo Nazis.
There was a few months where I had to ban server after server every day because someone was really into semi-lolli anime. They were posting it in every anime forum. I asked them why they were non stop posting upskirt or provocative drawings of very young girls and they got angry that I dared ask.
I’m unsure if you’re speaking as a previous admin or just as a user, but if the latter, would it not have been easier to just block the user directly?
Back in the day, we used to marvel at the mental fortitude of paramedics and war medics, who constantly see and deal with the most extreme accidents and horrors of humanity so that we, the public, don’t ever have to.
That burden does seem to have expanded rather. I legit think it might be less traumatic to triage and transport a selection of burns victims, traffic fatalities etc for a living than to moderate busy social media platforms.
At least in an ambulance you generally get fair warning what sort of unspeakable horror you need to attend next, and you can help them.
I suppose in the medical emergency industry you also don’t have to inform the disfiguring disease / patch of black ice on the road / tainted drinking water that ‘yep, sorry, you can’t operate here. Yes I know you’re just trying to get by but we do have a No Festering Gonorrhoea sign that you ignored before infecting this lady’.
TLDR: at some point community moderators (not the over zealous type) might need to be recognised as an emergency service
I’ve just seen your edit and the material added to the Fediverse entry on Wikipedia, your assertions seem well founded although I’m not tied into Wikipedia’s Mod community and the motivations of users therein. You’re definitely right that the Fediverse isn’t exactly a node of objectionable content, frankly I’ve seen none, although admittedly I haven’t plumbed the depths of every single instance. Their assertion should be noted though, that the Fediverse is wide open for abuse despite IMO not already being affected by the same volume as other platforms.
By their own numbers, the volume of CSAM was 0.03%, the volume of CSAM posted alongside keywords was 0.17%, the volume of CSAM posted with known associated hashtags was 0.22%, and 0.37% contained text related that kid of content. Less than ideal, you could say, given the nature of the content in question. The real crux of the matter seems to be whether or not it will increase, and whether or not Lemmy’s Mods have the capacity to moderate the content like other platforms IMO, but their claim that “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse” is more than slightly overblown even in considering the material.
I think this kind of critical analysis of the Fediverse could be completely right in every single one of the details and still miss the more important point that corporate social networks are being used in a directly hostile fashion towards vulnerable people RIGHT NOW to a near catastrophic degree of negligence to put things in the most charitable terms possible. Further the people who own those corporations publicly endorse narratives that invisiblize the violence happening to real human beings.
Realize that by getting lost in a baseball stats esque evaluation of the Fediverse that we cede ground already to people who are disengenous. We have to consider the context of the alternative reality of corporate social media to fairly evaluate the Fediverse.
You’re right, yes, op point. I’m not getting lost in the stats per se, and nearly turned my reply into an essay addressing the information readily available, but it bears saying given the nature of the info in the Wiki edit. You’ll find no corpo booster here in my camp, the very purposeful abuse (Mod or otherwise) of some users/groups on social media has been readily observable even beyond the purges of Antifascist and leftist groups.
I get your point, but the ‘real crux of the matter ’ is very much - what is the fediverse. That’s what an encyclopedia is for. It defines things.
Wikipedia is not the place to highlight or discuss the moral or legal standards that every entity must meet. That would be ridiculous.
Chicken soup is subject to at least 10,000 individual regulatory restrictions (no poisons, name must reflect content, pay this tax to enter this country, staff must be paid and free and blah blah, no more than x foreign substances, must not go rancid within this time frame, can’t be packaged in a paper envelope). Some, like the workers’ rights and fair pricing and amount of weird chemicals, are actually pretty important human rights issues that have very real, immediate effects of the health and wellbeing of various population groups.
Should they all be on the Wikipedia article for chicken soup? All of them? If so, I have news about the laws, restrictions, relations, challenges, emerging research, etc, into vegetable soup. And also tomato soup. And, in fact, every processed food. And if that looks a bit ridiculous, consider the ethical considerations of the tea industry. It’s horrific (source: I’m English). It’s been horrific for hundreds of years now and has literally ended nations, killed millions of people, and doesn’t look like it’s in the final stretch of being solved.
It is, therefore, probably too much to include on a page about a new cruelty-free brand of iced tea that’s just taking off. People would go to that page to read about that brand of iced tea, not tea in general, and certainly not the troubled history and socio-political scandals of the tea trade in general, unless they had a beef with the iced tea brand.
Which, I suspect, is what happened on the fediverse page. And I didn’t put the flags on the page, or remove the content, but I’m glad someone did.
@moubliezpas The reference for "With toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse" is a single study (https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/31293/33453) that looked specifically at Pleroma only, not the Fediverse.
Pleroma itself has its own baggage, and the study's own data is skewed in large part by one overwhelmingly toxic domain that is no longer active.
This is in no way a reasonable source for "toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse"
Also possibly useful: https://about.iftas.org/2025/03/27/content-classification-system-post-mortem/
@moubliezpas
This study: https://arxiv.org/html/2502.17926v2
compares Threads to Mastodon, and finds the toxicity levels to be roughly the same.
(I'll point out that "Toxicity in the Decentralized Web and the Potential for Model Sharing" study is similarly Pleroma only, 729 Pleroma instances from 2020, most of which are no longer online)
This is why Wikipedia has policies against relying on non–meta-analysis and non-book scholarship
@jaz @moubliezpas for several years, around 2018-2022, there were waves of folks who came to any instance with a reasonable LGBTQ/other leftist population and began shouting about how every mastodon instance was, quote, "worse than twitter and bluesky in every way, overflowing with racism and bigotry", and whenever I asked for evidence of any kind about this, I was of course accused, myself, of being toxic without any evidence of this anywhere in my histories.
Overall, its much, much lower.
Yep, that was the sentence that took me from ‘I don’t really agree with the tone of this but that’s my problem’ to ‘this is bad faith bullshit’.
Published papers are written by people with biases, blind spots, agendas, and sometimes, special forms of idiocy. That’s why we don’t take a single sentence from any random published paper and present it as the whole undisputed truth.
And while Wikipedia had similar levels of trustworthiness - in theory it’s peer reviewed by the entire reader base and presents information that shouldn’t be taken as absolute fact - I’m kinda annoyed that the system is so easy to game.
Part of me thinks that anybody editing quite so many pages about porn, gore, death, suicide, racism, violence, sadism etc should maaaaybe have an internal ‘this user is working through something psychological’ flag that prevents them from adding or subtracting more than 100 words or so to ‘normal’ pages.
But that would also be pretty easy to game, and would involve a slippery slope of deciding who is normal enough to edit which pages. And, thinking about it, gross and weird people with gross weird hobbies can still have normal opinions and I do want them as part of my society.
I just don’t want to have to look at all those gross and weird pages to decide whether I’m being reasonable and am safe to edit a Wikipedia page about social bloody media. There must be a middle ground between ‘any old nut job can write whatever they want and good luck arguing with them’ and ‘only this selected group of people may control the information that the rest of the world must has to accept’.
That section is just pure Ragebait lol
What’s written on Wikipedia is no different from what’s written on a wall in some city’s street. No one knows who wrote it, no one knows how much of it is true. What’s written is determined by insistence, not by agreement or expertise. Whether you can get something useful from its pages is a matter of luck.
except that wall is actually periodically cleaned, with new paintings on any wall in the city sending an alert to the townhall urging people to check the walls. if you try to force your writing through through pure insistence you'll soon find yourself banned
Literally everybody can see exactly what was written, when, and from which IP address. Not only is that history maintained indefinitely on Wikipedia, it’s also downloaded by thousands of people around the world.
Everybody who has ever added a missing punctuation mark to a page is recorded in history, the specific date and time and page and action, accessible even if the world wide web goes down and Wikipedia ceases to exist.
I’m not sure if your ‘anonymous graffiti’ analogy is quite right, though I’m also struggling to imagine many places in my country where someone could graffiti on a wall and not be tracked down very quickly if necessary.
YUP! Can confirm, den of iniquity over here! Just like the fact I’ve been running Linux for 18 years now, so I’m obviously a hacker and a subversive. We enjoy things here like CHOICE and FREEDOM. You’re all fucking DEVIANTS! And so am I! DEVIANTS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
Well the first hit is free with Arch Linux
Its gone now I think
.
Someone fixed it a few hours ago, yeah. We should also check back periodically to make it stay that way.
Lol wait till you see any of the Pakistan or India related articles. Its like the Ganges river in text form.
Meaning ?
it’s full of shit and will kill you if you wade in deep enough.
Beware of unearned knowledge.
You “lose” 100% of the battles that you choose not to fight.
Besides, people here are reporting that the content is already gone. Even if it comes back, it likely will bounce around back and forth but not return to this same state, so this was transient.
Even so, it seems not wrong? “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse”, regardless of how precisely that is measured, seems entirely accurate to me. YOU (and I) may choose to block such content, in part by being on an instance that enacts this choice for us, but that does not mean that such does not exist. Head on over to Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net to get a taste of what the Fediverse offers. It does exist, and while Lemmy.World defederated from it, so many other instances including Lemm.ee did not. Or Lemmygrad.ml.
It is so easy to forget about what was shoved under the rug, but the Fediverse is more like 4chan than most of us care to admit. Just because there are no Nazis currently standing in your little corner of a Nazi bar does not mean that you can invite your Jewish friends over to walk (safely) through the front door.
The Fediverse can be quite toxic. So much so that I’ve entirely stopped recommending it to people irl. We need to be more acceptable to people if we want to change our image, not just pretend that we are fine.
Sounds like you should be recommending specific instances rather than just generally recommending the fediverse.
Which one?
Which instance defederates from all of the tankie instances, and is not already overloaded i.e. Lemmy.world? Also, the name “Lemmy” has tankie implications that most Redditors flee from - hence why so many of us came first to Kbin instead.
Since none such existed, I helped create one by petitioning Discuss.Online to defederate at least from hexbear.net, even though doing so with lemmy.ml is a lost cause. It was successful, and now you can recommend it if you like.
Although America has imploded now and I no longer recommend any USA-based servers, even to people based in the USA themselves (as the average Redditor tends to be).
Though PieFed gives me much stronger hope for the future of the Threadiverse. People still need to set up blocks for instances like Lemmy.ml and politics communities if they want to avoid toxicity though. And even then, it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another. People have strong opinions, and want to vent! Therefore, highly ironically, leaving no space existing where someone can discuss politics or even news (or for some reason even memes?!) without the toxicity. I am not being a Karen here bc I am telling nobody what to do - only reflecting what I see.
Can you show a recent example? I don’t follow news communities, but it seems surprising that every news post would have a call for murder
This deal with Charlie Kirk has people on edge, although so too did Luigi, and the Presidential election, and so on.
Yes here’s an example from today - I just sorted News posts by active and scrolled down to find a post with >100 comments on it:
6 hours ago one person said (referring to USA Vice President JD Vance, the subject of the OP)
And someone replied:
Neither received any downvotes, and the latter reply received more upvotes than the one I quoted above it. Am I wrong to interpret that the reply is suggesting that it is unfortunate that the guy has not yet been shot in the throat? Involuntarily in case I need to add that, i.e. not euthanasia but non-consensual killing aka what most centrists would call “murder” (although I am not wanting to debate whether other definitions such as “justice” might also or even rather apply).
Of course it could be a “joke”, though isn’t the recipient just as much the party who determines what a message means as the sender? If it is a “joke” (possibly as in “haha jk except not really"), then there are an enormous number of such, and have been for quite awhile now - especially “joking” about how Luigi needs to save people, joking about the fact that a second amendment exists in the USA, joking about how people can conveniently die in non-murderous ways e.g. their liver goes out (see the posts about the recent Steve Bannon announcement), and just overall about how death is a good thing so long as it happens to “them”, the “other side” (again, I’m not wanting to get into whether it’s deserved, just stating here that such is being discussed, since these topics relate to how centrists from Reddit would view the Lemmy platform).
These kinds of things are likely to get Lemmy banned from the USA as the authoritarian program proceeds forward, but that is a separate issue from centrists (including those who think of themselves as leftists, not realizing what that means when recalibrated on a more global scale) and most especially conservatives (e.g. in the USA, that are currently using Reddit) feeling welcomed here.
So anyway that was the first such post that I examined. The next post has even more egregious and obvious comments, such as this one, from a whole week ago so at this point seems extremely unlikely to be removed by a mod and even if it were, it has already long served its purpose:
(And then s whole discussion ensues about just how okay it is to kill people. Other more… “circumspect” comments to that same OP include such things as “The 2nd amendment works for all sides.”
So far this is 100% of the first 2 posts I have examined, so let’s move on to #3. Yup, I immediately spot this really cute picture of a cat depicting someone being beheaded, in response to the statement “the aristocrats!”, itself in response to something deleted by a Moderator. So this makes 3 of 3 posts, still a perfect 100%. And I did not have to reference anything from any tankie instances (where the frequency is surely much higher), or anything removed or likely at this time to ever be removed by a moderator, one even having been from a week ago. Seriously, calling for shooting/beheading/otherwise killing “the enemy” are extremely common here. You have undergone extreme efforts to avoid seeing it, I understand, but it does exist, and new people visiting here can notice it, not knowing to expect this level of vitriol. Tbf even Reddit these days is exploding with calls to Luigi people, they just work much harder to repress it - which I am not saying is a good outcome, my only interest here lies in explaining what *is*, not what *should be*.
Filtered by Top Day on slrpnk
All of those posts are mere hours old, and shown from an instance that has defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad. And even there, I definitely see calls for outright murder, such as this one, although here it was fortunately caught and removed by a mod:
That post was of very limited / niche interest though, with only 17 comments total. If you want to disprove my wording that “all” posts have such calls, you can easily find several posts with 0 comments, which obviously disproves my wording choice:-). And likewise those with 1-20 comments - among a community that often has hundreds (e.g. this post from just 10 days ago has >1500) - is low-interest.
This is why I avoided using “Hot”, especially within a 1-day time period. But following your lead, I sorted by “Top Week”, and was going to ignore anything from just the last single day, although all of the top 4 posts are older than that so that makes things easier. The top one could be a bit of a bad example but like in response to “Shoot ‘em. Problem gone!” has “it is also a way to end conservatism… just sayin…” - but this one is much more likely to TRULY be a joke, in the spirit of that whole post in general, or at worst a venting of steam (although further down people are talking about “Solutions” that involve “electrowhatever or guns, which seem like the two bodies of knowledge a solution would come from.” - note that guns are very ineffective tools to affect non-violent means of resistance or to destroy property, and chiefly are used to KILL PEOPLE aka “murder"). Another one there is literally “shoot the fascists”, another is “if you need some tips on making firearms out of things easily lifted from home depo, I’m your man”, others stop short of advocating outright murder but still do things inching towards that end such as “When do we start rounding up all the Faux execs and the on-air talent … When do we start doxxing those that support Faux by watching Faux, and start getting THEM fired?” - granted it starts as “fired” but the reply immediately carries it forward with “And then those high profile people would start losing their homes and lives. I would celebrate that as justice served.” The latter is admittedly a stretch to say advocation for actual murder directly, but it is like one millimeter indirectly removed from it so as part of this whole batch I will include it here.
So using your procedure, though skipping over posts that are less than or only a day old, I have added one more to the pile. We are at 4 out of 4 so far, or 4 out of 5 if you want to count the Hawaii one as a false positive. Moving on to the next one I see like “I would straight up start busting windows out of any vehicle with trump stickers.” - which tbf is not murder, just terrorism/violence. So yeah, this one has no calls to murder that I saw. So this is 4 out of 6.
Next is this one - and I am getting tired so going to rush through this one. There are a BUNCH of comments describing guns like “He is saying arm yourself while it is legal, so you have weapons for when you need them to fight off bad people in designer uniforms… Roughly translated.”, “2A for all. Time to resist in other ways”. Again these are describing guns not infrastructure-destroying or people-convincing tools, but tools to involuntarily kill people aka murder. So this is 5 out of 7.
Certainly not 100% though, if that is your mark. Which would be fair on your part b/c my literal wording called for it by stating “it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another.”, and my hyperbolic exaggeration is clearly false (in my defense I did not mean per-post but rather like “all the content that I read in a day will include at least one call for murder”, but I did not clarify so that’s on me). Again, any post that has 0 comments would already have disproven it, as too is any comment with very small number of comments or interest, etc. However, it still seems true that well over half of all the current most active or top weekly posts from News@lemmy.world contain calls for using weapons to kill people or the lesser version of at least celebrating death of “the enemy” however it may happen, even if depicted in cutesy pictures of cat
First of all, sorry I thought you wanted to use slrpnk as the first link you posted was from there, I forgot that slrpnk doesn’t federate hb and grad
But actually, thinking about it now, does it really matter? LW defederates both, so there would be no way for a hexbear comment to make it to that community? hexbear.net/c/news@lemmy.world
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still not 100%
I don’t have time for a comparison, but doesn’t Reddit has a similar amount of call to violence today? Intuitively, one would think that if people are okay with reading those on Reddit, they would be okay with those on here too
Correct.
Hrm… you know what, maybe? I mean my first answer is most definitely no, bc Reddit fights hard to censor it, but beyond that, people find ways to convey the same meaning, so there is a certain sense to which your statement could be true? Perhaps I am thinking back to my / our experiences on Reddit from two years ago without updating it in my head to reflect modern times.
But then at that point I want to say no again, for several reasons. One, I do have to read some subs on Reddit bc the content is simply not here - and you go to where that is, and that concept will never change no matter how popular the Threadiverse gets - and I don’t see anything close to the levels that we see here. Then again, it might exist there, just not where I am looking?
However, two, people in r/Redditalternatives say that we are too toxic - which we are - and that as bad as things are over there, we are worse from what they see, and we also have less content. The only thing we have less of here that they like is fewer bots - although tbf we have those here as well, despite how most of us have blocked them and they tend to be properly labeled here (which I would argue makes 100% the difference - one that you know is a bot is not a problem, as it is not pretending to be a human).
All of this is far more complicated than I am able to say cleanly and succinctly - e.g. we do have a higher maximum here of extremists, and also it seems to me a much higher baseline level of it as well, but we also have kindness here, whereas there it seems mostly absent, and we have more intellectual discussions here whereas there the baseline level expectation seems to be either teenagers or right-wing trolls that everyone just seems to give up on keeping our and just accepts the fact that they are everywhere, in every sub, in most posts even though they get ignored.
And yeah, calls for murder appear there - but they tend to be removed. And yeah, some of that content gets removed here as well, but as I showed links to, not all of it, nor even perhaps the majority of it, though depending on which community, on which instance, and which subject matter and in particular which mod (team) is looking at it.
We are definitely a den of iniquity. Perhaps Reddit is too. X/Twitter even more so. Bluesky seems far less so though, so maybe that was the source of that comparative thought process - some journalist who is editing Wikipedia in their spare time, so applying their personal bias to it, which is true but mainly in a highly narrow sense?
Perhaps the focus should not be on whether calls for murder exist - I’ve shown you, they DO, but that overall the Threadiverse provides tools to engage with content in enjoyable ways. Obviously engaging with controversial topics is going to bring up controversial wording, but someone can - as you do - block it easily. Reddit is too restrictive, and 4chan too open, but the Threadiverse provides a nice middle ground. It does require a helluva lotta work though, to understand how to make proper use of those tools. Or rather, Lemmy does, whereas PieFed makes it downright trivially easy with Topic Feeds and keyword filters and such (e.g. “guillotine” and “2A” and perhaps things like “, deserve it” and whatnot). Here at least you can make something work, whereas on Reddit you just can’t.
Man, I really disagree with your stance but you’re arguing in an annoyingly reasonable, balanced manner and doing legwork to produce evidence for your claim that invites people to re-evaluate their long held stance.
It’s annoying because I like my long held stances. They’re comfortable.
I’m a big fan of dark humour (as long as it isn’t punching down and is kept in pretty well defined areas where it’s unlikely to upset reasonable people who happen to be on the wrong side) and have read all your posts thinking ‘sorry but if people can’t joke, or express their frustration and fear by pretending they aren’t powerless, that sounds like a recipe for frustration and repression’, which is reasonable because all the examples are on my socio-political side.
And you’ve made it kinda obvious, without being aggressive, that if I only think it’s ok because I happen to agree with them… It’s maybe time to re-evaluate my threshold for when joking and letting off steam online crosses the threshold that I don’t want to be part of that community any more.
So, full marks on ‘how to convince people to change beliefs that they have an emotional connection to’, because I’ve seen the argument a few times and it’s never been remotely effective.
And I guess, the world needs less violent jokes and personal vendettas in general, even though it’s clearly one side causing the actual problems. I can’t keep criticising them without being critical of the people in my own spaces doing the same.
(Really sorry, just a few marks deducted because I do not feel overjoyed or enlightened. I’m mildly annoyed that I’ve been in the wrong and have to change, for no personal gain, and it’ll take the fun out of a lot of the internet. I suspect at some point I’ll realise I’m much happier without reading violent stuff etc, and be much more grateful. But for now it feels a little like finding out that one of my new hobbies is problematic)
Thank you for your kind words. Most people who felt that way would either just be angry, or at best uncertain so would not share, so thank you for your bravery to open up and be vulnerable.
I also am a big fan of dark humor, especially comedians that do it, then hearing the audience, pause to explain a little bit - the best ones, the absolute masters of their craft, are indeed super gentle about it.
But we are just people, trying to get by in life. I will leave the actual “judgement” as to whether it’s good or bad to you (while acknowledging my own bias in that I think it’s bad, for numerous reasons but one is the slippery slope where it pulls someone down the pathway ever further along, bc if one step is fine then why not two, and if two is fine then okay what about three, and so on), but in any case I think that either way the situation is compounded by it being “unexamined”. Whatever our beliefs are, they are best if they are TRULY ours, rather than just borrowed from others without a thought as to whether they fit our actual selves. Crowd-thinking is not any kind of thinking at all.
We have such PRIVILEGES, and we don’t like to think about that. Most of my closer friends online tend to be older gay men or trans people, who don’t like to think about how privileged they are to have experienced trauma that a traditional neurotypical person has not (mainly bc feeling suicidal, they would think along the lines of privileged="good”, which it is not - what they experienced is not “good”, but it does make them “privileged” in terms of having traumatic experiences that allows them to understand things that others outright refuse to or perhaps worse are flat incapable of doing). Access to education is one such privilege. Ability to spend time reading is another. In contrast, a single parent of multiple kids in the USA hustling by working 2-3 jobs does not have such luxuries, and is all the more vulnerable to disinformation as a result.
And on the Fediverse, we spend a great deal of time blocking things that we do not like. We who enjoy fiddling with config files and trying out how they might change the outcome of a process - we are if not quite rare in the population then at least uncommon. Which is fine, but then we cannot delude ourselves - at least, not if we wish to remain honest with ourselves - that the stuff that we spent such enormous amounts of time blocking does not in fact exist.
People advocate for murder here constantly. Some might even mean it. If Russia or China or North Korea were not here trying to push agitation, then they are missing a great opportunity, imho - although fortunately (for them) useful believers will do that work for them, having already been converted on more popular platforms.
And then, as you said, there’s people just joking around. Which we DESPISE when we hear the right-wing people do it in our direction, yet we do it to them in turn. It’s natural though, and therefore lazy, and easy to fall into, without ever considering any other alternatives.
Whichever way you end up on this topic, kudos for taking the time to examine it and decide what you actually want here.
Hexbear is incredible and you’re a cretin for equivalating an instance of goofy trans communists with Nazis.
“The Fediverse isnt squeaky clean, look at Hexbear!!” says the .world poster as he continues to sponsor genocide and imperialism with his rhetoric.
Honestly with how .world removes talks genocide makes them just as guilty as they claim Hexbear is.
it looks like somebody who just saw this post edited wikipedia for the first time to remove that. this is why wikipedia's wonderful: it's that easy. i have this quirk where i wanna debate anyone who distrusts wikipedia or claim its rigidity
They did! The change log shows the main section of ‘I found a single paper criticising the fediverse so here’s 600 words on how terrible the concept is’, and also reassured me that I wasn’t just being lazy in not wanting to trawl through the text to edit it to be less awful.
I’m bizarrely excited about it too. You can’t thank anonymous Wikipedia editors, so I’ll throw a vague ‘thank you!’ out into the world and try to pay it forward.
My next battle: figuring out why I can’t edit this post, lol (maybe a mobile problem) and long term, why I didn’t think of ‘just edit it anonymously’.
lmao wait until it’s reverted, argued over, then the editor gets banned.
go on, show me
My ip got banned despite never editing wikipedia, never even reading the talk.
I think Wikipedia itself says that it is just an entry into topics. To confirm the things that are written there you check sources.
I have seen worse stuff on Instagram and Reddit than I have seen on the fediverse… and I use the fediverse far more.
That’s just how the internet works.
As with Wikipedia, I saw the same stuff with articles regarding religious topics that were just heavily guarded by a neckbeard atheist who had unreasonable expectations.
Wikipedia certainly isn’t wrong, the Fediverse is filled with so much political extremism, made worse by the Tankie Developers
!meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works to see more of how widespread tankies and their extreme bigotry and violent rhetoric spreads across the fediverse
Note this person is a Zionist promoting a community where they encourage Jewish ethnic surpremacy.
lemmy.world/post/35824465/19372031
<img alt="" src="https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/35d250c8-cc15-4f65-8f01-50753bc651bd.png">
Is that the same person?
I got banned by Goat for reporting that person. That person did not get banned.
So no?
I don’t think the conclusion you have reached is reasonable. By the logic you are running on every community is every bad thing anyone has ever posted and every ban would be grounds for de-federalization.
You got banned for specifically using “Zio” – A term coined by David Duke. I asked you to use a different phrase instead, such as zionist, zionazi or anything else, but you insisted on using Zio.
Your ban has expired by now anyway, I don’t dish out perm-bans unless it’s absolutely neccessary
Ignore my correction, I was misinformed
No, no – Specifically “zio”
Not Zionism – “Zio”
Gotcha, thanks for the clarification. Clearly I don’t run in right circles to have ever heard that before.
I’m still getting a ton of reports about this thread. An open call for everyone to cool their jets please. I don’t really wanna lock anything.
yeah that’s usually how extremists manage to crawl their way into movements. They hijack the movement and use specific dog whistles to identify each other while normalising extremism. It’s why communities gotta be vigilant when these dog-whistles, such as zio, pop up.
Goat banned you for calling out fascism, unheard of.
He was temp-banned for using Zio, which is a term neo-nazis and white supremacists use. I offered him a chance that he wasn’t aware of the word, but he instead doubled down and referred to David Duke as “some guy”
For more info see my my post about previous ban there where Goat got banned on DB0 for going full Zionist himself and somehow DB0 is tankies.
lemmy.world/post/35172737?scrollToComments=true
<img alt="" src="https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/6bf402f8-92d9-48f0-a6bc-79af3cc1a638.png">
Is this the part you wanted to highlight? Because this seems to be about you being a pro china genocide denier who was down voted for that point. I don’t get how you are getting “full zionist” from this.
No the rest of the thread where Goat goes full Zionist.
This whole thread does not make you or the dbzer0 community look the way you hope. Honestly this reads like some hexbear level horseshit. If you have some actual evidence please just post a screen shot or a link to the actual thing you want to show us.
I already did once and you tried to ignore it so go look for the rest yourself.
Are we seeing different links?
It is Hexbear level horseshit. Dbzer0 is federated with Hexbear and most of these users come from Hexbear or have Hexbear alts
Are you telling on yourself? I asked you to stop using Zio because nazis specifically use it.
That’s not at all true
It’s true, check the various pages of info collected by other users. And he’ll ban you for calling it out.
But he won’t ban the nazis! He was on Voat for a reason.
There are no nazis in my comm and they’re not allowed either. I was banned from Voat
People try to act like Wikipedia is some kind of miracle when it’s founded and run by fash.
Good luck editing anything on that site. Total shitstorm.
wait what? that’s new to me. what’s the deal?
Sounds like nonsense hyperbole
Source? I donate both my time and money to Wikipedia, so pretty invested on making sure it’s a force for good.
Today you learned any idiot can edit Wikipedia and it is mostly done by pro government entities.
Even worse. A lot of it just seems to be done by trolls.
Every now and again they have a big push to get more editors from more sections of society and normal humans, because a majority of the edits are done by a small amount of people, and these people spend so much time doing that that they don’t have much time for things like jobs, hobbies, socialisation, etc.
They are doing a great service, and most of them are great editors, but they are very very online and aren’t always interested in Wikipedia being a collaboration of people from all walks of life.
So they manage to get more random people to make an account and make their own first little edits, and then half those random people get yelled at for not following some hidden rules or for disagreeing with Big Mike who doesn’t like to be corrected or whatever and, surprise surprise, most people whose first experience editing Wikipedia never try again. The ones who stay are the dogged, determined ones, or the ones who don’t really care about criticism, and thus the cycle continues.
Seriously though, small time editors are absolutely essential to keep Wikipedia (reasonably) honest and unbiased. Literally anyone can contribute to the world’s biggest shared knowledge hub, and if you’re not a troll, a dick, a shill or an extremist then your contribution is really, really valuable.
If you see any page that has incorrect info, or anything that’s missing information that you know, or even some clunky grammar or out of date references, please do consider making an edit. There are a bunch of best practice guidelines on editing (that aren’t always very accessible) but the main ethos is to do what you can in good faith and don’t sweat the red tape. Someone else can come along afterwards and tidy formatting up or send you a message saying ‘hey, I’ve reverted your edit because you need a source / this type of source / you accidentally replaced the entire page on astrophysics with an emoji’, and they’ll link to the guidelines you need to follow if so.
I’d love to say it’ll be fun and chill and once you’ve realised how easy it is you’ll be evangelical about it. If you edit a totally innocuous page, it probably will be.
But it’s the internet, so there are all sorts of people including the knobs, so I’ll just say - by widening the pool of editors you will be benefitting Wikipedia whatever your actual edit is, and by ignoring any argumentative bastards you’ll be adding to the majority of Wikipedia editors who are normal human beings and not, well, argumentative bastards.
(Obviously if you are actually an argumentative bastard troll, no offence meant, I hope you have a great life but the applications to be a Wikipedia editor are sadly closed and honestly it’s not worth it 😀)
It is pretty fucking toxic if you’re not a Linux sheep or violent-leftist.
bruh
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/538eb433-c687-4be3-8f5b-2bae6f495cfb.jpeg">
Love it. Those hypocritical fucks will rue the day they fuck with Tux.
Well, it should be toxic for Reich Wingers
ok bye
How so?
Linux wins vs Windows (when it comes to user-control and stability). Immutable distributions allow reset to prior state, can Windows do that? Thanks for the bait by the way.
Thanks, another recommendation for my block list then :3
i’m a peaceful leftist and support criticism of fascism. if that makes me toxic then you’re the problem :3
It’s pretty toxic toward right-wing pieces of shit that espouse hate toward minorities, women and queer people. As it should be.
And reddit has shifted from that using auto-moderation I think
Do not view Wikipedia as the only source of truth. And please relax your soul in face of online drama.
Financial interests pay people to edit.
Mysteriously my ip is banned from editing when I tried to view talk on a suspect edit, even though I have never once edited a page or even accessed that part by this ip. None on former ip’s either.
Ip is on some shady brazillian blacklist so maybe that is it idk, everyone just trusting shady internet players.
It’s pretty cool being a member of a den of iniquity.
Meh. I’m holding out for wretched hive of scum and villainy.
I can bring villainy and snacks, maybe some sandwiches or something?
we are a den of scum and villany. You know. Places where like han solo hangs out.
Just wanted to bring up that when its one person and recent you can do a revision to revert to where it was and give a reason why that editor is griefing. Did it a few times on an article of a book called intelligence of dogs and some person took the article to be its about the intelligence of dog breeds (I mean it was in the context of the book and study done) and would change the list. I would revert with a link to what the book had and a comment that the article is about a book and if they wanted it different to run their own damn study and publish it in their own damn book.
Yeah, that generally sounds good. In this case though, it had been up for 6 months and a lot of people had edited the page since, so I wasn’t sure how that would work.
And, to be honest, cowardice 🤣 I don’t know if it’s just the sort of pages I’ve edited, but I’ve found the number 1 indicator for when a reversion will get pushback is when it was put there by someone with an unholy amount of edits that have a troll / far right / aggressive theme. Some people only seem to edit controversial topics, and some push really weird theories and will argue every bizarre claim as nauseum, some are very free with personal insults, and most are totally normal people.
But the ones who’ve made a slightly odd, vaguely political edit to a reasonably banal page, and when you leave a polite discussion on the talk page and carefully edit it to remove the most inflammatory bits they just revert your edit within a couple of minutes - I’ve had a terrible time with them.
Always, they revert your edit and then either make another minor edit right afterwards, or some other account / anonymous comes in and makes a minor edit, within 2 minutes of theirs. And when you check their history and see a vast majority of their edits are on X rated pages, in my experience that means you’re never going to win. Every edit you make will be reverted within minutes. If they put anything on the talk page it will be exactly as personally offensive as you can get without being outright ban-able. And their shadow account will be along right after every comment or action to agree.
It’s exhausting, and it totally made me lose faith in Wikipedia. I know there are channels to report that, but I’ve found that they take months and the discussion is like ‘yeah that was out of line but they’ve made so many non offensive edits, maybe they were having a bad day?’ with the odd essay-length barrage of insults from new accounts that are always deleted, but just remind me that it’s so easy to just create a new account for bad faith purposes that what’s the point wading through all this aggro just to make sure one user gets a stern talking to on one of his many accounts, for the sake of a line or two on a page about a topic you’re not that interested in.
Sorry for the tragic novella lol, it just really annoys me. Wikipedia could have been so great, but for the fact that trolls and bad actors don’t worry about following the rules, certainly don’t mind conflict, and can write 50 pages worth of bullshit in the time it takes an honest person to fact check the first paragraph, let alone the time and effort it takes to edit stuff by the correct channels.
And when you argue with them, that’s what they enjoy. They can wear people down just by being odious, and even if enough people wade in to help you out and waste their time arguing with someone who’s being deliberately inflammatory, and everyone agrees that yes the page on trees shouldn’t be mostly about lynching black people or whatever - that page is going to be edited again by a new account within days. All the decent people stand to win is a temporary, hard fought knowledge that a tiny piece of the internet isn’t quite as toxic as it was before, and will be again, and they lose so much energy and good will if they don’t like arguing. And for the dickheads, the entire thing is win-win.
I don’t know how to prevent that, other than a much stricter attitude to anonymous/ new account edits and offensive arguments, and detecting patterns like ‘this account always makes innocuous edits within minutes of this other person making controversial ones’, but that’s a bit more tightly controlled than Wikipedia could / should be.
(I mean the other solution is some sort of mandatory therapy and socialising courses for people who actively enjoy trolling / shit stirring / making people angry, but that would be a little beyond my or Wikipedia’s remit, so)
I mean my experience has been different. When I revert it reverts it and the person I think could go revert your revert. There are higher level people that can lock the article or whatnot but I don’t think they see the reversion of their edit unless they go look or maybe when logged in they get a message. I think if enough reversions go through one of the higher level folk maybe get pinged. I had to revert it back to the book list like 3 or 4 times then it stayed for awhile. Although I should look and see if its accurate but then I have to go look up the book and ugh.