Ohhhh, THERE’S the boner I was looking for! Thanks bro.

Mostly acid reflux, I fear.

I haven’t been pumped for a specific contestant on the show like this since Noel Fielding.

Yeah, it’s a pretty dumb slang.

You know some people say they have an automatic reaction to the word “moist”? I have that with the slang above.

What an odd thing to display. I wonder what their reasoning is for this?

Ooh, would you happen to know whereabouts? I can’t seem to locate it. Sorry…

Sure! So, for example, our current weekly topic and this new topic by a user have been downvoted by user named @[email protected]. Looking around, there’s a few others within they’ve downvoted as well with no upvotes anywhere. Checking the modlog shows they’ve been banned from other communities for vote manipulation as well (among other things). They don’t need to be able to do this.

Checking older posts, I see that someone named @[email protected] had gone in and downvoted dozens of things with no upvotes. Nearly every topic we had at the time, in fact (or at least as many as I looked at). This is not only against community rules, but it’s a pretty shit thing to do.

We’ve also got old blank accounts like @[email protected] and @[email protected] with zero posts or anything of any kind downvoting. They’re not contributing anything anywhere, so they don’t need to be there at all.

That’s just a few examples, but there’s more.

WOW. Community mods can now see votes and I can now verify things I’ve been suspecting for a long time. There’s a ton of non-posting users going into the community and downvoting every topic in it.

Does anyone know how we can ban someone from a community for vote manipulation if they’ve never posted there?

Not disagreeing with anything you said and enjoyed your perspective, but just wanted to add a personal thought to the end.

I don’t believe that hate speech can survive in a well-behaved logical discussion because most hate speech isn’t logical. This is one reason I feel you should never ban or even discourage discussion. If you figure out the hows and whys of someone you see as hateful, you can often expose and dismantle their faulty reasoning. If we can’t logically describe why an idea is bad instead of relying on personal morality-du-jour, then we are relying on faith, not intellect. Faith can not be relied upon for logical guidance because it is blind and often astoundingly stupid. Banning offensive speech as a blanket to extinguish thought is how churches (past and present) deal with dissension and detractors; it used to be immoral and offensive to be against God or interpretations of the higher-up holy rollers, and is still considered so in some countries.

Edited for clarity.

It’s been an uphill battle, but you’re very welcome!

Broadly speaking, I think you’re correct. I found a massive disconnect between how I operate when discussing online vs. how other people seem to, and it drives me bonkers. My response was why I began this Community in the first place. The only way you can realistically “win” is to make yourself better. If the other people in the discussion are focused on defeating you instead, then they’ve already lost at the outset.

When I discuss things online, I can’t even partially understand how people don’t want to have a more cohesive / logically sound opinion. You’d want to be more informed about a topic and smarter overall, wouldn’t you? I’m happy when I’m proven wrong because it means I’m now a better, smarter person and that is a massive win.

I agree that you should be trying to understand people. After all, if you’re potentially looking to change a mind, you can only do it once you understand them and can speak to the underlying issues with their argument.

I am fine with hate speech existing as long as it’s in a space that it can also be safely dismantled. If they’re free to speak, so are those that can utterly demolish that speech. If either drops their poop and then refuses to engage, that’s when I have a problem. If you look at where things fall apart in most online discourse, it has to do with the terminology they use. Each “side” of an issue has their own version of terms, and pretend that their opponent is using the same terminology they are.

To quote myself in a previous weekly thread:

Some of those issues are persistent in Lemmy to this day and are things I tried to add rules against in the sidebar. Things like:

• Calling someone dumb for bringing forth a logical opinion. No discussion, no “here’s where things fall apart” or “here’s why that isn’t applicable to the situation”, simply “lol fuck u, ur dum.” Or as with modern social media, a drive-by downvote. Most often in the forum days, this would come from someone who you’d recognize as being very opinionated, but not intelligent or self-aware enough to articulate why they felt a certain way. We’ve got tons of threads on this community where bad logic is called out, then the person downvotes and doesn’t comment further. My feeling is that this is because they don’t want to be wrong, so they don’t engage. They internalize the idea that their opponent must just be stupid, and walk away.
• You can be right for the wrong reasons, and wrong for the right reasons. There are tons of examples. You do not have to disagree with someone in order to point out that their reasoning sucks.
• Your morals are not an argument. You can use how you arrived at those morals, but not the morals themselves. Your morals are not logic and apply only to your outlook.
• It’s okay to be wrong. It’s downright awesome to become smarter due to someone correcting you or providing newer / more accurate information. You shouldn’t argue from a position of “I’m right, let me convince you.” Instead we should approach things from “This is how I arrived at this position. Are you able to articulate why I’m incorrect in believing this?”

Things at present remind me of my high school days and that “shut up nerd” culture that the jocks were stereotyped to have. Everyone thinks they have the moral high ground. Everyone thinks their position is the most defensible. Everyone feels they are better than their out group.

(Also, fantastic job sticking to the posting guidelines! Wanna be a mod?)

The URL on the image is wrong. It is: https://cooperateforcanada.ca/

You sound exactly like the kind of person I want in my community: [email protected]

Check the sidebar to see if it suits you too!

You sound exactly like the kind of person I want in my community: [email protected]

Check the sidebar to see if it suits you too!

Voted! Not waiting this time.

All good! That’s what I get for putting it off.

I quite like the winning English song. The other two I have a viscerally negative reaction to though…

Damn. Once again all stuff that I have already. Unfortunate. I guess this is how I make a 1-year subscription last about two and a half years though.

Dang, thought I’d have more time to vote.

Welcome medical personnel! We’d love to have you.