this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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My overall analysis is positive. Not a full perfect score, but better than Reddit. (Note: ++/+/=/-/-- indicated in comparison with Reddit, not in absolute terms.)
genetic fallacies?
A genetic fallacy is a claim that something is true/false based on its origin. It's a catch-all term for ad hominem, appeal to authority, appeal to novelty/tradition, etymological fallacy, so goes on.
Users in both Reddit and Lemmy really, really love to engage in this fallacy. I don't know why, but if I had to take a guess, it's because taking into account the origin of a claim in a non-fallacious way prevents them from voicing certainty on a matter, and plenty here/there have an irrational hatred against doubt.
Ah interesting, never heard that term. I was thinking it was believing that x race has a smaller brain or something, but I was gonna say I hadn't run across too many white supremacists on lemmy.
Yeah, the "genetic" there isn't related to our chunks of DNA, it's there for "origin". Think on it as "the fallacy of the genesis of the argument".
When it comes to racism Lemmy is way better than Reddit, since the typical user here has better reading comprehension. In Reddit you can outright say something racist and nobody will bat an eye, as long as you avoid easy-to-spot words like slurs; here it doesn't work. Same deal with transphobia, misogyny etc.
I am not sure if reading comprehension is the reason hate gets to stay on Reddit. I think it's genuine denial and/or acceptance from the mods, and especially acceptance from admin.
Seems to me that for validating information on subjects that one isn't an expert in, source would be important.
You can use sources to strengthen a claim in a non-fallacious way, through inductive² reasoning. However, most people in Lemmy and Reddit don't; they want to eat the cake (use deductive¹ reasoning) and have it too (use the origin of a claim as part of the argument), and that's the genetic fallacy.
And, if I had to take a guess on why they do it, it's probably because:
So inductive reasoning introduces a lot of complexity and doesn't let you vomit certainty. And yet both userbases are full of people who want to lie to themselves that they know something and that reality is simple.
And that's actually a big deal. Because, when you accept the genetic fallacy as solid reasoning (it isn't), you're opening the door to a lot of shitty manipulative tactics.
Notes/clarification:
I think I know what you're saying, though maybe an example might help. But we're talking about comments on the Web here, not a scientific paper. Most of us can not be subject matter experts and must use inductive reasoning to get by in life. And often have to depend on other sources like articles from trusted sources or scientific papers we're not very equipped to vet to shape our understanding of the world.
Just saying maybe your expectations are too high for a public Web forum.
If people were using inductive reasoning, that would be fine. They aren't - as I said they're trying to eat the cake and have it too: "expert said so, then it's true/false lol lmao".
And in the process they rush towards certainty on things that might be completely false, often because they're being manipulated to do so - because it's trivially easy to claim authority over a subject, or to stain someone else's authority over it.
My expectations - not just for web forums, but also for real life - is that, when we don't know something, we shouldn't claim that it's true or false. It's fine to conjecture, it's fine to say what you think/guess, but not to make a hard statement, unless you have good grounds to do so.
And inductive reasoning does not give you those good grounds to claim certainty.
However, I think that in web forums this rubs your typical user the wrong way. They want to believe that they know something, but aren't willing to spend the necessary effort to do so.
I would appreciate more people discussing things with these ideas in mind.
Between the echo chamber sentiment, and people's difficulty with empathy or accepting there could be other view points, it's hard to maneuver around hot topics and learn anything.
The extreme left sentiment has been repeatedly mentioned, but I'm honestly still hoping to learn other people's perspectives here.
I see what you mean. I'll try to give an example.
I tend to be skeptical of folks when I know they're incentivized monetarily, emotionally, or socially to believe a certain thing but I do my best not to discount them out of hand. I think most people have a tendency to write folks off completely when it's more useful to accept uncertainty. To know that a piece of information might be right even if it challenges my worldview. Unfortunately uncertainty is kinda hard work.
For instance, the US has a lot of incentive to make alternative economic systems seem awful. Anytime a pro US media source like Radio Free Asia says something negative about China. I have to accept that:
I have to accept that balance.
This works well for situations that don't effect me personally. On the other hand, if there's a person who has a predatory reputation in my friend group, I don't have the luxury of giving them the benefit of the doubt. They are a present danger to myself and the people around me.
I'm not sure I really get what you mean, could you give an example?
I'll use some silly examples.
Ad hominem - taking a claim as automatically false because of who said it:
Ad autoritatem - taking a claim as automatically true because of who said it:
Sometimes authorities are wrong. The likelihood of being wrong might be smaller than the one of a random nobody, but it's still there. You can't simply deal with it as "authority said so then it's true". (Check what I said about inductive logic in the other comment.)
There's more, but they all boil down to "you aren't analysing the claim, you're analysing where the claim is from".
Thanks for clarifying! :)
One example that happens quite often is "look, Uyghurs are in forced labour camps in China", and the genetic fallacy response is "nooo that was reported by the New York Times which is an organ of western imperialism so it's all bullshit you're a westoid goon"
I generally agree, but there is absolutely no way that witch hunting is worse here than on reddit. There was a shitton of doxxing and people being very aggressive over minor things, like YouTube drama. Also the Boston Bombing incident? It's not even close.
Most everything here seems spot-on, as to be expected from you who are careful with your words so that they can be relied upon:-).
But there is one aspect that doesn't mesh with my own experiences. I am not doubting that you are seeing it, but personally I have not seen much serious witch-hunting since leaving Reddit, or rather, since I blocked hexbear and lemmygrad.ml. Can you elaborate more on that? Is it limited more to certain communities, or certain instances? I wonder if I am merely leading a charmed existence here that differs from the norm, but even if so, that would mean that curation is possible to avoid that.
I did see a LOT of that in Reddit subs though, so it could be that my standard of comparison was perturbed from that side of the matter.
And Reddit did change me: I used to be proud of never blocking anyone at all, always ready for conversation with pretty much anyone who was even halfway trying, but now I do it and don't think twice when I realize that someone is not trying at all. So... perhaps I've blocked away this entire aspect of Lemmy, which if so, I will consider a success rather than its opposite:-).
I'll ping @[email protected], so I can address both comments together, OK?
I'm aware that this depends a lot on the sampling, and it's influenced by sampling biases*, but I do think that witch hunting has become a bigger problem here than it is in Reddit. Specially when it comes to two things:
I don't think that this is coming specially from Lemmygrad and Hexbear users; it seems to me like a more general problem.
Then there's the case of a certain admin team of a large instance, weaponising witch hunting to silence criticism against two governments (Russian Federation and The People's Republic of China) as if it was xenophobia (i.e. hostility geared towards people, not abstract structures of power), without explicitly saying "we won't tolerate criticism against certain governments here". That admin team is however a special case.
*in Reddit I was mostly hanging around small subreddits, where the problem doesn't seem as bad. In the meantime it's possible that I notice this more in Lemmy because, in other aspects, the userbase is better behaved. So yeah, I'm aware that this might not be accurate for other posters.
Thank you. Of course you are free to believe as you like but I did find your comment interesting and enjoy talking about it:-). Let's go from the bottom of your comment up towards the top: I agree that we tend to expect much more from those who act like adults than those who are already acting like children in every other way, so in that sense this would be a good problem to have, as in one source of bias in an otherwise highly agreeable experience, as opposed to Reddit where it's just one more splinter of shit.
Next, I thought the admin team that you mentioned was Lemmygrad? Which doesn't negate your point, it's just that my entire view of the Fediverse (lately) is without either that or hexbear, which explains why I am not seeing it as often, if indeed it is concentrated in such areas (who, like Reddit, seem to act more like children than adults). Although then, if indeed it is concentrated in a few areas, then it is possible for a user to avoid this source of bias. A known bias isn't the same as a non-existent one, but at least its being known allows for it to be controllable. I will be curious to hear how or if your thinking evolves as a result of us discoursing on this particular matter:-).
CP I have to (somewhat) disagree with you on: the definition of a "witch hunt" being "a campaign directed against a person or group holding unorthodox or unpopular views", which implies that a fully welcoming society should not do thus, i.e. that a person should be innocent until proven guilty. On the other hand, CP is literally a full-on actual crime in many countries, so a place sending content such as that out across the entire Fediverse can bring the unwanted attention of authorities not only to the place hosting that content but to any place federated with it as well. i.e. it seemed to me to be less of a "witch hunt" than a "self-policing" so that external authorities did not need to step in and pass regulations (or enforce existing ones) to shut down Fediverse servers, treating them like pirate seeding bays or such. Also, by definition they are not "innocent" if such content has already been shared that "proves their guilt" - the crossing of an actual, legal line really does make the situation different.
Therefore, you likely don't even mean that per se, and rather something one step removed, as in witch-hunting not actual CP but just people being nervous about anything that even remotely seems similar. That... seems understandable though? e.g. if your house was robbed, then you might spend extra time peeking out the window for awhile, for fear of it happening again. Especially if door locks haven't been implemented yet:-). Overall though, the Fediverse has to pick one side or the other there (of the law): either it is a pirate signal that attempts to evade detection and being shut down by authority structures, or else it cooperates with it. We seem to have decided (against the former and for the latter), hence people are understandably nervous about rogue entities that may jeopardize what we are building here. Especially since all a bully needs is an excuse to shut us down - e.g. Reddit, Meta, Twitter/X, etc. - and I would not put it past someone like Musk to intentionally share CP, then use that fact in a campaign to try and prevent his biggest rival (Mastodon) from competing with his profits. Thus, with the stakes being so very high (one morning we may wake up to find that all or a/some major instance(s) has(ve) been shut down?), and the existing amount of protection so low (as you say mod tools are next to nonexistent)... anyway, I would not call this "witch-hunting" then, b/c of the implication (in modern times at least) that the target is innocent in such situations (and I mean that entirely separately from morals, just in the sense of fulfilling the letter of the law). Though I am not sure what phrase would suit it better - something acknowledging that people performing actual crimes using the Fediverse, and which may cause the Fediverse to be shut down, is not good for the Fediverse as a whole? But maybe you meant something else entirely, in which case I hope all of this was at least somewhat interesting to read regardless:-).
Right-wingers... yeah that one I think you are probably right. And it goes along with politics bleeding into non-political matters too like cartoons and memes that specifically ask in the rules to be non-political (as distinct from the actual political memes communities - e.g. one on lemmy.world, another on lemmy.ca, and surely there are others). Fwiw, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the USA, and the act of Brexit in the UK, really have people on edge lately - some people talking here may literally DIE, or lose their jobs, or some other huge life-altering effect as a result of politics not leaving them alone, even if they wanted to ignore politics. Ironically though, the extremeness of the irl events highlights all the more the dire need to have a place that people can come to get away from all of that, if they wish to escape that for just ONE MOMENT and, e.g., enjoy a Star Trek meme:-P.
That said, being a fairly centrist person myself, I tend to get reactions FAR more often from far-right-wingers accusing me of not being far-right-wing enough than from left-wingers doing similarly. Even in such meta-matters, of talking about how we all talk about such relevant matters, the two sides are FAR from equal. Though, it's also a LOT more common in X (I hear, I literally do not have an account there) and on Reddit than here inside the Fediverse. And yet, I can definitely see what you mean if you are comparing not to "Reddit as a whole" but "certain specific, smaller Reddit communities" - those two categories are LEAGUES apart from one another, the latter being a million times better (and entirely plausibly still worth visiting, even now?) while the former has devolved into a shitstorm that just is not worth going to, for an educated adult human person imho. So: mystery solved then!:-D
TLDR: witch-hunting exists here, and even if far less so than on general (not niche sub) Reddit, it is more noticeable b/c here we expect better. Though is a common problem across all social media, not specific to here. [Insert in-group membership signals here, to increase acceptance of and therefore maximize accrual of fake internet points?:-P]
The admin team* that I'm talking about is lemmy.ml's. It would be within its* moral rights as instance owners to say "we don't want criticism against the Russian Federation or the PRC here", but that is not what it's doing - instead it removes any sort of criticism against either, under allegations that it violates rule 1 (no bigotry), leading others to believe that the content was xenophobic, and that's what makes it witch hunting.
*note: I'm treating "the admin team" as a single entity to avoid naming the ones doing it.
The definition of witch hunting that I use is a bit more inclusive - it's "publicly accusing one or more people of belonging to a morally reprehensible group, without having grounds to do so". It doesn't require an organised campaign. That's relevant when it comes to the CP talk.
It's self-policing when it's targetting actual CP and their spreaders, like the guys in LW did. That's the right thing to do.
It starts being what I call witch hunt when pointing fingers at distasteful but not CP content, saying that "this is pedo shit". I've seen the later happening here a few times, not just from lemmy.ml admins but from other users.
(Now thinking, most of those users were from lemmy.ml, lemmygrad and hexbear. Perhaps it's a fair point that most witch hunting comes from LG/HB? I'm a bit biased towards both as a communist, perhaps I'm being unfairly lenient towards them.)
So it's closer to what you said about people being nervous about anything that even remotely seems similar. Being nervous is IMO understandable; accusing people is not.
Ah, the alt right bloody loves some witch hunt, too. For them everyone is a degenerate woke bluepilled whatever, unless you're actively spamming slurs. And it's kind of funny, because they talk all the time about how the left is "virtue signalling", but they do something similar all the time, to avoid being witch hunted by their peers.
Oh no, I must have misremembered the details about lemmy.ml and conflated the original developers of Lemmy as being in charge of lemmygrad, not lemmy.ml? (or perhaps it was... both? or something like that?) Thank you for setting me straight. Yes I am with you there... now:-).
Something that sets LG and HB apart from other places is not merely what was said, but the manner in which things are handled. e.g. I say one thing that merely doesn't support their world-view hard enough and even WEEKS later they barage my account endlessly with continued mockery. More importantly, not just once but as a firmly established pattern of behavior. That is just not how I want to spend my time, on the internet or irl. It is LEAGUES apart from this civil discussion format that you and I are having - each willing to bend, not so much to each other but to whatever the Truth happens to be. If I am correct (hey, even a stopped watch...), or if you are, or neither, or both - it is that chasing after TRUTH that concerns us, and unites us in our shared mission.
Neither admiration nor equality are mandatory there (e.g. a hypothetical discussion between an adult moderator and a child first-time lemmy-er), but respect is, being foundational to the communication process. B/c otherwise what good is "tRuTh" when it cannot be conveyed, due to corruption introduced by the message delivery method? i.e. a truthful message is no longer truthful when it becomes corrupted, either by the delivery method or by the deliver-er (the latter goes off on a tangent that could get quite a bit deeper but the short version being that the message thus proferred for deliver is no longer the real message - e.g. if the truth were 1+1=2 but the sender caused the addition of +1 to each element, then 2+2=3 is no longer an accurate representation of the TRUE original statement; nor even would 1+1+1=2+1, b/c while that one preserves the mathematical integrity, it still differs in other ways e.g. it would take more resources to store, or brush strokes and paint supplies to write down if it were intended to be represented in such a manner, etc.).
Getting back to how this relates to LG and HB: their lack of respectful forms of communication makes them "wrong", regardless of whether the message they were originally aiming to convey was correct or not. I do not care if you are a communist, anarchist, freedumb-loving bald-eagle slaying Americunt or whatever, you are respectful to people, and I love that about you. In case you are interested, imho they do NOT seem like "your people". That said, I acknowledge that I am VERY biased myself here, b/c I have judged them by the worst set of interactions that I have had with them... and yet, is that not mostly a fair way to do things? (someone who kills is usually called a "murderer", someone who steals is usually a "thief", and so on) I am aware ofc that not every single person on them is "that" way, nor do I particularly care b/c I had a problem with some large-ish fraction of their userbase, which I solved by blocking them, and now I am happily enjoying the Fediverse, whereas before I was not happy anytime I forgot and accidentally responded even to what may seem like an innocuous meme post on it. If that one simple action (well, that pair of blocks) can dramatically improve my Fediverse experience, then I am happy to think of LG and HB as "a place where people tend to be disrespectful" (surely not all, but enough of them that they warrant that description?). And unless someone convinces me otherwise, I am also happy to share that opinion, in case it may help others to similarly improve their own Fediverse experiences.
Likewise, it seems that you are suggesting that even if in a far more limited scope, lemmy.ml has a lot of similarities. To confirm your suspicion: yes I was thinking about the LW handling of the actual CP. And I guess I do not know about the lemmy.ml handling of it - though I would draw a distinction between some commenter filing a report saying "this is pedo shit" vs. an actual admin implementing a policy, whether written and agreed to in advance aka above-board or unwritten and enacted on the sly. Still, if enough of them do that then... yes, I see that you are correct, that's "witch-hunting".
Though I was pointing out how Reddit at-large was LEGENDARY for doing that, though typically more in the most popular (and therefore largest) centralized subs, while the smaller & more niche subs were able to get away from all of that and at least have a chance at a better mod team. At least, if they did not rock the boat too awfully hard during the protests that went on.
About right-wingers: every accusation is a confession, yeah. Though left-wingers do have a different set of issues, e.g. the ivory tower / walled-garden approach that aims to be "correct" even while not actually being thus, i.e. this witch-hunting that we are discussing now. Between the two though, the Left vs. Right, they do not love witch-hunging "equally": I would say that the Right uses that tactic far more often, at least in the sense that there are some few Leftists who do not use it, where I have yet to see a Rightist that does not.
So I think my point might be phrased as saying that it might not be fully fair to say that the Fediverse has a witch-hunt problem that is in excess of what was observed on Reddit. Though you have convinced me that it is significantly larger than I thought here, while I hope that in turn I have convinced you that it is also possibly less extensive that you thought here (being more concentrated in a few areas rather than baked in throughout the entire Fediverse) but more to the point that Reddit was far more so. Especially nowadays, where the mods are extremely often the literal scabs at best and at worst the very people who were banned from those subs previously for refusing to play nice, and who now enjoy lording their power over others in the same way that they choose to view how others previously treated them, i.e. unfairly, capriciously, etc.