12 step process
Step 1: Write a 3-line paragraph summing up why you think something is wrong
Step 2: Realize that part of your statement might be incorrect or biased, and search the topic
Step 3: Find out that you’re technically correct and mostly correct, but there’s nuance that will end up in an argument.
Step 4: Add 6 more sentences to the paragraph.
Step 5: Realize that there are multiple complete thoughts in the paragraph, split it into 3 separate paragraphs. Add some detail you were avoiding for brevity.
Step 6: Reread what you just wrote and imagine what someone is likely to come-at you with and try to defuse it before it happens.
Step 7: Realize that one of the statements you used might be incorrectly used, search that idiom and change it for clarity.
Step 8: Preview
Step 9: Post
Step 10: walk away
Step 11: check back in 5 minutes later, reread it and realize you have an awful error and something is vague. edit it and mark the edit with an *
Step 12: wait for comments, walk away
step 13: come back a hour later, 2 upvotes and one downvote, reread it, compare it to previous posts, reread your previous posts. decide you don’t care for the tone and honestly don’t even really care for the subject.
step 12: delete
Sometimes multiple times in a row.
Sometimes on the same post.Happens on this platform too
I’ve written paragraphs and paragraphs about how calling someone stupid is not ad hominem. I’ve gone 20 comments into a thread trying to explain how analogies work. I’m currently in several arguments about the fact that water is, indeed, wet.
Someone gave some advice on a forum or a blog or something a long time ago that really stuck with me and completely altered my outlook about social media and interacting with people via the internet in general:
Before you hit “send”, ask yourself whether this is for your benefit, or that of those who will see it.
I basically stopped using socials after that, because I seldom thought of anything that followed this rule, and my feed was so full of garbage from people who also didn’t, but saw fit to post it anyway. The internet has given society an ego masturbation problem.
I have to remind myself engaging is mostly useless.
I’ve lived through the times when online discussion was considered “just weird internet stuff, not to be taken seriously” and then people grew up and everyone used the internet and it was the frontier of communication and was “shaping all facets of society” and now we’re back at “just weird internet stuff, not to be taken seriously.”
Your engagement is valuable for current or future shareholders of the company owning the platform. It is of paramount importance that you engage as much as possible. Although not enough, we would recommend for example, sleeping 7 hours instead of 8 to make time for engagement such liking/disliking and commenting.
When I read bs here I’m always switching between this and “if no one calls this out, people might assume it’s true”.
Duty calls. Someone is being wrong on the Internet! 🦸
I usually only do thar when people spread problematic stuff.
To be clear, I ain’t mocking you, I know the feels. Was just referencing
the BibleXKCDSorry, replied in a hurry, hence so short. I cracked a smile at your comment, don’t worry. Also did not know this
psalmxkcd before, thanks.I feel so targeted
Yeah but then the run the risk of arguing with a bot or a troll or a human being uninterested in having a productive discussion.
Yeah, getting out of the discussion at the right point is a skill I did not master yet.
deletes his own comment without posting it after realizing he was wrong after defending what he now no longer believes in, for seven paragraphs
Yep. Me sometimes. Like you know the answer. It’s simple and logical. The other person is obviously wrong and defending their position badly… But then you realise it’s stupid to try and waste your time on a subject you don’t even care about, to a person who cannot be educated.
But they have 3 upvotes and I’m at -2. Clearly everyone in this subreddit is wrong and I need to make them see that. (And then hate myself for it later on)
I am never spending 20 minutes on any comment ever.
Good. Keep it that way. As someone who has done that (way more than I care to admit), it’s honestly not worth it 99.99999999% of the time.
Hello ADHDers! It really is a health management skill to catch yourself and pull away. The worst is when you do care about the topic and you know you’re mismanaging your time, it doesn’t actually matter, but you can’t not “finish it so at least it’s out there”
Yup. I do this 100%. But mostly it’s because sometimes I get so hot on the subject, it feels good to get it out there and then I worry I was too brash about it. A trick I use is to leave the comment written on my phone in the background. Maybe I’ll send it, but more often than not I clear it out when I clean up my background apps and go, “Well, that was decided for me.”
This is a good trick. I use this trick. Not often enough, but still.
I do this, and I have a “graveyard log” file where I paste my discarded posts and replies.
When you’re 20 minutes into an argument on reddit and suddenly get permanently IP banned for saying something that didn’t even break rules
Their automated banning system has been on the fritz lately. I’ve seen so many [ Removed by Reddit ]s in the last couple months
Ong bro, I highly doubt that even their replies which say “this action was done without the use of automation” are even interacted with by the admins themselves, or any humans at all
Or you spend all of that time writing a well research comment and then realize that you’ve been shadow banned for pointing out that several sexual health/advice communities on there are run by what seem to be serial rapists….
That’s so messed up man :/
This feels like diffamation and harassment. Stick to the facts if you’re going to expose someone
I had screenshots and receipts. I’m not sharing them here, but I invite you to pick your favorite kinky advice community, and flip through some of those moderators histories.
Well in that case… 👀
I lost 7 reddit accounts, some over 12 years old, because I quoted someone saying a gendered slur on a serious discussion sub, so that he couldn’t edit his comment. Then i reported it. They banned me for “using a slur” and I appealed and the mods of that community laughed at me and acted like the sewage that they were and then when I appealed to admins I got perma’d.
New accounts made, those got insta-banned. Used VPN and new email, purged all cookies. Insta shadowban. Repeated the process, no VPN, reset IP, cleared everything, got shadowbanned within a day.
Meanwhile there are AI and bots just pouring low-effort content and comments across the entire website. “People” scream racial and sexist rants without facing any consequence. Entire communities of hate and sexism running rampant and gaining members.
It’s enough to make a reasonable person feel unreasonably conspiratorial and suspicious.
Ong bro, the reddit admins are basically just non-existent atp, highly doubt they do any work, cuz the AI based permabans are going haywire
Same on Lemmy
Damn, but atleast it’s decentralized here. Getting banned from a server doesn’t get you permabanned, IP banned, device tagged and witch-hunted across the site (as of right now)
Well, it could. You’ll have to switch instances m, but a lot of them could interpret this as ban evading
IP bans are a thing. They’re just not automatic and you get targeted by admins
Damn I see, that make sense. But still, reddit worse (as of right now), hopefully it collapses or people realize the CEO is a pedo who is basically turning it into a facist empire and they switch to another similar app
Haven’t used reddit in a while so I didn’t know that
I just assumed a lot of people here had… controversial opinions or crude language (well, you seem to have some as well)
The net is far more ban happy than it used to, it’s gotten to the point that I don’t feel safe using Steam Forums.
Didn’t care that much on Reddit, but on Lemmy, I feel like instance admins could choose to ban my account at any time, and that’s fucking annoying.
fr man
But IPs are dynamic.
Generally, yes. However, depending on how you get internet, it might be much more difficult to change an IP.
On cable, there is no guarantee that restarting your modem/router will change your IP. Lots of cable ISP have the policy to reassign the same IP as long as the DHCP lease can be renewed.
There are tricks like trying to unplug the modem for a long time, or change enough of its configuration/reset it to get a new lease. Or use a separate router that can change its MAC address.
Even if dynamic, some people can be “stuck” with the same IP for a while. In my case I can have the same one for months.
EDIT: I nearly deleted this comment.
I find myself tapping Ctrl+A -> backspace faster than I can react to it myself. Life is too short for waiting for the little cursor to travel all the way back.
Reddit? Nah that’s literally every platform.
It hits for me when I’m typing it out and I can already read the braindead response they’re going to type and I don’t want to spend another 2 paragraphs preempting the obvious response and I definitely don’t want to wait a few hours/days to explain why they’re still wrong.
When I write two paragraphs to reply to someone making a stupid, hateful argument and then they reply “I ain’t reading all that” and get a bunch of upvotes for it, I really think about every super-villain story where the bad-guy was trying to destroy the entire world and I feel a sharp pang of understanding.
Or you say fuck it and send the comment, but you refresh the page and he’s downvoted it faster than a human being could have read it lol
Me when I realize the person I’m commenting to is from hexbear.
I still don’t know what the controversy is about with hexbear.
They unironically think, genocide, murder, torture and tanks are the correct way to spread the freedom and joy of communism, and for the same reasons, they are not afraid of telling you so. Being federated with them usually leads to an endless stream of pity flame wars. Because they think arguing and insulting other’s intelligence will make their ideology win.
Ahh. Seems on par for the whole “lemmy’s turning into reddit” thing.
and thus federated platforms show a strength: defederate with the trash, and the rest get better quality posters! … in theory.
Tank you!
That’s because Reddit sells anger quite well. Their bots and human instigators work overtime to get you to comment like that. I think all of us Reddit refugees have fallen for this shit.
We’re not doing great on deprogramming ourselves either. The news outlets not only manufacture consent, they also manufacture outrage. This isn’t a new problem either. It’s been going on since at least the Spanish-American war, probably earlier (see also William Randolph Hurst , Joseph Pulitzer).
We’re not doing great on deprogramming ourselves either.
You can’t just post that without a source 😡
/s
https://hermetic.com/crowley/the-scientific-solution-of-the-problem-of-government/index
- The average voter is a moron. He believes what he reads in newspapers, feeds his imagination and lulls his repressions on the cinemas, and hopes to break away from his slavery by football pools, cross-word prizes, or spotting the winner of the 3.30.
He is ignorant as no illiterate peasant is ignorant; he has no power of independent thought. He is the prey of panic.
But he has the vote.
- The men in power can only govern by stampeding him into wars, playing on his fears and prejudices until he acquiesces in repressive legislation against his obvious interests, playing on his vanity until he is totally blind to his own misery and serfdom.
The alternative method is undisguised dragooning.
In brief, we govern by a mixture of lying and bullying.
-
This desperate resort to archaic weapons is the heritage of hypocrisy. The theories of Divine Right, aristocratic superiority, the moral order of Nature, are all to-day exploded bluffs. Even those of us who believe in supernatural sanctions for our privileges to browbeat and rob the people no longer delude ourselves with the thought that our victims share our superstitions.
-
Even dictators understand this. Mussolini has tried to induce the ghost of Ancient Rome to strut the stage in the image of Julius Cæsar; Hitler has invented a farrago of nonsense about Nordics and Aryans; nobody even pretends to believe either, except through the “Will-to-believe.”
And the presence is visibly breaking down everywhere.
They cannot even be galvanised with spasm of pseudo-activity, as still occasionally happens with the dead toads of superstition…
This was from a pamphlet he distributed on the streets, and I’m not going into the problems that may or not, are or aren’t, in the whole thing, but this post seems relevant, lucid, and veritable.
We’ve all fallen for some media/governmental wtfery, myself included. The issue is correcting it.
From a historical point, I found it immensely interesting. I went to the author’s wiki and was equally fascinated he came to the USA to paint, during the first world war, posisitioned himself as pro Germany, while spying for the UK, all the while.
A lot of people have a lot of miscommunication about him, including me, because I’ve always been under the impression that his spying wasn’t of any importance. And maybe it wasn’t, but that send worth investigating, if I ever have time
Aside, I’m interested to know what sort of anarchy the pamphlet is advocating, or the closest fit.
This is why “disable inbox replies” is such a great feature that I wish Lemmy would implement. For when you still have something to add, but it looks like the conversation is going downhill, the thought of further responses is causing anxiety, and you know the right choice is going to be to let the other person have the last word anyway.
The block feature is wonderful for this. I’m starting to use it liberally when I just can’t be bothered to deal with someone anymore. I don’t know if there’s a mute user function as well, but that would at least let them yell into the void instead of being blocked outright.
iirc block on Lemmy is “mute” and it doesn’t work like Reddit with preventing any interaction with any posts or comment threads you started (which I’m glad about, Reddit’s block imo is a horrible way of doing it).
Personally I don’t like the block feature for this for two reasons:
- it only targets one user, normally it’s more “I want to stop talking about this for now” than not wanting to talk to one person in particular
- I won’t see anything from that person in the future, which isn’t what I want unless they are really awful, just want to be done with that specific comment thread despite having some degree of respect for the people in it
And I’m the opposite. When I block someone, it’s because I’m sick and tired of that one person in particular and never want anything to do with them ever again. And for my own protection, I don’t want them to be able to see me or interact with my comments ever again, regardless of whether I’ll see that interaction or not.
When I block someone, it’s because I’m sick and tired of that one person in particular and never want anything to do with them ever again
Same, the main thing I’m getting at is, most of the time it’s not like that
Yeah, my personal experience is the opposite where I find myself having to outright block people because I generally don’t have an issue until outright blocking them is needed.
It would be great to have a “mute post/thread/comment” option that just stops any reply notifications for that specific item of yours. That way you don’t have to select specific people to mute/block and it doesn’t affect anything outside of that one specific comment of yours.
Yup, though on the upside notifications seem to only work half the time here.
I’ve wasted SO MANY hours arguing with stupid people on reddit…
