this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Actual Discussion
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Are you tired of going into controversial threads and having people not discuss things, circlejerking, or using emotional responses in place of logic? Us too.
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Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!
We’re back! Instead of putting a neutral topic in the introduction, I'm placing a bit of opinion on an issue to see if it helps spur discussion. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you’d like to help out.
This week, I'd like to discuss something that's been a bit of an issue for me personally.
Lemmy (and Reddit before it) appears to have a problem with overly-aggressive bannings for perceived slights. In the topic linked above there were people permanently banning users from multiple communities (any they moderate - dozens in some cases) for single downvotes, 4 downvotes across a ten-month period, and bannings because a moderator thought they maybe sorta kinda read that a user may have had a negative thought about their pet issue.
I've personally been banned from Communities (and sent some pretty vile PMs) for posting in our weekly threads here playing devil's advocate where I state hard questions that I do not necessarily feel are correct. They think they've discovered some secret agenda by finding posts I've made here and use them as "receipts" in order to dismiss anything they think they're reading that may be contrary to their opinion. Any context provided for the post falls on deaf ears.
I'm someone who operates on the idea of "If you can not defend an opinion from scrutiny, you should probably not hold that opinion."
To quote myself:
It’s pretty tragic that people can't handle opposing opinions. I think the activist nature of Lemmy is kind of a self-destructive spiral and people need to learn how to live with each other again. But I guess that’s the issue with modern social media as a whole… Nobody has any idea how to convince anyone else, only to yell at them louder.
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- Are niche Communities correct for banning anyone who downvotes?
- Do downvotes represent a "disagree" button for you (this Community notwithstanding)?
- Most importantly, what would it take to change this?
- Does it help build the Community? What about the platform as a whole?
- Is there a way to build a "safe space" without building an echo chamber online? Is that even a valuable thing to build?
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All good, and this was exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for and appreciate the answer. I didn't really see anything that disagreed with what I asked though.
As I mentioned, some of those questions were unanswered by the original responder and some were just assumptive next steps based on what I was reading. They weren't leading, they were clarifying and harder to answer and asked from another perspective. I try to ask (at least somewhat) challenging questions in order to get a more nuanced and informed take on topics and hope that asking them helps those that can explain as well. I'm on the side of bannings being generally bad for discourse and Communities as a whole. Permanent multi-Comminuty bans for small slights is even worse and makes Lemmy look thin-skinned and childish.
And to borrow the coffee analogy again, Reddit would be like Dunkin' Doughnuts (in which nobody gives a fuck about you as long as you get your swill there and make them money) and Lemmy would be more like an ethically-sourced small-batch experimental coffee shop where some batches are great and some are dogshit (except some of the baristas are kind of dicks because the band on your tee shirt said something they didn't like once). I don't think either is perfect, but I like it here better.
I like it better here too.