this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
35 points (94.9% liked)
Actual Discussion
1108 readers
1 users here now
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.
Welcome to Actual Discussion!
DO:
- Be civil. This doesn't mean you shouldn't challenge people, just don't be a dick.
- Upvote interesting or well-articulated points, even if you may not agree.
- Be prepared to back up any claims you make with an unbiased source.
- Be willing to be wrong and append your initial post to show a changed view.
- Admit when you are incorrect or spoke poorly. Upvote when you see others correct themselves or change their mind.
- Feel free to be a "Devil's Advocate". You do not have to believe either side of an issue in order to generate solid points.
- Discuss hot-button issues.
- Add humour, and be creative! Dry writing isn't super fun to read or discuss.
DO NOT:
- Call people names or label people. We fight ideas, not people here.
- Ask for sources, and then not respond to the person providing them.
- Mindlessly downvote people you disagree with. We only downvote people that do not add to the discussion.
- Be a bot, spam, or engage in self-promotion.
- Duplicate posts from within the last month unless new information is surfaced on the topic.
- Strawman.
- Expect that personal experience or morals are a substitute for proof.
- Exaggerate. Not everyone slightly to the right of you is a Nazi, and not everyone left of you is a Tankie.
- Copy an entire article in your post body. It's just messy. Link to it, summarize, and add your thoughts.
For more casual conversation instead of competitive ranked conversation, try: !casualconversation@piefed.social
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think you touch upon a great area: There are many ways to express agreement and disagreement, but downvotes being used as a form of suppression are neither.
In the before times slashdot had a metamoderation system where users were randomly assigned a few votes they could apply, the rarity and distribution made for a reasonable approximation of a fair moderation. However, lemmy differs from slashdot in that there are many different unaligned communities on lemmy where slashdot (and hacker news, and lobsters) are basically a single community with very clear unified interests.
The keys for high quality discussion (not agreement) in a community would be (best guess):
I suppose what I'm describing is the framework for a debate society or even toastmasters.