You are the product of 4 billion years of ancestors who fucked.
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C-C-C-Combo Breaker!
I think I saw a 2...
Enforced toxic positivity is unhealthy, yes.
It's not the cause, it's a symptom of a larger problem.
What would I need an "out" for?
A good forum design will only get you so far, the rest is up to the moderators. If you let bad actors in, it doesn’t matter how you designed your forum, they will poison the well and drive other people out.
Yes, well, the problem with hexbear was that it started with bad actors. As they made their true colors apparent to the lemmy community at large, they were increasingly defederated.
The best communities I’ve been in are in independent old-style forums. One of them is Tildes. Most of these don’t feature downvotes (or upvotes for that matter) and are honestly the better places to have discussions IMO.
Oh yes, my past experience is in old web forums as well. Those communities were more isolated though, they essentially existed inside their own bubbles. Unregistered users could read them, but not participate in any functional way, and typically the people that found them were looking for a community like that on purpose.
I've also experienced such communities becoming toxic due to the actions of individual moderators or admins, post voting not required.
Ultimately I think I agree this far - if you're going to disable voting you should do all of it. Removing only the downvoting is the YouTube path, the authoritarian path, the toxic positivity path.
I wouldn’t imply that the unhealthyness of hexbear is due to the disabled downvoting though, and I’m sure you aren’t either, but just to be clear.
No, I'm implying the reverse: disabling downvoting is a symptom of the unhealthy mentality of the people running that server. Disabling downvoting appeals to authoritarians - that is, the type of people who are interested in silencing dissent (QED).
The only Lemmy community I'm aware of that has actually removed downvotes is hexbear - because they were tired of having their pro-Maoist rhetoric downvoted to oblivion by sane people. Hexbear is not a healthy place.
Don't worry, this will still happen, they'll just use stolen IDs from previous fishing victims, or from the database of 70,000 that Discord already had breached.
It's real hard to find the interferer when there's interferers everywhere
It's actually pretty easy to locate a radio source on a particular frequency, especially if it's a frequency where most transmitters are known/registered (e.g. police radios).
also triangulation is hard, particularly for a bunch of meat heads who have been shown to struggle with high school education.
You do realize that not all police are beat cops, right? They have technical specialists. If there's an issue outside the qualifications of a regular officer, they just refer it to the specialists who know exactly what to do.
Police have been driving around with suitcase-sized Stingray devices since at least 2006. They absolutely have equipment that can triangulate a radio source - they don't even really need to understand how it works, just turn it on.
Enforced toxic positivity does not produce better conversations or better communities. It basically just turns a discussion forum into Disneyland, where everyone is happy all the time, because there's no other option. It's the kind of yes-man thinking you get in corporate meetings that produce really bad ideas because "don't be negative! there are no bad ideas here!"
China is doing this sort of thing, and worse, they're just less obvious about it.
For instance, China operates unauthorized police stations inside other countries, which they use to enforce party loyalty and target dissidents.
You should also read the article about Chinese government interference in Canada:
The Canadian government has been tracking Chinese government efforts to influence Canada since at least 1986.
In 2016, newspaper sources reported that Justin Trudeau had been attending cash-for-access events at the homes of wealthy Chinese Canadians in Toronto and Vancouver, generating a political scandal. Attendees at these events, including those with connections to the CCP, would pay up to $1,525 per ticket to meet Trudeau.
The People's Republic of China made attempts to interfere in the 2019 Canadian federal election and 2021 Canadian federal election and threatened Canadian politicians, according to Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Parliament of Canada's Foreign Interference Commission.
PRC manipulation activities in Canada are well documented, but it would be extremely naive to think they aren't pulling the same shit in other countries.
This is a bad idea. Transmitting on a government frequency with enough power to interfere with other radio traffic will get you a police visit. You're basically turning on a big lightbulb that says "come find me" for anyone who would bother to triangulate the source of the interference.
I vote we put them all on the island and leave them there by themselves, no one else in or out.