8 ms·

> So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don't see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righ

• brabel 4y ago
  > Toxic and hateful people simply get banned I don't know if that's supposed to sound like a good thing, but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" is made to disappear and never be heard of again. If you think "only bad people are toxic", you probably haven't been to many debates where your viewpoint happens to be the minority viewpoint.
  • andrepd 4y ago
    What an odd thing to say. You can ban people from your instance of mastodon, just like you could ban, kick, suspend etc, people from your IRC server in olden times. What is wrong with that? How strange to make an act of moderation on your own personal instance into an act of censorship.
    • flerovium 4y ago
      He's not complaining about the mastodon technical protocol: he's complaining about the people who control the community and the rules.
      • andrepd 4y ago
        > the people who control the community and the rules Who are these people? The protocol is decentralised, if you don't like it, spin your own instance! 5-10$ a month and you get more than enough for a few thousand people.
  • achenatx 4y ago
    here is a post from the front page of mastadon. Seems pretty toxic to me. Im sure that person isnt getting banned, but the equivalent from the right would get banned. Just so we’re clear here, Florida wants to ban children from discussing their periods but also wants student athletes to report their periods, in case you were still unclear about how fucking dumb these people are. I run a politics forum and the one rule is no name calling/insulting people (famous or a forum member), groups, ideology etc. It is incredibly civil. It turns out 1) that is the only rule you need to keep civility 2) it makes for a really boring place as most people just want to name call and not actually discuss politics.
  • devjab 4y ago
    > to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" To me there are basically two sides to this, and I'll outline them with two examples. One is when people decide to have a debate on whether or not trans women should be allowed in women sports. In this case, banning people who have the "wrong" opinion is sort of dystopian. At least with the decentralized social network, you can't really ban them, just silence them on your particular server, so in a sense it's less dystopian than centralized social media. But I frankly agree with you on this, because it makes having discussions on certain subjects impossible, which isn't great. The other example is when someone posts pictures of Warhammer models they have painted, and someone starts commenting on their gender, race, religion or whatever that is completely unrelated to the original post. Or when someone is being plain hateful in any context. In those cases, the way I see it is that the hateful person is breaking the social contract in which we all agree to be respectful to each other. Once you break that contract, then it no longer applies to you. This is the way the real world functions, and it's how the internet used to function before the ability to moderate assholes was centralized and sort of removed.
  • krapp 4y ago
    >but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" is made to disappear and never be heard of again. You misunderstand. Being banned from a Mastodon instance doesn't mean you disappear never to be heard from again. No one is going to try to murder you. You're still allowed to participate in society and communicate. Also, the "correct worldview" in this context means not being a racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic asshole. If you find that too much of a straitjacket on your personal liberties or radically free-thinking beliefs, there are Mastodon instances that will happily accept you. Of course, not everyone, everywhere is compelled to accept you and your speech with open arms, nor should they be. Freedom of speech and freedom of association are equal and opposite.
    • realjhol 4y ago
      I had to leave an instance because the maintainer said pro-life views were forbidden. Didn't matter whether you expressed them or not - the owner had a policy against private opinions. I agree with your point about freedom of association, but let's not pretend this is just limited to racism. And if you support the concept of free association, what do you do when it collides with civil rights law?
      • nicoburns 4y ago
        The great thing about Mastadon is that you're not actually excluded by being banned from a particular instance, you can go and join an instance that is aligned with your worldview (and as I understand it, still interact with people from other instances).
        • konart 4y ago
          What do I do if instance A (this is where the person I follow) decides to ban instance B (my instance of choice)? What if this happens more than once? Should I reregister every month and refollow the same people again and again? What if I set up my own server and people will decide that some of my toots are not "left" or "progressive" enough?
  • graypegg 4y ago
    This is an odd minority viewpoint for HN actually. I find most people feel rather empowered by the decentralized nature of mastodon… or email for that matter. Your right to freedom of speech is between you and the government. People aren’t required to publish your work just because you complain. The difference here is you can just hook into the same decentralized system the publisher is using, and subvert them by finding another instance to use or even making your own! With no difference in reach or power. Why is that bad? The seems to be MUCH better for you.
    • Edd314159 4y ago
      > Your right to freedom of speech is between you and the government. People aren’t required to publish your work just because you complain. This is a strawman. Commenter said anything about the right to free speech, only about the willingness to be exposed to opposing viewpoints. We all know that Bob is not obligated to listen to Alice, and he is not required to host a venue for her opinions. But Bob's eagerness to run away to a place where there is no risk of seeing Alice's view, while not necessarily bad (if you want to live in a bubble, live in a bubble), it is _not_ a virtue.
      • notnaut 4y ago
        Ignoring people with opinions that are sophomoric, bigoted, or can’t be differentiated from trolling saves an immense amount of time and frustration. Filtering noise can surely be closer to something a person with a healthy attitude towards other peoples opinions would do as opposed to letting every single person get their 30 seconds on the megaphone, even after their third or fourth flat earth tirade.
      • antiterra 4y ago
        What exactly is not a virtue about Bob’s eagerness to be able to eat lunch with friends and associates without having random people poking in and saying cruel things about his existence?
      • SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        I’m really confused by this rhetoric, because the logical conclusion is that Bob should at minimum be exposed to things he doesn’t want to be exposed to regardless of what the thing is because of the potential Bob might be missing out on a good point. But it also means if Alice’s view is sending Bob death threats and threatening to murder his family, Bob should be exposed to that as equally as if Alice’s view was that pineapples are a superior topping on pizza?
  • Vrondi 4y ago
    Set up your own server and ban the people you want to ban. It's that simple.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    I don’t know why HN seems to have a culture of confusing minority opinions for toxicity and hate. If you are against gay marriage there’s nothing at all toxic or hateful about that. Hell, I know gay people who were against gay marriage when the public debate was at its peak. Where it’s toxic is if any time a gay person talks about wedding planning, posts a meme about the phrase “her wife” having good energy, or shares art of two guys at the altar you appear in the replies to get on your soapbox and start an argument about gay marriage. Nobody asked. Alternatively, just like HN, if your account is entirely flamebait about gay marriage nobody wants to see that and you’ll get the hammer. Where it’s hate is when you express the that you’re against gay marriage because you don’t want to see gay people to be out in public, you think affection between two men is disgusting and unnatural, you call their sexual orientation a lifestyle choice, call gay people pedos, or otherwise pick on, doxx, belittle, or dehumanize gay people. Like y’all, it isn’t that hard to expressly minority opinions without being toxic or hateful. I express minority opinions constantly and have never once even been worried about the banhammer.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      It did not use too, but it is hard for me to tell where/when the shift happened. All I know for sure is that anyone with mildly stronger views on 1st amendment are called speech absolutists. It is extra annoying, because 'hate speech' is mostly recently made up term to stifle free speech AND, more importantly, does not exist anywhere in US constitution. << Like y’all, it isn’t that hard to expressly minority opinions without being toxic or hateful. You can, but it becomes a game of using language that it is harder to pinpoint ( hence silliness like Xi banning 8 for infinity ). All the while majority opinion can be as hateful as is deemed necessary ( and no one complains because it is the majority ) creating yet another echo-chamber we so sorely need. FWIW, this trend is now being challenged. edit: I like calling spade a spade. You can dislike it all you want, but I am personally less and less willing to comply with other person's sensibilities[1]. [1]https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763/is-it-racist-to-call-a-spade-a-spade https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763...
      • Spivak 4y ago
  • ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    So what I see often happens that gets people banned based on their political views tends to be someone trying to start a debate where someone else was not in a debate. Trans person: *exists and makes a post* "Honest debater": I don't think you should... And they get banned. Not everything is or was an invitation to "debate".
    • kitsunesoba 4y ago
      Also known as (if I’m not mistaken) “reply guys”: those who attempt to hijack threads by replying to posts and steering the conversation towards something only tangentially related to the post/poster, almost always in an adversarial manner, rather than starting their own threads for the topics they’re wanting to discuss.
      • wlonkly 4y ago
        I think "reply guys" are men who tend to always reply to tweets from women, inoffensively but repeatedly,[1] and the thing you're describing is "sealioning"[2]. [1] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-reply-guys https://mashable.com/article/twitter-reply-guys [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-internet-trolling https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-int...
        • flerovium 4y ago
          Honestly, "sealioning" reminds me of the ocean, which reminds me of my favorite shampoo, Ocean Breeze™. You should try it sometime!
      • ocdtrekkie 4y ago
        Yeah I'm generally not too up of whatever the latest term is, but you'll see accounts that literally registered and immediately started making no posts except telling people their political views are wrong. Or their existence is wrong. Like, if you're only there to argue, nobody is going to want to hang out with you, sorry. Plenty of good debates happen, including people with differing political views, but you have to bring something besides hate to the table. Of course, then those people claim they were "censored" for "being conservative" or whatever, but more than likely they were just banned because their only point in registering was to attack other people.
  • xorcist 4y ago
    > distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" People said exactly the same thing about open relays and spam filters some twenty years ago. A very famous Internet personality kept an open relay around for many years until there was literally no one left to federate with. I worked at a place who thought themselves obligated to keep around copies of all incoming messages for some period of time. Who are you to decide between signal and noise, and so on, the discussion went. Turns out that's useless discourse. Because similar logic goes the other way around, who are you to decide what I keep? I am not obliged to read email from all senders, and above all, I do not have to explain myself and I don't have to keep them stored as to not infringe their right of expression. Every decentralized protocol with any real world traction allows every actor to filter traffic in a permissionless manner. You can call it righteousness or as amoral as you'd like, but until you can present an alternative system that's how it's going to work.
    • flerovium 4y ago
      The analogy is inappropriate: 1. Spam is filtered, not censored. I can still see spam in my "Spam" folder if I want to. Mastodon doesn't merely filter "bad" content; it prevents you from seeing it even if you want to. It would be the equivalent of email actively deleting spam, and "spam" includes an email that suggests vaccines have side effects. 2. It's easy to see that it's not for the benefit of users. They could easily mark things as toxic (perhaps by category, or by who marked it as toxic), and let users filter out what they want. It's not about helping users. It's about controlling users. 3. "Spam" does not include contrary political viewpoints. There's a difference between a viagra ad. I don't want my uncle sending me political rants, but I certainly don't want google deciding I can't read them.
      • mavhc 4y ago
        Spam is censored, the vast majority can't even be sent because of SPF etc You can pick a different server if you don't like the censorship on the one you're on, that's the whole point To the spammers it's all great content you should be getting. No one's deleting your messages on your own Mastodon server, they're just not copying it to their server, what's the problem?
  • enaaem 4y ago
    That was pretty much the world before mass social media. Most forums were human moderated and you can be banned for just being a jerk. Moderators are most of the time pretty good at interpreting nuance, tone and intention.
    • brabel 4y ago
      Who are these magical people who are fair and just, and how do you choose them? How come do they choose to do this completely free of charge? Do you pay for your Mastodon instance membership? If not, why is someone willing to go through the trouble of doing this for free for complete strangers? How the strangers choose the right moderators for them, even though they are not paying for any of this? I don't know, but something doesn't make any sense to me with Mastodon and similar decentralized services.
    • TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Except, before social media, forums were focused and independent, and the Internet itself was a nerdy hobby. Getting banned from a discussion board might have hurt in some cases, but wasn't really that big of a deal. Today, social media are all-encompassing, and Internet is now a critical part of normal life. Getting banned from one modern discussion board can easily get you banned from every other one too, and/or the fallout may impact "offline" aspects of your life. At best, it'll make a bunch if things inconvenient. At worst, it may destroy your relationships, your career, and push you into poverty. Or, in other words: getting banned from a group in the 1990s or early 2000s was like getting a formal reprimand in your record at school. Today, it's starting to look more like getting a criminal record in the police database.
• jrm4 4y ago
  I have absolutely seen toxic behavior, because it was levelled at me. Specifically, for the "sin" of defending people who choose to also remain at Twitter because we still have some people we care about over there (in my case, lots of Black folks who haven't made the switch.) And for that, I've been called, e.g. a Nazi.