hoodatninja @ hoodatninja @kbin.social

Former landed gentry

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2 yr. ago

THERE ARE DOZENS OF US!

Reddit succeeded despite itself. Ultimately they stumbled into a secret formula that other social media sites couldn’t figure out: somewhat decentralized, unpaid moderators by the thousands. The competitive advantage it gives them over other sites is truly hard to overstate.

If we don’t want it to be like Reddit than we need admins/mods to be more liberal with bans and comment removals. The amount of “free speech” drum banging I’m seeing and demands by disruptive people that instances never defederate is already out of hand. You cannot let these people dictate your policies. If someone is consistently disruptive, even if they don’t technically break the rules or are borderline, show them the door.

We also need to get away from the “performative snark” (credit to another user who used that term recently, I really like it) that Reddit, Twitter, etc. highly reward. Don’t know what the exact answer is for that, but it’s a huge problem and I already see it when people are trying to have real discussions.

Don’t get me wrong, so far the quality here is much higher than most other places I’ve seen. But most conversations go one of three ways: You talk with someone and have an interesting discussion, somebody says something incredibly snarky/quippy instead of engaging “in good faith” and the other person gets dog piled on, or it devolves into a flame war and insults start flying.

Just because it’s better here doesn’t mean those other two undesirable situations aren’t happening way too often. I urge mods to intervene when people just start getting snappy with each other. A simple “keep it friendly“ goes a long way to reminding people to take a step back and remember there’s somebody on the other side of the screen. I know I often need that myself. It’s also a really great way to suss out who is there to pick a fight, because invariably someone will snap back at the mod over that and deserve a ban lol

To make political parties illegal is an attack on free-speech and the right to peaceful assembly. You would have to directly violate the first amendment in order to ban political parties.

I hope you are not being literal with your concept of a “competency test.”

As much as I am against the two-party system I am not in favor of sacrificing our right to assembly, especially in the context of assembling over shared politics, on the altar of "hopefully that'll make elections go better."

Please do not talk down to me. Nothing I said indicates I think this is standard. I was giving the historical context for why it is that way in the US. So please don't come at me with this "well actually" nonsense please. It's needlessly hostile.

The flip side is that independent candidates are fairly common.

That's not the result of not having people vote in primaries. That's generally the result of a parliamentary system, which is more common than anything resembling the US's representative democracy system.

As for the rest of your comment, you're grinding an axe over something I did not say.

So here's a part of the history you (and many others) are actually missing that will help contextualize this. Make no mistake, I have issues with the primaries too. But this is interesting and may even reshape your opinion.

For over a century we couldn't vote at all on the candidates. They were completely selected by the parties. People actually protested that system saying they had no say in the candidates, and thus the first presidential primary happened in 1912 I believe (forgot the state). It rolled out over the 20th century because people felt it was unfair the party got to select without their input.