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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I think that communities don't have to be for debate. Trying to force that seems fairly hostile to me.
Figuring out which slights are intentional or not is exhausting, unrewarding work and it's absolutely easier to assume all of them are hostile. I'm ok with that. There is little value to a user you have to scrutinize and maybe, just maybe, they're only ignorant and in need of education that you're going to have to provide and maybe, just maybe, they'll accept the lesson. Compared to a user that is clearly on board with a given community and how it's run, it becomes a pretty easy choice.
I've been banned from a bunch of keto communities for downvotes. I'm definitely not there intended audience and was only seeing things via my everything view. They banned me, I blocked those communities. That's fine. The only thing that even slightly bothers me is that it might skew their place on such an everything view and seems vote manipulation adjacent.
Oh, certainly not all Communities should be for debate, but some are explicitly designed to handle it. Plugging your ears and shutting out everyone who doesn't toe the line can also be incredibly bad. Look at outwardly racist communities for instance. The way to change hearts and minds is inclusion, not exclusion.
I would also hesitate to say that disagreement is hostile. It CAN be, but it depends on how it's handled on both ends of the discussion. Some people you can discuss with and get nuanced, some people flip out because you don't value the same things in the same stack order.
Many of these discussions don't rely on (or require) education, they require a reshuffling of priorities. People tend to ignore that other people value things on a different order and scale than they do and the attempt at education can come across as talking down to them. Doubly so for moral issues.
I don't think you understood what I meant by education. No amount of priority shuffling (whatever that means) is going to teach a person why what they've done is a transgression. You didn't really answer that in any meaningful way.
I find it interesting that you think some places need debate while acknowledging people react badly to it, especially if done poorly.
If a solution just requires everybody to change, it's not a solution.
To explain, the priority-shuffling means that I value things in a different order. For example, a strict vegan may value not eating meat more than survival in a starvation situation. I value the survival more and would eat the meat - it's a different stack order.
I value my family more than your family. You most likely hold the opposite stack order. That's all I meant. This is where a lot of confrontations come in; people don't understand or care about the order of other people's stack and don't understand that someone values X over Y. Hell, people don't often understand their own stack.
That's the issue and speaks to what I was getting at. I value an open and good-faith exchange of ideas, even if those ideas are not the norm. I'm all for people being gay even in the middle of a Southern Baptist church, for instance. It being a transgression doesn't matter. If a taboo flies in the face of a logical and scientific position, then the taboo should probably go away, which may take tact, time, and effort.
People react poorly to anything position they hold that is morals-based, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Most worthwhile change is resisted, at least somewhat. You know that saying "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into"? It's most often because the position they got into was based on a moral stance, not logic and they've reinforced themselves over time (often with echo chambers that misrepresent opposing views).
If a solution requires just enough people to change, it's may not be an easy solution, but may be a worthwhile one.
Priorities have very little to do with ignorance. Let's try a different example that has a little more nuance than the church one and happens too often in the real world: touching somebody's wheelchair without the their consent to "help" them. The person transgressing views themselves as considering the priorities of the person in the wheelchair. This is a problem of ignorance, not priorities. The person in the wheelchair should not have to deal with this let alone try to convince, educate, or care about how the other person feels or what they intended. That is the onus you expect of people that don't share your opinions, to coddle/educate/etc you because you view your intentions as Right or Good or whatever. They don't want the interaction and you think you have the right to force them into it. It's the epitome of egotism. Anybody that disagrees gets labeled as as being in an echo chamber.
Your response to the comment about people is nitpicking. Changing individuals doesn't provide a good ROI. Expecting them to do so on their own is wishful thinking. It isn't a difficult solution; it is an impossible one.
Overall, you're contrary and like arguing more than looking for better ideas. I think I get why you're having difficulties with mods. I'm done, too. You have no intent to listen or learn. If that's incorrect, prove it to the next person, not me.
Huh. And here I thought we were having a nice conversation.
I'd ask that you please consider that you may not have been as clear with your intended message as you may have thought, and not that the person speaking to you is just a bad-faith idiot in the future.