Recently, we merry mods have been noticing many-a-comments being in the report queue for perceived negativity (the aim of the community being to provide “a break from the incessant negativity and rage”). What actions should we do about these, if any? Do we need a newsome another-rule for this?
Here’s what I think: Some skepticism and scrutiny is always quite needed knowledge—especially against information that’s actually untrue/misleading—and any bars I can think of for removing negative comments would apply to reasonable skepticism as well. Thus, the mod team is asking y’all to drop some bars!
Edit
Assorted examples of reported comments
Actually, you’ve missed the mark. It’s not whining about an advancement, it’s legitimate criticism of the US health industry. He’s just saying what we all know to be true which is that regardless of technological improvements, lifesaving care will continue to be ruinously expensive for those that are able to access it and gatekept from many others.
If you have a problem with comments like these undermining celebration of scientific progress, then maybe you should think about the structural political issues that lead people to disillusionment and cynicism rather than labeling people as conspiracy theorists.
You know “big red“ voted for Trump. It’s a cute story, but I hope he gets what he voted for In the end
It’s too bad that curing patients is not a sustainable business model. Even if this did work we would only ever see it developed if you had to take it twice a month for the rest of your life in order to survive.
Edit: sorry, I just noticed this is in Uplifting News. So, let’s be optimistic. Maybe global capitalism will collapse and governments will start trying to take care of people.
Nobody said anything about ICE, we’re talking about the military known for bombing weddings in multiple middle eastern countries and then bombing ambulances when they respond.
If you have the money to commit atrocities in a dozen countries at once, you have money to spare.
That’s .world for you; complaining about Reddit while trying to recreate it exactly
It’s very sad to see hype like this. They only had 30 enrolled, this was just a safety study, and while the data looks promising, there is certainly not enough statistical power, which is why there is no approval yet.
Shame on the BBC. If you are going to quote invesigators, you should state that they have paid consultancy deals with UniQure. The same two people were equally excited about a Roche therapy years ago…
But UniCure stock went up 200% today, which is the point.
let me tell you by example of my country. we have a authoritarian leader, and big news media is very much in their pockets. if you go on news channel, it is either all positive stuff, or partisanal/communal shit.
Thing is that, the postive stuff does not feel positive, when you completely ignore reality. according to them, we should celebrate opening of a new highway, where majority of aour road network is fucked. we should ignore floods, or other disasters, and also ignore the corruption done in making highway, just to celebrate it.
Good does not have a meaning in a vacuum. it is a relative thing. if all we do is allow hopeful hippy yipee stuff, it eventually becomes cope.
Thank you for sharing your story. I agree insofar as the above sentence. I would hope that we could also be considerate if not even outright kind to others, especially as we realize that different people are in different mental health spaces as they take their own personal journeys around the sun each year. Schadenfreude in particular is something that people will outright leave social media entirely to avoid, so there becomes a DESPERATE NEED to have a “safe space” that is free of such. The rights of someone to vomit up their emotions onto everyone around them does not outweigh the rights of someone else to not have to listen. Which to be clear, I am not accusing you of thinking anything differently than that, only making sure that we are starting from the same common ground.
There are many, Many, MANY “news” communities all around the entire Fediverse. Can we not have just ONE community where e.g. schadenfreude is kept out? This is not a “paradox of intolerance” thing, since people in this community are not making that decision for others, only for themselves, as they choose to remain a member of this community vs. to block it.
Put another way: if you do not want an abortion, then do not get one? But why should you want to stop others from doing one? Similarly, if you do not want to participate in this “safe space” that blocks out negativity, then nobody is forcing you to - unlike the authoritarian regime that you unfortunately have to live underneath the auspices of
What the people of this community wanted is described well in the side-bar text imho:
I would argue that false news should be banned, so if you agree then… good. The above sentence though seems to me to talk about TRUE news stories that foster that hope.
This is what people have asked for. Why not let them/us have it? It is after all a choice, and once people are done taking a break from the “real(-istic) news”, they can rejoin society and listen in on actual conversations about more serious events taking place in the world. But what is wrong with “coping” with major depressive conditions occurring all around the world, and moreover, even if something were “wrong” (although as you say good is relative, so isn’t wrong also thus?), so what - why is that something that either you or I get to / have to judge? Again, why not let them/us have it? There are so many other places around the Fediverse to have deeper discussions - that is simply not what this community is about though? Make fun of this community elsewhere if you must!?! Other spaces are built specifically for that. For that matter, make fun of women too, and of trans people if you like - you may not win many friends by doing so, but you do you (I am being hyperbolic here on purpose btw, in case this exaggerated caricature of an argument helps get past anything that might otherwise get lost with too much subtlety), but importantly: not here? This is a safe space for people who want to get away from all of that for just one fucking minute, without having to turn off social media entirely.
Yes I hear your argument: “people who block out the world are making a poor personal choice” - but it is just that, a personal choice. You do not have to agree in order to respect it.
You could, of course, always make a new community that does things “better” (relatively speaking) than this one, if you feel that you would like to do so. Or make a proposal to do things differently here, e.g. as you are doing by stating your position. And I am stating my counter-argument to your position, hopefully in a (relatively) friendly manner without having created too much in the way of negativity:-).
it is already banned. we banned it alongside schadenfreude.
we are not allowing negative stuff. the argument is more of - we are making a safe space (or already have a safe space). should we allow people to debate/refute within it, or should we just keep ignoring those comments (that is what i have been doing as a mod) or delete them.
i atleast do not want the positivity too high for it to not feel real. for example, recent post on hiv drug, discussion of vaccine being 28000 in us, or possiblity to make it in 40$ elsewhere. it is not a positive bit. it is a informative bit. we are also realising that medicine in us is fucked, but there is hope of cheaper meds. we are still being real and positive. I deally this community should be such that we should get most news of world, so we do not have to “go back to reality”.
that is for us (as in the community members) to decide in this post. there should be a healthy amount of reality dose. we will not yell “people are dying in so and so place” under everynews, but we should still say - hey this bit of positive news, it has so and so additional notes, where x and y problems are real. without being all dystopian.
you have kept your points perfectly. these are the kinds of things we still want to keep. we could debate, without ever being personal. we both kept our points (imo you did better than me), and we may disagree but we still did not make this community “not uplifting”.
My vision (not that it matters much) for this comm is that it is news which is worth sharing with youngling. not cope, but not dystopic. we do not want our kids to only know horrors of the wsorld, but we do not want them to be delusional. We give them honest news, more the good ones, but still tell them about the problems. So they still strive to make the world better.
First, thank you so much for your kind comments. Sometimes I get discouraged and do not want to continue a conversation b/c it simply has ceased to be fun. You are engaging here as you press for truth and I appreciate that.
Second, I may have missed something - no not in your words but in the OP, where I only just now saw the edit that included the actual examples, before which I was arguing in the dark (also I was not certain if we were talking about the comments or the reports about those, although I did presume the former). So now I am confused more than ever: almost every single one of those seems negative to me! “I hope he gets what he voted for In the end” is the very definition of schadenfreude, is it not?! Phrases such as “ruinously expensive”, “So, let’s be optimistic. Maybe global capitalism will collapse…”, and so on. The last one seems legit though: it is pointing out a problem with the actual study. Maybe I am not smart enough to see though that all of these are of the same type? Perhaps, because the “you will know it when you see it” argument is indeed a slippery concept. But if the last example truly is different as it seems to me, then perhaps the response to it might be to remove the entire post that it refers to rather than remove simply that comment, for being “negative”?
Now with my head spinning I need to get my bearings: are you trying to say that continuing the community forward as it has been is too tiring on the moderation team, and so you want to change it? And if so, you don’t simply want it to become yet another “news” community, where pratically anything goes (hurtling insults, vomiting toxicity, etc.), as all of the other ones seem to be? (fortunately I am unfairly exaggerating here - actually e.g. !politics@beehaw.org seems quite sane - but definitely the trend across the Threadiverse seems more towards rather than away from toxicity) Instead, you want to keep it “mostly” as it was, but widen the scope just a tiny bit, e.g. to allow the last comment but none of the ones before it? If so, then I would be okay with that. Again, you could rather remove the entire post that it refuted if it was no longer “positive”, but so long as the comment itself isn’t too negative - e.g. is just straight-up schadenfreude “I hope you get what you voted for (implication: AND DIE, a HORRIBLE, AGONIZING TORTOROUS death)” vibes (sorry for expanding out that implication, but isn’t that WHY people are trying to avoid the schadenfreude, because the simple words “get” and “voted” and “for” are not upsetting, but rather the concepts that they point to, which touches on DEEP psychological issues that some people may not be in a position to handle yet, at that moment? I have been there multiple times this year as I watch the USA government situation before my very eyes.)
BTW I hold the same view as you about the children: they not only suspect, they KNOW when they are being lied to. They need extra care and attention to be told how to process that information, rather than assume that they are incapable and so avoid the issue entirely. People die, it’s a reality. Then again, I doubt that there are any truly actual children on the Threadiverse - at best we might have some teenagers who would already have had that bubble popped, but nowhere do we come close to needing to avoid talking about things for the reasons of “bUt ThInK oF tHe ChIlDrEn!?”. I rather see this community as those adults needing a break from the toxicity that is present in so many other places around the Threadiverse, particularly surrounding any “news” topics.
That last example comment… it is written respectfully, it expresses empathy, it cites facts and logical reasoning, it continues beyond that to connect the chain all the way towards why the article might be fraudulent (or if not factually so, then at least fraudulently over-hyping the reality of its claims when in reality nothing is yet known, but for $$$ reasons someone would rather claim to know more than is yet possible without doing the actual research). I guess I could see where that one is called “negative”, but it is not an example of true “negativity” - do you see what I mean in drawing that distinction? That one does not offend me in the slightest.
Whereas “I hope he dies!” (more politely phrased as “I hope he gets what he voted for”, but the same concept, yet its true meaning made abundantly more clear by following that up with “in the end” - why the END do you think? unless they mean the FINAL end, for that person at least? and even emphasizing it with the capital “In the” like an ominous phrasing that draws your attention to specifically that portion of the sentence) offends me much more. I blocked !politics@lemmy.world because it was just constantly like that, and I am thinking about blocking others like !nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz for the same reason (albeit to a far lesser degree ofc, still, how much shit is okay to appear in your water that you want to drink?).
Then again, while that is my vision for this place, I am not the one having to put in the work to read all that and decide whether removal is warranted. I have really strained here to convey my vision, definitely using WAAAAY too many words, and in my zeal all these little stories and tangents that I hoped would help but probably by adding length may even have hurt a little, as compared to if I had thought about it more and written it more concisely? But above all of that, the people who have to do the clean-up I really do feel like should get the highest say in the matter. I am so glad to have a community where especially the ubiquitous schadenfreude is kept at bay, at least as best as possible. I would REALLY hate to see more schadenfreude come into this community. But especially comments like that last example? Yeah I am totally okay with that one. Disagreements voiced respectfully, with empathy, may be negative but not contributing to negativity in my book. At which point we might have ended up agreeing with one another - e.g. similarly to how you mentioned in your country, forced “positivity” is not always a “positive” thing, right? Well the latter part is definitely true, though whether we fully agree or not I am not entirely certain - yet hopefully by talking it back and forth, with respect and empathy, we gained some better understanding of each others’ position? And THAT is an uplifting thing!:-D
the last example was under “Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time”. the importance of the news comes from the fact that treatment was even effective on 30 patients. that said the comment’s also a reasonable amount of skepticism, so i too have much higher levels of opposition against removing it.
And it makes sense that it was not a FULL rebuttal, only adding context (that the reporters were over-hyping it from the actual science done, which tbh is far more common than not these days). Truth is stranger - and more complex - than Fiction, after all. I see no schadenfreude in it at all, yes it is “negative” but in a way that is helpful, it is respectful, and polite (as much as can be expected). I suppose I can see from some people’s perspective though that it does NOT serve as a break from the incessant negativity and rage, because it changes the hopeful outlook to rage-inducing for the media hype, although then as people said it goes back to hope again. Yes, a tricky business indeed to figure that one out…
I like how you left it to the community to decide via their votes exactly how relevant it is. If it had simply said something like “get bent BBC and UniQure”, then yes remove it unequivocally, but since it is on the line… leave it to the entire community rather than have to take on that burden all by yourselves?
almost all of them are negative without reasons, they should be deleted imo.
(edit after writing) - imo these 2 should stay. while negative, they add something to chatter. they are not just yelling and atleast saying some sensical sentences ( i am not commenting on their validity here)
(edit over)
but there are more sensible negative comments (search miracle drug in this very page). there negative comment was necessary.
if we are law/tos abiding citizens there should be none (something something, uk child safety law - much of fediverse “decided” to make our platform adult only).
Also I did not mean that this should be kid friendly news. What i meant was that in spirit, we should only post something here which i feel is okay to show to some “child” (hypothetical). This idea was brought up around schadenfreude ban where thought is simple - someone getting harmed is bad. but if in front of a kid you get happy if a bad person gets hurt, they are confused - we taught them that getting harmed is bad. this is is where child friendly idea originated.
nah, i do not mind reading words. when online, i usually do not read long stuff, partly due to time constraints, othertimes i have the feeling of ai slop. if i know someone who has written stuff by spending time, least i can do is read (and/or respond), even if we disagree. I like to have my online conversation similar to how i would have them irl.
when i was not the mod, i had more respect for mods. now i have a tad bit less. a good mod’s responsibility is to make good rules, and show some examples. if done correctly, people respect them, and do most of moderation (by voting/reporting). Most of the time my job is to check if there are any reports today, what was posted, and mildly skim through post and comments (which i would have done regardless of being mod or not, as i only try to mod stuff i am interested in). I am not saying all moderation is easy, but my experience with this community (especially after the bad news ban) has been really easy.
<3
This one seems totally fine to me.
This one is more of a judgement call - I did not look up its context, yes it does add something though also is fairly “negative”. Granted, I am applying the slippery slope argument here where if it is not stopped then others will take a step forward, and then another step forward, and then still yet another step forward… and so on. Not a ban, but a removal and message to keep it uplifting - or better yet, not a removal either but just a message saying this far but no farther?
The miracle drug one seems fine yes - you did not include a link to that one so rather I mean that from your description it seems fine. More than fine actually as it REALLY added quite a VERY helpful point to the discussion! Yes people come here to avoid schadenfreude, but I see no schadenfreude in what you said about that comment whatsoever. “Hope” does not mean burying your head in the ground like an ostritch, but rather something good to look forward to. That should be tempered by facts, imho and it seems like in yours as well although I also think that there is room for reasonable people to disagree here, so that it is not blind faith in an unknowable “bright shiny happy future” but rather a realistic pathway forward to at least SOMETHING beyond our current drudgery - and while a drug that has severe side-effects should be carefully considered, remaining in addictive behaviors can likewise be life-threatening. It reminds me of the Ivermectin thing as a cure for covid: imagine someone posted THAT in this community, and someone else said “uh… yeah but uh…”, I would hope that you would not remove the latter comment that tempered that ah… “enthusiasm” for that uh… “hopeful cure” (for that life-threatening disease).
I am odd when it comes to children: I do not think that they should be “protected” from knowledge, and would rather have such matters explained to them. And if it is wrong to be happy about someone getting harmed in front of a child, then it is sitll wrong to be happy about someone getting harmed when NOT in front of a child, hence the child part is irrelevant to me. But I do see where you were going with that description and applaud the overall thought: if you feel guilty doing it (under whatever circumstances), then perhaps examine whether the thing being done is truly worthy of doing? If you feel guilty, it is because you yourself know that it violates something inside of you, so don’t encourage that kind of cognitive dissonance and rather own up to it, one way or another (unfortunately so many people do that nowadays, but in the other direction where they will unabashedly do such things in front of their children and not bat an eye).
I have been a mod before. I suppose I still am now for one dying community. It is a hard job, I know. Most mods on Reddit did not last more than a year or two b/c of the toxicity that they continually kept being exposed to - at least, not those mods who actually CARED about their communities. You seem to genuinely care and that’s awesome. Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by it all:-).
BTW I think it’s fricking awesome that PieFed describes that notice “please read the rule posts or sidebar description.” in-between the post and the comments below it, which I think will REALLY help people realize which community they are in. At least, PieFed users, Lemmy users will ofc continue to be left in the dark, increasingly more so as that software falls behind the ever-growing set of features that PieFed continues to add practically weekly now.
i added that. not the feature to piefed, but the warning.