/u/outwrangle before everything went to shit in 2020, /u/emma_lazarus for a while after that, now I’m all queermunist!
But people are polite to your face. On the internet there’s no face, so that goes away.
I think part of that comes from empathy, though obviously part also comes from fear of confrontation and habit. It all adds up to offline interactions being far less hostile than on the Internet because they’re not face-to-face.
This is also known as Internet Fuckwad Theory.
Chatrooms might be different. In a chatroom you get to know different users, even if you never know them as anything other than BigBallz420
On message boards or comments sections, though, there’s too many people to keep track of. You might never hear from me again. That makes it a lot harder, I think.
But yeah, mileage may vary.
Also this isn’t really a super fleshed out theory based on actual evidence. Just vibes.
I think you can overcome the empathy gap caused by the anonymous text format if you make the effort to empathize with people on the internet, but it requires you to want to make the effort in the first place.
Empathy offline or over video or on the phone is much more instinctual - in fact, it requires effort to resist empathy.
Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have?
I have a pet theory about this!
Humans can’t easily empathize with strings of text the way they do with voices and faces. When you read my posts you read it in your voice; I might as well be a figment of your imagination. As far as your subconscious is concerned, I am not actually a person. I’m an imaginary friend at best and an imaginary enemy at worst.
When someone beats up on me it’s because they’re imagining me as an enemy NPC, not a person with thoughts and feelings.
This is why arguing on the internet is basically pointless. We’re all just random encounters in the posting RPG.
Okay but this demonstrates why defaulting to federation is a bad idea, doesn’t it?
Wait, are new instances federated by default?
I thought admins had to choose who they were federated with.
What are you talking about?
This is clearly a Digg.
There’s a reason they’re trying to destroy and privatize USPS. It’s highly unionized and the workers won’t let them use USPS against us.
Also, while we’re at it, USPS should also provide municipal internet.
No profit motive and no private interests.
I’m sure there could still be private carriers, just like there’s still private delivery services like UPS and FedEx, but I don’t see why the average person should be relying on a private company for essential infrastructure.
I’m not sure why the USPS shouldn’t be the sole provider of email in the US.
Okay, based on that article Zipf’s law seems to mostly apply to languages. Cities, for example, don’t follow it.
Lemmy is not a forum.
Forums are structured around activity bumping, not recency and voting. A years old thread can end up back on the front page if someone posts in it. It’s just a different medium.
And it’s a medium that we need to preserve.
I write questions on bathroom stalls and then check back in on them every few days.
To be honest the quality of posts, comments, and moderation policies had gone way down hill since at least 2020.
Wasn’t that when they banned /r/chapotraphouse? 🤔
Removed by mod
I’ll sometimes agree with stuff Trump does too, like appointing Tulsi Gabbard, but I’m not going to say this means Republicans have become the party of anti war lol
It’s kind of stupid to say that Republicans aren’t the party of big business anymore. Both parties are parties of big business.
I donate to my instance.
Do you?
Oh no, I think defederation is only necessary when an instance becomes a problem. Until piefed.social becomes a haven for trolls to manipulate vote counts (which might never happen) then it’s fine.
But if a dozen anonymized piefed.social votes start downvoting everything I say because they’re monitoring my account then their admins would need to do something about it. If they didn’t, I’d want defederation.
They’re nasty pieces of shit when they don’t have to look at the person they’re hurting or putting in danger, but that only supports my theory. There’s an empathy disconnect that’s created when there isn’t a human face or voice immediately in front of them. Once they aren’t in danger of an in-person interaction all the venom comes out. Online, that’s basically all of our interactions.
I should point out the phenomenon where a minority in a community will magically become “one of the good ones” so that the bigots can continue hating minorities while empathizing with their neighbor. This is also becoming less common as we grow more isolated from each other and everyone moves online, destroying the potential for that face-to-face interaction.