24
votes
How do you report an entire topic?
See title. I think there's an entire topic on Tildes that needs to be reported, not just individual posts therein.
See title. I think there's an entire topic on Tildes that needs to be reported, not just individual posts therein.
As someone who is firmly on the left, I would highly recommend finding ways to keep a discussion and conversation open and respecful as opposed to trying to shut the entire conversation down.
I'm not sure what your intent is with this, but I am just putting this out there.
When a discussion doesn't start from a position of being respectful (imo), then it doesn't need to be had.
If I were on a sports team and made a mistake, I'd be open to talking about it if someone asked "what do you think went wrong out there?" But if they ask me "how badly do you think you fucked up?" I'm not going to have that conversation.
Ultimately, I'm one dude, and Deimos can do what they feel is right.
I get it, but unfortunately I've found not everyone has the emotional intelligence or self awareness to understand the difference and sometimes you have to read intent and see if there's space to correct them and move forward with the discussion or if it's a lost cause and they're just acting in bad faith.
If they're acting in bad faith, I 100% agree with you delete it.
I spend a lot of time deliberately exposing myself to right-wing discussion spaces and echo chambers to keep an eye on right-wing narratives, and occasionally drop in to them when I see an opportunity to create a bit of dissonance with their narratives. And I'm not defending them but the fact is people get stuck in that informational pipeline and that's literally their only exposure to the left or leftwing ideology is through those kind of disrespectful representations.
And also unfortunately, being silenced is their #1 rallying call to each other, and it's one of the gateways they use to indoctrinate people further, often because these people don't have the tools or context to even understand why what they said was disrespectful, the only thing they see is themselves being silenced.
I've seen it happen many times, when someone says something right-leaning and it gets deleted, there are often more extreme right wingers ready to swing in on that person and point to the left as proof that they're trying to censor them and is out to get anyone who doesn't agree with leftwing ideas, and they end up bringing those people deeper into those spaces promising to not censor them.
Again, not saying I think any of that is actually true or I'm agreeing with them, but it's what happens a lot in these conservative informational pipelines.
With that being said, I'm not saying allow them to be disrespectful, I'm saying find the difference between an earnest attempt at conversation even if it comes from a place of ignorance, and actual bad-faith and disrespectful discussions where they continue to be deliberately disrespectful.
However I'm sure Deimos will axe the thread because of the potential of political argument, which is his right too.
"When has progressivism been implemented badly" is not an inherently disrespectful question, any more than any other socio-political idea can be implemented well or not. It certainly had the potential to turn very toxic, but at the time I saw it, the comments were all participating in good faith.
When the thread was initiated, it wasn't just "when has progressivism gone wrong", it was "when has progressivism and wokeism gone wrong".
I've only ever heard of "wokeism" used in a pejorative manner. So I interpreted the thread's intention in that manner.
I don't think I was wrong then, and it's debatable if I'm wrong now. Regardless, the point is moot as the thread exists.
In the case of the post you're referring to, I like to remember wikipedia's guidelines: Assume good faith.
ie: Always assume ignorant curiosity until malice is proven.
I'll take it into consideration.
EDIT: Amusingly, that page suggests one course of action towards a potentially contentious edit or article is to remove it immediately.
I think of it as a good opportunity to learn what other people are thinking, and if you think differently it's an opportunity to explain your perspective.
If you can't teach someone your perspective, learn persuasiveness. If they aren't in a position to be persuaded, fine, maybe they'll come around in the future.
If they're being disruptive or the replies are getting heated, with personal attacks etc, report the thread. Your replies in a heated conversation will also be deleted.
I feel like this thread will end up suffering that fate. Everyone these days is too invested in divisiveness at this point.
During the founding of Tildes we've often voted that voices on the other side of the aisle as it were, were welcome, so long as they're civilized and respectful. Unfortunately even civilized discussions devolve into shit slinging that involves deimos, and we don't want to have to get him involved since it's a big hassle.
I've been involved in threads where my own replies have been deleted, along with others, when things got too heated. Coincidentally, it was most recently in a thread very much like the one in question.
I understand I'm a common denominator, so we can just leave that observation there.
I think maybe it's time for me to leave.
If you can be a rational voice towards progressive causes, in my opinion it'd be a loss to the site if you left. Otherwise there's an ignore button you can use for topics you don't like.
As a Canadian, I've seen too many people steered towards the alt-right by the whole "freedom convoy" thing just because they didn't want to wear a mask and they felt as if the big liberal government was the one who were making them do that.
With a few conversations and a few links to official government sites saying these are just guidelines, given by non-partisan health organizations based on objective science, rather than a big government conspiracy I've converted a few of them back to rationality.
I guess what I'm saying is, if it's in your capability, implement Hanlon's razor and try to talk to people in good faith. Otherwise ignore them and go about your day.
There's no better way of burying a thread on tildes than not replying to it.
To tell you the truth, I had that knee-jerk thought the first time one of my comments was deleted, and when one of my posts did not receive the positivity I thought it would.
But I stayed. I took the time to perform some self-reflection and found that I needed to make a change within myself. Looking back, I believe I chose right.
Tildes has been one of the few places on the internet where good dicourse can be had with people of varying interests and histories, and I personally would be sad to see you go.
OK, and I agree the title's loaded despite being unintentionally so. But the remedy for a bad title is to petition Deimos to change it to something neutral, not for it to be nuked entirely. You're just chopping down healthy trees for a firebreak when no fire has actually begun, there.
there wasn't any real intention behind it (like "triggering or owning the libs") as I lay out here.
You're always welcome to disengage from a discussion whether in person or online. It's pretty haughty of you to want to shut everyone else up from discussing something because it doesn't align with your opinions.
I remember back in the day, on older web forums, that it was in fact incredibly common for a topic to get locked when the discussion had gotten too heated or started from a position of bad faith.
Having witnessed the past decade and a half of "social media" taking away mind-share from traditional moderated communities, frankly, I think the old ways were better. And this site at least has the appearance of fostering a community in the style of the older web forums, as opposed to taking all comers and making moderation gamified or a free-for-all.
I've seen a few posts locked here over the years, I think. I've also seen mods delete comments or single threads that were completely in bad faith.
And I think it's pretty haughty of you to think that my intention was to shut down a conversation because it "doesn't align with my opinions." I saw, and continue to see, harm present and potential throughout the topic in question. I wanted the ability to flag that conversation to Deimos for consideration towards removal. I (and you!) can do the same towards any post, any number of posts, throughout the site here.
What I didn't want to do, was flag all 100+ posts for potential removal. Which is why I reached out here, asking how you can flag a topic, rather than flag every post within it individually. I got the direction I wanted/needed.
Your opinion was that people discussing a topic in certain ways == harm and want to report the entire thread to the site creator to nuke it. That's the definition of shutting down a conversation.
Then it's a good thing I don't have the ability to shut down a conversation. It's not my call. Never has been, never will be.
All I can do, is point out a thread, a topic, a post, whatever - point it out when it has the potential to cause harm, and say my piece. Which is what I did.
Other threads have been removed for similar circumstances throughout my time here on Tildes, and I'm still failing to see how me pointing out a potential problem point to the power(s)-that-be is me "shutting down a conversation".
I do not have that ability.
And what exactly is wrong with a moderator stepping in and shutting down a conversation?
Censorship is what people reach for when persuasion fails.
And?
I don't quite understand. Tildes is pretty expressly not styled in the fashion of a public square, but as a closed-knit invite-only community. Communities have moderators, and moderators have discretion which can be used to "censor" a conversation.
And to be clear, I've been on the receiving end of this sort of thing. Not here, but I have been asked in other spaces by their moderators to drop a subject. I either agree to do so, or I simply decide that the social space isn't for me and leave. There's no real dilemma about it.
The question isn’t can they, it's whether that improves the community or just makes it quieter. If the norm becomes "you can leave or shut up, take your pick", you don’t get a community, you get alignment.
That's precisely what I mean by discretion. It's up to the moderator(s) as to what kind of community they want to build, and it's up to the users as to if they're cool with the community's moderation or not.
You yourself have conflated “report to the site creator” into “nuke the conversation” but those are actually two separate actions.
Only the site creator can nuke a conversation, at their own discretion. It’s up to Deimos to make that call.
All Drewbahr is asking for is to raise the concern to get it looked at.
By arguing against the idea of a report button for threads, you seem to be under the impression that allowing someone to hit a report button on a whole thread is itself a threat to conversation (it’s not, I hope I’ve illustrated that they’re two separate things), or otherwise that nuke-worthy threads should continue to fly under the radar by not having a way to flag with the site owner.
Or perhaps you believe that the site owner is so swayed by the mere existence of reports that they are effectively a proxy for an end-user nuke button, but I don’t share this view at all.
Agreed. The thread is more or less ridiculous, but its existence shouldn't be offensive. Get in there and muck it up in the field of ideas, folks.
From the thread's performance, it's obvious that Tildoes aren't above a little romp every so often.
Was it a thread about US politics?
Na, it was about which progressive movements or ideas turned out to be harmful, not useful or false. It was sort of carelessly constructed, but I don't think that people should shame it on its premise.
Progressive doesn't always equal good, and I figure that despite it's mediocre framing, it's a good chance for moderates, lefties and righties among us to take part in some ritualistic sacred cow bashing ;)
The reporting mechanism just pings @deimos. He is an actual human, and nothing happens automatically. I have reported the top comment of certain threads that aren’t problematic yet, but are starting to get out of hand. The particular comment itself wasn’t bad, but it let Deimos know to keep an eye on it.
The best current way to report a topic is just to report one of the comments and explain your reasoning. This doesn’t help if there aren’t any comments on it yet though.
Thank you!
Message Deimos: https://tildes.net/user/Deimos/new_message
Thank you!
The thread you're referring to is pretty obvious and I have to say like it's the kind of "discussion" I sometimes just avoid on Tildes for own sanity. The super duper brave act of repeating things Elon Musk and Nazis on X the everything app but like, with civil language so it's fine.