“Debate bro” has legitimate uses because “debate bros” as a subculture do exist and deserve ridicule, but it means things like using “gotchas” and other underhanded rhetoric or arguing purely to posture, rather than just vocally disagreeing or being – in their view – overly concerned with minor details without necessarily deriving false implications from them (which would be a “gotcha”). Overwhelmingly, I get the latter and over time it started to be clear to me for reasons that I find kind of difficult to articulate that this sort of talk is, aside from being lazy, oriented around the caricaturing and disparaging of ASD traits that are a large part of our image of what a “nerd” is, which this site has a long history of enjoying the abuse of, as seen by the sordid emotes that were removed over time. I totally believe there need to be rules for communication, but part of the issue with the site’s approach to PC reforms is that it doesn’t actually change anyone’s attitudes or sentiments, it just changes how they communicate them. Something something “euphemism treadmill.”
No, I’m not advocating for banning the term “debate bro” or “nerd,” I’m just tired of people being lazy, ignorant assholes. I think a lot of it comes from the people on this site wanting to get a chance to strike at “cishet white males” but being such fucking cowards that they just punch down at ND people of that description who were often already shat on and physically abused for their whole fucking lives, not that I’m bitter about it or anything. That’s just the vibe I get though, since I’m not a mind reader. It could all be in my head, though I’ve seen two or three other autistic comrades say the same thing.
Like on this forum, where the goal isn’t to win an argument but to completely understand the other side and come to a correct conclusion.
I’d love to know where “this forum” is, because I’ve been here since the subreddit and don’t recognize that description.
To be clear on that last part, I’m saying that is the ideal usage of hexbear, and so I’ve seen “debate bro” trotted out in a way that seemed to be calling out a deviation from that. Hexbear does not always meet that ideal lol. I agree with that for sure!
And to the rest, interesting! I think I missed some history because I’m not sure which emojis this is about. I recognize definitely the points you are making! It’s definitely a difficult problem to solve with a process or rule, because there are so many ways to meander around those sorts of issues and cause the same problems without Walking over any specific line. I also have no better recommendations though.
Regarding emojis, we don’t have them anymore, but they were of scrawny, chinless, bespectacled white boys who were taken as sort of the avatar of channers. They were later removed for the obvious bodyshaming issue, but the broader portrait has never been challenged.
I think the problem is immensely easy to solve, because the problem is 100% people being lazy assholes. You don’t need to argue with people, but when someone voices disagreement, the appropriate thing to do is not write them off with insipid name-calling, but to either disengage, discuss the issue, or have an actual meta-conversation that isn’t predicated on immediately treating them like bad actors because you feel uncomfortable with someone saying that you’re wrong.
Sure, I agree mostly, but do we require the same for responding to, to take the extreme case, fascists then? The difficulty is in enforcing what you’re proposing, unfortunately, because I think we all shouldn’t be expected to respond seriously every time a Lemmy fascist shows up, but should respond seriously to comrades instead of dismissals and name-calling. But that line is super difficult to implement in practical terms. We could just always require full engagement, but unfortunately fascists know how to use such principles to waste our time and recruit others with sealioning and shit. How should we deal with that?
As I said, there are three options: Conversation (for where you believe there is something productive to discuss), meta-conversation (for when you believe there is a more fundamental problem with their mindset), and disengagement (for when talking to them is useless). I think that the vast, vast majority of the time, you can summarize it with these three. You absolutely don’t need to sit their and talk to someone just because they disagreed with you, but that isn’t the same as a license to devolve into name-calling and other childish behaviors like that. If someone is so hopelessly bad faith and persistent that none of these are appropriate, then just ban them (which may involve letting mods handle meta-conversation in cases where they aren’t just throwing out gamer words or something).
I agree with these in cases of good faith, but the bad faith case is exactly where I think it’s more difficult. And that because I think there is some real value in getting to mock someone who is sealioning or being a reactionary. It’s kinda why this place first populated (as a subreddit), because it’s genuinely relieving to have a place where you do that. Not just a perfect safe space where nobody ever comes with shitty opinions, but one where you send a PPB to someone who deserves it instead of having it deleted. I think it’s also valuable to the person being mocked to see that they just aren’t taken seriously. It makes some people investigate for themselves when they are just dismissed and laughed at openly instead of having their opinion hidden behind a ban. But maybe this is what you see as asshole behavior that you want gone too?
So, if we take that as something we should be able to do, we create a contradiction at the border between comrades disagreeing and someone deserving the dunk. It becomes ver difficult to handle.
If we intend on not doing the dunking, then I’m fully in agreement that your proposed model works!
I have no real strong opinion on this, just trying to discuss with you how it works and learn from your position
Again, I think it’s pretty simple: The schoolyard behavior of the subreddit was always a coping mechanism and maybe a means of advertising. Like most coping mechanisms, it can get you a certain result, but it ultimately is not a way to fix a problem, and the advertising angle is irrelevant because we’re a very insular group now.
The PPB-philia is just wishful thinking. People mostly don’t respond to schoolyard taunts with “gee, maybe I should care what these children think of me,” they write you off as children and understandably so. I’ve been the object of derision in this community many times, and never once has it positively changed my opinion on something, it’s just further convinced me that a huge portion of the community are philistines. The only times my mind has been changed by this community were from looking at actual discussions and expositions, though even then it can be pretty weak (see my original comment that you replied to).*
If there is rhetorical merit in combating something, refute it (this can be as simple as linking to an FAQ entry). If there is not, ban them and move on. The schoolyard rituals are a useless affectation from people desperate to live in a little power fantasy.
If that leaves you wondering why I’m even here, yeah, me too. The short answer is that there’s nowhere in the world where I feel at home, but at least here I can usually talk in a spontaneous way and be understood on a basic level, rather than need to continuously calibrate my speech to both be understood and not completely derail every interaction. Well, I need to calibrate it here too, but it’s just a matter of simple self-censorship, so I don’t mind it, compared to the counterfactual and theoretically-gutted frame that I need to speak to most people in . . .
Totally sympathetic, I think we mostly agree and I feel very similarly about hexbear now how it affects me and how I relate to it. I’m glad you feel more at home here than elsewhere, and improving that is maybe a goal we should have for the site. Have you thought of making a bigger post for this? I think maybe you’ll get the conversation started and maybe result in some changes, there are at least a good amount of hexbear users that would definitely support it. I’d even argue for it with you, despite my points against it named here. That because I don’t think we really have any influence on many people outside of hexbear, so the positive effect I name below is lessened.
But I do know that for me, a cis-white-neurotypical-man, the dunking was part of the reason that I started searching on my own for “what the fuck do these ignorant people believe to be so convinced of their dunks?”. And that led to me researching with a very different goal than just “looking for arguments”. Arguments were something I understood as only for the goal of winning a debate and nothing to do with truth, so the dunks got me to start thinking about what the truth was and looking on my own. That comes from my history growing up in a very reactionary environment, where any argument didn’t have to be correct as long as you got to hold you position at the end. It felt like a game. Meanwhile, dunking seemed to be like “you’re not just gonna lose an argument, you’re wrong and we don’t care to argue it”, which is interested me because it felt like a truth claim.
“Debate bro” has legitimate uses because “debate bros” as a subculture do exist and deserve ridicule, but it means things like using “gotchas” and other underhanded rhetoric or arguing purely to posture, rather than just vocally disagreeing or being – in their view – overly concerned with minor details without necessarily deriving false implications from them (which would be a “gotcha”). Overwhelmingly, I get the latter and over time it started to be clear to me for reasons that I find kind of difficult to articulate that this sort of talk is, aside from being lazy, oriented around the caricaturing and disparaging of ASD traits that are a large part of our image of what a “nerd” is, which this site has a long history of enjoying the abuse of, as seen by the sordid emotes that were removed over time. I totally believe there need to be rules for communication, but part of the issue with the site’s approach to PC reforms is that it doesn’t actually change anyone’s attitudes or sentiments, it just changes how they communicate them. Something something “euphemism treadmill.”
No, I’m not advocating for banning the term “debate bro” or “nerd,” I’m just tired of people being lazy, ignorant assholes. I think a lot of it comes from the people on this site wanting to get a chance to strike at “cishet white males” but being such fucking cowards that they just punch down at ND people of that description who were often already shat on and physically abused for their whole fucking lives, not that I’m bitter about it or anything. That’s just the vibe I get though, since I’m not a mind reader. It could all be in my head, though I’ve seen two or three other autistic comrades say the same thing.
I’d love to know where “this forum” is, because I’ve been here since the subreddit and don’t recognize that description.
To be clear on that last part, I’m saying that is the ideal usage of hexbear, and so I’ve seen “debate bro” trotted out in a way that seemed to be calling out a deviation from that. Hexbear does not always meet that ideal lol. I agree with that for sure!
And to the rest, interesting! I think I missed some history because I’m not sure which emojis this is about. I recognize definitely the points you are making! It’s definitely a difficult problem to solve with a process or rule, because there are so many ways to meander around those sorts of issues and cause the same problems without Walking over any specific line. I also have no better recommendations though.
Regarding emojis, we don’t have them anymore, but they were of scrawny, chinless, bespectacled white boys who were taken as sort of the avatar of channers. They were later removed for the obvious bodyshaming issue, but the broader portrait has never been challenged.
I think the problem is immensely easy to solve, because the problem is 100% people being lazy assholes. You don’t need to argue with people, but when someone voices disagreement, the appropriate thing to do is not write them off with insipid name-calling, but to either disengage, discuss the issue, or have an actual meta-conversation that isn’t predicated on immediately treating them like bad actors because you feel uncomfortable with someone saying that you’re wrong.
Sure, I agree mostly, but do we require the same for responding to, to take the extreme case, fascists then? The difficulty is in enforcing what you’re proposing, unfortunately, because I think we all shouldn’t be expected to respond seriously every time a Lemmy fascist shows up, but should respond seriously to comrades instead of dismissals and name-calling. But that line is super difficult to implement in practical terms. We could just always require full engagement, but unfortunately fascists know how to use such principles to waste our time and recruit others with sealioning and shit. How should we deal with that?
As I said, there are three options: Conversation (for where you believe there is something productive to discuss), meta-conversation (for when you believe there is a more fundamental problem with their mindset), and disengagement (for when talking to them is useless). I think that the vast, vast majority of the time, you can summarize it with these three. You absolutely don’t need to sit their and talk to someone just because they disagreed with you, but that isn’t the same as a license to devolve into name-calling and other childish behaviors like that. If someone is so hopelessly bad faith and persistent that none of these are appropriate, then just ban them (which may involve letting mods handle meta-conversation in cases where they aren’t just throwing out gamer words or something).
I agree with these in cases of good faith, but the bad faith case is exactly where I think it’s more difficult. And that because I think there is some real value in getting to mock someone who is sealioning or being a reactionary. It’s kinda why this place first populated (as a subreddit), because it’s genuinely relieving to have a place where you do that. Not just a perfect safe space where nobody ever comes with shitty opinions, but one where you send a PPB to someone who deserves it instead of having it deleted. I think it’s also valuable to the person being mocked to see that they just aren’t taken seriously. It makes some people investigate for themselves when they are just dismissed and laughed at openly instead of having their opinion hidden behind a ban. But maybe this is what you see as asshole behavior that you want gone too?
So, if we take that as something we should be able to do, we create a contradiction at the border between comrades disagreeing and someone deserving the dunk. It becomes ver difficult to handle.
If we intend on not doing the dunking, then I’m fully in agreement that your proposed model works!
I have no real strong opinion on this, just trying to discuss with you how it works and learn from your position
Again, I think it’s pretty simple: The schoolyard behavior of the subreddit was always a coping mechanism and maybe a means of advertising. Like most coping mechanisms, it can get you a certain result, but it ultimately is not a way to fix a problem, and the advertising angle is irrelevant because we’re a very insular group now.
The PPB-philia is just wishful thinking. People mostly don’t respond to schoolyard taunts with “gee, maybe I should care what these children think of me,” they write you off as children and understandably so. I’ve been the object of derision in this community many times, and never once has it positively changed my opinion on something, it’s just further convinced me that a huge portion of the community are philistines. The only times my mind has been changed by this community were from looking at actual discussions and expositions, though even then it can be pretty weak (see my original comment that you replied to).*
If there is rhetorical merit in combating something, refute it (this can be as simple as linking to an FAQ entry). If there is not, ban them and move on. The schoolyard rituals are a useless affectation from people desperate to live in a little power fantasy.
Totally sympathetic, I think we mostly agree and I feel very similarly about hexbear now how it affects me and how I relate to it. I’m glad you feel more at home here than elsewhere, and improving that is maybe a goal we should have for the site. Have you thought of making a bigger post for this? I think maybe you’ll get the conversation started and maybe result in some changes, there are at least a good amount of hexbear users that would definitely support it. I’d even argue for it with you, despite my points against it named here. That because I don’t think we really have any influence on many people outside of hexbear, so the positive effect I name below is lessened.
But I do know that for me, a cis-white-neurotypical-man, the dunking was part of the reason that I started searching on my own for “what the fuck do these ignorant people believe to be so convinced of their dunks?”. And that led to me researching with a very different goal than just “looking for arguments”. Arguments were something I understood as only for the goal of winning a debate and nothing to do with truth, so the dunks got me to start thinking about what the truth was and looking on my own. That comes from my history growing up in a very reactionary environment, where any argument didn’t have to be correct as long as you got to hold you position at the end. It felt like a game. Meanwhile, dunking seemed to be like “you’re not just gonna lose an argument, you’re wrong and we don’t care to argue it”, which is interested me because it felt like a truth claim.