3mo ago

Okay, yeah, I see now how it can be misinterpreted when taken out-of-context

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.one/post/14589828

Based on a true story:
https://lemmy.world/post/15491338

47 comments

Some background of this incident:
I made a post with a meme about a TV episode in which some evil aliens pretended to be friendly and share a vaccine, but the vaccine turned out to intentionally render the victims infertile so they would not be able to fight back when they began being enslaved. Unfortunately, I did not consider that to an outsider, the meme just looked like your garden variety vaccine misinformation/conspiracy. I was able to edit the title and add some context to the post body, so the post was able to "recover" as more people were able to see what the joke was intended to be. But initially, it was (understandably) down voted immensely. Just a funny misunderstanding.
- With Israel in the news lately, a lot more people have recently become aware of them literally doing that to Ethiopian immigrants...
  The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically.
  One of the Ethiopian women who was interviewed is quoted as saying: “They [medical staff] told us they are inoculations. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.” It is alleged that some of the women were forced or coerced to take the drug while in transit camps in Ethiopia.
  The drug in question is thought to be Depo-Provera, which is injected every three months and is considered to be a highly effective, long-lasting contraceptive.
  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-gave-birth-control-to-ethiopian-jews-without-their-consent-8468800.html
  So there's a couple other things people would think of instead of the show you meant
- I wonder if people just saw it in their feeds and didn't see the community? Since with just a few words into this comment I knew exactly what episode you were talking about... And I am sure that if I had seen your meme on chevron7 without the added context I would've known immediately. Since those are such a good couple of episodes
- So Stargate SG1?
  
  Specifically the episodes "2010" and "2001."

I don't like platforms that do not allow negative feedback tbh.
- Hexbear has downvoting disabled. Which is in part why they brigade people to express disapproval rather than merely use that.
  
  That can explain twitter
- It's not really that they don't allow negative feedback. They just prefer that if you do have negative feedback, you comment it instead of just downvoting and moving on.
  
  Doesn't that system make for incredibly obnoxious comment sections consisting only of people disagreeing and complaining + argumentative responders?
  Normal comment sections are often bad enough already
  
  I'm going to disagree with you there, because they love banning people who disapprove of their posts.
- The problem is that it's publicly shown. Let me pull an old comment:
  When you have an upvote/downvote structure, there is an incentive to not go against the grain and just post stuff that’s considered “acceptable” in the local community.
  Not everyone treats the votes the same way as well. Some people downvote because they don’t agree with the content, the poster, just because they sound disagreeable or simply because the post is too much to read. You can apply the same myriad of methods to upvotes. Not one motivator is the same.
  If we’d ditch showing the numbers and just have them work under the hood, discussions might start looking a lot more genuine.
  
  When you have an upvote/downvote structure, there is an incentive to not go against the grain and just post stuff that’s considered “acceptable” in the local community.
  Coward behaviour, post your hot takes, nobody knows who the fuck any of us are it's not like there's any actual consequences here. Get banned and spin up a new account on another instance or 9 ffs, the downvotes can't hurt you
  Not everyone treats the votes the same way as well. Some people downvote because they don’t agree with the content, the poster, just because they sound disagreeable or simply because the post is too much to read. You can apply the same myriad of methods to upvotes. Not one motivator is the same.
  Great argument to not give them any weight, like by disabling them to protect fragile egos
  
  When my instance switched from 0.19.3 - which your lemmy.world is still running on (awaiting 0.19.6 iirc for reasons) - to 0.19.5, downvotes became hidden by default and I had to turn them on specifically.
  I turned them on bc for me, more information is better - e.g. I like to distinguish between e.g. "1 upvote" that has not been seen by anyone yet (perhaps due to server sync issues, which just happened to me yesterday on startrek.website - e.g. my post has different numbers of comments and differences in voting numbers depending on which instance you view it from; such issues are still somewhat common on Lemmy, often due to keeping up with Lemmy.world that has 80% of the userbase, though 0.19.6 promises a reprieve iirc), vs. 1 net upvote that is made up of X upvotes + X downvotes.
  A lot of my posts tend to be controversial for some reason - e.g. this video that points out bias in news media reporting (towards more "exciting" content that sells rather than actual facts) got only 6 upvotes (above the default +1) and 5 downvotes. So... it's actual information to know that (a) people actually did see it, rather than it still sitting at just 2, and (b) as many people didn't like it as liked it, though far more people simply ignored.
  We cannot make people like things - even (literally) award-winning content that arguably they "should". All we can do is be sensitive to people's reactions. Like the man vs. bear debate - perhaps choosing the bear is "silly"? Then again, is it, really, truly, and anyway it's not our call to make, only others to choose as they wish. At which point, it's at least good to know what people's opinions are?

goodness I thought I was having some serious dejavu for a sec there
- Lol you remember the original Chevron 7 post?
  
  yeah it was a trip lol
  
  I was there, Gandalf...

Edit: for context though, my own downvoted posts tend to be genuinely unpopular. e.g. this one may arguably have the distinction of being the least popular post of that entire community, if you sort by controversial and see that it is the first one with double-digit total numbers. It doesn't matter how that whole situation turned out - people just did not enjoy seeing it, like at all, though I indeed found it interesting.
- Reminds me of when Jimmy Saville died and someone got massively downvoted for saying “But wasn’t he a paedophile?”. And then all the news came out about it. People hated him because he spoke the truth lol
  
  Hrm, I suppose that would depend: did the person who said that really know somehow that he was a pedo (especially if it predated all the news stories then how would he? maybe the news stories were rerun a second time), or was it just a wild guess that turned out to be correct?
  Anyway yeah, not many people seem to actually care about the truth - it is often painful, always seems to be difficult, almost always goes against the fantasy stories that we tell ourselves, etc.
- And, amusingly, it turned out to be right.
  
  I have never known Jon Stewart not to be. Unless he says in advance that he might be. His discipline, his willingness to listen to feedback, his dedication... all of that means that his wrong thoughts tend not to make their way on the air. Although this might have been before Jon Stewart's airing of that episode?
  I suppose it could have been wrong - like if Biden really did just have a cold or some such. But either way, the logical foundation that the article set forth intrigued me.

It's like how people in an information bubble post something and get encouraged by all of the people who think that same way, but the majority of people are actually against the idea.
- Yeah, it really is like that, isn't it?!

This must be how tankies feel

Displaying only up votes, or a combined score, is deceitful and misleading, and I'm very disappointed that Lemmy is following that trend. The big sites have chosen to do that because they're more interested in profit than objectivity. Why is Lemmy following their example?
- Well it's still up to the instance owner on how to display it.
  
  Or the app.