There’s probably a better community for asking this, but I haven’t been able to find that one either.
What I’m looking for is a place to discuss ideas that encourages good-faith conversation, staying on topic, and being decent to one another - while actively discouraging mean-spirited, facetious, or bad-faith responses that focus on criticizing the person asking the question rather than engaging with the substance of it. And by “discouraging,” I mean active moderation with very low tolerance for that kind of commentary.
I can see how that would be the case for a certain type of person - perhaps even the majority - but interestingly, my personal experience has been almost the opposite. The people here tend to lean in the same political or ideological direction, and they’ve become extremely sensitive to any ideas that seem to go against their worldview. They’ve dealt with so many bad actors in the past that the moment someone starts making the kind of noises that trigger their alarms, it becomes almost impossible to engage with them meaningfully. You quickly end up having to defend yourself against preconceptions formed simply because you’re willing to touch on a sensitive topic.
I think the contrast within the userbase here is actually sharper than on Reddit. There’s a large number of incredibly decent, mature, and thoughtful people - likely due to the higher average age - but there’s also a surprisingly large group of extremely vicious activist types who will dogpile on you the moment you say anything even halfway critical of their cause, or not critical enough of what they oppose.
And there it is. I wonder what really triggered your post?
Even taking all that you wrote into account I still think feddit deals with this better than reddit.
Which btw is also a problem in those subs you describe. No mod can afford to be that strict.
Anyhow, be the change you want to see. I’m sure you performed your searches by now and haven’t found anything suitable, so start your own and moderate it the way you see fit!
Or at least tell us which subs you miss.
And another thing that goes for reddit as well as feddit: downvotes by themselves don’t mean that you’re being dogpiled or silenced or whatever. Controversial takes always attract - well, controversy. Deal with it, discuss your way through it, after all that’s what you want, no? I still say the percentage of reasonable people here is far larger than on reddit.
This is exactly why I’d like to find - or create - the kind of community I described above. These kinds of accusations, even when implicit, don’t bring any value to a conversation. I’m looking for a place to discuss ideas - not people or tribes.
I see you are unwilling to answer that or any other question I posed. You want a completely theoretical discussion where people cannot point out to you that you aren’t flawless either.
FWIW I had a look at your posting history and I think you’re fighting windmills here.
This is just yet another completely baseless ad hominem accusation which both isn’t true nor in any way related to the topic at hand. I don’t understand your insistence on making this about me. Like I said: I’m not interested in discussing people.
r/samharris, r/zombiesurvivaltactics and r/suomi are the subs I miss from reddit. I’m not aware of not having addressed any other questions you’ve posed to me.
This is for sure part of it. Remember that most of us fled here from reddit, and many made a clean break. For me, that includes avoiding political discussion communities. I actively moderated two conservative political communities for years (r/AskConservatives and r/Tuesday) and also r/As an American, where political discussions often came up. I’m just exhausted by it. I’ve seen every bad argument under the sun from and towards every major political position.
When I spooled down reddit, resigned my modship in r/AskConservatives, and came to lemmy, I resolved to a) never mod a discussion community again and 2] never sub a political discussion community. And my life became so much better! I still engage with politics IRL, with real people in my community, but have zero interest in seeking out the same here.
So yes, if you want to discuss certain topics here you’ve got an uphill slog. And if you don’t want to be treated like a bad-faith actor you’ve got to put in the work to build a reputation as a good-faith one. There’s no shortcut for that; users recognize each other here.
I not only block political communities here, but I also filter out every post containing terms related to current political events or specific political figures. While I might touch on topics that are political by nature - like the Israel-Palestine conflict - I rarely engage directly with politics in a broad sense.
For example, yesterday I tried making a post about the concept of “sigma males,” where I even preemptively acknowledged my doubts about its scientific validity and criticized how it tends to frame even negative traits in a positive light. Yet all the responses I received were ridicule, personal attacks, and accusations. Apparently, I overlooked the fact that the term “sigma male” acts like a lightning rod for a certain kind of person - people who completely disregard the actual question and just start spewing hatred and negativity.
I’d really just like a place where I can indulge in my cold and analytical, autistic topics of interest with other like-minded people. I don’t even mind disagreement - on the contrary, I enjoy it, as long as it’s done in good faith.
Have you entertained the notion that the term “sigma male” is also a lightning rod for people who have specific ideas about masculinity and, by extension, its relationship to women?
What I am getting from your incredibly vague post is that the topics you are interested in have connotations that would imply to others that your interest isn’t entirely academic, and so they become wary of your motives/beliefs.
Let me frame it more hyperbolically: having an autistic special interest in Nazi memorabilia raises a lot of questions to other people about whether you are interested in more than just the memorabilia.
What I want to talk about isn’t the point of this thread - it’s about how I want to talk about it. Basic decency toward one another shouldn’t be an unreasonable thing to ask. I’m more than happy to discuss my underlying motives, but I want to do so in a civilized manner. These mental acrobatics - where, because I’ve said some “magic word,” I must now, with high probability, be a certain type of person - are absolutely ridiculous.
Well, the reason people are being weird to you about this is because you’re being vague on purpose and they don’t want to be someone who helped foster a community that discusses how pedophilia and CP should be legal and black people are subhuman.
Basically every debate forum will turn into that if you don’t monitor things and make sure there are clear ground rules enforced by competent moderators. If you are being genuine, you will have to be prepared for bad faith actors, actual pedophiles, abuse apologists, racists and ethnonationalists, and the resulting mixed opinions of the community and not get upset like you are doing all over this thread.
If the community that you want doesn’t exist, then to solve that problem you’d either have to make one and mod it properly, or find people IRL.
I, too, am interested in having serious good faith discussions, and will not become shrill if you present nuanced views, or criticism of mine.