While the !worldnews@lemmy.ml community has always been a little feisty, the flood of Redditors has turned much of any contentious subject into pure mud slinging. Take the recent post “Ukraine war: Kyiv claims its first victories of counter-offensive”. The discussion featured these insults:
- cia and nafo freaks
- I don’t think the person you’re responding to has the capacity to realize anything except their own delusions
- hasn’t achieved reading comprehension
- tankie
- fascist
- gargling Putin’s cock
- weasels
- So I sincerely ask you to either become a better person or just stfu.
- loonies
- Russian dick train
- willfully obtuse
And that’s just half of the page. Seems like it’s time to have at least some basic civility rules in place before this community is nothing but personal attacks.
On one hand, sure we could all do with some rules on civility.
However, people who support Russian claim to Ukrainian territory (not those that support and end to suffering, there’s some nuance there) are, to me, despicable. In the same vein that we must not tolerate intolerance, I don’t see that position as a viable position to take.
I’m all for vitriol when pointed at a handful of pre-selected targets. You can hate nazis, you can hate pro-russian pundits, and you can hate the guy who sold Ea-Nasir that bad quality copper in 1750 b.c.
that’s a reason why duplicate a community with same name can be usefull : if worldnews@lemmy.ml is not your taste, you can switch to worldnews@instanceX
This is what the voting system is for … upvoted comments become more visible. Downvoted comments disappear. The war inflames people in both sides … yesterday a Russian missile killed 11 civilians. So it’s understandable people will react like this. But I’d far prefer reading these kinds of comments than have some kind of behavior code. If they introduced that in a forum I’d be out very quickly.
While it’s understandable, that doesn’t mean that it’s productive. It also doesn’t mean that people can’t at least minimally restrain themselves.
