While the [email protected] 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.
I completely agree that insults like this are “pure mud slinging”. As I said elsewhere, I know reddit was basically a rage-engine, generating and thriving on rage, but that’s not real discussion. That’s “engagement” in the most cynical sense. Real engagement is discussion, back and forth, even with (especially with) disagreements.
I just saw a thread where one person’s “contribution” was literally nothing other than trying to combine the same 5 words into different insults in response to reasonable comments. There’s a difference between ending your evidence-backed reasoned comment with an insult or derogatory remark, and having the entire content of all of your comments be personal attacks or insults.
I’m unsure how I feel about making a rule around such a thing, because the mere presence of insults is not always enough to declare the comment(er) detracting; when the entirety of someone’s comment history is just that, then things become more clear-cut.
I don’t want an echo chamber. I want to see dissenting opinions. But I want those dissenting opinions to be in good faith, and not backed by aggression. I don’t want to see the content of people whose sole intent is to cause outrage and troll.