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.
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.
It also doesn’t mean that a small group of bot accounts or smurfs or anything else can change the votes in their favor and change the tide of what people think is the zeitgeist.
I’ve already seen it here where upvoted comments become randomly heavily downvoted for stating something against China or russias policies, while whataboutisms are suddenly upvoted in exchange.