Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I don't approve of comments that try to make fun of the userbase while removing their ability to respond, to be clear. But here is the alternative perspective as to why threads would be locked:
When I moderated r/polls, we would occasionally lock threads because we literally couldn't keep up. If it was a topic that particularly drew out the bigots in force, they would pile in faster than we could ban them. A thread like this could get over a thousand comments if it was one of the top ones that day. The solutions were then either:
This was on a sub of about 200,000 users, with 5-8 mods. There are subreddits with many times this amount of subscribers, so I can only imagine they might have an even lower threshold for locking.
It's a necessary "evil", if you can even call it that. Sure, you could go make your own sub or whatever where people have free reign over the stuff they post in the comments. With proper size you would realize relatively quickly what a fun idea that would be if you were responsible for it.
I know this will be a controversial opinion but I just don't see this being a big deal. Those comments inevitably get downvoted and kicked to the bottom of the list, and if you expand a comment that's -10 karma you probably know what you're getting into. I created and modded a sub that now has over 2mil subs and never once have I locked a thread (granted, it's one that's non political but we got our fair share of weirdly bigoted comments)
Allowing bigots a platform leaves the possibility that they band together, upvote each other, and normalize their opinions on your community gradually until people stop questioning it.
Add on to that the fact the OP on reddit directly receives each comment on their post as a notification by default.
Yes, another thing I don't ever want to see here: normalization of bigotry & fascism.
On Twitter, I saw one of the chuds saying "You're judging all Nazis as assholes!"
Why yes I judge all Nazis as assholes! Fuck normalizing fascism. KILL IT WITH FIRE, MODS!