It's entirely on you. You brought some valid points about how awful Cloudflare is, but that's not what got you banned. Your baseless claim of Cloudflare DoH somehow MITM SSL is. You are indeed spreading some FUD, even here by strawmanning what exactly you got banned for
keo
joined 3 years ago
Replacing "blatantly fake news" to "without a doubt false" doesn't solve the problem at all. It still relies on your view of things. Why you in particular should be the arbiter of Truth?
Even some of the topics you listed are worthy of discussion in my opinion and should not be outright banned by instance admins on such ambiguous terms that could be stretched to infinity. Most of them not even proven to be false but rather gathered large amount of evidence against them. Who's to say that new evidence won't change it tomorrow? Or that evidence we already have are not intentionally misleading to benefit someone? Or just statistical error?
Previously common knowledge was that homosexuals are pedophiles, there were actual scientific evidence supporting that. Imagine labeling any counterargument to that as "without a doubt false"?
I understand the desire to shield people from trolls and misinformation and I want that too, but ambiguous rules that rely on personal world view is a terrible way to go about it.
Seems mostly reasonable. Not sure about ban for "fake news" tho. It could be abused to silence critical voices. In the end it might produce echo chambers.
Maybe it's a good idea to add "repeated ban evasion" to the list. It could be checked through IP or fingerprinting. Doing it without sacrificing privacy would be difficult however. Account age might also indicate that something fishy is going on.
As a solution, could such people just be downvoted to hell? Self moderation is a nice benefit of reddit-like voting. Their effectiveness would plummet if nobody is seeing them, so they would eventually stop, right? To prevent spam they additionally could be rate-limited if they get downvotes only. Also, what about user reports? Maybe they should be also taken in consideration (their relative quantity and validity). Restricting new accounts might also help (until certain amount of karma has been reached, for example) against bots.
Censorship is not an answer, education is.
Even if you might not change their mind instantaneously, you will plant a seed of doubt (given your counterarguments are easy to digest and civil). Even if they don't want to listen, others who read your counterarguments will likely consider them. That's how I changed a lot of my stupid views by just reading other people arguing, but almost none by being directly in the debate (not immediately, at least).
Silencing them will only reinforce such views for them and for those who saw said silencing, that's how humans work (and for a good reason). It will look like you silenced them because you can't come up with convincing argument against their views and therefore they are right and you are wrong. Just imagine yourself at such position - they would think that you are brainwashed, not them.
There is also a downvote button exactly for that - spam, trolls and bad-faith arguments. If your vote is not enough, then point to others why you consider this to be deserving a downvote.
I know that it's easier to just get rid of these people, but that's exactly how we ended up with Gab and Voat. Correct solution is not always the easiest one.
Banning IP ranges is a terrible "solution". It hurts innocent while malicious actor could always circumvent it easily by using proxy/VPN/Tor.
My crude suggestion would be to restrict voting for new accounts (until certain karma threshold and time passed) like on HackerNews (one of the most civilized and helpful comment sections I've ever seen, lemmy has a lot to learn from it).
Additionally it could cost you karma to downvote, so unless you bring something useful to discussions once in a while, you can't downvote others.
Another option is to disable visible vote counter for everyone, so there would be little point in downvoting as means of harassment
Thanks for putting words in my mouth despite me explicitly agreeing that Cloudflare is awful.
If that's how you argue with everyone no wonder you are getting banned. The Mod that argued with you on Reddit had a patience of saint