• 6 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle






  • I’m not sure you’ll get that from any instance that allows politics, to be perfectly honest, as politics will tend to swamp all other discussion because it generates more traffic and discussion. I’ve spent time on microskiff.com (a boating forum), which is intensely right-wing, and it got so toxic they had to ban political discussion altogether. They have an open feud with The Hull Truth (another boating forum) which leans more left and attracts more voices who challenge conservatives. /r/Hunting was kinda conservative and generally policed itself, but that’s because the mod team nuked anything that went off the rails.

    Conservative-friendly spaces usually stay functional one of two ways: either they create a conservatives-only safe space or they refuse to let conservatives be overtly conservative. As someone who was a Reddit moderator for over a decade, you’re kinda driving at the major gripe conservatives have with the open internet. They tend not to get a warm welcome not because they’re conservative, but because when they flock together they tend to get disruptive and toxic very quickly. So then the warnings, removals, and bans come out, and the toxic crowd crows about being “censored”, and the toxicity/pushback ramps up in an endless loop. It’s the same song and dance everywhere they go, unfortunately. The conservative-sphere is just too infested with toxic conservatives for non-toxic conservatives find breathing room.

    Additionally, Lemmy the platform has a steep learning curve which limits it to a more tech-savvy audience, and these kinds of forums naturally attract more left-leaning users, so I don’t think Lemmy is the place you’re going to find much conservative traffic in the first place.






  • I’m not sure I follow. You’re suggesting that >0 people take meaningful action as a result of hearing about this protest. I’m saying that >0 people take fewer meaningful actions as a result, and >0 probably turn away from your cause when they hear about stupid shit like this. So for every one convert in the right direction, there are some in the other direction. Whether or not the two balance is certainly up for debate, and which side you prefer to highlight at the expense of the other, depends on your preconceived opinion.

    Which really just reiterates that this kind of nonsense is a net negative, because the people who respond positively to it were already converts in the first place.





  • Who’s actually doing that, though? I mean that sincerely. Is there anyone who wouldn’t have gotten involved, but who was swayed to do so by orange paint on historical artifacts? This seems like directionless compensatory venting by activists whose other strategies are failing to meaningfully persuade.

    Further, what’s the balance of people in the other direction who have an inkling that they’d consider doing more, but who are swayed against it by the increasingly unhinged extremist tactics these protestors are using? There’s an entire online ecosystem rife with a combination of climate denialism, analytical paralysis, and doomsaying, and there’s a non-zero number of people who likely either stop caring or throw their hands up in frustration because protestors are doing more harm than good by throwing what I’m sure looks to them like ridiculous tantrums. For every ally they gain, they probably lose some, too.

    And that’s not even touching on the fact that systemic structural changes are the only possible solution to this problem, and making the average person feel guilty and/or agitated is a weird form of victim shaming.