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A comment on Moderation Is Different from Censorship. Parent comment

Re:Moderation Is Different from Censorship by Asraelite on Thursday November 03, 2022 @08:46AM (#33450158)
I've found that when posting a popular opinion, you can have absolute minimum effort fluff like "racism is bad" and get plenty of upvotes, but for controversial opinions you need to tread extremely lightly. You need disclaimers and careful wording and references etc. to avoid being downvoted. In many cases that's not even enough.

Positive interactions are certainly possible and do happen, but the site is heavily heavily tilted towards groupthink. Fighting it is an uphill battle.

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Re:Moderation Is Different from Censorship by richbell on Thursday November 03, 2022 @09:06AM (#33450360)
> In many cases that's not even enough.

Users rarely deviate from the established upvote/downvote patterns. In fact, I'd go as far as saying many users don't even read the comments before voting.

When two users are having a heated argument, it's common for a third person to respond to the 'right' person with an innocuous comment and be heavily downvoted for it.

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Re:Moderation Is Different from Censorship by acdha on Thursday November 03, 2022 @09:05AM (#33450353)
It’s definitely easier to go along with the status quo, but where in life is that not true? Things like academic debates have a lot of rules and structure trying to reduce that but even there it’s understood that certain positions are harder to argue than others.
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