i never understood this take. echo chambers aren't inherently bad; forced debates are never good. communities are supposed to be places you go to feel comfortable not where you'd forced to debate or turn anything into an argument.
Exposure to other viewpoints is good. No need to debate. And if you’re on a large instance, you’ll see that. Not everyone thinks alike, there are shades of gray. Discussion is allowed to happen but intolerance isn’t tolerated.
The tankie instances ban anyone for even asking questions politely that they don’t agree with. It’s a total monoculture and I assume they’re mostly still kids, because everything is black and white and can be solved without any nuance at all.
Exposure to other viewpoints is good yes, but is it good when that exposure only ever gets you insults hurled your way from the people you’re trying to have a discussion with?
Is exposure to other viewpoints good when those viewpoints are half-baked straw man hot-takes that the users are just parroting because they heard their favorite YouTuber say it?
I don’t need to be exposed to yet another dipshit who insists the holodomor never happened. That’s not me avoiding other viewpoints, that’s me avoiding fucking morons.
This is very close to the Nazi point of "just asking questions" or when they say it's just free speech. Not saying you're arguing it, but it is a very thin line.
What's the line then? Why do people ban Nazis and not tankies? Tankies are authoritarian, they defend the massacre of Ukrainians, the Uyghur genocide, and other historic "socialist" atrocities. Why do we give them leeway? Are they skirting the line just enough? Are they intentionally using the optics of socialism to do so? Etc.
Keep in mind, just because someone blocks someone or an instance it doesn't necessarily make the space an echo chamber. We don't know if they live in a state or work in a place that is blasting Fox News 24/7. They may be very active on Twitter exposed to that sewage. Heck, the liberal point of view is quite a lot as is with the way they are defending Israel.
I think I’m arguing the exact opposite. We should ban/defederate nazis and tankies. But we shouldn’t ban people with different views that aren’t beyond the pale.
You can have a nuanced opinion of Israel/Palestine without being labeled as a genocide denier since it’s still in the fog of war.
It’s much harder to have a nuanced opinion about Rohingya, the Holocaust, Uyghur, Darfur.
I assume they’re mostly still kids, because everything is black and white and can be solved without any nuance at all.
This is SO important. Remember that the "Dirtbag Left" a la Chapo et al. was created when the Alt Right was running rampant in high schools. Their goal was to attract young people to the left. Which is great! There's a place for cringe edgy teens to feel like they can fight for a better world. But I'm really not looking to hang out with arrogant teenagers right now, and definitely not with their emotionally immature adult chaperones.
Exposure over and over won't be novel, or helpful, just grating. We do not need to endlessly rehash every possible argument, over and over and over and over and over.
Even if the other viewpoint is that trans people should get shot or locked up and are members of a secret child sex ring?
I don't think I want that on my feed.
I don't want people that want to kill me on my screen while I shit
90% of the time it's bigots who are upset that they're getting deplatformed. The other 10% of the time it's the incredibly idealistic or naive. Either way it's a crap argument. You are under no obligation to endure verbal diarrhea, nor is it your responsibility to change the minds of the people spewing it. They shit the bed, they can lie in it.
Normal interactions with normal communities will be plenty of diversity, there's absolutely no reason to engage with or listen to nazis. Right wing politics has mastered brainwashing, it's dangerous to read that shit too often.
They've mastered brainwashing to conservative religious nutjobs and incels. Maybe young and naive teenage boys, on top of that. If you aren't an idiot or a teen, you should be immune for the most part.
Not that I'm saying you should go out of your way to interact with Nazis. Unless the interaction involves punching.
Thanks for the nuance. While I agree that tankies can be annoying, I think it's stupid to compare them to fascists with the whole "red fash" thing. Just because they have some terrible takes of their own, it doesn't make them fascist.
The worst of them do deny genocides, which is terrible, but they do it out of a habit of denying anything western powers claim actually happened. I imagine many of their members are trolls and contrarians, as well. Despite this, like you said, some of them have decent takes and not all of them are off the deep end, yet
People who say this are generally fine being a part of every other instance that is full of liberals who repeat fascist propaganda verbatim. Seen rather clearly in response to the recent escalations in Gaza.
Hexbear kind of pissed me off for a week. But I kind of like how nakedly transparent they are. Now, whenever I come across one of those threads, I see where its coming from and I relax. They're just pro-russia regardless of if it makes sense. I don't know what the Murica equivalent of Russia is, but they're that
They're anti US, not necessarily pro Russia. They support Russia in the Russia-Ukraine war because they think Ukraine is a US puppet state because the country wants to align with Western nations, and of course no nation on earth has its own agency and everything is the US's fault. They're pro anything that challenges the US and other liberal countries.
They remind me of a bunch of teenagers trying to be edgy.
They are campists. It's been the bane of leftist parties forever. That's why socialism really got a foothold in Europe via third-way social democracy, because it doesn't feel the need to make tyrants into folk heroes in order to relitigate the cold war
Would you say the same when someone is harassing you? Or how about if they were Nazis? Because keep in mind OP is just blocking them and not removing them from all of lemmy.
I like getting exposed to languages that I'm not fluent in. Sometimes I pick something up or get curious and learn something new from translation. A multilingual internet is a colorful and beautiful place.
That'd be fine if the tankie takes had any value to them. The only value they've added to me is showing me why real world communism has always ended up the way it has. And now I've learned that lesson, so theres no further value
My hot take is: Depending on the individual, this may be a healthy and responsible thing to do. The outrage cycle that was established in commercial social media to "drive engagement" is very bad for our meat computers (shown in multiple studies). It is much healthier and more productive, at times, to block users, communities, and potentially instances (removing this ability, and forcing me to use their algorithm for sorting, is why I left Reddit, in addition to the harm caused to disabled communities).
I disagree, I would love to block NSFW instances, and I'm grateful to the users that voluntarily post in there. For me Lemmy is too searchable for me to get into those luxuries.