Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
The 730 people who upvoted this post do care.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
Votes mean as much as the shit I just took.
No. The shit that you took is more meaningful than fake Internet points.
Usually I’d agree with this, but on this post, the upvote count is a direct representation of how many people care about this issue (out of the number of users who saw this post). That is meaningful.
I don’t have access to traffic data to make a good argument on this specific post. Without the ability to compare total interactions vs votes, as well as the ratio of up vs down, it’s a matter of general principle in my opinion.
It is also my opinion, having moderated off and on since the nineties on various types of forums that pretty much any post is ignored by a majority of users that come across it. Voting really only shows which people are willing to use the effort to hit a button. If a majority of users don’t engage, I think that it is indeed a direct representation of how many people care. Again, I can’t see those numbers, so it’s kind of a moot point to make at all, but I suspect this post is like most posts anywhere.
But I still maintain that votes are meaningless across the board because they’re a horrible metric for anything at all, especially when they’re the only metric available.
Edit: again, fwiw, in the time it took me to type that up, the number of positive votes went down by 3. And, iirc, at the point where this tangent about the value of votes started, or was over 400, which is still meaningless, but taken in isolation would point to a general trend where there’s significant disagreement with whatever it is about the post drawing votes.
I kind of see your point. The information we have is not sufficient, and we cannot really know how much of the Lemmy userbase cares about this issue.