That’s a really good simple version of identity verification, but it would be beneficial to have something like academia’s ORCID system. ORCID provides a single ID with a wide range of meta data, education history, employment history, credentials, etc. It also stays valid across name changes, whereas it looks like presscheck.org is partially tied to their real name.

The fediverse equivalent is diaspora*, but I’ve never really seen much activity. It’s also not been adopted by people I know IRL, so I don’t feel much drive to use it.

Do you really think any self-respecting person would honestly answer such questions that generalise an entire group of people?

Hence the name, ask a woman. The hope is that you get answers that reflect the diversity of the population that the question was posed to. Unfortunately, the history of such subreddits is often such that what men want to hear gets upvoted, and more honest answers languish.

Just ask this in real life where you have to look into someones face.

Some questions can be considered impolite to ask or violates some culture’s norm. Posing them online gives a buffer. Sure talking face to face is usually more informative, but not always.

The value of subjective votes is that in the ideal situation they act as a way to judge whether or not a comment is adding to a conversation. It’s nearly impossible to put that into a set of rules that can be enforced without being arbitrary. Of course, downvotes all too often turn into the “I disagree” button, filtering out comments that are high quality but express a point of view that is merely unpopular in the community.

Every social network can breed problems because this is how humans are - a mega colossal mixed bag.

And not just “this how humans are,” but that people are generally more unpleasant in online interactions than in face-to-face interactions. We care about each other less, since usually they’re just an anonymous person (or joker). Tone of voice and facial expressions are missing, so it’s easier to make mistakes about intent and reply in kind.

I’ve found that upvotes and downvotes are nice from the moderator’s perspective for a few reasons:

• They provide a level of distributed community moderation that takes load off of the official moderators.
• The rules can focus on a core set of more objective principles, while votes can be more subjective.
• Votes still leave the content in place. Moderation is usually a more extreme measure, involving removing the content in full or in part. The user may also be banned, either temporarily or permanent.
• Moderation decisions can turn into massive backlash, particularly if the user then goes to complain to a meta group about the decision. Votes are votes, there’s no individual or group of individuals to complain about.

Alone, of course one person wouldn’t. But if shoplifting is rampant in an area, it absolutely will make a difference. There’s a mall near me that has slowly been hollowed out because the area had an increase in shoplifting. Retail typically runs on very low profit margins, so it’s surprisingly easy to push them into being unprofitable.

I focused on food deserts because (1) food is a critical human need and (2) food must be bought frequently. Traveling to a consumer electronics store is something one would typically do only occasionally. Grocery shopping tends to be somewhere around weekly. But yes, it would equally apply to consumer electronics or other stores.

Retail outlets will tolerate a certain amount of product loss (shoplifting) as just a cost of doing business. But if an area has so much shoplifting that the location is losing money, it will eventually get shut down. It doesn’t matter if they’re a massive big box retailer or a mom and pop store. Stores cannot stay open if they are being bled dry by shoplifting, and they will leave eventual.

My objection is that shoplifting contributes to food deserts. But hey, I’m just some capitalist shill or something.

I’m bringing these up because they’re subjects we’ve wrestled with over at /r/moderatepolitics. The subreddit started with one simple rule, no personal attacks. Since then, a few more rules have been added that are more quality-of-discourse improvements. But even the “no personal attacks” rule turns out to be deceptively simple. Who is protected? Can you call a politician a duffus? Where is the line between pointed criticism and personal attacks? Just a few ideas to chew on.

Could you clarify whether source citation is a rule or just a guideline? While that can increase the quality of discourse, it also makes for somewhat higher bar to entry.

Could you also clarify as to whether “be civil” includes character attacks on groups of people, as opposed to just people on the lemmy instance?

Reddit’s userbase was beginning to decline around a year ago

I don’t think that’s correct, since all the sources I found referred to growth in user numbers. At worst might be a softening of growth.

Possibly a future feature? The Internet’s history is, after all, littered with the refuse of failed communities. It would be sad for Lemmy to hasten that issue. It would also help communities graduate from attaching to another instance to being their own instance if there was a social split (e.g. moderation decisions) or they outgrew their host instance.