Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@social.cleverlibre.org

Idk who needs to hear this, but:

People disagreeing with what you post online is not what "trolling" is.

I feel like I have to say this a lot, but *words mean things*.

@imklg Maybe people don't want to boost your posts because you call them "trolls" when they engage with you. 🤷‍♂️

@imklg Even offline, there are plenty of jokes I laugh at but don't repeat.

Why do you care more about going viral than you do about people showing appreciation for what you write?

In my mind, both boosts and favorites hold equal appreciative weight.

By far, the best mac & cheese I ever had:

@Natanox You're describing something subjective as if it is an objective measure.

For example, saying that "Nazis are the scum of the earth" is hate speech against Nazis. However, most of us would agree that such speech is valid and perfectly permissible.

But if hate speech is outlawed and a Nazi gains power over how those laws are used, they can and will use them to crack down on dissent, not to protect the rights of the marginalized.

That's why it's important to recognize that #HateSpeech is absolutely #FreeSpeech. The answer is not to try to shut it down with the corruptible levers of government, but rather to contextualize it and drown it out in inclusive, accepting speech.

@justiceLICSW Not gonna touch the capitalism one, but I have to disagree with you about regulating free speech. That's a recipe for people losing their other rights.
Speech is inherently subjective. When the first laws were passed in America outlawing hate speech, do you know who the first person was that they were used against? It was a cop arresting someone for proselytizing, after he called the cop a "damned fascist".
While free speech may be used in ways that are unsavory, it also allows us to speak truth to power in a way that many other countries don't allow (see, for example, blasphemy laws), and underpinned the entire civil rights movement.
If we cede that control to the government, the inherently subjective nature of speech gives bad actors in the government (I'm sure you can think of a few of them) a free license to shut down opposing views, reducing a major point of friction we currently have against a slide into fascism.

Ultimately, the TLDR comes down to: The best answer to bad speech is not trying to shut down the bad speech... It's drowning it out in good speech. Let people hear both sides and make up their own minds.

@Pat Right, but advertisers get less views when people hate the experience. Even from a pragmatic standpoint, they're incentived to do better.

Do news sites not realize that their UX is garbage, or do they not care?