I mean, the point of a mermaid isn’t that it’s a sexy looking fish, it’s that other than its tail, it looks like beautiful human women. In some stories, sailors don’t even realize they’re taking to mermaids because their tails are underwater. Also, mermaids were generally considered bad omens or malicious entities, and when they did seduce humans, it was usually to kill them, so it’s not like the folklore was very pro-mermaid sex.

Does Lemmy have a Confidently Wrong community yet?

LOL, you said that 4 hours ago. If that’s really true then get the fuck out if my notifications already.

“Fin.” said the guy who spent a week trying to get the last comment. Fucking clown.

LOL, yeah, definitely didn’t say that, but that’s about the level of comprehension I’d expect from a dude who thinks someone who’s drinking til they puke is more sober than everyone else.

Will do! Thanks for dropping in on a week old thread to let me know what a dipshit you are!

To be fair, I think their actual national pastime is Cricket, which is significantly more boring.

I’ve never had them, so I can’t comment on their taste, but aesthetically, it looks like a dish you’d be served in a Soviet prison.

Well, I’m really sorry if I done something to give you the impression I give a fuck what you think. That definitely wasn’t my intention.

I mean, yeah, but that’s so much better. Sure, our food sucks, but it sucks in such an elevated way that it’s almost an art form. British food seems like it was made by a guy desperately trying to put together a meal from ingredients he bought at a gas station. American cuisine seems like it was made by a chef who is losing his sanity to Lovecraftian horrors beyond our comprehension. The world looks at beans and toast and laughs at how pathetic it is.They look upon the Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco and weep, for they now know there is no God.

Sure, just like we created a story about him fucking a couch to bring attention to what a weird little choad he is.

I look at the form of downvoting you’re conducting as a form of vote brigading

You’re welcome to look on that however you like, but that’s not what brigading is; actual brigading is a coordinated attack by a group of accounts to affect the vote count of a specific community or user. That’s why it’s called brigading; you’re supposed to be part of a brigade.

It’s great that you only downvote things taken out of context or misinformation, but it’s not abnormal to use voting to express approval or disapproval for opinions. The vote counts on this thread show that most people are using voting this way.

More or less. A quick skim of the comments shows that there’s going to be some internal fighting over this, but I don’t really care. As long as it banning people for downvotes doesn’t become normalized by Lemmy Mods, this doesn’t affect me.

It could be, but it’s really not. This community posts shit insulting, “carnists,” all the time, then suddenly claims they’re getting attacked or brigaded when these posts get negative responses. I get not wanting to have to debate random assholes every time you share an article about veganism; I even get banning people for being hostile to your insulting memes; but banning people for downvoting a meme is messed up, which is why the other mods on /c/Vegan just removed Mod the responsible for this..

…or you don’t start a public community on a public website if you don’t want input from the public? Also, the other mods on /c/Vegan removed the Mod responsible for this ban wave, so it seems like they agree with me that downvotes aren’t grounds for community bans. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We insult the rich and powerful etc, what class of protection are you proposing to secure? The omnivores? Who’s going to police what’s hostile or insulting? I don’t understand what this call to action is trying to implement or suggest besides outside policing of communities which is one of the reasons the fediverse was made to combat that type of control.

What the ever-loving fuck are you talking about? No one’s asking for anyone to police the Vegan community. They’re free to post as many obnoxious memes as they like, it’s just fucked up to block people for a downvote. Yeah, a lot of Linux communities post shit about Apple or Windows users, but if the mods start combing through the downvotes to ban anyone who disagrees with them, I’d like to think we’d recognize that as an abnormal behavior. What is so hard about this?

Edit: It looks like the other mods on /c/Vegan have chosen to remove the Mod responsible for this ban wave, so hopefully we’re all on the same page that this is abnormal behavior, and not how mods are meant to operate.

Alright, well I didn’t realize creating a private community was such a hassel, but I still don’t see why I’m expected to hide from this community when they post antagonistic shit. If they want to insult people who eat meat, fine, but then you have to deal with the fact that the people you just insulted might downvote you. It’s not my job to help them insulate their echo chamber.

You’re actually acknowledging you’ve “downvoted a lot of their memes” because of previous un-related content

No I’m not. I could see how you could choose to misinterpret what I said like that, but I didn’t say that, and I’ll rephrase it so that there is no question as to what I’m saying; they share self-righteous, antagonistic memes, and when those memes wind up in my feed, I downvote them. There are also plenty of neutral posts (articles, etc.) from that community that I don’t downvote, but when shit like this, and this, and this ends up in my feed, I downvote it.

I could block the instance, but I see absolutely no reason to silence myself and allow their shitty opinions to go unchallenged. Why should I hide from their content and allow their community to insult me freely? I’m using the downvote button, the most passive way to express displeasure online, to respond to someone who is insulting me for my lifestyle. Why the fuck is the appropriate answer supposedly, “well, you should instead just hide from the people insulting you.” Why isn’t the response to the community, “Yeah, if you insult a lot of people, you get a lot of downvotes, maybe stop posting such hostile shit.”

I guess I could, but I don’t feel the need to turn my feed into an echo chamber. I’m not going to go to the community to pick a fight, but I’m not going to hide from content I don’t agree with. I’ll just downvote it and move on. Besides, the OP is right; if the mods don’t want their community to get downvoted, it’s their responsibility to make their community private, not my responsibility to block their shitty content.

Since I wrote this, things have changed a bit. The mod in question seems to have become extremely unpopular, even in her own community, and she’s gone on posting spree on /c/vegan that’s getting downvoted. I still think you can demonstrate that she was trying to manipulate the downvote numbers, but it the evidence is less clear.