Post #1929114

While it’s fair to note that this is a pretty raw assessment of the data and could potentially be skewed by any number of variables that aren’t being accounted for, it agrees with my anecdotal experience and therefore I choose to believe it. Some servers take a more laissez faire approach and others take a more authoritarian approach, and that’s fine because joining a server is a voluntary act. No one is being subjected to anything unwillingly, they are choosing an experience that works for them. Tangentially related ruminations But I think it’s definitely valuable for people to recognize and be aware of the fact that certain servers tend to censor dissenting voices and create a walled garden environment. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it can be frustrating when users develop fairly extreme viewpoints as a result of this curated environment, and then react strongly when confronted with more mainstream perspectives. It’s good to explore different perspectives and see what the mainstream is getting wrong, but if you insulate yourself from the mainstream entirely, you kinda reduce your ability to actually challenge it. Like you can follow your own intellectual path and end up wherever you end up, but that’s a solo mission. If you feel like where you ended up intellectually is better than where you started and you want to share that with others, you actually need to walk back down the path, reconnect with the mainstream, and lead others step by step down your alternate path. It’s not effective to just stay in your obscure branch and yell at people about how wrong they are, you need to actively lead them through the sequence of rational steps that got you from point A to point B. And in many cases, they will nitpick and try to disagree at each step, because there’s an inherent inertia where humans simply don’t like to change their opinions unless it becomes absolutely unavoidable. Furthermore, the intellectual path that you followed could just be straight up wrong/illogical, and the opinions you are trying to change could actually have been right all along, and you might be the one who is actually wrong. So it’s a very scary thing to engage in such a way.