this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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There's an easy experiment I've accidentally run.
Find a thread with a consensus emotion. For example, say that something is a scam, so you have outrage, mistrust, and scepticism.
Take some words from the opposite emotion, calm, trust, believe. Use them to make a point that agrees with the consensus. Watch the downvotes roll in.
People will focus on the emotions from the individual words and not think at all about their meaning as a whole.
Can you give me an example?
Here's one at -2 that's all facts, but doesn't agree with the sentiment of the thread.
https://lemmy.world/comment/7823893
I'm clearly not a fan of Spez (I'm here, aren't I?), but people constantly exaggerate the editing incident.
The fact is that he took a bunch of comments that said "fuck u/Spez" and made them say fuck [the commenter].
That's a problem because it demonstrates what could happen with more subtle edits. It creates reliability issues. But those more subtle edits aren't what actually happened. People constantly take the potential for harmful abuse and act like the harmful abuse actually happened.
Counterpoint: the potential for harmful abuse from a source that has proven itself willing and capable of it, can in itself be harmful abuse. With that action Spez pointed out "your reality is mine. I can make you say anything I want and there's nothing you can do about it." So, then, people stopped saying things, one of the contributing factors to which was the fact that Spez could just sockpuppet your account whenever he wanted, to say anything at all.
That sounds like an abusive relationship to me. It creates reliability issues like you said, it breaks the bond of trust, and that won't be restored. The damage is done at this point regardless whether he ever took it farther than the initial threat.