Just empathize for a moment, imagine - you’re scrolling on your feed which encompasses the world’s daily news. You see a picture of a modern day concentration camp’s aftermath. You see the gruesome effect it has on people or you say the mass grave. You open it up and you decide to write a comment. What do you comment on?
I just think if it’s anything other than empathizing with the subject matter and engaging with it your comment is going to come across as robotic, as inhuman, because if something like this doesn’t move you then there’s something wrong. I don’t think a meta comment pinned to an empathic and engaging topic would be down voted so horribly. For instance, if someone said “I can’t believe this level of cruelty is still going on in places with abundant resources historically. Side note: when the source material moves off Twitter we should reshare that as Twitter is owned by a Nazi.” I would think people wouldn’t stop to down vote.
It’s not about getting in line with the prevailing narrative in this instance, it’s just the nature of Internet discussion in an aggregate platform on a serious topic that’s got a long time scale. You’re talking to strangers about people being tortured or dying and we live in a world where some non-marginal amount of people don’t care or applaud it so the first thing a frequent reader wants to do when reading a comment is vet that you’re not one of the applauders.
Just empathize for a moment, imagine - you’re scrolling on your feed which encompasses the world’s daily news. You see a picture of a modern day concentration camp’s aftermath. You see the gruesome effect it has on people or you say the mass grave. You open it up and you decide to write a comment. What do you comment on?
I just think if it’s anything other than empathizing with the subject matter and engaging with it your comment is going to come across as robotic, as inhuman, because if something like this doesn’t move you then there’s something wrong. I don’t think a meta comment pinned to an empathic and engaging topic would be down voted so horribly. For instance, if someone said “I can’t believe this level of cruelty is still going on in places with abundant resources historically. Side note: when the source material moves off Twitter we should reshare that as Twitter is owned by a Nazi.” I would think people wouldn’t stop to down vote.
It’s not about getting in line with the prevailing narrative in this instance, it’s just the nature of Internet discussion in an aggregate platform on a serious topic that’s got a long time scale. You’re talking to strangers about people being tortured or dying and we live in a world where some non-marginal amount of people don’t care or applaud it so the first thing a frequent reader wants to do when reading a comment is vet that you’re not one of the applauders.
I don’t think that really adequately describes what’s happening in this thread.
Yes the subject is distressing, but plenty of distressing topics are discussed on lemmy all the time without this level of animosity.
I feel like every “distressing” thread has comments like that one that are innocent but obtuse and suffer the same vote ratio.
But perception is manipulative, without data I can’t back my position. Maybe we’re both wrong and the reality is somewhere in the middle.