• @Serinus@lemmy.world
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    01 year ago

    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.

      • @Serinus@lemmy.world
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        01 year ago

        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.

        • @Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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          01 year ago

          I mean a comment that does this

          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.

          I’m just not quite understanding what you mean. It doesn’t have to be a real comment.