Saw this a lot on Reddit. Its not specific to here, just trying to gauge how people think. I’d see people posting about how “X said this! Have you seen what else they said in their site history?” And a stream of votebombing would happen.
I also wonder if this behaviour went the other way. Bias was confirmed, so profiles get a little boost? There are sites that hide posts and comments after a certain number of downvotes, but these always seemed to get the engagement even after.
Viewing the comment history of other people shouldn’t even be a feature, or at least optional. It made Reddit so incredibly toxic.
Same, post history should be optional.
It’s such a childish behavior to stalk someones history just to be able to dismiss their argument. It makes nuanced discussion between different camps so much harder and is a big reason why Reddit was so polarized.
On YouTube, everything is much more self contained, you only see like 3 comments of the same person on the same channel. It is much more refreshing to be there in my opinion.
Being on Reddit is like fighting with your toxic ex who constantly brings up something irrelevant you did 10 years ago.
The features a social network has very much influences the quality of the discourse. I would much rather Lemmy gives users much more fine grained control over these kinds of features. Like give users the option to hide their post/comment history, but then perhaps also let communities ban those users from commenting, let each community decide. Same with anonymous posting etc…
How else are we supposed to find out is someone is a bigot asking bad faith questions and/or trolling? Comment and post history helps us decide if we should ignore, block, report, or respond kindly to someone.
Or it could go the other way - it could confirm the bias of others who have bad views of the world. It could actively connect them. And trolling is not always a bad thing, its been used in the past to tackle big corps who’ve fucked up for one thing.
We aren’t talking about big corps though, we’re talking about regular users. This is lemmy, not reddit, no big corp to tackle here. And just closing off information such as comment and post history because “trolls could find other trolls to group up with” isn’t an issue if the common users goal is to block and report bad actors.
You’re the only person I’ve ever heard say something positive about YouTube comments sections
depends on what channel you’re on
I’m sorry… you want Lemmy to be more like YouTube?
Because I think you might be in a minority of one there.
I can understand the argument that trawling through years worth of posts to see if someone ever said something naughty is a bad thing, because it doesn’t allow people to grow and change.
That being said, having very little or only a few innocuous comments means you can’t tell if someone is arguing in bad faith, and by the time you can tell in the discussion itself, they’ve already won. That, and in real life people have reputations for a reason. A clean slate for each and every comment (or a small group of comments) would lead to chan behavior, which is a net negative.
Something like 6 months of history, the most upvoted/downvoted/controversial comments (and of course their context) might be an alternative. I’m not sure how well hiding history and silencing users would work: that could just force trolls to make new accounts, which makes things worse.
I see your point but I don’t agree with removing the post history or otherwise hiding it. For better or worse, post history is part of the social construct.
Think of it another way: hang out in a community long enough and you’ll have lived through the post history of other participants anyway.
I have seen this go badly and to reiterate I do appreciate the sentiment: I used to be very active on a Reddit wristwatch sub - people who had previously posted in subs related to counterfeit watches often got a hard time whenever they posted in other places (one sub in particular). It seemed that some commenters could never accept that some people had both “reps” and “gens”, or that some people wanted to have a good knowledge of “reps” (to avoid being fleeced on the second hand market, for instance).
Fortunately, there were enough level-headed folk (and more reasonable subs) that didn’t adopt this attitude.
We can choose to look or not look and we can choose whether to act or not act on what we find. And one way or the other the post history is there anyway.