Oh, for sure, I understand the distinction. Not seeing downvotes on your own posts is a good measure for reasons stated. I’m just saying also support a more aggressive stance, which is making downvotes off for new server instances, that’s all.
Yes. As a hexbear user where down votes are disabled I find the experience is much more enjoyable. Ideally down votes off would be the default for servers.
I love discovering little things like this. That’s a interesting find!
Score is relative though. On hexbear we have downvotes disabled. This means we can not down vote but also means down votes do not federate.
Studies have shown that down votes actually have a large psychological impact negatively on the user. Down votes are frankly unproductive. They might also encourage bad behavior, because if your goal is to stir the pot then down votes are a great indicator that it’s working.
On hexbear we operate on a fork of Lemmy. One of the changes is to the active algorithm, which makes posts decay faster then core Lemmy. Since the change things move pretty smoothly on the front page.
An automated system of banning is something primed for abuse. We see this already on other platforms that has trigger mechanisms for banning a user pending review. Its a shoot first ask questions later approach that could be weaponized against people.
Echo chamber is a very loaded term. A safe community is a protected community. To someone intruding on a space that values the community it has built, it might look like bad faith action. However, often the inverse is true, and the intruder is the one acting in bad faith. That could mean they willingly or ignorantly disregard the rules of a space, or are unwilling to listen and understand the perspective of a given space, and simply want to argue.
The value in Lemmy is that you can build and curate the kind of site culture and ultimately network culture you desire. If you do not like that culture, you can anyways find another place to hang out.
As it stands, you can implement your ideas using a bot. One thing definitely lacking on Lemmy is a kind of Auto moderator. It should be remembered though that auto moderator was a community built tool until Reddit assimilated it into the site as a core feature.
I stand corrected.
Kind of a disappointing read when 2 out of the 3 are not actually services you can use yet.
Could you provide some reading material for those off us who want to have a better understanding of their political process?
Why do you care about seeing downvotes? They’re bad for your health anyway.
:nerd:
Bespoke artisanal stars!
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponized information and disinformation and “fake news” to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, “a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism”.
- Andrew Brown. (2003). Scourge and poet
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author’s personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, Nazi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth.
Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A history (published 2003) draws directly from The Gulag Archipelago and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
However, in contrast to these depictions, we have this interesting report produced by the CIA regarding the nature of the gulags, or “Forced Labor Camps” as they describe them. Let’s take a second to note that this year, California voted to uphold their forced labor practices in the state, and that the US still maintains constitutionally protected forced labor as a form of punishment.
A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
- Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
- From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
- For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
- Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.
- Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
- A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
- In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
- Saed Teymuri. (2018). The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA
In terms of scale, Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. …
Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” …
Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states…
- Michael Parenti. (1997). Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, “over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision.” That’s 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States’ Prison Industrial Complex today is larger than the USSR’s Gulag system at its peak.
Regarding the “death rate”, In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive…
Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
- Timothy Snyder. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not death camps.
Nor was it slave labor, exactly. In the camps, although labor was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (minus expenses).
We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson…
The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG
We can comb over the details all you want, but I don’t think you care about the details. You are looking to reinforce your own personal bias, not correct it. You are not taking an objective and materialist view of history regarding the Stalin era of the USSR. Not even, at a minimum, drawing comparisons between the prisons in the Soviet Union and the current for-profit systems that exist today in America.
All this effort in this post will go on to be wasted, I feel. I do it, though because your post will attract others with similar questions, and hopefully those more willing to deprogram themselves will read it and do more investigating.
You’re not going to build a socialist movement if you build it off the back of Cold War era red scare propaganda. You came to us with a simple question, and to fully understand the answer, you need to read more and deprogram yourself.
Anytime comrade!
Before Marx, the term communism was used by many utopian socialists to describe an idealist, egalitarian society.
Its modern usage is almost always traced back to Karl Marx’s usage of the term where he introduced the concept of scientific socialism alongside Friedrich Engels. The theory of scientific socialism described communism not as an idealistic, perfect society but rather as a stage of development taking place after a long, political process of class struggle. Marx, however, used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably and he drew no distinction between the two.
Lenin was the first person to give distinct meanings to the terms socialism and communism. The socialism/communism of Marx was now known simply as communism, and Marx’s “transitional phase” was to be known as socialism.
Prolwiki > Communism > Etymology
So yes, there is a distinction between the two, but I have a feeling this isn’t the distinction you were referring to.
Could you be talking about Social Democracy? Because, that’s not socialism, or communism. If you’re interested in this distinction presented by Lenin, you might want to read Chapter 5 of The State and Revolution.
So I think the CIA is talking about specific camps, and it could be possible that these camps were operating different working hours, but maybe what Callcott is describing is an average or generalized notion of an eight-hour day across the entire system. From the first page of the CIA report, section (2), subsection (a), it states:
Forced Labor Camps ia the USSR: This six-page report provides detailed information on the organization of labor camps and on working and living conditions in camps the area of Bratsk (N 56-02, E 101-4O) and Tayshet (N 55-57, E 96-02) in Irkutsk Oblast. The bulk of this information concerns Ozerlag, [ REDACTED ] Other camps described In the report are Kraslag near Tayshet, Minlag in the Vorkuta area, and Vyatlag rear Verkhne-Kansk in Kirov Oblast.
So these camps might have been operating 10 hours days for a reason, and then changed that policy later.
We’re talking about WWII, so actual Nazi’s. You define them by the uniforms they wore and the allegiances they swore, it’s not some mystery.
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponized information and disinformation and “fake news” to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, “a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism”.
- Andrew Brown. (2003). Scourge and poet
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author’s personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, Nazi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth.
Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A history (published 2003) draws directly from The Gulag Archipelago and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
However, in contrast to these depictions, we have this interesting report produced by the CIA regarding the nature of the gulags, or “Forced Labor Camps” as they describe them. Let’s take a second to note that this year, California voted to uphold their forced labor practices in the state, and that the US still maintains constitutionally protected forced labor as a form of punishment.
A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
- Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
- From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
- For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
- Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.
- Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
- A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
- In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
- Saed Teymuri. (2018). The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA
In terms of scale, Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. …
Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” …
Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states…
- Michael Parenti. (1997). Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, “over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision.” That’s 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States’ Prison Industrial Complex today is larger than the USSR’s Gulag system at its peak.
Regarding the “death rate”, In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive…
Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
- Timothy Snyder. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not death camps.
Nor was it slave labor, exactly. In the camps, although labor was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (minus expenses).
We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson…
The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG
We can comb over the details all you want, but I don’t think you care about the details. You are looking to reinforce your own personal bias, not correct it. You are not taking an objective and materialist view of history regarding the Stalin era of the USSR. Not even, at a minimum, drawing comparisons between the prisons in the Soviet Union and the current for-profit systems that exist today in America.
All this effort in this post will go on to be wasted, I feel. I do it, though because your post will attract others with similar questions, and hopefully those more willing to deprogram themselves will read it and do more investigating.
You’re not going to build a socialist movement if you build it off the back of Cold War era red scare propaganda. You came to us with a simple question, and to fully understand the answer, you need to read more and deprogram yourself.
The API has an endpoint for marking posts as read. It would be a matter of adding a button to the interface to mark the post as read.
I’m sure if an issue was opened on the Lemmy UI side it could be implemented by someone.
I wonder what dbzer0’s implementation is like. I know slrpnk uses dokuwiki with a db connector for using you’re Lemmy account for authentication (you have you be a slrpnk user).
I think if these servers are already implementing their own wikis then the burden on server admins already exists for those that want it. I haven’t checked in on the Ibis project in a while, but maybe one day that would be the “official” wiki for Lemmy, in that it’ll have first class support for integration with Lemmy.
Ive been thinking about this a lot and its a real shame Lemmy doesn’t have a built in wiki…
Yeah, generally downvotes are pretty minimal across the board for sure.