I don’t think I’ve seen every strawman argument against veganism all at the same time in the same place like that last thread that reached the front page the other day…

There’s one moderator on the community, but that’s not enough to stop the trolls coming here to derail any semblance of vegan discourse. Like, banning carnists here isn’t gonna happen (unless it does I guess), but we could have mods with copy-paste anti-strawman arguments with proper citations on standby, so hopefully it never gets as bad as the other thread.

I’m not a fan of heavily moderated places, but maybe having a rule like “don’t post post x y z argument and watch a b c Earthling Ed video instead” would help cut out some of the “good-faith” antivegans. But then again, the omis were excusing their behavior as it “reached the front page of lemmy”, that means murder is OK now! /s

Curious to see what the community’s thoughts would be. Do we just need to relegate ourselves to the circlejerk communities from now on, or would this community actually be by vegans for vegans?

Edit 1: I am now a mod of the community. I’ve reworked the sidebar and added some resources on veganism, rules, and links to other communities. I am interested to gauge feedback on it, and if anyone has any suggestions please comment them :)

  • gredo@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    51·
    1 year ago

    Hello everyone,

    I am sorry I don’t really have time to be on Lemmy right now, and even less so, moderating this community.

    I see two options:

    • I kill this community and all of you switch to one of the other vegan communities
    • Some of you take over this community

    If you want to become a moderator on this community, please PM me. Between the moderators we will then choose a new owner.

    If less than two people answer this call by end of Sunday, I will delete this community.

    Sorry about that, but I think this the best for Lemmy and the vegan community.

    Edit: We now have one moderator from Australia and me from central Europe. Would be nice to have someone from the Americas to have a nice time zone distribution.

  • JackGreenEarth@lemm.eeEnglish
    73·
    1 year ago

    If we ban carnists we won’t have any chance of converting them. We should instead argue against them when they make bad arguments.

    • Eevoltic@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      71·
      1 year ago

      True. I think we should have some resources in the community box and a FAQ of sorts that they can also be directed to. At the moment there seems to only be

      Community about everything vegan

      Although, thinking about it now, we could have a [Vegan Only] tag for posts where the discussion can be debates about veganism for vegans. Not sure if that would ever be respected or if it’s even practical. That way there can be the vegan outreach as well as serious discussions on veganism.

      • Audacity9961@feddit.chEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think banning carnists is the solution.

        I do think that rules similar to /r/vegan would help a lot.

        I think another forum would be better for arguments against veganism, otherwise this forum will just get swamped with upvoted carnist answers to vegan or vegan-curious questions, or upvoted arguments against veganism. We will also routinely see the same fallacies over and over again.

        Look at the recent discussion around the post of keto.

      • Pablo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’d appreciate that. To make it more clear I’d call it [Vegans only], but I love the idea that the OP can decide it upfront.

        • Eevoltic@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          We have this already, at least mostly.

          1. Topics not relating to veganism may be removed.

          Looking at the modlog I can see you’ve already used that as a reason to remove comments.

          In regard to somewhat off-topic—although still related to veganism—comments, I don’t think we need any kind of rule for that at the moment. The OP and mods can ask people to stay to a certain topic and I think most people would follow that. If there are problems with a thread getting super off-topic (like most of the comments being unrelated to the original post) then it’s probably better to lock it and maybe split it into separate posts if people want to there to be a discussion on something. It helps for visibility for the off-topic discussion as well as keeping the original topic easy to read and follow.

          Like, an example with the recent post that comes to mind. There was a discussion about the environmental effects of plastics, but it wasn’t initially tied into veganism (it did after reading the entire thread, but it should have been compacted into a single comment and probably tie back to the original topic like suggesting plastic alternatives to you instead of implying

          spoiler

          skin

          was a better alternative for you.). The comment was removed by you as it became the grounds for off-topic conversation and a lot of it wasn’t about animal rights at all, but it can be started as a new post if it’s tied back to veganism.

          Unrelated, but I think a few people have the assumption that vegainism is a hipster environmentalist thingy first and foremost, rather than an animal rights movement, so we should be on the look out for it. Obviously, the environment is important to animal rights, but topics about it are part of veganism rather than it being the full scope of what it means to be vegan.

          If we do get a lot of off-topic & vegan related comments on the majority of posts then we should consider it for sure.

          Sorry if I’ve worded this strangely, been about 30ºC in my home all day so I’m a bit tired lol

          • Pablo@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Thanks for the explanation and that’s exactly how I feel about it! I didn’t know I could convert a comment into a separate post, that’s a cool feature! I’m at work so sorry if I GOT it wrong lol

            • Eevoltic@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              I didn’t know I could convert a comment into a separate post, that’s a cool feature!

              Sorry, I meant manually doing that by asking people to make separate posts or by making one yourself. We can’t move comments (I think), but that’d be an interesting feature if we could. I do see that it could be used for abuse if mods could move anything anywhere.

              You didn’t get anything wrong btw, I just explained what I meant poorly :)

    • Chev@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      1 year ago

      With compasion. Nobody loves getting attacked or made feel stupid.

  • Doublepluskirk@startrek.websiteEnglish
    41·
    1 year ago

    How about consolidating some of the vegan communities? You concentrate the user base (which hopefully means more consistent content and less repetition) and get more mods in one place. I know other communities have done this successfully, but it’s dependent on mods agreeing, so maybe not that easy.

    • Eevoltic@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      42·
      1 year ago

      I’m not sure if that’s gonna be able to happen here. The only other good vegan community I’ve found was on hexbear, and I don’t think many people can even see it. I’ll start looking around though, see if there are any other vegan communities that may be able to do something like this. Although, I’d hate to see it ending up super centralised just because we need mods.