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 :)
Additionally a rule to exclude off-topic could be beneficial.
We have this already, at least mostly.
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