Out of the 37,000 people who voted for posts or comments in the last month, the 10 most prolific voters (0.02% of us) cast as many votes as the bottom 59%. Here’s how that looks, visually:
As you can see, a lot of people didn’t cast many votes. Someone cast 23k votes, with a group of 13 each casting at least 10k votes.
“But of course most people aren’t really engaged, most of those 37k people are just NPCs who don’t really matter” you say, “Rimu you’re just including them to make it seem worse than it is”, you might say. Ok, cool, let’s pretend the bottom 85% of us don’t matter and just look at the top 5000 voters. Here’s how the distribution looks among them:
Still super unbalanced. Let’s analyze this a bit.
Among those 5000, the top 147 (2.94%) cast as many votes as all the others (4853 people) combined. Among those 5000, the average number of votes cast in a month is 1142. Among the top 147, the average number of votes cast in a month is 6868.
How do you feel about a tiny group having this much influence over what news you receive?
I agree, I don’t really mind people expressing their point of view. I often find it interesting to understanding how other people see the same event under a different world view.
I’m traveling, so that study took me a while to read all the way through. Thanks for linking it. It had quite a bit of interesting stuff in it. Many things in it made me think conservatives are potential future leftists (distrust of mainstream media, want safety/security/health for their community, etc.). In my view/experience, they realize things aren’t working/are broken, they just have been given a bad solution(s).
Haha. Yeah, I get you. It’s tough to discuss anything with someone who can just declare “god decided it should be this way” and that’s basically the end of the discussion.
I have had some good experiences/responses of discussing things with conservatives by ‘abstracting’ the discussion. As in I don’t discuss current policy or people, but abstract group A interacting with group/person, and also make sure they feel no pressure in the discussion and can end the talk at any time with no issues. I find it helps them not just “regurgitate” things they’ve heard for their information sources.
With you on the execution of the communist/anarchist ideas. Anarchism has an “evolutionary” branch that presupposes that anarchism can be brought around by nonviolence and policy changes. That’s a version I can potentially get behind and might be worth looking at, if you have interest.
Yeah, when someone asks me my political orientation, I say “I’m at least for social democracy”. Not sure where exact I land after that.
Can’t say I’ve every talked with cowbee (name sounds familiar), but that’s good they aren’t combative and explains their views. Also, didn’t know they had a FAQ (knew about the anarchist FAQ), might have to look for the communist version.
I can kind of see cowbee’s point, but that’s so far from how I see the situation and how they could get to what they want, its tough to understand.
Haha. I think I tried the discworld books, but they didn’t grab me :(
If you want to check out some potential policies that could be implemented in the US, you might want to check out the community I created (PoliciesForAll). I tried to come up with policies that could be enacted locally that would reduce authoritarianism and improve people’s lives. The polices are supposed to be “boring” so that no one would really object to enacting them.
I’m glad you were able to read that study! I took much the understanding you did, how we basically want the same things. We seem to come off just as crazy to them, but we’ve got to communicate effectively with each other if we ever want to deradicalize some people.
I don’t talk politics with my dad other than when I have to tell him he’s drifting into racism. 🙄 My brother likes to tease him by leading him to see the benefit of some bit of Dem proposed legislation and as soon as he agrees he says “well than vote for some Democrats because that’s what you actually believe in!” Then he gets all pissy and doesn’t want to talk stupid political takes for a while.
Here’s a good example of a cowbee information post. It has the like to the suggested reading list, which is nicely formatted, a long comparison of social democracy vs communism, and an infographic. Again, no implied support for anything they say, but impeccable presentation.
I gave you a sub for PoliciesForAll. I’ll have to read through your posts. I skimmed through the library one a bit and it seemed like good stuff. Things like that that give everyone a baseline access to necessities I think is crucial to having a fair, just, thriving society.
I generally don’t tell them my “alignment” when we are discussing (to prevent them becoming biased or prejudiced during the discussion). I offer to tell them, just I don’t want to bias their thoughts, before hand. They’ve always been fine with that and the reasoning.
Eek, that sounds tough. Sorry you have to go through that.
Thanks for the link, that was a helpful cowbee post. I’ll have to look into their reading list.
Thanks for the sub. I’ll have to finish writing and posting the rest of the policies. I left the best ones for last (ex. horizontal support on the local/city level).
Yes, coming into a chat without declaring an implied agenda is the best way to go. I think it took my inlaws about 3 years to learn I wasn’t a conservative, and even after I said I was, it took them a few more months to grasp it wasn’t a joke. They asked my opinions a few times but stopped. The one sister spent the most time talking to me, but after everything she said, she said along the lines of “this sounds bad when I say it out loud” and then never brought up anything again. They do treat me a bit different. I wouldn’t say bad in most cases, but there are definitely some times where things are off.
Always glad to share links and resources!
I look forward to seeing more from you!
Well I’m glad they don’t treat you badly, at least.
Haha. I want to finish up some of the remaining coding for my fedilytics’ posts before I go back to “policies for all” posts (unless I just have some written I haven’t posted yet). So, it might be a couple weeks before you get any new content there.
Either way, it’s been good chating with you :)
Good, I like the fedilytics posts too!
Nice talking with you as well!