I see two issues here:

• more “dunking”
• awful takes getting more attention

Agreed 100%.

As someone with some unpopular opinions that I think are backed by good data, I get down votes on a number of my comments. I find that changing the way I present ideas goes a long way toward changing perception. My natural way of presenting things is to give the TLDR at the start and justify it after, but a lot of people don’t read past the TLDR. So when presenting something controversial, I’ll change my tactic to reference something popular and demonstrate some tweaks I’d make to arrive at my idea.

For example, I’m a fan of a Negative Income Tax. Most people don’t know what that is, and I used to start by saying it could replace welfare, which is unpopular (I have good reasons to want that end goal). Instead, I pitch it as UBI, but not going to wealthy people, and that’s a lot more popular, amd then down the thread I can show how it could make welfare more accessible (i.e. replace it) by eliminating the complex application process.

If I didn’t see downvotes, I wouldn’t be able to make that correction.

And we should take it a step further and have posts be digitally signed by the author. That way we can detect any db-level tampering.

And then there’s my instance:

• sh.itjust.works - pretty chill, and things tend to work pretty well

I’m not sure what else to say about the culture.

Yeah, pretty much. A segfault happens when you access memory incorrectly, and Rust is all about correct memory access.

Nice. I wonder if they’d be open to rewriting portions in Rust to catch these types of issues with the compiler instead of the user. I’m willing to help if someone else gets the devs on board.