I feel like things on Lemmy were pretty chill several months ago, and that’s started to change.
People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor. Now I get the sense that people have become quick to be negative, attack, and not be constructive.
Am I crazy in feeling like the vibe has changed?
Worth noting, the number of people who come here “to escape authoritarian moderators”. Nearly all of them were moderated for good reason.
I also don’t think the presence of places like hexbear are doing us any favors.
The thing that actually worried me a little bit more was people upvoting the aggressive comments to be top comments.
I was reading some thread over at !politics@lemmy.world today, and a lot of stuff advocating for political violence were the top comments. Mods yanked it, but nevertheless, people were vibing with some comments about dragging people through the street. I felt like I was on X/Twitter.
Yeah, I think it’s a legitimate and growing problem. I think a lot of folks don’t realize, but since growth has slowed from Reddit more broadly, the people who feel they have been “unfairly silenced” are the fastest growing subpopulation around here. If I’m honest, I think the only real antidote is to reestablish growth from communities with kinder dispositions.
We don’t need to take from nicer communities, we need to build nicer communities. Right now there aren’t any left wing instances, which is a big problem. It was nicer back when lib.lgbt existed.
Right now there aren’t any left wing instances
Bro what
Also it doesn’t have anything to do with political distribution. It’s an issue of habit and disposition.
Left wing people are disposed to helping others. Right wing people aren’t. Nobody’s cultivating left wing spaces where kindness is a habit.
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You read my mind. It’s the same feeling I got when a reddit sub would degrade into a toxic circle jerk, and I’d have to unsub. Except it feels like it’s a lot of lemmy communities lately. I feel like I can’t respectfully disagree with anyone without being met with ad hominem attacks. I don’t think something like changemyview could survive.
Also reminds me of those anti-moderate subs, which is a sentiment literally synonymous with radicalization. I’m all for free speech, I would just rather they state whatever take they have with a calm, measured demeanor.
You have a problem with people being against the status quo?
People like to fetishize revolution.
Even offline I have friends that talk that kind of way and just reveal themselves as being poor students of history.
The irony.
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YES, IT’S JUST FUCKING YOU, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WITH THIS GUY…
Careful with the punctuation it makes you seem rather aggressive
Suck rocks you worthless git!
How dare you make the obvious joke before I got a chance to make it! You supreme overlord of feigned fury! Fake raaaage!
I was busy and couldn’t make it to the comment section in time, you two comment sniping chodes deserve to be interrupted by someone knocking on the door then lingering until you finish when you’re taking a poop
Strap in. It’s an election year
Internet’s gonna internet.
Blocking still works though.
It’s almost always a small amount of people causing problems.
I still get some ghost replies occasionally, but it’s never going to be anything worth reading. Most of the toxicity comes from reply chains they start as well, so you’re not missing out on any constructive conversation.
Maybe, but you’re still awesome.
Awe shucks. Thanks. Right back at ya.
People have been asking this for as long as I’ve been on lemmy.
It depends a LOT on which instances you interact with. It’s a challenge of the fediverse in that every person has their own unique experience, some bad others good.
Definitely this 👆
And it also depends on the communities you visit. If you enjoy verbal first fights, try politics and news. If not, there are also quite a few wholesome communities too.
No you. /j
What I found is that hot topics come with the season, in June/July about Ukraine, in July/August about Meta, in October/November about Gaza, in December about Biden. There’s been plenty of charged discussion on these topics, and internal Lemmy dramas.
However, one thing I see more often here on Lemmy than other places is people updating their comments, being willing to admit they’re wrong or that their comment came off as hostile, and open negotiation in general. Consider the near defederation of programming.dev and lemm.ee, it was resolved amicably to everyone’s benefit.
I also see people thanking others for softening their tone and being kind, to them I say, keep doing that and encouraging good behaviour and ettiquite online!
The vibe has gotten much more negative, to the point that I don’t really want to post anymore. I came here in early June with the Reddit API stuff, and was shocked at how communal it was. It actually got me to start posting again (I hadn’t posted on Reddit since the early to mid 20-teens because it had gotten so toxic).
My last three posts (nothing inflammatory) have gotten flamed. Someone actually hunted me down based on my post history and I had to take the time deleting most of my old posts.
So from my perspective it’s not just you. I’m back to being a lurker.
Yeah I stopped posting when most of the smaller communities died out due to the DDoS attacks on Lemmy world. All the larger communities are pretty hostile to new people
Sorry to hear. If you want a more laid-back community, there is !casualconversation@lemmy.world
Thanks, I’ll give it a try. Just made my first post there
Law of probability. The more people join, the more of a chance someone will say some stupid shit.
Also: SUCK MY BALLS
Thank you for translating that into Manbird
THE MOON HIDES FROM ME
We can absolutely do better than reddit on this one. If someone is breaking rule 2 (be respectful), report that comment and we’ll get to it as soon as we can.
You’re awesome btw.
o7
Are reports anonymous? I don’t want to report a user that breaks rules only for the offending user to be friends with an admin and get me kicked from a community as payback
No, the mods of the community can see who sent the report.
That can be a good thing, too, to find out if someone is abusing the report feature, as was common on Reddit when people didn’t like someone’s comment.
Reports are not anonymous, but they also aren’t public. Only visible to admins and mods of that community.
It’s a tradeoff, anonymous report abuse was a big problem on reddit that I didn’t want to replicate here. If the admins or mods aren’t trustworthy on your server, you should pry move to another one.
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Maybe you should take care to follow said rule yourself? Looking through your recent comments in this thread it seems more to me that you are going in hard with bad takes and get hurt from getting dunked at. The question is really: Do you consider yourself respectful when you use ignorance to spite leftists?
For the first time in a liberal’s life, your viewpoints are being the least bit challenged. Must be awful, we socialists can’t imagine what you’re going through.
Why don’t you shut hell up nerd
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It’s just you
It’s an election year and Trump is in the election.
Lost among the “internet sucks now, it used to be better” discourse is that the old internet was heavily moderated. The laissez faire parts of the old internet were known as the seedy corners of the web. Social media and its modern derivatives like lemmy take on that latter philosophy.
It’s no wonder it’s chaos every where. The libertarian tech bros have really impressed their world view on everyone. So the prevailing philosophy is these “digital town squares” should be absolute free speech zones. Except town squares in real life do not work like this anywhere. At least not in most liberal democracies. In real life there is bureaucracy. There are police, fire, ambulances. There is the simple matter of neighborly social contract. You cannot go into a real life town square and do whatever you want. You cannot just up and fight strangers, engage in lewd acts, set up encampments or what have you without permits. In the same way internet requires structure. Counter intuitively it used to have a lot more of it on account of sites being run by a real human being. Not the mega conglomerate investor groups feeding off ad/engagement profits.
Those users unfamiliar with the old internet yet pine for the good old days would have hated it. Power hungry mods is a meme as old as the internet itself. It’s a necessity of the internet. Hardly anybody gets banned for being an asshole anymore. Sometimes (often more like) people need to be forced offline so they can go outside.
Say something dumb in an IRC channel? Get banned.
The good ol’ days when I was young and irresponsible and got banned for it. I learnt how to converse with people online through this. Talk shit, get banned. I also feel like I forgot some of this on later platforms.
I hated it at the time, but like most learning experiences, grown to appreciate it later. I can’t believe I had free and unmoderated access to the internet’s back in the early 2000s. Shout out to those mods for putting a teenager in their place!
I feel the mainstream lemmy instances have attracted the reddit mob mentality where any deviation from the groupthink is treated as radicals or bots.
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That’s because capitalism is an extreme right wing idea
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