Is it just me, or have the comments on Lemmy become extra aggressive over the past 3 months?
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?
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!
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.
More exposure in news and media. More asylum seekers from reddit.
Definitely. A few months ago, there basically weren't any crytpo-bros on Lemmy. Now any time I say anything negative about crypto, about six of them jump out of the woodwork to give their big long spiel on "the useful use-cases for NFTs" which I just roll my eyes harder every fucking time over.
It's mainly you just have more trolls and aggressive people because we're beyond the initial group who was actually looking for more community. Admins/mods do a pretty good job of banning trolls, but not until after they've shitted up the place for a bit, usually.
Also, the nature of Lemmy means that someone who gets banned for spamming an article just goes and makes an account on a different instance and then just goes and makes the same post in the same communities literally minutes later.
Popularity is rising, the bad actors are coming. Oh well.
Now any time I say anything negative about crypto, about six of them jump out of the woodwork to give their big long spiel on “the useful use-cases for NFTs” which I just roll my eyes harder every fucking time over.
This seems to correlate with the sudden rise in promotion of the Brave browser I've been seeing here.
Anyone here seen the folding ideas video?
Man one of them was trying to bring their crypto bullshit here and I fucking ripped their ass a new one. It's probably still sore to this day.
What are you on about? If anyone is interested, read my comment history
Edit: if we store the shitty pictures on blockchain, literally nothing changes, except a big and bulky blockchain. "I can just save the picture lmao" will still be the answer.. Are we supposed to store every software on blockchain too? I don't think it's viable
This article too is flawed
Positive and negative are qualitative and measures in this case.
Subjective ones at that.
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.
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.
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
Please don't. Join another instance, run your own, whatever. We need more canapés!
Ha ha I wish—that’s one of the few things I left up that didn’t get completely bombed by a hostile user and their 8 alt accounts. All I said in a comment was that women should be allowed to play video games without the expectation of being hit on my random men, but I guess that’s an unpopular opinion 🤷♂️. No more content from me lol.
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
Maybe, but you're still awesome.
Awe shucks. Thanks. Right back at ya.
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!
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
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!
TL;DR - A millennial goes on a tangent about the good ol' days.
I remember being permanently or temporarily banned as a kid/teenager with simple messages like "go outside". Mostly for being too rude or annoying, or edgy. As teens and kids often are.
Idk if it's a thing on Lemmy, but I'm all for extended temporary bans for simply repeatedly being a dick to others.
The "old internet" for me was something like 2006-2012. And I agree, people who pine for it probably couldn't hack it in 2024, it was racist, it was homophobic, and threads went off the rails with people giving unsolicited advice on how to please your gf, but it was fun, it was dynamic, often complete strangers behind phpBB nicknames felt more real than your closest friends on Instagram do now.
I yearn for those days. Not because I particularly want to deal with racist, homophobic idiots, but because I miss the dynamic internet before mega social network sites. I miss the nuance, people knowing each other on forums and whenever someone who's known in the community would post something that on surface level is banhammer-worthy per the rules, the community would talk it out and the hammer would fall when people call for it, not always strictly adhering to the rules. And yes, that did produce the power-hungry mods. But it's not like much has changed.
I feel like I'm going off on a tangent. I just miss the randomness.
I recently had a chat with a new colleague about how you can't joke with a lot of Zoomers about race/nationality/sex because they don't perceive nuance. I think it's a cultural thing imprinted by the internet content coming from America. We're both from Eastern/South Eastern Europe and people don't immediately get their panties in a knot over offensive jokes because they realize that a racist-sounding joke does not make the person racist. And I feel that's the state of the internet now too, and it's ok, but I miss the sharp edge that it used to have.
I also miss the weird smileys.
tldr a child gives us his wisdom lmao
first by mocking and then by doing the thing he mocked
well played asshole
the internet only existed for like eight years before you started using it and you pine for your past but shit on those who were alive for the first part
just fuckin retarded man, snap out of it and quit being a cunt
My suspicion is that a lot of redditors migrated over here about 7 months ago when certain apps shut down, including myself. At first, they were polite in an unfamiliar environment, but they've grown comfortable and act out, or speak less thoughtfully, like they originally did on Reddit.
Why don't you shut hell up nerd
It's just you
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
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.
No, the mods of the community can see who sent the report.
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.
Being pro something you are against does not break the "be respectful" rule.
You really shouldn't go around trying to silence people with different opinions than you.
Trigger warning on this. Can't get the spoiler thing to work at all.
Definitely not imagining it.
Since I first joined I went from having nice conversations with strangers about the weirdest things, never having a single negative interaction, to nowadays saying I think women deserve a baseline level of respect and being told I should die giving birth to a rapists baby.
To be fair, the dude who said that did get banned from the instance I'm on for that, but it happening in the first place would have been unthinkable to me a few months ago.
agreed there is a definite influx of misogynistic incels lately. Feel like I’m spelling out how women are human beings a lot more than I ever had to here before. Conversations are more on the de-evolutionary side.
There's no need to debate misogynists here. Downvote and report them and we'll ban as soon as we can.
It's amazing how quickly the Internet ruins the Internet. Hopefully we can work together through defederation and as a community that doesn't just let shit slide to keep that 00's era chat and forum feel alive. Either way, good luck out there!
Yeah it fucking sucks
The syntax is a bit confusing. You need to leave the first "spoiler" untouched. You can delete the second "spoiler" to set the title, and then replace the three underscores ___ with your text:
"
\
::: spoiler my-title
my-text
::
"
Edit: Looks like most apps don't support this and this spoiler markdown only works in the browser.
thats something a complete idiot would say
I've found that it depends on the community. The bigger ones get more toxic comments but more niche ones are still polite. What that suggests to me is that people who are here for entertainment are more likely to rant and mouth off, whereas as those who are here to share their passions and interests are engaging in a more fun and positive way.
The 80/20 rule applies to toxic Internet behaviors as well, 20 percent (or less) of the user base is responsible for 80 percent of the toxicity.
It's always the same people being awful here, if you are taking notes, you can quickly identify the worst posters on this platform after a week. People always complain about how they are unfairly banned by reddit moderators, but you have to remember, sometimes the bans are really justified.
I think the ony real (and unpleasant) solution is to moderate very aggressively whenever there is bad behavior (although, I must add, permanent bans should be rare and reserved for extremely bad behaviors)
Holy cow I thought I was the only one running into rude people.
I'm dealing with that right now, and also what I noticed is the abundance of downvotes on facts, but upvotes on feelings.
Dunno. I still think Lemmy is better by quite a bit. I still participate I reddit occasionally, and I think it’s become far less engaging as a place of discussion. It’s just the same old reposts and tired old comments over and over. It’s rarer to find insightful comment chains.
Lemmy is starting to attract some of the Reddit tropes. Dumb sex questions in asklemmy or any of the other retreads that we’ve all seen a score of times. But as far as discussions go, if one can get into one, they’re good.
I feel the mainstream lemmy instances have attracted the reddit mob mentality where any deviation from the groupthink is treated as radicals or bots.
That's because capitalism is an extreme right wing idea
I’ve always found the tone harder here than it ever was on Reddit. Community blocking is key to enjoying Lemmy; even still, I think the audience is younger here than it was on Reddit and younger people broadly feel pretty shafted by today’s economy (they’re not wrong either) and tend to express themselves in simpler solutions (some of them correct in ways older folks can’t let go of their habits to recognise, many of them wrong in ways you can only learn through wisdom). Lack of consistent community management means you have to be much more aggressive in blocking individuals and communities yourself.
I've resorted to instance blocking instead of community blocking, most of the worst offenders are all on the same instances anyway. And then individual users based on their nonsensical comments, plus a curated keyword blocklist.
It's just like back on reddit... One of the reasons why I couldn't do it without Sync, haven't seen the filter capabilities in any other app.
This isn't a new problem, Reddit was the same way. As a site grows, it gets harder to moderate, and that means more people trolling for attention. Go to your user settings and change the default view from "All" to "Subscribed", and you'll have more control over your home page.
Early adopters are closer to a community and are aligned by technical and ideological similarity; then come secondary waves that aren't as community focused; and then once you hit a critical mass it becomes worthwhile to try to shape consensus, so the marketing and agit-prop shillbots enter the fray.
Yeah, probably a little, but this same change was 1000x more noticeable like half a year ago when reddit banned third-party apps. I think it's reasonable to lament the change, and I kind of miss the tight-knit community from the first three years I was here, but it's still worth celebrating the platform taking off. Ultimately all you can do is be the change you wish to see in the world.
That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I'm going to be a little less zen about it.
That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I'm going to be a little less zen about it.
The spammers aren't here in custom full-force software_dev_lemmy_bots mode yet, but when they come, moderation tool development will increase in effort tenfold.
The nation states are already using their "play Guess The Bot and lose" games. It's the ones who post often and with clear lines in the sand you need to worry about. Problem is, there is a sea of regular people just like that.
Lemmy needs to go through a fork or three before it becomes viable to the mainstream. Currently Lemmy users produce much less legitimate worthwhile information on far less subjects than reddit, and even Quora shudder thinking about it.
Granted, I've only been here for about a week before reddit disabled 3rd party apps. Maybe the first 3 years were the golden years. I'm only speaking as to the bot infestation I see currently.
How do you know the bots aren't already here? What security fortress does Lemmy have that reddit doesn't which stops bots from being here?
I don't anymore, but it definitely still doesn't feel anywhere near as bad as reddit is.
In the past, the security fortress Lemmy has had that reddit doesn't is the userbase being too small for organizations to feel astroturfing is worth their time.
Holidays, shorter days, colder weather affects depression a lot.
And there is a correlation between being very active on social media and depression.
Online Social Networking and Mental Health
Just be nice and patient with them they deliver most of your content for free.
At least in the communities I'm subscribed to and interact with, I've still seen it mostly be positive interactions.
It's been my experience that it's a couple problem instances where most of the toxicity comes from.
Lemmy.ml users are the worst by a long shot. I hear they're mutants who live underground!
If you're talking about the two that I think you are, I agree. I suspect my pleasant experience is due to my instance defederating completely with those, which is pretty swank.
Which ones, if you don't mind me asking?
I've seen toxic behaviour supported by mods on Hexbear, Beehaw, and Blahaj mainly. World is also pretty bad.
You're right, and you're on one of them.
I feel like its hit and miss with lemmy. Depending on the topic, your way of thinking and the community, you can either get folks to be agreeable and helpful or get dogpiled on, called names and other childish things.
The internet is still a place where being a jerk has no major consequences so folks may let loose ok someone they deem lesser than themselves, dumb or plain offensive.
IRL this doesn’t break through as much if you‘re no longer in school as most workplaces at least have some restrictions against bullying or mobbing and a lot of peeps have good lawyers these days.
So, from someone who polarizes since being born (not by choice): it’s just circumstances imo.
I must be ancient here, because nobody has claimed this is like September 1993 all over again...
I am not that old but I know that reference. :)
I was 2. I'm still traumatized.
Marked spoiler for potential vibe harshing
If I say something spicy it's usually because I feel like whoever I'm responding to isn't making a point in good faith.
There was a thread last month where someone was asking why race was a bad thing. That wasn't the text, but it was subtext. I posted something about how op probably would have been sterilized under eugenics policy. I get why I was banned. It was spicy. I still think op was pulling a "just asking questions" racism. I responded how I felt that kind of question deserved to be treated. Look me up in the mod logs if you're curious.
I still think op was pulling a “just asking questions” racism. I responded how I felt that kind of question deserved to be treated.
I suppose you wanted to handle it yourself, but the proper way to treat that stuff is just to report it to the mods and move on.
Leave it to lemmy.world to ban you for being against eugenics.
I apologize if these include me.
As we in the US loom towards the election I am getting more and more raw and worried about it. And with that my fear brings out screechy obscene me. That is one of my fear responses that I lose the handle on a lot.
So please forgive me. I will try to avoid political threads as we ramp up to either the end of American democracy or the continuing gerontocratic oligarchic republic.
I feel like a very high percentage of posts and comments here are just "Americans bad." And as an American, even though the things they are complaining about don't apply to me specifically, it makes me feel very unwelcome.
I feel like that’s kind of the case for a lot of things here. God forbid you find anything remotely positive about the wrong brand of phone, operating system or web browser. You’re unwelcome.
It's a bit on an echo chamber. The world is frustrated with us. But if you are in another country as an American, you'll be judged more by your actions usually. In my personal experience most people still understand that there's 2 Americas and a little bit of humility and humbility is all it takes to be seen as more than a red hat and a flag.
Europoor here, sending virtual support to you.
I think the high popularity of Trump is very damaging for all of the USA.
Well, I'm an American and right now our country is going down the shitter and it's important to call out the fascists that are taking us there. Does that shit apply to me specifically? No. Does that mean I ignore it? Fuck no.
Maybe you should grow up and accept valid criticism.
Yet it is stupid to ignore the progress we made despite the political climate. The No Surprises Act and Inflation Reduction Act come to mind. No amount of people saying "lmaooo american healthcare HAHAHA" is actually going to fix our healthcare, and repeatedly focusing on the bad without the good just represents a lack of understanding of actual issues.
Maybe you should grow up and stop seeing the world as black and white.
I honestly don't feel much has changed. There was perhaps a bit of a "new" feeling in the start and some excitement about the project, but I don't think people have gotten more aggressive or anything.
But I think all this probably depends what circles you hang out in. Probably also depends on what instances you federate with.
Yes! I've been seeing a lot of toxic comments and posts lately. It's kinda turning into a niche hyper toxic reddit.
many, if not most of the popular/highly-trafficked communities are basically echo chambers now, anyone who disagrees with whatever the cookie-cutter general consensus of the day is becomes a hate magnet.
Disagree with an admin and you're a pariah.
I think there are more bummer world events happening like the Israel Hamas war and bummer late stage capitalism in general which leads to more inflammatory and charged discourse, compared to just after the Reddit exodus when we were united against Reddit.
Lemmy in general isn’t different from other social media in that it isn’t great for political discourse. Without the human connection there is less incentive to consider the experience and viewpoints of others when you can just downvote and read a hundred that agree with you
I haven't noticed, but some people say they are feeling political tensions, and...
The year 2024 is notable for the large number of elections, with 7 of world's 10 most populous nations (Bangladesh, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Mexico) voting; countries that are home to nearly half of the world's people will hold elections in 2024.
From the Wikipedia complete list.
I guess everyone is just a little worried about national and international elections.
I just started a few days ago and already had to deal with a transphobic troll. Online is so toxic that I'm afraid eventually all social media platforms end up on trolls radar and they seek to destroy them. It's a shame because they ruin social media for everyone including themselves.
So many people lack a basic sense decency that they actually think it's ok to cause harm to other people simply for their own amusement. It's usually straight white american males too.
Report transphobic comments and we'll get to them as soon as we can. No one should have to deal with transphobes.
I just started a few days ago and already had to deal with a transphobic troll.
This is why a lot of trans people are on Hexbear, which aggressively polices such behavior and defederates from instances that don’t sufficiently moderate it.
It’s usually straight white american males too.
Can I ask why you wanted to add the last sentence? You might be right, statistically, but the tone sort of implies that you judge the group rather than the behavior. (apologies if that was the joke).
Personal experience.
From personal experience about 80% of the harassment I recieve is from straight white american males, not kids either, many times they're middle aged. There are some females in the mix, rarely people of colour but there have been a few.
If I were to guess I would imagine it's because women and people of colour also belong to vulnerable communities and run the risk of attracting the wrong type of attention and becoming targets themselves.
Not every white american male is a troll or violent obviously but since 2015 the ones who are continue to become active threats.
Honestly I see them almost as victims themselves. No troll, stalker, mass shooter, etc started out that way. They became radicalized online by getting wrapped up in online activities they were not emotionally nor intellectually equipped to handle.
An example is the Christchurch massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mosque_shootings
He didn't start out as a mass murderer, he was radicalized online in places like 8chan. He even posted on 8chan that they needed to keep an eye on Christchurch because something big was going to happen.
It's not just americans and it's not just white males but so many get caught up in the culture of trolling that there are going to be those who become fundamentally damaged by the continued activity to the point that they take it too far and sometimes that leads to things like mass shootings, or swatting, stalking or other criminal behaviour.
Can I ask why you wanted to add the last sentence?
Because it's true? And this is coming from a straight, white, American male.
look at you pretending you don't use heuristics
As a straight white American male, word.
And, sorry (that's my greeting, lol. no one seems to ask why when you're 40, bearded, chubby and white, they just nod in silent agreement).
Some people just don't like others to have nice things. Even if it's something that should be as simple as tolerance at worst and acknowledgement and acceptance at best. A diverse community creates a better world, it can also cause stress for folks that are afraid of change. Thank you for being part of this one and sharing your experiences so any of us that are listening can self analyze and be better in the future. Please be patient with the slower ones as they are drug Cialis first into the modern world.
Sometimes it's hard to see yourself through a narrow lens.
I FART IN YOUR GENERAL DIRECTION!
100%. Seems like people are just itching to fight now and taking comments out of context constantly. They're just throwing out insults instead of engaging or asking for clarification. Dunno what happened.
People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor.
Careful. I'll correct my neighbour's spelling, too . :-)
It's definitely gotten worse, especially the political circlejerk, jeez.
with the american elections coming up, tensions are rising. Quite predictably so, really
Sorry guys, I got mad
Vibe has changed but it's because of more users. The original users picked Lemmy because they were tired of reddit, so they were naturally nice people that didn't vibe with the shit that was going on at reddit. They wanted something else. We wanted something else.
That's why we shouldn't wish for exponential growth. This place will lose its charm quickly if we end up arguing with the trolls.
Nah, most of the extreme racism or genocide denial/advocation I moderate comes from lemmy.world and shitholefornazis. .ml users are generally tame, especially the old hats.
Comming from Reddit, I find it really peaceful, but IDK how it was before. Except for the people at Hexbear who bullied me for liking South Park. The socalled "dirtbag left" is basically the proudboys pretending to be far-left.
It's never a bad idea to instance block them. They'll endlessly bully you and gang up like a bunch of school children. The only thing that stops it is to stop responding.
I do not know what you are talking about, you were the one who came put swinging, they reacted like I would expect,
Also proudboys are Fash, guess who is the most anti-fash
Also ypur political annalisis seems to go from "is like trump suporter" to "Is like proudboy" not very nuanced
P.S. I only found this because I had to track down said hexbear post because of the smearing you do with it while convenently not linking it... so for context https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/3197853, it was not for "simply liking southpark"
Liberals just can’t fathom the possibility that socialists walk among us, therefore they must be cryptofascists or paid shills of foreign States.
I assure you that we have been here all along, despite two red scares and a cold war to try to purge us.
It’s pretty insulting, considering that American socialists helped bring about the weekend and the eight hour workday.
There are socialists, and then there is a fairly new wave of terminally online toxic assholes borrowing socialist rhetoric.
There is a difference between activism and empty virtue signaling. A huge portion of the online left is more interested in letting everyone know how pissed off they are than actually making the cultural gains necessary to improve anything.
There's people who are constructive and try to be polite who have different world views, and then there's the people who just insult and spam racial slurs. The second category gets a block on offending users and a block on an entire community if it's repeated
Considering a lot of them are anti-Semitic, defend USSR invading Poland, some even homophobic. They're literally just larping fascist pigs
Still conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, I see. First of all, anti-Zionist Jews and non-Zoinist Jews exist.
There is no fediverse instance more queer-friendly and than Hexbear; what are you even talking about?
You obviously don't know what fascist means. You should probably stop using the word until you go read the definition.
redfash
My god. I sit here couching my thinly veiled calls for civil disobedience in "in minecraft" and "this is satire," and here's someone openly calling for a murder. Maybe next time I want to make a joke about billboard burning being a fun pastime for the whole family, I won't be as afraid of getting a visit from the fun police
I don't mind disagreeing and even bickering a bit, but when somebody gets extra or pointedly disengenuous I just block em. IDGAF. 🤷
I think it's just a growing pain of the contradictions of Federation resolving themselves, mostly in the political sphere.
You have left-wing instances (lemmygrad.ml), center-right instances (lemmy.world), and right-wing instances (sh.itjust.works). Even if different instances defederate with each other, there will always be overlap instances (lemmy.ml being the biggest, but also lemm.ee, startrek.website, mander.xyz, programming.dev, etc.). And while individual users can block specific instances, this doesn't prevent them from seeing and responding to their posts. Communists and Liberals and Libertarians, who each believe the others are literally as bad as the Nazis (and I'm not making a value judgement here - maybe some of them are right), are forced to interact with each other on occasionally political topics.
The hard right, unlike in Reddit, isn't really a figure here - and moderators on Lemmy don't know how to handle political disagreements where both sides are within the sphere of acceptable discourse.
That and an election year plus huge, ongoing international events recently means people are all heightened and on edge.
Idk why, but I feel like I'm starting to associate this kind of behavior with people who used to be on Reddit and moved over here when all the third party apps got Thanos snapped.
I first got here around July 2023, and it was pretty cool. Nowadays it's probably a little less cool.
The same assholes who were on Reddit being pieces of shit are here too.
It's the internet, everything is reduced to being shitty within weeks of getting noticed.
The Eternal September found us 😭 But it was only a matter of time
Anecdotally, I’ve seen more spam lately too.
Btw, what are we calling aggressive chat bots? Auto-trolls? Strife bots? Contentionator-3000s?
Giving them a name means acknowledging their existence. Block and ignore ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ.
Just lots of trolls lately, most communities are fine but some have poor moderation so these types of comments/posts take some time to get deleted. All the communities I'm browsing are quite chill.
I'll downvote all of you
People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor.
You should ask a police officer how some neighbours talk to each other...
It has gotten worse and it will only continue to do so. There are people who are respectful and hold back their darkest impulses, but there are others who choose to hold those same features in high regard, as literal virtues in their eyes. Blocking hexbear and lemmygrad has helped my own peace of mind immensely, but you would not want to block lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or such so... here we are.
I do not really see any permanent solution to this problem, short of eternal vigilance. That's just nature though, e.g. viruses constantly evolve and seek new hosts, hence hosts that do not keep up die, there's no way around needing to keep up defenses against such a tireless onslaught. Similarly for information vs. misinformation too, it seems:-(.
It has also gotten much harder to have any discussion with even the tiniest hint of subtlety on the Fediverse - is Biden/Linux/socialism/religion good or bad? "Yes." For some of us, knowing what will happen - the flood of toxic responses I mean - if we dare to speak up is enough to cause us to cringe enough that we would simply rather stay silent instead. If only the opposing side were like that too! But no, they elect not to hold their own tongues, even while expecting YOU to hold yours. That too seems just the nature of the universe.
if we dare to speak up is enough to cause us to cringe enough that we would simply rather stay silent instead.
It's a different kind of Chilling Effect. It reduces conversation, because it convinces some people to not become involved at all.
Whereas conversations like this one with you has the opposite effect - thank you for your addition and the link:-).
People here realize that narratives have consequences and know we can't just live in la-la land where everyone is happy all the time. I mean yeah you can do that but then don't be surprised pikachu face when you find yourself in the company of neo-nazis who are doing the same.
I posted a cookie recipe in response to a cookie meme, got roasted for not converting baking units to science units. So yeah, people are getting kinda aggressive.
Dont you mean you got baked, not roasted?
Sounds about right. I've noticed on Lemmy people get a hard on for calling Americans stupid because "they don't know the metric system". Even though I've explained a few times that a) we use both, depending on the situation and b) there are other countries that do the same
The number of trolls is going to increase as the user base increases.
Plus, you get the same negative effects of the echo chambers like Reddit did, but I think the communities being so small amplifies the effect.
I haven't noticed a change, but I also haven't ventured outside of the echo chamber/hug box of my subscribed communities feed.
Never forget the way the human brain works, with the more common interpretation being: "it takes 7 instances of positive things to outweigh 1 negative."
For my part I haven't really noticed any difference, but I only infrequently comment!
I've said it before, Lemmy is a fickle place.
I expect it will get better with time as we get more users.
The halcyon days of Lemmy lasted a week or so. As soon as you have mods coming over for Reddit you have all the shit they are schlepoed along with them. I’m only in here when I’m shitting and then only because I’ve memorised the blurb on the back of the air freshener can already.
OMG, yes! I've been running into so many rude/toxic comments lately. For me it feels like this place is devolving into Reddit again.
A symptom of rising tensions around the world in recent months, and this platform already being a political space.
Before it was toxic positivity. The veneer has broken down now that people aren't trying their best to bring over reddit refugees, and the ugly underneath is visible.
I know this is a bit account (nothing against you btw I think the bit is great) but honestly this is 100% correct.
Lemmy was nice when it was just FOSS enthusiasts trying to build a better social media. Now new people have joined who are using it for its intended purpose, instead of just trying to roll a snowball.
All of those FOSS enthusiasts have the same horrible opinions and attitudes that everyone else does, once you get them talking about something actually important and contentious rather than their treats and toys.
Thank you for agreeing, but this isn't a bit account. It's an account where I'm a bit more honest than usual. I made it so I could be open about my gender on social media without being outed.
Many will tell you this is normal and just how the internet is.
How depressing.
When they are insulting should mean that they have no arguments... maybe they have issues on their life. Who knows, but it's a waste of time to reply to them.
I haven't really noted a shift, but there's always a few folks in a given place, real or virtual, that are absolutely unwilling to take a nuanced view. My way or the highway and all that. Hard to have a historical view though when a major part of the users have all come on board in the last 7-8 months, me included.
Aggressive yes, and more people deliberately misinterpreting what you say just to feel smug. Also people that don't understand that a Lemmy comment can't have the exhaustive detail and context of a Wikipedia article, and they take any omission of such in a comment as ignorance by the op.
You're aggressive!
That's just normal behavior of human beings.
removed by moderator makes this funnier no matter what the original comment was.
I blocked hexbear not because of their political beliefs, but because they would fucking ruin entire content sections by being super annoying.
I'm also glad to see your comment not triggering the same brigading behavior I used to see a lot more often.
Yeah. You can say one thing they agree with, but saying one thing wrong will trigger a deluge of negative comments of people participating in a group hate.
Yes. Yes you are.
This vibe has been here from the start. But it was kept at bay by defederating left and right from "troublemakers".
Problem is actual troublemakers don't care where they are. All they have to do is make a new account and keep on troubling.
So all the isolation managed to do is slow down the conflict, make it less visible. And it worked too.
Yet you can't stop the fighting, not for long anyway.
We have to fight, have to make drama. Peaceful living is too boring all the time.
Simply a side effect of successful user growth without adequate growth in moderation of the user base. Same thing has happened on every forum since the first BBS
Depends on the threads you discuss i guess, I find it pretty chill
Sounds like fighting words..
I kinda started getting that feeling too but I thought that was because I started getting more involved in discussions and political ones more. Before it was mainly quick comments for me. Anyways if someone starts to insult or deliberately distort what I am saying by cherry picking combinations of words from my comments, I put on my "three words at most troll hat" and the discussion dies pretty quickly. No point in writing a paragraph for a comment if the other person is just gonna take one word out of it and bash the rest with it.
Not just the comments. It used to be page 4 or 5 where the hate/rage content would start appearing in the top posts. But it's been creeping up, and now even page 1 looks pretty bad sometimes. I bet even Americans are starting to feel alienated if they're not perpetually angry.
A couple days ago someone was trying to debatebro me I told them to eff off and that I wasn't going to humor their bad-faith ass.
Was expecting to get hate for it but instead woke up to 20 votes on the comment. It's awesome.
Yeah I've given this place an honest try but people are so quick to downvote, it's not exactly encouraging me to actively post here
Also I notice the same 10 assholes in every thread
Especially the grammar Nazis that floated here on a turd from the reddit cesspool.
Yeah, I’ve been blocking a lot more than I used to.
Tolerance always has a limit. And the one thing any tolerant society can never tolerate are intolerant people - because they will destroy that society. Trump and his followers are the very definition of intolerant.
Thus the "if you are tolerant, you have to tolerate me" argument is often used by aforementioned nutbags or internet trolls, and I very much hope you fall into the latter category.
And regarding stupidity - sadly there is no mechanism to ensure that it is fairly distributed. A less than ideal public school system paired with the propaganda of media conglomerates can easily result in a society with half the population considered "dumb" (not really stupid, but brainwashed / uneducated with a lack of critical thinking and/or a lack of basic scientific knowledge ...) - but I would not judge the US population that quickly. Trump is probably also a symptom of the broken US democracy.
I don't tolerate those who have no respect for others. If you hate women, gays, trans people... No I won't tolerate you.
Half at a minimum.
Definitely has gotten worse. I even resorted to blocking users who do nothing but antagonize others
Part of it is the paranoia about what people perceive as trolls or shills, combined with thinking that their opinions are a matter of life and death. I've seen people here talk about the old internet and I think what helped back then were communities were generally smaller, more tight-knit, and there was a greater separation between the internet and "real life". I can't fault people for being paranoid when many governments and corporations have added the internet as a platform where messaging must be controlled.
There have been media works that point out that the internet, although allowing people to connect from all the way around the world, paradoxically isolates us. This is something we can at least partially mitigate by giving others the benefit of the doubt and not be so quick to dismiss and antagonize. While it is tough to respond kindly to someone who insults you, sometimes doing so can have a disarming effect on them.
I thought I was being targeted by trolls, so I wasn't the only one
Now you've made an enemy for life, buddy.
Oh dear day three and this thread is still going and doubling in size.
I blame politics
Only when I browse All
On a related note. Is there an Android Lemmy app that allows me to view my subs as a homepage? It's only local and all in Voyager.
Eternity has this, great app in general
I'll try that as well. I landed on BaconReader (RIP) for the other site. Haven't found quite the same fit with Lemmy apps. Always down to try a new one though. Thanks!
You can set this up in Connect
I'll give that a look. Thanks
Lemmy is a left leaning echo chamber loaded with hateful and violent speech toward Trump and the GOP in general. Whenever I bring this up, I get downvoted to oblivion. I hardly engage anymore, not like I used to. Too much crazy. Trust me, I fucking hate Trump, but the death threats and shit are too much
It's becoming the new reddit
It comes in waves. I don’t like the overly sensitive crap either though.
I've noticed the comments becoming more and more hostile and a lot more argument than discussion recently.
Conflict bots?
I blame the Israel/Palestine conflict heating up again. It made it more apparent how much antisemitism was lurking below the surface. Ecer since it seems like there's a significant divide even on communities that aren't news and politics focused.
Yeah, that's definitely what the conflict brought to light. Not the fact that people and most nations are happy to allow or even support literal genocide and ethnic cleansing as long as it's done by people they like against people they don't like.
There were 153/193 votes calling for a ceasefire for a UN resolution. It's not most nations that are happy with it
For me, it's the genocide thing. Like how the USA killed over a half million people in Iraq.
Maybe it’s the instances I frequent, but almost all of the “antisemitism” I’ve been seeing is actually anti-Zionism/non-Zionism, which are not antisemitism, despite Zionists’ unending efforts to conflate the them. In fact, Zionist antisemitism is a thing.
I also think it's the Israel/Palestine conflict but for the complete opposite reason lol.
Well there's only a few hundred people commenting and a lot of initial transfers have stopped using the site because it only caters to extremist views. Hell even I'm about to just stop and use Tildes exclusively.
Personally I've never seen it the way everyone claims, from day one this place seemed to just be the worst of reddit, but who knows.
You're conflating a natural phenomenon, anger, with maladaptive expressions of it. Name-calling is not owning your anger; it's disowning it
Let's be needlessly toxic 🚀🤩
In any case, welcome to my block list.
no you only hab anger issue
kbin.antisocial
The average person who comes here is looking for something that isn't reddit, because they were caught in the great content and moderation purge as reddit frantically tries to maintain a clean public face while it prepares for its IPO, which will turn it the rest of the way into garbage.
In other words, people who come here are pissed off to have to come here, pissed off to be here, and pissed off in general. As the exodus continues this trend will increase, and I truly hope we don't start making the censorship mistakes and heavy-handed banhammering that wound up creating the need for this place to begin with.
I would guess that many people came here for that reason. On Reddit, keeping etiquette has become more important than contents. Having your post deleted because of noninclusive language or harsh tone, that's not fun. Having to write "in my opinion" before any relevant sentence is also annoying. Of course, it is. It's always opinions.
Bunch of pansies with keyboards, as some would say.
It might be partly that. And have you seen how neighbors talk to each other?
I try to concentrate on the content, and I always keep in mind that the author might be in a hurry, is having a bad day or whatever. It's rarely personal.
Racist much?unchained immigration all over the first word from India, muslims and Africa.
Lmao it has nothing to do with immigration
One thing I love about lemmy coming in from reddit is that people don't vote like sheep, so there's lots of cases where your votes balance out. Meanwhile on reddit if you get even 3 downvotes within the first few minutes your comment is doomed to get slammed into the 50s.
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.
You can see them jumping from Lemmy server to Lemmy server as they get banned from each.
Eventually, they'll just set up their own instances so they can bother people with impunity.
And then we block that instance! Or it gets defederated.
So there's going to be a fediverse and a mirror fediverse?
Isn't that basically what basedcount is?
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.
There you go, that's your problem. Political topics always gets heated and brings out the worst in people, no matter the platform. The first thing I did is block all politics (and general news + sports) communities, and it's been a fairly pleasant experience so far for me, except for the odd troll or fanboy that shows up every now and then.
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.
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.
Well remember that any instance you federate with also gets to vote. If you feel like votes aren't matching your values, perhaps you should try an instance with more of the "aggressive" stuff defederated.
The irony.
Indeed. And looking at the deleted post... definitely a power trip.