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.
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 [email protected] 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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)
As long as you are able to differentiate between bad language (skills), cultural differences, and bad behavior. On Reddit that's basically the same. Many things may sound harsh, but are often just expressed frustrations, voiced in an imprecise way. And often, nuance is lost in translation. Many foreigners aren't used to nuance like Americans are.
Many Europeans won't hold back. Like, you tell your neighbor that he's an idiot directly to their face. Out of love; how else would they know. Apparently, none of their friends told them. Poor fellow. Just an example. I've learned that Americans won't do that, for whatever reason. they would just call them idiots wherever they are not around, and keep smiling. ;)
Tangentially related, but yeah, some usernames one can remember after seeing them for the umpteenth time and then one spots the same people all over the hot topics 😅 that doesn't only apply to toxic ones, it's just that an active core of Lemmy community is still small enough, a nice time to be a part of it
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 think downvotes on facts and upvotes on feelings is just people wanting to feel validated, but not having the energy to engage with content. It used to happen on reddit too a lot. A lot of communities there are based on dealing with human emotions and situations in life. People seeking advice and validation about their lives being the primary motivation for even creating an account on the site.
I have a little pet theory backed by some reading that people are overstimulated by junk content to the point where they just can't meaningfully engage in serious discussions anymore and that leads to the phenomena of populism on a political scale and simple, emotion-based upvoting on a Lemmy scale.
In 00s and 10s, my friends and I used to engage with the Internet and each other in a very different way than in the more recent years: We basically were the content generators for ourselves, making conversations based on our ideas fueled by movies, books, or pure imagination, with a lot of jokes and other content that, compared to today, probably took much more effort; we made ambient music with a shitty mic, gathered together, somewhere away from our homes, to talk and watch shit on some weak-ass laptops, maybe game and talk on said laptops, maybe game online, share stupid proposals for our art projects like making music or writing stories or drawing, sharing results.
Of course, we recited some jokes, rein reenacted some, and ironically enough, the most repeated were the ones coming from short-term content, like the z0r.de flashes or skits from collection-type videos like the GMOD Idiot Box. Back then such short-form content was more of a rarity, it seems, so we still had a lot room for creativity and something more meaningful and such, while now this type of content has filled way too many spaces, with much lower quality, too - we've seemed to have stopped creating, despite having arguably much more fuel for it thanks to the many changes our lives brought.
Thinking about this makes me browse the Internet a little less and focus on writing or reading, two things I've been most creatively engaged with since I was a kid, hoping that can bring creating stuff back to my life and the lives of my friends and family, at least to some degree, as opposed to just consuming lazy content and having even lazier, meaningless, dull conversations with people I care about.
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.
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.
Reddits comments were slow to deteriorate. It initially had very insightful and genuinely comical comments and slowly turned to common jokes and politicized arguments. But now that we changed to this I feel like we can't go back, it is the discourse now.
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.
Post is still up, friend. Or at least I assume it is because I got banned from that community and I can't see the post anymore. I didn't see that mod take anyone else out with me, either.
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.
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.
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.
Oh man... I use Precisely the wrong phone, operating system, AND web browser!
Heck, I am using the wrong Operating System on my wrong Phone, and I am commenting right now on the wrong web browser.
Also, not American, but alot of my friends are.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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!
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.
I have noticed more hostility and more downvotes. Whereas before, everyone was mostly civil and hardly ever saw any posts get downvoted unless it was actual spam.
I’ve only been here since July 2023 but yeah, feels like over the past few weeks, it’s gotten a little different.
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.
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
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.
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.
Maybe it's the walled garden thing and the fact that there are less people now compared to 3, 4 months ago. The dust settled and everyone went back to reddit 🤷.
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.
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
Taking about U.S politics is a good way to make anyone not from U.S leave. I don't care about politics, yet my wish to not get bombarded by it simply cannot be fulfilled here. So I have to seek other social media platforms, which means I spend less time here.
All communities, no matter how friendly, will eventually grow toxic. Though right now it's mostly just shitheads from Reddit thinking that this is their new home for their tomfuckery. Life instantly gets better when you block them.
I mean awhile ago it was just normal arguments but it's ramped up to the point now where people are being racist, transphobic or saying they're gonna find them irl and gun them down which is something I don't want to see.
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'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!
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.
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.
Most claims I see are saying it's just criticism of Israel, and then excusing literally anything hamas/Palestine does as totally legitimate, which is way more than being anti-zionist.
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.
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.