No Stupid Questions

Yeah. I've enjoyed Lemmy casually for years, but this last year has really killed my desire to read or post here.

The world is kind of a shitty place right now. And to be honest, I'd be surprised if it wasn't, at least to some degree, affecting everyone's calm.

Welcome back, I've been here the whole time and currently it seems a bit more toxic and hostile than when RIF shut down, I feel there are a couple more contrarians now than before but it hasn't been a steady decline. There has always been the odd jerk and troll on this site. I would say the time Lemmy was most wholesome when !cat@lemmy.world flooded the front page with black cats, it was such a cute problem for us to have. Anyone else remember that?

Like others I'd say it's cyclical month to month. This year there's daily doom in the news with US politics. If you want to avoid that then block !news@lemmy.world, !politics@lemmy.world, !usa@midwest.social, and other news and politics if it fills up with Trump posts. 2024 was a lot more hopeful and I think that reflected in the average user's demeanor even if there was bothsidesism, Gaza stuff, Ukraine stuff and Trumpism stuff. You'll be informed of important developments as Trump stuff leaks out on occasion but you don't need to be constantly engaged. Also if you do curate your All/Local feed then maybe some new communities sprung up that need pruning to fit your desired vibe.

Also: If you see a crapton of comments on a post with low votes then you know best to turn and run from the thread where most of the comments are.

No, just an uptick in complaints about it.

Makes me pretty proud if my subscription list, honestly.

No. Why? Are you accusing me of something? Are you threatening me??

/s

Excuse me?! Are you saying I'm negative?! Are you trying to start a fight with me, bro?! I am THE, I mean THE most positive, fun and likeable person on THE internet, bro. THE.

There's a facet of internet culture that revolves around ridicule. I'm not sure but I think it stems from the streamer world. It's like a modern form of celebrity gossip (read: harassment) that got commoditized into social media. So it's not just gossiping about celebrities like in the past era of media.

Harassment used to be driven by publishers. In this era of social media anyone and everyone is a content publisher. People trawl the internet for things they think can be made spectacle. Right down to a random internet comment 100 replies deep in a thread. If for whatever reason they think this person is to be made a fool of then they proceed to reply with such belligerence.

They engage as if they are an outside observer. As if they've an audience like it's Jerry Springer or something. As if they are the only human being. They don't see others as human. Everyone else are caged animals for them taunt. To throw objects at through the cage bars or to tap on the glass. They think they are the main character.

I think there's some psychological effect where their parasocial relationship with their favorite streamers and the herd of loyal viewers gives them a false sense of power based on the crowd effect or something. They can't see it from the perspective that they are a lone poster being deranged.

I think the vote/like/share model gives them a false sense of power. When they see the uplikes number go up, they think they have a herd of supporters behind them. A simple little number on a screen emboldens them.

Nobody seems to see anything out of the ordinary with this. Such is the nature of this era of internet and the hostility. It's normalized. They don't know of any way of being.

You're not a streamer with a herd of followers. You're just a sole internet user. You have no crowd behind you. It's like you think you do. It's bizarre. From observers outside your perspective, you're like an unstable person wandering the city streets. Pedestrians avoid you. They don't want to aggravate you. You're seen as someone possibly having a mental break. Or is it drugs or some kind of substance abuse.

On the internet now it's unavoidable. These crazies are out here. They're aggravated. They jump down anyones throat. On much of social media it's the only way they know how to be. Just belligerence against belligerence all the time. Nobody talks like a normal human being. It's like they're derealized. Dissociated.

A basic fact that internet has no moderators anymore. They're moderators in name only. The definition of the word is lost. To "moderate". To preside over a discussion. Nobody does this anymore. The crazies are allowed to run amok. There's some hints of actual moderation on Lemmy instances. The extremists have been grinding away at wearing this down though. In general this kind of thing is completely absent on social media anymore.

The only time I see it anymore comes from people from the older eras of internet. Those to came about in the modern internet have no concept of civility.

I've not noticed that in particular yet. but it might be because I block accounts that don't add constructively to the comments, so maybe I'm not seeing a lot of the worst behaviour.

Filter your content to get the vibe you want.

Blocking the porn and impotently hostile makes it quite the chill platform.

I also noticed how every post just has 5-10 random down votes. Like perfectly fine post in the correct community, not controversial, no rules broken, -10 down votes.

It seems that out in the real world and here in the digital world we have been allowed/engineered to lose our civility and respect. Reminds me of the rock orchestra DEVO.

Replies have certainly taken on a more Reddit-like quality to some things. Like rude for the sake of being rude.

I considered making a really insulting comment on this just for fun, but I just can't be arsed.

Yes, blocking posts from .ml and dbzer0 helped. Same goes for just liberally blocking anybody, who starts screaming instead of participating nicely.

I've been considering blocking .world, as some of the mods are behaving like power tripping reddit mods. But it's the biggest instance and without it I wouldn't have any content.

I first joined and started using Lemmy probably a couple months before you.

Back then, when anyone was being uncivil, needlessly hostile, rude, or aggressive, there was a very high likelihood that other users would call it out quickly. Many, many wonderful folks did it on my behalf multiple times and that's one of the big reasons I stuck around, because that's cool as hell if you ask me. I'm here to enjoy myself and have a little fun, not to be verbally abused because some problematic person lacks reading comprehension or prefers to make wild assumptions based on very limited information.

I won't say there's been a recent uptick in hostility, unless your definition of lately is a lot more lenient than my own. However, I will say that with each new outrage from Reddit comes an influx of new users and with each new influx, it's only a short period of time before I notice things are suddenly a bit less nice, friendly, and casual.

Sadly, things are at the point now where I rarely bother to read any responses, replies, or messages in my inbox. I usually just go in there to click "mark as read" to clear the notifications without reading them and move on. There's just too much negativity directed my way, often super randomly to the most innocuous stuff, or random users I can't recall ever interacting with who somehow seem to have a chip on their shoulder. It's actually kind of bizarre at times. Regardless, for my style of participation, which is mostly parodying old people facebook and sharing random anecdotes, feeling like I need to ignore replies is still okay, I guess.

Anyway, glad I'm not the only one who has noticed the shift. Wish there were an easy button to get things back to the welcoming place Lemmy used to be.

Post quality go down. Echo chamber go up.

I haven’t noticed anything in particular, and I do post in more controversial areas like Politics and News. There’s always a chance to get negative feedback in those c/.

I have noticed some ancient-ass reddit-type reposts of the same old shit that circulates reddit, though. That junk can die.

E: maybe I stand corrected. I asked for a source for a claim and got downvoted because someone’s ego couldn’t take it or it was too hard to provide a source.

Yes.

I change accounts far more often now.

From a neutral viewpoint, the world is more divided than ever, no matter what values you have, there's someone who opposes them with few, if any exceptions. Those opposing viewpoints have only grown in strength and number on the Internet, for years.

Additionally, the "us vs them" mentality of everyone is blinding them to even understanding why someone would disagree with their viewpoint. Of course that's not everyone, but it's a growing and very loud group.

Political violence is also starting to run rampant. Escalation after escalation. It keeps building.

So in this time of having a global voice, that can reach hundreds of millions of people with a single tweet or comment or thread or post or whatever, and with so much growing hatred among different political groups, it's unsurprising to me that conflict is rising.

Additionally, Lemmy is growing. Not everyone that joins Lemmy will be the same type of person that joined Lemmy after the Reddit API incident. That influx of people had a very similar value set, because they almost all came here from Reddit for the same reason. So there's at least a good amount of overlap in everyone's values.

Over time, more and more diverse people have been joining Lemmy, and it's not surprising that they have differing opinions on a lot of things.

This outcome was pretty much inevitable.

As far as I'm concerned, as long as it's done respectfully and civilly, then disagree. Debate. Try to understand the opposing viewpoint, even if you don't agree with it.

It seems hostility is the norm across most social media.

It's growing everywhere. The problem is subjective, which is why the current model fails. I've tried to suggest ones in the past where users have more control about general moderation in their communities or can at least choose their curators, with communities themselves are more decentralized from their instances, but there is no interest, at least not in losing that power of control.

The people who downvote after every reply don't really help, they either just want the last word or aren't really interested in an honest conversation. The anonymous downvotes don't really help either (specially when they coincide with thread upvotes coming from accounts with no comment or post history that just seem interested in nudging the conversation to an alt).