It feels like the amount of both, divisive posts and ghoulish comments is rising again.
One could argue that the world has a lot of divisive stuff going on and lemmy just talks about it. But the way people post about stuff seems more oot and hateful than it has been in the past.
Not saying it is that but if I wanted to bring the Fediverse down or at least keep my customers from going there, I would sow this stuff as much as I can.
I'm blocking ghouls left right and center atm but if I ever asked a friend to join lemmy, I'd hate to think of what they would see that I dont anymore.
Do we need stronger moderation?
Maybe ban politics from c/memes?
Become a little more stringent on "dont be a jerk" rules in communities?
One thing that really bothers me is the collapsing "discourse". Trying to mend fences and keep the conversation between sides going ime leads to nothing but downvotes and shitstorm.
I feel like a little more interaction (instead of intervention, at first) of the moderators would do wonders there.
Being a jerk is extremely subjective - someone could brand you much worse than that just from a polite disagreement from your side, that they don't want to deal with. Aside from anything else, this is a highly "techie-y" space with a ton of strongly held opinions and ideals, and misunderstandings when communicating/discussing them happen. A lot. It will keep happening. People will look like asses without necessarily doing so intentionally.
Now, outright trolling, spamming, shitting on discussions with obvious bad faith participation, consistently derailing unrelated threads with one's hobby horse, obvious flamebaiting and so on... great. Reporting and removing more of that should be a priority everywhere.
Banning politics from any non-political community that can be persuaded to do so also sounds like a great idea on general principle. Politics is poison (particularly what passes for it in the US), and it would be polite to not shove it down the entire fediverse's throat. Every geographical sub is politics, every news sub is politics, there are dedicated politics and politicalmemes communities, and still it's fucking everywhere else also. Asklemmy and NoStupidQuestions are full of thinly veiled soapboxing (which leads to a lot of awfully stupid questions). People who want to JAQ off to politics can easily make their own community for that (that way, the rest of us can block it, as intended), or else keeping it in their pants would've been kinda polite, idk. Seems odd to insist on posting political stuff everywhere.
Your post is one hell of a ride. It starts very lenient and then says exactly what I was trying to say but worded much better. Thank you very much. That is both a very good explanation and one I happen to agree with fully.
Because I‘m an admin IRL, autistic and sometimes rude myself. But namecalling, trolling and shitting on peeps is too much even for me. I feel like saying that using certain brand is a stupid idea is rude but no big deal while going on about people and groups makes me squirm.