Is it just me, or have the comments on Lemmy become extra aggressive over the past 3 months?
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.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)
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
Marked spoiler for potential vibe harshing
spoiler
It might be a mix of a lot of things. The Palestinian Genocide, Ukrainian War, Chinese Expansion, actual probable chance of a second Trump Presidency, and a great many other issues are probably weighing heavy on the minds of net denizens. That and less sunlight than in the summer months.
Plus I've never seen any posts from a Foodporn or cute pets lemmy community, but I have seen crimes against the culinary arts and some posts about pets that have died.
People are just not feeling optimistic, and that leads to feelings of repression and anger.
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 must be ancient here, because nobody has claimed this is like September 1993 all over again...
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 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 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.
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.
Sorry guys, I got mad
Reddit exodus effects. Reddit did not have the best kind of people on the internet. It just has had a bit more tamed 4channers.
Also, it is way too clear how there is political animosity that practically threatens real lives of non-white people, or ruins their job/career lives, in the current situation that went from Ukraine side picking to Israel apartheid support vs opposition. All this as we came from COVID pandemic, horrific mental health and fucked up socialising abilities.
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.
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.
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
I've always felt people are extra aggressive in here if that helps.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 honestly haven't noticed any changes. 2 months after the rexodus and the honeymoon phase ended, things stabilized. Some drama with tankies but not much else. People here are just as generally rude or kind as they’ve ever been.
All I know is the tanky and red scare shit took a steep nose dive.
Many will tell you this is normal and just how the internet is.
How depressing.
A symptom of rising tensions around the world in recent months, and this platform already being a political space.
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
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.
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.
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.
Depends on the threads you discuss i guess, I find it pretty chill
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.
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.
Yeah, I’ve been blocking a lot more than I used to.
I feel you: someone was trolling me for what I said about Busuu because I used the words ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ as a Christian.
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.
There has been an uptick in right wing nutbags and bOtH sIdEs morons... Coupled with the fact that we have to deal with Trump AGAIN had made all of us angrier because we didn't believe our neighbours could be THIS dumb to vote for a criminal that tried to overthrow democracy.
It's resulted in a tone of "I'm sick of this shit!!" from the left
Trump is a cancer.
I've only really experience negatively on "All".
I try to stay on "Subscribed" or rarely browse "Local".
This was about the same experience that eventually become of Reddit. Pre 2015 Reddit Frontpage wasn't as rage-baity as it is now. Since the Spezxodus the frontpage looks even different now. They removed usernames showing on posts because it takes away emphasis that you're a real person. There is also a change to on which subreddits make it to the Frontpage. Not sure if by design or just a symptom of the people who stayed on Reddit.
Most if not all of the communities I subscribed to were some form of hobby and they were usually level headed people there. Just people who were enjoying something. Some eventually became so large that some of the people who gravitate towards negativity showed up and did make it slightly worse. For the most part they were okay.
The problem with "All" is that it isn't curated at all and there is no thought behind most of it. There's is no community there. Just random votes.
I think the people who like drama and negativity seek those things. They'll reward posts that embody those things.
Oh dear day three and this thread is still going and doubling in size.
I thought I was being targeted by trolls, so I wasn't the only one
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
Only when I browse All
Conflict bots?
I've noticed the comments becoming more and more hostile and a lot more argument than discussion recently.
It comes in waves. I don’t like the overly sensitive crap either though.
HMU on telegram if you got verified Id.me let hit $100k upwards and split @pounddc1
It's becoming the new reddit
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.
sometimes, people need to be told they're stupid/shitty/etc. it just makes me feel better. i'm not trying to win a debate, i just don't want to hold my tongue because fuck you. with everyone so afraid of being cringe or big mad lol, there's no room left for healthy expressions of anger. anger is a human trait. anger is a useful tool. anger gets shit done. don't be afraid of your anger. tell someone they're stupid today. they might need to hear it.
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.
This place has always been a shithole. It has been months since I've been on here and this place is still as mind numbingly stupid as ever. The userbase is 40% brain dead Marxists who are vile and hostile, 30% insufferable tech bros who spam the same posts and articles day after day, and 30% annoying Redditors that made Reddit annoying who decided to migrate over.
There was a brief period of time over last summer when the Reddit meltdown was still fresh where this place saw a surge of normal people posting normal content, but the newness of this site faded and most people went back to reddit where is actual content, thus leaving the extremists and spammers who would've been banned on there anyway.