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.
Totally true. I made a totally reasonable comment about a month ago (stated that women shouldn’t be hit on at the gym by randos), and I got downvoted to oblivion and the comment was spammed by 7 different users who essentially acted like I was Hitler. Then they started spamming my comment history and I had to delete all of my old posts.
Seemed like a real person was behind it, but may have been using bots to spam me.
That sounds insane. No idea if this was just one person but it is totally possible. I havent thought of this yet. This has happened to me on multiple occasions. Where a handful of folks immediately jumped me and a lot more reasonable peeps later chimed in confusing me even more since I though my idea was outlandish at that point.
Yeah, I think there’s a handful of toxic folks on here who are behind the bots or a series or alt accounts. I think Reddit probably had more infrastructure in place to crack down on stuff like that, but it’s happened to me (although less dramatically) in other threads here as well. But yeah, there’s no way my relatively normal comment got immediately downvote spammed and commented on by 6 different accounts. Definitely alts.
Jeez. I cant imagine how shocking that must be. I‘m shocked regularly by much lesser problems. The thing is I often cant see the underlying motives. If I do, its more a pattern that I recognize than a more obvious thing like sarcasm or bad faith arguments. They take a long time for me to show up.