Worth noting, the number of people who come here "to escape authoritarian moderators". Nearly all of them were moderated for good reason.

I also don't think the presence of places like hexbear are doing us any favors.

YES, IT'S JUST FUCKING YOU, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WITH THIS GUY...

Suck rocks you worthless git!

Strap in. It's an election year

Internet's gonna internet.

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.

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.

Maybe, but you're still awesome.

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!

Law of probability. The more people join, the more of a chance someone will say some stupid shit.

Also: SUCK MY BALLS

Why don't you shut hell up nerd

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.

It's an election year and Trump is in the election.

thats something a complete idiot would say

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Coincidentally, a genocide has been unfolding in the past 3 months, and that tends to put people on edge.

I feel the mainstream lemmy instances have attracted the reddit mob mentality where any deviation from the groupthink is treated as radicals or bots.

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.

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)

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.

Holy cow I thought I was the only one running into rude people.

I'm dealing with that right now, and also what I noticed is the abundance of downvotes on facts, but upvotes on feelings.

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.

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.

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 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.

At least in the communities I'm subscribed to and interact with, I've still seen it mostly be positive interactions.

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.

I must be ancient here, because nobody has claimed this is like September 1993 all over again...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Yes! I've been seeing a lot of toxic comments and posts lately. It's kinda turning into a niche hyper toxic reddit.

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 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 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 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.

A lot of people are having a hard time right now. Try to be the change you want to see and react kindly and rationally would be my advice.

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.

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 definitely gotten worse, especially the political circlejerk, jeez.

People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor.

Careful. I'll correct my neighbour's spelling, too . :-)

I FART IN YOUR GENERAL DIRECTION!

Yeah, definitely the vibe has changed. It's kind of sad.

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.

Sorry guys, I got mad

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.

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.

You mean comments like this one?

https://feddit.nl/comment/6215624

Yeah, it's getting worse.

I don't mind disagreeing and even bickering a bit, but when somebody gets extra or pointedly disengenuous I just block em. IDGAF. 🤷

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.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen more spam lately too.

Btw, what are we calling aggressive chat bots? Auto-trolls? Strife bots? Contentionator-3000s?

I'll downvote all of you

The same assholes who were on Reddit being pieces of shit are here too.

It's the internet, everything is reduced to being shitty within weeks of getting noticed.

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.

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...

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.

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!

A symptom of rising tensions around the world in recent months, and this platform already being a political space.

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've said it before, Lemmy is a fickle place.

I expect it will get better with time as we get more users.

Sounds like fighting words..

Many will tell you this is normal and just how the internet is.

How depressing.

OMG, yes! I've been running into so many rude/toxic comments lately. For me it feels like this place is devolving into Reddit again.

You're aggressive!

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.

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.

Yeah I've given this place an honest try but people are so quick to downvote, it's not exactly encouraging me to actively post here

Also I notice the same 10 assholes in every thread

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

That's just normal behavior of human beings.

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.

Depends on the threads you discuss i guess, I find it pretty chill

Especially the grammar Nazis that floated here on a turd from the reddit cesspool.

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.

Yep, you're not wrong.

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 🤷.

every time I see a full page meme in the middle of a comments thread I want to punch a hole right through its face

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

its why I barely participate let alone browse anymore

Yeah, I’ve been blocking a lot more than I used to.

I blame politics

Definitely has gotten worse. I even resorted to blocking users who do nothing but antagonize others

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.

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 thought I was being targeted by trolls, so I wasn't the only one

Now you've made an enemy for life, buddy.

It comes in waves. I don’t like the overly sensitive crap either though.

I've noticed the comments becoming more and more hostile and a lot more argument than discussion recently.

Conflict bots?

I know I am late to this discussion but I also have given up on Lemmy. Instead of decentralised company we got little fiefdoms with local land lords acting often worse than the worst Reddit moderators.

Where Reddit is suffocating in overruling even simple subreddits - on Lemmy we saw a land rush where often people squatted groups with topics they openly oppose and only use to harass everyone who disagrees with their opinion. Seriously, I have seem Lemmy-Groups about Muslims run by Muslim-Haters, Groups about Judaism run by Jew-Haters and so on.

Oh, I still thing Reddit is a rotten place but it has its nieche corners where it shines. Lemmy? I have only found one single Group I am actually interested in and where the moderators are acting reasonable. Honestly, Lemmy could be nice if there wasn't such an ungodly amount of haters in power positions and people would be more chill about differences and mistakes.

Only when I browse All

im seeing more arguments

On a related note. Is there an Android Lemmy app that allows me to view my subs as a homepage? It's only local and all in Voyager.

Did the automod delete my comment about how the tankie and red scare shit had died down???? Like wtf???

Something about people apologizing for Genocide and even encouraging it does tend to rattle some jimmies.

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.

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.