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?
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.
Liberals just can’t fathom the possibility that socialists walk among us, therefore they must be cryptofascists or paid shills of foreign States.
I assure you that we have been here all along, despite two red scares and a cold war to try to purge us.
It’s pretty insulting, considering that American socialists helped bring about the weekend and the eight hour workday.
There’s people who are constructive and try to be polite who have different world views, and then there’s the people who just insult and spam racial slurs. The second category gets a block on offending users and a block on an entire community if it’s repeated
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There are socialists, and then there is a fairly new wave of terminally online toxic assholes borrowing socialist rhetoric.
There is a difference between activism and empty virtue signaling. A huge portion of the online left is more interested in letting everyone know how pissed off they are than actually making the cultural gains necessary to improve anything.
Plus they think the stupidest shit matters.
Earlier I saw people complaining about the Hogwarts game because of JK Rowling. Yeah, don’t play the videogame based on the book series that was written by a transphobe. Cause somehow that means the videogame and it’s developers are all transphobic too?
Someone should tell them transphobic people breathe oxygen, maybe they’ll suffocate themselves as activism.
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.
Are reports anonymous? I don’t want to report a user that breaks rules only for the offending user to be friends with an admin and get me kicked from a community as payback
No, the mods of the community can see who sent the report.
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.
That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I’m going to be a little less zen about it.
The spammers aren’t here in custom full-force software_dev_lemmy_bots mode yet, but when they come, moderation tool development will increase in effort tenfold.
The nation states are already using their “play Guess The Bot and lose” games. It’s the ones who post often and with clear lines in the sand you need to worry about. Problem is, there is a sea of regular people just like that.
Lemmy needs to go through a fork or three before it becomes viable to the mainstream. Currently Lemmy users produce much less legitimate worthwhile information on far less subjects than reddit, and even Quora shudder thinking about it.
Granted, I’ve only been here for about a week before reddit disabled 3rd party apps. Maybe the first 3 years were the golden years. I’m only speaking as to the bot infestation I see currently.
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.
I think downvotes on facts and upvotes on feelings is just people wanting to feel validated, but not having the energy to engage with content. It used to happen on reddit too a lot. A lot of communities there are based on dealing with human emotions and situations in life. People seeking advice and validation about their lives being the primary motivation for even creating an account on the site.
I have a little pet theory backed by some reading that people are overstimulated by junk content to the point where they just can’t meaningfully engage in serious discussions anymore and that leads to the phenomena of populism on a political scale and simple, emotion-based upvoting on a Lemmy scale.
I like your theory and wanna agree.
In 00s and 10s, my friends and I used to engage with the Internet and each other in a very different way than in the more recent years: We basically were the content generators for ourselves, making conversations based on our ideas fueled by movies, books, or pure imagination, with a lot of jokes and other content that, compared to today, probably took much more effort; we made ambient music with a shitty mic, gathered together, somewhere away from our homes, to talk and watch shit on some weak-ass laptops, maybe game and talk on said laptops, maybe game online, share stupid proposals for our art projects like making music or writing stories or drawing, sharing results.
Of course, we recited some jokes, rein reenacted some, and ironically enough, the most repeated were the ones coming from short-term content, like the z0r.de flashes or skits from collection-type videos like the GMOD Idiot Box. Back then such short-form content was more of a rarity, it seems, so we still had a lot room for creativity and something more meaningful and such, while now this type of content has filled way too many spaces, with much lower quality, too - we’ve seemed to have stopped creating, despite having arguably much more fuel for it thanks to the many changes our lives brought.
Thinking about this makes me browse the Internet a little less and focus on writing or reading, two things I’ve been most creatively engaged with since I was a kid, hoping that can bring creating stuff back to my life and the lives of my friends and family, at least to some degree, as opposed to just consuming lazy content and having even lazier, meaningless, dull conversations with people I care about.
