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?
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.
The thing that actually worried me a little bit more was people upvoting the aggressive comments to be top comments.
I was reading some thread over at !politics@lemmy.world today, and a lot of stuff advocating for political violence were the top comments. Mods yanked it, but nevertheless, people were vibing with some comments about dragging people through the street. I felt like I was on X/Twitter.
I was reading some thread over at !politics
There you go, that’s your problem. Political topics always gets heated and brings out the worst in people, no matter the platform. The first thing I did is block all politics (and general news + sports) communities, and it’s been a fairly pleasant experience so far for me, except for the odd troll or fanboy that shows up every now and then.
Lemmy.nz also defederated Hexbear, which helped a lot.
Technically they pulled a “you can’t fire me, I quit” and defederated first, but whatever.
Yea, they tend to do that, think they did the same with blaahaj. Pretty funny tbh.
You didn’t block all politics. Everything is political.
No it’s not. You can have casual communities or gaming or sports communities that aren’t political.
Casual conversation, gaming, and sports are political.
You read my mind. It’s the same feeling I got when a reddit sub would degrade into a toxic circle jerk, and I’d have to unsub. Except it feels like it’s a lot of lemmy communities lately. I feel like I can’t respectfully disagree with anyone without being met with ad hominem attacks. I don’t think something like changemyview could survive.
Also reminds me of those anti-moderate subs, which is a sentiment literally synonymous with radicalization. I’m all for free speech, I would just rather they state whatever take they have with a calm, measured demeanor.
You have a problem with people being against the status quo?
Yeah, I think it’s a legitimate and growing problem. I think a lot of folks don’t realize, but since growth has slowed from Reddit more broadly, the people who feel they have been “unfairly silenced” are the fastest growing subpopulation around here. If I’m honest, I think the only real antidote is to reestablish growth from communities with kinder dispositions.
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We don’t need to take from nicer communities, we need to build nicer communities. Right now there aren’t any left wing instances, which is a big problem. It was nicer back when lib.lgbt existed.
Lemmygrad or ml aren’t left wing? The entire platform feels left wing as all anyone can ever say is how bad capitalism is.
Right now there aren’t any left wing instances
Bro what
Also it doesn’t have anything to do with political distribution. It’s an issue of habit and disposition.
Left wing people are disposed to helping others. Right wing people aren’t. Nobody’s cultivating left wing spaces where kindness is a habit.
People like to fetishize revolution.
Even offline I have friends that talk that kind of way and just reveal themselves as being poor students of history.
Well remember that any instance you federate with also gets to vote. If you feel like votes aren’t matching your values, perhaps you should try an instance with more of the “aggressive” stuff defederated.
Possibly, although those instances also have less content. I remember starting out with a BeeHaw account like many of us here. Trade off was often less content, no ability to create your own communities, but less people lashing out at each other.
Beehaw is very selective though (and that’s fine). There is a middle ground between lemmy.world and Beehaw though.
But you said elsewhere that you go on American political communities. I’m not American but from what I’ve seen, it is hardly surprising that those places would be toxic. I think at this point, arguing US politics online seems like a lost cause. You’re probably better off discussing politics IRL.
You think Beehaw isn’t aggressive?
The irony.
You can see them jumping from Lemmy server to Lemmy server as they get banned from each.
Eventually, they’ll just set up their own instances so they can bother people with impunity.
And then we block that instance! Or it gets defederated.
It would be super nice if users could block instances.
Like, I have no desire to see anything from the furry instance.
You can on instances running .19 or newer. Settings -> Blocks -> then at the bottom is an option for blocking instances.
It became a thing in Lemmy 0.19 - as long as you’re on an instance that has updated to that, it should be available to you. At the bottom of the settings page in the web ui, but if you use an app they might not expose that to you yet.
I hadn’t realized it had been implemented yet since I don’t use the browser. Thanks for the update!
I think that came with version 0.19.1 specifically.
Connect has been able to do that from the get go. As well as individual communities within instances.
I think that’s coming (or is it implemented already!?)?
I totally thought that was in 0.19 but I haven’t actually seen that yet.
It’s under Settings -> Blocks -> then down at the bottom is the block instances option.
0.19.1
the 0.19 implementation is so half-assed I genuinely think the Lemmy devs just don’t want that functionality but expected quite a lot of backlash if they outright said as much, so they decided to implement something that ticks the box in the “wanted features” list without having any effect
afaik it only blocks communities and explicitly lets users from blocked instances through
Feel free to make open an issue to improve instance blocking. Or better yet a pull request. We are only a few devs with limited time, and hundreds of issues to work on.
If the apps don’t have instance blocking yet, the webui does (in 0.19)… I haven’t tested it, but it’s there, at the bottom of my settings page 🙂
You can do this with certain apps, like Boost!
Huh, I guess I haven’t tried it recently, because that’s what I’m using.
…and then they spin up a new instance with a new domain…
Domains are unfortunately fairly cheap and it’s not impossible to get a different IP assigned to a server box.
I don’t mind costing them the effort or $10 for a new domain
Incidentally I have several domains with DNS provided by freedns.afraid.net, which allows sharing domains. Everyone who asks for a domain under any of mine just seems so very sketchy. Now I have to worry if they’re a nazi looking for a new domain to get banned
Isn’t that basically what basedcount is?
I’m unfamiliar with it. Would you be so kind as to explain what you mean?
This guy
From the siderbar:Avoid Censorship. Stay Based.
So there’s going to be a fediverse and a mirror fediverse?
And the other one is the one with opposite facial hair
That was always a risk of decentralized services, unfortunately.
You’re describing Hexbear.
hexbear is insanity larping
Hexbear called me a troll for being further left than them. They thought I was an extreme caricature of a leftist for saying things like “xenogenders are real” and “slurs against disabilities are bad”. My presence was actually critically destructive because I had effective points against all their reactionary opinions that made it impossible for themselves to honestly call themselves leftists. Now it’s against the rules to like me on there. That’s how bad I was for them.
Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and Lemmy.ml bring nothing of value to the community, in my view.
Yeah, definitely the vibe has changed. It’s kind of sad.
Hexbear federated
Who is this character
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.
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.
What?! How can you say this about me!
*Sobs*
At least in the communities I’m subscribed to and interact with, I’ve still seen it mostly be positive interactions.
It’s been my experience that it’s a couple problem instances where most of the toxicity comes from.
You’re right, and you’re on one of them.
Oh yeah i’ll add ee to the list. I knew I was forgetting someone.
Lemmy.ml users are the worst by a long shot. I hear they’re mutants who live underground!
Yes I can agree, I am on the way to becoming a T-9000 cyborg humanoid warmachine.
Well i’m here to put the allegations to rest: I do in fact live above ground.
Had an account there. It was permabanneed for telling someone on Hexbear that their meme responses were childish. Ever since then I just block that entire instance from my feed.
If you’re talking about the two that I think you are, I agree. I suspect my pleasant experience is due to my instance defederating completely with those, which is pretty swank.
I’ve seen toxic behaviour supported by mods on Hexbear, Beehaw, and Blahaj mainly. World is also pretty bad.
Which ones, if you don’t mind me asking?
Any of the .ml domains are cesspits to some degree, ironically enough.
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Hexbear: Similar to lemmygrad they have their strong convictions, but don’t have the maturity to back it up.
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LemmyWorld: Users are a mixed bag but the admins seem dead set on turning the place into a nazi bar.
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sh.itholefor.nazis: The only thing you need to know about these guys is they have a c/ for conservatives
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feddit de: Literally every user on this instance is dead set on reminding you that Germany never underwent denazification
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discusstchncs de: same story but to a much less extreme extent
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lemm ee: The owners don’t really moderate and its users reflect this fact. Universally unpleasant userbase.
You forgot Lemmy.ml which is a combination of all your examples.
Really? Even the ones with nazis in them? Really would like to see you justify that one.
EDIT: Oh you’re one of those anticommunist nonces. Okay, discarded.
I’m only gonna comment on Hexbear and you’re completely wrong. They do have less patience with libs comming there saying shit, but everytime that happens, there’s always people actually engaging and backing up all of their claims. It’s not only dunking.
It’s usually buried under the dunking but I think that’s because hexbear doesn’t have up and down votes, so they have to comment to make their opinion known. It leads to a lot of annoying brigading looking behavior on comments, but at least their good comments tend to be pretty good. Sometimes it’s not worth digging through all the sarcasm, pig poop balls, and picture posts to find it, though lol.
From my experience I think tchncs.de is fine, and lemm.ee is a victim of large userbase. You have few iffy people on slrpnk and sopuli at times, but things like that are best ignored.
As long as the political takes do not start to become obviously stupid or have evil moral intent, a basic level of the hot takes should just be ignored. One needs to tolerate a bit of this stuff just for mental exercise and to “know the enemy”.
I still remember that clash I had with an ecofash on slrpnk. Thankfully they were quickly taken care of but even some of the gold star instances can have problem users from time to time.
Give it 2-3 more months, and we will have a better consensus on how Lemmy will stay for a while. I think the most important part has been solved, that being Lemmy becoming a defacto valid, sane, non-conspiratorial and non-fascist alternative to Reddit that does not need to act like a “safe space”, retaining some open discourse qualities.
In all honesty, I do not want the whole Lemmy to become a singular 100% leftist echo chamber entity, but have instances that also broadly cover the spectrum outside of rightwing lunacy. Richer discussions allow for bidirectional flow of ideas, and it is pretty much established that people eventually start to like too many leftist ideas, even if not all. I have worked for 3 years to help refine and grow Lemmy, and the more established it becomes as anti-capitalist/corporation Reddit alternative, the lesser those shithole Reddit clones and private spaces get to grow (ones where rightwing, Western nationalist, anti-LGBT, pedophilic and hateful elitist LARPer narratives flourish the most). Private spaces should be for personal and sensitive conversations, confidential stuff, or people like activists, dissidents and professionals.
I’m extremely confident that at the very minimum Lemmy will be a nice little hangout spot, but it’s seeming like it’s going to be far more than that from what i’ve seen so far. It really is unique in that different types of shittiness is isolated within instances which means people will converge where they should be and problem groups will naturally DNI with each other leading to minimum conflict in the long term.
What really makes lemmy special is its true freedom of speech approach. And actual freedom of speech, not just nazis talking over marginalized people or single individuals controlling the conversation through their star power alone. You can make a random post, good, or bad, doesn’t matter, and you’ll actually be able to get organic traffic on it. I mean for god sake I made a crappy joke about cutting the mold off of cheese and growing marshmallows on trees and it got the attention that it deserved (which, to be fair, wasn’t much)
Mastodon barely anyone will see you unless you already have a following, and that sucks. You don’t really have to worry about that here.
lemm ee: The owners don’t really moderate and its users reflect this fact. Universally unpleasant userbase.
This is categorically untrue. You can find our administration policy here, and we frequently ban users for breaking our instance rules. At most you could make the claim that we are lenient when it comes to things like heated arguments, as we often give warnings or temporary bans to users in such cases, but on the other hand, our “no bigotry” rule is very strict, and violations have consistently resulted in permanent bans.
We of course don’t screen all posts and comments which our users write, so we can only respond to reports, but I assure you that our admin team is constantly going over and responding to the report queue (which is a big effort, and clearly a thankless job).
By the way, I just want to point out that we have ~3000 active monthly users on lemm.ee, I find it very unlikely that you can make an accurate universal judgement about such a huge group of people.
That’s what the owners of feddit de said too and it didn’t stop their users from constantly leaving harassing messages on anything left of hitler. In fact, it was one of your members leaving a shitty comment that spurred me to add ee to the list, it wasn’t even included initially.
EDIT: You do realize that modlogs are public right? I went through them and was less than impressed with what I saw. It seems your idea of “moderation” is to remove when people call you on your shit, which is especially convenient that someone just so happened to call out that your conservative c/ (why is there a conservative c/!?!) is being run by an actual pedo. So yeah, sums up what I expected from you guys.
I am not really interested in discussing this with you, as you already have an opinion about lemm.ee and seem intent on spreading false rumors about us. I’ve learned several months ago that no matter how much you give to people for free, there will always be users demanding more, so I don’t think there is any chance of you being interested in what I have to say. I am just responding here, so other users who may end up reading this thread don’t come away with the impression that what you are saying is true.
First of all, no user has ever been banned from lemm.ee for criticizing the admin team. Our admins have banned nearly a thousand users in the past ~7 months (just think about that for a second - that is a massive amount of bullshit our volunteer admins have had to wade through in the span of less than a year), and indeed the mod log is public, so you can easily check the ban reasons, which are consistently related to violations of our basic instance rules.
If any moderation team on any of our communities does not follow our instance rules, then such communities are closed. We have in fact had to do this several times before with some conservative-type communities, mainly because they wanted to push the ideas that some people, based on their identities, are less valuable as humans that others. The current conservative community on the other hand is consistently moderating based on our instance rules, and they have incorporated the no bigotry rule into their community rules as well. If this ever changes, then we will take action, just as we have done previously.
Regarding the allegations against one of the mods, I’m not sure if you’ve seen the event they were referencing, but I think it’s safe to say that this event was extremely misrepresented by the accuser. In any real cases of CSAM, lemm.ee has taken drastic actions. We have purged, banned, defederated, reported to authorities, we have implemented some technical safeguards, and we will continue to take action like this in the future as well.
Let me just finish off by saying that we are a volunteer team giving up our time for free. I realize that users want admins to be perfect and moderate exactly in line with their preferences, but we are humans, we miss things, we make mistakes, and we can not possibly be available 24/7 or read every single piece of content posted by other lemm.ee users.
Letting it get just bad enough that it doesn’t cause problems for you isn’t how anyone should moderate. You have to be proactive and get rid of problem users before it gets to that point, make it clear that isn’t welcome, which is something your instance has routinely failed to do.
Also for the record I know that you’re full of shit when it comes to the owner of conservative c/ not being a pedo because conservativism is at its core a pedo ideology, just like all right-wing ideologies; it always comes back to child abuse with those types. CSAM attacks don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen when you foster the kinds of people who are into that shit and you make them feel welcome, which is exactly what your “we’re going to do the bare minimum of moderating” is attracting.
I’ve already made it clear that i’m not going to fold to any of your tricks, and you’ve made it clear you’re aware you’re wasting your time on me, so why you even bothered to besmirch your reputation by even engaging in the first place is beyond me, but definitely speaks to the lack of experience and borderline negligence that you carry about. I sincerely hope shit gets better for you and the mod team and hopefully an actually competent moderation policy can go a great step in ensuring you never have to deal with more attacks going forward, because that shit fucking sucks and nobody should have to go through it. I hope whoever did it is rotting in a jail cell and that’s coming from a prison abolitionist.
Oh and BTW just going forward, don’t tell someone whose complaining about your instance members being harassing little shits “nuh-uh disinformation” unless you’re prepared to get a fatal dose of all that fermented spite unleashed right into your face. Making it about you is the single worse thing you can do in that case and really tells everyone in the room where your priorities are.
EDIT: and there go the downvotes, well I think that’s a good of a place as any to cut the thread.
Remember that time the World admins removed the rules against discrimination from their terms of service and got rid of the code of conduct? Racism was legal for a while there.
.ee is my favourite instance because I trust the average user more than the average admin.
To be fair anything is a step up over LW’s antimoderation. They wanted to be reddit and I think they succeeded in the worst way.
Antimoderation seems to be the norm on Lemmy. For example, I was banned from Beehaw for being “pompous”. I have narcissistic personality disorder, and being pompous is a symptom. It’s a disability that interferes with my ability to display humility. I was being nice, kind, following the rules, doing what I was told, trying to resolve problems peacefully, and the admins said I was pompous and banned me. NPD isn’t a disability when it comes to kindness, morals, ethics, or prosocial behaviour. But I can’t turn being pompous off, any more than I can turn being weird off as an autistic person.
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Why don’t you shut hell up nerd
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It’s just you
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.
Lemmy is one of those places where you’re expected to be kind, but not necessarily expected to apply that to neo-nazis like on Reddit.
No, I’ve definitely had people on Lemmy upset that I was unkind to fascists.
Sure fine, but you weren’t banned for it.
Yeah, I was.
Yikes. Sorry you had to put up with that shit.
What’s funny about this is .ml is one of the nastiest, most toxic instances out there.
Nah, most of the extreme racism or genocide denial/advocation I moderate comes from lemmy.world and shitholefornazis. .ml users are generally tame, especially the old hats.
many, if not most of the popular/highly-trafficked communities are basically echo chambers now, anyone who disagrees with whatever the cookie-cutter general consensus of the day is becomes a hate magnet.
Disagree with an admin and you’re a pariah.
I find comments like this a bit weird. I first got into lemmy about 2 years ago, and back then lemmy.ml was full of toxic leftism. It still is, but at least now there is more federation so it’s easier to ignore all that without losing all comments.
Overall, toxicity rises with popularity. It’s just impossible to gain a lot of users without some of them disagreeing with you. And social media is designed to increase friction, so things get toxic. Even if Lemmy isn’t making money from that friction like something like Reddit is, it’s still using the exact same design.
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 never a bad idea to instance block them. They’ll endlessly bully you and gang up like a bunch of school children. The only thing that stops it is to stop responding.
I do not know what you are talking about, you were the one who came put swinging, they reacted like I would expect,
Also proudboys are Fash, guess who is the most anti-fash
Also ypur political annalisis seems to go from “is like trump suporter” to “Is like proudboy” not very nuanced
P.S. I only found this because I had to track down said hexbear post because of the smearing you do with it while convenently not linking it… so for context https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/3197853, it was not for “simply liking southpark”
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Track You? No I found this as I was trying to find context to your claim you kept making on Lemmygrad that seemed far feched, but as I said I was giving you the bennift of the doubt, this one poppoed up when I searched the page for Hexbear.
To bully you, also no I am adding context to your constant claim that is blantantly false, I do not understand how someone with a Doctorate in something and 42 years of life still thinks that providing context to a smear is bullying, but smearing a comunity of people, who is one of the most inclusive and welcoming groups on the internet, is not bullying.
And what agian id the deff of dictator, I could easily argue Troudou, Mary Simon or Charly III could be dictators of canada, and Biden the dictator of the US
Also with the bullying, repeated malicious name calling check, constant, and at this point with how many times we have explained to the post I have to assume intetional and malicious miss understanding, Constant calling us facists, and agian, as was explained to you before Communists are not Facists and we dont support trump, nor do we “enable” him, and calling us all “privlaged white boys” agian I would love to direct you to our demographics survey
But the behavior you have been demonstrating is the behavior consistant of a bully, not I, not my fellows from Lemmygrad, not those from Hexbear, so I would recommend, as one human to another, that you take a seat, and reflect, because clearly something is stuck in your craw, and I genuinely hope it gets
Considering a lot of them are anti-Semitic, defend USSR invading Poland, some even homophobic. They’re literally just larping fascist pigs
Still conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, I see. First of all, anti-Zionist Jews and non-Zoinist Jews exist.
There is no fediverse instance more queer-friendly and than Hexbear; what are you even talking about?
I can think of a few.
Not a pro Zionist. But thanks for putting words in my mouth
There is no fediverse instance more queer-friendly and than Hexbear; what are you even talking about?
I am guessing that the reasoning is as follows:
- The short twentieth century’s people’s republics were frequently heterosexist in some way
- Many on Hexbear defend the people’s republics (within reason)
- Ergo, Hexbear is heterosexist
This reasoning does not apply when defending dictatorships of the bourgeoisie such as Imperial America and the British Empire, because
You obviously don’t know what fascist means. You should probably stop using the word until you go read the definition.
Cool 👍
redfash
Idk what that means
Redfashes do exist, but not on Hexbear or Lemmygrad.
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 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.
I mean I boycott products if I don’t agree where the money is going. Nestle, Amazon, Israel (BDS), etc etc. Everyone who has the capacity should at the very least try to avoid funding people and projects they think are detrimental to life.
How much of the revenue is actually going to Rowling for the product?
I have no idea or interest in finding out, but it isn’t zero
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
What racial slurs?
You know what ‘racial slurs’ they care about. “White”, maybe “privileged”, maybe “spoiled”, “entitled”, “Northerner”, “Imperial core”.
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.
Say something dumb in an IRC channel? Get banned.
The good ol’ days when I was young and irresponsible and got banned for it. I learnt how to converse with people online through this. Talk shit, get banned. I also feel like I forgot some of this on later platforms.
I hated it at the time, but like most learning experiences, grown to appreciate it later. I can’t believe I had free and unmoderated access to the internet’s back in the early 2000s. Shout out to those mods for putting a teenager in their place!
TL;DR - A millennial goes on a tangent about the good ol’ days.
I remember being permanently or temporarily banned as a kid/teenager with simple messages like “go outside”. Mostly for being too rude or annoying, or edgy. As teens and kids often are.
Idk if it’s a thing on Lemmy, but I’m all for extended temporary bans for simply repeatedly being a dick to others.
The “old internet” for me was something like 2006-2012. And I agree, people who pine for it probably couldn’t hack it in 2024, it was racist, it was homophobic, and threads went off the rails with people giving unsolicited advice on how to please your gf, but it was fun, it was dynamic, often complete strangers behind phpBB nicknames felt more real than your closest friends on Instagram do now.
I yearn for those days. Not because I particularly want to deal with racist, homophobic idiots, but because I miss the dynamic internet before mega social network sites. I miss the nuance, people knowing each other on forums and whenever someone who’s known in the community would post something that on surface level is banhammer-worthy per the rules, the community would talk it out and the hammer would fall when people call for it, not always strictly adhering to the rules. And yes, that did produce the power-hungry mods. But it’s not like much has changed.
I feel like I’m going off on a tangent. I just miss the randomness.
I recently had a chat with a new colleague about how you can’t joke with a lot of Zoomers about race/nationality/sex because they don’t perceive nuance. I think it’s a cultural thing imprinted by the internet content coming from America. We’re both from Eastern/South Eastern Europe and people don’t immediately get their panties in a knot over offensive jokes because they realize that a racist-sounding joke does not make the person racist. And I feel that’s the state of the internet now too, and it’s ok, but I miss the sharp edge that it used to have.
I also miss the weird smileys.
tldr a child gives us his wisdom lmao
first by mocking and then by doing the thing he mocked
well played asshole
the internet only existed for like eight years before you started using it and you pine for your past but shit on those who were alive for the first part
just fuckin retarded man, snap out of it and quit being a cunt
Your comment nicely illustrates OPs observation.
Anyone can feel free to disagree with me or poke at inconsistencies in what I wrote, I know they’re there, but I don’t have the time to write an essay. But calling me a retarded child while misinterpreting what I said is exactly the kind of aggressive commenting I believe OP is pointing out.
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.
I was just commenting on this to my gf a couple of days ago - I’m browsing and posting on the internet less so I feel more free to do things in a way that I like without thinking about the what audience they’re for.
In a way the awful state, and what I view as a downfall (remains to be seen), of big sites that everyone has been tied to for essentially a decade feels like shedding chains. I hope more people quit and spend their energy elsewhere. It doesn’t have to be another site, it can be any offline endeavour.
I’m on Lemmy because I’ve come to a realization that the reason I enjoyed internet back in the day was, as you said, a different type of engagement. And I don’t think it will ever be as it used to be. But a big part of that engagement was conversations like we’re having right now. At least in my algorithm enclosed corner of big social media sites I don’t see people reacting and having a conversation. It’s just a reaction, thanks, like, bye. Sometimes there’s arguing. But never a conversation.
Interesting theory; what also plays a big factor is mob mentality I find.
And if someone comments after you correcting one small thing, you’ll then get downvoted as well.
I disabled votes on my clients. I don’t want a number to potentially sway my opinion on a comment or post
I wonder if that’s why Youtube did it also, for downvotes at least
Lemmy users discovering that human nature doesn’t change just because the name of the website isn’t Reddit:
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.
This is the first I’ve heard this perspective. It’s worth keeping in mind the remainder of the year. Thanks for that
It’s an election year and Trump is in the election.
A terrible and infuriating time. Brutal year ahead.
At least we had three years of rest, right?!??
Well, not exactly, that orange cockroach has been scurrying around this whole time.
Didn’t you guys have an attempted coup in that time?
xXX88Trump_The_Strongman14XXx personally assured me that was just a peaceful protest
anybody with xXX in their name is a virgin though
Completely unprompted too. Just normal people who happened to independently organize that day.
Just happened to book a flight to DC that day, who knew?
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.
Maybe, but you’re still awesome.
Awe shucks. Thanks. Right back at ya.