Ask Lemmy

How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?

We don't because:

1. it's a wider issue than 'the Internet'. Haven't you noticed how even politics in general, which was supposed to be the epitome of our democratic societies, has morphed into an hate-filled shit show at best, when it's not effing openly celebrating murders and assassinations of people we don't like?
2. we're part of the issue. It's not a 'them' vs 'us'. It's us. And most of us, no matter what we believe in, are acting like morons, at best.

but Lemmy seems to have gotten worse alongside the rest of internet culture, proving me wrong.

Lemmy has not "gotten worse" in my opinion. It was worse to begin with and when I arrived a few years ago, the first thing I had to urgently learn is how to filter out what I call its 'noise': that constant (and self-celebrating) hatred for 'the other camp', the hatred for those who dare not think like 'us' (I certainly don't put myself in that group). I then moved from Lemmy to Piefed, mostly because back then at least it offered me simpler/more efficient ways to filter out that noise.

How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?

Like mentioned in other comments, the only way is through changing (civil) society itself. Aka through education.

As long as our respective public educative systems (I'm from France, but I know it's as shitty in the USA if not worse) are allowed to not do their job of actually educating and teaching kids some common values and principles (next to some actual knowledge and know-how), toxicity will thrive.

It thrives because it has been normalized and because those who benefit from it are being regarded as role models. But it's even worse than that: just publicly discussing this issue and its causes would expose anyone to being... punished by an angry toxic crowd of people that don't want to hear they're being toxic (or that their 'ideology' they want so hard to believe in have morphed them into assholes). That is a huge loss for any freedom respecting society, and a huge win for those benefiting from that hate/toxicity.

edit: clarifications.

• Shun the toxic people. Block them and don't look back.
• Seriously, block them. They're still gonna toxic whether you're there to observe it or not.
• Find a well moderated instance that isn't afraid to show toxic people the door
• Block .ml, grad, hexbear, dbzer0, and quokk.au
• Block any other instance or person that centers itself around identity politics
• Block all the news/politics communities. Just get your news from actual news services. The comment section for most news/politics posts here is worse than an entire garbage dump on fire.

And you'll end up with like 3 federated users left which is basically my /all feed now 😑

Post nice comments under good posts. It really makes a difference to the active posters and generally lifts the mood of this place.

Oh yeah? Well your finger looks like a finger. Boom, take that sucka.

You're only in control of yourself. Write thoughtful and positive posts, replies. Up/downvote based on how thoughtful and positive you think posts are.

You don't have much power but what you have you can use.

The first rule of the internet I ever encountered back in the mid-90s was "don't feed the trolls". We've lost that piece of philosophy along the way, and now we all actively engage with cunts instead of just blocking them and moving on. Oblivion is the ultimate tool for dealing with anonymous people who behave like fuckheads. It's a win for them if you respond to their provocations, so just don't. Don't be posting shit like "I know you're trolling, but..." just don't even acknowledge them. Block/report/move on. It's really that simple. The simplest remedy is also the most effective. How cool is that? We just have to tell our limbic systems, because the urge to engage is overwhelming sometimes. But take pleasure in sending these bastards into the abyss, enjoy hitting that block button and growing your blocklist. Look at your blocklist from time to time, and bask in the glory of it. Delight in how many people have been stopped dead in their tracks from ever bothering you again. Get excited when you see a new cunt emerge, and how much fun it will be to add them to the list.

As for 'reply guys' and general pissiness from curmudgeons (that is, people who are dickish but not actually harassing you) you can simply think of whatever anger or displeasure they're expressing as being very much their problem. If they talk to you like you're stupid, just know that they're struggling with their own issues and that's why they're behaving like a stone in everyone's shoe. Talk to them normally and without emotional language (if you need to talk to them at all), and keep in mind that anyone else who happens upon this interaction will see that you're a reasonable and cool person and the other guy is a wanker.

If you knew the other person had a brain tumour that made them behave like a prick, you'd be much less bothered by them, but the thing is, that "brain tumour" exists in everyone. No one is really the master of their own behaviour, we're all dragging millennia of other people's genetic shittiness behind us, and our individual capacity to introspect and reflect on our shittiness and try to do better is also something we don't create within ourselves, we're all pretty much stuck with what we have, with our wiggle room for improvement being as preordained as our circulatory systems. So think of everyone as a tumour-riddled victim of circumstance and they won't be able to hurt or annoy you anywhere near as much. Be happy that your particular tumours aren’t making you behave like a dickhead in public. It's all about framing, just don't let the other guy do the framing and you're good.

Be the change you want to see in the world, online and IRL. it’s the philosophy I live by

As you said, decentralization is key. Highly active human moderation is the only known solution to keep communities free and tolerant, and human mods have a relatively low limit as to what they can handle without making it a full time job (or burning it out)

The Lemmy network is still centralized enough that many smaller instances make the calculus that it's better to be federated with the large weakly moderated instances than to lose access to the many small communities on those instances.

But increased decentralization makes more granular defederation possible. A weakly moderated instance can simply be blocked.

I think we'll get there in time.

The biggest one is we have to get rid of engagement algorithms. All the major platforms show you content more like that which you interact with, which is usually things that piss you off or things you heartily agree with. This creates bubbles and prevents exposure to new ideas and different thinking people. And when you have that for a few decades, it greatly reduces empathy for your fellow man.

Go back to like the '90s or so and politics was dinner table conversation, the sort of thing that would be discussed in friendly company. Because it was understood that while you and I might disagree on what the best path for America is, we both understand that we both want America to be great.
But go forward to the early 2000s, 24-hour cable news, internet, echo chambers and bubbles started to form. And both sides politically took advantage of this, drummed up the rhetoric and no longer was it 'we are better for America' it became 'the other guys don't believe in what America stands for and anyone who supports them is not American'.
This killed the discourse. No more respectful disagreement, no more opponents shaking hands, it became a fight to the death for the future of the country in the eyes of many voters.

This is not just politics. It's every issue. It's how we have our discourse now. Respectful debate is dying. Whatever the issue is, you either agree with me or you're awful. And that is what we need to fix.

We need to promote empathy, mutual understanding, and respect for those we disagree with.

Block .ml and don’t engage with .ml users

lemmy/piefed have been getting a surge of users from reddit. i can't imagine algorithmic brainrot fades overnight.

Downvoting just gives trolls the negative attention they want. Ignore, block, and/or report. That’s it. We can’t change human nature.

Actually do downvote posts if you would have preferred not to read that and it isn't of note.

I.e. downvote the 3rd post about the same tragedy when nothing has changed and not much time has passed. Downvote negativity. A neutral vote is for things that are mid and don't matter.

I can really only compare to Reddit and find the dedicated generally better

But those outliers are a doozy. I don’t recall even wanting to block anyone on Reddit but have blocked at least half a dozen here. Just earlier today I had to because we were enjoying a nice discussion, then someone stumbled in saying they’ve debated politics with me, starts attacking, trying to start an argument over something completely unrelated ….. Reddit had plenty of trolls but I never encountered anyone there who followed me around to be an asshole.

So on the one hand the capability of blocking anyone is a great way to stop seeing the most toxic part of the fediverse, but on the other hand there’s got to be a more permanent solution

I think all we can really do is set an example ourselves and to allow mods to do their jobs. We can only really control our own behavior, especially a place like Lemmy where it's basically impossible to ban someone.

I try to keep my posts PG, try to understand others, ignore people I can't find common ground with, and just try to be the type of poster/commenter I'd like to interact with.

People are a little bit toxic so people gathering place will be too.

I don’t think it’s a massive problem as it mostly seems to take care of itself with some effective moderation.

it consists of people too mad to be on reddit, sad trans people, and people who try to deal with linux everyday, and me...so this stress will eventually come down as toxicity with the lack of moderation. im not saying moderation is the solution, im saying this is how we are, let us be.

You can't.

Most people love it, even if you don't. That toxicity was always there... just look at how incredibly popular day time toxic TV and reality TV was before the internet and social media...

That said, plenty of people who posted here are barking up the right tree. Be what you want to see, and block/don't engage with shitty toxic people and their toxic ideas. Support other users by upvoting and interacting with them when you see good content, and if the mods remove those posts, then stop using that community.

Way too many mods give into the toxic BS on social media due to the pressure that toxic people create.

Obviously, the internet has always been a toxic place, (the phrase “flame war” has been around for decades,) but it seems to have gotten so much worse over the last few years.

Ehhh. I don't know. I think that there are ways in which it's gotten better and ways in which it's gotten worse over time.

I never really used any of the big social media sites that rely on automated recommendations to any degree. I understand that a major factor was that they measured user engagement, and what we found is that users are considerably more-engaged with content that enraged them than pretty much anything else. They tended to recommend material in that vein. I think that this discovery (as well as the ability to easily measure views on traditional-media sites) also encouraged ragebait to be posted.

That probably is a step back.

The Internet is a lot more diverse of a place than it once was. Back around, say, the 1990s, it was mostly university people, engineering types, stuff like that. A lot of countries had very few people online. You had fewer points of disagreement in a number of areas. But bring people with a wider variety of views into the situation, and you have more room for conflict, I think. I think that to some degree, that's just intrinsic to having a more-diverse Internet, throwing all of humanity (or at least everyone that can more-or-less speak a language, which for English, is a lot of people) just means that people from different walks of life and social norms suddenly encounter each other, and, well, ideas clash.

I feel like there is a real sense in which very negative worldviews are more-prominent, maybe partly because of media

and not just social media, but traditional media

favoring more-alarmist articles and titles. Doomerism, like. That's not so much directly toxic, but I think that people who feel stressed-out tend to be less-pleasant.

And the Internet permitted for forums and media chambers that are very much aligned with specific individual groups; it's easier to live in echo chambers. The long tail

the Internet is so large and permits for so many niche environments that people don't have to be exposed to broader views in society if they don't want to. I think that that tends to let people demonize other people more-readily, if they don't interact with them.

On the other hand:

Trolling (in the sense of trying to post provocative comments that would incite a flamewar) used to be very common on forums I'd used, like Slashdot. I don't see much of that on the Threadiverse.

Usenet permitted crossposting articles to multiple Usenet groups. Clients tended to default to respond to all of these. This resulted in people trying to crosspost articles between groups that had users with conflicting views (e.g. comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy and comp.sys.mac.advocacy) to induce conflict. That's not how current Lemmy handles crossposting

instead, replies go to one community. (PieFed does merge discussions into a single page, though.)

Widespread community moderation, which showed up on Reddit (and the Threadiverse, as it followed in its footsteps) has also improved things a fair bit. Usenet had efforts at tacked-on moderation that weren't incredibly effective.

Some things we could encourage: Design social spaces with more repeat interactions. Many toxic people feel they can just move on to another part of the crowd. But if everyone knows them, and that they’re an asshole, It’s not so easy. See the example of “beep”, a user in the comics community who repeatedly cropped out the artist of comics.

I could also envision ways to reinvent forum moderating. For instance, one idea I had for moderating toxicity in a video game is that bans would not last a very long time, but for them to be lifted, the offender must upload a video, or present themselves live on webcam, of themselves describing what they did and apologizing.

If it’s too much, there’s more subtle approaches; like that old study on DOTA 2 where they’d present a post match survey, asking people to rank their teammates - then their own level of team contribution - and it would lead to reduced toxicity in their next match.

You don't, the internet has always been this way.

I'm not positive that you can do much outside of simply (temporarily or permanently) banning people who are acting shitty.

On the flip side, banning people because they disagree with you is how we end up with the kind of echo chambers that breed other socially toxic problems like strict partisanship, and cults of personality... so it's a fine line.

Generally I don't see a lot of people on Lemmy acting like straight-up assholes. I don't always agree with people, and I think there is a potential for "flame wars" and arguments, but as long as everyone is acting in good faith and being reasonable about what they are expressing I feel that's generally an acceptable level of conflict.

I've never wanted someone banned because they said something I didn't like. Like... If someone wanted to come here and make the case for why Donald Trump is a great president, I would love to see them try. The real problem is when people resort only to trolling and forego any attempt at having a real good-faith conversation. That's when the relationship breaks down and the conversation is no longer conducive to running a real community. When people start acting like assholes, making personal attacks, or continually arguing in bad-faith, then I think it warrants at least a temporary ban.

The goal of the internet should not be conflict avoidance or group-think, but mutual respect and treating each other like human beings. For the most part, I think the Fediverse is pretty good about that.

If we block and ban everyone that thinks differently from us, we can create a utopian paradise where everyone thinks the same. This might go on for years-decades maybe-until Elon Musk perfects his Neurolink protocol. At that point we will merge our thoughts, creating the ultimate Unity.

There will be no more hunger, no more pain. Dissent will be unthinkable. We will become....one.

Don't be afraid to block users.

Moderation. We had a big influx of users with the Reddit api drama that created a bunch of communities, and then all returned to Reddit shortly thereafter, leaving most of the big communities largely unmoderated. The threadiverse isn’t going to become less toxic until new moderators step in and clean up the worst of it.