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

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.

Why don't you shut hell up nerd

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

thats something a complete idiot would say

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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