No Stupid Questions

I noticed it a few months ago. It feels like a sudden, inorganic shift. Either all the good people have trickled off to a better basin, or someone or something has influenced Lemmy users

I have noticed more people inferring things from a small part of a reply and rather than read and try to understand it, they insted get upset about it and reply back about what they think the op said.

Excuse me?! Are you saying I'm negative?! Are you trying to start a fight with me, bro?! I am THE, I mean THE most positive, fun and likeable person on THE internet, bro. THE.

Blame reddit. Lemmy is the home for us, the permabanned.

Not really. But I purposely avoid any politics related community.

It's growing everywhere. The problem is subjective, which is why the current model fails. I've tried to suggest ones in the past where users have more control about general moderation in their communities or can at least choose their curators, with communities themselves are more decentralized from their instances, but there is no interest, at least not in losing that power of control.

The people who downvote after every reply don't really help, they either just want the last word or aren't really interested in an honest conversation. The anonymous downvotes don't really help either (specially when they coincide with thread upvotes coming from accounts with no comment or post history that just seem interested in nudging the conversation to an alt).

I've seen roughly the same time frame. As far as I can tell no, this is just how toxic this place is. There's a bunch of people who continuously claim people from reddit are coming and bringing some form of toxic with them, but as often as not those people seem super toxic. There's a huge community of Linux fanboys who circle jerk over the same exact talking points in different meme formats (the talking point being "windows 11 is spyware, Linux Just Works ad doesn't even require a login -- but don't worry guys, this is the year of the ~~Linux desktop~~ steam deck"). There's a huge circle jerk over whether or not Russia is bad. There's the "liberals aren't leftists, liberals are capitalist genocidal shitbags" circle jerk. None of these have really changed in at least the last year, it's the same people making the same posts on the same topics.

But, it's nice to see a news feed of interesting posts so as long as you ignore the bullshit it still seems fine. Or if you like arguing.

Compared to election season? Nah. But everybody sees different stuff on Lemmy.

Yup, lost of people here accusing others of being "genocide apologists" for expressing even the slightest approval or agreement with Harris or Biden on anything. Yet, somehow, they don't seem to want to criticize the current administration, blaming everything on the liberals as if they're the ones solely responsible for this mess. Curious, isn't it.

Yes, but sometimes I wonder if it is just the nature of what happens when a social media network grows large. I did observe how some subreddits instantly get more toxic as they grow bigger too

... On the other hand though, coincidentally I did see some very recent comments that are decidedly more right-wing than the general Lemmy userbase. I personally try not to judge ppl's political orientation but I do wonder if there's something weird going on

Yeah the news are triggering the worst instincts of some users who tend to lash out alot, and some trolls might be taking advantage of that

It takes a special kind of person to be a good moderator.

There are trolls. Not as many as other places, but we have them.

Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream -- people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).

The goal is to keep opinions we don't want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they've gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.

(All of the stuff above is basically the "standard" for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you're above a certain size.)

https://archive.is/PoUMo

from Bannon:

“The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”

So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.

“All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review

The best defense is to call them out on it and then walk away. They'll downvote the shit out of you, but who tf cares about upvotes and downvotes. If someone is getting downvoted heavily, read what they said carefully before piling on.

Yeah. I've enjoyed Lemmy casually for years, but this last year has really killed my desire to read or post here.

Yes its more negative. Comes with more users who want to play keyboard warriors over things they feel strongly about.

I don't think so, it's just a dynamic that any platform (including Reddit) has, and like always, it depends on what community you join and what instances your account is federated with.

Things are quite politically tense right now, and it doesn't help that there are also a lot of issues outside of that sphere (enshittification, Windows 10 EOL, etc...) that could make people angry as well, and have heated debates.

Also, with any influx of people, there may be tensions as the userbase has more voices from different viewpoints, and some may escalate while others won't. You do have the ability to pick and choose who your admin is (instance), where you want to post, and where you'd like to visit, and you can make your own community without restrictions, so if one method of moderation in a community seems out of your preference, feel free to explore an alternative.

You suck! (im sorry im just kidding)

No, it's not just your imagination. It has become distinctly more hostile in all communities.

It seems hostility is the norm across most social media.

No. Fuck you.

/s

Yes, blocking posts from .ml and dbzer0 helped. Same goes for just liberally blocking anybody, who starts screaming instead of participating nicely.

I've been considering blocking .world, as some of the mods are behaving like power tripping reddit mods. But it's the biggest instance and without it I wouldn't have any content.