Today has been especially bad, and was inspired sadly by about 6 straight posts of only negativity here.
I want to say that being negative towards something is not a bad thing, it’s very valid to critique things. However, a community becomes toxic when the majority of it’s content is negative.
Gaming is an obvious one. It’s very obvious all around the internet that gaming communities are negative generally, and Lemmy certainly takes the cake. In the case of GTA 6 coming out this month we can (and have) had multiple stories about Rockstar’s unethical practices, the pricing, ownership, and to be clear I agree with all of it. However, there is also valid positive things that people want to discuss but are immediately downvoted to hell, or have comments brigaded on with responses like “Don’t you know about X, Y, or Z??”
I’ve been in comment threads where people have told me that they are afraid to post here because of the responses they might get. Now this is absolutely true everywhere, and we will often respond “You just have to tune them out” but the scales are shifting to the majority of responses are negative.
New users will not simply block/tune out the majority of commenters. New users will see that a community is toxic and turn around and go back to where they felt it was better.
This is the root of my frustration - that Lemmy is no longer a geeky place where people can talk about Star Trek and Linux - but that it’s becoming a toxic place where if you aren’t talking about why Star Trek and Linux are the only good things on the planet that it should be called out over and over.
Worse is that the scales a tipping to simply being “If it is popular, it is not good” which is a huge red flag for toxic community. To be clear it does not mean that if something is popular that it must be good, but instead we are falling for the same trap that is on corporate social media.
Anger and toxicity are fun, they are dopamine hits. So when there’s a huge post about <<popular thing>> and everyone dogpiles, everyone has that dopamine hit and it spreads, and it makes people want to dogpile more. Unfortunately I think this has left individual posts, and this is now driving a large part of our comment sections, that people feel included when they are all dogpiling on a popular thing. It’s addictive.
It’s incessant and exhausting being here some days.
Some examples to think on:
- Harry Potter fans (who have already said they will not buy anything from Rowling again and are aware) who still want to enjoy the books/movies they already own, but are shouted down and downvoted
- Sports fans posting about football, to have jokes about “sportsball” made to them.
- (Is that really any different from nerds being made fun of by jocks in highschool, only this is in reverse and worse yet, we’re supposedly more mature now?)
- Freaking pumpkin spice. The world is on fire and people get a tiny bit of joy out of cinnamon and allspice, can we let them just enjoy that?!
I think that sums it all up, I wish people could just enjoy things here without having the majority of comments be about why they shouldn’t enjoy it. I think this attitude has already lost of a good chunk of users who could be adding to the fediverse, instead now back on corporate social media.
It’s anecdotal but I’ve shown the fediverse to 3 other people who are trekkie nerds like me. They gave up in less than a week not because the fediverse was complicated, but because they felt like they weren’t wanted here.
Be the positive change, be encouraging. Don’t belittle for someone for liking a popular thing if you like something more obscure, instead post about obscure thing and why you like it and share it! Inform users of things like Rowlings insane shit-headery, but don’t demean them for still enjoying the books. If you don’t like sports that’s cool, but let them cheer on their team.
Thanks for listening. I’m going to have a pumpkin spice latte now.
I’m nice
Wait till you hear about reddit
I just found your post because I’m debating deleting my app and bookmark. It’s so fucking negative all the time. The gamers, as you point out, are especially toilet water.
I know there are smaller communities but there aren’t many for me and the larger ones are at a point I no longer want to continue.
I genuinely never read my replies. I just say my peace and keep scrolling.
these people when someone enjoys a thing:
If this was true reddit should be in the negatives, but their growth model is entirely focused on ragebait and addictive algorithms that are meant to keep you in a state of constant anger/depression.
The alternative is we ban anyone’s who’s toxic or mentions Israel like reddit does. But there’s a reason we are all here, and not reddit… People like Lemmy specifically because its not reddit.
I just don’t think there’s a specific way its “supposed” to be and that the entire nature of humans communicating ideas and opinions is messy. If it wasn’t we would just be pulling all our information from some master list that is prescribed to us. Which is what ai is going to do and dictate our thoughts, while telling us what we can and can’t talk about.
This was how Reddit became for me. I’ve not noticed that trend on Lemmy to the same extent but I don’t hold so many outlier opinions and preferences wrt the user base here. Being a white guy in tech rules, I would advise anyone to try it. Lowering the bar to entry is another problem. I guess log off and go for a walk in nature every now and then.
I hate to be a negative response about negativity (and please don’t think I’m unaware of any irony here) but you kinda already answered your own question.
This is how the internet works.
You can be right, and make a true statement, and yet: someone will manufacture an exception to prove you wrong. Someone will add additional information to act like you didn’t know what you were talking about. Someone will exploit a technicality to make you wrong. Someone will ignore the spirit of your argument and quibble over the literal words you wrote.
Steam made steam linux and a gaming system yay; steam sucks, the system is too expensive, and steam is an effective monopoly.
USA anything decent; USA imperialist killers
Discuss any other nations’ unfortunate events or bad moves; USA imperialist killers
Democrats anything positive: democrats spineless corportate neoliberals
Linux thing; linux users shitting on windows
I want to play the new AAA multiplayer game on windoze on my custom PC ; you loser you should play 5 year old singleplayer on linux because anticheat sucks and why’d you spend that much on a botique build and why spend money on a new AAA PC game…
I wouldn’t care so much it’s just that every post winds up with the same criticisms when it comes to these subjects.
The only solution really is subscriptions to the /c/ you like and avoid /all or as you suggested…ignore the stuff that drags you down. I wind up in the same spot, I’ll open a post and within a couple comments if it devolves into trash talking some aspect of it I close the post and move on.
NGL, I came her a year ago from Reddit where I spent 16 years before I got banned…
This place is not at all as toxic, though yeah, I agree that gamers can get het up about issues and how studios run things and can get spiky with each other, but lemmy is so much less rage-filled.
Y’all are absolutely sweet kids most of the time and I love it.
Important Internet Tips:
- There can be more than two sides to an issue, not just the Right Side and the extreme opposite Wrong Side.
- Criticizing or questioning some aspect of the Right side does not make you a shill, cheerleader or crusader for the Wrong side.
- People who belong to a demographic group are not identical people who think identically.
- “Obviously” is not a valid argument. What seems obvious to you might not be obvious or even sensible to someone of equal intelligence.
- The person you’re passionately arguing with might be on the toilet taking a dump before study hall (or recess).
New user here, overall I feel there’s quite a few people eager to express their opinions here, a lot of the times inside YOUR posts or comments, this isn’t a bad thing necessarily, but a lot of the times they don’t really have a ton of supporting arguments under their opinions, and those comments can really be shut down if you slow down the conversation into a logical argument, they crumble down if you point out the obvious problems in the thing they are saying or how they misread what you wrote and just made up an alternative reality version of what you put in.
Like assumptions for example:
- I like Harry Potter = I support EVERYTHING jk rowling did or will ever do = therefore, I am transphobic.
Those are completely unrelated things that are assumed and the thing that’s attacked is not the statement made by the guy that said he’s into Harry Potter, but the assumption made like 2,3,4 chains down the line, completely hallucinated by the guy replying and not based on reality.
Like I know
I feel like a huge chunk of the people on Lemmy (myself included sometimes, unfortunately) are just looking for arguments, opportunities to tell people they’re wrong, or opportunities to proselytize their own beliefs. Which I think is to be expected on any discussion platform, but it’s just about every single thread here, even threads in communities dedicated to more light-hearted things like the meme and shitposting communities.
Maybe part of that is that people just aren’t as aware of what community they’re in when they start reading/replying to comments. That could be a side effect of Lemmy’s size and spread-out-ness - I bet a bunch of people are subscribed to a bunch of different communities, or just have their default feed to be everything, just so that their feed always has new stuff in it, and so everything just sort of melds together into a single uniform doom scrolling experience in their mind. IDK, that’s my theory anyways.
Here’s a key thing I think you’re missing about Lemmy: Lemmy is anti-corporate and anti-capitalist by nature. That is the single thing that pretty much all Lemmy users hold true. That’s why we’re here. It’s not all negative. It’s negative when you’re trying to push a product, especially when it’s made clear it hurts other people.
Try discussing an indie game, especially one with a good track record of treating employees well, or one owned by a cooperative. You will almost always see positive responses. Lemmy users are happy to support good things. They’re also skeptical of corporations (for good reason) and are quick to turn against them when it turns out they’re run by bad people.
I’ll give you an example: Anyone who sees this, what is your favorite indie game, and what about it is special to you? Mine is probably the incredibly standard response of The Outer Wilds. It has so much soul and understanding for the human experience, and it gives you the freedom to discover it for yourself.
I agree Lemmy has a negativity problem, disagree it’s driving off new users. If negativity drove people away Twitter and Reddit would be ghost towns. If anything people crave it.
The problem with negativity is it tends to drive positive people away. People stop bothering trying to have actual discussions because if you express anything resembling positivity someone is eager to respond with a memey “Oh you sweet summer child”.
Eventually every interaction is like that, nobody feels like talking to each other and just want to one-up one another in how cynical and world weary they are. Happens long enough and you get reddit, happens even longer and the cynicism turns to nihilism and it turns into an incel space.
It’ll have users, it just won’t be pleasant to use.
