As the space becomes more popular, the level of social cohesion goes down.

Also, every space on the internet where users talk is now infested with shit chatbots trying to keep poor people angry with each other to prevent us from flaying rich people alive

Fuck off /s

It’s not a Lemmy thing. People (at least here in the States) are feeling anxious and defeated about the state of the world. That shit makes people irritable. Irritable people are prone to lashing out at anything that trips over their last nerve.

My wife works for a nonprofit that focuses on providing services to families with children who have emotional or intellectual needs. She told me she’s witnessed more meltdowns from parents these last 6 months or so than she’s seen in her 15+ years in the field.

Facism is making the people that would normally be reasonable get really emotional and people love to lash out anonymously.

I think part of it at least is reaching a critical mass.

Lemmy was definitely a collection of relatively like-minded geeks at the start. Even when we disagreed on issues, we all agreed that we needed to work together to make the community grow.

Now that it’s grown to a respectable size, there are more dissenting opinions as well as less tolerance for dissent; and more to the point, there is space for absolutely vile content that used to get choked out. Now to stop this sort of thing, the ‘old-timers’ are more likely to say "shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down, and behave!!!’ before they can get a solid foot hold.

Meanwhile, the worst of those people are feeling both entitled and persecuted, and shouting their garbage louder than ever.

This happens everywhere that gets to a certain size. I remember when reddit stopped feeling like a secret community and more like a warehouse.

Of course, there are other reasons that people have mentioned below: The world is tired, worn out, and PISSED OFF at the half that disagree with them. The president of the United States has broken every rule of diplomacy, grace, and civility that people tended to follow in social life. Social Media has made it far easier (too easy) to dehumanize people and turn them into a one-dimensional pastiche of their posted opinions.

And we’re facing the destruction of the planet, genocide, and the global resurrection of fascism.

The world is getting worse, I’m afraid. I really wish it wasn’t true and I spent a lot of time emphasizing the good to my mom before she died; but honestly, it’s getting worse.

The world is kind of a shitty place right now. And to be honest, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t, at least to some degree, affecting everyone’s calm.

From a neutral viewpoint, the world is more divided than ever, no matter what values you have, there’s someone who opposes them with few, if any exceptions. Those opposing viewpoints have only grown in strength and number on the Internet, for years.

Additionally, the “us vs them” mentality of everyone is blinding them to even understanding why someone would disagree with their viewpoint. Of course that’s not everyone, but it’s a growing and very loud group.

Political violence is also starting to run rampant. Escalation after escalation. It keeps building.

So in this time of having a global voice, that can reach hundreds of millions of people with a single tweet or comment or thread or post or whatever, and with so much growing hatred among different political groups, it’s unsurprising to me that conflict is rising.

Additionally, Lemmy is growing. Not everyone that joins Lemmy will be the same type of person that joined Lemmy after the Reddit API incident. That influx of people had a very similar value set, because they almost all came here from Reddit for the same reason. So there’s at least a good amount of overlap in everyone’s values.

Over time, more and more diverse people have been joining Lemmy, and it’s not surprising that they have differing opinions on a lot of things.

This outcome was pretty much inevitable.

As far as I’m concerned, as long as it’s done respectfully and civilly, then disagree. Debate. Try to understand the opposing viewpoint, even if you don’t agree with it.

That’s exactly the same time I migrated. Personally, no, I haven’t noticed an uptick in that, it’s just as hostile as ever. It just about scratches the itch enough to be a functional replacement for what Reddit used to be for me though so I hang around. There’s solace in that it’s not ALL nasty, it’s just extremely likely to devolve in to that at a hair trigger and however benign or even how mundane the original topic of discussion, someone will try to clumsily make it related fascism or imperialism.

Check your communities, and what instances they’re on. Not all are created equal. lemmy.ml tends to be pretty wacko unless you’re of their particular ideological alignment, lemmy.world is very very large and thus has a very very large number of obnoxious shitheads compared to other instances. On the other hand, beehaw.org is intentionally and pathologically positive. I also find lemmy.ca quite friendly, though I might be biased.

I first joined and started using Lemmy probably a couple months before you.

Back then, when anyone was being uncivil, needlessly hostile, rude, or aggressive, there was a very high likelihood that other users would call it out quickly. Many, many wonderful folks did it on my behalf multiple times and that’s one of the big reasons I stuck around, because that’s cool as hell if you ask me. I’m here to enjoy myself and have a little fun, not to be verbally abused because some problematic person lacks reading comprehension or prefers to make wild assumptions based on very limited information.

I won’t say there’s been a recent uptick in hostility, unless your definition of lately is a lot more lenient than my own. However, I will say that with each new outrage from Reddit comes an influx of new users and with each new influx, it’s only a short period of time before I notice things are suddenly a bit less nice, friendly, and casual.

Sadly, things are at the point now where I rarely bother to read any responses, replies, or messages in my inbox. I usually just go in there to click “mark as read” to clear the notifications without reading them and move on. There’s just too much negativity directed my way, often super randomly to the most innocuous stuff, or random users I can’t recall ever interacting with who somehow seem to have a chip on their shoulder. It’s actually kind of bizarre at times. Regardless, for my style of participation, which is mostly parodying old people facebook and sharing random anecdotes, feeling like I need to ignore replies is still okay, I guess.

Anyway, glad I’m not the only one who has noticed the shift. Wish there were an easy button to get things back to the welcoming place Lemmy used to be.

While Lemmy might be getting a larger variety of personalities, some of them being jerks, I still find it a far more pleasant place to be than reddit.

No, fuck you

/j

There has been a noticeable uptick in new rightist accounts lately.

Instead of blocking people, I tag the bad actors in Voyager and have noticed that most of the toxicity comes from the same small group of specific people.

I haven’t noticed much, but I do have a lot of people blocked…

The most important thing for me is that the amount of truly thoughtful comments I’ve seen is higher than on any other platform I use.

There’s a facet of internet culture that revolves around ridicule. I’m not sure but I think it stems from the streamer world. It’s like a modern form of celebrity gossip (read: harassment) that got commoditized into social media. So it’s not just gossiping about celebrities like in the past era of media.

Harassment used to be driven by publishers. In this era of social media anyone and everyone is a content publisher. People trawl the internet for things they think can be made spectacle. Right down to a random internet comment 100 replies deep in a thread. If for whatever reason they think this person is to be made a fool of then they proceed to reply with such belligerence.

They engage as if they are an outside observer. As if they’ve an audience like it’s Jerry Springer or something. As if they are the only human being. They don’t see others as human. Everyone else are caged animals for them taunt. To throw objects at through the cage bars or to tap on the glass. They think they are the main character.

I think there’s some psychological effect where their parasocial relationship with their favorite streamers and the herd of loyal viewers gives them a false sense of power based on the crowd effect or something. They can’t see it from the perspective that they are a lone poster being deranged.

I think the vote/like/share model gives them a false sense of power. When they see the uplikes number go up, they think they have a herd of supporters behind them. A simple little number on a screen emboldens them.

Nobody seems to see anything out of the ordinary with this. Such is the nature of this era of internet and the hostility. It’s normalized. They don’t know of any way of being.

You’re not a streamer with a herd of followers. You’re just a sole internet user. You have no crowd behind you. It’s like you think you do. It’s bizarre. From observers outside your perspective, you’re like an unstable person wandering the city streets. Pedestrians avoid you. They don’t want to aggravate you. You’re seen as someone possibly having a mental break. Or is it drugs or some kind of substance abuse.

On the internet now it’s unavoidable. These crazies are out here. They’re aggravated. They jump down anyones throat. On much of social media it’s the only way they know how to be. Just belligerence against belligerence all the time. Nobody talks like a normal human being. It’s like they’re derealized. Dissociated.

A basic fact that internet has no moderators anymore. They’re moderators in name only. The definition of the word is lost. To “moderate”. To preside over a discussion. Nobody does this anymore. The crazies are allowed to run amok. There’s some hints of actual moderation on Lemmy instances. The extremists have been grinding away at wearing this down though. In general this kind of thing is completely absent on social media anymore.

The only time I see it anymore comes from people from the older eras of internet. Those to came about in the modern internet have no concept of civility.