Memes

My mantra with those things is:

1. Attack the message, not the messenger. If the messenger insists on repeating a sufficiently absurd message, I'll not stop them from repeating their mistake.
2. Informing lurkers takes priority over changing my conversation partner's stances.

I'm new to Lemmy but it just feels more like Reddit in the sense that if you're not part of the "hive mind", then you're just told to "go away" instead of participating in actual discussion.

It's caused me to post less than when I initially joined. There's not as much activity on Lemmy than on the Reddit equivalent in the main "channel" I read. So I've found myself wandering back to Reddit but I don't post or comment much there either.

Lemmy see those nuts. Ha! Goteem!

I always avoid communities related to politics because of that reason. There are other reasons, like a big focus on US politics or being feed with politics 24 hours per day every day.

But I noticed an increasing amount of hostility in other communities as well, not related directly to politics. For example, in those communities about Ukraine, there is always the usual tankie spreading strong words and what not. Or when there is a post about defederating certain instance, it seems that people take it personally and swear words are easily launched.

People can say the same things in a good way, being nice and polite. There is no need to troll or make others feel shitty. It also depends on what instance you're on, but for the most part, it's on us how we want this to become into: either a civil place to discuss everything, or Reddit 2.0.

Yesterday evening I was feeling the same way, so I started blocking users that are clearly posting inflammatory or aggressively brigadey content (note: not to be confused with things I don't agree with. It's about tone and tact, not content), or things that I find annoying to see over and over like the same trollish meme and emoji images. After only an evening of doing that, my Lemmy experience has been worlds better. I did notice a particular instance being the trend which makes me look forward to instance blocking, though at the moment I'd prefer to still do so on an individual user basis.

In the early days of Reddit it was said that the voting buttons were there to reflect whether the poster was adding to or subtracting from the discussion. I really liked that idea because you could upvote someone you completely disagree with because they were having a conversation in good faith.

Instead, the voting buttons devolved into an agreement button and a popularity contest. The toxicity is obvious here when a post is heavily downvoted for disagreement with the masses, despite being a bona fide entry into the conversation.

Slashdot always had an interesting take on the idea with max +5/-5 and the whole "outstanding", "funny", "informative", etc tags that could be applied. This allows for several meta conversations - the jokes and memes, the serious, the philosophical and more with our interfering with one another and lets the readers absorb the topic based on the level of their mood.

I wish we could somehow encourage and promote content that makes an effort to understand and contribute, or even share a differing opinion (politely). And highly discourage nasty replies.

When people explicitly participate in bad faith, I frankly don't get what's so terrible about showing them the door, or in this case, turning off their megaphone line to other instances. If their behavior is great, terrific, super-acceptable and cool where it comes from - wonderful! It can stay there, and the rest of us can see less childish trolling. Because that is 100% "their thing" at an instance level.

Whatever excuses, "boo hoo Reddit was so mean to us years ago", whatever crocodile tears that "it's not everyone", whatever "eThIcAl ImPlIcAtIoNs" of blocking or defederating - I don't give a shit about excuses trolls make, sorry not sorry. Being taken seriously is not a Right, let alone when you obviously just want to dick with people. "Yes, sure, let me get into Serious Debating Position right in front of this boxing glove on a giant spring I just watched you set up."

Every discussion about this is not only provoked by their consistently shitty behavior, it also tends to get derailed, trolled and sealioned across instances proving the point immediately. Droves of people are fed up with the whole thing - or would be, if the threadiverse even had "droves" of people left. It is directly and indirectly harming participation: surprise, most people do not want another 4chan, whatever the paintjob.

Their alleged, tragic, Reddit-discriminated backstory seems a lot less convincing going by their current behavior. Instance gets federated, people immediately start to troll and "dunk" like the brave Internet Warriors that they are, and are not subtle about it. When notified "that's not really cool here, could you not?" the response is a solid "UP YOURS" because they're Just That Cool and/or literally "Owning The Libs". This remind you of anything?

The threadiverse was something I'd idly mention to friends (at least the more political and leftist ones, because even before this shitshow, it was relentlessly politically shrill as fuck) and hoped I'd eventually get to seriously recommend. Now I just can't recommend it to anyone: a dying, troll-infested, technologically suspicious mess, circling the drain.

I won't go into details but very quickly Lemmy has changed for the worse. I don't see it as that different from Reddit now

This i completely agree with.

Just recently had an argument where i voiced my opinion (albeit not in a really intelligent way at first i admit) and i immediately got a fat load of sarcasm from a person who disagreed with me. Said person thought i was a troll. I tried to convince them multiple times that i am serious and in fact not trolling but i think they still don't believe me. It got to a point where it was so cumbersome to continue the argument that i just stopped replying.

I'd really prefer if everyone could be a bit more civil/professional in a disagreement.

If people post memes or whatever with politics you are going to get political responses.

Politics is real shit, and with the state of things in the world right now, it's going to get heated.

Civility can be a little hard to maintain when you genuinely believe the other side will wipe you out given half the chance.

Honestly it seems to be mostly related to the instances you're on and who they're federated with

The instance I primarily use (Blahaj) had some drama recently that turned it into a bit of a shit show for a little while but once we were no longer federated with the problem it quickly got a lot nicer

Basically now you can have a civil discussion without people dogpiling and sealioning you down for having a slightly different opinion

@[email protected]

I like good faith, nuanced discussions but it seems like a lot of times when I try to be nice people see it as a sign of weakness and go on the offense. There's a lot of interesting political and historical discussions we could have, like, "Were Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms necessary for the conditions of the time to eradicate extreme poverty in China, or were they a deviation from socialist ideals that have caused China to be irrevocably compromised by corporate interests (in which case, what should've been done differently)?" On Hexbear, that's something that we have disagreements and nuanced good faith discussions about, but it's impossible to do that in an environment where everyone accuses me of being a bot or shill or a tankie or whatever whenever I acknowledge that any policy China has ever implemented was at all successful.

I guess it's easier to get into higher-level discussion when you have a set of agreed upon values and basic assumptions. I just wish I didn't have to deal with all the accusations and name-calling, but I'm not one to roll over either. There's a reason we have Pig Poop Balls.

Is it an inevitable problem with scale?

I feel much the same, but I also feel that there has been a rise in trolls and those who seek to create strife.

Arguing is all good and dandy, but arguing with trolls tends to result in wasted time and bad after tastes. If we are not supposed to block or ignore the trolls from the troll instances (those whose admins ignore or promote trolling and crusading), we'll need more powerful moderator tools, potentially spanning multiple instances, which Harbour their own problems.

As with most social media, I think the voting system makes it worse. There is always an element of "playing to the audience," in that the easiest way to get validation (votes, boosts, replies) is to make sure everyone thinks you're morally or intellectually superior over the person you're talking to, whereas an actual normal conversation would be focused on the exchange of new ideas and perspectives.

Stronger moderation could help, and filtering the less civil communities could help, but I suspect it's just a natural consequence of having a built-in validation system that applies to every post and comment everywhere. As engagement in the fediverse grows overall, I could see it getting worse mainly because of more 'vote-seeking' behavior.

I fully appreciate the desire for more civil discussion.

But please be aware that tone policing has been used as an offensive weapon against many marginalized groups: "We get that you want to fight for your rights, but could you please do that in the form of civil discourse?" That phrase is almost always heard when years of civil discourse lead nowhere.

Civility is a two-way street. It is not "I get to insult whoever I want and they have to meekly argue on my terms."

Agreed.