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’ll be honest, I’m starting to fall out of love for Lemmy because of this shit. Recently I’ve taken up Bluesky to contact a friend of mine, and when I decide which app I want to use when I zone out, Bluesky usually wins. I know a lot of you hate it because it’s corporate owned, but God damn it, the vibes are much better there.
Also I’ll say this flat out: at least when I go there I’m never bombarded by “voting and protesting are both stupid and you’re an idiot for thinking you can ever make the world a better place within legal methods” propaganda, like I do from a certain instance.
It seems like the worst migrated here because they got banned from Reddit for having an extreme stance and, instead of talking and discussing things like a normal person, they would just immediately have a toddler-level freak out on everyone who didn’t share their view.
Then they’d make a “safe space” community here where even mild disagreement / someone fact-finding / an errant downvotes while browsing /All would result in a ban, thus creating a completely worthless echo chamber and causing them to become even more extremist.
As a litmus test, if your community has custom words they use regularly for normal people, you may be in an extremist echo chamber.
The trick is finding the comfy middle ground between 4chan (no moderation at all) and “Tesseract” moderation.
(If you weren’t here for it Tesseract was a Lemmy app whos creator decided to ghost-ban usernames in his own application’s code. It did not end well when it was found out)
I lean toward no moderation at all but I realize that’s madness.
I left lemmy and only came back for memes (but occasionally engage otherwise). Lemmy hivemind has a very ridgid idea of right and wrong and I came here initially with the idea that this would be somewhere unlike reddit where I would have the space to form my own opinions as opposed to being force fed someone elses. At the end of the day it’s more social media with all the same problems. I go back to discord for nuanced discussions honestly
Welp, you’ve summed up what I’ve been thinking for a while. I don’t know if it is really a Lemmy thing, pessimistically informed folks, or just the Internet. It’s probably all of them. I know pretty much exactly what OP is referring and have no answers. Just commiseration.
As long as Lemmy accepts “fuck” is as part of a title, you can bet it will pull in toxicity and negativity.
I found a small private forum and haven’t come back to lemmy in months.
This population is jaded, angry and brittle. It’s like being bullied in school again. Why would anyone want to stay here?
You have inspired me to make pumpkin spice syrup so that I may enjoy more pumpkin spice products. Haven’t had enough of that this year.
it really does. if people don’t agree with you they bully you. And then the mods delete your comments when you are just trying to be civil and have an opposing viewpoint.
Agree 100%, you really notice it when you start creating posts regularly and like 80% of the comments are some variation of a complaint.
I agree and think balance is key. One should always embrace happiness when possible while also trying to better their local environment, if possible. Knowing the truth doesn’t mean I have to be sad or angry about it 24/7.
I’ve posted comments where the overall response seemed to have a sense of “it’s not okay to be happy”. Shit will always be shitty somewhere at any given time. It’s okay to smile and have fun. We all need a break from the shit every now and again.
It took me years to finally find happiness. I’m not going to give it up.
This place is honestly worse than reddit at times, not every community here obviously but I have stumbled across some that just felt like everyone who was too cynical and doomer for reddit decided to come here.
Negative post. Downlemmied, nerd.
it is natural development of any digital community platform. one of my communities is littered with folks who post snide comments on abstract art they dont like and its kinda funny when they get defensive about it.
I’ve had six grande soy pumpkin spice lattes this season, and I feel neither wanted nor unwanted here. I also watch my NFL teams each week, but I’m not a big talk about it to everyone kind of guy. I’ve noticed that Lemmy is heavy on doom and gloom, but when it starts to get to me, I stay off the threads for a bit.
Enjoy your pumpkin spice latte, and go Bills.
