It feels like the amount of both, divisive posts and ghoulish comments is rising again.
One could argue that the world has a lot of divisive stuff going on and lemmy just talks about it. But the way people post about stuff seems more oot and hateful than it has been in the past.
Not saying it is that but if I wanted to bring the Fediverse down or at least keep my customers from going there, I would sow this stuff as much as I can.
I’m blocking ghouls left right and center atm but if I ever asked a friend to join lemmy, I’d hate to think of what they would see that I dont anymore.
Do we need stronger moderation?
- Maybe ban politics from c/memes?
- Become a little more stringent on “dont be a jerk” rules in communities?
One thing that really bothers me is the collapsing “discourse”. Trying to mend fences and keep the conversation between sides going ime leads to nothing but downvotes and shitstorm.
I feel like a little more interaction (instead of intervention, at first) of the moderators would do wonders there.
Thanks for reading this rant. Have a nice day.
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In any given public space, the pendulum swings endlessly. Or is it just a wrecking ball? Can’t tell.
Anyway, nothing lasts forever. More so for human relationships else the divorce rate wouldn’t be as high as it is.
As products of knowledge and emotions ranging from zero to Infinity, the variety will always divide one from the other at some point. Even twins can grow to dislike each other, let alone complete strangers.
So asking for uniformity is a lost cause from the start. Civility is enforceable up to a point. And chaos is unreasonably violent.The obvious solution is compromise. Some like to give and take in turns, others to merge opinions into something that all sides agree to or something no one wants. Yet nothing is guaranteed to work because we simply aren’t built that way.
Individuals will individualize, eventually. Willingly or not.
As the fediverse becomes more and more of a feasible alternative to corporate social media, it will be inevitable that trolls and spammers will use our platform for malicious things. All we can do is to get better at moderation, maybe somehow bust these farms.
Half of the traffic everywhere is bots:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1264226/human-and-bot-web-traffic-share/
Holy father christmas! Thats dystopian. Thanks for mentioning it.
Just so everyone is aware, this is the thread OP interpreted as so abusive it would warrant banning this person across multiple instances.
In this thread, you’ll notice that another user dares to disagree with haui_lemmy. haui_lemmy interprets that as trolling, and goes on a crusade to purge the entire lemmyverse of dissent.
Nice, so now you‘re trying to discredit me somehow for disliking your way of commenting? You need help, seriously.
Try to find an instance that bans trolls?
I am on my own instance and I ban them but if someone joins world, they’re f*cked. I feel like the communities are very lenient which is fine in normal situations but when peeps start shitting on others (be it religion, ideology or others) they should act. Just my two cents though.
Yeah.
I guess we can’t just direct friends to “Lemmy” in general and instead direct them to beehaw.org, or your instance, or wherever there is the kind of moderation we agree with. From there our friends can see a filtered view of the communities on lemmy.world.
If the biggest instance has a libertarian mod policy that does mean “more selective” instances need to put in more work but on the positive side it does provide a more diverse pool of people and content to sift through.
Politics is banned from c/memes@lemmy.world
And speaking as a mod, report things. The vast majority of things I’ve dealt with as a mod were ones I saw myself or things friends sent on discord. People need to utilize the report function more often if they want moderation on things. We’re not psychic.
As for being more stringent on the not being a dick rule, no. There’s a base level of civility we expect but if we start getting super stringent on what constitutes being a dick, that’s imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.
Lastly, it’s the Internet. Assholes exist everywhere. You are not going to escape it, ever, if you’re using public servers. It’s pretty much required to accept that fact just to use the Internet. Moderators do not exist to prune and preen social media to make it more comfortable for people. We remind people to follow the rules and act upon those who do not. If you’re not breaking the rules then we’re not going to “interact” because we have our own lives and our own posts we are interested in.
Are there any app notifications or email options to let yo know about reports? I modestly mod a couple subs and I have never found a way to reliably get report notifications unless I log in through a browser based front end.
Personally not familiar with any but I can ask around. I’m just always on PC.
I heard that someone was developing a tool to enable this
Hello again Mr. Stamets! ❤️
<3
Thanks for elaborating. I didnt know the report button is not used often. Good advice. Will do just that.
As for moderation:
I‘m a mod myself (both here and on reddit) and I don‘t necessarily agree that its imposing to ask people for civility if a discussion gets heated and kneejerk reactions start popping up. But I‘m thankful for every mod that does the good work and even more so for you openly commenting about it. You’re doing important work.
Then there is „the internet“ which I think is like the world. If we were in a postapocalyptic hellscape, we‘d have no rules, no communities. Only fight to survive. But we aren’t and we do have communities and rules. Therefore, I‘d say we‘re still responsible for the stuff that happens in our tavern (for lack of a better analogy). Are we to keep the guy in the corner from saying things we dont like? No we shouldn’t, but we definitely should keep him from starting a bar fight.
This is just my opinion. Feel free to debate me on it. :)
I’d love to debate you on it, but you’re not giving me much to work with.
Generally, a mod willing to debate me is a mod I want around
Trying my hardest not to make others regret opening the app. Both for my answer and stuff that I could have moderated.
that’s imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.
Now I’m curious how common this is, because it’s not at all why I left. I left to get away from Reddit the company. If anything I think Reddit subs tend to be moderated too leniently (which is good for Reddit, because hate is engagement)
That’s fair. It depends on the communities. Places like Tumblr and Pics had effectively no moderation which left the entire place just a shithole. But then you had places like WorldNews and StarTrek where the mods became specifically known for stirring shit and causing a boatload of problems. Hell, one particular moderator of StarTrek is the reason that so many other communities splintered off.
For me it was a lot of heavy handed moderation. The lack of moderation was frustrating too, don’t get me wrong, but I guess the communities I was most active in were ones where people were constantly pointing out how the moderators were terrible people.
Right, that makes sense. I’ve managed to avoid most of that, except for two cases where a mod grew tired of the sub and decided to ruin it. One of them involved turning it into an unironic Mussolini fan sub so at least there the admins stepped in.
imposing moderator will on community
Rich, coming from the mod that banned me because I called him out on a shitty joke.
Stamets is the worst kind of power user. Spams garbage everywhere, argues with everyone. Fragile as glass.
Ok honestly thank you for that. I kind of gathered that from his pretty much only shitposting and attitude in his comments. Idk why but being banned because of him really bugged me.
Yeah you’re not crazy. He is provocative and cries transphobia when called out for it. Then deletes the comments that make him look bad.
I don’t remember you but the modlog says you were banned for homophobic comments. So I’m gonna go ahead and say that nah, you weren’t banned for calling someone out on a joke 👍
You posted a misogynistic meme, I said “i thought we left that in 2023,” and apparently you didn’t like that so you called me a bigot and banned me. None of what I said was homophobic or bigoted. I just didn’t like your meme because it seemed like the millionth time one of us has made an “ew women” joke and it’s tired and shitty to women. So you said I’m homophobic and banned me then told me to fuck off basically.👎 Which cut me off from participating in the largest LGBTQ+ safe space on Lemmy. So yeah.
…riiiiiight. Or, and this is way more likely, you were banned for saying homophobic shit. Which is why it says banned for homophobic content. I’m going to go with the modlog reason 👍 I’ve yet to see someone on Lemmy who had something like “homophobic comments” added to their modlog ban be for no reason whatsoever.
You were cut out of that safe space because you inherently made it less safe. Of course you’re not allowed in if you’re going to go ahead and make it worse for everyone else. What insane arrogance.
I’m going to go ahead and go back to forgetting you exist now.
I mean, I have screenshots, but k.
lol they banned me for misinformation for calling theirs out. Deleted all the comments to control the dialogue as well.
Said I had proof during another exchange (they started) but the comments are deleted, admin came (yay I kinda thought) said the logs are public. Asked the mod (stamets) to show the deleted comments and the admin to show the log, or atleast how to access it, and banned again.
This place is worse than Reddit for this shit right now, you have an admin lying and hiding stuff for a mod, one they put as moderator for a bunch of communities. Thats not fishy or anything……
I would love to see this “public mod log” because their doesn’t seem to be a way to see (ALL) deleted comments on the current one.
I fully expect another ban for this, for no other reason than Stamets is a thin skinned mod who doesn’t have the emotional capability to mod, and antagonizes Lemmy users and uses their mod powers (abuse) to hide it. Its a fucking shame really, admins are letting it happen too, excusing it in a lot of cases.
I’ve said my peace, unfortunately not much more I can do. I’ll let him go Lord over his little fiefdoms as he wishes. The whole experience has totally turned me off of Lemmy TBH; I’ve literally never had this kind of issue with a mod here or on Reddit.
It’s been a little terrifying seeing a shit ton of supposed liberals acting like trump supporters the last couple weeks. Calling anyone who disagrees with them or questions anything about biden fascists, going out of their way to say hurtful ableist shit, calling pro Palestinian protestors Russian plants (one person even calling for them to be executed), chanting “FOUR MORE YEARS!” whenever Israeli genocide is mentioned, lots of really MAGA-type shit. Besides the last thing though, I’ve hardly seen any of this irl. I’ve just assumed liberals have taking a sharp right turn into reactionary shit, but maybe some/a lot of it is a conservative psyop or something. Idk, I still think it’s mostly authentic unless proven otherwise, but if I were a hate group on 4chan or a russian troll farm trying to make leftists not wanna vote for democrats I’d be doing exactly this
Thanks for chiming in. That indeed is scary.
Astroturfing is a very common thing nowadays btw. There are many cases that even made the news: https://www.businessinsider.com/astroturfing-grassroots-movements-2011-9
Sorry for linking that site. Feel free to google others.
I will start to really pay attention what communities these shitty posts in my feed come from and both report and block them in my instance. Lets see if that helps.
Nah, things seem okay. I’ve noticed more politics misinformation since it’s an election year.
That might be the reason for what I‘m seeing. Everything seems very politicised.
Toxic discourse in large Internet communities predates Reddit, even. It’s been a thing since before there was the web, becoming significantly more likely to find once you get to a critical mass of people.
It’s a good time in the political cycle to find and contribute to niche communities. I almost never come across this kind of thing because that’s where I hang out.
Yeah I’ve encountered a few accounts lately who either have mental health issues or are bots designs to stir discord. Their entire posting history is divisive shit stirring.
Funny how every 4 years the internet gets markedly nastier. I wonder why???
Yes. Exactly what I‘ve seen as well. The election year thing might be the reason though. I know a couple people with mh issues. They’re no problem. These accounts either belong to severely deranged individuals or bots.
Yep I remember this pattern of behavior distinctly from last time.
One of the big ones that sticks out is you start seeing a lot of people claiming to be democrats or left aligned showing up all of a sudden and being big time concern trolls and talking about sitting out the election and/or claiming that there’s no difference between voting democrat or republican, which is demonstrably absolute horse shit.
And just a lot of added vitriol. It seems like even politically unrelated discussions get meaner and more argumentative. I expect it’s just gonna get worse as we get closer to November. It’s only the beginning February. Ugh.
Yeah, I‘ll just block communities now instead of people, until morale improves. :)
Thanks for elaborating. I enjoyed reading it.
One thing that makes me sad about lemmy is that if you find people with „based“ opinions, longer/more regular discussions with them seem impossible. I used to talk to folks in reddit pms a lot when i was at my worst. Helped me immensely.
Well, have a good one.
Not discrediting mental health issues, but being “severely deranged” is a mental health issue
Totally true. I made a totally reasonable comment about a month ago (stated that women shouldn’t be hit on at the gym by randos), and I got downvoted to oblivion and the comment was spammed by 7 different users who essentially acted like I was Hitler. Then they started spamming my comment history and I had to delete all of my old posts.
Seemed like a real person was behind it, but may have been using bots to spam me.
That sounds insane. No idea if this was just one person but it is totally possible. I havent thought of this yet. This has happened to me on multiple occasions. Where a handful of folks immediately jumped me and a lot more reasonable peeps later chimed in confusing me even more since I though my idea was outlandish at that point.
Yeah, I think there’s a handful of toxic folks on here who are behind the bots or a series or alt accounts. I think Reddit probably had more infrastructure in place to crack down on stuff like that, but it’s happened to me (although less dramatically) in other threads here as well. But yeah, there’s no way my relatively normal comment got immediately downvote spammed and commented on by 6 different accounts. Definitely alts.
Being a jerk is extremely subjective - someone could brand you much worse than that just from a polite disagreement from your side, that they don’t want to deal with. Aside from anything else, this is a highly “techie-y” space with a ton of strongly held opinions and ideals, and misunderstandings when communicating/discussing them happen. A lot. It will keep happening. People will look like asses without necessarily doing so intentionally.
Now, outright trolling, spamming, shitting on discussions with obvious bad faith participation, consistently derailing unrelated threads with one’s hobby horse, obvious flamebaiting and so on… great. Reporting and removing more of that should be a priority everywhere.
Banning politics from any non-political community that can be persuaded to do so also sounds like a great idea on general principle. Politics is poison (particularly what passes for it in the US), and it would be polite to not shove it down the entire fediverse’s throat. Every geographical sub is politics, every news sub is politics, there are dedicated politics and politicalmemes communities, and still it’s fucking everywhere else also. Asklemmy and NoStupidQuestions are full of thinly veiled soapboxing (which leads to a lot of awfully stupid questions). People who want to JAQ off to politics can easily make their own community for that (that way, the rest of us can block it, as intended), or else keeping it in their pants would’ve been kinda polite, idk. Seems odd to insist on posting political stuff everywhere.
Your post is one hell of a ride. It starts very lenient and then says exactly what I was trying to say but worded much better. Thank you very much. That is both a very good explanation and one I happen to agree with fully.
Because I‘m an admin IRL, autistic and sometimes rude myself. But namecalling, trolling and shitting on peeps is too much even for me. I feel like saying that using certain brand is a stupid idea is rude but no big deal while going on about people and groups makes me squirm.
Have a good one. :)
Thanks, and you too. :)
Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same. There couldn‘t have been a worse time for LLMs to be so accessible, capable and fairly unregulated. The perfect conditions to make this year the worst for internet content we‘ve ever seen. By a landslide. We will look at the last 10 years and feel nostalgic on how good these years were with their little bot armies, cute clickbait and adorable fake news.
Oh wow. Thats a bleak but very convincing outlook you have painted. Lets pray this doesnt come to pass.
The cheaper and easier it gets to produce and distribute content online, the more I am convinced that we will need to start requiring people to put something of actual value at stake to let them join a social network. The sad thing is that, aside from simply charging money for access, there is nothing that I see that could be used but not abused by governments or corporations.
Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same.
Interesting you don’t mention Israel doing a fucking GENOCIDE and the USA supporting it.
This is the kind of commitment the post is taking about.
No, the US is not supporting genocide.
When the Jewish people took the motto NEVER AGAIN what, exactly, did you think that meant? Did you think it would mean “oh please, Sir, don’t hurt us please?”
Hamas, seeking the elimination of the Jews of Israel decided to find out, and used their own population as shields.
You reap what you sow.
Hamas seeks no such thing and your blind acceptance of what is inherently a racist perspective based on Islamophobia is extremely telling.
Yeah, it’d be real fucked up if Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, all allied and interconnected Iran-backed terrorist groups, had direct calls for jihad and genocide in their charters and mottos, or founder and leader quotes saying they are glad Israel exists because it saves them the trouble of hunting the Jewish diaspora
OH WAIT
THEY DO
If you want to talk about violence, any level of violence, as a legitimate response to colonialism, especially when it enters the ethnic cleansing stage, fair enough, but don’t pretend they’re not genocidal fuckwits themselves with plenty of proof for their intentions.
If you want to know why Lemmy is full of pissed off people fighting in the comments it’s because half the people who comment on Lemmy have the fact checking ability of a mentally incapable squirrel and they’ll repeat any damn thing they hear.
- Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
The leadership explicitly refuses to repudiate the old charter that called for genocide, and has directly said they can’t do that politically, or even call it a replacement.
It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out why, you sure as hell wouldn’t be pretending you don’t understand why MAGA leaders won’t criticize the Confederacy or the KKK.
Why are they atacking Jordan then?
Give it a rest.
They event, while deplorable, doesn’t really generate new bot flow. The same conservative and Russian style bots are already up and running.
You don’t think the US and Israel have an online presence pushing propaganda? I’ve noticed some odd voting patterns on some posts relating to the genocide and recent bombings.
I never said that. Of course they do. But they’ve always been here.
Israel ramping up their genocide so significantly and a new US military campaign in the Middle East seems like a great reason to increase propaganda activity. I have a feeling it will only continue to get worse as the conflict spreads.
A fair consideration.
I’ve been noticing the same sort of behaviour that you’re talking about. And while I don’t know the cause, I don’t think that it’s caused by trolls or bots. Instead I’m guessing a few potential factors:
- Demographic concentration in general purpose, lax moderation instances, tailored to attract your typical Reddit user instead of more reasonable people.
- Lemmy+Kbin users being proportionally more combative, entitled, petty, and/or whiny, due to how people reached this platform.
- “Powerjanny” mentality being inherited from Reddit, specially given the likely higher proportion of former Reddit moderators here.
- General lack of mod tools, forcing moderators to take sub-optimal decisions on how to handle users and content.
- Normalisation of witch hunting, making people walk on eggs to avoid being confused with witches, and assuming that the ones not walking on eggs fly on a broom.
- Normalisation of stupidity, and subsequent normalisation of oversimplifications, assumptions, genetic fallacies, phobia against uncertainty, decontextualisation, etc.; with those things either making the stupid act in a hostile way, or others act in a hostile way towards the stupid.
- Natural reinforcement of behaviour in social groups.
This is already a rather large wall of text and I’m trying to be succinct, but feel free to ask further reasoning on any of those points.
Disclaimers to avoid replies to this comment that would exemplify it
I’m aware that I’m not exactly “gentle” towards users showing stupidity, thus being part of the problem, and in no moment I even implied to be “above” it.
By “stupid” I’m clearly referring to able people who behave in an irrational way. I am not talking about disabled people. In fact “the stupid” is better seen as a set of user behaviours than as a specific group of people.
Good points. Thanks. I see your comment as very reflected and although pretty honest (which is generally frowned upon here I guess) its not mean imo. I like it.
Very good points, thanks for sharing.
I’ve seen two trolls recently, but you can see them from very far away, and they post in general ask communities like AskLemmy or No Stupid questions.
On smaller communities, they are not around that much. And I don’t go to news or politics communities.
Can relate. I will probably have to just leave communities that enable this sort of behavior.
People here are blaming politics. I don’t think that’s it. The quality of comments and discussion here has taken a massive nosedive for the past four months or so, no matter what the topic is.
I think it’s pretty simple, the terrible won. Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible. They didn’t come back. So now we’ve created the toxic enabling environment that is enabling it hard today.
You can fix it with moderation, but that’s a lot of work, and people get really angry.
I’m pretty close to just cutting my losses on lemmy. It’s heading in the same direction as reddit but with less moderation, and simply because it’s smaller, the awfulness is more visible.
Strongly recommend using the block more. Be your own mod
that works for me, but I want to have good conversations with others, that’s kind of the point. Blocking terrible people doesn’t get that to happen
Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible.
That, and the fact that simply there isn’t enough good discussion to begin with. This community kind of has movement because it’s a meta-topic, but for everything else it’s mostly "let’s pretend we are superior than redditors because we found our way here and “let’s pretend we are not in Reddit for all the other niche communities that we are still interested.”
I think the biggest mistake in the execution of the protests is the effort was spread around “going dark” for as many subreddits as possible. It would be a lot more effective if we got one big-ish niche and told them “let’s focus all our efforts to get you out of Reddit and migrate completely to any other alternative.” Go for something completely random but with commercial interest, like /r/sneakers, and if a moderate success of getting 15% of the user base to Lemmy would translate into 500k signups.
That, and the fact that simply there isn’t enough good discussion to begin with. This community kind of has movement because it’s a meta-topic, but for everything else it’s mostly "let’s pretend we are superior than redditors because we found our way here and “let’s pretend we are not in Reddit for all the other niche communities that we are still interested.”
That’s a real issue. Hopefully it will get better over time, but sometimes at the moment it feels like shouting into the void.
It feels like Lemmy has also become less… diverse? At this point I think the default assumption is that every user is a white, cishet, male, tech nerd from the US, which wasn’t as much the case in the earlier days.
