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Is it just me, or have the comments on Lemmy become extra aggressive over the past 3 months?

I feel like things on Lemmy were pretty chill several months ago, and that’s started to change.

People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor. Now I get the sense that people have become quick to be negative, attack, and not be constructive.

Am I crazy in feeling like the vibe has changed?

boywar3 ,

Never forget the way the human brain works, with the more common interpretation being: “it takes 7 instances of positive things to outweigh 1 negative.”

For my part I haven’t really noticed any difference, but I only infrequently comment!

markus99 ,

Less about the sub and more aobut the world going to shit with the ultra aggressive companies and unchained immigration all over the first word from India, muslims and Africa.

tcrash ,

Lmao it has nothing to do with immigration

davel ,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

unchained immigration all over the first word from India, muslims and Africa.

jesse-wtf Racist much?

forgotmylastusername ,

Lost among the “internet sucks now, it used to be better” discourse is that the old internet was heavily moderated. The laissez faire parts of the old internet were known as the seedy corners of the web. Social media and its modern derivatives like lemmy take on that latter philosophy.

It’s no wonder it’s chaos every where. The libertarian tech bros have really impressed their world view on everyone. So the prevailing philosophy is these “digital town squares” should be absolute free speech zones. Except town squares in real life do not work like this anywhere. At least not in most liberal democracies. In real life there is bureaucracy. There are police, fire, ambulances. There is the simple matter of neighborly social contract. You cannot go into a real life town square and do whatever you want. You cannot just up and fight strangers, engage in lewd acts, set up encampments or what have you without permits. In the same way internet requires structure. Counter intuitively it used to have a lot more of it on account of sites being run by a real human being. Not the mega conglomerate investor groups feeding off ad/engagement profits.

Those users unfamiliar with the old internet yet pine for the good old days would have hated it. Power hungry mods is a meme as old as the internet itself. It’s a necessity of the internet. Hardly anybody gets banned for being an asshole anymore. Sometimes (often more like) people need to be forced offline so they can go outside.

auzas_1337 , (edited )

TL;DR - A millennial goes on a tangent about the good ol’ days.

I remember being permanently or temporarily banned as a kid/teenager with simple messages like “go outside”. Mostly for being too rude or annoying, or edgy. As teens and kids often are.

Idk if it’s a thing on Lemmy, but I’m all for extended temporary bans for simply repeatedly being a dick to others.

The “old internet” for me was something like 2006-2012. And I agree, people who pine for it probably couldn’t hack it in 2024, it was racist, it was homophobic, and threads went off the rails with people giving unsolicited advice on how to please your gf, but it was fun, it was dynamic, often complete strangers behind phpBB nicknames felt more real than your closest friends on Instagram do now.

I yearn for those days. Not because I particularly want to deal with racist, homophobic idiots, but because I miss the dynamic internet before mega social network sites. I miss the nuance, people knowing each other on forums and whenever someone who’s known in the community would post something that on surface level is banhammer-worthy per the rules, the community would talk it out and the hammer would fall when people call for it, not always strictly adhering to the rules. And yes, that did produce the power-hungry mods. But it’s not like much has changed.

I feel like I’m going off on a tangent. I just miss the randomness.

I recently had a chat with a new colleague about how you can’t joke with a lot of Zoomers about race/nationality/sex because they don’t perceive nuance. I think it’s a cultural thing imprinted by the internet content coming from America. We’re both from Eastern/South Eastern Europe and people don’t immediately get their panties in a knot over offensive jokes because they realize that a racist-sounding joke does not make the person racist. And I feel that’s the state of the internet now too, and it’s ok, but I miss the sharp edge that it used to have.

I also miss the weird smileys.

unreasonabro , (edited )

tldr a child gives us his wisdom lmao

first by mocking and then by doing the thing he mocked

well played asshole

the internet only existed for like eight years before you started using it and you pine for your past but shit on those who were alive for the first part

just fuckin retarded man, snap out of it and quit being a cunt

auzas_1337 , (edited )

Your comment nicely illustrates OPs observation.

Anyone can feel free to disagree with me or poke at inconsistencies in what I wrote, I know they’re there, but I don’t have the time to write an essay. But calling me a retarded child while misinterpreting what I said is exactly the kind of aggressive commenting I believe OP is pointing out.

b_n ,

Say something dumb in an IRC channel? Get banned.

The good ol’ days when I was young and irresponsible and got banned for it. I learnt how to converse with people online through this. Talk shit, get banned. I also feel like I forgot some of this on later platforms.

I hated it at the time, but like most learning experiences, grown to appreciate it later. I can’t believe I had free and unmoderated access to the internet’s back in the early 2000s. Shout out to those mods for putting a teenager in their place!

tcrash ,

It’s becoming the new reddit

snek ,
@snek@lemmy.world avatar

Coincidentally, a genocide has been unfolding in the past 3 months, and that tends to put people on edge.

UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT ,

Well said, rising slope of solid rectangles

Dud ,
@Dud@lemmy.world avatar

I just call them crescendo.

snek ,
@snek@lemmy.world avatar

Thank you, though I know you’re not willing.

Porokoro ,

There’s no genocide, you people are ignorant as shit

snek ,
@snek@lemmy.world avatar

Then what is the ICJ investigating? And how do you explain the hundreds of genocide experts who have called it that? Thanks.

OtakuAltair ,
@OtakuAltair@lemmy.world avatar

No no, you see, South Africa and the ICJ are actually the legal arm of Hamas (actual thing Israel has claimed)

We are all Hamas on this blessed day

OtakuAltair , (edited )
@OtakuAltair@lemmy.world avatar

Man sh.itjust.works needs some better moderation

bhamlin ,

You’re aggressive!

unreasonabro ,

NO YOU

fight me in my driveway

snausagesinablanket ,
@snausagesinablanket@lemmy.world avatar

Especially the grammar Nazis that floated here on a turd from the reddit cesspool.

spez_ ,

Grammer*

Bazoogle ,

Gamer*

uSpetzWon ,

I think it was about my very first time on Lemmy when I saw someone seriously suggesting killing the rich. No joke but in all seriousness saying that we should.

In 10+ years of Reddit I don’t think I never saw a post like that.

I guess it fits nicely with all the pro Hamas propaganda here.

davel ,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

porky-scared

palestine-heart

unreasonabro ,

The average person who comes here is looking for something that isn’t reddit, because they were caught in the great content and moderation purge as reddit frantically tries to maintain a clean public face while it prepares for its IPO, which will turn it the rest of the way into garbage.

In other words, people who come here are pissed off to have to come here, pissed off to be here, and pissed off in general. As the exodus continues this trend will increase, and I truly hope we don’t start making the censorship mistakes and heavy-handed banhammering that wound up creating the need for this place to begin with.

_sideffect ,

Holy cow I thought I was the only one running into rude people.

I’m dealing with that right now, and also what I noticed is the abundance of downvotes on facts, but upvotes on feelings.

auzas_1337 ,

I think downvotes on facts and upvotes on feelings is just people wanting to feel validated, but not having the energy to engage with content. It used to happen on reddit too a lot. A lot of communities there are based on dealing with human emotions and situations in life. People seeking advice and validation about their lives being the primary motivation for even creating an account on the site.

I have a little pet theory backed by some reading that people are overstimulated by junk content to the point where they just can’t meaningfully engage in serious discussions anymore and that leads to the phenomena of populism on a political scale and simple, emotion-based upvoting on a Lemmy scale.

_sideffect ,

Interesting theory; what also plays a big factor is mob mentality I find.

And if someone comments after you correcting one small thing, you’ll then get downvoted as well.

noobdoomguy8658 ,

I like your theory and wanna agree.

In 00s and 10s, my friends and I used to engage with the Internet and each other in a very different way than in the more recent years: We basically were the content generators for ourselves, making conversations based on our ideas fueled by movies, books, or pure imagination, with a lot of jokes and other content that, compared to today, probably took much more effort; we made ambient music with a shitty mic, gathered together, somewhere away from our homes, to talk and watch shit on some weak-ass laptops, maybe game and talk on said laptops, maybe game online, share stupid proposals for our art projects like making music or writing stories or drawing, sharing results.

Of course, we recited some jokes, rein reenacted some, and ironically enough, the most repeated were the ones coming from short-term content, like the z0r.de flashes or skits from collection-type videos like the GMOD Idiot Box. Back then such short-form content was more of a rarity, it seems, so we still had a lot room for creativity and something more meaningful and such, while now this type of content has filled way too many spaces, with much lower quality, too - we’ve seemed to have stopped creating, despite having arguably much more fuel for it thanks to the many changes our lives brought.

Thinking about this makes me browse the Internet a little less and focus on writing or reading, two things I’ve been most creatively engaged with since I was a kid, hoping that can bring creating stuff back to my life and the lives of my friends and family, at least to some degree, as opposed to just consuming lazy content and having even lazier, meaningless, dull conversations with people I care about.

auzas_1337 ,

I was just commenting on this to my gf a couple of days ago - I’m browsing and posting on the internet less so I feel more free to do things in a way that I like without thinking about the what audience they’re for.

In a way the awful state, and what I view as a downfall (remains to be seen), of big sites that everyone has been tied to for essentially a decade feels like shedding chains. I hope more people quit and spend their energy elsewhere. It doesn’t have to be another site, it can be any offline endeavour.

I’m on Lemmy because I’ve come to a realization that the reason I enjoyed internet back in the day was, as you said, a different type of engagement. And I don’t think it will ever be as it used to be. But a big part of that engagement was conversations like we’re having right now. At least in my algorithm enclosed corner of big social media sites I don’t see people reacting and having a conversation. It’s just a reaction, thanks, like, bye. Sometimes there’s arguing. But never a conversation.

httpjames ,
@httpjames@sh.itjust.works avatar

I disabled votes on my clients. I don’t want a number to potentially sway my opinion on a comment or post

_sideffect ,

I wonder if that’s why Youtube did it also, for downvotes at least

AVincentInSpace ,

Lemmy users discovering that human nature doesn’t change just because the name of the website isn’t Reddit:

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

Part of it is the paranoia about what people perceive as trolls or shills, combined with thinking that their opinions are a matter of life and death. I’ve seen people here talk about the old internet and I think what helped back then were communities were generally smaller, more tight-knit, and there was a greater separation between the internet and “real life”. I can’t fault people for being paranoid when many governments and corporations have added the internet as a platform where messaging must be controlled.

There have been media works that point out that the internet, although allowing people to connect from all the way around the world, paradoxically isolates us. This is something we can at least partially mitigate by giving others the benefit of the doubt and not be so quick to dismiss and antagonize. While it is tough to respond kindly to someone who insults you, sometimes doing so can have a disarming effect on them.

fidodo ,

Lemmy is so much smaller than other networks I really doubt there are many shills here.

ShellMonkey ,
@ShellMonkey@lemmy.socdojo.com avatar

I haven’t really noted a shift, but there’s always a few folks in a given place, real or virtual, that are absolutely unwilling to take a nuanced view. My way or the highway and all that. Hard to have a historical view though when a major part of the users have all come on board in the last 7-8 months, me included.

iAvicenna , (edited )
@iAvicenna@lemmy.world avatar

I kinda started getting that feeling too but I thought that was because I started getting more involved in discussions and political ones more. Before it was mainly quick comments for me. Anyways if someone starts to insult or deliberately distort what I am saying by cherry picking combinations of words from my comments, I put on my “three words at most troll hat” and the discussion dies pretty quickly. No point in writing a paragraph for a comment if the other person is just gonna take one word out of it and bash the rest with it.

fidodo ,

100%. Seems like people are just itching to fight now and taking comments out of context constantly. They’re just throwing out insults instead of engaging or asking for clarification. Dunno what happened.

milicent_bystandr ,

What?! How can you say this about me!

Sobs

nycki ,

This isn’t a new problem, Reddit was the same way. As a site grows, it gets harder to moderate, and that means more people trolling for attention. Go to your user settings and change the default view from “All” to “Subscribed”, and you’ll have more control over your home page.

Squizzy ,

Reddits comments were slow to deteriorate. It initially had very insightful and genuinely comical comments and slowly turned to common jokes and politicized arguments. But now that we changed to this I feel like we can’t go back, it is the discourse now.

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