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?
Trigger warning on this. Can’t get the spoiler thing to work at all.
Definitely not imagining it.
Since I first joined I went from having nice conversations with strangers about the weirdest things, never having a single negative interaction, to nowadays saying I think women deserve a baseline level of respect and being told I should die giving birth to a rapists baby.
To be fair, the dude who said that did get banned from the instance I’m on for that, but it happening in the first place would have been unthinkable to me a few months ago.agreed there is a definite influx of misogynistic incels lately. Feel like I’m spelling out how women are human beings a lot more than I ever had to here before. Conversations are more on the de-evolutionary side.
There’s no need to debate misogynists here. Downvote and report them and we’ll ban as soon as we can.
This. Most of those guys probably got banned on reddit and drifted here and they’ll do the same after getting banned here. No point in wasting brain cells arguing with people who can’t think for themselves about right and wrong.
We can absolutely do better than reddit on this one. If someone is breaking rule 2 (be respectful), report that comment and we’ll get to it as soon as we can.
Are reports anonymous? I don’t want to report a user that breaks rules only for the offending user to be friends with an admin and get me kicked from a community as payback
Reports are not anonymous, but they also aren’t public. Only visible to admins and mods of that community.
It’s a tradeoff, anonymous report abuse was a big problem on reddit that I didn’t want to replicate here. If the admins or mods aren’t trustworthy on your server, you should pry move to another one.
No, the mods of the community can see who sent the report.
That can be a good thing, too, to find out if someone is abusing the report feature, as was common on Reddit when people didn’t like someone’s comment.
Yeah, probably a little, but this same change was 1000x more noticeable like half a year ago when reddit banned third-party apps. I think it’s reasonable to lament the change, and I kind of miss the tight-knit community from the first three years I was here, but it’s still worth celebrating the platform taking off. Ultimately all you can do is be the change you wish to see in the world.
That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I’m going to be a little less zen about it.
That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I’m going to be a little less zen about it.
The spammers aren’t here in custom full-force software_dev_lemmy_bots mode yet, but when they come, moderation tool development will increase in effort tenfold.
The nation states are already using their “play Guess The Bot and lose” games. It’s the ones who post often and with clear lines in the sand you need to worry about. Problem is, there is a sea of regular people just like that.
Lemmy needs to go through a fork or three before it becomes viable to the mainstream. Currently Lemmy users produce much less legitimate worthwhile information on far less subjects than reddit, and even Quora shudder thinking about it.
Granted, I’ve only been here for about a week before reddit disabled 3rd party apps. Maybe the first 3 years were the golden years. I’m only speaking as to the bot infestation I see currently.
I feel the mainstream lemmy instances have attracted the reddit mob mentality where any deviation from the groupthink is treated as radicals or bots.
At least in the communities I’m subscribed to and interact with, I’ve still seen it mostly be positive interactions.
It’s been my experience that it’s a couple problem instances where most of the toxicity comes from.
Which ones, if you don’t mind me asking?
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Hexbear: Similar to lemmygrad they have their strong convictions, but don’t have the maturity to back it up.
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LemmyWorld: Users are a mixed bag but the admins seem dead set on turning the place into a nazi bar.
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sh.itholefor.nazis: The only thing you need to know about these guys is they have a c/ for conservatives
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feddit de: Literally every user on this instance is dead set on reminding you that Germany never underwent denazification
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discusstchncs de: same story but to a much less extreme extent
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lemm ee: The owners don’t really moderate and its users reflect this fact. Universally unpleasant userbase.
lemm ee: The owners don’t really moderate and its users reflect this fact. Universally unpleasant userbase.
This is categorically untrue. You can find our administration policy here, and we frequently ban users for breaking our instance rules. At most you could make the claim that we are lenient when it comes to things like heated arguments, as we often give warnings or temporary bans to users in such cases, but on the other hand, our “no bigotry” rule is very strict, and violations have consistently resulted in permanent bans.
We of course don’t screen all posts and comments which our users write, so we can only respond to reports, but I assure you that our admin team is constantly going over and responding to the report queue (which is a big effort, and clearly a thankless job).
By the way, I just want to point out that we have ~3000 active monthly users on lemm.ee, I find it very unlikely that you can make an accurate universal judgement about such a huge group of people.
That’s what the owners of feddit de said too and it didn’t stop their users from constantly leaving harassing messages on anything left of hitler. In fact, it was one of your members leaving a shitty comment that spurred me to add ee to the list, it wasn’t even included initially.
EDIT: You do realize that modlogs are public right? I went through them and was less than impressed with what I saw. It seems your idea of “moderation” is to remove when people call you on your shit, which is especially convenient that someone just so happened to call out that your conservative c/ (why is there a conservative c/!?!) is being run by an actual pedo. So yeah, sums up what I expected from you guys.
I am not really interested in discussing this with you, as you already have an opinion about lemm.ee and seem intent on spreading false rumors about us. I’ve learned several months ago that no matter how much you give to people for free, there will always be users demanding more, so I don’t think there is any chance of you being interested in what I have to say. I am just responding here, so other users who may end up reading this thread don’t come away with the impression that what you are saying is true.
First of all, no user has ever been banned from lemm.ee for criticizing the admin team. Our admins have banned nearly a thousand users in the past ~7 months (just think about that for a second - that is a massive amount of bullshit our volunteer admins have had to wade through in the span of less than a year), and indeed the mod log is public, so you can easily check the ban reasons, which are consistently related to violations of our basic instance rules.
If any moderation team on any of our communities does not follow our instance rules, then such communities are closed. We have in fact had to do this several times before with some conservative-type communities, mainly because they wanted to push the ideas that some people, based on their identities, are less valuable as humans that others. The current conservative community on the other hand is consistently moderating based on our instance rules, and they have incorporated the no bigotry rule into their community rules as well. If this ever changes, then we will take action, just as we have done previously.
Regarding the allegations against one of the mods, I’m not sure if you’ve seen the event they were referencing, but I think it’s safe to say that this event was extremely misrepresented by the accuser. In any real cases of CSAM, lemm.ee has taken drastic actions. We have purged, banned, defederated, reported to authorities, we have implemented some technical safeguards, and we will continue to take action like this in the future as well.
Let me just finish off by saying that we are a volunteer team giving up our time for free. I realize that users want admins to be perfect and moderate exactly in line with their preferences, but we are humans, we miss things, we make mistakes, and we can not possibly be available 24/7 or read every single piece of content posted by other lemm.ee users.
Letting it get just bad enough that it doesn’t cause problems for you isn’t how anyone should moderate. You have to be proactive and get rid of problem users before it gets to that point, make it clear that isn’t welcome, which is something your instance has routinely failed to do.
Also for the record I know that you’re full of shit when it comes to the owner of conservative c/ not being a pedo because conservativism is at its core a pedo ideology, just like all right-wing ideologies; it always comes back to child abuse with those types. CSAM attacks don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen when you foster the kinds of people who are into that shit and you make them feel welcome, which is exactly what your “we’re going to do the bare minimum of moderating” is attracting.
I’ve already made it clear that i’m not going to fold to any of your tricks, and you’ve made it clear you’re aware you’re wasting your time on me, so why you even bothered to besmirch your reputation by even engaging in the first place is beyond me, but definitely speaks to the lack of experience and borderline negligence that you carry about. I sincerely hope shit gets better for you and the mod team and hopefully an actually competent moderation policy can go a great step in ensuring you never have to deal with more attacks going forward, because that shit fucking sucks and nobody should have to go through it. I hope whoever did it is rotting in a jail cell and that’s coming from a prison abolitionist.
Oh and BTW just going forward, don’t tell someone whose complaining about your instance members being harassing little shits “nuh-uh disinformation” unless you’re prepared to get a fatal dose of all that fermented spite unleashed right into your face. Making it about you is the single worse thing you can do in that case and really tells everyone in the room where your priorities are.
EDIT: and there go the downvotes, well I think that’s a good of a place as any to cut the thread.
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If you’re talking about the two that I think you are, I agree. I suspect my pleasant experience is due to my instance defederating completely with those, which is pretty swank.
The 80/20 rule applies to toxic Internet behaviors as well, 20 percent (or less) of the user base is responsible for 80 percent of the toxicity.
It’s always the same people being awful here, if you are taking notes, you can quickly identify the worst posters on this platform after a week. People always complain about how they are unfairly banned by reddit moderators, but you have to remember, sometimes the bans are really justified.
I think the ony real (and unpleasant) solution is to moderate very aggressively whenever there is bad behavior (although, I must add, permanent bans should be rare and reserved for extremely bad behaviors)
Internet’s gonna internet.
Suck rocks you worthless git!
YES, IT’S JUST FUCKING YOU, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WITH THIS GUY…
Careful with the punctuation it makes you seem rather aggressive
Strap in. It’s an election year
I must be ancient here, because nobody has claimed this is like September 1993 all over again…
I am not that old but I know that reference. :)
Worth noting, the number of people who come here “to escape authoritarian moderators”. Nearly all of them were moderated for good reason.
I also don’t think the presence of places like hexbear are doing us any favors.
The thing that actually worried me a little bit more was people upvoting the aggressive comments to be top comments.
I was reading some thread over at !politics@lemmy.world today, and a lot of stuff advocating for political violence were the top comments. Mods yanked it, but nevertheless, people were vibing with some comments about dragging people through the street. I felt like I was on X/Twitter.
Yeah, I think it’s a legitimate and growing problem. I think a lot of folks don’t realize, but since growth has slowed from Reddit more broadly, the people who feel they have been “unfairly silenced” are the fastest growing subpopulation around here. If I’m honest, I think the only real antidote is to reestablish growth from communities with kinder dispositions.
We don’t need to take from nicer communities, we need to build nicer communities. Right now there aren’t any left wing instances, which is a big problem. It was nicer back when lib.lgbt existed.
I was reading some thread over at !politics
There you go, that’s your problem. Political topics always gets heated and brings out the worst in people, no matter the platform. The first thing I did is block all politics (and general news + sports) communities, and it’s been a fairly pleasant experience so far for me, except for the odd troll or fanboy that shows up every now and then.
You didn’t block all politics. Everything is political.
You can see them jumping from Lemmy server to Lemmy server as they get banned from each.
Eventually, they’ll just set up their own instances so they can bother people with impunity.
And then we block that instance! Or it gets defederated.
It would be super nice if users could block instances.
Like, I have no desire to see anything from the furry instance.
It became a thing in Lemmy 0.19 - as long as you’re on an instance that has updated to that, it should be available to you. At the bottom of the settings page in the web ui, but if you use an app they might not expose that to you yet.
I think that came with version 0.19.1 specifically.
More exposure in news and media. More asylum seekers from reddit. I haven’t noticed too much change within the communities I’m subscribed to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s been some change across all of Lemmy. It is a super niche platform that is getting more attention and drawing more general users.
If someone were doing a school project with large dataset analysis and modeling, it would be cool to compare quantitatively the amount of positive vs negative comments a year ago compared to now.
Positive and negative are qualitative and measures in this case.
Subjective ones at that.
Especially the grammar Nazis that floated here on a turd from the reddit cesspool.
Grammer*
No you. /j
What I found is that hot topics come with the season, in June/July about Ukraine, in July/August about Meta, in October/November about Gaza, in December about Biden. There’s been plenty of charged discussion on these topics, and internal Lemmy dramas.
However, one thing I see more often here on Lemmy than other places is people updating their comments, being willing to admit they’re wrong or that their comment came off as hostile, and open negotiation in general. Consider the near defederation of programming.dev and lemm.ee, it was resolved amicably to everyone’s benefit.
I also see people thanking others for softening their tone and being kind, to them I say, keep doing that and encouraging good behaviour and ettiquite online!