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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Another place I frequent got rid of the downvote so if people actually disagree with you they have to use words to make their point. Kinda funny how that solves a lot of issues.
I did exactly that but I wasnt allowed to federate with the others until I enabled it again…
Really? I thought that Reddthat and Beehaw disabled down votes while still being federated
Dont know. When you have your own instance, you get admin settings. If you disable downvotes, it says others might not federate with you or such. Its been a couple months since I last looked in there.
I’m pretty sure those two are fine without downvotes, if that can help
Yeh, probably. Have a good one. :)
Thanks, you too!
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.
Only the wet-lipped and dry-eared are upset by trolls.
What does that even mean.
It kinda bugs me when one of the more prolific posters get shitty comments directed at them specifically in return for their contribution. Maybe it’s just a side effect of being a small community but for real just shut up and enjoy the memes, if you have nothing nice to say keep scrolling.
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
Agree. And that’s been my experience here too. I made two posts critical of reddit and they each seemed to have been astroturfed by toxic reddit shills.
I think it would require a lot of active and dedicated mods and admins, which I’m doubtful is doable. I don’t know that there’s a fix for this but a “true block” (instead of the current “mute”) might help; but there are major downsides to that type of feature as well. I wrote in a blog that it might require an advanced AI to moderate everything.
I made two posts critical of reddit and they each seemed to have been astroturfed by toxic reddit shills.
Here or at Reddit? I have never ever ever seen proof that Lemmy is pro-Reddit at anything. Like, most of the people here migrated from Reddit on bad terms with them.
That might be an idea. Humans are infamously bad at tone policing. An AI cant possibly make it worse. (I‘m kinda kidding but not really)
It’s either that or, gasp, actually paying moderators.
I’d rather just automate the solution. It’s still going to run into some amount of human tweaking and biases, but at least it won’t require the massive amount of manpower that moderation requires right now. Something that requires so much manpower that no corporation is willing to actually pay the workforce.
Being old enough I used to wear an onion on my belt heres my perspective. I see it like back in the day we had radio and tv. Radio often played songs you didnt like. I remember thinking how awesome it would be to have a station that only played what I liked and no “shitty” music. But alas, when a shitty song came on you changed the station or turned it down. Same with tv. They were a public good and we had to tolerate what others preferred. I see it as my personal responsibility to curate my lemmy experience and thankfully theyve given me the tools to do so. It takes 2 seconds to block a shitty user and instances that arent to my liking. This was difficult on reddit due to the size and firehose nature of it but its quite effective here, for now. Do I see comments I dont like? All the time…once. Then that user is blocked. Hopefully people who dont like the cut of my jib have blocked me as well so their experience is better tailored to them. If your expectation is the radio station never plays a shitty duran duran song youre gonna be disappointed. And in general if you try to control other people youll find yourself frustrated. Be careful who you give your time and attention to.
I completely agree. Thats why I like the fediverse so much.
But if your favorite radio station started to host lets say very divisive content more often, wouldnt you be a little upset since they had been a stable installation in your life? Would you not call at the station and feedback them? Would they not want to hear if something they did was a very bad move from their audiences perspective? I know I‘d want to know if my customers/audience was very upset with me, ideally before I‘m alone, screaming into the void.
Just my take ok this :)
That analogy doesn’t work for malicious state-managed LLMs.
A shitty Duran Duran song? You take that back!
Unless you’re talking about modern Duran Duran, in which case please continue.
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.
A lot of it depends on the instance. I think there’s a little bit of a smartest bears type of problem going on, with a lot of the bad-faith content coming from just ignorant and abrasive people being sincerely ignorant and abrasive, not anything that’s a bot or a deliberate troll.
Personally, I’ve done some rounds of unsubscribing from tech and politics subs on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, and when I’ve done that my amount of toxic content and interactions went way down. I think the prevalence of the exact same thing on the tech subs points to it probably being just a bad-person problem in large proportion, although I’m sure deliberate malfeasance is at the root of some of it also.
I agree that some people just are original jerks. But those still cant roam free in a community. Its like making a bar and knowing that people are getting mugged in the restroom. The bar owner or personnel (even if its a coop) need to intervene.
Well… that’s why I used the smartest bears analogy. I’ve noticed the mods are usually pretty on top of removing content that’s genuinely personally insulting or racist or what have you. But there’s a wide, wide grey area of someone whose post is discussing “the issue” in a technical sense, but just comes at it from a perspective of “here’s why I am right and you are wrong and not only that you’re clearly not smart enough to see my side and I can’t believe I need to explain it to someone again” with 0 interest in learning anything on their side. IDK if it’s reasonable to try to remove comments or ban people for that behavior, but it definitely doesn’t lend itself to a good discussion, and it’s common (probably majority) particularly on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.
Thats pretty much how I view it as well.
Being a jerk can have many faces and there are a lot of people right on the edge of getting in trouble but not quite. Those are also the worst people to work with IRL. They fall up the ladder and are usually pretty incompetent.
If they are repeat offenders, I confront them in the places I mod since I dont want them hollowing out the community by this constant low key abrasion.
Others who just have a hot temper I leave mostly alone until they really go overboard.
Thats how I do it and thats what I think is best. Obviously not everyones opinion though.
I have a dream of creating a community where people can argue about factual questions and give citations, with an AI moderator that will award points for things that are demonstrated based on solidly factual citations and no points for things that are someone yelling with increasing firm confidence that their opinion is the right one. My dream is (a) the AI moderator could be made to work and (b) it would cause people to lose the “me and my agreeing-people are right about everything by definition” mentality that’s pretty easy to develop in a forum where you can literally say anything at all without getting any feedback aside from other people telling you they agree or disagree.
Probably my dream on counts (a) and (b) both is incorrect, but it is my dream. In my dream it works.
I browse All and block any subs or users that are toxic. After a month. My All feed is enjoyable and I get the benefit of not missing any new subs or content that pops up.
Maybe because I don’t use Lemmy at real bot hours, I haven’t seen them. Maybe see a spam bot every other day.
I also tend to sort by top 6 hours or top 12 hours so a lot of low effort content gets filtered out.
I also don’t consider people who make off the wall comments or hold opinions I disagree with or think are uniformed or stupid as trolls.
The other thing is that I comment with the philosophy that not every comment signifies a response and so if a reply is a troll or in bad faith, I just keep scrolling.
I agree with most of this. Some might just be my hours being spot on.
But trolls and other idiots often dont turn out to be just that in the first response. I often give people the benefit of the doubt. If they start splurging no thought opinions or such I try to understand, maybe try to debate them. But some people repeat the same stuff over and over as if putting fingers in their ears. If I point it out it gets worse quickly.
So I‘m not exclusively dealing with bots and trolls. Its also very ignorant people who very much dislike being proven wrong or get their opinion challenged.
Out of curiosity, can you specify the topics or give specific examples of this shitty behavior you speak of? Without examples it is impossible to determine if you are discussing behavior that is straight-up pathological (e.g. name-calling) or people having a different opinion.
Okay, I did mention it in another comment but I didnt do so in the main post. Thanks for pointing it out.
I‘m talking about name calling, ad hominem attacks, ridicule, twisting words, bad faith arguments. So, mostly abusive language/rhetoric, not disagreement or different opinions.
how do you differentiate what you perceive as bad faith vs disagreement and differing opinions?
i frequently see simple disagreement here being painted as bad faith when its just… disagreement.
And to the contrary, I’ve seen people claiming blatant bad-faith behavior as “just disagreement”.
Wikipedia:
Bad faith (Latin: mala fides) is a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another. It is associated with hypocrisy, breach of contract, affectation, and lip service.
Here are some nice examples. I can’t come up with a perfect example rn. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/bad-faith-good-faith/
It boils down to essentially playing devils advocate just to shut someone up.
i know what it is, i was asking for more specifics about what you see on lemmy.
I‘m not sure I understand your question. Do you want me to come up with examples from lemmy?
Yes
I was about to left Lemmy/Kbin for good when some stupid fascists from Lemmy(grad).ml called me names and harassed me, despite the fact that I’m neurodivergent (like that would stop them from doing such actions, but anyway). And then I started blocking every community and user from those places, as well as any community/magazine about US politics or about any US topic because I don’t give a damn heck about that place. And my experience improved really well.
While I sympathize with a fellow ND, I dont think calling lemmy.ml fascist is a great idea. They might be tankies from what I hear but thats the other extreme.
Still, thanks for sharing your opinion.
Well said. Lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml are malicious misinformation factories supporting authoritarian governments, namely the Kremlin and CCP.
They’re worse than garbage and I’ll never recommend the fediverse to anyone, or even admit to using it, while they’re so prominent.
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.
Yes, lemmy.world is a mess right now
I‘m very happy that I‘m not totally alone with that opinion.
Lemmy.world is absolutely wild. I had a comment deleted that was a response saying we shouldn’t nuke innocent people, I had a comment removed saying confederates are bad. I don’t know what the fuck their mods are smoking.
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.
Bots are probably increasing in number. Even without improvements in technology, people’s adeptness at using robots will continue to increase.
