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’ve been thinking this for a while. Like I blocked all the news communities to get away from it, but now it’s everywhere. I wish I had the free time IRL to work on things for the smaller communities.
slrpnk.net is down and Lemmy has a problem.
More seriously I agree with you. Even one slrpnk whose instance rule state positivity this negative, doomerism, defeatism mentality was creeping in There is so little community whose vibe isn’t entierely based on negativity and among it comment section are not safe.
We need to improve each on our own if we want our cause (weither it is developping the fediverse or something else) to grow.
You could add AI (LLM’s) to the list.
Tangentially related, a while ago I thought to myself that I would make an effort in actually posting more content that isn’t just ranting about things in the world… so mostly posting memes and such that I enjoyed.
Like a week after that there was the drama about reposters started, and a lot of people in the Fediverse meta community at least pushing the point that resposting is bad and will destroy the Fediverse (slightly paraphrased and exaggerated). I know that what people were probably annoyed with was the guy who had some plugin to optimise pulling content from Reddit and often took posts about other people’s experiences or even other people’s OC (not to mention the AI usage to sometimes answer comments). Still the rhetoric quickly turned into all reposting being bad, and that felt very demotivating, like if anything posted isn’t OC it’s not good enough.
I’m sure that most of the Fediverse doesn’t give a fuck about reposting, and I would find it hard to say that the top upvoted users of the Fediverse, who generally seems very liked, isn’t also reposting. I mean I find it hard to believe it’s all OC and not a collection of content encountered elsewhere. After all this is the nature of social media, sharing experiences and re-sharing content you liked (or sometimes, was enraged by).
This post leans heavily on “negativity”. By which you seem to mean anything critical. Criticism is not a bad thing.
It’s my experience that there’s not really discussion on the platform, once you voice an opinion outside of the leftist echo chamber, it’s instant ban. Typically noticed when trying to upvote an article and getting an error.
The comments you are getting are the perfect example of the toxic community the Fediverse has fostered.
It’s really not a place to share ideas and have discussions like old Reddit was.
You, “We can’t have discussions here.”
Me, “Discussions about what?”
You, “Stop being rude.”
Say what you can’t discuss and stop vagueposting. Or keep vagueposting in your feelings and be voiceless. All the same to me.
I thank you for proving my point.
Vaguepost +1.
I think you aren’t discussing ideas because you’ve yet to share one.
Odd.
I’m rude to people all the time…
…and I’m nice to other people all the time.
No ban issues here.List the top three opinions that get you banned in detail so that we can root cause why you’re being banned.
I’m just here for the fisting
That’s not really exclusive to lemmy, that’s just the internet.
I’ve never met a community that wasn’t just a little toxic to new users. And old users. And heavy contributers. And lurkers. And the fucking mods.
I’ve had to block every single gaming community that pops up on Lemmy. I‘m not sure anyone here actually likes games with how obnoxiously toxic they are about everything.
This take is valid, but your feed must look very different from mine.
Yeah the last 9 months or so the feed have sadly had alot less porn.
Give up the good fight and just block the idiots. They can’t be reasoned with. I’m not here to endlessly debate settled social dynamics with Russian bots.
I’ve been trying to counter it with toxic positivity but nothings changed yet.
You’re beautiful
let people be angry
welcome to lemmy. i love you.
Purity testing seems to be a feature built into social media.
Tha k you for the name, I’ve needed a term for it. I kept thinking virtue signalling, which is kind of what I mean but not entirely
