The block function is heavily used. Whole block lists get passed around quite frequently. I've never really seen much hate on there unless I'm clicking into something obviously heated politically. Other people may have other experiences, but the current culture there is to not engage the hate farmers and just block people instead

[–] [email protected] 7 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

Which is honestly how it should be, feeding the trolls or tolerating them is detrimental to any platform, even engaging with them to correct them is giving them fuel.

Reporting and blocking is the only way and have always been, I don't know what changed that people decided tolerating/engaging with them was being the better person.

[–] Klear 1 points 2 hours ago

Reporting and blocking is the only way and have always been, I don’t know what changed that people decided tolerating/engaging with them was being the better person.

I think it's the general focus on driving engagement and feeding the algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

b-b-but echo chamber!

[–] icecreamtaco 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (3 children)

In the real world, you cool down hostility by talking it out. On the internet it’s the opposite, and that approach gives the village idiot a global megaphone to radicalize or enrage others with. I think mass adoption social media is new enough that we’re still figuring out how it should work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

In the real world you don't get obvious bad faith actors in your face shouting nonsense very often, and when you do, you usually walk away from them too. It's not helpful to engage with people who are actively working against cooling down.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago

Isn't it more in the real world people don't interact with close to the number of people they do on the internet, and they never encounter or avoid a lot of people which acts like a real world filter or blocklist?

Internet is like walking in a store and then being flooded with hearing the thoughts of everyone in the store like you're experiencing a telepathic attack.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

In the real world, you cool down hostility by talking it out.

I mean... it depends, not everything can be descalated, dependes on the person, their intentions and the place.

On the internet it’s the opposite, and that approach gives the village idiot a global megaphone to radicalize or enrage others with.

Pretty much, people know how to behave or they don't... and they can learn or not, but we have no reason to tolerate the village idiots.

I think mass adoption social media is new enough that we’re still figuring out how it should work.

I remember old forums, there was no tolerance for trolls and you could get punished along the troll for feeding it, so people learned to leave them alone and just report them, good sites/forums were heavily moderated and curated.
I think it started to go down the drain when moderation/ownership was removed from the users, just like with community servers for multiplayer games, companies care only about their own interests so allowing trolls who cause engagement by bait were more than welcome, they just pretended to moderate the services.
Nowadays... well reddit punishes mods who actually moderate the subs so that's a waste of time, the fediverse seems to need to learn to just not tolerate nor engage with trolls... and the users have to learn to just report and block, just like the BlueSky users do so the mods can locate and remove the trolls (either users or servers).
I think admins/mods must be MUCH less tolerant of possible trolls and not be afraid about curating the content to their liking... it's their server/community after all.

[–] radix 7 points 23 hours ago

Nuclear block plus a culture of not feeding the trolls means the only toxic accounts I've run across are just a day or two old. Block and move on. The experience can only be as negative as each user lets it be.

[–] static09 5 points 1 day ago

This has been my experience too. The community moderation tools on top of the tools available to moderate my own feed are leagues ahead of other platforms. Being able to temporarily block keywords feels really awesome in avoiding dumb shit that can blast through social media.