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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[–] echo64 16 points 9 months ago (6 children)

People here are blaming politics. I don't think that's it. The quality of comments and discussion here has taken a massive nosedive for the past four months or so, no matter what the topic is.

I think it's pretty simple, the terrible won. Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible. They didn't come back. So now we've created the toxic enabling environment that is enabling it hard today.

You can fix it with moderation, but that's a lot of work, and people get really angry.

I'm pretty close to just cutting my losses on lemmy. It's heading in the same direction as reddit but with less moderation, and simply because it's smaller, the awfulness is more visible.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible.

That, and the fact that simply there isn't enough good discussion to begin with. This community kind of has movement because it's a meta-topic, but for everything else it's mostly "let's pretend we are superior than redditors because we found our way here and "let's pretend we are not in Reddit for all the other niche communities that we are still interested."

I think the biggest mistake in the execution of the protests is the effort was spread around "going dark" for as many subreddits as possible. It would be a lot more effective if we got one big-ish niche and told them "let's focus all our efforts to get you out of Reddit and migrate completely to any other alternative." Go for something completely random but with commercial interest, like /r/sneakers, and if a moderate success of getting 15% of the user base to Lemmy would translate into 500k signups.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

That, and the fact that simply there isn’t enough good discussion to begin with. This community kind of has movement because it’s a meta-topic, but for everything else it’s mostly "let’s pretend we are superior than redditors because we found our way here and “let’s pretend we are not in Reddit for all the other niche communities that we are still interested.”

That's a real issue. Hopefully it will get better over time, but sometimes at the moment it feels like shouting into the void.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Strongly recommend using the block more. Be your own mod

[–] echo64 5 points 9 months ago

that works for me, but I want to have good conversations with others, that's kind of the point. Blocking terrible people doesn't get that to happen

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

It feels like Lemmy has also become less... diverse? At this point I think the default assumption is that every user is a white, cishet, male, tech nerd from the US, which wasn't as much the case in the earlier days.

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

Agreed, except I don't think people starting to act terrible was the main problem. I think it's mostly bots.

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

I can see that. I will probably just start blocking communities and instances that have one of the extreme stances (either freeze peach absolutism or why you not outraged?!)

I‘m not going to leave lemmy or the fedi since there literally is nothing else, and especially not something with this much potential.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Some people do actively looking for fights instead of having meaningful discussions. I noticed them less and less now though, so either the mods got them, or they blocked me because I often call them out, or maybe they stopped frequenting smaller communities.