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I’ll take the normies over people who unironically uses normie as an insult
But yes, I saw one post in particular earlier to day from your typical right wing shill that was baiting people.
This is rage bait. And it’s like the third post identical to this in as many days. The others were by right wingers pissed they weren’t on truth social.
I am not really noticing this at a large scale. I’ve seen it here and there but not enough to be worrisome. The ration of good content to poor content still remains heavily in favor of the good.
Well, that’s where moderation comes into play.
As much as people hate the idea, you need strict moderation to keep a given platform civil and on topic. To do that you need either robust tools (which lemmy does not have yet), or moderators able and willing to put in the time to keep things on track.
When a forum is run with a low tolerance for incivility, it will eventually become less of a target for jerks.
I catch hell any time I say that because people seem to believe (in spite of a millennium+ of evidence otherwise) that the default state of discourse is friendly and orderly. It simply isn’t. People are assholes. When they have the veil of quasi-anonymity, there are large amounts that won’t even pretend not to be.
I’ve seen it happen over and over again since the first html chat I was involved with in the nineties. Even before that, but when you were dealing with pre aol era internet, it was much less of a problem because of the barrier to entry.
You want friendly, chill communities, you have to pick between firm moderation with large and open numbers of users, or light moderation and limited access/numbers. The middle ground is just too open to bad actors.
On reddit, I saw strict moderation change a sub. I saw subs go from constant flame wars and nastiness into a fairly relaxed vibe in a matter of weeks just with active and mild moderation. With stronger moderation and clear community rules, you really can maintain a great community with only bare minimum randos stirring trouble.
Why do people hate the idea of moderation?
No clue. But it seems to be most common among people that are most likely to believe that they should be able to say whatever they want, wherever and whenever they want.
Where? Every comment section I see is still a ghost town.
It just takes one person posting a comment to start a conversation. No one wants to be the first to comment, but once someone gets it started others chip in.
Yeah! (spirit noises)
Right? This is the most comments on one post ive seen in a while.
“there’s too damned much ragebait”, cried the ragebait…
First of all I don’t think rage baiting and arguments are reddit culture. Reddit culture is people who act like know it alls when they have no experience or knowledge about the subject.
I have barely seen any arguments and I’ve seen no rage baiting. It’s healthy to have arguments on a site based around discussions.
oh look another techbro hipster whine
Yeah.
June was glorious. It was like the internet of the 1990s all over again. There wasn’t a lot of content, but what there was was posted by actual people who would actually engage in good faith. I had forgotten what that felt like.
But it’s been all downhill from there, and at this point, it’s starting to feel like Reddit, just on a smaller scale. More all the time, I’m just seeing rage bait that’s posted either by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot, and if I bother to respond to it, it’s likely that if I get any response at all, it’s just going to be a string of shallowly emotive rhetoric and fallacies that again is either posted by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot.
I’m cynically unsurprised but still disappointed.
No positives?
More users means more content, which is a positive of course.
Yeah, more means more nice peeps and more dickheads, cest la vie
My big hope with the fediverse is that stuff like that can be contained. lemmy.world is the big instance where most anything goes. If you’re looking for quality curated content, then you’ve got places like beehaw.org. Similar to /r/AskHistorians, but that was always an awkward system. Is /r/AskPlumbers or whatever up to the same standards, or just some rando subreddit? Now, if you find a community like ancientegypt@askhistorians.org, then you can explore the other communities on the instance and be reasonably assured that they’re also up to snuff.
Also, I think the memes and other easily-ingestable content is a healthy sign. It draws people to the fediverse, and then they can discover more niche communities that make them stay long-term. The memes aren’t for everyone, but the memes help everyone get good communities.
My hope is the opposite, I’d like to see instances become more transparent. Make communities able to migrate instances, and merge. Hosting instances should be more like bit coin mining Which miner that does something shouldn’t matter, it’s all about keeping anyone from having a majority stake and the whole thing just works for users.
Eternal September perhaps? As the population grows, the culture changes. It’s unavoidanle to an extent (if Lemmy keeps growing… But don’t we want that?).
it is avoidable (or at least it can be slowed down enough to be manageable) if there is a pre-existing culture. lemmy simply didn’t have one beyond a vague foss/privacy focus and whatever’s going on over at lemmygrad, so the reddit migration brought over a lot of people who then set it up to be exactly like what they were used to (being reddit).
if you go look at mastodon (or the microblogging fedi in general) for example, the biggest instances still have their fair share of “twitteriness”, but as you get to the smaller, tigher knit, and stricter moderated instances, you’ll see a culture that’s significantly more laid back (and yes, very gay).
i think what’s happening is that the big instances act as a “firewall” of sorts. catching the people who just want a twitter 2. and the people who want more and vibe with the smaller fedi culture will then self-select and migrate out into the smaller instances after realizing all the cool people (and in lemmy’s case, communities) they follow are on those smaller instances and all the interaction they get on the large instances are boring reply guys (or worse, actual bigots that go unmoderated because no large instance can keep up with moderation and .world has inadvertently doomed itself even if it has not realized it yet)
over time i expect lemmy to have it’s own share of these tight knit instances - and as the hype dies down and the trolls start getting bored, communities start migrating, moderation tools improve, and yes - the occasional defederations that will inevitably happen - .world and it’s ilk will be the reddit 2 some people want to have (with the good and the bad), while a different, unique, culture will slowly but surely form across instances that intentionally keep themselves smaller and more focused. and of course you’d be able to talk across communities in these separate “sides” of the threadiverse thanks to federation.
hell, i’d say it’s already getting started.
You’ve described what Reddit went through. I think that’s basically the process of maturation of any social platform. Reddit attracts (I.e. automatically subscribes) users to the default subs and so those are the biggest mainstream areas. Most people who want something more (and how I have used reddit for many years) move to smaller subs and find a much better environment there. Or communities break out to make smaller versions (true gaming, true movies, true fitness, etc).
Basically I don’t think any of this is platform specific, it’s just how things evolve online. Certain features judge development in a certain direction, but in that regard Lemmy should be much better without bullshit algorithms and disguised advertising posts… For now.
Arguments are not a bad thing!
Yah dude. I am a super newcomer to Lemmy, but when I started up it was refreshing that it was cerebral and different and marched to its own beat. I never even really noticed how much image / meme content had taken over reddit, until I saw a place without it. I didn’t agree with the tankies. But, there are tankies! This place is great. It’s different and authentic. I like it. And now, over the last couple of months I’ve been carefully attempting to keep my subscriptions on Lemmy to the factual stuff and eliminate from the feed stuff that’s memes or “Hold my whatever, I’m going in!” just kind of time-wasting.
And yet, even in the “good” parts I’ve been seeing this takeover of people who are… I don’t even know what they’re doing. I think it’s just sort of this dopamine loop that they want to come on and yammer. I’m sort of assuming that this is maybe a problem only on the big instances, that may be better on Mastadon or on more form-a-community type of instances? Maybe? I hope so.
Honestly the fact instances are being defederated has helped a lot. It seems to happen at a rate that doesn’t seem ridiculous, not like there is a flood of garbage but still not none.