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.
Important Internet Tips:
- There can be more than two sides to an issue, not just the Right Side and the extreme opposite Wrong Side.
- Criticizing or questioning some aspect of the Right side does not make you a shill, cheerleader or crusader for the Wrong side.
- People who belong to a demographic group are not identical people who think identically.
- “Obviously” is not a valid argument. What seems obvious to you might not be obvious or even sensible to someone of equal intelligence.
- The person you’re passionately arguing with might be on the toilet taking a dump before study hall (or recess).
Upvoted for a truly unpopular opinion.
I don’t agree with this at all. Your issues apply to basically any place on the modern internet. Hell, it applies to humans just being humans and having different opinions on stuff.
NGL, I came her a year ago from Reddit where I spent 16 years before I got banned…
This place is not at all as toxic, though yeah, I agree that gamers can get het up about issues and how studios run things and can get spiky with each other, but lemmy is so much less rage-filled.
Y’all are absolutely sweet kids most of the time and I love it.
I feel like a huge chunk of the people on Lemmy (myself included sometimes, unfortunately) are just looking for arguments, opportunities to tell people they’re wrong, or opportunities to proselytize their own beliefs. Which I think is to be expected on any discussion platform, but it’s just about every single thread here, even threads in communities dedicated to more light-hearted things like the meme and shitposting communities.
Maybe part of that is that people just aren’t as aware of what community they’re in when they start reading/replying to comments. That could be a side effect of Lemmy’s size and spread-out-ness - I bet a bunch of people are subscribed to a bunch of different communities, or just have their default feed to be everything, just so that their feed always has new stuff in it, and so everything just sort of melds together into a single uniform doom scrolling experience in their mind. IDK, that’s my theory anyways.
Especially with all the political stuff I think there’s lots of bots
Here’s a key thing I think you’re missing about Lemmy: Lemmy is anti-corporate and anti-capitalist by nature. That is the single thing that pretty much all Lemmy users hold true. That’s why we’re here. It’s not all negative. It’s negative when you’re trying to push a product, especially when it’s made clear it hurts other people.
Try discussing an indie game, especially one with a good track record of treating employees well, or one owned by a cooperative. You will almost always see positive responses. Lemmy users are happy to support good things. They’re also skeptical of corporations (for good reason) and are quick to turn against them when it turns out they’re run by bad people.
I’ll give you an example: Anyone who sees this, what is your favorite indie game, and what about it is special to you? Mine is probably the incredibly standard response of The Outer Wilds. It has so much soul and understanding for the human experience, and it gives you the freedom to discover it for yourself.
It seems to me you may be mixing toxic negativity with negativity. Toxic behavior like spreading misinformation or supporting and excusing violent behavior should be moderated. Negativity in general though is going to be based on the instances and communities you visit and the users you choose to block or not block. For example you can block a handful of users and join more positive communities to curate your ‘home’ experience to be mostly positive, and switch to ‘all’ when you want to see the general trends or what’s recently popular across instances.
There is also such a thing as toxic positivity, and that has been forced on humanity as a whole for far to long. There is a concept called the overton window which I feel applies here. Right now, politically the world is swinging back to the Left, however, one should not see this as a swing to totally leftist, purely lazze faire social morality. A certain amount of healthy cynicism is required to allow a society to function properly. It provides the basis for being skeptical of things too good to be true, it powers our B.S. detectors, and gives people a moral plausible deniability for dismissing assholes as assholes. It’s cathartic as well. Knowing that other people feel the same is comforting.
We live in times that try mens souls, so goes the quote; don’t begrudge us a place to vent. It’s healthy to get it out of ones system.
This is not being toxically negative. This is how the internet SHOULD be and there’s just a bit of whiplash when you pull the corporate umbilical cord out that requires a sanitized feed. Lemmy is like 4chan but the folks are mostly Liberal/Leftists instead of Misogynist/Racists.
gotta block.
I mean I agree with what you say at a high level, but personally I find lemmy so refreshingly straight-talking. I find most of these issues really stem from social media partly being a reflection of social and actual realities.
Like… things are not OK in the real world. I know you added that caveat in your post, but I also think it’s reasonable to expect people to be miserable when conditions are deteriorating for so many of us, and hope in the future is at an all-time low.
Good vent though. I think we’re just going to have these back and forth reactions and counter reactions forever and ever. Even if we solve all our existential problems, I’m sure we’d find something to whine about.
Who knows maybe in 500 years someone will be posting to a BBS about how people are too positive and how we used to be able to access real darkness.
How do you fussy fuss about negativity and then want to enjoy Harry Potter?!
If you can ignore Joanne’s constant vitriol, and still enjoy HP, you can certainly ignore it on the Internet. But also, eeww gross you ignore Joanne’s constant hatred.
I agree Lemmy has a negativity problem, disagree it’s driving off new users. If negativity drove people away Twitter and Reddit would be ghost towns. If anything people crave it.
The problem with negativity is it tends to drive positive people away. People stop bothering trying to have actual discussions because if you express anything resembling positivity someone is eager to respond with a memey “Oh you sweet summer child”.
Eventually every interaction is like that, nobody feels like talking to each other and just want to one-up one another in how cynical and world weary they are. Happens long enough and you get reddit, happens even longer and the cynicism turns to nihilism and it turns into an incel space.
It’ll have users, it just won’t be pleasant to use.
