Posted this on shower thoughts but Ig here is more appropriate, I feel like lemmy is not the place I remember it being last year.
I really liked the atmosphere of civil arguments and understanding here, which is the reason I started posting actively as well, even though I have always been a lurker, but I feel like I have stopped feeling happy but instead more and more agitated when browsing, I remember people having civil discussions and willing to listen to others, content was low, but what each post produced was really high quality, nowadays though I rarely feel like it
People here have now started acting like as if they are some sort of god gifted individuals who are right in every regard, they love to throw the word ‘propaganda’ around but fail to acknowledge they could be a victim of it as well, I remember we could still have discussions about controversial topics without things getting ugly, nowadays it is not like that, comments get weirdly personal and sometimes even turn into insults and even phobic, people are hell-bent that they are right on certain issues, and never consider any other opinion or that something might be more nuanced than they think
I can be a victim of propaganda too, but what I really loved is that you were able to have healthy discussions and put forward your opinions, which meant you were much more aware of everybody elses opinion and their reasoning, which meant you could see things with different perspectives, nowadays though it is very different, you say something slightly controversial and be prepared for the hate comments (remember the mildy infuriating post? The guy ended up deleting it)
I have learned a lot from lemmy, and I have had wonderful conversations with some of you but I feel like the days where we all were collectively trying to build a good, happy and accepting community are gone, I won’t be surprised if any redditor looked us and thought we are a group of really closed minded people who wont accept anything that is not the common sentiment here
I was a little kid when reddit was gaining traction, so I have no Idea what sort of thing happened, maybe it was similar to this? I would really like if some early reddit adopters who also came here add their comments
One of my favorite moments I remember here is when there was some sort of meme about Ramadan, I clicked hesitantly thinking it’s gonna be a war zone, but I was surprised to see people having fun discussing how people deal with fasting where the sun never sets for months, that feeling was beautiful, I guarantee it will be a different situation now
Absolutely no way of knowing, since none of us are clairvoyant enough to compare the present to the future.
Most interactions I’ve had here have been very nice and friendly. I see pointless fighting sometimes, but I mostly avoid such posts and communities anyway.
I guess what I was going for is that there’s still tons of good stuff.
Try saying something controversial next time
Controversial things get controversial suprised pikachu face.
I am fine with a prolonged or even a heated discussion, but I am not ok with insults and name calling
It’s interesting to me that this pretty agreeable comment is being downvoted, and in a post about how lemmy might be having less healthy conversations now and in the future. It’s pretty illustrative of the sentiment being asked about in the post.
Surely people who are arguing about anything at all can agree that insulting people doesn’t lead to a productive outcome. I doubt if anybody has ever been called a name and responded by changing their mind about whatever topic was being disagreed about.
It was probably just the downvote train – downvote everything the person says in the chain after they say something wrong.
Or they looked up OP’s history and saw that the “controversial thing” he said was that public executions are a good thing, and was arguing against everyone no matter what they said or what evidence they provided.
I’m generally not one to be in favour of name-calling, but when someone won’t listen to reason or evidence that goes against their argument (and has no evidence of their own), there isn’t really much else you can do.
And some people kinda deserve to be called names. Again, not saying OP deserves it. But where that line is will be different for everyone. And I get it if being “pro-public execution” is past the line of deserving name-calling in some people’s opinion.
there isn’t really much else you can do
One could also do nothing. What are the insults supposed to achieve?
some people kinda deserve to be called names.
Are you arguing in favor of retributive “justice”? Isn’t it exactly OP’s shitty opinion that they get bullied for?
I like to think that this post should be independent of that one, but it has become one so I will continue it that way
If you actually look in those discussions, you will see that I am replying to the same arguments again and again, which might make you believe that I am not willing to accept evidence, go down further my history and you will see that I have also taken back a lot of my statements after I see my mistake, I am not saying I am some sort of perfect being, I make mistakes
Lets assume that my opinion is wrong, is name calling the way to correct it? I see those people who disagree with me the same way they see me, but you will not find me spouting insults or calling names at anyone unless they start it first (even then I don’t resort to words used above, at most I will say lol or call out their hypocrisy), I was replying the same thing over and over again to different people, and I was perfectly willing to move the discussion forward, I might have learnt something, I didn’t left a single argument unreplied in my knowledge nor did I said any derogatory terms to anyone, but it somehow is justified when they do the same? If you wanna bring a change in someone, do you think you can do it by calling them stupid/dumb or saying they don’t deserve respect? I definitely hold some controversial opinions but never have I ever forced them on someone or called anyone who doesn’t agree with me dumb, I felt like the only way to move forward as a society was to respect everyones choices and opinions as long as they are not forced, but I am starting to doubt most people see it that way
Thats my entire fucking point, the thing that is gonna correct a wrong opinion of mine is a good argument where the other side actually shows me reason through some means, not smartasses calling me names
Honestly I am glad I made this post, it has removed a lot of doubt I might have had about this whole community I have been a part of, I was thinking maybe I would be able to read other peoples experiences, what do they think about it, but there is not a single person here who have shared their experience in a meaningful way, just pointless downvotes, generic statements and honestly weird stuff which I don’t even see as relevant to what I said because I said something bad about all these divine beings or merely said something they don’t agree with
I have always loved this but it has now turned into something that I only use to browse memes after a long day
Maybe your argument isn’t against Lemmy, but against online discussion in general. Heating debates that break into less constructive postings have been around since the days of BBSes and Usenet. I don’t disagree with your point that people should try to act like adults when discussing topics, but a (not so) different format doesn’t change how people are, especially when they feel protected by anonymity to react badly.
Usenet is where the term “flamewar” got invented, for discussions that were almost entirely heat and almost no light. It’s very human, really.
Seems like you like to roam around in news communities where political news are pretty much common. So I would not be suprised if lemmy seems like what you mentioned in your text in your perspective. Try joining more “fun” communities and leave the news communities.
While I do think this is a legit question, it’s not smart to call the entire lemmy fediverse bad just because the news communities’ people were like that.
Tbh there is not really much else going on, I visit asklemmy and nostupidquestions, but there are rarely good new posts, none of the niche communities I am interested in are active, memes are just mostly lurking
Well yeah. That’s what I also miss in Lemmy. Niche communities won’t be a thing anytime soon if Lemmy doesn’t get a little popular. Though you definitely can find communities that are interesting and aren’t just political stuff. Or just take a break from Lemmy. After all, Lemmy is just another Reddit with federation.
I honestly would go back to Reddit if the third party apps were not killed by their API change, I really miss niche communities. My only choice now is to either stay with Lemmy and wait till it (if ever) gets popular or just use Reddit in the browser with uBlock Origin.
Apparently you can use Revanced to hack a free-tier OAuth key into some of the old apps and get them working again. I haven’t tried it yet myself though.
I also remember seeing an app that scraped the reddit website instead of using the API.
Damn that’s smart, I really ought to get an android next time, iPhones are really starting to get on my nerves
Niche communities also wont be a thing if active users here keep behaving like divine overlords and being dicks on top of it
Removed by mod
This right here is the kind of nastiness I don’t want to see on lemmy.
You can call out bad behavior without using personal attacks.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call it a personal attack.
OP comes in and says “Smells like shit in here”. This commenter just checked OP’s shoes.
Decorum is for keeping reasonable conversations on track, not defending proponents of public executions from criticism.
I am not ‘butthurt’ with people disagreeing with me, I am ‘butthurt’ that some people have lost all sort of civil sense
You made a long ass post about people not being civil when you promote violent public state sanctioned murder. Your terrible opinion does not deserve civility any more than someone promoting lynching, which are the non-state sanctioned version of the same thing.
Asking if lemmy has peaked because of people criticizing your shitty opinion is the most butthurt thing you can do.
when you promote violent public state sanctioned murder
I read OP’s post and must have missed this. Where did OP promote violent public state sanctioned murder?
It was in an earlier post about taliban publically executing a murderer, I said that I don’t know the exact circumstance but I can definitely see reason why you might do something like this, regardless whether it’s right or wrong, I find it hilarious that this person disagrees with me but also think I don’t deserve any respect because I hold an opinion contrary to him, and thinks the way to change it is calling me names
A lot of people actually were providing pretty good arguments but I don’t really want to participate anymore
Please provide evidence of a single name you were called in this thread.
Just one.
Otherwise I think I see the problem.
‘Butthurt’, I agree it’s not name calling, but it’s not any better
So… You can accept people publically executing people, but people calling you names is a step too far? Am I understanding that right?
I am saying that people who think that people who don’t agree with them don’t deserve respect should not say that executing murderers and rapists is bad, I’d rather hear arguments of people which have a higher moral standing and provide arguments rather than descending straight to insults
So, that’s a yes, then. You seem to think that defending public execution gives you a higher moral standing than someone calling you names.
So if a lot of people were providing good arguments, why not just ignore the haters, and focus on the debaters?
I made this post because the ‘haters’ have slowly been rising (this post itself makes a pretty good case), ofc I wasn’t taking them seriously there, but they certainly wrecked the mood here
Well you and I can both have a long discussion about this, but the thing is you are not responsible for my opinions/beliefs/actions or vice versa, so I am not gonna bother
man, talk about god gifted individual opinions amiright
No, I don’t think so. Today I’ve read and participated in some great threads about UK politics, the books people are currently reading, some great metal (the music genre) recommendations, Linux distros that are both privacy respecting but easy to use and a few other things.
I was on reddit pretty much from the start of the Digg migration. It’s not really comparable as reddit didn’t have subs or comments at first it was literally a link aggregator with votes. When they did start appearing it was OK and then it got increasingly not OK very quickly. I took long, long breaks from it over the years and every time I succumbed and returned with a new account it was noticeably a lot worse. I won’t go back again as it feels like every sub, even the smaller ones, are just bombs either constantly going off or about to go off. It thrives on negativity.
Lemmy simply isn’t like that. I’m not naive enough to think it never might be, but right now it’s not. Of course there are fall outs and anger but not at the same level of constant vitriol I got accustomed to seeing on reddit.
what each post produced was really high quality
I’ve only been participating in discussions on Lemmy groups for 3ish years, but I’m quite sure that never happened. There have always been good and bad posts, good and bad comments, civil and less civil users.
Around the time of the Reddit migration 6 months ago, things weren’t bad. Maybe it was because of the optimistim of the time. There were plenty of bad posts, but enough good posts and enough users voting that they were often buried. In my experience, at this point, there are far, far more bad than good.
To me, the tone changed and things got more aggressive with the reddit migration itself, not after. I haven’t noticed much difference between now and six months ago, but there is a definite tone difference between now and a year ago
Unfortunately, I would not be suprised.
I joined towards the beginning of the Reddit migration, so Im not an OG user or anything, but even in the few months that I’ve used it, Lemmy feels like its become far smaller and more hostile.
As you said, when I joined, there was obviously biases, echo-chambers, and trolls, but there was good faith discussions, and arguments on viewpoints rather than just personal attacks or downvotes en-masse with zero rebuttal. As of writing, this post is a pretty perfect example of the change. There are a couple responses with little detail, a highly upvoted personal attack, and all OPs comments are downvoted.
My best guess is that the lack of content has pushed away more of the average users, leaving mostly just the stubborn and elitist. Making it worse, the lack of content pushes users to /all where they find content not aimed at them. This hostility obviously pushes people away, and causes the issues to snowball. I honestly have no idea how we fix it at this point. It might just be down to getting it more casual users to offset the toxic users, but without huge amounts of funding, I don’t see that happening.
I think it might have something to do with moderation too. A lot of quiet communities aren’t as actively moderated lately because activity dwindled down after the initial Reddit influx. So I think more bs is slipping through the cracks a bit too.
It’s not the downvotes really (they were not a problem either before), but the bad faith arguments, insults that is really starting to get to me, I honestly am kinda at fault tbh, tmrw is my physics final, (I came here to take a break, but I am now in a much worse position) and here I am arguing on what is essentially reddit 2.0, but without all those niche communities that makes people stick to a platform, where we can have discussions with people who share a similar interest, I feel bad for all of us, we came here from reddit, thinking we are gonna make a community where we can put aside biases and insults, have healthy discussions and keep out the corpos, but the thing is we have failed in everything we promised each other, except the corpo part
There’s some tense communities but most I’m in are very cheerful.
i’m still having fun but lemmy.world needs to examine its moderation policies and get it together. i get that it’s the largest instance, growing pains, etc., but that’s only an explanation, not an excuse.
They’re deleting so much content.
Yesterday they deleted a thread where we were discussing whether men deserved help when being abused.
The problem is, the comments in favor of men being treated as humans were getting a lot of upvotes, so that spooked someone’s agenda and they deleted the whole thing.
yeah, they deleted a common ragebait post only after several hours of leaving it up to collect exactly the bitter vehemence it was designed to. it was actually terrifying.
I remember how the comments on top were with like 0upvotes lol
