OK so if you feel Lemmy has been trending towards hostility in the past weeks ppease here me out, interact in the comments but keep it civil.
Lemmy vs Reddit
We all had our reasons to move to Lemmy. What I remember clearly from the beginning of the summer was that we were all praising the tone. Over the years, Reddit has become increasingly toxic - most of all in the comment section. To me, that was what made Lemmy special. Even with less content, the general vobe was what made me come back every time.
clash of the clans
Due to the nature of the fediverse, we get to interact with people with different backgrounds and dofferent ideas. Potentially an incredibly enriching experience for everyone. Anti-defed lemmings defend staying federated with everyone for that precise reason, which I really get. But lately the vibe has turned sour. Every post that has the slightest political undertone becomes this big us-vs-them show. Please stop
discussion vs. shitshow
I am not arguing for stopping discussing our opinions. I also get the whole they don’t have downvotes thing. But can we please treat eachother with dignity, and when writing comments say ‘I believe’ or ‘in my opinion’ instead of ‘you all this or that’?
I think this is the only way forward if we want to prevent everyone from personally blocking a lot of instances in the furure.
Yesterday evening I was feeling the same way, so I started blocking users that are clearly posting inflammatory or aggressively brigadey content (note: not to be confused with things I don’t agree with. It’s about tone and tact, not content), or things that I find annoying to see over and over like the same trollish meme and emoji images. After only an evening of doing that, my Lemmy experience has been worlds better. I did notice a particular instance being the trend which makes me look forward to instance blocking, though at the moment I’d prefer to still do so on an individual user basis.
I’ve got to be honest, I find this kind of wild. That the tone a comment is said in is more important than the actual content of the message.
That assessment is precisely backwards for me.
I agree . I mean I expect people to be passionate about some topics… ie climate change, wage gap, fascists, big pharma, etc. If it’s not spicy you’re doing it wrong.
I share the same view on this topic with the person you’re replying to and appreciate that you chose to type this out the way you did instead of something like ‘lmfao, wtf?’, which could have also signalled disagreement.
(TL;DR: I’m blocking users I feel are significantly cluttering Lemmy with trolling or annoying posts of no substance, not ones that have different ideas than my own. Acknowledging different ideas and perspectives is good.)
I feel like we’re already being hurt by algorithms and whatnot only sending us what we want to hear and filtering out opposing views or ideas. If someone disagrees with me or has an idea different from how I already think, I should know that someone is out there who thinks differently than I do. Maybe I’ll even learn something or come to appreciate a perspective I hadn’t considered before. It can be interesting and even enlightening to see differing viewpoints, and that’s part of what’s so fun to me about the Internet. We can easily see there are all sorts of people out there with different thoughts and ideas.
We’re all bound to lose our cool sometimes, but if I see a poster consistently being inflammatory or trollish, I don’t find value in trying to digest that kind of exchange. Some people may enjoy watching the setting of the bait and seeing others walk into the trap of engaging. It’s just not the type of content I’m into and I found it was becoming increasingly common so I started blocking users that I felt were consistently producing these kinds of situations.
This comment is weird because it doesn’t really follow from what I wrote.
I just find it strange that people value the tone of a message more that the content. Surely the content of the message is far, far, FAR more important than the tone it’s conveyed in?
Like, when people post genocidal rhetoric, it’s not better because they say it in a polite fashion. And it’s not worse if they were raging while they said it. It’s bad because of the content of the message.
But then people say stuff like you did, and it’s kind of unbelievable to me because it seems like valuing the lipstick more than the pig it’s slapped on.
Wow. My experience is quite precisely the opposite. With algorithms on most social media constantly trying to shove “opposing views” in my face at all times. Except those “opposing views” are usually that I am a danger to society and should not be allowed to exist as an LGBTQ person. Because that is what drives engagement.
So uhm, maybe an echo chamber is a privilege you enjoy, but it’s not universal.
But… I genuinely do not understand how you can say this? Because you have primed yourself to ignore anyone who disagrees with you with any degree of vigour. Some disagreements are not going to be civil. But those are often the MOST important disagreements! The ones that people are passionate and angry about.
I’m not saying every troll has something of value to say. But in my experience, you have it precisely backwards. The people who are angry are more likely to be sincere in their beliefs, while the dickhead who types like they’re participating in a debate club is usually the one trolling.
I can see where you’re coming from. I think you might be conflating the idea of what I consider worth taking the effort to block a Lemmy user over with what I might personally consider good ideas or opinions of inherent value. If I see a single post spewing genocidal rhetoric I’m not going to block the user and think that my blocking them is somehow going to make a difference in the underlying issue. I might want to see future the responses to their post (hopefully arguing against it), or I’ll just scroll past it.
Now if I’m seeing that user consistently posting that same kind of thing as I browse around Lemmy, sure, I’ll block them even if their posts are written in the most tactful and respectful way possible, because at that point it’s become repetitive clutter that I don’t want to constantly see while browsing Lemmy. The user blocking part comes in when something has become a consistent annoyance or frustration, because I find it’s not worth the effort to block every user who posts something awful the first time I see it rather than just moving on.
We might be experiencing some semantics issues. I don’t equate angry or frustrated posts to inflammatory and trollish posts. I’m talking about when people are smugly trying to “own” or “dunk on” someone, or being excessively rude and accusatory (I can imagine some situations where this might sometimes be considered justified), or baiting a reaction trap. And I’m generalizing, not arguing a hard unbreakable rule. I agree there’s nothing wrong with getting angry or frustrated about important issues that are a real problem, and I admit some of my most frustrating interactions have been with people who use the approach of “I’m being civil (in my argument for something awful, like genocidal rhetoric) and your angry response means I win the argument by default because I am being ‘reasonable’ while you are not.” I really do get frustrated by that rhetoric playbook tactic. So I do think I see where you’re coming from.
I do agree we’ve had different experiences, and that none are universal. I was caught in an “echo chamber” that almost had me voting in support of California’s Proposition 8 (ban of same-sex marriage) back in the day and had I not been willing to listen to opposing views going against what I had been raised to believe in, I might still be trapped in that environment that I still see some of my old friends and family stuck in.