Obviously, the internet has always been a toxic place, (the phrase “flame war” has been around for decades,) but it seems to have gotten so much worse over the last few years. I used to think decentralization of the internet would fix the worst of it, but Lemmy seems to have gotten worse alongside the rest of internet culture, proving me wrong. How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?
The biggest one is we have to get rid of engagement algorithms. All the major platforms show you content more like that which you interact with, which is usually things that piss you off or things you heartily agree with. This creates bubbles and prevents exposure to new ideas and different thinking people. And when you have that for a few decades, it greatly reduces empathy for your fellow man.
Go back to like the '90s or so and politics was dinner table conversation, the sort of thing that would be discussed in friendly company. Because it was understood that while you and I might disagree on what the best path for America is, we both understand that we both want America to be great.
But go forward to the early 2000s, 24-hour cable news, internet, echo chambers and bubbles started to form. And both sides politically took advantage of this, drummed up the rhetoric and no longer was it ‘we are better for America’ it became ‘the other guys don’t believe in what America stands for and anyone who supports them is not American’.
This killed the discourse. No more respectful disagreement, no more opponents shaking hands, it became a fight to the death for the future of the country in the eyes of many voters.This is not just politics. It’s every issue. It’s how we have our discourse now. Respectful debate is dying. Whatever the issue is, you either agree with me or you’re awful. And that is what we need to fix.
We need to promote empathy, mutual understanding, and respect for those we disagree with.
I like what you have to say, but I will be honest. Hate radio is what started this journey for me back in the 1980s and there was no mythical time you could have a polite conversation in the US about politics. The whole politics ruining Thanksgiving has been going on since the Vietnam War and the concept probably dates back to before the Revolutionary War in the US.
Before Vietnam the US literally purged everyone that was too left with McCarthyism. Before engagement algorithms there was constant propaganda on all TV channels, radio, and print designed to do everything from break up unions to reinforce the Christian Nationalist movement. Think adding In God We Trust to all money in 1955.
I see where you are coming from as I was once there long ago. When you unravel the propaganda/lies you begin to see the bigger picture and understand why the forces that control us work so hard to misinform and create an alternative reality where America is the good guy.
The reckoning of what the US has done and continues to do is truly insurmountable for a typical human being. Mutual understanding easily becomes a tool of oppression where we are expected to forget all of history and culture to compromise with people who are selfish and misinformed.
You can give someone who wants to destroy you all the respect in the world and it won’t change that they want to destroy you and will given the chance. This is the reality we face and harkening back to an imagined time of mutual respect is not the panacea we would like to think it is.
Don’t be afraid to block users.
This is great advice for Lemmy.
Today’s internet sucks arse. 90s internet was where it was at. It was mostly just nerds and everyone had their own little section kid the web. Now it’s tiktwat this and faecesbook that. It’s so fucking commercialised now. When I was a wee kiddo, it took a week to download a movie, but at the same time I would love if we could go back to that time :(
Sorry to digress :/
Agree.
I mean, you can still hop on gophernet and use http only sites with HTML only if you wanted.
If you stay off of the corpo sites, install mullvad, use a different DNS, use ublock with waterfox, also Usenet, somehow, exists still. you can still have a good internet experience. The bots haven’t totally poisoned it yet.
Now in 5 to 10 years, it will truly be destroyed by slop. And nothing left. Thats when us nerds will start having our own underground web thats difficult to access and unknown to many.
Example. The Dreamcast is back online. The community is full of true nerds because its too complex for a normie (but it’s really not that hard actually) to get them up and running.
Also use more open source software. Youll enjoy computing far more.
I agree, everything was truly better then and mostly sucks now, but hey we can at least make the best of it.
People here in the fediverse seems perfectly happy to downvote factually correct arguments. Or to upvote blatantly invalid or false arguments. Just because they prefer the fake conclusion. It seems much worse than on Reddit.
So I think part of the solution could be to somehow enforce against people arguing in bad faith. Timeouts or blocks, or whatever.
Votes don’t really matter here. Some instances dont even have downvotes! Just don’t worry about it. If you do want to worry about it, then just accept that not everyone is bound by your ideas about the purpose of the down vote.
There’s an easy solution to that: I’m pretty sure on Lemmy (not sure about Piefed) admins can see who downvoted. So it’s just a matter of mods/admins having and enforcing rules that facilitate conversation.
Just report it when you see it happening!
Given that instance admins do not run communities on their instances necessarily, and that they don’t control other instances - I don’t know you would expect to do this. Nor appreciate of the negatives of embedding such power into the threadiverse structure.
We stop talking about assholes and instead tell them they’re assholes and ignore them.
we learn the difference between things that can be disagreed on and things that are universal.
we stop thinking that if we just step on enough faces, we’ll eventually get to the top.
we actually give recognition to good people instead of rich people and especially show that to kids.
Some things we could encourage: Design social spaces with more repeat interactions. Many toxic people feel they can just move on to another part of the crowd. But if everyone knows them, and that they’re an asshole, It’s not so easy. See the example of “beep”, a user in the comics community who repeatedly cropped out the artist of comics.
I could also envision ways to reinvent forum moderating. For instance, one idea I had for moderating toxicity in a video game is that bans would not last a very long time, but for them to be lifted, the offender must upload a video, or present themselves live on webcam, of themselves describing what they did and apologizing.
If it’s too much, there’s more subtle approaches; like that old study on DOTA 2 where they’d present a post match survey, asking people to rank their teammates - then their own level of team contribution - and it would lead to reduced toxicity in their next match.
Many people post online because they want to have an argument or bait other people into an argument. I’m not sure how you can correct a fundamental human flaw in a specific online community.
Lemmy hasn’t gotten worse. Lemmy has become more popular with all of the Reddit fuckery. When more people show up more problems come with them.
Same thing with big cities. More people = more assholes and crime, and more expensive. More people moving into my town is destroying all the land (ripping out forests for row after row of shit apartments) all built by the same company. More crime now because of more people coming in.
Never understood the lemmy circle jerk for megaopolises. I’m sure its just because most have never been out of their 13 sqft apartment and don’t realize how awesome wide open spaces are. Sad really.
Be the change you want to see in the world, online and IRL. it’s the philosophy I live by
You can’t.
Most people love it, even if you don’t. That toxicity was always there… just look at how incredibly popular day time toxic TV and reality TV was before the internet and social media…
That said, plenty of people who posted here are barking up the right tree. Be what you want to see, and block/don’t engage with shitty toxic people and their toxic ideas. Support other users by upvoting and interacting with them when you see good content, and if the mods remove those posts, then stop using that community.
Way too many mods give into the toxic BS on social media due to the pressure that toxic people create.
with a few exceptions reality tv is so bad. I don’t see the appeal except for a few (alone, ice road truckers) and even those it annoys me when they try to make the false drama.
I heard somewhere that the appeal of reality tv is that in it social norms negotiated. People always tend to “update” their understanding of what’s socially acceptable behavior and what is not. Reality tv to many people is just a means for them to rate what behavior is good and what’s bad. What they often dont unerstand, is the extent to which these shows are scripted and that the writers and media channels are the ones who predetermine the roles and morals.
So what you percieve as “bad” about reality tv might be that the framework in which norms are being discussed is extremely flat and homogenous.
Or in other words the characters and the writing just sucks.
the false drama is the point.
You’re only in control of yourself. Write thoughtful and positive posts, replies. Up/downvote based on how thoughtful and positive you think posts are.
You don’t have much power but what you have you can use.
And report content you don’t like to your admins!
the best possible answer.
Post nice comments under good posts. It really makes a difference to the active posters and generally lifts the mood of this place.
Actually do downvote posts if you would have preferred not to read that and it isn’t of note.
I.e. downvote the 3rd post about the same tragedy when nothing has changed and not much time has passed. Downvote negativity. A neutral vote is for things that are mid and don’t matter.
downvote the 3rd post about the same
Isn’t the problem with this that there are different communities which might have valid reasons to post very similar things, and the order they’re displayed to you may result in you downvoting the original?
Sort by new and pick your favorite community. If you are fed up with the particular news it probably doesn’t matter anyway.
How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?
We don’t because:
- it’s a wider issue than ‘the Internet’. Haven’t you noticed how even politics in general, which was supposed to be the epitome of our democratic societies, has morphed into an hate-filled shit show at best, when it’s not effing openly celebrating murders and assassinations of people we don’t like?
- we’re part of the issue. It’s not a ‘them’ vs ‘us’. It’s us. And most of us, no matter what we believe in, are acting like morons, at best.
but Lemmy seems to have gotten worse alongside the rest of internet culture, proving me wrong.
Lemmy has not “gotten worse” in my opinion. It was worse to begin with and when I arrived a few years ago, the first thing I had to urgently learn is how to filter out what I call its ‘noise’: that constant (and self-celebrating) hatred for ‘the other camp’, the hatred for those who dare not think like ‘us’ (I certainly don’t put myself in that group). I then moved from Lemmy to Piefed, mostly because back then at least it offered me simpler/more efficient ways to filter out that noise.
How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?
Like mentioned in other comments, the only way is through changing (civil) society itself. Aka through education.
As long as our respective public educative systems (I’m from France, but I know it’s as shitty in the USA if not worse) are allowed to not do their job of actually educating and teaching kids some common values and principles (next to some actual knowledge and know-how), toxicity will thrive.
It thrives because it has been normalized and because those who benefit from it are being regarded as role models. But it’s even worse than that: just publicly discussing this issue and its causes would expose anyone to being… punished by an angry toxic crowd of people that don’t want to hear they’re being toxic (or that their ‘ideology’ they want so hard to believe in have morphed them into assholes). That is a huge loss for any freedom respecting society, and a huge win for those benefiting from that hate/toxicity.
edit: clarifications.
I don’t buy this narrative that toxicity is inevitable. That’s the narrative pushed by Reddit/Xitter/Meta because toxicity causes engagement which makes them rich. They don’t want to delete it. It’s only inevitable if admins allow it to be.
That “rule” don’t apply on Fedi where we can simply join an instance that actively bans all the bs.
I don’t buy this narrative that toxicity is inevitable.
You’re more than welcome to buy what you fancy, I don’t recall saying it was unavoidable. I even think I mentioned why we somehow manged to make it as… present as it is, and how we should try to get rid of most of it (hint: through education).
Can we get rid of all of it? Nope, unless one is to pretend we’re perfect? Don’t know about you but I’m certainly not perfect.
My belief is that toxicity online is like building a six lane highway through a residential neighborhood. If you build the infrastructure to support more cars, and the law allows speeding you’re going to get more cars (and more car accidents).
If you build platforms that don’t allow cars/limit their behavior where people are trying to have a polite conversation, you’ll see quiet more thoughtful modes of transportation and fewer innocent bystanders get hurt.
Wow that analogy worked pretty well.
My opinion is that toxicity can be found in every little gesture in our daily life, no need for an highway. It’s also not somethign ‘external’ to us that appears because of poor decisions. It can and often thrives even in the most ‘humble’ or humane ‘infrastructures’, to use you image. Suffice to look how two people, say two neighbors, can literally hate on one another for petty reasons.
If you build platforms that don’t allow cars/limit their behavior where people are trying to have a polite conversation, you’ll see quiet more thoughtful modes of transportation and fewer innocent bystanders get hurt.
People can have a fight on the street, or in a pub, in a shop, at work, or wherever, even at home, within a family circle, because “he looked at me!” or because “I don’t like the way he dress” kind of reasons. Do you really think tech is the issue?
But once again, you’re more than welcome to believe what you want to believe. Just don’t try to put words in my mouth that I did not say.
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but it sure seems like you’re saying that toxicity can inevitably be found in every little gesture in our daily life, including internet platforms, which is a narrative I disagree with.
People can have a fight on the street, or in a pub, in a shop, at work, or wherever
Pretty much all pubs and shops I know quickly expel and ban people who fight there. If those places allowed fighting (as many internet platforms do) users looking for a fight would eventually gravitate there, and people looking to discuss peacefully will go elsewhere.
Do you really think tech is the issue?
No, I’m saying people are the issue. Toxicity is not something that can be found everywhere, it only pops up where it’s allowed to flourish.
Why?
toxicity is inevitable in real life such as much. toxic people are everywhere, and they drag people down with them.
i’ve had toxic family, friends, and co-workers. sometimes you have no choice but to live with it, sometimes you can ignore it, sometimes you can boot the person from your life if they cross certain boundaries. and sometimes the toxic person tries to get you removed.
the false tech bro assumption I’ve seen since forever, is the idea you can engineer out people’s negative behaviors and impulses… you can’t. they will find a way to exploit whatever system you set up. that’s what they do… that’s what makes them toxic. you cannot create a social media network that is free from toxic people, unless you make one with no people involved.
I’m not talking about engineering a problem away. I’m saying it can’t be engineered away and requires human adults in the room (moderators in this case) to handle bad behavior.
Accepting the presence of toxicity as a fact of life does nothing more than attract more toxicity.
2 reminded me of a saying. You’re not stuck in traffic, you ARE traffic.
and sometimes you have no choice but to submit. and that’s OK
it’s also not your fault if a drunk driver or similar crashes into you and causes a traffic jam… it’s the other person’s fault.
way too many toxic folks on lemmy are apologizing for the drunk driver and blaming the victim constantly. especially when they identify with the drunk driver or start thinking ‘he had no choice!’
Your posts are really great. Just wanted to say it’s super cool to have someone thoughtful contributing and articulating a realistic approach.
Thank you very much. I’m just sharing what I think.
Couldn’t agree more! People should be more tolerant and stop hating on people having different opinions
…What’s the different opinion Anakin?
block em. make the experience you want.
