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?
Unite in working class solidarity and tear down the country situations of capitalism
Like, downvote the guy to the dirt if you want, but I think there’s a grain of truth in here. So long as the world at large is so severely negative, a good portion of that is going to bleed over into anywhere people who live in that world gather.
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.
block em. make the experience you want.
One thing is to ensure that people understand you won’t take their bullshit anymore. Mass muting, banning, and deplatforming helps get rid of a lot of toxicity because said people are only interested in it.
As you said, decentralization is key. Highly active human moderation is the only known solution to keep communities free and tolerant, and human mods have a relatively low limit as to what they can handle without making it a full time job (or burning it out)
The Lemmy network is still centralized enough that many smaller instances make the calculus that it’s better to be federated with the large weakly moderated instances than to lose access to the many small communities on those instances.
But increased decentralization makes more granular defederation possible. A weakly moderated instance can simply be blocked.
I think we’ll get there in time.
Fuck you cunt
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.
Ehhh. I don’t know. I think that there are ways in which it’s gotten better and ways in which it’s gotten worse over time.
I never really used any of the big social media sites that rely on automated recommendations to any degree. I understand that a major factor was that they measured user engagement, and what we found is that users are considerably more-engaged with content that enraged them than pretty much anything else. They tended to recommend material in that vein.
That probably is a step back.
The Internet is a lot more diverse of a place than it once was. Back around, say, the 1990s, it was mostly university people, engineering types, stuff like that. A lot of countries had very few people online. You had fewer points of disagreement in a number of areas. But bring people with a wider variety of views into the situation, and you have more room for conflict, I think. I think that to some degree, that’s just intrinsic to having a more-diverse Internet, throwing all of humanity (or at least everyone that can more-or-less speak a language, which for English, is a lot of people) just means that people from different walks of life and social norms suddenly encounter each other, and, well, ideas clash.
I feel like there is a real sense in which very negative worldviews are more-prominent, maybe partly because of media — and not just social media, but traditional media — favoring more-alarmist articles and titles. Doomerism, like. That’s not so much directly toxic, but I think that people who feel stressed-out tend to be less-pleasant.
And the Internet permitted for forums and media chambers that are very much aligned with specific individual groups; it’s easier to live in echo chambers. The long tail — people don’t have to be exposed to broader views in society if they don’t want to. I think that that tends to let people demonize other people more-readily, if they don’t interact with them.
On the other hand:
Trolling (in the sense of trying to post provocative comments that would incite a flamewar) used to be very common on forums I’d used, like Slashdot. I don’t see much of that on the Threadiverse.
Usenet permitted crossposting articles to multiple Usenet groups. Clients tended to default to respond to all of these. This resulted in people trying to crosspost articles between groups that had users with conflicting views (e.g. comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy and comp.sys.mac.advocacy).
Widespread community moderation, which showed up on Reddit (and the Threadiverse, as it followed in its footsteps) has also improved things a fair bit. Usenet had efforts at tacked-on moderation that weren’t incredibly effective.
If we block and ban everyone that thinks differently from us, we can create a utopian paradise where everyone thinks the same. This might go on for years-decades maybe-until Elon Musk perfects his Neurolink protocol. At that point we will merge our thoughts, creating the ultimate Unity.
There will be no more hunger, no more pain. Dissent will be unthinkable. We will become…One.
Moderation. We had a big influx of users with the Reddit api drama that created a bunch of communities, and then all returned to Reddit shortly thereafter, leaving most of the big communities largely unmoderated. The threadiverse isn’t going to become less toxic until new moderators step in and clean up the worst of it.
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.
You’re so right with all that you say. Except your admirable self deprecating US exceptionalism. US peeps shouldn’t beat themselves up about the crimes or horrible acts their countrymen are/have done. Where and when any other country is in the same position individuals of those places act in the same ways. Cue every powerful and not so powerful civilisation in history. The rest of us it seems have to clean up their messes as best we can. It seems its a natural animal response that we as a species haven’t been able to adequately address socially or civilisationally.
I don’t really know enough about the subject and how it relates. But these awful group dynamics aren’t confined to humans alone, i feel like this article, Chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park wage lethal ‘civil war’, relates in an important way to the point you make in your comment.
I can’t really speak to other countries but from my understanding the entire world is varying degrees of fascism at this point.
The US is exceptional, just not in the way most people think. No nation comes close to the suffering the US has caused and will cause in the future.
You can see parallels to modern US imperialism like with Britain costing countless lives in places like India. Also, a little further in the past with the Spanish treatment of Native Americans which the US then repeated.
We of course have the privilege of looking at this through a modern lense. What really strikes me is the level of enlightenment in Europe in regards to native rights and the practice of slavery before the US was formed.
It is clear that people knew better at this point and this shows the malfeasance that defines America. The people that went on to found America knew better than to do what they did. This animus against humans is what makes people in the US arguably unique. A kind of modern day barbarian if you will bringing back what was supposed to be lost.
The heart of the US is a republic founded on deception, terrorism, greed, and murder. Even our first President was a murderous land baron well on his way to becoming the world’s first billionaire adjusted for inflation.
I think your point centers around if anyone else would have done it the way these depraved manipulators did. I really don’t think so. The ruling class of the US are really in a league of their own.
Exceptionally depraved, cruel, and greedy amongst their peers around the world with near limitless resources at their finger tips. Imagine any single European country having access to the empty landmass that is the United States.
This is the real reason behind the myth of American Exceptionalism. It is like having near limitless wealth compared to everyone else who has a fixed income. The US is the equivalent of a trust fund baby. A psychotic mass murdering nepo baby that spread its shit all over the world.
Remember all that land, well you see it wasn’t really empty. Que the first genocide which the US still carries out to this day with boarding schools. There was of course plenty of room for the Native Americans and the whites to coexist. Hell, most of the US is still pretty damned empty to this day.
It was never even about the land. It was about a desire for systematic extermination. This ties in with your point about chimpanzees and also back to your original point that anyone else would have done the same thing.
Have you ever heard of the bonobos? They are another Chimpanzee that doesn’t fight and kill each other. If a male gets too aggressive the females hold him down and have sex with him until he chills.
Living up to your name with this comment doomsider ;). I like your bonobo example, shows theres often other ways to handle things. Theres a lot to that comment, so i’m going to try to pick the key ideas in each area and directly address them.
Fascism used so broadly becomes woolly. Certainly you could describe MBS’ Saudi Arabia as a fascist regime by following definitions. But it doesn’t get at the whole picture of that Authoritarian Monarchy. For example because there is no organised ‘opposition’ as such to suppress. Be it trade unions, opposing political parties. So calling everything fascist hides useful differences that helps understand how people across the world have freedoms or are oppressed in different ways.
The suffering the US has caused? Its a lot, but USAID saved millions as well, always weigh in good things done by a people, it may amount to nothing, but its intellectually dishonest to ignore. The key is were the US actions that caused suffering more or even with Mao’s Great Leap forward, the Bengal Famine, many more examples abound. The only unique suffering the US has ever caused is the nuclear attacks on Japan, and that was chosen in part due to the perceived larger loss caused by a US and allies ground invasion. What could have happened to the East Asia region if Stalin’s Russia were more involved? I think more suffering.
Europe is an interesting case from the 1700’s, and certainly earlier than that, to compare to. Because its there that you have the most well known to the Wsstern mind progenitor to the Nation State model we live in today. Its not really the enlightenment that changed attitudes, plenty of people couldn’t give a fig about a lot of the enlightenment ideas, and went on their merry way suppressing, murdering and extracting the wealth of other parts of the world. Every European country is guilty of this througout that time, just like the US. The key point though, is they didn’t do it in Europe. Because there was a rules based society between those peoples, war was ongoing but organised, this is why the European Aristocracy completely freaked out when the French Revolution then Napolean happened, because it threatened to flip that rules based system the contolinent worked on.
Systematic extermination has happened in many societies, the sack of the city of Troy might be a famous old example, the Rwandan Genocide is a new example. So systematic extermination of a population isn’t unique to the US.
So hopefully the violence and greed of humanity can be put to rest as a uniquely US trait.
The real reasons for uniqueness though, you are right, come from the scale and abundance of the US.
But its not ideological, its what I touched on with the French Revolution. The worst of crimes happen when the rules guiding the society are somehow suspended. And this is what happened with the US over and over again in different contexts.
Below are some examples of the worst crimes where the rules guiding a society have for some reason been suspended, in this vacuum of instability is the most dangerous moment.
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Bengal Famine 1943, in the course of the British total war effort (suspension) Churchill directs the required food supplies out of India.
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Rwandan Genocide 1994, assassination of the President and resulting power vaccum and disarray (suspension) led to militias hunting down the Tutsi minority.
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French Revolution, Estates General (suspension), storming of the Bastille (suspension) ,King Louis flight to Varennes (suspension), Thermidorean Reaction (suspension), Coup of 18th Brumaire introducing Napoleon (suspension), the White terror (suspension). The whole period from 1789 to the restoration is littered with suspensions of varying degrees, and like with all historic comparisons France makes an excellent comparison to the US.
The suspension of the guiding societal rules is why canny commentators looking at the US are so intent upon the court system. If that breaks, then all bets are actually off. But the Orange Babboon’s regime has been knocked back significantly more than they’ve won, so its hard to argue the courts are pliant, even with the Supreme Court’s favourable ideological bias.
Conclusion:
Its not a barbaric ideological group of elites, although they may be there and present, its the moments in time and place where a suspension in the guiding rules of people are suspended.
Fascism comes in many flavors and in varying degrees and the US has lead the way evolving corporatism into its logical conclusion the corportocracy. Think the military industrial complex itself lobbying for military action or proliferation. A sick partnership ensuring future death.
The fact that I can be critical does not mean I don’t recognize some of the good things. The US did help prevent spreading of disease in countries despite overthrowing 70 plus countries and killing uncounted millions of civilians.
China has raised close to a billion people out of abject poverty even if its policies killed millions of its own citizens.
The British Empire did bring modern technology to the colonies they brutally oppressed. Always look on the bright side of life?
I have to disagree with hand waving away what the US has done. Certainly you might compare it to history, but this isn’t ancient history with the Mongols or the Romans.
These are modern times and intent matters in culpability. The propaganda used to draw people to the Americas is another great example of the knowledge of what is right. The founding fathers of America loved to write about their virtues.
Is it fair to hold them to a higher standard? As I said we get to look at all this from a modern lense. The answer in unequivocally yes. We debated and decided on genocide. It was not a happenstance or an unfortunate externality.
Hitler was inspired by the genocide of the Native Americans and modeled his eventual extermination of the Jews after it. Ford and other wealthy US industrialists helped bankroll the Nazi Empire.
When Hitler approached other nations to take the Jews in the US refused and these wealthy lobbyists made sure to stroke anti-jew sentiment throughout Europe to ensure no one else would.
Nowhere to go the Jews were sent to the ghettos only the Nazi didn’t have a way to track them effectively. None other than IBM comes to the rescue and develops a census system that was used for those cool looking WWII arm tattoos.
IBM then helped with the computing power to figure out just how many Jews to load onto the trains per day so the deaths camps wouldn’t back up. You know, just typical logistical stuff.
That is another genocide the US participated in. That is what makes all the pro US WWII propaganda so ridiculous. Fascism was never defeated, a chapter was just closed for the moment.
As I stated the ruling class that calls the shots for the US are unlike anything before and they are not just what anyone would do. I am sure some people would describe it as evil and I think it was and is criminal in nature.
Playing both sides of conflicts and eventually turning this apparatus against US citizens in a third genocide known as The War on Drugs. Resulting in no less a third of all US citizens having some sort of criminal conviction, millions of families destroyed and millions of lives lost and still going strong to this day.
Almost everyone in America has lost a loved one to addiction. Crazy amounts of people overdose because the government tries to criminalize them in its genocidal efforts.
Out of control gun violence. I know several people in my lifetime that have been shot and killed. Being shot and killed is the number one child killer in America. It really does boggle the mind to realize there are more guns than people in the US.
It is not normal, I am trying to explain this to you. US technology has been unbelievably devastating to the world and has ushered in our AI apocalypse of mismanaged dysfunction.
US is responsible for so much suffering just through their technology alone. From the extremes like the Nuclear technology to the environmentally devastating like leaded gasoline. Just leaded gasoline alone has killed hundreds of millions of people and was estimated to still kill five million per year.a couple of years ago.
I don’t think anyone can truly comprehend the destruction that the the US has brought. Insane things like poisoning every human on the planet with both forever chemicals and plastics.
Back in the 1950s petroleum scientist knew about global warming. The US have fought tooth and nail to discredit the information they knew from the start. This purposeful campaign to deny or minimize reality will lead to the inaction that will displace a billion people with no plan which will likely become the greatest loss of life from a man made event in history.
It will be in the billions of dead before it is all said and done and that is if we don’t face total annihilation with the possibility of a nuclear winter.
This is not the future that humanity deserves. The list goes on and on and no matter what horrors you learn about, there are several more afoot. More research reveals more atrocities that would all take a lifetime to truly research.
I really wasn’t looking for a counterpoint to everything I said. Thanks for the effort though.
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lemmy/piefed have been getting a surge of users from reddit. i can’t imagine algorithmic brainrot fades overnight.
You have to treat the toxicity in society to treat it on social media. If, for example, you banned all the “negative” toxic accounts, Lemmy would become a bastion of toxic positivity. The people would sense its fraudulence and leave, and it would still be toxic. Eradicating bots would probably be an effective step toward a solution.
Downvoting just gives trolls the negative attention they want. Ignore, block, and/or report. That’s it. We can’t change human nature.
Its not so much the outright tolls I’m concerned about (voting alone filters most out), as the general toxicity in the culture. Things like increasingly widespread personal attacks, decreased etiquette and consideration for others, and just the general death of discourse.
Oh, I see. In that case, I think the best we can do is set a good example. For example, I try not to let myself get drawn into childish arguments.
You don’t, the internet has always been this way.
I think all we can really do is set an example ourselves and to allow mods to do their jobs. We can only really control our own behavior, especially a place like Lemmy where it’s basically impossible to ban someone.
I try to keep my posts PG, try to understand others, ignore people I can’t find common ground with, and just try to be the type of poster/commenter I’d like to interact with.
