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.
Because they are Hipsters.
Most lemmites don’t have an actual personality, or likes even.
They never grew out of that teenage “this is popular and therefore I hate it” mentality. Even when they themselves deep down want it.
Look at those same gaming subs when the thought of an AI vibe codes slop emulator, that will bring those games they claim to hate (GTA6 and anything Nintendo specifically). And they practically trip over themselves to get it.
First: thank you so much. I’m not a perfect fit here and have taken my fair share of lumps.
I too envision Lemmy a place where people tired of corporate surveillance and exploitation can come and share their enthusiasm for the work of Luigi Mangioni and other heroes.
I’m only partially kidding.
There are sadly a lot of people who do not rankle at corporatism and exploitation.
There are some people who will even stand in line to buy the shiny new thing just because corporations have told them it is shiny and new.
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.
a huge chunk of youtube is just people going off on reddit or twitter comments now, and the more absurd and insane the take they are going off about, the longer the video and the more views it gets.
the problem is discussion is hard. running a marathon is hard. that’s why most folks don’t want to do either thing, and they also think people who do those things are insane.
making short cynical quips and sniping at each other is easy.
What keeps me from posting more is that often times I feel that I need to explain the entire post or otherwise someone will nitpick it in order to find something wrong with it. It happened a few times when I returned to lemmy on this account and it’s just been an experience that I expect from now on.
And I just don’t have energy for that.
That said I think a larger issue is that we lack active hobby communities. I’m sorry to say this but politics in general tends to be very depressing. Politics and news is what lemmy mostly consists of outside of the cats community of various meme communities. We could use more variety on all.
Yeah, plus that impulse is self-defeating. Folks can sense it and will come at you harder and they generally dislike people ‘explaining’ things to them. They mostly want you to affirm them.
Agreed hobby communities are needed. But there just aren’t enough users in here in general to support them. We’d need 10x the userbase for them to even get started. Reddit had 2 million users in 2008… we have like 45K. So you’re going to get the majority of content here being the most popular/general topics, like politics and news.
Even the movie/tv/gaming subs here are fairly limited in activity and scope, and those were huge on reddit from the start.
Yeah, you are right. I’ve gotten complacent with just rolling my eyes and moving on or kvetching more than I should, but I try to be positive to most people and especially in smaller or hobby communities.
My own thought on it is that in part some of the negativity stems from having so few places we can speak unfettered. So a lot of unfettered speech comes out here. There are still subs that police speech heavily or push their own agenda that directly leads to furthering negativity in it’s own way. But the openness that can be had here is still greater than most communal places online.
I think it is social media in general.
I’d say it is just as bad though when you have some subreddits where everyone is forced to be happy and “celebrate” everything like trained seals.
If the world is increasingly a negative place, so are its inhabitants. I don’t think there’s anything particularly surprising about this.
However, most of the examples of ‘negativity’ you provide aren’t even negative or toxic. They’re just people informing others of harmful effects of various things, like indirectly supporting union busting or lowering of wages, among countless other horrible practices, by purchasing a copy of GTA 6, because Rockstar and Take-Two are very well known to go all-in on both of these.
Unless it comes down to specific wording - ‘fuck you for giving money to company xyz’ vs ‘did you know that company xyz (…)’. As in the example towards the end of the post. That makes sense, and I can agree that antagonizing people for this is a bad idea.
Otherwise it’s never negative or toxic to point these things out. They are incredibly important, and everyone should know about them to make informed choices.
It may seem negative, because the corporations, and nearly everything they stand for and do are extremely negative. It’s hard to mention genocide positively, isn’t it?
Of course, you can, for instance, buy and play GTA 6 without thinking about all the terrible things Rockstar and Take-Two do. You’ll probably have a better time, too. But surely, you realize it’s nothing more than willful ignorance, and at the end of the day you’re supporting horrible scumbags in exchange for some fun, whether you want to or not.
One of the reasons the world is such a shithole is precisely because a lot of people choose to live in bliss. At least those who can afford to, because more and more simply can’t. Many Lemmy users are trying to combat this, I think out of desire to create a better world. Which we should absolutely encourage, minus the part about antagonizing people.
Sadly that’s nothing new to the internet. I used to see it in Newsgroups, and IRC and BBSs and discussion boards.
Generally giving a socially repressed nerd an anonymous platform where they know more (valid or not) than someone, leads to that negative behavior.
Someone mentioned something about the dopamine hits and that rings quite true. It gives them a feeling of superiority. It was also the same framework that drew people into MAGA, and really the only way to counter it is to outnumber them, remind them they’re in the minority and that it’s not socially acceptable no matter how “right” they think they are.
and ironically that social punishment, drives them back around to where the started, the feelings of exclusion and repression.
People need to police each other, it’s just how we are. We want to control others and make them behave how we want them to behave, and we get angry when that doesn’t happen.
I think Lemmy’s userbase tends toward the chronically online, and as such you get very black and white viewpoints gathered through a 27" lens six inches from their face (or a 6" rectangle a foot from their face). I don’t think it’s possible to exist majority online and have a positive viewpoint about anything. And in fairness, we have watched the decline of the internet, but the Internet itself is a vector for propaganda, and what better way to coax people into a belief than making them mad or sad.
The cure is always get out of here, but it’s a bitter medicine.
I don’t know man, I hear/see the same viewpoints IRL, but I also life in a ‘progressive utopia’ myself.
I left my IRL volunteer hobby community because it became infested with toxic viewpoints about politics and that ‘oppressed vs oppressors’ dynamic. Meetings when from ‘what things do we want to do’ to ‘how long can one of us rant about how oppressed they are’. And most of those folks… were younger, under 30 and they aggressively leaned into identity politics and wanted to create a ‘mission statement’ where we talked about social justice and liberating oppressed peoples, etc.
Misery loves company, so if there are a lot of miserable people they want to keep it that way.
Maybe it’s a sign of our times?
I agree with you though that there are a lot of people here who are bitch asses. Some of the comments here are almost parody. I think it’s best not to engage though. It’s the most bitch assy of comments that get these hude threads where people are arguing with them. It dominates threads, so it’s counter productive. Just stop engaging with these people.
There are entire communities though that are almost entirely negative. Fuck cars comes to mind. Like I get it’s about reducing reliance on them, but it’s in the most off putting way, and attracts zealots.
Yes, it’s a cultural shift that’s ongoing.
I notice it IRL too. Where I live everyone constantly complaints all the time now, and if you don’t complain or agree with their complaints… you are the ‘negative’ one. There is a post-pandemic overdrive of doomerism and framing everything in a negative way, and social media is partially to blame as everyone perpetually feels inadequate and projects that onto everyone else in this hyperreality they live in now. Some of the conversations I’ve overheard at bars the past few years are just like these endless self-referential doom loops of pervasive self-criticism. And if you are outside of this type of thinking/conversing, you are socially rejected or considered offputting/ignorant.
It’s a very different discourse than what was going on in the 2000s, or 2010s. Back then we knew what was real, and what was fake, and most of us weren’t trying to make the fake into the real.
I’ve also noticed, saying you’re happy or enjoying your life or are well-adjusted makes you a terrible offputting person now. People will clap back at you super hard about that makes you awful, and you should feel bad about it because ‘somewhere someone is suffering and if you aren’t suffering for them then you have no empathy’ or something… is the gist of the argument all the time.
IDK, gamers are sucking steam here like every gaming communities anywhere else, and I’m always downvoted to hell when I point that it’s a shitty business.
I’ve joined Lemmy in 2023 after the reddit API changes, and to be honest I’ve noticed an overwhelming amount of negativity and hostile discourse since the first week I was here. I don’t know if it’s because of the instances I’m on or the communities I frequent, but I’ve found it almost impossible to talk about things here without literally everything turning into a huge toxic debate.
I can never find entertaining/worthwhile discussion here about silly, simple stuff like TV shows, cinema, music, celebrity gossip, internet culture, games or tech gadgets. It’s a platform where its users take themselves way too seriously and the self-righteousness and moral superiority have reached insane levels lately. You mentioned HP and sports. As someone who works in tech I could add “not de-googling your phone”, “not running Linux” and “having to use AI at work” as things that make you an absolute worthless piece of shit to lemmy.
What’s funny is that while I could see the point in “educating” people or getting occasionally political on a huge platform like reddit, here it’s mostly just preaching to the choir: I already am aware and agree with most of the takes. So we’re adding nothing but negativity that just feeds on itself. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people only lurked not because they have nothing to say, but because the potential reaction to anything posted here makes them nervous.
It also doesn’t help that for some reason people just flock to the main community posts that are just political or general news to comment on those but never comment or post on more specific or niche ones. Reddit has a subreddit for almost any tv show, band, underground culture, movie genre or game you can think of, and those tend to be very active hotspots for entire fandoms. Here it’s very different, and I suspect it’s less about the amount of users and more about the KIND of users. There’s just this off-putting vibe of “nothing is worth my time except reminding people that everything they’ve ever liked, said or done makes them slaves to capitalism” that’s seriously holding the fediverse back.
I too started using Lemmy shortly after the Reddit API fiasco. They took my redditisfun app away from me and wanted me to use their garbage first party app. I don’t want your achievements. Lemmy.world was cool for a while. I thought that only the weird instances like hexbear and lemmy.ml and beehaw were problematic. I’ve been donating to lemmy.world to keep it going for years.
Now I see increasing levels of hostile, toxic comments toward anyone who disagrees with the hivemind here, just like on reddit. Things you mentioned like having to use AI in any capacity or even driving a car seem to cause a flood of downvotes and angry comments.
I used to contribute to lemmy. Now I come here to lurk because I don’t feel welcome. I’ll probably stop donating and visiting at some point if this continues.
I feel you. redditisfun was the exact dealbreaker for me as well. I had truly high hopes for Lemmy when I joined and was pretty confident it could eventually completely replace Reddit for me, but users have been making it pretty hard. It feels like it was born at the boom of the culture wars, and then it inherited all of the wars and none of culture. A lot of the people replying to harmless comments here with unneeded hostility further prove that.
I wonder how many of the FuckCars people drive and are just projecting their self-hate.
Or I guess they are all Europeans who live in major metros?
everyone is looking for engagement. that means they flock to the posts with the most engagement, and those posts garner the most negativity because that’s what drive engagement. angry people post, they vote, they read comments, get angry, vote and post more.
it’s how the internet works. positive silly stuff doesn’t drive engagement. people who laugh at stuff don’t comment, they might vote at best.
people come here being primed by the rest of the mainstream internet with is predominately driven by algorithmic slop. most of your FB, IG, Reddit feeds are going to be anger inducing misinformation trash. it’s inescapable.
I mean I don’t necessarily agree that “it’s inescapable” although it’s getting increasingly hard to escape for sure.
What I do on Reddit that I basically can’t do here is only follow (as in literally keep some tabs open on) a few specific communities for things that I like that have nothing to do with the “anger inducing misinformation trash”. I can go to r/horror to check out and discuss new horror movie releases, a passion of mine, I can go to r/fauxmoi for some snarky but mostly inoffensive pop culture commentary, I can go to the subreddit for whatever show or game I’m currently obsessing over, and so on. And over there the “positive silly stuff” DOES drive engagement because in those smaller (or not small but simply “targeted”) communities the engagement is driven by people being actually invested in the topics being discussed.
I think your view sort of reflects the “negativity” that one finds here. What you’re saying is right, but you’re talking about algorithms and comment sections like algorithms and comment sections ARE the internet. They are not. In the 90s and early 2000s we didn’t have those; we didn’t have YouTube or Instagram or Twitter or any of the big corporation “social” agglormerates. And we still had engagement, and a reason to turn on the 56k and wait minutes to load each single image everyday.
The fact that people today can’t even imagine an internet without feeds is what’s really concerning to me, and probably one of the main reasons why even in a “place” like the fediverse we haven’t been able to recreate the internet that was (and is supposed to be).
Your view here is fueled by nostalgia though. It’s not the 90s and 2000s anymore. That internet is gone, and it’s never coming back. This is the internet we have now, and it’s the internet that people enjoy using. In the 90s very few people were on the internet, now 76% of the world’s population has an internet connection, 6+ billion people
Yeah, I believe in reality. I argue for reality. That is ‘negative’ for idealists like yourself, who seem to think we should aspire to exist outside of reality. Just like I argue against idealists who think life in the Middle Ages was blissful and amazing and life is 2026 is horrific… despite them being objectively wrong. If you argue from an idealist perspective and think reality is a negative thing, of course I am ‘bad’ to you.
I also generally think idealism is self-defeating and socially awful when it’s not grounded in realism. A lot of people idealize the 1950s too, but only because of the nostalgic perception that life was ‘better’ then than today, but only really for uneducated white men. For pretty much every other demographic group it was worse.
Do you think people or doctors in 2026 can imagine medical care without MRIs and all the other imaging equipment we have now that didn’t exist a generation ago? You seem to be saying the Fediverse should aspire to your ideal of a hospital that doesn’t use imaging equipment and that’s somehow going to be better than one that does?
What are you even talking about here? You’re literally arguing for the sake of arguing and further proving my point, and OP’s point, that the fediverse is fixated on negativity. Literally nothing you said was implied by my comments.
This tends to be more noticeable in smaller forums. May I introduce the “fuck 'em” ideology? I would prefer that everyone be chill/kind; but, ya know… differing opinions and personalities behind anonymity. “Fuck your burn” is a surprisingly apt way to deal with it. We’re all welcome here… and that’s the unfortunate beauty of it
As I mentioned in another comment, the lemmy community here has gotten significantly worse in the past 6 months or so. So much that I’ve stopped contributing and started pulling back. People are hostile, angry, and I don’t feel like I can have a real discussion on this platform like I could in late 2023.
I agree with all of your thoughts here and believe that if things continue the way they are, this platform will die the way that voat or digg did. It will increasingly become an irrelevant circlejerk.
Oh yeah, rage has never baited an audience… And there’s definitely not a term for that \s
… it’s also the term for a particularly angry masturbation session.
