Asklemmy

The subject of the arguments is certainly politics (and war and religion), but the source of the arguments is strongly differing world views.

Despite what we'd like to believe about ourselves, humans are not well-adapted to being exposed to a wide variety of differing viewpoints. We evolved in small, racially and socially homogenous groups, for the most part. Up until the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of humanity lived and died within 30 miles of where they were born, and only had daily interaction with what was essentially an extended family.

Travel, mass immigration, and the Internet changed all that. Being exposed to such a diversity of opinion on a daily basis quite simply breaks our brains. It causes a tremendous amount of internal conflict and stress, for some more than others. That constant strain becomes more intense when there is war, such as in Gaza and Ukraine, or particularly divisive politics. There are obviously some extremely contentious elections coming up, including the US election, which has tremendous global implications. There are, no doubt, people on Lemmy right now for whom the result of the US election is a matter of life and death, and yet they aren't US citizens and can't vote.

We should all take a chill pill and try to be less confrontational and use less emotionally-charged language when it comes to hot button issues. The politics and news subs are an avalanche of charged words and phrases like genocide, fascist, apartheid, Nazi, racist, transphobic, anti-gay, religious zealot, and many others. Those are fighting words. Deserved or not, words like that not only reflect, but also create, a lot of emotional dissonance and stress, which lead to emotionally charged arguments.

You got to be edgy on the internet, it's the law

LMAO

hateful and violent speech toward Trump and the GOP in general.

As should be the case :)

These groups are only alive by sheer mercy.

Taking about U.S politics is a good way to make anyone not from U.S leave. I don't care about politics, yet my wish to not get bombarded by it simply cannot be fulfilled here. So I have to seek other social media platforms, which means I spend less time here.

I'm not even American and I usually don't care either way, but it's so annoying. Why can't we just have apolitical or at least more focused communities online anymore? I would literally join any community that outright banned all political speech for a change nowadays.

this and a prodigious use of your block button. you don't owe anyone the right to talk to you like a jerk. and even more, you curate your online space. vibes are off? you're allowed to block people. even if they haven't said anything to you specifically. if someone is the sort of person you would never want to be around IRL, why allow them in your space online?

I disabled votes on my clients. I don’t want a number to potentially sway my opinion on a comment or post

I think downvotes on facts and upvotes on feelings is just people wanting to feel validated, but not having the energy to engage with content. It used to happen on reddit too a lot. A lot of communities there are based on dealing with human emotions and situations in life. People seeking advice and validation about their lives being the primary motivation for even creating an account on the site.

I have a little pet theory backed by some reading that people are overstimulated by junk content to the point where they just can't meaningfully engage in serious discussions anymore and that leads to the phenomena of populism on a political scale and simple, emotion-based upvoting on a Lemmy scale.

Grammer*