Fediverse

I've been noticing the same sort of behaviour that you're talking about. And while I don't know the cause, I don't think that it's caused by trolls or bots. Instead I'm guessing a few potential factors:

1. Demographic concentration in general purpose, lax moderation instances, tailored to attract your typical Reddit user instead of more reasonable people.
2. Lemmy+Kbin users being proportionally more combative, entitled, petty, and/or whiny, due to how people reached this platform.
3. "Powerjanny" mentality being inherited from Reddit, specially given the likely higher proportion of former Reddit moderators here.
4. General lack of mod tools, forcing moderators to take sub-optimal decisions on how to handle users and content.
5. Normalisation of witch hunting, making people walk on eggs to avoid being confused with witches, and assuming that the ones not walking on eggs fly on a broom.
6. Normalisation of stupidity, and subsequent normalisation of oversimplifications, assumptions, genetic fallacies, phobia against uncertainty, decontextualisation, etc.; with those things either making the stupid act in a hostile way, or others act in a hostile way towards the stupid.
7. Natural reinforcement of behaviour in social groups.

This is already a rather large wall of text and I'm trying to be succinct, but feel free to ask further reasoning on any of those points.

People here are blaming politics. I don't think that's it. The quality of comments and discussion here has taken a massive nosedive for the past four months or so, no matter what the topic is.

I think it's pretty simple, the terrible won. Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible. They didn't come back. So now we've created the toxic enabling environment that is enabling it hard today.

You can fix it with moderation, but that's a lot of work, and people get really angry.

I'm pretty close to just cutting my losses on lemmy. It's heading in the same direction as reddit but with less moderation, and simply because it's smaller, the awfulness is more visible.

I've seen two trolls recently, but you can see them from very far away, and they post in general ask communities like AskLemmy or No Stupid questions.

On smaller communities, they are not around that much. And I don't go to news or politics communities.

Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same. There couldn‘t have been a worse time for LLMs to be so accessible, capable and fairly unregulated. The perfect conditions to make this year the worst for internet content we‘ve ever seen. By a landslide. We will look at the last 10 years and feel nostalgic on how good these years were with their little bot armies, cute clickbait and adorable fake news.

Being a jerk is extremely subjective - someone could brand you much worse than that just from a polite disagreement from your side, that they don't want to deal with. Aside from anything else, this is a highly "techie-y" space with a ton of strongly held opinions and ideals, and misunderstandings when communicating/discussing them happen. A lot. It will keep happening. People will look like asses without necessarily doing so intentionally.

Now, outright trolling, spamming, shitting on discussions with obvious bad faith participation, consistently derailing unrelated threads with one's hobby horse, obvious flamebaiting and so on... great. Reporting and removing more of that should be a priority everywhere.

Banning politics from any non-political community that can be persuaded to do so also sounds like a great idea on general principle. Politics is poison (particularly what passes for it in the US), and it would be polite to not shove it down the entire fediverse's throat. Every geographical sub is politics, every news sub is politics, there are dedicated politics and politicalmemes communities, and still it's fucking everywhere else also. Asklemmy and NoStupidQuestions are full of thinly veiled soapboxing (which leads to a lot of awfully stupid questions). People who want to JAQ off to politics can easily make their own community for that (that way, the rest of us can block it, as intended), or else keeping it in their pants would've been kinda polite, idk. Seems odd to insist on posting political stuff everywhere.

Yeah I've encountered a few accounts lately who either have mental health issues or are bots designs to stir discord. Their entire posting history is divisive shit stirring.

Funny how every 4 years the internet gets markedly nastier. I wonder why???

Nah, things seem okay. I've noticed more politics misinformation since it's an election year.

Half of the traffic everywhere is bots:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1264226/human-and-bot-web-traffic-share/

It's been a little terrifying seeing a shit ton of supposed liberals acting like trump supporters and just general assholes the last couple weeks. Calling anyone who disagrees with them or questions anything about biden fascists, going out of their way to say hurtful ableist shit, calling pro Palestinian protestors Russian plants (one person even calling for them to be executed), chanting "FOUR MORE YEARS!" whenever Israeli genocide is mentioned, lots of really MAGA-type shit. Besides the last thing though, I've hardly seen any of this irl. I've just assumed liberals have taking a sharp right turn into reactionary shit, but maybe some/a lot of it is a conservative psyop or something. Idk, I still think it's mostly authentic unless proven otherwise, but if I were a hate group on 4chan or a russian troll farm trying to make leftists not wanna vote for democrats I'd be doing exactly this

Try to find an instance that bans trolls?

Politics is banned from c/[email protected]

And speaking as a mod, report things. The vast majority of things I've dealt with as a mod were ones I saw myself or things friends sent on discord. People need to utilize the report function more often if they want moderation on things. We're not psychic.

As for being more stringent on the not being a dick rule, no. There's a base level of civility we expect but if we start getting super stringent on what constitutes being a dick, that's imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.

Lastly, it's the Internet. Assholes exist everywhere. You are not going to escape it, ever, if you're using public servers. It's pretty much required to accept that fact just to use the Internet. Moderators do not exist to prune and preen social media to make it more comfortable for people. We remind people to follow the rules and act upon those who do not. If you're not breaking the rules then we're not going to "interact" because we have our own lives and our own posts we are interested in.