I’m a long time Lemmy lurker and occasional Redditor. Since the Reddit influx, I’ve watched the frequency of shitty Reddit-type behavior, e.g., combative comments, trolling, and unnecessary rudeness, just sky rocket.
I’m happy to have more content on Lemmy, but I wish the bad actors and assholes would have stayed on Reddit.
Yes, I realize the irony of posting this on a new community that’s basically a Reddit transplant.
I think that it’ll get better over time, for structural reasons: since Reddit is a big instance with lots of users and only a few admins, the admins give no fucks on how you behave there. (And if you’re banned by a mod, you create another username and problem solved.) Here however individual users are more precious for their instances’ admins, so admins have more reasons to keep their instances clean of people likely to piss off other people. And, even if they don’t, I predict that instances with notoriously rude individuals will get defederated. The net result is that those users will have low visibility for other users.
What concerns me the most is not combative, trolling, and unnecessary rude users. It’s the stupid - users who are able to reason but actively avoid it. It’s the context illiterates, the assumers, the false dichotomisers, the “I dun unrurrstand” [with either an implicit “I demand to be spoonfed as per my divine right”, or an “I disagree but I’d rather pretend that I’m a stupid than outright say it”] and the likes. People tend to pat those users on their heads and talk about esoteric stuff like “intentions”, but I don’t think that they should be socially accepted here, as they drive the dialogue level down and make the place less fun for other users.
It might be different if there was noplace else for them to go. But why does EVERY place on the internet - Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Threads - all have to cater to it? Can’t there be just ONE place where we hold ourselves to a higher standard? Maybe this means we’ll see fewer posts / comments / “activity” - but is that a bad thing, necessarily?
Still, as I learned how to drive, I realized something: if you leave a space somewhere, someone will fill it. If we want to build something different, it will require expended effort to make that happen.
Federated networks are, by design, not able to be constrained by one set of rules and standards. The place you are looking for is Tildes, a centralized, invite-only, text-only website whose selling point is “high quality discussions” and very harsh moderation against anything that does not fit their standard of “high quality”.
I’m not sure if you want to hear this from me or not, but your answer seems to me to be an example of the Binary Fallacy, or Principle of False Dilemma, where you assume that there are only two sides, with no room for subtly or nuance in-between.
For instance, as on Reddit, here too individual communities could moderate according to different principles, depending on the magazine and what they wanted. At least, even Reddit used to have that, so I’m guessing it’s actually possible here as well.
Because other people don’t care about your standard.
If you want to make an instance where it’s’ enforced, do so - that’s the whole point of the Fediverse. Just don’t be surprised when you have no users.
Just don’t be surprised when you have no users.
Depending on which are those standards, you might get a lot of users. We had examples of that even in Reddit, where a few subs (like r/AskHistorians) had fairly specific rules that boil down to “don’t be a moron” and they were still fairly popular, even in a site that could as well have as slogan "lasciate ogni ragione, voi ch’entrate"¹. That’s because not even the stupid benefit from the others’ stupidity, so they still gravitate towards environments with higher standards².
So what !OpenStars@kbin.social said might be actually viable; the Fediverse (or at least, some chunks of it) could hold itself to a higher standard. The question is how; perhaps through instances? User culture? Or even UX changes that make context harder to ignore and stupid shit sink to the bottom (against the Fluff Principle³)?
(At those times I really want a c/TheoryOfTheFediverse…)
- give up all reasoning, you who enter.
- I believe that this is one of the things that make well-kept gardens die by pacifism.
- “on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.”
I’d like to emphasize another advantage we have–the general sense of self-rule and control. We actually have a modicum of power here, we’re not just fueling profits for some spez. We can move around, organize however we wish.
This creates a naturally higher morale environment. I think things are a little, oh, excited right now, but I expect we’ll probably settle down a little bit over the next few months, as people settle in more.
The trolls, though, those are here to stay I’m afraid. Internet is the internet, you need a private community to truly guarantee none of them forever. And even that doesn’t always work. Hackers and bot attacks too, also here to stay. We’re big enough to be a decent target now.
The trolls, though, those are here to stay I’m afraid. Internet is the internet, you need a private community to truly guarantee none of them forever.
Can’t that be mitigated with blocklists, like with ads or spam calls? Like imagine if you could subscribe to a blocklist where it’s updated regularly. It could be self-maintaining. If 10 people block a certain account, it gets shadowbanned for every other subscriber.
Most of them, yeah, probably. Though you’d need anti-abuse measures to prevent it from being weaponized. Would be hard to balance. And particularly good trolls can’t be caught, too, that’s half the point. They can really only be smothered by superior content and not upvoted. You don’t really want to downvote them either, ideally.
Make them feel awkward and unengaged. That’s the strongest defense.
