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.
The thing with the combative comments/rudeness, in my experience, mostly looks like someone being direct and then a bunch of readers being offended by the bluntness. Whether it was on Reddit, here, or forums and Usenet back in the day. So many problems with “tone” in text is caused simply by the reader reading it in a combative tone that the writer never intended.
Putting that entirely on the reader is unfair. The author of a comment or post has some level of responsibility to manage their side of the communication as well.
There’s a reason that, as a species, one of the first things we invented after digital communications was emoticons and eventually shorthand terms to convey emotions (lol, lmao, wtf).
Body language, audible tone, syllable emphasis, or the rest of the damn near endless list of minor things we use to communicate, we needed to make sure we could avoid being accidentally combative by default.
I’m not so sure about that sometimes. It’s definitely true, but many people are bad at inferring tone in text because they have no ability to read between the lines. And I’ve noticed trendy little catchphrases or code words have caught on in Reddit and Twitter. People love to throw around the words “gross,” “yikes,” and “disgusting” when talking about something they find slightly morally questionable. They’ll punctuate a sentence with “full stop” when they want to decisively shut down an argument. Things like the cry-laugh emoji and the clapping hands after every word (I’m on my laptop right now, sorry I didn’t just type the emojis). These things are meant to illicit an exact emotional response, and you almost never run into people speaking so boldly in real life. People have become such caricatures online that it’s insufferable to even try to have a real conversation.
Reddit is definitely full of shitheads who seem to get all their emotional discharge out of the way online. Personally, I haven’t really noticed it here anywhere near the level of Reddit. Even the act of downvoting a comment seems nearly unheard of from what I’ve observed.
Add to that a large part of the Internet (Americans I can only presume) are the biggest moral prudes around.
Like they’ll see someone say fuck in a conversation and be like “guys that’s totally uncalled for, let’s be civil here” when really it’s just a bit of fucking emphasis behind a word and causal as fuck.
Non-prude American here. My hypothesis is that younger-ish folks are raised paranoid of their every word being recorded and played back to their parents. There’s a weird tone to the under 25s that feels like every word had to go through legal.
Perfect example: Oh my gosh!
Who the fuck says, “Gosh?” I think I might have heard 1 grandparent say it back in the early 90s. It’s, “Oh my god!” There’s punctuation to the word. Gosh sounds like you’re trying to whisper so your clergy doesn’t hear you being naughty.
So, yeah, we hate those fucking cunts, too.
Rather than labeling an entire nation as “moral prudes”, it’s important to recognize that different cultures have different standards of civility. I know many Commonwealth nations consider words like “fuck” and “cunt” to be simply everyday ordinary language, but in the United States, one is considered very low-brow and crude, while the other is very nearly the most offensive word in our vocabulary.
Different cultures, different standards.
Difference is the US is the default and their views are imposed on everyone else.
You don’t ask the minority to be more respectful of the majority at their own expense.
Also very clearly said a large portion of Internet users who are American are moral prudes, not all Americans. But hey gotta be offended somehow.
I would almost ignore the profanity aspect, because that’s one of the easiest to learn about and laugh at together, and lean into the fact that some cultures don’t engage with sarcasm the same way as others. Or that some cultures (and sub-cultures) make heavy use of mockery and teasing in ways that are confusing to others.
There are many circumstances where it can be difficult to tell the difference between a joke and a jab in a cross-culture conversation. And that’s not even getting into language and slang barriers.
