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.
I’m not sure that it’s full-on toxic
It’s definitely negative
I’m not really seeing it as a problem.
We’re generally moderately anti-corporate
We’re very pro LGBTQA+
If you have people that won’t come in because of that, They’re probably where they’ll be happiest.
If you wanted to solve that problem for yourself and friends, you could start a community for whatever you want and see if you can get people to join. You’d likely be more successful starting your own instance and putting the controversial stuff over there. The main instances won’t see it in their ALL and your instance will still get all the more progressive data in it’s all.
That’s not to say they they can just drop into other instances book clubs and start gushing over Rowling’s work.
You see, what happened is, she got real fucking rich and vocal and actively wants to hurt our friends, and honestly I think calling us Toxic over shitting on her content over here is selfish. It’s just consequences.
PSL, we’ll give you a hard time, but not really gonna care. it’s closer to candy corn wars.
NFL, honestly, unless you’re leaking into a more nerdy community or trying to put it in news, i couldn’t see you getting that much push-back. you could stand up any combinations of Teams/Divisions and for the most part people who don’t want to see it would leave it alone. Now could you get Football fans to sign up to lemmy, no idea.
I’m really happy about the Midterm results. And if anyone’s interested, I’d like to tell how this year I got into MUDs! I’ve been playing heaps of Starmourn, a MUD in space! I play as a nanoseer who controls nanites and the mystical power of the void!
Still no respect for Harry Potter adults, though. I want them to hide their love for the series and only enjoy it in secret.
Let me perform a test. See replies.
I mean I agree with what you say at a high level, but personally I find lemmy so refreshingly straight-talking. I find most of these issues really stem from social media partly being a reflection of social and actual realities.
Like… things are not OK in the real world. I know you added that caveat in your post, but I also think it’s reasonable to expect people to be miserable when conditions are deteriorating for so many of us, and hope in the future is at an all-time low.
Good vent though. I think we’re just going to have these back and forth reactions and counter reactions forever and ever. Even if we solve all our existential problems, I’m sure we’d find something to whine about.
Who knows maybe in 500 years someone will be posting to a BBS about how people are too positive and how we used to be able to access real darkness.
Here’s a key thing I think you’re missing about Lemmy: Lemmy is anti-corporate and anti-capitalist by nature. That is the single thing that pretty much all Lemmy users hold true. That’s why we’re here. It’s not all negative. It’s negative when you’re trying to push a product, especially when it’s made clear it hurts other people.
Try discussing an indie game, especially one with a good track record of treating employees well, or one owned by a cooperative. You will almost always see positive responses. Lemmy users are happy to support good things. They’re also skeptical of corporations (for good reason) and are quick to turn against them when it turns out they’re run by bad people.
I’ll give you an example: Anyone who sees this, what is your favorite indie game, and what about it is special to you? Mine is probably the incredibly standard response of The Outer Wilds. It has so much soul and understanding for the human experience, and it gives you the freedom to discover it for yourself.
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.
I honestly feel like people who don’t accomplish much or aren’t trying to be good at something get negative and jealous very easily.
It’s like with your example, football. The strongest athlete, pound for pound, to ever play any sport was an American football player named Walter Payton. He was only 5’10" and weighed 204lbs. He was unstoppable. A killing machine. Faster and more powerful than anyone in human history.
Maybe someone will say, “he’s not from my country” or “my country isn’t great at that sport and we don’t play it” or even “he’s black” or “he’s just an American” or whatever Americans say about people from other places.
It all comes from insecurity of their own bodies and capabilities.
Pick any realm and apply this stuff. We live in a world of people who are weaker and more insecure than those who are great.
Who do you want to be?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m fine with bigots feeling unwelcome here. Not everyone is inherently deserving of respect.
I don’t see it because I blocked the overly negative communities a long time ago. It takes a few days of effort and then you’re good.
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.
