Unpopular Opinion

I get where you're coming from. This platform made me realize once and for all that I'm not a leftist, despite thinking of myself as one for most of my adult life. But I'm definitely not a conservative either, so I'm rudderless. A lone wolf.

Anyways, to the original point, there are a lot of toxic people here. They were on Reddit too, but there was a lot more to dilute their presence. Be active with your blocklist, and use an app that allows you to filter words and instances. Those few actions will drastically change your experiences on Lemmy. It changed mine enough that I went from being an inch away from leaving forever, to actually enjoying most of my time here. And heck, I learned something about myself in the process, and continue learning every day. No sense in only being around people you agree with, that'll just stunt your growth as a person.

I think it depends on the community. All the ppl at sdf.org are pretty cool though. Maybe your instaces is full of annoying people and you only see that in your feed.

Hey man they are just morons and downvotes. Being offended is simply the cost of free speach. U can choose not to give a fuck or u can choose to take it personally its up to u.

Hexbear, grad, and ml are fucked so u can disregard anything they say or do. If people arnt engaging in good faith call em out on it or just call em a cunt up to u.

You forgot where their feelings about a subject hold more weight that your facts. Its usually over some childish pearlclutching.

I have a different experience. I have not blocked anyone or amt instance. I am om lemmy.world, so that might be it?

Twitter made me hate people. FB made me realize just how dumb people are. Reddit made me realize that there are no good guys in positions of power. Bluesky is actually pretty chill. But I prefer this format. A forum style.

It has some crazy, but I've found it refreshingly with it in many ways. People here generally understand that getting paid enough money instead of ripped off by a billionaire is good. The stuff you shouldn't have to filter for.

checks profile

I can see why you hate everyone here. 🫠

One thing I noticed is alot of people on Lemmy think that everything on the internet should be free and have no ads. In a perfect world this would be great but most of the sites people regularly use are expensive to operate and wouldn't exist. I do use as blocker and pirate stuff sometimes but I also pay for YouTube premium and a couple other services. Plus I go to movie theaters whenever there is a movie I really want to see and support.

I see your instance is federated with both Hexbear and Lemmygrad. Going to gesture vaguely at that being the root of your problem (or at least > 90% of it).

Blocking instances helps, but you'll still see users from there in the comments and in other communities (not on the blocked instance). Some UIs will hide users from blocked instances. I know Tesseract does (I wrote it to do that), but others might as well.

My experience here has been pretty great after getting my blocklist and feed curated.

Must be a different Lemmy you're talking about. My experience has been nothing like that and generally quite positive.

+1 for unpopular. I think planet earth is worse platform.

Get a instance that doesn't federate with .ml instances or hexbear, block the Lemmy.world political communities and you can enjoy Lemmy mostly without assholes.

At this point, i’m having a decent time here but I also have a decent block list, an instance blocked, and another mostly blocked.

I don’t mind the commies too much, since I’m an ancom, though I have argued with them on my previous main account a lot, and it did get exhausting since some communities dogmatically support specific arguments that have been proven wrong a hundred years ago or are based on strawmen, or fundamental misunderstandings, or on viewpoints that haven’t been mainstream since the 1800s.

Lemmy has changed a bit since I joined when reddit announced their api changes. It used to be more radical, but I’ve seen a lot more centrists and center left folks join, and I think the mixing of that has caused a fuckton of drama.

Though I don’t see a lot of insults anymore. I’ve been insulted a million different ways, but since march or april I’ve seen a reduction in people calling me a slur or people calling me a fascist or trumper even though my position is to the left of theirs. I remember being insulted incessantly after October of last year.

I tend to be careful where I reply with political talk (AKA not on .world or most hexbear communities) but the non political communities are wonderful. I fucking love the queer communities here (even on hexbear) and the open source communities are also great.

I just hope the toxicity drops to what I remember around June or July of last year once elections end.

I find that if you avoid the political and news forums and some of the meme forums, you avoid 90% of the assholery that exists on Lemmy. But that’s true for Reddit as well and I think is probably just a truism about the internet in general.

It’s not really the people, I think, that is the problem; it’s that people feel strongly about politics and when they have the anonymity and disconnection of the internet to free them from true social accountability, we express ourselves in increasingly overconfident and arrogant ways, which obviously pisses other people off and creates arguments. In other words, the internet is ideal for festering toxic debating environments. Our psychology just wasn’t meant for it.

There are two keys to success for an internet community:

• limit the conversation to a circumscribed subject
• have decent moderation

This has not changed since the 90s. It's the reason that any community devoted to "world news" or "politics", whether it be here or on the R-site or anywhere else, is destined be a train wreck whereas one on "gardening" or "classic BMWs" or whatever will generally be pleasant.

Fair-minded moderation is what turns a cesspool into a merely unpleasant hangout, or a decent community into a great one.

IMO the gold standard for a successful community is clearly Hacker News, which (logically) combines a well-defined purpose with top-notch moderation. Rather than just deleting comments and handing out bans, the moderator there intervenes in discussions to push them back on course, often in a plaintive manner that appeals to people's good sides. The positive results of this approach were even the subject of a feature article in the New Yorker.

This is a not a technical problem as much as a human one. Restrict the bounds of conversation, then take a smart approach to moderation. Success will follow.

Like most people say if you want more pleasant experience, it'd be better to avoid politics.

Dank memes is also tangled with politics and crudeness anymore and outlived their days.

Also you don't need to feel obligated to respond to rude or unpleasant people, just block em' and go about your own interest.

Lastly treat others how you would like to be treated. If you just go around trying to counterpoint argue and call everyone terrible then you might suffer some backlash.