No Stupid Questions

Not really. But I purposely avoid any politics related community.

People are desperately combing through comments, looking for something to be outraged about. That’s what happens in echo chambers - when the outgroup isn’t around to be attacked, people start eating their own. It turns into this insane purity spiral where nobody is ever good enough.

I also noticed how every post just has 5-10 random down votes. Like perfectly fine post in the correct community, not controversial, no rules broken, -10 down votes.

Post quality go down. Echo chamber go up.

No, but I do actively block any community designed to rage bait like news, politics, and faith

Yes its more negative. Comes with more users who want to play keyboard warriors over things they feel strongly about.

I noticed it a few months ago. It feels like a sudden, inorganic shift. Either all the good people have trickled off to a better basin, or someone or something has influenced Lemmy users

I have noticed more people inferring things from a small part of a reply and rather than read and try to understand it, they insted get upset about it and reply back about what they think the op said.

Nothing outside the usual to me.

But that’s another good perk of Lemmy: if you don’t like this instance, join another or create your own.

Yes, but sometimes I wonder if it is just the nature of what happens when a social media network grows large. I did observe how some subreddits instantly get more toxic as they grow bigger too

... On the other hand though, coincidentally I did see some very recent comments that are decidedly more right-wing than the general Lemmy userbase. I personally try not to judge ppl's political orientation but I do wonder if there's something weird going on

Yes, it seems to be.

Yeah the news are triggering the worst instincts of some users who tend to lash out alot, and some trolls might be taking advantage of that

You want a piece of this??

I feel like it's steadily increased over the last 6 months or so, but it's hard to really say. And it's still pretty tame.

Block and block often. Now if lemmy admins will just unspez their attitude about reciprocal blocks I can cull the herd of raging douche nozzles infesting every online community.

There are trolls. Not as many as other places, but we have them.

Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream -- people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).

The goal is to keep opinions we don't want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they've gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.

(All of the stuff above is basically the "standard" for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you're above a certain size.)

https://archive.is/PoUMo

from Bannon:

“The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”

So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.

“All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review

The best defense is to call them out on it and then walk away. They'll downvote the shit out of you, but who tf cares about upvotes and downvotes. If someone is getting downvoted heavily, read what they said carefully before piling on.

Replies have certainly taken on a more Reddit-like quality to some things. Like rude for the sake of being rude.