Obviously, the internet has always been a toxic place, (the phrase “flame war” has been around for decades,) but it seems to have gotten so much worse over the last few years.

Ehhh. I don’t know. I think that there are ways in which it’s gotten better and ways in which it’s gotten worse over time.

I never really used any of the big social media sites that rely on automated recommendations to any degree. I understand that a major factor was that they measured user engagement, and what we found is that users are considerably more-engaged with content that enraged them than pretty much anything else. They tended to recommend material in that vein.

That probably is a step back.

The Internet is a lot more diverse of a place than it once was. Back around, say, the 1990s, it was mostly university people, engineering types, stuff like that. A lot of countries had very few people online. You had fewer points of disagreement in a number of areas. But bring people with a wider variety of views into the situation, and you have more room for conflict, I think. I think that to some degree, that’s just intrinsic to having a more-diverse Internet, throwing all of humanity (or at least everyone that can more-or-less speak a language, which for English, is a lot of people) just means that people from different walks of life and social norms suddenly encounter each other, and, well, ideas clash.

I feel like there is a real sense in which very negative worldviews are more-prominent, maybe partly because of media — and not just social media, but traditional media — favoring more-alarmist articles and titles. Doomerism, like. That’s not so much directly toxic, but I think that people who feel stressed-out tend to be less-pleasant.

And the Internet permitted for forums and media chambers that are very much aligned with specific individual groups; it’s easier to live in echo chambers. The long tail — people don’t have to be exposed to broader views in society if they don’t want to. I think that that tends to let people demonize other people more-readily, if they don’t interact with them.

On the other hand:

Trolling (in the sense of trying to post provocative comments that would incite a flamewar) used to be very common on forums I’d used, like Slashdot. I don’t see much of that on the Threadiverse.

Usenet permitted crossposting articles to multiple Usenet groups. Clients tended to default to respond to all of these. This resulted in people trying to crosspost articles between groups that had users with conflicting views (e.g. comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy and comp.sys.mac.advocacy).

Widespread community moderation, which showed up on Reddit (and the Threadiverse, as it followed in its footsteps) has also improved things a fair bit. Usenet had efforts at tacked-on moderation that weren’t incredibly effective.

Fuck you cunt

Unite in working class solidarity and tear down the country situations of capitalism

As you said, decentralization is key. Highly active human moderation is the only known solution to keep communities free and tolerant, and human mods have a relatively low limit as to what they can handle without making it a full time job (or burning it out)

The Lemmy network is still centralized enough that many smaller instances make the calculus that it’s better to be federated with the large weakly moderated instances than to lose access to the many small communities on those instances.

But increased decentralization makes more granular defederation possible. A weakly moderated instance can simply be blocked.

I think we’ll get there in time.

• Shun the toxic people. Block them and don’t look back.
• Seriously, block them. They’re still gonna toxic whether you’re there to observe it or not.
• Find a well moderated instance that isn’t afraid to show toxic people the door
• Block .ml, grad, hexbear, dbzer0, and quokk.au
• Block any other instance or person that centers itself around identity politics
• Block all the news/politics communities. Just get your news from actual news services. The comment section for most news/politics posts here is worse than an entire garbage dump on fire.

And you’ll end up with like 3 federated users left which is basically my /all feed now 😑

I think all we can really do is set an example ourselves and to allow mods to do their jobs. We can only really control our own behavior, especially a place like Lemmy where it’s basically impossible to ban someone.

I try to keep my posts PG, try to understand others, ignore people I can’t find common ground with, and just try to be the type of poster/commenter I’d like to interact with.

Block .ml and don’t engage with .ml users

Oh yeah? Well your finger looks like a finger. Boom, take that sucka.

Moderation. We had a big influx of users with the Reddit api drama that created a bunch of communities, and then all returned to Reddit shortly thereafter, leaving most of the big communities largely unmoderated. The threadiverse isn’t going to become less toxic until new moderators step in and clean up the worst of it.

You have to treat the toxicity in society to treat it on social media. If, for example, you banned all the “negative” toxic accounts, Lemmy would become a bastion of toxic positivity. The people would sense its fraudulence and leave, and it would still be toxic. Eradicating bots would probably be an effective step toward a solution.

I can really only compare to Reddit and find the fediverse generally better

But those outliers are a doozy. I don’t recall even wanting to block anyone on Reddit but have blocked at least half a dozen here. Just earlier today I had to because we were enjoying a nice discussion, then someone stumbled in saying they’ve debated politics with me, starts attacking, trying to start an argument over something completely unrelated …… Reddit had plenty of trolls but I never encountered anyone there who followed me around to be an asshole.

So on the one hand the capability of blocking anyone is a great way to stop seeing the most toxic part of the fediverse, but on the other hand there’s got to be a more permanent solution

lemmy/piefed have been getting a surge of users from reddit. i can’t imagine algorithmic brainrot fades overnight.

My own personal thoughts on things that might change to improve:

• I’m pretty interested about the prospects for something like “curated lists”, where people can publish ban lists or “upvote lists” or something like that that users can subscribe to if they decide that they like a particular curation list’s material. Something that can leverage positive and negative recommendations more-readily. My understanding is that Bluesky has something along those lines.

• Reddit originally was intended to rely on voting to do per-user recommendation. Over the years, it kind of drifted away from that. At the time I left, it still didn’t do that. I think that it’s probably also possible to create automated recommendations based on things like a user’s upvotes. I suppose that there’s some echo chamber potential here, depending upon how one votes.

• I see a lot of people being negative on the Threadiverse, people that sound often depressed or something, but not really people fighting between each other that much. There are people who could be nicer, but in terms of interpersonal fighting, I don’t see that much. That being said, I do avoid some instances.

• Beehaw.org has a relatively-restrictive moderation policy. That’s not what I personally prefer, but I will say that it has a fairly-upbeat set of discussions on its communities compared to most instances. It defederated with lemmy.world, but has not with lemmy.today (my home instance) and a number of others, so if you’re specifically on the hunt for more-positive conversation, you might investigate it.

• My own personal belief is that making votes public has reduced the amount of “I disagree with you, so I downvote” stuff. It’s also possible that there are other factors going on, but I think that after lemvotes.org in particular became widely-available, the amount of what I’d call downvoting in discussions on controversial topics declined on here. There have been some instances that disallow downvotes entirely (beehaw.org is an example of an instance that does this).

• From a moderation standpoint, there are some policies from Reddit subreddits that I think were generally successful. /r/Europe had a pretty hard “do not edit article titles” rule. This went further than I personally would have, as sometimes I think that adding context to a title could be useful, but that avoided a lot of issues where people would insert their personal positions into post submissions rather than in a top-level comment. I think that some form of that can be a useful convention.

• On an directly-opposing note: I think that a lot of articles are clickbait (and some are ragebait, and the latter tends to drive unpleasantness). I’ve seen various proposals to try to let users submit alternate article titles and those be voted on or something like that. Maybe it’d be a good idea to let users submit alternate titles and mods pick from them or something like that. Reddit didn’t do that, but maybe things along those lies could be successfully done.

• In general, I don’t think that Reddit got many things wrong. One thing I think it did get wrong was to change how blocking worked at one point from “I ignore all comments from a user” to “that user cannot respond to me”. The Threadiverse software packages presently work like “old Reddit”. I think that that’s a good idea. On Reddit, this change to how blocking worked resulted in a lot of people posting inflammatory content, then blocking the other user so that they couldn’t respond, so it’d look like the other user had conceded the point. Then the other user — now infuriated — would go start responding to other comments in a thread pointing out that this first user had blocked them. That never ended well.

• We do have automated stuff to try to detect tone, sentiment analysis. This sometimes gets used to do things like identify users getting upset in automated calls and direct them to a human. It might be possible to automatically flag potential flamewars for moderators, to reduce the time until they get noticed.

Downvoting just gives trolls the negative attention they want. Ignore, block, and/or report. That’s it. We can’t change human nature.

Post nice comments under good posts. It really makes a difference to the active posters and generally lifts the mood of this place.