Since I joined Lemmy in June this community has just been getting more and more toxic. I never see good news, just bad news, and always the same biased takes. If anyone tries to disagree or point out a silver lining they get shut down. What is going on?
My guess: These days, all social media is full of outrage bait and extreme political takes that try to elicit strong emotions and engagement. Because Lemmy is fairly new, a decent chunk of the early adopters are the most terminally online and more likely to be swept up in it. Reddit’s early days were similar, but internet culture has definitely gotten more intense since the early 2010s.
The solution: Be the change. I make a point to be active in positive communities and try to avoid the corners with more aggressive politics or people who are addicted to outrage and just want to argue all the time. It’s going to take more chill people being active posters/commenters. It’s part of the reason I’ve been motivated to post as much as I do, when I never did back on reddit.
I agree, with one exception:
Has it really been that way? I’ve been on reddit since 2010 and from what I remember it was definitely much more nerdy and full of tech people who live on the internet, but I don’t think it had much in common with what we call “terminally online” today. I associate “terminally online” with people who really care about things like culture wars and trying to push their views on others, spending a lot of time arguing about it. Whereas reddit in 2010 was much more homogenous - the stereotypes about forever alone IT nerds with nerdy hobbies were much more true than now, but that meant there were nowhere near as many cultural things to argue about. People sometimes had really weird or controversial opinions, but there was not a lot of added toxicity about it that’s omnipresent now in the discussions.
Ime the “terminally online” problems with toxicity and culture wars only started around 2014-15 with the rise of “online feminism”, that seemed like the first big division into two hostile groups that spent significant time just attacking each other.
I agree with you and probably could have worded that better. I meant pretty much what you said - that the early adopters of reddit back then were techy and very online, with some strong opinions that come with that territory (remember r/atheism?), but it’s nothing compared to recent years.