I’ll take the normies over people who unironically uses normie as an insult

But yes, I saw one post in particular earlier to day from your typical right wing shill that was baiting people.

This is rage bait. And it's like the third post identical to this in as many days. The others were by right wingers pissed they weren't on truth social.

I am not really noticing this at a large scale. I've seen it here and there but not enough to be worrisome. The ration of good content to poor content still remains heavily in favor of the good.

Well, that's where moderation comes into play.

As much as people hate the idea, you need strict moderation to keep a given platform civil and on topic. To do that you need either robust tools (which lemmy does not have yet), or moderators able and willing to put in the time to keep things on track.

When a forum is run with a low tolerance for incivility, it will eventually become less of a target for jerks.

I catch hell any time I say that because people seem to believe (in spite of a millennium+ of evidence otherwise) that the default state of discourse is friendly and orderly. It simply isn't. People are assholes. When they have the veil of quasi-anonymity, there are large amounts that won't even pretend not to be.

I've seen it happen over and over again since the first html chat I was involved with in the nineties. Even before that, but when you were dealing with pre aol era internet, it was much less of a problem because of the barrier to entry.

You want friendly, chill communities, you have to pick between firm moderation with large and open numbers of users, or light moderation and limited access/numbers. The middle ground is just too open to bad actors.

On reddit, I saw strict moderation change a sub. I saw subs go from constant flame wars and nastiness into a fairly relaxed vibe in a matter of weeks just with active and mild moderation. With stronger moderation and clear community rules, you really can maintain a great community with only bare minimum randos stirring trouble.

Where? Every comment section I see is still a ghost town.

First of all I don't think rage baiting and arguments are reddit culture. Reddit culture is people who act like know it alls when they have no experience or knowledge about the subject.

I have barely seen any arguments and I've seen no rage baiting. It's healthy to have arguments on a site based around discussions.

oh look another techbro hipster whine

No positives?

My big hope with the fediverse is that stuff like that can be contained. lemmy.world is the big instance where most anything goes. If you're looking for quality curated content, then you've got places like beehaw.org. Similar to /r/AskHistorians, but that was always an awkward system. Is /r/AskPlumbers or whatever up to the same standards, or just some rando subreddit? Now, if you find a community like ancientegypt@askhistorians.org, then you can explore the other communities on the instance and be reasonably assured that they're also up to snuff.

Also, I think the memes and other easily-ingestable content is a healthy sign. It draws people to the fediverse, and then they can discover more niche communities that make them stay long-term. The memes aren't for everyone, but the memes help everyone get good communities.

"there's too damned much ragebait", cried the ragebait..

Yeah.

June was glorious. It was like the internet of the 1990s all over again. There wasn't a lot of content, but what there was was posted by actual people who would actually engage in good faith. I had forgotten what that felt like.

But it's been all downhill from there, and at this point, it's starting to feel like Reddit, just on a smaller scale. More all the time, I'm just seeing rage bait that's posted either by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot, and if I bother to respond to it, it's likely that if I get any response at all, it's just going to be a string of shallowly emotive rhetoric and fallacies that again is either posted by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot.

I'm cynically unsurprised but still disappointed.

Arguments are not a bad thing!

Eternal September perhaps? As the population grows, the culture changes. It's unavoidanle to an extent (if Lemmy keeps growing.... But don't we want that?).

Honestly the fact instances are being defederated has helped a lot. It seems to happen at a rate that doesn't seem ridiculous, not like there is a flood of garbage but still not none.

Yah dude. I am a super newcomer to Lemmy, but when I started up it was refreshing that it was cerebral and different and marched to its own beat. I never even really noticed how much image / meme content had taken over reddit, until I saw a place without it. I didn't agree with the tankies. But, there are tankies! This place is great. It's different and authentic. I like it. And now, over the last couple of months I've been carefully attempting to keep my subscriptions on Lemmy to the factual stuff and eliminate from the feed stuff that's memes or "Hold my whatever, I'm going in!" just kind of time-wasting.

And yet, even in the "good" parts I've been seeing this takeover of people who are... I don't even know what they're doing. I think it's just sort of this dopamine loop that they want to come on and yammer. I'm sort of assuming that this is maybe a problem only on the big instances, that may be better on Mastadon or on more form-a-community type of instances? Maybe? I hope so.

I wish there was a way to identify and fully block out bad faith actors.

True. But I’m just glad there are enough people to have conversations. Hopefully some of the smaller subs can exist soon.

I’ll agree. When I first came here it reminded me of being part of 4chan back in 2005 when pranks and memes were partially cerebral and relied on you having some basic intelligence. Even if they were dumb, you had to appreciate the majesty of mass-calling GameStop to ask if they had Battletoads in stock. 4chan slowly devolved into a cesspit, and it didn’t occur to me until I joined Reddit 10 years ago that the people I had cut my teeth with regarding internet culture had moved on.

Over the years Reddit became slowly more, and then radically less interesting. I gravitated toward more niche communities or ones that challenged my worldview to maintain my engagement. It could still be engrossing, but I noticed more and more that Reddit just filled the gaps when I had nothing better to do, like reading on the toilet.

Early in the divergence I jumped to kbin and rediscovered the kind of intelligent discourse I had been missing all over again. However, I’ve already seen fascist apologizers and trolls migrating as well.

To borrow a phrase: “But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.”

Before I left Lemmy I saw lots of threads with people calling each other “comrade” and saying that “uKrANiAns R nAzIs!”

I’d take the crappy memes over that any day. It’s not all about personal entertainment folks, those people are toxic.