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Lemmy has a toxic negativity problem and it's scaring off new users (poptalk.scrubbles.tech)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world
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Today has been especially bad, and was inspired sadly by about 6 straight posts of only negativity here.

I want to say that being negative towards something is not a bad thing, it's very valid to critique things. However, a community becomes toxic when the majority of it's content is negative.

Gaming is an obvious one. It's very obvious all around the internet that gaming communities are negative generally, and Lemmy certainly takes the cake. In the case of GTA 6 coming out this month we can (and have) had multiple stories about Rockstar's unethical practices, the pricing, ownership, and to be clear I agree with all of it. However, there is also valid positive things that people want to discuss but are immediately downvoted to hell, or have comments brigaded on with responses like "Don't you know about X, Y, or Z??"

I've been in comment threads where people have told me that they are afraid to post here because of the responses they might get. Now this is absolutely true everywhere, and we will often respond "You just have to tune them out" but the scales are shifting to the majority of responses are negative.

New users will not simply block/tune out the majority of commenters. New users will see that a community is toxic and turn around and go back to where they felt it was better.

This is the root of my frustration - that Lemmy is no longer a geeky place where people can talk about Star Trek and Linux - but that it's becoming a toxic place where if you aren't talking about why Star Trek and Linux are the only good things on the planet that it should be called out over and over.

Worse is that the scales a tipping to simply being "If it is popular, it is not good" which is a huge red flag for toxic community. To be clear it does not mean that if something is popular that it must be good, but instead we are falling for the same trap that is on corporate social media.

Anger and toxicity are fun, they are dopamine hits. So when there's a huge post about <> and everyone dogpiles, everyone has that dopamine hit and it spreads, and it makes people want to dogpile more. Unfortunately I think this has left individual posts, and this is now driving a large part of our comment sections, that people feel included when they are all dogpiling on a popular thing. It's addictive.

It's incessant and exhausting being here some days.

Some examples to think on:

  • Harry Potter fans (who have already said they will not buy anything from Rowling again and are aware) who still want to enjoy the books/movies they already own, but are shouted down and downvoted
  • Sports fans posting about football, to have jokes about "sportsball" made to them.
    • (Is that really any different from nerds being made fun of by jocks in highschool, only this is in reverse and worse yet, we're supposedly more mature now?)
  • Freaking pumpkin spice. The world is on fire and people get a tiny bit of joy out of cinnamon and allspice, can we let them just enjoy that?!

I think that sums it all up, I wish people could just enjoy things here without having the majority of comments be about why they shouldn't enjoy it. I think this attitude has already lost of a good chunk of users who could be adding to the fediverse, instead now back on corporate social media.

It's anecdotal but I've shown the fediverse to 3 other people who are trekkie nerds like me. They gave up in less than a week not because the fediverse was complicated, but because they felt like they weren't wanted here.

Be the positive change, be encouraging. Don't belittle for someone for liking a popular thing if you like something more obscure, instead post about obscure thing and why you like it and share it! Inform users of things like Rowlings insane shit-headery, but don't demean them for still enjoying the books. If you don't like sports that's cool, but let them cheer on their team.

Thanks for listening. I'm going to have a pumpkin spice latte now.

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[–] 5 points 11 hours ago (4 children)

I would add that one of the fundamental problems with Lemmy is that people are not using the voting system in good faith. Upvotes and downvotes have increasingly become a measure of whether someone agrees or disagrees with an opinion, rather than whether a contribution is relevant, factual, constructive, or adds value to the discussion. That was never what the voting system was designed for.

Genuine question, citation ?

I've not seen anything that properly defines what the voting system is for other than the join-lemmy docs which seem to state it's purely for visibility and sorting.

Lemmy uses a voting system to sort post listings. On the left side of each post there are up and down arrows, which let you upvote or downvote it. You can upvote posts that you like so that more users will see them, or downvote posts so that they are less likely to be seen. Each post receives a score which is the number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

    To clarify, Lemmy's voting system is specifically designed to indicate engagement, regardless of whether that engagement is positive or negative. And that actually reinforces my point about the spirit of the system being misused.

    People are increasingly voting based on whether they agree with the person making a statement, how they feel about the way it's presented, or whether they like the factual implications of what's being said, rather than the actual merits of the contribution.

    The distinction is important. Whether you personally agree with something is entirely separate from whether the information being presented is factually correct, relevant, or contributes meaningfully to a discussion.

    I don't think this needs to be explicitly spelled out in Lemmy's documentation or charter. It's a fundamental principle of any good-faith voting system. Voting should reflect the value of a contribution to the discussion, not simply serve as a mechanism for rewarding opinions we like and punishing opinions we don't.

    When people abandon that distinction, voting stops being a meaningful measure of community engagement and becomes little more than a popularity contest. And that's precisely the kind of behavior that contributes to the toxic environment we're discussing.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 hours ago* (2 children)

    That's a lot of interpretive logic to apply to a statement that basically says

    "votes are for sorting, upvote things you like, downvote things you don't"

    That you have a strict interpretation of what votes are and are not for, doesn't change the fact that its not supported by official sources.

    If you want to push your interpretation, you do you, but presenting your interpretation as definitively the spirit of what was intended is factually incorrect.

    It's that kind of claiming of objective correctness that fuels fundamentalism and shuts down and kind of reasonable discourse.

    Not that I necessarily disagree with your idea of what this kind of voting system should be (an entirely different conversation), im just saying it's not definitive or official, and claiming that your suggestion "is what it really means" weakens your argument as a whole.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 hour ago (1 child)

    First, I appreciate you actually engaging with me in a way that presents an argument supported by points and facts rather than resorting to condescension or simply declaring me objectively wrong. That's the kind of discussion I'm interested in having, even when we disagree.

    That said, I don't think my interpretation necessarily makes me more rigid or fundamentalist. I'm making a distinction between the letter and the spirit of the voting system. There's a difference between what the mechanics allow people to do and what we believe those mechanics are intended to accomplish.

    I understand that the official documentation is vague. It describes voting as a way to influence visibility and ranking, and essentially tells users to upvote things they like and downvote things they don't. It doesn't explicitly say votes should be based on factual correctness or the quality of someone's contribution. I acknowledge that.

    But I also don't think the absence of an explicit rule means we're precluded from discussing the underlying philosophy of the system. My argument is that treating votes as personal like/dislike buttons undermines the quality of discussion and the usefulness of the ranking system.

    I'm not arguing that my interpretation is an officially established rule. I'm arguing that there's a distinction between what the system technically allows, what its documentation actually says, and what we believe constitutes responsible participation.

    I'm perfectly happy to debate what the voting system should represent. I just don't think someone's interpretation should be presented as objective fact when the official documentation doesn't support that level of certainty.

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