I come on here every so often to see what’s going on, and every time I leave disappointed. This is my top 3 grievances at the moment:
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This place feels dead. It’s usually quite, but lately it really feels like a ghost town. Idk what the actual stats say, but I feel like the amount of comments, posts, and variety seem to have gone down quite a bit over the past few months.
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The amount of genuinely hateful content has gone up. I feel like Lemmy as a whole used to have better moderation even just last year compared to now. Every time I get on here, I’m seeing more and more gross content that’s either racist or bigoted or just downright gross. This content doesn’t get taken down even when reported. As horrid as Reddit’s moderation is, it’s still not this bad.
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Outside of the tech communities, there’s no information hygiene anywhere in sight. The news subs publish the most questionable of sources, sometimes outright misinformation… and nobody cares? People don’t criticize weak sources or call out false claims or even value accuracy. I’ve seen multiple instances of users saying something false and getting upvoted for it and a person correcting them getting downvoted for it. Like, what’s even happening?
I don’t know, I feel like when I joined a couple of years ago Lemmy was so much better. It felt more active, the community felt more down to earth, kind, and friendly, and the content was higher in quality. There was much optimism surrounding the Fediverse that’s not there anymore. Now it feels like a more left wing version of Voat than a genuine Reddit alternative. Am I the only one feeling this way or do other people feel the same?
It’s an affect of people’s warped social media brains that think nobody else can be different than them or think different than them. Who read everything through a distorted lens due to their anger issues.
I mean, I can’t even say ‘The Jewish population of the USA is 7.5 million’. Without random people telling me that is anti-semantic, and others saying it’s pro-genocide, and both groups reporting the comment until it gets removed. That’s how messed up these folks are, that they can’t even allow statements of basic facts.
Or they will say it’s ‘fake’ or ‘conspiracy’ information… lol
The bad news is this predates social media. The even worse news is social media makes it louder.
I think it’s a reaction to feelings of powerlessness and frustration at the world. Social media is an easy way to get that energy out, even if it’s a very toxic way of doing it.
Major issues and inequality aren’t new, but our ability to get a 24/7 fire hose of info about it is. I don’t think anyone’s figured out how to healthily handle it yet. Consuming it all the time destroys our mental, but hiding under a rock isn’t great either I feel. I’ve been struggling to find that balance more and more these days.
the irony is you can 24/7 fill your life with stuff that isn’t that, but people choose to do so.
Just like you can be informed with a quick google query, but people totally ignore that option and embrace ignorance.
I think you’re right, but it’s also true that it’s much easier to find the bad stuff. News in general reports bad news much much more frequently than good news, even though good news is happening too.
There’s a newsletter I subscribe to called Fix the News that only reports good news, and it’s kind of startling how major some of the stuff on there is each edition, things I don’t hear about at all outside of it.
So I think you’re right that people should try and seek out better stuff, but also I have a lot of empathy for not doing so because the machine wants us to be sad and hopeless, and you really have to try to avoid that trap.