Posted this on shower thoughts but Ig here is more appropriate, I feel like lemmy is not the place I remember it being last year.
I really liked the atmosphere of civil arguments and understanding here, which is the reason I started posting actively as well, even though I have always been a lurker, but I feel like I have stopped feeling happy but instead more and more agitated when browsing, I remember people having civil discussions and willing to listen to others, content was low, but what each post produced was really high quality, nowadays though I rarely feel like it
People here have now started acting like as if they are some sort of god gifted individuals who are right in every regard, they love to throw the word ‘propaganda’ around but fail to acknowledge they could be a victim of it as well, I remember we could still have discussions about controversial topics without things getting ugly, nowadays it is not like that, comments get weirdly personal and sometimes even turn into insults and even phobic, people are hell-bent that they are right on certain issues, and never consider any other opinion or that something might be more nuanced than they think
I can be a victim of propaganda too, but what I really loved is that you were able to have healthy discussions and put forward your opinions, which meant you were much more aware of everybody elses opinion and their reasoning, which meant you could see things with different perspectives, nowadays though it is very different, you say something slightly controversial and be prepared for the hate comments (remember the mildy infuriating post? The guy ended up deleting it)
I have learned a lot from lemmy, and I have had wonderful conversations with some of you but I feel like the days where we all were collectively trying to build a good, happy and accepting community are gone, I won’t be surprised if any redditor looked us and thought we are a group of really closed minded people who wont accept anything that is not the common sentiment here
I was a little kid when reddit was gaining traction, so I have no Idea what sort of thing happened, maybe it was similar to this? I would really like if some early reddit adopters who also came here add their comments
One of my favorite moments I remember here is when there was some sort of meme about Ramadan, I clicked hesitantly thinking it’s gonna be a war zone, but I was surprised to see people having fun discussing how people deal with fasting where the sun never sets for months, that feeling was beautiful, I guarantee it will be a different situation now
Unfortunately, I would not be suprised.
I joined towards the beginning of the Reddit migration, so Im not an OG user or anything, but even in the few months that I've used it, Lemmy feels like its become far smaller and more hostile.
As you said, when I joined, there was obviously biases, echo-chambers, and trolls, but there was good faith discussions, and arguments on viewpoints rather than just personal attacks or downvotes en-masse with zero rebuttal. As of writing, this post is a pretty perfect example of the change. There are a couple responses with little detail, a highly upvoted personal attack, and all OPs comments are downvoted.
My best guess is that the lack of content has pushed away more of the average users, leaving mostly just the stubborn and elitist. Making it worse, the lack of content pushes users to /all where they find content not aimed at them. This hostility obviously pushes people away, and causes the issues to snowball. I honestly have no idea how we fix it at this point. It might just be down to getting it more casual users to offset the toxic users, but without huge amounts of funding, I don't see that happening.
I think it might have something to do with moderation too. A lot of quiet communities aren’t as actively moderated lately because activity dwindled down after the initial Reddit influx. So I think more bs is slipping through the cracks a bit too.
It’s not the downvotes really (they were not a problem either before), but the bad faith arguments, insults that is really starting to get to me, I honestly am kinda at fault tbh, tmrw is my physics final, (I came here to take a break, but I am now in a much worse position) and here I am arguing on what is essentially reddit 2.0, but without all those niche communities that makes people stick to a platform, where we can have discussions with people who share a similar interest, I feel bad for all of us, we came here from reddit, thinking we are gonna make a community where we can put aside biases and insults, have healthy discussions and keep out the corpos, but the thing is we have failed in everything we promised each other, except the corpo part