this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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People here are blaming politics. I don't think that's it. The quality of comments and discussion here has taken a massive nosedive for the past four months or so, no matter what the topic is.
I think it's pretty simple, the terrible won. Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible. They didn't come back. So now we've created the toxic enabling environment that is enabling it hard today.
You can fix it with moderation, but that's a lot of work, and people get really angry.
I'm pretty close to just cutting my losses on lemmy. It's heading in the same direction as reddit but with less moderation, and simply because it's smaller, the awfulness is more visible.
That, and the fact that simply there isn't enough good discussion to begin with. This community kind of has movement because it's a meta-topic, but for everything else it's mostly "let's pretend we are superior than redditors because we found our way here and "let's pretend we are not in Reddit for all the other niche communities that we are still interested."
I think the biggest mistake in the execution of the protests is the effort was spread around "going dark" for as many subreddits as possible. It would be a lot more effective if we got one big-ish niche and told them "let's focus all our efforts to get you out of Reddit and migrate completely to any other alternative." Go for something completely random but with commercial interest, like /r/sneakers, and if a moderate success of getting 15% of the user base to Lemmy would translate into 500k signups.
That's a real issue. Hopefully it will get better over time, but sometimes at the moment it feels like shouting into the void.
It feels like Lemmy has also become less... diverse? At this point I think the default assumption is that every user is a white, cishet, male, tech nerd from the US, which wasn't as much the case in the earlier days.
Some people do actively looking for fights instead of having meaningful discussions. I noticed them less and less now though, so either the mods got them, or they blocked me because I often call them out, or maybe they stopped frequenting smaller communities.
Agreed, except I don't think people starting to act terrible was the main problem. I think it's mostly bots.
I can see that. I will probably just start blocking communities and instances that have one of the extreme stances (either freeze peach absolutism or why you not outraged?!)
I‘m not going to leave lemmy or the fedi since there literally is nothing else, and especially not something with this much potential.