I was thinking about this again after reading https://jlai.lu/post/22505617 and how Tesseract shut down because of people’s inability to behave. And this isn’t the first occasion where I’ve seen people really abruptly leaving Lemmy or the fediverse because of the general atmosphere. Personally I’ve avoided most political communities aside from a few, and I’ve mostly engaged in more niche places, and I haven’t encountered too many issues with people. But I’ve definitely seen very snarky, aggressive comments from some people, and no doubt there are more of those the more political the community is. I guess it’s logical that the fediverse would attract those most opinionated, or those that have been banned on other platforms for inciting (what someone else might see as) hate, violence or other various reasons.
Do you think the fediverse has a civility problem and is there anything we can do about it?
“A civility problem” is stupid gatekeeping bullshit. It’s not specific in any way.
You know what is an actual problem? Modern Nazis. Corporate bot accounts.
What if you’re uncivil to a Modern Nazi? Is that not OK? What if you’re uncivil to a Corporate Account spamming advertisements? Well, OP would have you castrated, then banned for it. Really? Why?
They’re power hungry, and want to control everything. The level of civility is such that they think if they took over, everything would be back to normal. It’s pretty standard narcissistic behavior. Same as “If people just listened to jebus, like I listen to jebus, the world would be a better place”. No, it won’t. It will be worse off.
All atheists are uncivil to religious people simply by existing. That’s what religious people lie about, anyway. Who’s going to protect the atheists from false accusations? Nobody.
OP’s “I would make everything better with my vague bullshit” - is just vague asshole bullshit. Is that uncivil? I don’t give a fuck. Seems like OP could use some more uncivility in response to their controlling nonsense.
This is the perfect joke answer to this question.
Agree.
Complaining about civility is the first step toward letting morons rule.
If one is making foolish or false statements, one should expect to be humiliated. Come back when you are better educated.
If one is being an asshole for no good reason or making false accusations against another due to losing an argument, they should understand that they are now a legitimate target for everyone to dump on with impunity.
Being confidently wrong, or an asshole without cause deserves equal or greater consequences to the harm caused. Public shaming via humiliation - aka incivility - is more effective than actual punishment or moderation.
I don’t think that anyone should be “humiliated”. If someone expresses an idea, it’s likely that they are making use of that idea in their life (or that a reader might start using that idea in their life), so if you think their idea is harmful, it’s surely better to provide an alternative idea rather than only question their dignity. Expressing that someone should “come back when they are better educated” makes me think that you want people to stop making comments as frequently and to read comments more often than they did before. I think that reading more comments can be helpful, but suggesting that someone should avoid commenting deprives us of an opportunity to understand that person better, and if we want to cooperate with someone, it would be better to have a better understanding of them (and if we don’t cooperate with someone, we will probably have to compete with them: “When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”). The only reason I know of to stop engaging with someone is if they’re acting in bad faith: if someone is trying to distract you by trying to get you to make uninteresting comments instead of allowing your attention to be focused on something more productive, it’d be a help to other people to make that clear. In essence, this is “trolling”. Something like Bluesky lists might be useful in that situation. I don’t see how targeting someone to “dump on” is helpful: that seems like a distraction from more productive activities, which is probably exactly what a “troll” wants. I suspect that the best “consequence” in response to harm is to start ignoring someone and to make it easier for other people to ignore that person.