I’m not going to pretend that early 2000s or 2010 Internet was better, but I recently switched to the fediverse because of the harassment I was receiving online.
I had gotten into a small argument because someone essentially stole the background set dressing for a weird thing they tried to do in their creation, when I pointed it out they responded by going through my post history and telling me that I should have committed suicide.
when I responded it was childish to go through my post history because of an argument, someone completely unrelated sent an image of a child’s skull split open and they were very obviously dead, just in an attempt to get a rise out of me.
like, I dunno, I feel like when I was younger people would either just call each other names and then leave it at that or complain about it night and day, but it wouldn’t ever progress to the point that people would just outright post gore in my messages.
am I alone in feeling that over the past 8 years people have gotten a lot meaner online?
Doesn’t seem like it’s the internet, just small sections of it. Specific communities. I usually stay away from those. Unfortunately, Lemmy seems like it’s become pretty toxic in the last couple years.
I was in several USENET groups and they were basically lemmy under a microscope. There were group leaders, people not to be trifled with, words you couldn’t use, certain opinions were verboten, you had to carefully frame your remarks for a particular crowd or you’d get flamed, all the same as here.
People are trained in the modern day to attack people in their tax bracket over literally anything.
Also, people will become more irritable and stressed the more stressors we force on them. People now work more than any generation in the last 100 years. They have less spending power, they are losing their rights and being guilted into birthing slaves for the meat grinder. All while the world is dying before our eyes and nobody in a position of power does anything to help.
It’s a depressing reality, and we should expect people to act accordingly.
Overall, I don’t think you’re wrong that the internet has become more actively hostile however I will also note that shock content has always been a part of the internet.
There’s two girls one cup there’s that guy sitting on the jar there’s the infamous LiveLeak website, there’s meat spin. Like the amount of random Infamous shock content from internet history that I could rattle off is enough to make your stomach turn.
I have yet to see the shit I saw on rotten.com.
I completely agree that things have gotten a lot meaner in recent years, perhaps reflecting real life divisiveness. I’ve never encountered nothing anywhere near that toxic; I hope you’re ok
What i see is more trolls. More people who just want to argue or insult. More people who may have a point but jump right to denigrating the entire person or political affiliation or culture or country. That was one of the reasons I left Reddit but it’s here too.
But it’s also the commercial services, treating their customers worse and worse. More ads or more data collection or less service or uglier about scenarios that don’t fit their ideal
No, this is not new. I remember posting on a conservative blog decades ago and some users threatening to kill me in detail because I was pro-human rights. I didn’t take them seriously, but that level of toxicity has always existed.
Lemmy has a block feature that works great.
The internet was always filled with childish people who were siloed into echo chambers, simply because they decide to take an “us versus them” approach, rather than looking into both sides, and compromising somewhere in the middle. This is something we lost, because we fell for the trap of Roman Catholicism and its forks of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
