It’s not inherently toxic but I’d argue the experience is a net-negative. Social media rewards all the bad and inflammatory behaviour that makes it so. The incentives are not aligned with being nice to each other.
One of the culprits in my mind are visible like counts. The ability to up- and downvote messages is a good one but the scores shouldn’t be visible to anyone. Comments like “ACAB” or “eat the rich” bring zero value into the discussion but rather are just meant to fish likes from your own team and annoy the opposition. I doubt that removing that feature now would no longer solve the issue but it’s one of the main things that trained us to act that way.
Personally I’m hoping for more powerful tools for curating our feeds. It’s probably going to have to be AI based as I can’t imagine how else you’d do that but on top of just simple word and domain filters (which even lemmy doesn’t have) we need smart filters aswell that you could enable which filters out topics you don’t like seeing. Kind of like with enough people using adblockers it would discourage ads-based bussines models and incentivices companies to come up with alternatives. With enough people using similar blockers for toxic content the people creating would quickly realize they’re shouting into the void.
It’s not inherently toxic but I’d argue the experience is a net-negative. Social media rewards all the bad and inflammatory behaviour that makes it so. The incentives are not aligned with being nice to each other.
One of the culprits in my mind are visible like counts. The ability to up- and downvote messages is a good one but the scores shouldn’t be visible to anyone. Comments like “ACAB” or “eat the rich” bring zero value into the discussion but rather are just meant to fish likes from your own team and annoy the opposition. I doubt that removing that feature now would no longer solve the issue but it’s one of the main things that trained us to act that way.
Personally I’m hoping for more powerful tools for curating our feeds. It’s probably going to have to be AI based as I can’t imagine how else you’d do that but on top of just simple word and domain filters (which even lemmy doesn’t have) we need smart filters aswell that you could enable which filters out topics you don’t like seeing. Kind of like with enough people using adblockers it would discourage ads-based bussines models and incentivices companies to come up with alternatives. With enough people using similar blockers for toxic content the people creating would quickly realize they’re shouting into the void.