Answer questions if I can
This + I like to just give people answers. I find too often online somebody will ask a question and a lot of users will often try to be helpful but fail because they didn't actually answer it.
Dumb example Q: "What's the best Indian food in this city?" A: "There's not a whole lot of Indian food but you might have luck with a burgeoning southeast Asian store"
If people would interact with others as they would do face to face. For whatever reason, we are so quick to forget the person at the other end. You'll see people complain or discuss real people with literally no empathy and it can be mind boggling at times.
This is sadly so true. I think part of it too is that text is a poor medium for expression at times. For example, it's harder to read sarcasm.
I find this to be less of a problem in less formal spaces. When typos, capitalization, and memes all get incorporated into the dialect, sarcasm and other nuance comes across much more readily. See also: Tumblr.
I suspect that sort of dialect wouldn't be as comprehensible here though, because of the greater diversity in demographics here than Tumblr or my small closed group chats with friends. Here on Lemmy, I try to mitigate this by giving the benefit of the doubt and never ever feeding the trolls.
(Does downvoting a troll count as feeding it, because it gives them attention? I don't want to risk it, so I usually pass them by, but I'm curious as to people's consensus here.)
Part of the challenge of social media is that it leads you to interact with many more people than you ever could in normal life.
While the vast majority of people are delightful, there are significant numbers of people with whom I wouldn't want to interact, either face-to-face or online.
One thing I should get better at is avoiding engagement with those people online who I wouldn't benefit from interacting with.
I don't talk to the crazy person ranting on the street, why would I do it online?
Absolutely.
This is precisely the problem, yes. As a mod in my one sub, this is most often the only time I had to intervene -- when the tone of the conversation got rude, insulting, disrespectful. I would always think to myself, "Is that how you'd talk to that guy in person??". Mind boggling, indeed.
Downvoted unkind discourse.
Upvote is for quality. No vote is for noise/disagreements. Downvote is for hate.
In theory, the lower a score, the less people see something. If I disagree with something that's said (like a civil political opinion), then I won't 'like' it. That takes away one potential point. But if someone is being unkind to others (mean, rude, trolling, etc) then I'll downvote, which I see as removing two votes. The one they could have had from me, and one from someone else. Hopefully, that means they won't get as much attention.
If it's really bad, then I'll also report
Upvote is for quality. No vote is for noise/disagreements. Downvote is for hate.
Yep. This, I think, "is the way". The downvote for disagreement is not a good pattern and probably never was IMO. This is a good way of putting it. Another way someone else put it was essentially that the downvote is about the way in which something is said and the upvote is about whether you agree with it.
I honestly think separating them out in some way, so that we can still use the downvote as an effective tool of aggregating the quality of a post, but not in a way that is simply there to offset upvotes. Like, maybe two "scores", number of upvotes and number of down votes with different filters for each? In a way, the "controversial" sort achieves something like this.
If i have something bad to say, i don't.
I block and never talk to the nazis.
It's not a life hack, but I try to be polite and open with people to a reasonable extent. I turned around several internet arguments with this attitude, even when we had a different opinion at the end there was no toxicity.
There are always the unreasonable idiots and straight up crazies and of course the trolls. Well fuck those people, just block them 👍
Since switching to Lemmy I use my up/downvote in a different way than on reddit. Upvote now means I think the comment/post contributes something valuable while downvote means the comment/post is unnecessarily unfriendly or just not contributing anything constructive.
Typical Reddit voting v Lemmy voting
Reddit Lemmy I agree Upvote Upvote I disagree, but it contributes to the conversation Downvote Upvote Meh Downvote - Trolling and bad faith arguments Upvote Downvote This is the way. Maybe this should be shown to everyone who signs up and everyone should be reminded once in a while to keep up this system.
That's what they were originally about on Reddit as well before its gradual decline. "Reddiquette" as they called it.
Unfortunately it turned into an "I agree" or "I disagree" button.
Yea ... I said it above, but I think separating the up and down votes so that they don't contribute to the same "score" might help. Make the downvote a separate process of basically softly and quickly reporting a post/comment for being out of line.
What I, at least in theory, try to do is upvote everyone I'm replying to even if I'm replying to disagree - because if I've replied then by definition it has contributed to the conversation. It gives your reply better visibility as well. It's really hard to do sometimes though.
Curate my feeds so I mostly don’t see negatuve content (doomers, cynics, trolls, etc)
I do this, and employ frequent and rapid blocking on social media.
Instead of engaging, dick wads get blocked without comment.
Log off occasionally.
Not feeding trolls.
I'm building a peer-to-peer search engine
Radical optimism. Hell yeah! Basically anti-doomerism.
Commenting to creators with specific things that I like about their work
Acknowledge when other people have been particularly nice, helpful, funny or interesting. Support those who make mistakes and hold their hands up, and apologise myself when I’m in the wrong.
Disconnect.
I write a lot of comments that I feel add important information and context, I add links to save other people clicks, and I back down on the odd occasion I make a mistake.
not be an asshole to everyone, and trying to explain my reasoning.
Use a non-chromium browser son that web environment integrity doesn't work. (Librewolf)
I comment jokes everywhere in order to make people laugh, or at least smile. Or at least least slightly blow air out of their nose.
don't be an asshole.
works for corporations, individuals, and everything in between.
uBlacklist: block SEO, clickbait garbage from Google search
Shutup.css: blocks comments on all websites; I enable it on websites (such as lemmy) in which the website is dedicated to discussion. This prevents me from seeing stupid MSN like comments.
AdBlock: Blocking ads. They are slow, they are annoying, they follow you and I hate them.
Privacy.com cards: Lets me lock a card and certain amount to a website I may or may not trust, and prevents them from charging more than I state. Has been VERY useful for Amazon Eero in which they keep auto subscribing me to eero Plus and “don't know what happened on their end”.
This is more so related to Xbox, but:
Filtering all messages from people who aren't my friends into a separate inbox that doesn't notify me. Blocking party invites from people who aren't my Xbox friends (prevents assholes in Overwatch from DDoS).
Moderate the OnlineFavors subreddit.
Honestly I joined the fediverse apps instead of traditional social media, Lemmy and Firefish and Pixelfed. It's quite nice on all of them, I got rid of Twitter and Instagram and probably will quit Facebook next. It feels much better.
Probably nothing since I have no free time 😕
Post photos of beans
Block freely and block often.
Once in a while i dont respond to stupid comments....
Donate monthly to the Wikimedia foundation
Remove anonymity.
I’m not advocating for that. The internet would be a boring dystopia, but it sure as shit would be nicer if every statement could be tied back to a real person.
Heads up: you probably misread the question. It's not "What would you do" but "What do you do"
Ah yes I did. Thank you. I will delete.
Would it? Facebook is a cesspool.
I doubt even a third of facebooks profiles can be easily traced to a real person. Be that as it may, I answered the wrong question so it’s a bit of a moot point.
I don't think this is the case. People are assholes in real life too. People get videos taken of them being violent or racist all the time and they don't care. They just come up with some bullshit excuse. Look at all the celebrities that said some dumb shit in Twitter and the next day was like "whoa lol don't drink and take ambian."
Agree lots of people are assholes in real life too.
I don’t think the internet would suddenly be “nice” (and boring). It would be “niceR” though.
Don't participate or be involved in the most popular online communities. I find once an online community reaches a threshold it goes to shit. Finding your niche people online is the best way to finding a nice place you belong.
people like the hexbear news threads I guess
Argue with random people on the Internet so they can see how cool I am and how smart my ideas are.
Stop feeding off what is given to you and look for and search for quality, informative, objective content that is not manipulated to play with you emotions.
The internet is many things other than just a place to waste away your time, energy and awareness of the world.
Agree with the narrative so everyone feels safe and secure
Provide detailed help troubleshooting people's tech problems.
My response might become helpful to many people in the future, even if it doesn't help the person who originally asked the question.
- force privacy from companies
- block most logging from vpn's
- remove communist safehavens
- force Roblox to remove stichface
- make terms and conditions and privacy policies 4 pages maximum
- disband all databrokers
- burn drug selling tor sites
- bring back vine
- google chrome slowed down by 60%
- destroy terrorist safehavens
- thread's blocked from fediverse
- decentralized networks like the fediverse and xmpp become popularized
- tab groups in every browser that minimum 6 People use
- downloading music becomes simple
- no pop up ads
- Facebook users DENCRASE by 18% .
-Improve moderation of major social sites with more penalties for harassment. I feel like the lack of proper moderation has encouraged people to be needlessly mean over petty nonsense and sometimes even ruin lives.
-Add more privacy protections
-Force websites that allow both minors and 18+ content to have NSFW filters in place by default for anyone under 18 (looking at you Twitter)
-Getting rid of intrusive ads
-Websites given legal repercussions in knowingly spreading dangerous conspiracies (such as Facebook doing nothing about posts encouraging violence against a minority group in Myanmar eventually leading to genocide)
