Obviously, the internet has always been a toxic place, (the phrase “flame war” has been around for decades,) but it seems to have gotten so much worse over the last few years. I used to think decentralization of the internet would fix the worst of it, but Lemmy seems to have gotten worse alongside the rest of internet culture, proving me wrong. How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?
Some things we could encourage: Design social spaces with more repeat interactions. Many toxic people feel they can just move on to another part of the crowd. But if everyone knows them, and that they’re an asshole, It’s not so easy. See the example of “beep”, a user in the comics community who repeatedly cropped out the artist of comics.
I could also envision ways to reinvent forum moderating. For instance, one idea I had for moderating toxicity in a video game is that bans would not last a very long time, but for them to be lifted, the offender must upload a video, or present themselves live on webcam, of themselves describing what they did and apologizing.
If it’s too much, there’s more subtle approaches; like that old study on DOTA 2 where they’d present a post match survey, asking people to rank their teammates - then their own level of team contribution - and it would lead to reduced toxicity in their next match.