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?
People here in the fediverse seems perfectly happy to downvote factually correct arguments. Or to upvote blatantly invalid or false arguments. Just because they prefer the fake conclusion. It seems much worse than on Reddit.
So I think part of the solution could be to somehow enforce against people arguing in bad faith. Timeouts or blocks, or whatever.
Votes don’t really matter here. Some instances dont even have downvotes! Just don’t worry about it. If you do want to worry about it, then just accept that not everyone is bound by your ideas about the purpose of the down vote.
There’s an easy solution to that: I’m pretty sure on Lemmy (not sure about Piefed) admins can see who downvoted. So it’s just a matter of mods/admins having and enforcing rules that facilitate conversation.
Just report it when you see it happening!
Given that instance admins do not run communities on their instances necessarily, and that they don’t control other instances - I don’t know you would expect to do this. Nor appreciate of the negatives of embedding such power into the threadiverse structure.