Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same. There couldn‘t have been a worse time for LLMs to be so accessible, capable and fairly unregulated. The perfect conditions to make this year the worst for internet content we‘ve ever seen. By a landslide. We will look at the last 10 years and feel nostalgic on how good these years were with their little bot armies, cute clickbait and adorable fake news.

A lot of it depends on the instance. I think there's a little bit of a smartest bears type of problem going on, with a lot of the bad-faith content coming from just ignorant and abrasive people being sincerely ignorant and abrasive, not anything that's a bot or a deliberate troll.

Personally, I've done some rounds of unsubscribing from tech and politics subs on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, and when I've done that my amount of toxic content and interactions went way down. I think the prevalence of the exact same thing on the tech subs points to it probably being just a bad-person problem in large proportion, although I'm sure deliberate malfeasance is at the root of some of it also.

People here are blaming politics. I don't think that's it. The quality of comments and discussion here has taken a massive nosedive for the past four months or so, no matter what the topic is.

I think it's pretty simple, the terrible won. Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible. They didn't come back. So now we've created the toxic enabling environment that is enabling it hard today.

You can fix it with moderation, but that's a lot of work, and people get really angry.

I'm pretty close to just cutting my losses on lemmy. It's heading in the same direction as reddit but with less moderation, and simply because it's smaller, the awfulness is more visible.

Yeah I've encountered a few accounts lately who either have mental health issues or are bots designs to stir discord. Their entire posting history is divisive shit stirring.

Funny how every 4 years the internet gets markedly nastier. I wonder why???

Being a jerk is extremely subjective - someone could brand you much worse than that just from a polite disagreement from your side, that they don't want to deal with. Aside from anything else, this is a highly "techie-y" space with a ton of strongly held opinions and ideals, and misunderstandings when communicating/discussing them happen. A lot. It will keep happening. People will look like asses without necessarily doing so intentionally.

Now, outright trolling, spamming, shitting on discussions with obvious bad faith participation, consistently derailing unrelated threads with one's hobby horse, obvious flamebaiting and so on... great. Reporting and removing more of that should be a priority everywhere.

Banning politics from any non-political community that can be persuaded to do so also sounds like a great idea on general principle. Politics is poison (particularly what passes for it in the US), and it would be polite to not shove it down the entire fediverse's throat. Every geographical sub is politics, every news sub is politics, there are dedicated politics and politicalmemes communities, and still it's fucking everywhere else also. Asklemmy and NoStupidQuestions are full of thinly veiled soapboxing (which leads to a lot of awfully stupid questions). People who want to JAQ off to politics can easily make their own community for that (that way, the rest of us can block it, as intended), or else keeping it in their pants would've been kinda polite, idk. Seems odd to insist on posting political stuff everywhere.

You're not imagining it. I'm pretty sure you can see regular work from propaganda teams on lemmy. I'd love to see the backed logs to confirm it.

They tend to work in very hostile teams to brigade topics.

I've been noticing the same sort of behaviour that you're talking about. And while I don't know the cause, I don't think that it's caused by trolls or bots. Instead I'm guessing a few potential factors:

1. Demographic concentration in general purpose, lax moderation instances, tailored to attract your typical Reddit user instead of more reasonable people.
2. Lemmy+Kbin users being proportionally more combative, entitled, petty, and/or whiny, due to how people reached this platform.
3. "Powerjanny" mentality being inherited from Reddit, specially given the likely higher proportion of former Reddit moderators here.
4. General lack of mod tools, forcing moderators to take sub-optimal decisions on how to handle users and content.
5. Normalisation of witch hunting, making people walk on eggs to avoid being confused with witches, and assuming that the ones not walking on eggs fly on a broom.
6. Normalisation of stupidity, and subsequent normalisation of oversimplifications, assumptions, genetic fallacies, phobia against uncertainty, decontextualisation, etc.; with those things either making the stupid act in a hostile way, or others act in a hostile way towards the stupid.
7. Natural reinforcement of behaviour in social groups.

This is already a rather large wall of text and I'm trying to be succinct, but feel free to ask further reasoning on any of those points.

Yes, lemmy.world is a mess right now

Try to find an instance that bans trolls?

Another place I frequent got rid of the downvote so if people actually disagree with you they have to use words to make their point. Kinda funny how that solves a lot of issues.

Half of the traffic everywhere is bots:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1264226/human-and-bot-web-traffic-share/

I was about to left Lemmy/Kbin for good when some stupid fascists from Lemmy(grad).ml called me names and harassed me, despite the fact that I'm neurodivergent (like that would stop them from doing such actions, but anyway). And then I started blocking every community and user from those places, as well as any community/magazine about US politics or about any US topic because I don't give a damn heck about that place. And my experience improved really well.

It's been a little terrifying seeing a shit ton of supposed liberals acting like trump supporters and just general assholes the last couple weeks. Calling anyone who disagrees with them or questions anything about biden fascists, going out of their way to say hurtful ableist shit, calling pro Palestinian protestors Russian plants (one person even calling for them to be executed), chanting "FOUR MORE YEARS!" whenever Israeli genocide is mentioned, lots of really MAGA-type shit. Besides the last thing though, I've hardly seen any of this irl. I've just assumed liberals have taking a sharp right turn into reactionary shit, but maybe some/a lot of it is a conservative psyop or something. Idk, I still think it's mostly authentic unless proven otherwise, but if I were a hate group on 4chan or a russian troll farm trying to make leftists not wanna vote for democrats I'd be doing exactly this

Only the wet-lipped and dry-eared are upset by trolls.

Maybe because I don’t use Lemmy at real bot hours, I haven’t seen them. Maybe see a spam bot every other day.

I also tend to sort by top 6 hours or top 12 hours so a lot of low effort content gets filtered out.

I also don’t consider people who make off the wall comments or hold opinions I disagree with or think are uniformed or stupid as trolls.

The other thing is that I comment with the philosophy that not every comment signifies a response and so if a reply is a troll or in bad faith, I just keep scrolling.

Nah, things seem okay. I've noticed more politics misinformation since it's an election year.