Also, those upvotes and downvotes don't mean shit here

I've seen more instances of "you're right, I'm being a dumbass" than I was prepared to.

The Old Place put a patina of grime on my soul. People are alright here.

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As they say in Texas. I’ll bet you couldn’t pour !@#$ out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won’t go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You’re a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformation. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly. You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You’re a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won’t have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. And what meaning do you expect your delusional self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral[size] equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meat slapper. On a good day you’re a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. You smarmy lager lout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oink artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don’t have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well... it didn’t really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative flame was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us ”normal” people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are ”challenged” persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn’t have been ”right”. Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you. P.S.: You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally NOT GOOD.

I agree for the most part. However, in my effort to post content, I've gotten more than a few snarky or mean comments about the quality of the content. I get it if it's not for you but just down vote. You don't need to make the person feel bad for trying to help Lemmy grow.

I stopped using upvotes/downvotes at all on Reddit. Unless you were on New, exclusively, it didn't matter how often you got on Reddit, anything you were seeing was at least fifteen hours old. Any conversation was already done. Any up/downvotes you put in wouldn't matter at all and probably just got ignored by the system. Anything you had to say would only appear to you, in reality it just dropped to the bottom of the sea, never again to be seen. Thousands had already spoken, somehow, and you were just walking through a snapshot of the past, already said and done.

For now, it's much smaller here. Sometimes I find myself upvoting a post just to let the person know that somebody actually came in here and gave a fuck about what they had to say, that they aren't talking to themselves in an empty room.

It makes sense to care a bit more, for a lot of reasons. We'll see how long that vibe can sustain itself.

It’s the same crowd and over time they will be identical. The power of moderation is the only thing that keeps nastiness in check.

Well at least we have the circlejerk going for us

I upvote for general encouragement. But I upvoted this especially to be nice to you, OP. I also gave you a lil boost.

Every platform is nice at the start, for mainly the reason you say: people who join early have an interest in the platform, so we actually try to keep it nice.

Then every successful new platform gets its own eternal september. A large influx of people who don't care about the platform at all, they just want to use it to talk to people. And of these, yes many are still nice people, but also many aren't.

You see this in all kinds of communities, not just online. If you're in a new or niche hobby, everybody there will have an interest in improving the hobby and the small community, so it will probably be very nice. When it gets mainstream (I'm looking at MTG here, but other people probably know other examples) then it starts to attract people who do nothing but complain.

Fuck you. I hate you all.

Just kidding. I like it here. Sometimes a little boring but maybe that is a good thing. I have plenty of things to do. This is a nice break and not stressful like some other sites.

Because it’s easier to moderate smaller communities and the average idiot hasn’t discovered these types of communities. Reddit on the other hand has reached mainstream status, so the average idiot is going to sign up there and say stupid stuff or be idiotic. Every platform goes through this.

Even when I argue here, it's very civil.

I think part of it is that it seems like Lemmy has older users on average than Reddit. For teenagers and young twenty years olds raised on the internet, they seem to not really know how to talk to people in a productive way, so it's often just toxic, nasty or empty. Obviously this isn't all people, but internet culture kids tend to all sound and act the same.

I had sexual relations with your mother.

Tbh, my upvote policy didn't really change when I moved to Lemmy.

Something has to be dangerously bad for me to downvote it.

I upvote anything that seems interesting or agreeable to me.

Have the upboot because I think you're handsome and cool.

It's great that this newfangled platform isn't filled with hate, but that's just because not that many people know about it yet. Give it time to grow, and the hostility will be more apparent. It's the sad reality.

But for the time being, I absolutely love this place.

You're a cool OP. Have an upwardpointingarrow, sir or madam

Yup here's an upvote.

I think a lot of us are into free software and Linux. Something about open free software social media platform is right up my alley.

Almost all of my posts here get upvoted. On reddit they mostly got ignored.

I downvoted your post and laughed, but then I took it back. Sorry

I just jumped from reddit and hope this is true. I can't stand the toxicity there anymore.

I've started seeing the Reddit creep of petty Actually Guys arguing pointlessly to someone about the most dumbest shit and trying to be all high and mighty for it, like any of the discourse matters.

That was one of the best part of leaving Reddit; not having some insecure someone try to one up and fight you for saying, "Haha! Rabbits are cool!"

You dickhead

Come here and give me a hug

The best part about Lemmy/Kbin etc now are that downvotes aren’t hidden, rightfully so. Just because a set of people don’t agree with you doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the same visibility as somebody that is more agreeable to a set of people.

Niceness… will change and evolve over time as more and more people join. :-)

2 small theories as to why this could be:

1. Down vote count is shown. On reddit, a down vote, unless it put total karma from a comment into the negative, was imperceptible. I felt less bad about abusing the functionality and downvoting opinions I disagreed with

2. Lemmy is a lot smaller than Reddit. Whereas on Reddit I might see a low-effort post and go "get this garbage off my feed" on Lemmy I'm like "YEAH! Way to populate my feed!"

I think reason for that is the community is still very small. I think as the fediverse will add more users it will attract advertisers, which will attract people who want to make money & game the system

Honestly the issue isn't Reddit, it's just people. Most people are decent to great, with a smaller group of bad to horrible. With more people on Reddit the pool of bad to horrible is bigger, and they tend to be the loudest of the bunch.

Cram it, meatbag!

It feels like I'm talking to real humans. Not some ultra sensitive sissy all the time. It's just so much less mentally taxing

When people are rude to me here, which I admit is rarer than on Reddit, I block them a lot faster. Maybe that sort of goes against what you're saying because it means I'm less tolerant here than I was on Reddit, but I am determined to make Lemmy a more pleasant experience for myself.