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?
You can’t. It’s driven broadly by human stupidity, which has been exploited by the rich to make us hate each other over nothing.
This is of course by design so the dissatisfaction people have with society/life/etc gets attributed to each other, instead of the actual source.
The problem is, you can’t make stupid people think.
I would warn that you can see different results across language barriers. Some games actually have much nicer communities in other languages.
It shows you there are different circumstances leading to the vein of toxicity, but the causes might be much larger than a moderation team could tackle.