I have been on reddit for just about 12 years now. Something I’ve noticed over time is just how hateful the place has become. A complete outrage machine. Every single sub became filled with it. I’ve filtered so many subreddits over the last few years, it’s insane. I don’t know enough about this place to be sure, but I do hope it doesn’t become the same type of echo chamber of anger.
I received the most incredibly chiding, condescending and critical reply on Lemmy the other day, for saying one sentence which was just adding some info to a reply chain. “Oh, that’s also called this”. I was told “pedantic much??” and then the person ranted for a paragraph about how I was a terrible person seeking to spread discontent, and various other bizarre insulting bullshit. Best part: they mod 6-7 subs on some instance. So… Lemmy isn’t a magic formula, unfortunately. The same people are excited to make it just as bad as reddit ever has been.
This is because people are people. Some of us are “good”, some of us are "bad, most of us are in between. But anyplace that people congregate is going to see at least some of the bad.
Sadly it seems to aways happen to sites that get too big.
I remember a while back when the first comment was always someone debunking the clickbait article headline with a good source and succinct summary. Redditors famously never read the article, but the comments were often better than the article.
Now, you have to scroll down half the page to find any original thought. You see dozens of people spouting nonsense or even defending nonsense because they…don’t want to be wrong?
One example: an image from the 50s displaying a child with their hand caught in a fire pull with a caption explaining that the device would trap the kid at the spot to deter pranksters.
The device was indeed designed to deter pranksters, and it would attach to the user’s wrist, but it would come free. So you would know the kid who did it because they have a thing stuck on their hand.
I recognized the device and had a video demonstrating its proper, safe function. People were still arguing with me.
Why would anyone want to put any creative/intellectual energy into a place like that?
It certainly became degrading after a while. I have had some amazing conversations on Reddit, but as time went on they became more and more sparse.
I haven’t thought back on Reddit much until lately with all the bullshit that’s been happening and man, being in this space reminds me of why I enjoyed Reddit in the first place.
I can relate in so many instances on Reddit where I recognized something and would explain it, but people would argue against (like you said) or my comment would get overlooked entirely as it wouldn’t create enough buzz.
I think the fediverse is just the soft reset that the internet needed.
Don’t forget the same low effort pun threads cropping up over and over. Or someone writes a pretty decent joke and the replies immediately have at least one person repeating it in a worse form. It’s not as bad as the contrarianism for its own sake or the aggressive strawmanning, but goddam. So much about discourse on Reddit had been exhausting for fucking years.
About 10 years here. That’s why I had Apollo. I filtered out all that shit. Everything you could imagine. Hundreds of things hidden.
Eventually I had a home feed of crafts, patientgamers, every cat sub you can imagine, bread, and a bunch of other peaceful things.
Before that I was just so angry all the time and arguing with redditors. I won’t go back to all that.
Don’t know how one could possibly use the site without filters from apps like that or RES. it’s so chaotic.
Exactly why I refuse to participate anymore among a dozen reasons.
My partner liked specific communities there but kept getting recommended upsetting stuff (got sucked into AmITheAsshole in a bad way, etc) so I uninstalled the official app and installed Apollo instead and their mental health greatly improved. But healthy satisfied people aren’t profitable for corporations.
This is the way. Though despite all that I started to keep my Reddit browsing a secret as the average person considers a “redditor” a pretty negative thing to be.
Tbh kinda glad in that sense that the API fiasco revealed the true colors of the company and gave me a very clear reason to leave. It hadn’t felt “good” in a long time and now I know why.
the average person considers a “redditor” a pretty negative thing to be.
Redditors consider a redditor a negative thing to be. It works because no redditor believes they are one. It’s everyone else who’s a part of the gross hivemind, not me. Reddit thinks this and reddit does that, but not me. I’m different and special. Not one of them.
It’s also the case that several things can be true at once. Like, maybe you are part of the reddit mob-mentality, but on certain issues you have opinions that very much go against the grain.
I read the post the same way. In the few times Reddit has come up IRL I just ask, “Have you heard of Reddit?” Then it’s either yes or no then we move on.
No one in the real world gives a shit about being a “redditor.” Which to your point, means nothing.
Same. Years ago when I first got on Reddit I was very politically active and my subs were a ton of political, economic, societal etc subs. But I just got sick of opening up Infinity and seeing nothing but doom and gloom as far as I could scroll. I transitioned away from that over time and at the end my subs were mostly cats, some specific TV show and game (meme) subs, and some niche hobby subs.
It was so helpful to block users, especially in my local cities subreddit.
City subs were always some of the most contentious, full of trolls and hostility. My theory is it’s because rather than bringing people together purely from common interests, they gathered people purely based on geographic location.
I went to a sun for a local municipality recently. Someone made a post about something sort of silly. Responses were good natured like “uh… that’s silly” so OP was there “waiting for the next STUPID comment”. Yeah, great. I don’t really need to participate in that.
As a European, the increasing cynicism and apathy to American politics of many users has made me really bad mood, maybe I should have cured my feed better, but now it doesn’t matter anymore as lemmy is my new home.
It’s the removal of a down vote count. It’s the same problem across all social media. People spew absolute outrageous comments… Get 3 likes or votes, and they think it’s a positive score.
The reality is 10k down votes and 3 likes from bots.
It’s really changed the internet landscape and ultimately society. We hide dissent.
That’s not how Reddit works. It would show a comment score of -9997.
I was on Reddit since 2010 and it has always been a shit place. I stuck around for small subs, but Reddit at large was always a refuge for racists, misogynists, and reactionaries. I was around for the fall of violentacrez; anyone remember that disgusting creep and how Reddit gave him a stupid fucking golden Snoo for running an insane number of creepy and violent subs? Until the existence of r/jailbait became a scandal and liability, so they axed him, and the majority of users from what I could see were wailing and gnashing teeth over not being able to post sexual pictures of minors? Anyone remember the r/creepshots debacle?
Idk why y’all think there was some golden age of reddit. It was always a hellsite run by creeps and Nazi sympathizers that happened to also be an okay platform for niche forums (which, in my experience, were constantly getting trolled and harassed by the knuckle-draggers who formed the site’s primary demographic). The only thing that surprised me about the last month’s events were how many people were surprised.
I never saw this side of Reddit. I have no idea of who you are talking about either. I was there for awhile and my take was that it was an anonymous chill place to discuss things.
I learned about some things I never would have guessed and was exposed to sides of life I never would have known otherwise. There were some good times and bad. I can see an increase in aggression and bots. I do agree that taking away the down vote changes things. But I have changed too. So I don’t see it as a cause and effect. It’s just website. It’s not my singular reason for existence.
Reddit was a washed down 4chan. For those who came from a forum life in the 00’s and knew 4chan too, Reddit made sense.
That kind of content will keep happening and popping, and there will be a lot of people supporting it. Because we’ll always have teenagers eager to see fringe stuff, and social misfits that want to be seen/heard.
I think that we need to understand that Lemmy and the Fediverse can hold such things, but they aren’t at fault for that. Reddit was faulty as a corporation, but not as a platform. And because Lemmy, the Fediverse and ActivityPub are techs free to anyone, they aren’t liable for this, but the owners of the instances of these techs are.
We have already seen how this plays out, thankfully. We’ve seen a lot of instances defederating exploding-heads.com, and this is good. The same with many people saying to defederate from Meta’s new social network.
I think we need to understand that, profoundly, human beings are very heterogeneous. We’ll always have nice and bad people. And that communities reflect that. Having everything in one instance (Reddit) is not a very good solution. Having them in different instances and each one with their own ethos, makes more sense as a society. Especially because we behave like that. I usually don’t mingle with douchdbags.
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They did this to themselves.
Part of it was corporate greed and incompetence by the Reddit team where they were trying to drum up numbers for their upcoming IPO. For a social media platform, member numbers is pretty much the only thing that matters, so connected with the other 2 issues, it probably was encouraged for them to ban users knowing full well that most of them would just create a new account - which of course that would let them say they have even more registered accounts when they would go to advertisers.
Part of it was various misinformation campaigns run by political parties and foreign governments to spread hate and instability. The “Smarter Everyday” YouTube channel specifically did a video about Reddit and “bad actors” a few years back on the phenomenon which I recommend everyone watch, but not sure how linking to videos is accepted on Lemmy, so I’ll let you find it. The FBI keeps on warning us about “bad actors” trying to spread lies and it is only going to get more intense as we get close to the upcoming US elections.
Part of it was an echo chamber where no alternative views could be expressed without mods getting all uppity and banning users. Mods have ultimate say and there were no checks-and-balances to what mods could do. No real way to question a ban and no real way to question a mod. And the lack of alternative views is especially egregious because Reddit was obviously a very left leaning site. They were doing the exact same thing that they would make fun of right-wing media would do, namely create this echo chamber where only like-minded people were really allowed to speak. Now to be clear, I lean left on the vast majority of issues, but for fucks sakes, some of the nonsense that was accepted on Reddit would make even me cringe.
In the end, Reddit got too big for it’s own good because most of these problems could be solved on a much smaller site, but Reddit got so big with so much money at stake and then it’s size made it such a large target for people. It became just a toxic mess.
(sorry for the diatribe, I was going to write 3 bullet points and leave it at that, and then just kept on expanding it more and more)
Yup, that’s the video. 3 years ago and almost 1M views and people still don’t really take the threat of “bad actors” seriously enough.
Removed by mod
I find it difficult to take your complaints seriously when you - by your own admission - were posting anti-trans dog whistles.
Nobody is obliged to host your shitty views - even on Lemmy.
This is the problem.
I’m not anti-trans. Be whoever you want to be, I don’t care.
But people like you, online, think any sort of questioning about what spaces non trans women (oh god why do I have to even qualify that. They’re women ffs) deserve to have is somehow transphobic.
Women have been terrorized by men trying to invade their space for generations. What are their rights?
r/gamingcirclejerk sounds like a unlikely place to find mods who are open to opinions. I’m at the point where I’ve conditioned myself not to comment on big subreddits because if I know not enough people will side with me about something it’s pointless to say it. That I feel like a lot of people sense in intellectual debates. They think you’re all on camera and this is for the front page of a newspaper or something and you have to have full time editors proof reading it. It never was meant to be like that though, and it creates an information suppressed community.
I’ve conditioned myself not to comment on big subreddits…
Doesn’t that defy the whole point of having free expression?? Having to always walk on eggshells is total bullshit. If you get downvoted, that’s one thing, I am more than fine with taking the hit if others don’t agree with my comment, but getting banned for something that is simply an alternative viewpoint is nonsense. And I obviously get why banning people is needed sometimes (spam, totally hateful comments, sexual links, etc), but bans should be for a limited time (like say a 24 HR ban) so as not to force a user to needlessly create a new account every other week because of some out of control mod.
Yep, I was talking more about downvote hivemind and getting hidden/shadow banned. Not the same conversation I guess… But it is a symptom of the behaviour reddit has turned into. I remember I used to not feel so judged online when I was in highschool for expression, but Reddit now adays is an angry place to be in sometimes.
But if it’s on r/all, shouldn’t that be an expectation to have a differing view point expressed on a controversial topic?
Also, the mods didn’t ban me from the sun, the admins account banned me completely from the entire site.
“Banned by reddit”
Not
“Banned by moderator”
I know a streamer who also got banned for a personal message he sent to a fan. He had the word bastard in it but it was in jest. On his own subreddit… He talked to the fan on a stream and he even denied reporting him, which means Reddit watches your messages and you can be banned for a week for saying “bad words”. Reddit is dead lol.
What a shithole
Except for egregious issues (endless spamming, posting onlyfans links, and just totally hateful posts all the time) there should almost never be a total and complete permanent ban.
Someone’s first offense should be a 24 hr ban. Basically a cooling-off period. No big deal. Go outside for a bit. If you get banned again, maybe it is then 48 hrs. And there should be some stipulations where the same mod can’t ban you again (to keep them from abusing the rules). And then it goes up from there by a day with every new ban. The whole permanent ban thing needs to go away except for extreme cases.
I have no idea how Lemmy works, but I really hope they are open to a system like this.
A repeating pattern I noticed on Reddit: Whenever a video of a woman hitting a man was posted (which is of course wrong, not condoning violence at all!), the comments were always filled with hundreds of guys happily proclaiming their readiness to knock tf out a woman given the right circumstances. Just waiting for an excuse to get violent.
I see you’ve been to /r/ActualPublicFreakouts (I don’t think what you say here necessarily is true, but if you go to the one I mentioned or any other violent sub, like /r/FightPorn, the comments will be dominated by the kind of people who likes the type of stuff the sub is made for.)
Also, I want to add something: Beware of people fetishizing the fediverse as a cure-all to all or most of Big Tech and social media’s problems. Remember, the technology is rarely ever the problem, the humans are. So long as humans remain really clever apes, you are not going to solve hate speech, spam, or outrage.
In fact, it seems like outrage about Reddit is currently driving the majority of engagement on Lemmy so far, even though it’s been three weeks since the API protests. Just look at all of the most upvoted posts here. Discussions about how bad Reddit is currently and how Lemmy/fediverse will save everything and make everything good. On social media, moderation is still extremely important, and from the snark and trolling I’ve seen here and there, I hope the mod team doesn’t fall behind and I hope that the Lemmy developers create better mod tools, because if Lemmy does blow up, expect bots to show up. Expect propaganda. Expect automated trolling. All this shit hit Reddit as it got more popular.
Addressing the “it’s humans, not the tech”.
The tech established and designs an interaction and presentation system humans interact with.
Human behavior may be the problem, but it’s embedded in and influenced by the environment and systematic influences.
A simple voting without differentiation will always lead to people voting as agree rather than contribution worth or quality. It’s designed as a mingled mixed concern.
Exactly. I honestly don’t care about reddit anymore. It’s frustrating opening my feed here and having a large portion of the posts and comments complain about reddit. Like who cares? I think we can all agree that we don’t like the route reddit too which is why we’re here. Complaining about it more isn’t going to do anything.
Eh , its probably just temporary. People just had apps they’ve used for 10 years yanked away and it’s jaring how it all went down. Of course people are going to want to talk about it.
I think a lot of it is just Schadenfreude. A lot of people sunk a lot of time into Reddit and felt betrayed when this happened. The fact that they (and I’m including myself in this) migrated here to begin with was a huge change/step for them. So it’s only natural that many aren’t going to be able to simply just “walk away” and never think or talk about it again. It’s still fresh in people’s minds and the people who it affected the most need that feeling of vindication whenever Reddit does something to screw itself up even further.
All of that to say, I get where you’re coming from, but it’s not going to be forever. Once everyone has had a chance to blow off their steam we will see things start to normalize again. At least until Reddit finally collapses at which point that will probably be the talk of most social media platforms for some time.
Agreed, most of the content I see is whining about either reddit or Twitter, it’s boring af
At least it means I fuck around less at work
Based
Thanks. Somehow people are basking in the glow of potentially having found a solution to centralized social media. But here’s the thing: someone has to pay for it, and someone has to moderate it.
Many Mastodon instances couldn’t handle the increased load of sign-ups when Twitter crashed or malfunctioned. I see a lot of smaller Lemmy instances begging for money already even though those places aren’t host to as much content as Lemmy.world does.
We need to be aware of the limitations of the fediverse too. No, it will not solve hate on the Internet because the people who self-select to be here are somehow virtuous and above the “average Redditor”. You still need money and good moderation.
If i had to guess then maybe a bunch of instances could solve that with ads and selling big data (info of the users). Not that we would whant that but its the most sthealty way to do that.
Lol people have had debates about that on Mastodon for ages. The consensus is that most people are unwilling to donate anything or see ads on the instances they use. They expect hosts to keep the instance up out of the goodness of their own hearts, and many instances have shut down over the years because hosting was no longer economically sustainable for their owners even as those owners begged for donations.
Most users (especially those who just consume free software/fediverse services and contribute little else) want something to be both free and good. That means subsidized by the owner because they believe in the cause and good because of the lack of monetization.
I completely agree with you. I was in a conversation with someone in the comments section when they asked me to explain a group and their motto… When I did they started calling me with names like I was a lowly person or I was in the wrong for supporting them when I never did. When I called them out for not reading my entire commnet and just blindly hating on me they got angry and reported me to Reddit authorities. I don’t know what the authorities saw in the comment that they permanently suspended my account. Even after emailing them and saying I never said anything wrong or abusive they still didn’t listen. At that point I had enough and just deleted my account
Unfortunately that hasn’t been unique to Reddit. Outrage, hate, and conspiracies generate clicks and engagement on platforms. Recent events within the last decade gave rise to a lot of coordinated hate campaigns. User created subreddits were a double edge sword for this in both being able to filter out these groups but also giving them their own echo chambers to congregate and embolden one another. The transition from liberal freedom of speech to absolutionist right to hatred made social media companies millions simultaneously in accepting money to promote controversial topics and harvesting the resulting outrage on their platforms. Reddit and their staff effectively became one of many internet war profiteers giving all sides bases of operations.
To end on a semi-positive note, with the rise of federated services, instances may still give these extremists places to seethe but they can at least be ‘sanctioned’ or defederated from the rest of the larger fediverse very easily.
This was also part of the strategy of foreign influence in western politics. Britain, France, and The United States got hit by this, hard. Driving anxiety pushes people to the political extremes and prevents actual political process from happening. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a degree to which outrage is warranted. The economy has yet to fully recover from 2007 and looks to be taking another dip now, police violence, a broken binary political system in America, you name it. There are all sorts of stuff to be frustrated with. But Russia and China feed that. Reinforce it. Encourage us all to hate each other
You used to be able to tell who the bots were, but now we have political movements espousing the same thing the bots are because they are both feeding off the same source.
What really broke hope for me is the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, before the vaccines or effective treatment, n95 masks were the best protection. This should not be a controversial statement, just one of fact. A former Republican candidate for Governor of Connecticut, helped to get free masks distributed to every community in the state. His economic policies were way too conservative for me to consider him as a candidate, but he stepped up to help when it counted, so points to him. Unfortunately, after the worst of the pandemic, he ran again and while he never officially endorsed the anti-maskers, but he didn’t denounce them either, and went to rallies cosponsored by them. He knew what the right thing to do in 2020 was, but when he ran in 2022, the outrage machine was in full effect with countless “unmask our kids” groups and instead of doing what he knew was right, he did what was easy and convenient. He still lost, because the Democratic governor of the state who had led the state through the pandemic had done a good job. Propaganda turned something that was common sense into a political statement.
A simple and easy thing that would help prevent needless deaths became a political football kicked around by the right. Much of the anti-vaccine rhetoric (some now being spewed by a “Democratic” candidate 🤦♂) originated in Russia and was meant to keep the population there from seeking western vaccines when the Russian vaccine was shown to be inferior. But because everything gets pushed into political framing, public health and science became team red vs team blue instead of humans united against a virus that kills. When we get a really nasty virus (COVID isn’t that deadly compared to an avian flue), the world is screwed because so much anti-science has been pushed in order to generate engagement in media and social media.
It was around the 2016 election that things started to change. Before that, there was still a mentality of open and genuine discourse in most subs. But after the election that started to die, people started realizing bots and alt-righters had no interest in open discourse, on the contrary they would see to abuse such channels as a platform for their hate, and would use such hate and anger in an attempt to shape and suppress discussions. This forced the community to become far more jaded and less open, realizing just how vulnerable the community was to radicalization and firehouse misinformation.
On the early internet, we all had this vision that free access to information would free everyone, that unlimited information could only do good. Most of those people now understand how nieve we were, unlimited information means unlimited disinformation, and that organizations would always see to weaponize information the way they weaponize everything else. We are in a different internet age, now.
Outrage breeds engagement. Same with Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, MySpace, AOL,Netscape…
Anger is an extremely effective way to spread an idea.
Posts which incite emotion in you make you engage - upvote, comment and share. CGP Grey (a redditor himself) made a great video about this a while ago.
We can only hope Lemmy users are more self-aware, and choose to engage with things they enjoy more than things they hate. But given human psychology, it’s unlikely…
If Lemmy stays just niche enough to keep the hoardes of angry internet users away, I think we might just have a goldmine.
Reddit didn’t always use to be such a cesspool of hate. I think as things grow and attract the masses, they attract the type of people that are only on the internet to be driven by their emotions. The up/downvote system solidifies that too.
My thinking is that you can have a campfire with 20 people around it and still have meaningful conversations. Put 1000 around that same campfire and shit will go sideways.
The up/downvote system solidifies that too.
I keep saying this even as former reddit users keep wanting the same damn karma system here :( this isn’t reddit and I don’t want it to be. I hope lemmy’s friendlier culture survives the influx.
I think the old forums had it right and I hope we can see that persist here. Don’t need karma or algorithms to surface content, just mid-size/smaller communities and good moderation.
I’m mainly lemmy.world right now and have a few federated subscriptions, but I imagine at some point I’ll branch out and spend more time on the local feed of some other instance because I’ll be chasing that mid-size population.
I wonder if the increase of porn will affect this. From past experiences I got the impression the people and/or the way they communicate changes when it becomes a platform to search for fapping material. Either because it attracts a different type of person or because it changes interaction between users.
I’ve been on Reddit going on 15 years now and it’s absolutely nothing like what was a decade ago. This is what happens when millions of people invade a site, mods become control freaks and the executives don’t care about anything other than dollar signs.
Yeah, I honestly missed all those “novelty” accounts that had gimmicks to the posts that were actually enjoyable. Spotting specific users in the comments and all that. Nowadays all the ones you spot in the comments are “oh that’s a bot”.
At first, the bots were kind of cute but then they began overrunning the whole site.
I completely agree with you, I was there for 10 years. The place definitely became hateful, the users changed, the culture changed. The site just feels horrid now unless you’re in some super niche sub.
There’s always a few subs that get shoved un your face which are straight up the most racist shitholes ever. Lately, I got served a lot of /r/2westerneurope4u and it is absolutely disgusting literal /pol/tier
