Reddit slowly became filled with hate
Reddit slowly became filled with hate
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.
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.
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.
Damn, it didn't always used to be like this. In the early 2010s, Reddit used to be a great conversation starter.
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.
Am I the only one who never looked at a general feed on Apollo? I would open the app which was set to open to a particular sub and then I would navigate back to the list of favorite subs and pick which one to check in on. I would prefer an app that shows me that list of favorite communities at launch but haven’t found it yet.
Definitely not. I would peruse Home for just a little bit, but mostly I’d swipe over and go to specific subs. The past 3 months I only logged in to upload chapters of a story. Reddit had become pretty stale for me.
I feel like most of the comments were from people who were doing Internet as a lifestyle.i mean, I wouldn't know a better way to get depressed and bitter...
Yep. I was more loyal to Apollo than to Reddit. I paid for Apollo premium but would not do that for Reddit. Also I hated the UX on Reddit’s website old or new. Now my issue with Lemmy and Kbin is to wait for an app that matches Apollo.
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.
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.
As a non US person I was reading your post and thinking how right you are and how international politics also got into the same problem of increased anger. And than got to:
But Russia and China feed that. Reinforce it. Encourage us all to hate each other
As proof it is really working even on aware people. It is a big problem seeing thing just from one perspective, that "feeding" even if intentional actually started from west. Just look at the movies, Russians and Chinese are always bad guys, for decades. What do you think they will think about west if they grow up looking how west is seeing them? How will they react?
How will someone in Afghanistan support west when someone from west destroyed their country and killed family and friends, maybe with good reason and couldn't be done differently, but I am talking about individuals here.
I don't think there is ultimate truth, but we can try and see events from a bit wider perspective.
Unfortunately that hasn’t been unique to Reddit. Outrage, hate, and conspiracies generate clicks and engagement on platforms.
Yesterday I stumbled upon this post. Really sad.
Their mention of signal:noise struck a chord for me.
Ever since this gelled for me a few years ago, I have been on a miserable (and obviously impossible) mission to find places to see and discuss useful, HUMAN information with other useful HUMAN people on the internet.
Blocking whole forums on topics I really enjoy is mechanically easier than curating the contributors to those conversations on an individual basis. It hurts my heart to do it, but it is impossible to keep the noise out without wholly ignoring signal that I enjoy.
Even people I used to really enjoy talking to have had to be ignored. They stopped caring about nuance, and got intellectually lazier. They switched from reading to skimming, and the well thought out comments got shorter, and more hostile.
This is undoubtedly the snake eating it's own tail.
They filter their inputs so heavily, and have done battle with bad faith for so long that their outputs resemble the very thing they were trying to avoid.
Unsure what my point is other than commiseration with OP. It's utterly disheartening to realize that the technology that was created to connect us all has been co-opted and subverted - transforming it into a hideous monster of hate, and misery that forces us all to internally disconnect from entire parts of it.
That's not to say that it couldn't have been expected.. but I have no fucking idea how it could've been prevented.
The longer you think about that scenario the more fucked up it gets. Google argues that it's a problem of scale, which is outrageously BS when you consider Google of all companies let their own account system be easily botted, and don't use any of the ludicrous number analytical tools purpose built for detecting spam trends (3rd parties use them all the time to spot political spam).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
I wrote this a couple of days ago here on my own feelings that reddit just turned all of us into such awful people and how much I hated everything about it but still can't stay away from being a redditor.
It's really long, I think it's one of the best and worst things I've ever written. Give it a read if you'd like, I would really appreciate it.
https://lemmy.world/post/858027
I think my point is that we are not redditors anymore, we don't belong there, and there is no place for hate or self-hate here.
And after being here, I'm honestly pretty indifferent towards reddit now.
we are not redditors anymore, we don’t belong there
This is something that became very clear to me when I made the mistake of going back for a visit yesterday and found a lot of that "fear, derision, doubt, apathy" in one of the last places I expected to find it. It was heartbreaking but did make it clear that we (or, at least, I) really do not belong there anymore.
It is time to help build something new.
The sense of despair over at reddit is something that once you see it, you can never unsee it. And it just permeates everything there.
In this crappy hyperconsumerist materialistic world where everything could be fake, we should understand that there are just somethings that's beyond all help, but we should all still try our best to help and save what we can.
Or put it more succulently:
"Life is plastic, it's fantastic."
I really enjoyed your post, it really encapsulated my feelings toward the site and then ultimately, how I locked myself into it.
One question though, are you really on the take from Big Barbie?
All jokes aside, thanks for your post.
Well, most jokes aren't as funny if you explain them, right?
"Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.
the concept of fediverse give a lot more ways to block hate, and there isn't any algorithm to spread hate for engagement
This is key. I'm hoping that this platform can break the toxic social media cycle because it's funded by the people who use it.
I remain concerned about bots. I don't think there's a silver bullet to that problem, and I understand that a lot of astroturfing involves making people angry. Eyeballs = money is only one factor that leads to this toxicity.
I can only hope that because the platform doesn't have a financial interest beyond its users that it will truly grow to serve its users.
Yeah... "Engagement." That's what it is.
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.
I blame the 24 hour news cycle and end of the Fairness Doctrine. It has allowed editorializing and "spinning" of news stories as opposed to being factual and objective.
People give the fairness doctrine far too much credit, it only applied to your local over the air news channels. Not cable, and it wouldn't have applied to the internet.
This is correct. The idea is that bandwidth is public property and as such holding a license to use part of it entails public obligations. This is why radio stations are required to repeat their identification a certain number of times per hour, for example.
Cable networks are privately owned and therefore were never subject to the same kinds of regulation.
I'm not sure that's true. You have to remember that when the fairness doctrine was still in force everyone got all of their information from broadcast. Even when cable first came on scene and got popular in the late '70s and early '80s, it was simply to improve how well you got your broadcast stations, and maybe give you a chance to have a few additional channels. The idea of basic cable took years before it took off.
The Fairness Doctrine only ever existed due to the way the broadcast airwaves were divvied up. It had no bearing on cable's CNN, etc.
Not sure about the Fairness Doctrine's role, but it saddens me that people don't seem to be nearly as aware of the damaging effects of the news cycle anymore. People seem even less aware that getting your news online, or through social media, doesn't protect you from it either.
If you'll excuse the ramble: Years ago when the Tea Party (arguably one of the first big far-right movements in the open) started gaining traction in the US, they held a rally in DC. People were apalled, but to my knowledge there weren't issues where anti-Tea Party counter protesters were attacking Tea Party members with bike locks
or concrete mix in milkshake cups in an attempt to injure Tea Party members. (During the time of antifa and Trump supporter protests/rallies there was shit going around online about how to mix quick dry cement mix with fast food milkshakes to make a slurry that would cause severe chemical burns on people. Not sure if that was real or not.)EDIT: I've been informed the concrete milkshake thing wasn't real.What did happen was that Comedy Central, who (we know now) had already been planning on holding a joke rally in DC to build hype for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's shows even befoe the Tea Party mess, started pushing online into the groups suggesting a separate counter rally.
The Rally to restore sanity (or to keep fear alive, as Colbert was advertising it satirically) started gaining a ton of traction online. At the least, it was an opportunity for fans of Stewart and Colbert's shows to come out and have a laugh. At best it was a way to show that the Tea Party didn't have power and was just a bunch of hot air.
I went to the Comedy Central rally. They made it a fum time with guests like Mythbusters, music, and speeches from Colbert (in character) and Stewart. What impacted me the most was the sheer amount of people. If you have a chance check out the bird's eye photos of the two rallies. The rally to restore sanity easily outnumbered the Tea Party four times over. Thousands upon thousands of people there with joke picket signs, having a fun time.
Stewart's closing speech has stuck with me, even now over a decade later. It pains me that it seems that even John Stewart himself seems to have forgotten it, or re-evaluated his stance.
I'll share some the parts I find particularly important:
I can’t control what people think this was, I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear.
They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times.
And we can have animus and not be enemies.
But unfortunately one our main tools in delineating the two… broke.
The country’s 24 hour politico, pundit, perpetual panic “conflictinator” did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder.
The press could hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus illuminating issues here-to-fore unseen.
Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden unexpected dangerous flaming ants epidemic.
If we amplify everything we hear nothing.
There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats but those titles that must be earned…you must have the resume.
Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult not only to those people but to racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate.
Just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe not more.
[...]
the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false.
It is us through a fun house mirror and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead and an ass shaped like a month old pumpkin and one eyeball.
So why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin assed forehead, eyeball monster?
If the picture of us were true of course our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable.
Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our constitution, or racists and homophobes who see no ones humanity but their own?
We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is, on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing by hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done.
The truth is we do; we work together to get things done every damn day.
Most American don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives.
Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do.
Often something they do not want to do. But they do it. Impossible things that are only made possible through the little reasonable compromises we all make.
[Image of a packed highway on screen]
Look, look on the screen this is where we are, this is who we are: these cars.
That’s a school teacher probably thinks his taxes are too high, he’s going to work.
There’s another car, a woman with two small kids can’t really think about anything else right now.
There’s another car swinging, I don’t even know if you can see it.
The lady’s in the NRA and loves Oprah. There’s another car an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah.
Another car is a Latino carpenter. Another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist Obstetrician. Mormon JZ fan.
But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong beliefs and principles they hold dear.
Often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers.
And yet these millions of cars must some how find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile long 30 foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river.
Carved by people by the way that I’m sure had their differences.
And they do it, concession by concession, you go then I’ll go, you go then I’ll go, you go then I’ll go.
Oh my god is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? ahh oh that’s ok you go, then I’ll go.
And sure, at some point there’ll be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute; but that individual is rare and he is scorned and not hired as an analyst.
Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkenss and back into the light we have to work together.
And the truth is there will always be darkness.
And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the Promised Land, sometimes it’s just New Jersey.
Time and time again I see people with good intentions effectively saying that "making concessions for those hideous reprehensibles is tacitly supporting them" by allowing a group to have a space to speak, hell sometimes by even allowing a group to exist.
Yes, yes, the tolerance of intolerance paradox and all that. That's valid and important. My point is that far too often I see people jump the gun.
Go ahead and deplatform people calling for your death. Don't deplatform them because they don't think your lifestyle choices aren't valid/okay, and they are discussing that in a separate space from you.
Make an attempt to ignore them, live and let live, or an honest attempt at discourse in good faith as if you are dealing with other human beings.
Again, not if they are actively calling for the end of your life, but far too often I see people stretch that with "they support ideas that align with people who would deny me my existence" as if there's some sort of idealogical purity standard we all need to adhere to lest we let the wrong opinions in and taint ourselves by the vaguest of "idealogical association".
Should we be concerned that the majority of painters are nazis because Hitler liked to paint? Of course fucking not.
Most people are not purely the opinions they espouse online. Often there's deep layers of nuance left unsaid, personal lived experiences causing them to draw different conclusions from what you think.
The world falls apart if everyone out in real life caused things to come to a screeching halt to shout someone down and call for deplatforming or shunning every time they encountered an opinion they found reprehensible.
I'm guess just tired of the extremism absolutely fucking everywhere. From people with offensice opinions and especially from well meaning people who are motivated by their feelings of righteousness to try and protect themselves and others. People insisting that if you don't literally use every single opportunity you have to speak out against the wrong of the day, then you are actively supporting that wrong.
Just got a general day to day mood of "Sir, this is a Wendy's"
Rally to restore sanity was a blast. The whole reddit team (myself included, at the time) were there, and Raldi wrote a neat little QR code network feature, where you could scan other redditor's QR codes, and after it was done we released a graph showing the network effects, who met whom at the rally, or the minor rallies across the country.
That was back when reddit was actually fun. I can't imagine, nor would I attend, any modern rally event with the purpose of meeting redditors
The internet itself is far more to blame than either of the factors you cite. Why? Because it destroyed journalism's traditional revenue model and in so doing murdered local news. Only the biggest legacy news organizations can still make ends meet through a subscription base, so the result is that everyone else is left churning out bullshit clickbait articles in a competition for views.
"Information wants to be free," was the mantra of the early internet, and that's nice as far as it goes, but good journalism is expensive and when we gut the revenue stream of an entire industry, we shouldn't be surprised that what's left kind of sucks.
Yeah, I agree 100%. I remember Reddit from 12 years ago, where discussions were lively, but it was mostly trolls who would get downvoted. Now it’s just an ‘I disagree’ button. Sharing and discussing different opinions can be fun, even if they are different as long they are not hatefull. We shouldn’t hate on diverse opinions, that’s how we can learn from each other, in my opinion.
Hopefully, Lemmy will remain somewhat smaller so that we can have more quality discussions and not turn into an outrage machine, with people acting like they are holier than the Pope.
Online discourse has gotten to the point that if you disagree, you’re hateful
Hate is a meaningless word now, like so many over used words in this climate
Yep, I saw a guy comment that "communism doesnt work" the other day on here and the first reply was someone calling them a "hateful bigot" and I was confused, since nothing in the first guy's comment had anything hateful in it, just a statement about communism not working.
Words like fascism and nazi have lost their meaning and people basically use them as a stand in for I don't like what you are saying
I’m hopeful Lemmy can avoid the hate/outrage/fear cycle. At the moment it feels very peaceful.
I often wondered if a need to sell advertising space and user data led to reddit pushing content that catered to anger, outrage and fear, as it drives engagement.
I often wondered if a need to sell advertising space and user data led to reddit pushing content that catered to anger, outrage and fear, as it drives engagement.
I suspect it did. There have been studies on the general phenomenon, although I don’t know of any that focused on reddit in particular.
There will always be obnoxious jerks, of course. With Lemmy, though, there’s no profit motive behind promoting them, and no algorithm that’s biased in their favor. Without a profit motive, there’s no reason to hand assholes a megaphone.
Plus, the admins basically run an employee operated co-op with eachother. They can foster and nurture the kinds of interactions they enjoy online without any need to attract more users, advertising dollars, or anything else. Their instance gets to be whatever version of the ideal online community they always imagined
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...
Post that trigger outrage are much more likely to be upvoted. Users feel good seeing their ideas reinforced especially in contrasting “us vs them” scenarios.
To be fair to reddit, it really depends on the sub. If you go on /r/fightporn or /r/crazyfuckingvideos you're going to get a certain demographic that tends to be reactionary.
Then if you go on /r/politics or /r/socialism or /r/conservative you're gonna get clickbaity echo chambers
But there are subs with great discussion on niche topics. /r/zizek or /r/credibledefense or /r/askhistorians all have very little outrage and instead good discussions and analysis.
The problem is not unique to reddit. It's a side effect of a large enough community. The focus gets broad and the issue is that posts like Twitter screenshots or memes are easier to digest. Because they are easier to digest, more people click on them and upvote. Therefore these posts will almost always reach the top before articles or other long for articles.
This over time gives incentive for posts that can a) draw the most attention with a headline and b) is fast and easy to digest
Outrage porn is exactly that. You see an image "DeSantis passed a bill to out toxic chemicals in roads!"
People don't bother to do research on what the law says m and they immediately go to the comments and make jokes or berate the GOP/DeSantis
Nuanced discussion gets pushed to the bottom and once again people will downvote whatever they feel is against the narrative constructed by the OP.
Tldr: no reddit isn't getting worse in this regard. It's a function of large online communities. This website will likely see the same effect should certain communities get large enough.
Zizek is a sexpest obsessed with comparing everything to rape and his followers are a cult of personality. This is a very strange one to include in your list of non-echo chambers, particularly as he and his audience are political partisans just like the first three you criticised.
The inclusion here seems more like snifffff ideeeology, as he would say.
I admit my inclusion is ideology- I am trying to subconsciously convert people to Stalinism. You will be the first to get sent to the gulags.
On a more serious note, it's obviously partisan but it's not click baity and it's a small community that's actively moderated. Posts are kept on topic so the focus of the sub doesn't get too broad and lead to the phenomenon in question.
For a sub that got wrecked, check out /r/chomsky
Before 2016 it was a place to post long form articles, interviews with Chomsky, nuanced discussions, etc. Afterwards it was placed on some astroturfing list and now it's just a generic center left Twitter screenshot type sub. Get similar content as /r/politics or /r/whitepeopletwitter
Which brings me endless amusement to find out when most people on the sub actually hate Chomsky's belief in freedom of speech or his opinion of the Ukraine war
Tldr: no reddit isn’t getting worse in this regard.
Post-API, reduction in good moderation might be a factor, though.
r/politics and r/conservative should be the same sub to create some balance.
Either that or force r/politics to merge with r/progressive or r/liberal or r/socialism or r/far left or something
r/politics not having a conservative voice was my biggest “wtf” when I first joined reddit
The sub name is so misleading
Ya /r/politics should be /r/centerlefttwitter
I think the idea of mixing subs is cool. There's a sub.. /r/capitalismvssocialism which I liked. Basically people from different perspectives actually discuss things.
I hate echo chambers
I remember /r/debatefascism too before it got banned. I would go on there and talk to fascists. I don't understand why they banned it. Better to have them out in the open instead of hiding in dark spaces of the internet
Strong emotions drive participation, which in a For-Profit Social Media site means more eyeballs for more time, hence more money from advertisers.
As it happens adversarial hate (i.e. two sides, pitches against each other, humans hating humans rather than just a hate for something generic like "poverty" or "light beer") is amongst the strongest and certainly one of the easiest to create.
My hope is that in the absence of a profit motivation and of popularity-score-keeping in the form of karma, the fediverse won't turn into that specific kind of swamp. That said, only time will tell.
It's about 10 years ago they slowly began to forget their own reddiquette rules, 5 years ago they had almost vanished completely, although you can still find the rules on reddit, nobody upholds them anymore.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette
Originally these rules were actually observed, not just by mods, but by users in general, and if you violated them, you were reminded.
Today most people on reddit don't even know they exist, and the site has devolved more and more.
I absolutely agree in the hope the same doesn't happen here.
Should we do something similar to reddiquette in lemmy? Lemmyquette?
Lemmy.world has taken the rules from their Mastodon, which are linked from the frontpage.
Lemmy is a more fragmented system than reddit, but so far the lemmy instances/servers I have seen have pretty good rules, with few exceptions, that have been defederated.
If lemmy gets really big, I'm guessing it will split into spheres of different rules. For now I'm happy with the rules of lemmy.world, let's just hope there will be good mods enough to uphold them.
Lemmalities?
Relying on etiquette is a recipe for failure. You just end up with eternal September or worse.
Lemmaccords? Lemmytreaty? Lemmypact? Lemmygulation? Lemmymands?
And this is the problem with "norms". It only takes a handful of sociopaths who want to be jerks to break whatever it is.
I don't consider sociopaths as norms. I think reddit turned a bit infantile along the way, children testing boundaries or trying to be edgy can be a huge nuisance.
No matter whether it's "norms" or other groups, the only force that can hold a community civil long term, is good moderation. Without it any community is most likely to devolve.
That requires volunteers who care about the community. I think most people here are helping by not being asshats.
Only if you used it in a very mainstream, surface level way. Smaller, niche subs have always been where the best communities are because they don't attract normies. None of the subreddits I used degraded in quality and I never had issues with moderation. These problems will develop in any online community that bleeds in to the mainstream social consciousness.
Just a point: don't fall into the trap of thinking that high-intelligence or whatever you think is not "normie" is less prone to all of the very same emotion-driven bullshit as all others.
No matter how intelligent you are, you can't out-smart your own subconscious because it's just as "intelligent" as the rest of you.
Only if you used it in a very mainstream, surface level way
Sure, but it's still remarkable and it does change the tenor of the overall site.
At one point a couple of years ago I peeked at /all and I'm gonna say 85% of the top posts were from subreddits that were basically themed variations of "hey look at this asshole"
That shit definitely filters into the culture, and you see it in comment threads all the time where sometimes idea of a worthwhile contribution is just tagging iamverysmart or whatever
The whole site just primed itself into getting annoyed, pissed off, or outraged about anything at the drop of a hat
As I say, that's the way all these big social media platforms go eventually. At the moment we are fortunate that Lemmy has a relatively low number of users, so a larger portion of the people who are here are genuinely interested in having a good faith discussion and engaging more with their respective communities. For this reason I'd much prefer Lemmy to grow slowly over time, rather than have a mass influx of normie redditors who are only here because their app stopped working.
It varied for me. For example I lurked on /r/watches and would watch as the group mind ripped to shreds anyone who dared showing a digital that wasn't Casio or a fashion watch. /R/PLC stayed good the whole time. I guess because we had a common enemy, everyone else in the universe.
I always felt the karma system fed the toxicity. People became more defensive and passive aggressive if someone had downvoted them, and there was a tendency for people to just mass downvote unpopular opinions instead of engage with the user in question. Personally I don't like that Lemmy has an upvote/downvote system on comments either. Any time you give people a lazy way to say "I don't like this comment" instead of actually explaining why they don't like it, the quality of the conversation begins to deteriorate.
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.
Mods slowly realized they could turn s sub into an echo chamber with no pushback. You could even say something in sub A and get banned in sub B for it.
Yeah that was crazy. There have been times where I've posted a comment in a sub and I'd get a notification that I've automatically been banned from some other sub.
There was a time where simply commenting in some subs lead other subs to automatically ban you. Even if you said in /r /somelameshit “wow, this sub sucks” another sub you never participated in at all would automatically ban your account.
The site just became so unbearable the last year or so.
Found it hard to have discussions on the bigger subs because it felt like it was just too easy for people to just swoop in and be a dick.
Once replied to a post about a student having to drive 2 hours home from college to visit. People were saying that was an insane amount to drive and that it wasn't reasonable. It was in Texas and they were just driving from Houston to Austin which really isn't insane. My college was the same amount of distance here and I drove back each weekend.
Had somebody angrily reply with how that was bullshit and I was a moron for thinking it was normal to drive like that. Also said I was what was wrong with the site (lol).
All I did was try to give my own personal experience with being in college im Texas when your university is 100 miles away and I got weirdly attacked. Like it was my fault for the size of my state lmfao
Some people on the internet live in a very detached reality... 😅
I live in canada and a 2 hour drive home from college is the norm lol. But yeah i get you thats frustrating, its like some people are just looking for a fight.
I once commented in a thread about RPGs and how i was excited for Baldurs Gate 3, and these two guys jumped on me saying how it was sad i was excited for a turnbased RPG when turnbased RPGs were a dead genre.
I pointed out pokemon is turnbased and sells gangbusters and dragon quest 11 sold 10m but I was wasting my time because they both just continued with childish insults
Some people - many people in larger cities - literally to that far to/from work on a daily basis (which IMO is kinda crazy and I'm glad the push for WFH is helping change that)
I just started baldurs hate 3 this weekend!
It feels like an actual real rpg. Which is missing from the genre these days
Love it
Those types of gatekeepers are the worst. Turn based RPGs are great games and having more should never be an issue lol.
Turn-based combat rocks though! It feels more strategic and tactical.
Shrug. I went to college out of state and it was 2 hours from home. Wasn’t a big deal to me. It’s not like I visited every weekend tho. I’d visit maybe once or twice a semester.
I am independent and like to spread my wings. My g/f at the time was 1.5 hour away and we managed to see each other several times a semester.
I guess I don’t see the big deal. Everyone deals with challenges differently I guess. To me it’s just a thing to do to get better. It’s not permanent. Just a minor hurdle.
Was a "fuck cars" user? They can be pretty ignorant and unreasonable sometimes.
Maybe you should've just biked that 100 miles. Lol
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.
People ruin everything.
Yeah, socializing would be so fun if it weren't for all those pesky people!
I'm telling myself it was terf and troll sock puppet accounts.
I'm very keenly waiting for captcha to be fixed, I hope most instances decide to make you fill out a captcha for EVERY post. That and paid instances will make a huge difference compared to Reddit. It will become way harder to spam and astroturf discussions, but I'm not sure how to handle legitimate bots.
AI can solve captcha easily, captcha only causes inconvenience for authentic users, it does nothing to prevent bots
That's provably false across many social media sites. No anti-bot solution will ever be perfect and it will always be a cat and mouse game. Captchas have a measurable effect on limiting registrations and comments from bots.
We don't say "deadbolt locks only cause inconvenience for homeowners, they do nothing to stop burglars breaking a window". We defense in depth. We use the deadbolt as one part of the security/defense plan.
Captcha is one part of the many actions and systems that would make up effective protections.
Yeah I know we have an automated service at my work that automatically solves the captcha off some government site and then scrapes some data off of it every day (it's public data). The sucess rate is near 100% I believe.
Magic happens when you only require captchas that a language model told you were inciting, hateful, or plain troll feeding. It even makes sense to make part of the score thread-global, as in "Someone already made a Hitler comparison, better throttle this thing". The worse the score, the more often claim that the user failed to solve the captcha.
Accusations of censorship will fall flat because you don't prevent anyone from posting, troll feeders won't bother posting because they don't care enough to bother, trolls get bored, trolls leave.
I think the larger a community becomes, the more likely that will happen.
12 years as well. It’s a different place, and lemmy feels a lot like old Reddit. I will miss the endless stream of content but this is healthier, and your voice isn’t drowned out like it was in the later years of Reddit. There was a massive shift in 2016. So much angrier.
11 years for me. 2016 was when I made a fresh account with only niche hobby subs. Everything else just felt like it was swimming in Russian election interference and neo-nazi on-ramping. It all just turned so quickly I thought.
The Russia thing is overstated, the hatred and fear was inborn and whipped up by shadowy domestic forces (corporate money) not shadowy foreign ones. Occasionally they collaborate too but ultimately it's all very American.
I've seen that as well. I unsubbed from subreddits like r/badcopnodonut, r/leopardsatemyface, and r/hermancainaward months before the API debacle out of outrage fatigue. It's not that I don't care about the injustice, it's just that I got tired of the negativity from the spectacle du jour.
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)
Roughly 5 years, so I joined when things already went to shit. But I still did notice a decline into utter shit.
What kinda pissed me off the most was the constant know-it-ally behavior. People were wrong but they still defended their standpoint not because they believed in it, but just out of spite. "I don't care about the truth, I only want to own the others big time!"
Reddit is a site full of bratty children and adults acting like bratty children. The worst part about that is, it is toxic and before you know it you start acting that way yourself. Me included. This whole fuckening was a wakeup call and I am glad it happened.
Yeah I was the same as you, I joined about 5 odd years ago, I needed the push to get off of Reddit, like I still enjoyed it but you say one tiny thing and you're getting abused by someone sitting on the toilet on the other side of the planet.
I ended up losing a friend because of reddit. They found it and just morphed from cheerful to always in a bad mood. Occasionally picking arguments with me from stuff they had seen on that site. At one point I just told them to stop going there, that they were becoming a nasty person because of it. She said she did but I didn't believe her.
Early march 2020 I am dealing with the lockdown and watching my entire life deathspiral. My toddler won't wear a mask, her older sister is crying because she misses her friends at school, I have no idea if I will have a job next week, and my wife is a nurse going into NYC hospital every day. All this going on and my friend sends me an email demanding I get her pictures of the corona beer public burnings going on. That she knows for a fact are happening because she read it on reddit.
I called her and I won't repeat what I said because I am highly confident it would get me in trouble with LEOs. Not a "hey I know you have small children and your wife works in a hospital in the hardest hit city in the US, are you okay? Is there anything I can do to help?". No, just an email trying to make fun of the people in my country.
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.
It wasn't just Reddit. The entire world has become more hateful and more violently aggressive. I mean, even just wearing the wrong colored hat or having the wrong skin color is enough to get you literally killed anywhere you go. Nowadays it seems like everyone is competing in the Oppression Olympics.
just wearing the wrong colored hat or having the wrong skin color
This is very much NOT unique to modern times.
The Blues vs the Greens is from ~500 CE. The Nika riots.
It was over chariot racing teams. We've been up in arms about everything since forever.
do you think the world became more hateful alone, or it's your own perception based in social media, or the social media changed the perception of a lot of people, making them hateful ?
honestly, i think the 3 poi ts are correctly, in it's own way, statistic speaking violence was diminishing, it's always was that, especialy with the evolution of society, media just made everything look worse, that maked people act more agreesively because everything was "falling apart" and media helped enhace this sentimentent too, like a snow ball, that's what i think
While I do think social media, and regular news media, paid a large part in shaping the aggressiveness of modern society, there is a lot to be said about other aspects as well.
Global economic collapse caused by multitudes of reasons, rapid decline in mental health, a massive extinction event causing all sorts of forever-lasting trauma, and more are continuing to contribute to growing aggression in society at large.
People want to tell you how much they suffer as if it somehow makes them superior or better. But at the end of the day, everyone is suffering, and that's bad. All suffering is bad. I don't go around telling people my family members died because of a past injustice, not because their stories or lives are worthless, but because saying my bad position in life is because of what happened to them is just me blaming my dead family members for my situation. Or blaming some invisible, long-dead boogeyman. Either way, the root of the problem is refusing to accept that its up to me to work to change my situation, not just give up and stop trying.
And this refusal is only amplified in echo chambers often found on social media, and news media. Now more than ever, people are seeking out confirmation bias articles, and refusing to investigate anything that doesn't agree with their opinion because they decided that one biased opinion piece means that entire site is compromised.
This is a complex problem, that quite frankly, if it was ever to be solved, would take thousands of years to unravel and undo.
It seems to me social media is making people more hateful. Anecdotal of course.
just wearing the wrong colored hat or having the wrong skin color
the first thing is something what you can easily change and when wearing it, you're telling everyone who you really are, the second thing is something you are born with. It is silly comparing those two.
I was accused of being a Trump supporter and subsequently harrassed because I wore a red baseball cap, which had a baseball team logo on it, home from a baseball game that the team was playing in.
My point in mentioning both is that it such a stupid thing to get upset over (color of clothing), equally as stupid as being upset about someone else's skin color. People that do either are clowns.
Been on Reddit since the Digg debacle (2008 ? 2009 ?).
For me, it was the non stop posting about Musk-Trump-West-Rogan-Peterson-Shapiro-Kardashian that drove me insane and limited my Reddit use to only the subreddits I followed.
So I thank Spez for his decision to ditch third-party apps because it got me out of the septic tank that Reddit has become.
I was rounding out either year 12 or 13 on my account and got banned for ban evading. I made sure to double check on the actual rules before creating another account-- all they really said was to not comment where you were banned. Okay fine.
STILL got hit, despite never interacting with the sub that banned me after banning aside from saying '...why?'
"PlEaSe ReSpEcT mOdS sAyInG tHeY dOnT wAnT tO tAlK tO yOu."
Look here, reddit-- I gladly will. But it is fucking dumb to get banned and then permabanned for asking why you were banned in the first place.
Fuck uspez
Maybe people should realise that they, too, have a life, just like Musk-Trump-West-Rogan-Peterson-Shapiro-Kardashians.
Unfortunately hate = engagement = advertising impressions = money
That's why it's important to like, and comment, and thank posters for positive posts.
I generally do appreciate the high quality of the posts here. I give it five to seven years before it degrades but then we'll have higher numbers of users and niche communities with higher quality of convo.
That's the beauty of federation: if this place degrades, we'll just go somewhere else that doesn't federated with it.
It was very polarised. I found it hard to get along with the left subs, impossible with the right subs. People are increasingly less interested in making compromises and more so in having their way or the highway. Though I doubt this is a Reddit issue alone. The world stage has been moving, fast. No doubt sped up by the numerous global crises we just had or are currently having.
While some may say that it is just an impression, it certainly is true. The cuprit is non other than the algorithm. People tend to write comments about why they disagree, and like where they agree. Liking takes less time, so you’re not as engaged as when you’re commenting. Being engaged gives them more money, so the algorithm does as it’s been told and just engages everyone so they are on the site longer to make more money. This enrages people, because everyone else is dumb and wrong and they have to tell them their opinion, which makes the algorithm happy, which leads to more disagreements. It’s a money making spiral.
Making comedy at the demise of others and this whole "equal rights, equal left" bullshit have been gaining traction on Reddit over the years. So many of the top subs are filled with rage content to satisfy the hate-boner of the incels. Lemmy is really a breath of fresh air. Let's hope it stays like this long enough to restore some of my faith in humanity.
10 year user. I agree what used to be a place for discussion, jokes, fun comment chains, devolved into rage bait and vitriol. I definitely don't miss it.
While at first I was upset at the destruction of Reddit and lamented my routine, I am now so happy it happened. We all needed a new place to reset and be human again.
Reddit used to host blatantly racist subs until fairly recently.
They still do, but they used to, too.
Reddits rules actually have an explicit exception allowing hate speech and long as it's against the correct demography. Not too distant addition.
Right? I stopped viewing anything other than a few curated subs after a while because I realised all it was doing was making me angry and upset. It can't be healthy to be exposed to that constantly.
It was always like that, is the problem.
I never did become an app Redditor, like I never used Apollo or any of that, so I was always using whatever their production interface was on browser. For a brief time they were allowing us to create filter lists for r/All so you could attempt to browse that beast looking for interesting communities without the sea of porn and hate groups, then they took that function away pretty quickly, I guess we were using it too much.
Eventually, the truth dribbled out that investors were breathing down their necks for user growth at any cost, since there was no profit. This is why bullshit like Coontown, fatpeoplehate, and just endless constellations of far-right hate speech communities were allowed to thrive and grow during the entirety of the 2010s. So long as they didn't do anything that put Reddit in legal jeopardy, Admin refused to chop off large parts of their precious user metrics.
This meant the rest of us dealing with a community where the Nazis were always in the walls, even if you were browsing subs about container gardening. Things like r/JusticeServed allowed populist hate groups to grow large and juuust barely mainstream enough that you could pretend they were something else. You were always tiptoeing around the hate groups, hoping that nobody in your container gardening sub posted something that would bring the Eye of Sauron upon you.
So, to be clear, it didn't become hateful, it's been like that for years and years. The rest of the internet was far more aware of it than I think the average habitual Redditor was, as far as they were concerned Reddit was just as toxic as 4Chan, but at least 4Chan is clever and influential, sometimes.
If you avoided r/All like the plague, and made a part-time job out of curating your experience, you could get a half-assed positive result that looked nice enough if you squint. It was true, there were some genuinely nice communities on Reddit - and they tended to be very practical in nature, like r/Excel - which didn't attract chuds. Any subreddit which gave some fool a chance to bitch about things they didn't like got big, fast, and ended up pinned to the top of All, where, again, anybody who wasn't already a logged-in user would see it, festering.
The only reason Reddit has persisted for so long is that it basically stole away the user bases that once filled all the individual forums of the internet, and came to hold them hostage. It was chill circa 2011, before the Digg migration, before they'd even rolled out subreddits, yet. It got nasty fast as the userbase grew and it started to attract average folk.
The only thing that Lemmy has going for it is that lack of commercialization. To be very clear, the Nazis are already here. They move in fast. Stormfront was one of the first big sites on the internet, period. People avoided Mastodon for a long time because the last they heard that's where the Nazis went when they started getting banned elsewhere. Whether it was true or not, the hate groups are already on the Fediverse.
The difference is that for now, we can block their communities from participating in our communities, which hopefully is enough. We couldn't do that at all on Reddit, admin just ignored thousands and thousands of reports and always had the final say on everyone's lives. Just don't go around thinking that hatefulness is something brand new, you must have been working hard to ignore it for a long time. That shit's been baked into Reddit for a decade.
Lol you are delusional of you think reddit encouraged or tolerated right-wing speech. I was permabanned for opinions that aren't even that extreme; those further to the right than me were constantly getting banned and coming back under new names and meme subs as the admins attempted to quash them.
You make it sound as if you were on the beaches at Normandy lmao chill out, you aren't a fucking soldier against fascism.
Yeah, I don't know that other guy is on. Reddit hates conservatives. Same as most of the internet, really. You had to go looking for the right, meanwhile /r/politics is a default sub.
Welcome to 10'ish years ago, OP.
I had to make sure I didn’t somehow write this in my sleep or something, it’s word-for-word exactly what I’ve been thinking for the past few years.
Many subs are solely focused on generating outrage, hate, anger, being infuriated, and just general discontent. Baiting people with strawmen of groups they dislike, obviously fake tweets/exchanges to get people riled up, etc.
Although none of this is particularly new, /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/____inAction, and other straight up racist subs were vicious to the point of some being banned years ago.
But now it’s more of a general ragebait machine that creeps onto /r/all regularly and can take over any subreddit completely without proper moderation.
That's why every sub I moderated had a hard no politics, no incivility rule in place.
You'd be amazed how much of the nastiness goes away when you just ban anyone breaking either rule. Things turn chill and friendly. The posts and comments start staying on topic, and (eventually) users start most reporting when the rules get broken instead of getting nasty themselves.
As much shit as I would get in modmail and DMs, it was worth it to be able to go into a niche sub and just have these relaxing, friendly conversations.
The outrage machine, as you brilliantly name it, is the default now. But we can change that, and we can definitely keep it out of the fediverse as it grows, as long as we're vigilant and don't fall prey to it oursleves
There were some political subs that were civil and conversely there were a lot of non-politics subs that posted ragebait all the time. I was 10 years in Reddit and through that I filtered hundreds and hundreds of subs to the point where my r/all was almost tailor-made for me, with a focus on my mental wellbeing and some of my politics allowed but even lots of political subs I agreed with filtered as to not doom my daily mood. And something curious I noticed was that in the last year or so there has been an uptick in ragebait videos specifically in video-focused subreddits that were pretty chill before. It almost felt like some people were coordinating from Discord or something to post these videos at the optimal hours and boost them with the initial upvotes and everything. One by one a lot of subs were colonized by these types of videos. Many times pushing race anxiety issues. I only noticed because every 2 o 3 weeks I had to filter another one: PublicFreakout, JusticeServed, fightporn, WinStupidPrizes, Whatcouldgowrong, dankvideos, DocumentedFights, CrazyFuckingVideos, Unexpected, NextFuckingLevel, etc.
I do understand the concept that getting angry about things doesn't do anything to change them. There is little point in spending your life furious about the injustices of the world without taking action, but I do find what you just said quite strange.
If people can't talk about these things without risking a ban, aren't you just complicit in enabling those injustices? Like if we all bury our heads in the sand and never get animated about anything then nothing ever changes for the better? Am I making sense?
Take the reddit exodus for example. I find this all to be overwhelmingly positive, and a step in the right direction. It wouldn't have happened without a core group of very pissed off people shouting from the rooftops in every available space.
I just fundamentally disagree with the approach to moderation that you described. I get it, you don't want to know about politics - your landlord does, the police do, your boss does. Ya dig?
The point is that not every sub/community is the right place to discuss these kind of things. There will always be something major going on, should every sub/community be constantly discussing these things?
For example, there's a lot going on in US politics right now the the SCOTUS decisions. It's definitely worth discussing these major things, but in the right place. A niche gaming sub would not be the appropriate place for that.
The reddit API changes were different since this would likely affect every subreddit.
What's great is that if specific instances get toxic they can get banned, but the power isn't concentrated in few hands like Reddit.
When Reddit was announcing the API changes I had a similar (but stupid) idea of using Blockchain to create something similar but that would be A) slow as fuck and B) problematic.
Lemmy is goated
I've been saying this for a couple of years.
My hope is the negative people are the ones using the main reddit app and they just stay there.
Let's keep good vibes here!
yeah the last couple of years got real bad. one of the reasons it's not so hard to let go
Since 2015-16 hostile anti-democratic governments: Russia, China, Iran, to name a few and their allied western chaos operatives: Rogan, Musk, Peterson, Trump, Stone, to name a few, have been disseminating conspiracy theories, propaganda and disinformation designed to harm and divide humanity. It has worked. This has been going on for a long while, but 2015 is when things really got rolling. We can change this trend if the will is there.
Peterson an agent of chaos? Isn't that the man that said people need to tidy their rooms?
Good lord, horseshoe theory is true, now to rebel, you need to be a conservative.
I think it's a bit unfair to throw everyone in a list with Trump. Rogan is not too bright, Musk has totally disconnected from reality, Peterson, I really liked Peterson, but this new, angry and narcissistic personality is irritating. I don't know who Stone is. But none of them is a total caricature of a well behaving human. Trump is the embodiment of every negative american stereotype: dumb, narcissistic, loud and obnoxious, without any merit or moral. Still, half of the USA elected this moron, because no one else was talking to them, or took their concerns seriously. The left and the right radicalized each other. The left have to start with getting of from the moral high ground, and start talking at least with the center, and as a reaction the right hopefully will disengage from their more extremely bigoted ideas. If the left keep up their echo chamber, and make everyone an enemy who has a different view on some things, there's gonna be a civil war. And this time one side has more guns, and nothing to lose.
A couple of things I disagree with here. All those mentioned absolutely belong in the same category as trump. Really only about 30% of eligible voters elected trump (we really need to work on voter turnout). What the wackos on the right call the radical left is so center it's painful. 80s republicans are about the equivalent of what the Dems are now. And fuck the right for trying to take away people's rights to live and pursue happiness. This is not a "both sides" issue by any stretch.
This is an ongoing problem with our Information Age. The fediverse already has this problem, though to a much lesser degree than reddit. Look at the structure of titles of threads on the political magazines/communities here. They are designed to make you outraged, because the sources they come from made their titles with engagement in mind and that permeates over to here. My hope is that the group of people on the fediverse, who are more interested in the future of the internet than most, will give rise to an idea that helps combat this problem.
I don’t think it’s just that. Politics has seen the trend going right for a while now, and not just the US. When there are people in power saying they’ll do dumb shit that’s even dumber than before it’s bound to get more outrages. And even putting politics aside you’re getting corporates that are getting greedier and greedier, and serious problems that have been festering without sufficient effort to solve for years like climate change showing up with the consequence (and still not enough is being done). So, in general, we as a whole haven’t been doing enough to solve existing problems while making new ones. Problems just keep on piling and that’s what we are seeing.
I agree. Many politics related posts are roughly equivalent to anything from r/Politics. It’s been really disheartening to see that it wasn’t Reddit causing the toxicity. It was the users. And they’re here now, trying to be just as toxic. The funny thing is people will read this thinking “it’s the other guys he’s talking about.” No, I’m talking about both sides. I’m referring to everyone who calls those with different political opinions “Nazis.” Reddit used to be a place to discuss ideas. Now there and here requires strict ideological homogeneity.
People hated it, but this is why I was on political compass memes. Both sides were taking jabs at each other in a very wholesome environment. Gosh I hate politics now and it’s because I refuse to get enraged about it. It’s funny how when I cut politics out of my life I felt so much better. And the sad thing is that I know it’s a positive outcome for a lot of people. I’ve stopped educating myself so I’ve stopped voting.
And yes it was the users. It always was and always will be. The people that have joined lemmy or kbin or mastodon are likely of a similar mindset. That makes a hivemind. It’s already happening now, and I doubt the fediverse will make anything really change.
But I’m here for the memes and just found Reddit’s practices unethical.
Well. "Back then" not everyone had that level of access to the internet. Also keeping it limited.
And yeah. It is always up to the community.
Reddit has so many people on it it behaves like society. If you're in a bad neighborhood (sub) you're going to deal with bad people.
I was also a Digg refuge so spend the last decade and a bit there the biggest gripe with what changed is everyone has the need to be contrarian and be "right" even if that's making a comment about missing a comma or trying to do some six degrees of Kevin Bacon to get to a non-existent issue in a discussion. No one can just say I don't enough about X they have to be the biggest nerd in the room at all times.
Then people just downvoted again, so they could feel "right" without anyone contributing to the discussion. So what should be a back and forth of good conversation between people who are interested in a thing becomes a black and white opinion point scoring game of imaginary internet scores.
I've noticed, over the last month or so, a lot of right wing hate subs have started making their way to the front pages in r/all and r/polular.
It’s the humiliation spez deserves after such spectacularly bad management. Good luck with the IPO, dumbass!
looks at post title
It was a Dune joke about Spez getting eye surgery. Ill accept that it's not very funny but it wasn't meant to be anymore hateful than the general sentiment around the guy.
May the effects of his LASIK eye surgery chip and shatter!
I honestly don’t know, but my inclination is that people trend that way in any space if they don’t go touch grass and have a real conversation with people
We definitely don't interact with people on the other end of the keyboard with the same level of empathy and patience that we would face to face.
So much outrage and doom. The algorithm rewarded people being more and more extreme, even about real problems.
Like, yes I lean left like reddit, but not every issue is the biggest scandal that has ever existed.
If you get swept up in that stuff, you'd think the world was about to end. And you'd frequently encounter people who think just so.
...or that da ruthless librul snowflakes are coming to take your guns away and turn your masculine christian baby boy into a girl.
Meanwhile, these very same assholes cheer when their orange dictator throws immigrants' children into cages. Their personal nightmares are just in their minds. Yet the nightmares they create are very real.
... did you legitimately just miss the point of the post you're replying to?
The habit of overblowing events into crisis is not unique to either side, and neither is either sides' reactions to those imagined crisis causing harm.
The damage from the Antifa rallies to the communities they occured in is very real too, despite your feelings on the neccessity of those rallies, whether you think the people causing damage were false flag plants, etc.
And no, I'm not going to engage you in some sort of discussion trying to determine which side is worse. I'm also not trying to say that both sides are equal either. It's just disingenuous to pretend this is localized to any specific idealogical group.
How do you think that Lemmy won't be any different as it scales and grows? I've already seen plenty of trolling and snark around here.
Lemmy has been good because the people who aren’t giant douchebags came here first. Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula here.
I recently took a digital walk down memory lane as far back as 2007 and the rage machine has been in full force online since even before then. We gotta find a way to disarm it.
It's this: https://youtu.be/tR_6dibpDfo and we are all being manipulated to not trust our institutions and to fight with each other.
With the api changes it has exploded with posts misleading everyone with gifs that happened years ago with inflammatory titles, the racism and hate is just left to fester within comment sections etc... It's really sad to see how much the platform can be damaging to everyone visiting it without moderation. It feels like the funnyjunk website now, but somehow is getting worst. Seeing an entire feed only filled with hate, misinformation, and full of bots.
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
test
Just check out /r/politics here, it’s not reddit-specific.
Seems tame here? Unless you hate women or healthcare, then I guess it could feel biased.
I definitely don’t hate either of those things, but OP describes Reddit as an “outrage machine”, and I’m just saying that we have the same thing going on here. It’s definitely not as bad yet, it’s just sad to see Lemmy fostering the same kind of outrage that Reddit has.
Redditors are migrating here, but still bringing typical “Reddit” behavior with them, dehumanizing their political adversaries in comment sections and spewing hateful rhetoric to anyone who disagrees.
Unrelated, but it's kind of weird that [email protected] is US politics even though there's nothing American about lemmy.world
Yeah in the short month-ish I've been a part of a few different lemmy instances the level of "political empathy" has taken a nose dive in the past few days IMO. I think that sadly with such a fast migration from reddit the opportunity to form a different culture here is simply drowned out.
Their algorithm is designed to stoke hatred and conflict, so they get more user retention.
Which is probably the main reason they closed their source code.
While this is true with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube I think reddit algorithm wasn't designed that way.
The three sites I mentioned don't have option to downvote (well, YouTube removed it recently) this is purposefully done so anything that is controversial will drive engagement. People like to show disapproval, since there's no downvote in case of Facebook they will likely use the laughing emoticon or write a nasty comment, in case of Twitter or YouTube they will do the same. There is activity, those posts will be promoted and engaging even more people.
In reddit you could downvote a comment or even report it to moderators. The comment it will make it go to the end of the list and even collapse it. If moderator gets involved the comment will be even removed and a nasty user possibly banned.
This actually moderates the community. I noticed that on reddit the most hateful communities actually need moderators to tip the scales in the other direction.
This is why I'm not fully convinced that beehaw.org and tildes.net made a good choice blocking downvotes, as this requires more work from the moderators and prevents community to moderate itself. Though at least tildes.net has labels, which maybe do this function.
Since they "fuzzed" their upvote and downvote algorithms, there's no way to prove reddit upvotes and downvotes are accurate at all. They can easily artificially say "this post has 10000 upvotes" in their backend, and we would never know if they did that.
I suspect reddit actually just fakes votes on some posts.
Outrage breeds engagement. Same with Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, MySpace, AOL,Netscape....
I'm new to Fediverse, just another reddit refugee, but in my short time here it's been refreshing reading through relatively balanced and thoughtful comments.
I think I'd almost forgotten what a mature online discussion looked like after years of autopilot reddit doomscrolling.
Feels weird only realising what was happening in retrospect, guess there's a learning in that for me somewhere.
I'm seeing the same hateful content here in the politics subs, but that's to be expected. People really get heated over politics. I've been blocking more and more subs for this reason. I only really need to be subbed to hobby subs anyway
To be fair, people are having their right to exist being questioned, and some people just became second class citizens by law recently. It's kind of a big deal.
I'm not sure if it falls under the category of "hate," but there are some mean comments I've noticed popping up on here. For instance, someone posting a question on "no stupid questions" and getting a mean response. In my opinion, it's unavoidable on the internet. Mean comments are to be expected. However, I had the thought to respond and defend the original poster. But I was too afraid to do so in FEAR of getting the same mean response from someone else.
I think it comes from lurking on Reddit and seeing how people responded to each other. But I think we have a responsibility here in this platform to call out hate and even mean comments.
Being able to click the activity on a post and see who's boosting it is very helpful. When someone is saying really diabolical, you can block not just them but all the others that like 'em. It's some work, but definitely feels a bit empowering.
Definitely noticed this as well. Another thing that pissed me off was the amount of repost, sometimes done by bot accounts. It became more apparent in small subreddits. Also, onlyfans models spamming most nsfw subreddit.
people forget r/imgoingtohellforthis was a thing. Hate was always on reddit. It might have been disguised as something else, but it was there. Problem is its impossible to tell what's satire and whats actually objectionable. There was a tipping point where imgoingtohellforthis switched from satire to objective racism. Reddit started its downward decline the day that sub got banned. I dont endorse what they became, but banning them proved reddit was no longer as open as they claimed.
Also r/fatpeoplehate
That's a pretty good example. I remember there was a youtube video that discussed the sub when it got banned. This was years ago so I don't remember who uploaded it. The guy discussed that (as a fat person), he didn't like that it got banned. It was really easy for him to block the sub so he would never see that kind of content. Then when it got banned those people flooded out to everywhere else. The echochamber was actually somewhat effective in containing that group of people.
And that few year period when fatpeoplehate was a big subreddit. Or when Pao did something bad as CEO and got a much more personally violent reaction than spez has received lately.
Umm... and most of the Lemmy instances are nearly as open? For example, Lemmy.ml bans:
- Criticism of China or Russia
- Discussion of the war in Ukraine
I've seen the mods over there lay a heavy hand at anyone who tries to talk about or discuss these topics.
Also, for good reasons, most of the mainstream Lemmy instances do not have any of the "rauchy" communities that Reddit has.
Umm… and most of the Lemmy instances are nearly as open? For example, Lemmy.ml bans:
Criticism of China or Russia Discussion of the war in Ukraine
Was pretty easy to prove 2 is bullshit...
https://lemmy.ml/search?q=Ukraine&type=All&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=TopAll
So I'm assuming 1 is as well
Quick edit:
Yeah, your post history makes it pretty obvious...
Complaining about "normies", calling everyone you disagree with "tankies", and complaining about how people won't date you...
Unfortunately in addition to people who choose to leave reddit, Lemmy also has the people ip banned from reddit
Wtf for real? Fucking tankies are already trying to take over this place.
What's great about Lemmy is that it isn't just one big community but a bunch of small ones that band together to share content. If a community gets too toxic there's a migration path to a new one without getting locked out of the system as a whole.
Back in the old days of the internet when a forum started to get too big they often started to get toxic. Since each forum was isolated leaving it would be pretty hard since you'd not want to lose the good with the bad. Lemmy improves in that in that you can leave for a new community but you don't get locked out of all the content from elsewhere so there's less lock in giving users more choice to find a community that works for them.
One thing that would help is account linking which would decrease lock in even more.
I dunno man. /r/fuckcars seemed pretty tame to me.
Speak for yourself.
I'm a 1992 Toyota Tercel
I don’t think it’ll happen. That’s why this will work, because the fediverse has controls for this. Say the folks over at another lemmy instance start hosting communities that are allowing hateful content, if you’re on lemmy.world you can count on the devs there to defederate that instance, and then it completely disappears from your view. It’s important to understand that you could still go directly over to the web portal for that instance and still see the content, but after they’ve been defederated, you’d have to a make an account on their server to interact with their content because all the reputable or safe instances will block them. So then it’s up to mods, like always. So if someone starts a community at lemmy.world then starts allowing hate speech in their community, I believe the devs at lemmy.world can simply nuke the whole community in one swipe, plus probably delete any accounts on lemmy.world that were engaging with the deleted community. I’m just learning so correct me if I’m wrong, but these sets of checks and balances seem to me to create an environment like a salty lake that will prevent certain things from growing, like the widespread douchebaggery that infested Reddit like a kudzu vine.
I'm brand new to Lemmy and the fediverse and not very familiar with how all this works. If I have an account here and they defederate someone else, that means it doesn't show up in the fediverse feed here? But can I still view it if I search for it explicitly?
If the owners of your instance (you're on Lemmy.world) blocks another instance, then you would have to go to the other "instance" (effectively, their actual website) to view the content. You would have to make an account at their instance to interact with the content on their site.
Alternatively, you could also make an account with a different lemmy instance (or kbin/etc.) that federates with them (but I didn't wanna complicate the above explanation too much.)
I’m not 100% sure yet. Try this https://lemmy.plasmatrap.com/post/7752
I had to start sorting by controversial to find comments of interest in many threads since most the conversation was so generic and sanctimonious. That’s a big part of why this is a digg moment for me with reddit.
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
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.
It's the politicization of the online space. Chances are it will happen here, or, perhaps worse, lemmy.world will end up filter-bubbling and everyone on the other side of the spectrum will make their own space where we both give the finger to a blank wall and pretend we're brave.
But yes, it did get worse, because it became less about life and more about the appearance of life, much like most social media.
we both give the finger to a blank wall and pretend we're brave.
Perfect imagery.
If you want to go way back, take a look at old BBSes or Usenet. The flame was commonly deployed. For many decades now people have used the internet to look at pictures of cats and also to talk trash or otherwise say horrible things. I don't think Reddit is different in any major way, except that on subs that were decently managed, many of the worst commenters were banned and the worst comments were often down voted into oblivion. It really did depend on the subreddit.
The fact that some people behave like assholes is not in itself anything indicative about a website working well or poorly. In real life some people behave like assholes some of the time too. Of course we have and should continue to take reasonable steps to deal with much of the badness, but we should never expect or aim for perfection on this front.
It is same thing on every social media platform. The reason why I deleted Facebook and Twitter because I was getting angry all the time.
I don't think it was gradual, it was an active admin corps that tried to build balance with progressive Redditors by allowing Nazi thugs free rein to brigade, troll, and spread their hate.
Yes it patently and profoundly idiotic to try and counter empathy with Aryan Christofacism.
And so we find ourselves in the Fediverse and hoping it won't go the same way again.
Sounds like you're as self-aware as Reddit is.
Can confirm, I've grown to really hate redditors over the past 13 years.
So many debate lords just looking to make arguments out of anything. They completely ignore what you say and read what they want to hear so they can argue against points they made up.
Seriously, thank you for this thread. I'm glad to hear it's not just me wondering this.
It's the day after the 4th of July in Seattle, so I thought see how many of my neighbors burned shit down by accident.
Instead I saw:
- A car driving around shooting fireworks at people.
- A young man getting stomp-mugged.
- A child in a spiderman costume getting absolutely humiliated and assaulted by his peers.
Realized I wasn't logged in and this was just first-page BS. FFS it's a total depression, rage, hate-machine.
The users of reddit in no way mirrored the real world. I consider myself an indepentant in real life, I vote based off of issues that are important to me, I get my news primarily from Reuters and the AP, but I found myself filtering out more and more subreddits as they became filled with hate.
Neutral sounding subreddits such as Politics and News became hate filled groups that attacked anyone right of the far left.
I've abstained from contributing to reddit for years due to this and hope Lemmy doesn't experience the same hate filled fall.
Even on Lemmy, I've been seeing a bit of this. Like on the front page, for a day or two, there was that meme from LemmyShitpost about US incarceration rates titled "Happy Freedom Day... I Guess"
Come on, do people genuinely want to shit on a country on the day of it's independence that millions of people look forward to celebrating? Can they not keep their negativity and hate to themselves? Any comment that called out this circlejerk was just downvoted and was told that "Lemmy isn't the platform for you" and that Lemmy is only for "People that live in reality". Verbatim.
It's just saddening to see, and it reminds me why I just curate my subscription feed and never look at the general front page. Like yes, a collective outrage at the Reddit admin is what drove the spike in users as of late, but it feels different when you're shitting on other people and the things they're passionate about, for something undeserved.
I think it's universal across the internet. I've seen the comments on ig get more an more aggressive too. I think we're all subconsciously anticipating conflict
Whoa, don't you dare to disagree with the Reddit Hivemind.
While I agree, I feel like this is not a reddit problem and more a problem of the internet as a whole. The global population of english speakers on the internet has started trending to being madder and angrier over the past decade. I wonder if we make it out of this economic downturn and peoples lives become easier if it would start to get better? Fat chance of that happening though with Climate change going unaddressed and continuing to hurt the poorest of us.
Theres a lot of people here outraged, especially against capitalism for some reason
Yes, for some reason. How can this be? /s
Welcome to the party pal
I struggle with that one, too. Like, the alternatives are better? I think there are a large amount of people who have not found financial stability, and they feel like all they can do is "fight the system".
Just because you don't understand it you don't have to belittle people for their opinions. And yes, even poor people are allowed to be heard without judging them for being poor.
I don't think this is the right place for this kind of discussion. But yeah even people with financial stability can be against the system for good reasons.
Reddit's the new facebook. You're racist uncle will be talking about it the next Thanksgiving.
To be honest, you can say the same about Twitter
It's not a great place anymore, mind you it hasn't been for some time but now it's a shit show!!
I found a lot of Reddit was around "This person bad" for whatever of a million reasons.
And, of course I got downvoted for saying so on Reddit.
I remember that I got into Formula 1 because years ago that was one of the rare subredits without hate and fighting and than in a few years it become worse than stackoverflow and 4chan combined.
The rest of it similarly, some small subs were almost ok, but general feeling was just too aggressive.
Like others said, it can easily just be algorithm that is promoting hate since it is hunting for engagement and aggressiveness generates engagement. Similar to other social networks.
To be fair, it's always been cesspool. But, the levvies are spilling their trash to all corners, now.
My work-around was to never read replies to my comments unless I had good reason to think they would be intelligent. Ultimately this meant that I only really read replies to comments made in niche subs.
Reddit is almost complete toxicity.
There's jerks everywhere. Just block them.
I don't think I've experienced that in my 13 years on Reddit, then again I'm selective with what I sub to.
I joined when it was starting to go to shit and by the end of it, it was complete shit
Same! I couldn't even go into my regular subs without seeing some idiotic political post, or have someone flip out on me.
If you're missing that feeling, find a politics sub and advocate for conservatism.
Conservatives have no platform aside from opposing and dismantling other platforms.
It should be illegal to marry your cousin, as well as anyone who is underage. It might be a good idea to abort incest babies if the mother feels the same way.
Or be anything right of center on Lemmy.ml
Reddit was only good for porn and low-effort trolling.
Who told you the internet was a safe space?
Far left are the source of the problem.
