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.
I have mostly good things to say about Reddit and the more I read about it, the more I realize that that’s just because I always connected to it through Boost for Reddit.
I haven’t used either but I think boost has a lemmy app. I’m pretty sure it’s made the same dev(s) but I’m not fully sure
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.
r/notliketheotherredditors
It’s also the case that several things can be true at once. Like, maybe you are part of the reddit mob-mentality, but on certain issues you have opinions that very much go against the grain.
I read the post the same way. In the few times Reddit has come up IRL I just ask, “Have you heard of Reddit?” Then it’s either yes or no then we move on.
No one in the real world gives a shit about being a “redditor.” Which to your point, means nothing.
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.
As a European, the increasing cynicism and apathy to American politics of many users has made me really bad mood, maybe I should have cured my feed better, but now it doesn’t matter anymore as lemmy is my new home.
It was so helpful to block users, especially in my local cities subreddit.
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…
Unfortunately that hasn’t been unique to Reddit. Outrage, hate, and conspiracies generate clicks and engagement on platforms. Recent events within the last decade gave rise to a lot of coordinated hate campaigns. User created subreddits were a double edge sword for this in both being able to filter out these groups but also giving them their own echo chambers to congregate and embolden one another. The transition from liberal freedom of speech to absolutionist right to hatred made social media companies millions simultaneously in accepting money to promote controversial topics and harvesting the resulting outrage on their platforms. Reddit and their staff effectively became one of many internet war profiteers giving all sides bases of operations.
To end on a semi-positive note, with the rise of federated services, instances may still give these extremists places to seethe but they can at least be ‘sanctioned’ or defederated from the rest of the larger fediverse very easily.
This was also part of the strategy of foreign influence in western politics. Britain, France, and The United States got hit by this, hard. Driving anxiety pushes people to the political extremes and prevents actual political process from happening. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a degree to which outrage is warranted. The economy has yet to fully recover from 2007 and looks to be taking another dip now, police violence, a broken binary political system in America, you name it. There are all sorts of stuff to be frustrated with. But Russia and China feed that. Reinforce it. Encourage us all to hate each other
You used to be able to tell who the bots were, but now we have political movements espousing the same thing the bots are because they are both feeding off the same source.
What really broke hope for me is the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, before the vaccines or effective treatment, n95 masks were the best protection. This should not be a controversial statement, just one of fact. A former Republican candidate for Governor of Connecticut, helped to get free masks distributed to every community in the state. His economic policies were way too conservative for me to consider him as a candidate, but he stepped up to help when it counted, so points to him. Unfortunately, after the worst of the pandemic, he ran again and while he never officially endorsed the anti-maskers, but he didn’t denounce them either, and went to rallies cosponsored by them. He knew what the right thing to do in 2020 was, but when he ran in 2022, the outrage machine was in full effect with countless “unmask our kids” groups and instead of doing what he knew was right, he did what was easy and convenient. He still lost, because the Democratic governor of the state who had led the state through the pandemic had done a good job. Propaganda turned something that was common sense into a political statement.
A simple and easy thing that would help prevent needless deaths became a political football kicked around by the right. Much of the anti-vaccine rhetoric (some now being spewed by a “Democratic” candidate 🤦♂) originated in Russia and was meant to keep the population there from seeking western vaccines when the Russian vaccine was shown to be inferior. But because everything gets pushed into political framing, public health and science became team red vs team blue instead of humans united against a virus that kills. When we get a really nasty virus (COVID isn’t that deadly compared to an avian flue), the world is screwed because so much anti-science has been pushed in order to generate engagement in media and social media.
It was around the 2016 election that things started to change. Before that, there was still a mentality of open and genuine discourse in most subs. But after the election that started to die, people started realizing bots and alt-righters had no interest in open discourse, on the contrary they would see to abuse such channels as a platform for their hate, and would use such hate and anger in an attempt to shape and suppress discussions. This forced the community to become far more jaded and less open, realizing just how vulnerable the community was to radicalization and firehouse misinformation.
On the early internet, we all had this vision that free access to information would free everyone, that unlimited information could only do good. Most of those people now understand how nieve we were, unlimited information means unlimited disinformation, and that organizations would always see to weaponize information the way they weaponize everything else. We are in a different internet age, now.
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).
I’ve never been a Twitter user, but this makes me wish I could follow Mastodon users from here
You can. This is the admin of the server where I am.
EDIT: I forgot that you’re on a Lemmy instance. My bad.
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.
A lot of those people are here too, trying to recreate that outrage machine
Hey fuck you asshole I will literally murder you and your whole family. /s
Freedom of /s.
of /s
/s
Yeah and many people are looking for the replacement communities for their subreddits, seeing the same community names in here kinda annoys and scares me. Sure reddit management sucks hard but the average user wasn’t the best either. I hope they don’t create the same weird culture that they had on reddit.
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.
That problem is not site-specific. Any website that becomes a hub for real information will be targeted by disinformation trolls. It’s how the fascists keep the ignorants chanting “both sides!”
Its either the fascists, or people trying to make money from tribalism.
Same people really
When your arms are getting cut off, it doesn’t really matter who is holding the chainsaw.
Unless you want to prevent them from doing again, anyway
But only the right wants you to be able to protect yourself.
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.
It would also benefit well with the fact that it’s open-source. I hope that one day I could also contribute to the project somehow. Hopefully OSS and decentralized social medias become the future. It’s time to stop letting billionaires make money by using our data.
Yes! Honestly, when people on the political right started throwing tantrums when Twitter blocked Trump, their “but muh town square”-rage felt like “finally they’re getting it!”, our marketplace of ideas should not be controlled by privately owned companies!
I think it’s really important to our democracies, that truly democratic means of communication be available online. Lemmy, Mastodon, the entire Fediverse is really one big toolkit to place the control over our data, our communication and thus, our political dialogue back in the hands of the users.
Sure, admins and instance hosters have a lot of power here, but way less than, for example with Big Tech.
Yeah… “Engagement.” That’s what it is.
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
This very post conflates outrage with hate. Change can start from within methinks, even though I’m not usually an individualist.
The outrage usually is outrage over perceived hate
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.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
Indeed, but during the time of the fairness doctrine cable was primarily used to watch broadcast networks, but without signal degradation. In other words, most of what people consumed on cable for the first 10-15 years of cable’s existence were broadcast network content. The doctrine could’ve been expanded to cover basic cable networks and 24/7 news instead of scrapped.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
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.)
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 Fairness Doctrine only ever existed due to the way the broadcast airwaves were divvied up. It had no bearing on cable’s CNN, etc.
Oh? I don’t know about the “fairness doctorine”.
You owe it to yourself to read the wiki article at least. It died under Reagan.
Ya about the time it became out dated and irrelevant. Doesn’t apply to the internet or cable TV.
He should have extended it as opposed to ending it. But that’s kind of the problem with him and his administration. All of the deregulation of his time is what led to today’s bullshit. He will go down as the worst president in recent history in my books.
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.
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
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.
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.
Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram…their default content (your frontpage, your personal feed, etc) show you the content their algorithms have determined will make you most engaged and remain there longer to 1. Generate more free content for them to sell, 2. command your attention so they can sell that attention to advertisers. Corporate “social” media is technically “social exploitation” and has effects that reach into the real world. The behaviors they feeds spill into our interactions in real life.
💀
So, are you saying that “reaching across the aisle” and hearing alternative views are bad things? I get avoiding hate speech and excessive negativity but is think a happy medium would be more healthy.
I think that hearing alternative views isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but humoring insane takes is. I feel like there’s a difference.
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
This person is spreading misinformation, anti-trans propaganda, and using false equivalences, all of which have been established and disseminated by known hate groups.
But was he being hateful for simply saying them? He wasn’t calling anyone hateful things, calling for anything to be banned, calling for anyone to have rights taken away. He was making meta-commentary on how discussion of this stuff or anything adjacent to it is forbidden and tend to get conversation just completely shut down.
Like this shit is some sort of high grade SCP style cognito-hazard.
I can’t see how anyone can expect to make inroads against these beliefs if they aren’t willing to engage with the people who hold them as if they’re a reasonable person with some bad takes (until they prove themselves otherwise). I think most people have just given up and just lump people who say shit like this in with the legitimately hateful, earned or not.
I get that most of us don’t have the energy for trying to talk people out of harmful beliefs and it’s easier to just cut things off at the pass to be safe, but I fear the proliferation of this sort of action is eliminating opportunities to bridge these idealogical gaps.
Surely you don’t slash the tires of every car you see with some dumbass Trump bumper sticker right? Run every NRA bumper sticker off the road? You ignore it, at most you glare and get on with your life. Maybe you make a mental note of who has those stickers to avoid them.
I fully respect the admins/mods rights to say “we aren’t having this discussion here”, your rights to speak against that sort of post and block it, etc. No one should have to interact with shit they don’t want to, or give platform to shit they don’t want to.
I just get so tired of this argument that if you say shit that bad people have said then you’re a bad person, instead of maybe just someone otherwise reasonable with some shit beliefs (until proven otherwise).
If that’s a wrong take, some sort of “hateful person in the closet” statement, then do what you need I guess. I’m just tired man.
See what I mean? ^^^
Insanity
deleted by creator
💀
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.
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.
I think the user meant “norms”, as per the following definition:
norm
something that is usual, typical, or standard. “this system has been the norm in Germany for decades”
a standard or pattern, especially of social behavior, that is typical or expected of a group.
Thanks I misunderstood.
I had completely forgotten “reddiquette” was a thing people actually followed back in the day.
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.
It has nothing to do with intelligence. With everything, you have people who are passionate and everyone else who is just there to skim off the top. The latter don’t care about degradation of the thing because their interest in it never runs deep enough for them to notice or care.
That would make “normies” the ones “who are just there to skimming off the top” and “people who are passionate” non-“normies”.
Personally I would hesitate to go as far as saying that being passionate is abnormal. Maybe not the majority but not so out there as to be abnormal.
Further, I’ve seen plenty of dumb, negative or wasteful “being passionate about things” (including in myself, though I’m trying to improve). A sports fan fanatic about his or her team is passionate but if that means they’re constantly involved in tribalistic discussions that’s not a positive contribution in any way form or shape. Similarly in my profession (software engineering) the young an passionate types tend to be the most innefective of all (kinda like me swimming before I actually was formally taught how to do it - lots of throwing water all around for little in the way of results).
All this to say that I don’t think “being passionate” is abnormal or always positive.
That would make “normies” the ones “who are just there to skimming off the top” and “people who are passionate” non-“normies”.
That is what I just said, yes.
Well, anchoring your definition of “normative” to what is in the 2020s little more than a tech marketing word targetting the young and naive, is certainly an “interesting” take on mankind.
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.
The whole site just primed itself into getting annoyed, pissed off, or outraged about anything at the drop of a hat
So… like tumblr?
checks notes
Yes.
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.
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
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)
Those types of gatekeepers are the worst. Turn based RPGs are great games and having more should never be an issue lol.
I pointed out
No use in arguing with people who want to yuck your yum.
Baldurs Gate 3 looks fantastic and I’m looking forward to giving it a go at full release :)
Turn-based combat rocks though! It feels more strategic and tactical.
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
Some people on the internet live in a very detached reality… 😅
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
