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.
Welcome to 10’ish years ago, OP.
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.
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?
Don’t forget the same low effort pun threads cropping up over and over. Or someone writes a pretty decent joke and the replies immediately have at least one person repeating it in a worse form. It’s not as bad as the contrarianism for its own sake or the aggressive strawmanning, but goddam. So much about discourse on Reddit had been exhausting for fucking years.
It certainly became degrading after a while. I have had some amazing conversations on Reddit, but as time went on they became more and more sparse.
I haven’t thought back on Reddit much until lately with all the bullshit that’s been happening and man, being in this space reminds me of why I enjoyed Reddit in the first place.
I can relate in so many instances on Reddit where I recognized something and would explain it, but people would argue against (like you said) or my comment would get overlooked entirely as it wouldn’t create enough buzz.
I think the fediverse is just the soft reset that the internet needed.
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
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.
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
I joined when it was starting to go to shit and by the end of it, it was complete shit
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.
I think there is only one affective way to deal with this. Shit stirrers are looking for negative engagement. Downvotes are engagement, they show them people are reading their tripe and are “triggered”. Correcting/arguing same thing. On lemmy I have zero tolerance for bigotry, both sidesism, just asking questions, etc. Immediately blocked. If everyone just refused to engage and blocked they would move on without the attention they so crave. It honestly does wonders for mental health not dealing with people being intentionally provocative.
For anyone who would like to be all " Yea but freeze peach, discourse across the aisle, safe space, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Id be happy for you to stick your head up so I can ignore and block you. See above.
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.
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.
See what I mean? ^^^
Insanity
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.
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.
You’re absolutely correct. From where I sit, I wasn’t put on this earth to educate settlers and those who sound like them who should know better by now with the entirety of the Library of Alexandria at their fingertips. There’s other people with less skin in the game than me who can stick their necks out and catch those rounds when they come. I’ve seen no definitive proof that ‘the other side of the aisle’ even sees me and mine as human, across about a hundred sixty years; so why take that chance anymore in a climate that slides closer and closer to civil war?
I agree with you and I feel like I should have taken the time to discuss the post before I removed it. Misinformation is against the sitewide rules so I jumped on it, but you’re right. It was a lost opportunity to educate someone.
I think that hearing alternative views isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but humoring insane takes is. I feel like there’s a difference.
I was very block-happy for half a year or so, anyone who was unnecessarily rude or aggressive (or participated in pun comment chains…) was immediately gone. Sadly you could only block 1000 accounts and you didn’t get your blocks back if an account was banned/deleted. With the entire list full I could never go and delete the old ones because 9 times out of 10 the page would take too long to load and crash, then if I did make it in the only way to tell if an account still existed was to open it in a private tab. Ignoring with RES was better and hid posts/comments completely instead of still showing them with “blocked user” replacing the username, but it didn’t carry over to mobile. Hopefully the system will work better here.
Hopefully so. I feel that our time and attention are the most precious things we have and happiness largely depends on being careful who and what we give our time and attention.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Sadly it seems to aways happen to sites that get too big.
This is because people are people. Some of us are “good”, some of us are "bad, most of us are in between. But anyplace that people congregate is going to see at least some of the bad.
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.
Tbf lemmy just went through a huge wave of fuck spez posts not too long ago. And still is ongoing to some degree
Unfortunately Lemmy is not immune to this behavior. I made a comment about what I think of the current general political situation in the U.S. and some loon flew off the handle, throwing around the standard anti Fox tropes and name calling
Some people just can’t help themselves. Especially when it comes to politics and the like. They are incapable of having a discussion and all they do is attack and name call. Their identity is wrapped up in their political views and they can’t think for themselves. They come from every side and are everywhere.
Its justice when villains like spez and trump get their daily dose of hate.Hate only deserve to bad people.
“Hate is worse though. It’s poison that corrodes it’s container: more damaging to the one who hates than the one hated”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Not “normative”. Normie.
