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.
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.
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.
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.
What kind of account linking did you have in mind?
Not OP, but the ability to transfer my subscriptions to another instance without headache would be enough.
That’s the only major pain point in switching instances.
Yes. This is a big potential problem. If you invest a lot of time building up a profile and gaining trust and social cred, you should be able to migrate your profile over to another instance if there are issues
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.
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.
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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.
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 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?
See what I mean? ^^^
Insanity
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.
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.
There’s jerks everywhere. Just block them.
All the quality data is gone… now it’s just hostile trolls… good riddance…
And bots! Lots and lots of bots!
You should check out the Apollo for Reddit sub. I had to unsubscribe from it lol.
That’s why I used third party apps and RES. When I left, I had filtered hundreds possibly thousands of subreddits
Same here. And the official app sucks so much I just can’t stand it.
I still have to run a code to change all my comments to “deleted because f u/spez” and erase my posts…
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)
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r/gamingcirclejerk sounds like a unlikely place to find mods who are open to opinions. I’m at the point where I’ve conditioned myself not to comment on big subreddits because if I know not enough people will side with me about something it’s pointless to say it. That I feel like a lot of people sense in intellectual debates. They think you’re all on camera and this is for the front page of a newspaper or something and you have to have full time editors proof reading it. It never was meant to be like that though, and it creates an information suppressed community.
But if it’s on r/all, shouldn’t that be an expectation to have a differing view point expressed on a controversial topic?
Also, the mods didn’t ban me from the sun, the admins account banned me completely from the entire site.
“Banned by reddit”
Not
“Banned by moderator”
Except for egregious issues (endless spamming, posting onlyfans links, and just totally hateful posts all the time) there should almost never be a total and complete permanent ban.
Someone’s first offense should be a 24 hr ban. Basically a cooling-off period. No big deal. Go outside for a bit. If you get banned again, maybe it is then 48 hrs. And there should be some stipulations where the same mod can’t ban you again (to keep them from abusing the rules). And then it goes up from there by a day with every new ban. The whole permanent ban thing needs to go away except for extreme cases.
I have no idea how Lemmy works, but I really hope they are open to a system like this.
I know a streamer who also got banned for a personal message he sent to a fan. He had the word bastard in it but it was in jest. On his own subreddit… He talked to the fan on a stream and he even denied reporting him, which means Reddit watches your messages and you can be banned for a week for saying “bad words”. Reddit is dead lol.
What a shithole
I’ve conditioned myself not to comment on big subreddits…
Doesn’t that defy the whole point of having free expression?? Having to always walk on eggshells is total bullshit. If you get downvoted, that’s one thing, I am more than fine with taking the hit if others don’t agree with my comment, but getting banned for something that is simply an alternative viewpoint is nonsense. And I obviously get why banning people is needed sometimes (spam, totally hateful comments, sexual links, etc), but bans should be for a limited time (like say a 24 HR ban) so as not to force a user to needlessly create a new account every other week because of some out of control mod.
Yep, I was talking more about downvote hivemind and getting hidden/shadow banned. Not the same conversation I guess… But it is a symptom of the behaviour reddit has turned into. I remember I used to not feel so judged online when I was in highschool for expression, but Reddit now adays is an angry place to be in sometimes.
I find it difficult to take your complaints seriously when you - by your own admission - were posting anti-trans dog whistles.
Nobody is obliged to host your shitty views - even on Lemmy.
This is the problem.
I’m not anti-trans. Be whoever you want to be, I don’t care.
But people like you, online, think any sort of questioning about what spaces non trans women (oh god why do I have to even qualify that. They’re women ffs) deserve to have is somehow transphobic.
Women have been terrorized by men trying to invade their space for generations. What are their rights?
Yup, that’s the video. 3 years ago and almost 1M views and people still don’t really take the threat of “bad actors” seriously enough.
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
Was a “fuck cars” user? They can be pretty ignorant and unreasonable sometimes.
Maybe you should’ve just biked that 100 miles. Lol
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.
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
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 :)
Bro you have to try fire emblem and onimusha tactics
I wish I could be hyped over BG3, or anything in the CRPG fantasy genre; but everyone’s got the same basic, boring ‘core four’ races, the same core rulebook classes, and I’m the kind of tabletopper who was always ass-deep in the splatbooks looking for the more interesting, not-dime-a-dozen races and classes. Like, where’s BG3’s elemental planetouched? Where’s the beastfolk? Why are there eleven varieties of elf here?
Idk, shit just depresses me because there’s not a fantasy setting for me to really immerse in to get away from all my friend groups chattering positively about FFXVI.
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.
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… 😅
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
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?
Relying on etiquette is a recipe for failure. You just end up with eternal September or worse.
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.
I meant more in regards to the naming, not the rules themselves ^^"
Lemmalities?
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.
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.
Yeah misunderstandings like this are the ones that people forget generate outrage and perceived hate.
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The hate is starting to spill over to Lemmy. I just had to block someone because they decided to start insulting me. I am not going to tolerate that behavior on Lemmy. I barely tolerated it on Reddit.
it’s the same people, it’s gonna be the same site.
the voting system ensures your going to see what makes people most emotional, and the people you interact with are going to be the most emotionally moved.
I just hope Lemmy can drop the fake pretentious “rational, emotionless” facade
I get that, but I was tolerant to an extent of insults on Reddit. I’m done with that. If you can’t talk to me like you would if we were in the same room, I’m not going to talk to you. And most people don’t insult strangers when they’re in the same room with them because they’re not stupid enough to encourage a physical altercation that could result from it. But behind Internet anonymity, they get away with it. Fuck that, I’m not putting up with it. You insult me (not as a joke, obviously) and you get blocked.
Sounds like a pretty fair etiquette to me
Sending love, fellow human. :)
Thank you, kind person and the same back! :)
