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.
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.
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.
Eh , its probably just temporary. People just had apps they’ve used for 10 years yanked away and it’s jaring how it all went down. Of course people are going to want to talk about it.
I mean I’m sure it’s just temporary but it’s kind of off-putting in what is probably the biggest opportunity for more users to join Lemmy.
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.
To be fair, all ex-pats aside, the complete collapse of reddit would be almost inarguably noteworthy in and of itself, and I would expect there to be pretty extensive discussion of it no matter what.
Agreed, most of the content I see is whining about either reddit or Twitter, it’s boring af
At least it means I fuck around less at work
Based
Thanks. Somehow people are basking in the glow of potentially having found a solution to centralized social media. But here’s the thing: someone has to pay for it, and someone has to moderate it.
Many Mastodon instances couldn’t handle the increased load of sign-ups when Twitter crashed or malfunctioned. I see a lot of smaller Lemmy instances begging for money already even though those places aren’t host to as much content as Lemmy.world does.
We need to be aware of the limitations of the fediverse too. No, it will not solve hate on the Internet because the people who self-select to be here are somehow virtuous and above the “average Redditor”. You still need money and good moderation.
If i had to guess then maybe a bunch of instances could solve that with ads and selling big data (info of the users). Not that we would whant that but its the most sthealty way to do that.
Lol people have had debates about that on Mastodon for ages. The consensus is that most people are unwilling to donate anything or see ads on the instances they use. They expect hosts to keep the instance up out of the goodness of their own hearts, and many instances have shut down over the years because hosting was no longer economically sustainable for their owners even as those owners begged for donations.
Most users (especially those who just consume free software/fediverse services and contribute little else) want something to be both free and good. That means subsidized by the owner because they believe in the cause and good because of the lack of monetization.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
Lemmaccords? Lemmytreaty? Lemmypact? Lemmygulation? Lemmymands?
Lemmalities?
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 ^^"
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.
I don’t think I’ve experienced that in my 13 years on Reddit, then again I’m selective with what I sub to.
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
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
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
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That must have been an interesting time to be part of the team there! Reddit was an amazing site back in the day, and it’s a tragedy that so much good and interesting “internet firsts” that it did/enabled are being lost now with the crap.
There’s no obligation, but the lemmy/kbin github projects might get some use out of your knowledge. They’re a bit overwhelmed right now and everyone has differing ideas of how to do stuff like deal with bots, brigading, etc.
Unfortunately I missed out on the QR code thing, but I did manage to snag one of the last shirts! Colbert’s (I think it was Colbert’s letter on the back) writing team really went overboard on weaving memes into his “letter”, but that was totally in line with online culture of the time.
Not sure if that was real or not.
Uh, no. It wasn’t, so it would be better to not repeat it as if it was credible.
Thanks for keeping me honest! I’ll edit it. Unfortunately comment edits don’t seem to sync across different instances consistently yet. I should probably be more careful before posting a comment for now.
Sure, not to try to slight you, just the “concrete milkshake” thing was something spread by Andy Ngo to try to pretend he was a victim and that “Antifa” was a wild anarchic hate group out to harm people.
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.
Whoa, don’t you dare to disagree with the Reddit Hivemind.
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
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’ve heard of PageRank based solutions, what sort of ai models should we be looking at?
As simple as SpamAssassin, that is a naive Bayes classifier, to running a full-fledged LLM which is very likely complete overkill. It really doesn’t need to be particularly sophisticated as being inaccurate isn’t really a problem, the whole scheme relies on the statistical impact it has on the whole forum, not the impact it has on a single post.
PageRank really only applies to analysing links.
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.
I think the larger a community becomes, the more likely that will happen.
