Just realized something I *don't* miss about reddit: post anxiety
Did you ever have that feeling on reddit of "I better word my post just right, otherwise AutoMod will take it down"? Some subs had such strict auto moderating that it was a crap shoot to post something. Not so here. I know there's value in moderation, and I'm sure Lemmy/kbin/etc. will add more of it with time. But, for now, it was just nice to not be nervous when I was submitting a post here.
I didn't post a lot but I was definitely anxious about commenting because if it wasn't worded just right, someone would take it out of context and be offended by it or downvote it to hell. I remember telling someone that I loved their poems - downvoted. I corrected someone about the difference between ESAs and service dogs - cue arguments when they can just literally read the ADA (law). I apologized for getting something wrong - insults and talked down to. I also remember being told that latinx is what trans Latinos want people to use, I used it and was greatly talked down to and told I'm not a real Latino. It felt like reddit was just really hostile no matter what I did. There were many times I wrote a comment but then discarded it.
Always remember that people on any social media platform could be intoxicated and replying to stuff. You can walk on egg shells and just absolutely piss someone off whose drunk and they'll tear into you. They'll never admit they're wrong from embarrassment
My favorite part is when people would argue with your comments for things you never said. They would take an illogical leap from my actual words and get angry about it.
I didn't care about down votes I just didn't want to get involved into an argument because I used to spend a dumb amount of time and effort rebuking some replies including searching for sources and making sure I was clear and would use well thought out reasoning and arguments like in debate class... it's a waste of time. A waste of time and it just puts you in a bad mood and makes you defensive. I shouldn't have to be defensive about common sense.
I think this was worse in the bigger/more general subs. I mostly stayed in technical/science-y subs and people would correct each other without too much fuss. But then the intent was usually to actually learn things and being corrected (sometimes incorrectly, leading to a bigger discussion) was just more opportunities for everyone to learn more.
Debate bro culture is real. It has permeated every form of social media we currently have, and in time it will be here as well, if it isn't already. The best thing to do is to figure out when people are being disingenuous when engaging with you, and if they are, ignore them. Of course that's easier said than done.
You've got a bunch of nerds whose sole positive trait they ascribe to themselves is being smart, so they'll do anything to prove that - it's the only thing keeping them going. That was reddit.
The secret to commenting fearlessly is to not read your replies. Most reply-thread conversations are people aggressively talking to themselves to feel like winners. The alternative to engaging like that is to embrace the tendency to self-talk, turn a sensitive thread into an essay prompt for yourself, and don't look back, unless you really feel like getting in an argument that day.
Sometimes you miss good faith engagement that way, but if it's important to keep that, you can add another point of contact.
Or read it but if you feel it’s being too aggressive just (try to) ignore it. Don’t reply and feed into their arguments, no matter how right you may actually be.
This is what ended up happening to me. I ended up going almost an entire year without checking my inbox, instead I would only read replies by revisiting a thread and manually checking comments, and only if I was super interested in a reply or discussion. It was tiresome, and I basically ended up treating reddit as a journal for myself to gather my thoughts on a variety of subjects, to find out how I really felt. In that context, reddit succeeded, but so far, my lemmy experience has been much more social, while also being a place to sort my shit out.
Truegaming was like that: you had to make a post that fostered a discussion...but you couldn't frame it in any was as something that could possibly be asking readers a question, or imply a demand for reader input.
So, you had to write something that people would reply to and not reply to at the same time...
I've used that mechanism as a moderator intentionally.
Some subs just get a lot of low effort, low quality posts, by setting certain automated rules, you can filter out people that don't read any submission instructions. In practice those are nearly always low effort.
A simple example is "set post flair to X before clicking on submit" and if they don't do that, just autoremove the post and tell them why and to contact the mods if they disagree.
Anyone that cares will delete and resubmit correctly. Anyone that doesn't really care will move on to something else.
I never had that feeling, but funnily enough some automods objected to the text i used to overwrite my posts/comments before deleting them... The text is a Leonard Nimoy quote 🤦♂️
I remember when I was trying to post a review from a movie I'd judt watched and since I said "I just watched" in the review r/movies told me to go to another sub. On that other sub I couldn't post unless I had my title start with IJW (it was a sub exclusively for reviews after watching the movie), so i made another post with the right title but couldn't post it because I had to wait X time before making another post. Dude, after 3 deleted posts I just gave up and didn't make my review
Right now Lemmy / Kbin are still in the “blackjack and hookers” phase of building our own (better) Reddit. Even our biggest subs are 1000X smaller than their Reddit counterparts, which means that there are fundamentally different ways the community can be moderated. If the platform keeps growing at its current pace, don’t be surprised if you start to see changes to the algorithms and auto mod (such as curating your feed so you aren’t bombarded with thousands of posts per second)
I barely created posts on Reddit. Sometimes automod was a real pain in my ass, not gonna lie, but only in few specific subreddits. Although it's true that the mood here is more friendly to create posts and/or comment in them. I don't feel myself questioned, despised or attacked by others.
I also really, really like the ability to microblog at a magazine. A whole tab just for the casual, quick, less thought out posts that would make people sneer in disgust and smash the downvote button for having wasted their time on reddit. Probably with a "cool story bro" or "sir this is a wendy's" on the way past. I feel a lot freer to just engage without worry here.
Though I find I'm hesitant to use this feature on communities that aren't hosted on kbin (e.g. lemmy), knowing they'll probably just see it as a regular post and have exactly the reaction above.
I remember in some communities when I was posting where I hadn’t submitted a new post before (I commented much more than posted), going back and forth to the rules over and over again to make sure I didn’t miss something, only to have my post removed by auto mod or a regular mod anyway, for not following some rule that wasn’t in the list of rules.
I got used to not caring about downvotes on comments much, and to not caring about hostile replies, but not the new post “did I somehow violate a rule that wasn’t in the list?” anxiety. I will not miss that at all.
(To be clear, I’m not anti-moderation or anti-mod at all, this is limited to this specific situation, which happened more often than you’d think, sadly.)
Fuck the bots, I'm so glad they're gone. Reddit constantly hides your posts for no reason. Someone can post in a support subreddit, and they'll wonder why they don't get any replies for hours. Cuz reddit fucking hidden it without notifying them. Imagine how sad a suicidal person must be to see no replies when they're desperately seeking for advice.
Glad I'm not the only one noticing this! Didn't realize how much it had affected me. It took me days to dip my toes in when I came here, and I still felt that 'twitch' waiting for the automod to slap my post down, or feeling the insta-flames or downvote parade in some of the big subs.
Absolutely. I've given up trying to post before because the bots or even human mods kept deleting my posts for not having the right wording or tagging or eh9
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