I don’t know what it is, but people there seem to be turning nastier and nastier. Like for instance, I posted some technical question on an electronics subreddit earlier, and something in my post - not sure what - landed me a -15 score, and people replying that if I didn’t like it I could fuck off. All I said was that some component wasn’t placed in a terribly convenient location in the new design, and the people who posted angry and rude comments weren’t even the designers. I mean what the actual fuck…
It seems a lot of subreddits I used to enjoy participating in are now full of people in a really antagonistic mood, and I often hesitate to post anything there now because I know it has a 50% change of turning nasty. And so instead, whenever possible, I post in the equivalent Lemmy community because even though they have a hundred times fewer users, it’s a much less frustrating experience.
I come interact on Reddit or Lemmy to have a good time, not to pick up a fight and get insulted by passive-aggressive internet lusers with frayed nerves.
I’m not unconvinced that R×ddit isn’t completely overtaken by shills & people who have swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.
Have a critique? See a flaw? Something that bugs you about a product? YOU’RE WRONG, IDIOT!!! EVERYONE LOVES [thing] SO YOU ARE STUPID FOR CRITICIZING IT!!!
Quiets down the detractors. They don’t have a voice.
Quiets down anti-capitalists, politically-motivated folk, logic-minded… you know. People who cause trouble for those with something to sell you.
The reverse happens on Lemmy too in some community. Like for example the fairly popular!aboringdystopia@lemmy.world: it’s a radical anti-capitalist, probably pro-communist and most assuredly pro-anarchist community, which is generally fine by me. But if you go in there to express a reasonable opinion that isn’t “burn all corporations” or “kill all capitalists” and expect to have a reasonable discussion, that’s just not gonna happen. You’ll just get modded down. It’s not so much a place to discuss anything than a big anti-capitalist circle jerk.
So you can find places where people are angry and nasty like on Reddit here, but usually you kind of know in which community you’ll find the anger. On Reddit, the anger is everywhere and for no reason, including on subbreddits that aren’t the least bit controversial. And even if you don’t criticize a product or diss a company or its products, most Redditors are ready to jump at you because… well, they seem to feel the need to be aggressive.
I’m fairly convinced the nature of the platform turns them like that: Reddit is subtly aggressive too and I’m convinced it rubs off on its users.
A lot of Lemmy markets itself as a highly free-speech platform. Which is fine… but I’ve been around the internet enough to know that sites with anonymous free speech attract all kinds of folk who may not have the best of intentions.
Lemmy is far from some kind of online utopia. Make no mistakes about that!
Lemmy is far from perfect, and I’m 100% certain it’s going to become completely terrible as soon as a critical mass of the morons currently haunting Reddit transition over. But for the moment, it’s refreshing, the signal/noise ratio is still high, and it doesn’t feel like you’re being exploited for your data and advertised to all the time.
To be fair, that description of being piled on by angry people who are looking for an excuse to be angry could easily describe a lot of threads I've been in on the Fediverse lately. Seems like there's an unfortunate mood going around right now.
Some of the cool people moved to Lemmy, but it still seems like a fairly small fraction. I think a larger number have just completely given up on social media and are no longer participating.
Attitude is the main reason I started looking for reddit alternatives over four years ago, not ui or privacy or moderation or the api stuff (which came a lot later). I have a lot of theories for why it happened (that aren’t just the capitalism and astrotufing circlejerk) but they’re hard to back with substantial evidence
I’ve been hearing society is bad and getting worse from a variety of people since I was born in the height of the Cold War, and I’ve come to believe it’s only a perception. It’s no better or worse than it’s ever been: it’s just that as people get older and the standards of their youth change, they feel alienated by a world that is increasinbly not theirs anymore.
I’m old enough to be a grumpy old man but I keep reminding myself that this isn’t my world anymore either. And if I’m honest, I don’t see how the world of today is significantly worse than when I was a kid and we were all preparing for nuclear armageddon any minute now. And I always remind myself how my grandparents and my parents constantly told me to stop listening to “degenerate n*ger music” and quit wasting my time with those damn computer things and pursue more “manly” endeavors. I don’t want to become bitter like they were because I have no real reason to: the world of today really hasn’t done anything to me, it just feels weird.
However, I will say this: social media brings the worst out of people. It’s like reality TV of the 80’s and Usenet, but turbocharged. I think the utter social mediocrity that is social media contributes a lot to the perception that society is worse: it isn’t, it’s just that the worst of it is a lot more visible and more vocal.
I suspect many people who generally want to be kind and helpful have given up trying there. I know I certainly have. Look how active I am here, that’s a lot genuine engagement they’ve lost and I know I’m not the only one.
Reddit is terrible as a website. But it still has the communities that developed there over years, and they are an invaluable resource. They are definitely positioning themselves to pull a Digg, but until the Reddit-killer comes along with a mass exodus (and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna be Lemmy unfortunately) access to those communities will entail dealing with reddit.
Digg (a link aggregator very much like Reddit) started pulling similar shit and everyone left for the alternative, which was Reddit at the time.
After everybody left Digg, Reddit became the default and after about 15 years they are doing the same things that drove people away from Digg
And even now that they kind of have a form of* threads they’re still hard to access and not indexable. Whenever someone recommends discord as a reddit alternative I wonder if they really understand why we’re seeking an alternative in the first place. I have no interest in setting up camp somewhere I’ll have to abandon in a few years again.
lot of subreddit doesn’t move yet. Move a communities is not easy. If the community is your business (game, company specific, or fandom, movie, …) moving is lot more difficult.
Each month, I’m again reassured of my choice to just avoid Reddit. The only problem is it holds so many answers to problems. Always shows up in search results, and it’s usually the best answer out there.
I am still hopeful that the Fediverse will take over that role soon. I mostly lurked on Reddit, but I’ve pushed myself to make the kind of posts and comments here that I liked on Reddit.
I’m not a poster but I comment here way more than I did on Reddit. Some of that is because it feels a little “safer” to comment here. Hopefully that lasts, though I fear it won’t.
So it’s not just me. I only used it for the occasional search result and those times so this didn’t fait affect me but this can only be good for Lemmy.
Yep, it seems Boost died today. I don’t frequent reddit these days, but my wife is still a mod there and she was using Boost for moderation right up until last night.
On the odd occasion that I do go to my old subs, they’re filled with repost bots and low value comments.
RedReader is pretty bad… I don’t think I have the motivation to force myself to get used to how different it is even just for browsing really… Hard to imagine having to use it to moderate anything (if it were even possible… I don’t think it is though).
Yea, it will be a hard problem to solve. There’s no good solutions right now. Hopefully someone with the creativity and skill will come up with something.
It becomes a pain vs gain problem. How hard do you make it, also balancing the inconvenience.
You could easily force users to enter a one time code via email every 3 months (or more or less time). This would be hard to automate and if you changed it up even more so.
Bots aren’t the problem. You mistake the tool for its operator by cursing a bot. If I had a specific purpose for a bot, I’d use one. The difference between my using a bot and a clickfarmer using a bot is that I wouldn’t treat Lemmy instances as a resource to be exploited (and ultimately ruined). Such an attitude would inform the how and the what behind my bot use.
The problem as always comes back to bad incentives, bad design and bad behaviour.
Yea, but AI bots do it at an unprecedented scale. The price of generating bullshit is practically 0. There is already cheap AI content every where and people are already getting tired of it. It’s true that human actors has done something similar for a long time, but now AI will make the process so easy that AI junk will be everywhere. Look at Google search results, it’s already filled with blogspam generated by AI. Blogspam was a problem before, but now it’s insufferable. Cheap midjourney “art” is showing up in search results even when you search for real classic artist, you get these ugly AI copies. Generative AI is the ultimate bullshit and spam machine.
That might work for now, but AI bots can easily create more content faster than human moderators can go through. We will need mechanisms to prove humanness.
I identify with your problem as we are similarly, human people. Have you thought as I have in the past, “Why not let AI solve this problem for me?” I have used BotRemoverAI.co for this issue and the results have been highly acceptable!
I can see the measures we currently take for ads (large user-maintained subscribable blocklists) being part of the solution. That, and some form of privacy-respecting POW scheme.
Lemmy is just as political as reddit, just on the opposite spectrum. But yeah at least the memes stay in the meme communities, which I’ve all blocked. So that is nice, at the very least.
That’s the eternal cycle of social media. It starts nice and then it get flooded by MAGA extremists until it becomes a cesspool of hate and disinformation.
See: Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, TikTok is well on that path as well.
I’m not a regular there any more, but I feel like there’s more “natural” spam posts nowadays. They’re not natural enough that they haven’t prompted me to check the account’s post history (all mention product x, of course).
Not mostly, but people are buying Truth Social shares not because they think it’s a sound financial decision, but because they support the company. It’s meme stock logic.
I mean, an IPO is a pretty reasonable point to allow insiders to trade. You've just published a huge amount of information about the company, so the insider advantage is at a relative low. It's somewhat common for blackout periods to exist prior to things like earnings announcements, but after the announcement is usually when trading is permitted.
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