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.
Unfortunately that hasn’t been unique to Reddit. Outrage, hate, and conspiracies generate clicks and engagement on platforms. Recent events within the last decade gave rise to a lot of coordinated hate campaigns. User created subreddits were a double edge sword for this in both being able to filter out these groups but also giving them their own echo chambers to congregate and embolden one another. The transition from liberal freedom of speech to absolutionist right to hatred made social media companies millions simultaneously in accepting money to promote controversial topics and harvesting the resulting outrage on their platforms. Reddit and their staff effectively became one of many internet war profiteers giving all sides bases of operations.
To end on a semi-positive note, with the rise of federated services, instances may still give these extremists places to seethe but they can at least be ‘sanctioned’ or defederated from the rest of the larger fediverse very easily.
This was also part of the strategy of foreign influence in western politics. Britain, France, and The United States got hit by this, hard. Driving anxiety pushes people to the political extremes and prevents actual political process from happening. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a degree to which outrage is warranted. The economy has yet to fully recover from 2007 and looks to be taking another dip now, police violence, a broken binary political system in America, you name it. There are all sorts of stuff to be frustrated with. But Russia and China feed that. Reinforce it. Encourage us all to hate each other
You used to be able to tell who the bots were, but now we have political movements espousing the same thing the bots are because they are both feeding off the same source.
What really broke hope for me is the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, before the vaccines or effective treatment, n95 masks were the best protection. This should not be a controversial statement, just one of fact. A former Republican candidate for Governor of Connecticut, helped to get free masks distributed to every community in the state. His economic policies were way too conservative for me to consider him as a candidate, but he stepped up to help when it counted, so points to him. Unfortunately, after the worst of the pandemic, he ran again and while he never officially endorsed the anti-maskers, but he didn't denounce them either, and went to rallies cosponsored by them. He knew what the right thing to do in 2020 was, but when he ran in 2022, the outrage machine was in full effect with countless "unmask our kids" groups and instead of doing what he knew was right, he did what was easy and convenient. He still lost, because the Democratic governor of the state who had led the state through the pandemic had done a good job. Propaganda turned something that was common sense into a political statement.
A simple and easy thing that would help prevent needless deaths became a political football kicked around by the right. Much of the anti-vaccine rhetoric (some now being spewed by a "Democratic" candidate 🤦♂) originated in Russia and was meant to keep the population there from seeking western vaccines when the Russian vaccine was shown to be inferior. But because everything gets pushed into political framing, public health and science became team red vs team blue instead of humans united against a virus that kills. When we get a really nasty virus (COVID isn't that deadly compared to an avian flue), the world is screwed because so much anti-science has been pushed in order to generate engagement in media and social media.
It was around the 2016 election that things started to change. Before that, there was still a mentality of open and genuine discourse in most subs. But after the election that started to die, people started realizing bots and alt-righters had no interest in open discourse, on the contrary they would see to abuse such channels as a platform for their hate, and would use such hate and anger in an attempt to shape and suppress discussions. This forced the community to become far more jaded and less open, realizing just how vulnerable the community was to radicalization and firehouse misinformation.
On the early internet, we all had this vision that free access to information would free everyone, that unlimited information could only do good. Most of those people now understand how nieve we were, unlimited information means unlimited disinformation, and that organizations would always see to weaponize information the way they weaponize everything else. We are in a different internet age, now.
As a non US person I was reading your post and thinking how right you are and how international politics also got into the same problem of increased anger. And than got to:
But Russia and China feed that. Reinforce it. Encourage us all to hate each other
As proof it is really working even on aware people. It is a big problem seeing thing just from one perspective, that “feeding” even if intentional actually started from west. Just look at the movies, Russians and Chinese are always bad guys, for decades. What do you think they will think about west if they grow up looking how west is seeing them? How will they react?
How will someone in Afghanistan support west when someone from west destroyed their country and killed family and friends, maybe with good reason and couldn’t be done differently, but I am talking about individuals here.
I don’t think there is ultimate truth, but we can try and see events from a bit wider perspective.
The longer you think about that scenario the more fucked up it gets. Google argues that it’s a problem of scale, which is outrageously BS when you consider Google of all companies let their own account system be easily botted, and don’t use any of the ludicrous number analytical tools purpose built for detecting spam trends (3rd parties use them all the time to spot political spam).
Their mention of signal:noise struck a chord for me.
Ever since this gelled for me a few years ago, I have been on a miserable (and obviously impossible) mission to find places to see and discuss useful, HUMAN information with other useful HUMAN people on the internet.
Blocking whole forums on topics I really enjoy is mechanically easier than curating the contributors to those conversations on an individual basis. It hurts my heart to do it, but it is impossible to keep the noise out without wholly ignoring signal that I enjoy.
Even people I used to really enjoy talking to have had to be ignored. They stopped caring about nuance, and got intellectually lazier. They switched from reading to skimming, and the well thought out comments got shorter, and more hostile.
This is undoubtedly the snake eating it's own tail.
They filter their inputs so heavily, and have done battle with bad faith for so long that their outputs resemble the very thing they were trying to avoid.
Unsure what my point is other than commiseration with OP. It's utterly disheartening to realize that the technology that was created to connect us all has been co-opted and subverted - transforming it into a hideous monster of hate, and misery that forces us all to internally disconnect from entire parts of it.
That's not to say that it couldn't have been expected.. but I have no fucking idea how it could've been prevented.
I recently took a digital walk down memory lane as far back as 2007 and the rage machine has been in full force online since even before then. We gotta find a way to disarm it.
This is an ongoing problem with our Information Age. The fediverse already has this problem, though to a much lesser degree than reddit. Look at the structure of titles of threads on the political magazines/communities here. They are designed to make you outraged, because the sources they come from made their titles with engagement in mind and that permeates over to here. My hope is that the group of people on the fediverse, who are more interested in the future of the internet than most, will give rise to an idea that helps combat this problem.
I don’t think it’s just that. Politics has seen the trend going right for a while now, and not just the US. When there are people in power saying they’ll do dumb shit that’s even dumber than before it’s bound to get more outrages. And even putting politics aside you’re getting corporates that are getting greedier and greedier, and serious problems that have been festering without sufficient effort to solve for years like climate change showing up with the consequence (and still not enough is being done). So, in general, we as a whole haven’t been doing enough to solve existing problems while making new ones. Problems just keep on piling and that’s what we are seeing.
I agree. Many politics related posts are roughly equivalent to anything from r/Politics. It’s been really disheartening to see that it wasn’t Reddit causing the toxicity. It was the users. And they’re here now, trying to be just as toxic. The funny thing is people will read this thinking “it’s the other guys he’s talking about.” No, I’m talking about both sides. I’m referring to everyone who calls those with different political opinions “Nazis.” Reddit used to be a place to discuss ideas. Now there and here requires strict ideological homogeneity.
...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.
It wasn’t just Reddit. The entire world has become more hateful and more violently aggressive. I mean, even just wearing the wrong colored hat or having the wrong skin color is enough to get you literally killed anywhere you go. Nowadays it seems like everyone is competing in the Oppression Olympics.
just wearing the wrong colored hat or having the wrong skin color
the first thing is something what you can easily change and when wearing it, you're telling everyone who you really are, the second thing is something you are born with. It is silly comparing those two.
It’s not that silly. I’m a man. If I decide to wear a dress in public do I deserve to receive hate? Our identities and beliefs shape our actions and what we wear. It’s not so easy to draw a line between the two like that.
I was not talking about wearing a kind of clothing, but specific clothing showing your political and ideological of someone ways clothes with 1488 I will treat them like the Nazi he is.
Anyway OP said he was just wearing non MAGA red hat. So in that case I agree that was overreaction. In fact would prefer people did that so the association would disappear. I originally thought OP was taking about actual MAGA hat.
My dress communicates specific political and ideological beliefs. If I choose to open carry, that communicates specific beliefs. If I choose to wear a BLM T-shirt, that communicates beliefs.
It sounds like you’re perfectly happy to judge people by what they wear, so OP’s example is clearly apt.
Yes, if you wear BLM shirt you are telling everyone you care about racism and discrimination, if you wear Nazi shirt you telling everyone that you believe white race is superior to everyone else.
What's so hard to get? Why I can't assume your views when you are going out of your way making it obvious to everyone what your political stance is?
I was accused of being a Trump supporter and subsequently harrassed because I wore a red baseball cap, which had a baseball team logo on it, home from a baseball game that the team was playing in.
My point in mentioning both is that it such a stupid thing to get upset over (color of clothing), equally as stupid as being upset about someone else’s skin color. People that do either are clowns.
Apollo was the only way I could continue to use Reddit. Its subreddit and user and keyword filters were invaluable. The loss of Apollo meant going to a version of Reddit that was bad for my mental health, so I hung it up. I haven’t been back since June 12th — the longest I’ve gone without logging in to Reddit since I joined 11 years ago — and don’t plan to go back.
Yes I did the same. I had a list of over 50 keywords to filter out starting with Trump. Did the same with my rss news reader. I haven't seen anything mentioning him in years.
I'm seeing the same hateful content here in the politics subs, but that's to be expected. People really get heated over politics. I've been blocking more and more subs for this reason. I only really need to be subbed to hobby subs anyway
To be fair, people are having their right to exist being questioned, and some people just became second class citizens by law recently. It's kind of a big deal.
Christ just keep it in your echo chamber please. No one is having their “right to exist questioned.” It’s always insane hyperbole with you people. Maybe you should call it “genocide” next? That’s a popular term for the terminally online.
You think the recent lbtq+ ruling at the supreme court level, the trans laws refusing healthcare to trans people, roe v Wade reversal, Florida's removing trans minors from their families by force are not people having their right to exist questioned, then you are probably a republican. So that makes sense.
Being able to click the activity on a post and see who's boosting it is very helpful. When someone is saying really diabolical, you can block not just them but all the others that like 'em. It's some work, but definitely feels a bit empowering.
I’m not sure if it falls under the category of “hate,” but there are some mean comments I’ve noticed popping up on here. For instance, someone posting a question on “no stupid questions” and getting a mean response. In my opinion, it’s unavoidable on the internet. Mean comments are to be expected. However, I had the thought to respond and defend the original poster. But I was too afraid to do so in FEAR of getting the same mean response from someone else.
I think it comes from lurking on Reddit and seeing how people responded to each other. But I think we have a responsibility here in this platform to call out hate and even mean comments.
Yes, this is the thing. When community is small you can curate it well, I think tildes.net and beehaw.org are doing good job at it, but as there is a mass migration then also the less than stellar users move too and it is getting harder to keep the community friendly.
12 years as well. It’s a different place, and lemmy feels a lot like old Reddit. I will miss the endless stream of content but this is healthier, and your voice isn’t drowned out like it was in the later years of Reddit. There was a massive shift in 2016. So much angrier.
Even on Lemmy, I’ve been seeing a bit of this. Like on the front page, for a day or two, there was that meme from LemmyShitpost about US incarceration rates titled “Happy Freedom Day… I Guess”
Come on, do people genuinely want to shit on a country on the day of it’s independence that millions of people look forward to celebrating? Can they not keep their negativity and hate to themselves? Any comment that called out this circlejerk was just downvoted and was told that “Lemmy isn’t the platform for you” and that Lemmy is only for “People that live in reality”. Verbatim.
It’s just saddening to see, and it reminds me why I just curate my subscription feed and never look at the general front page. Like yes, a collective outrage at the Reddit admin is what drove the spike in users as of late, but it feels different when you’re shitting on other people and the things they’re passionate about, for something undeserved.
The most “engaging” content rises to the top…which is generally the most outrage-provoking. Not to excuse or dismiss the people who were doing terrible things, or those who experienced pain or hardship; but those were the MOST PROVOCATIVE things anyone could find. MILLIONS of other people nearby experienced calmness, joy, etc. but that is just left out of consciousness.
I think it’s universal across the internet. I’ve seen the comments on ig get more an more aggressive too. I think we’re all subconsciously anticipating conflict
While I agree, I feel like this is not a reddit problem and more a problem of the internet as a whole. The global population of english speakers on the internet has started trending to being madder and angrier over the past decade. I wonder if we make it out of this economic downturn and peoples lives become easier if it would start to get better? Fat chance of that happening though with Climate change going unaddressed and continuing to hurt the poorest of us.
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.
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.
It’s the removal of a down vote count. It’s the same problem across all social media. People spew absolute outrageous comments… Get 3 likes or votes, and they think it’s a positive score.
The reality is 10k down votes and 3 likes from bots.
It’s really changed the internet landscape and ultimately society. We hide dissent.
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