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.
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.
I was on Reddit since 2010 and it has always been a shit place. I stuck around for small subs, but Reddit at large was always a refuge for racists, misogynists, and reactionaries. I was around for the fall of violentacrez; anyone remember that disgusting creep and how Reddit gave him a stupid fucking golden Snoo for running an insane number of creepy and violent subs? Until the existence of r/jailbait became a scandal and liability, so they axed him, and the majority of users from what I could see were wailing and gnashing teeth over not being able to post sexual pictures of minors? Anyone remember the r/creepshots debacle?
Idk why y’all think there was some golden age of reddit. It was always a hellsite run by creeps and Nazi sympathizers that happened to also be an okay platform for niche forums (which, in my experience, were constantly getting trolled and harassed by the knuckle-draggers who formed the site’s primary demographic). The only thing that surprised me about the last month’s events were how many people were surprised.
I never saw this side of Reddit. I have no idea of who you are talking about either. I was there for awhile and my take was that it was an anonymous chill place to discuss things.
I learned about some things I never would have guessed and was exposed to sides of life I never would have known otherwise. There were some good times and bad. I can see an increase in aggression and bots. I do agree that taking away the down vote changes things. But I have changed too. So I don’t see it as a cause and effect. It’s just website. It’s not my singular reason for existence.
I never saw this side of Reddit. I have no idea of who you are talking about either. I was there for awhile and my take was that it was an anonymous chill place to discuss things.
I learned about some things I never would have guessed and was exposed to sides of life I never would have known otherwise. There were some good times and bad. I can see an increase in aggression and bots. I do agree that taking away the down vote changes things. But I have changed too. So I don’t see it as a cause and effect. It’s just website. It’s not my singular reason for existence.
I never saw this side of Reddit. I have no idea of who you are talking about either. I was there for awhile and my take was that it was an anonymous chill place to discuss things.
I learned about some things I never would have guessed and was exposed to sides of life I never would have known otherwise. There were some good times and bad. I can see an increase in aggression and bots. I do agree that taking away the down vote changes things. But I have changed too. So I don’t see it as a cause and effect. It’s just website. It’s not my singular reason for existence.
Reddit was a washed down 4chan. For those who came from a forum life in the 00’s and knew 4chan too, Reddit made sense.
That kind of content will keep happening and popping, and there will be a lot of people supporting it. Because we’ll always have teenagers eager to see fringe stuff, and social misfits that want to be seen/heard.
I think that we need to understand that Lemmy and the Fediverse can hold such things, but they aren’t at fault for that. Reddit was faulty as a corporation, but not as a platform. And because Lemmy, the Fediverse and ActivityPub are techs free to anyone, they aren’t liable for this, but the owners of the instances of these techs are.
We have already seen how this plays out, thankfully. We’ve seen a lot of instances defederating exploding-heads.com, and this is good. The same with many people saying to defederate from Meta’s new social network.
I think we need to understand that, profoundly, human beings are very heterogeneous. We’ll always have nice and bad people. And that communities reflect that. Having everything in one instance (Reddit) is not a very good solution. Having them in different instances and each one with their own ethos, makes more sense as a society. Especially because we behave like that. I usually don’t mingle with douchdbags.
I’ve been on Reddit going on 15 years now and it’s absolutely nothing like what was a decade ago. This is what happens when millions of people invade a site, mods become control freaks and the executives don’t care about anything other than dollar signs.
Yeah, I honestly missed all those “novelty” accounts that had gimmicks to the posts that were actually enjoyable. Spotting specific users in the comments and all that. Nowadays all the ones you spot in the comments are “oh that’s a bot”.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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’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?
There’s always a few subs that get shoved un your face which are straight up the most racist shitholes ever. Lately, I got served a lot of /r/2westerneurope4u and it is absolutely disgusting literal /pol/tier
I completely agree with you. I was in a conversation with someone in the comments section when they asked me to explain a group and their motto… When I did they started calling me with names like I was a lowly person or I was in the wrong for supporting them when I never did. When I called them out for not reading my entire commnet and just blindly hating on me they got angry and reported me to Reddit authorities. I don’t know what the authorities saw in the comment that they permanently suspended my account. Even after emailing them and saying I never said anything wrong or abusive they still didn’t listen. At that point I had enough and just deleted my account
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.
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