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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably due to reddit’s r/politics being centered on USA politics. A lot of communities are redditors migrating their subreddits to a lemmy instance, and lemmy.world is the most popular with them.
The web knows it is American because it knows what isn’t American and it also knows what it means to be American by knowing what doesn’t mean to be American.
Yeah in the short month-ish I’ve been a part of a few different lemmy instances the level of “political empathy” has taken a nose dive in the past few days IMO. I think that sadly with such a fast migration from reddit the opportunity to form a different culture here is simply drowned out.
I won’t fall for your ruse for a second and propose that in fact you are just getting your jollies with us, and hoodwinking us into thinking you really do, when in fact, you don’t!
I definitely don’t hate either of those things, but OP describes Reddit as an “outrage machine”, and I’m just saying that we have the same thing going on here. It’s definitely not as bad yet, it’s just sad to see Lemmy fostering the same kind of outrage that Reddit has.
Redditors are migrating here, but still bringing typical “Reddit” behavior with them, dehumanizing their political adversaries in comment sections and spewing hateful rhetoric to anyone who disagrees.
Yeah I agree. Lemmy is rapidly mirroring Reddit from its early days. And without good mod tools, it’s going to be tough to police such behavior as time goes on. Platforms are rarely the problem, it’s the people posting.
I wasn’t specifically referring to “rage bait”, I was more so referring to the “chamber of anger” that OP mentioned. Navigating this site on the app I’m using is kind of buggy so it’s hard to switch from writing a comment to looking at posts quickly. Here, the second post that I looked at had a hateful comment upvoted to the top of the thread: kbin.social/m/politics@lemmy.world/t/…/532776
Same type of comment that you’d see on Reddit, sad to see this place quickly turn so hateful.
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