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.
About 10 years here. That’s why I had Apollo. I filtered out all that shit. Everything you could imagine. Hundreds of things hidden.
Eventually I had a home feed of crafts, patientgamers, every cat sub you can imagine, bread, and a bunch of other peaceful things.
Before that I was just so angry all the time and arguing with redditors. I won’t go back to all that.
Don’t know how one could possibly use the site without filters from apps like that or RES. it’s so chaotic.
Exactly why I refuse to participate anymore among a dozen reasons.
My partner liked specific communities there but kept getting recommended upsetting stuff (got sucked into AmITheAsshole in a bad way, etc) so I uninstalled the official app and installed Apollo instead and their mental health greatly improved. But healthy satisfied people aren’t profitable for corporations.
I have mostly good things to say about Reddit and the more I read about it, the more I realize that that’s just because I always connected to it through Boost for Reddit.
I haven’t used either but I think boost has a lemmy app. I’m pretty sure it’s made the same dev(s) but I’m not fully sure
This is the way. Though despite all that I started to keep my Reddit browsing a secret as the average person considers a “redditor” a pretty negative thing to be.
Tbh kinda glad in that sense that the API fiasco revealed the true colors of the company and gave me a very clear reason to leave. It hadn’t felt “good” in a long time and now I know why.
the average person considers a “redditor” a pretty negative thing to be.
Redditors consider a redditor a negative thing to be. It works because no redditor believes they are one. It’s everyone else who’s a part of the gross hivemind, not me. Reddit thinks this and reddit does that, but not me. I’m different and special. Not one of them.
r/notliketheotherredditors
It’s also the case that several things can be true at once. Like, maybe you are part of the reddit mob-mentality, but on certain issues you have opinions that very much go against the grain.
I read the post the same way. In the few times Reddit has come up IRL I just ask, “Have you heard of Reddit?” Then it’s either yes or no then we move on.
No one in the real world gives a shit about being a “redditor.” Which to your point, means nothing.
Though despite all that I started to keep my Reddit browsing a secret as the average person considers a “redditor” a pretty negative thing to be.
Damn, it didn’t always used to be like this. In the early 2010s, Reddit used to be a great conversation starter.
Am I the only one who never looked at a general feed on Apollo? I would open the app which was set to open to a particular sub and then I would navigate back to the list of favorite subs and pick which one to check in on. I would prefer an app that shows me that list of favorite communities at launch but haven’t found it yet.
Definitely not. I would peruse Home for just a little bit, but mostly I’d swipe over and go to specific subs. The past 3 months I only logged in to upload chapters of a story. Reddit had become pretty stale for me.
As a European, the increasing cynicism and apathy to American politics of many users has made me really bad mood, maybe I should have cured my feed better, but now it doesn’t matter anymore as lemmy is my new home.
Yep. I was more loyal to Apollo than to Reddit. I paid for Apollo premium but would not do that for Reddit. Also I hated the UX on Reddit’s website old or new. Now my issue with Lemmy and Kbin is to wait for an app that matches Apollo.
I feel like most of the comments were from people who were doing Internet as a lifestyle.i mean, I wouldn’t know a better way to get depressed and bitter…
It was so helpful to block users, especially in my local cities subreddit.
Same. Years ago when I first got on Reddit I was very politically active and my subs were a ton of political, economic, societal etc subs. But I just got sick of opening up Infinity and seeing nothing but doom and gloom as far as I could scroll. I transitioned away from that over time and at the end my subs were mostly cats, some specific TV show and game (meme) subs, and some niche hobby subs.
I remember a while back when the first comment was always someone debunking the clickbait article headline with a good source and succinct summary. Redditors famously never read the article, but the comments were often better than the article.
Now, you have to scroll down half the page to find any original thought. You see dozens of people spouting nonsense or even defending nonsense because they…don’t want to be wrong?
One example: an image from the 50s displaying a child with their hand caught in a fire pull with a caption explaining that the device would trap the kid at the spot to deter pranksters.
The device was indeed designed to deter pranksters, and it would attach to the user’s wrist, but it would come free. So you would know the kid who did it because they have a thing stuck on their hand.
I recognized the device and had a video demonstrating its proper, safe function. People were still arguing with me.
Why would anyone want to put any creative/intellectual energy into a place like that?
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.
I blame the 24 hour news cycle and end of the Fairness Doctrine. It has allowed editorializing and “spinning” of news stories as opposed to being factual and objective.
The Fairness Doctrine only ever existed due to the way the broadcast airwaves were divvied up. It had no bearing on cable’s CNN, etc.
People give the fairness doctrine far too much credit, it only applied to your local over the air news channels. Not cable, and it wouldn’t have applied to the internet.
I’m not sure that’s true. You have to remember that when the fairness doctrine was still in force everyone got all of their information from broadcast. Even when cable first came on scene and got popular in the late '70s and early '80s, it was simply to improve how well you got your broadcast stations, and maybe give you a chance to have a few additional channels. The idea of basic cable took years before it took off.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
Indeed, but during the time of the fairness doctrine cable was primarily used to watch broadcast networks, but without signal degradation. In other words, most of what people consumed on cable for the first 10-15 years of cable’s existence were broadcast network content. The doctrine could’ve been expanded to cover basic cable networks and 24/7 news instead of scrapped.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
This is correct. The idea is that bandwidth is public property and as such holding a license to use part of it entails public obligations. This is why radio stations are required to repeat their identification a certain number of times per hour, for example.
Cable networks are privately owned and therefore were never subject to the same kinds of regulation.
Oh? I don’t know about the “fairness doctorine”.
You owe it to yourself to read the wiki article at least. It died under Reagan.
Ya about the time it became out dated and irrelevant. Doesn’t apply to the internet or cable TV.
He should have extended it as opposed to ending it. But that’s kind of the problem with him and his administration. All of the deregulation of his time is what led to today’s bullshit. He will go down as the worst president in recent history in my books.
Not sure about the Fairness Doctrine’s role, but it saddens me that people don’t seem to be nearly as aware of the damaging effects of the news cycle anymore. People seem even less aware that getting your news online, or through social media, doesn’t protect you from it either.
If you’ll excuse the ramble: Years ago when the Tea Party (arguably one of the first big far-right movements in the open) started gaining traction in the US, they held a rally in DC. People were apalled, but to my knowledge there weren’t issues where anti-Tea Party counter protesters were attacking Tea Party members with bike locks or concrete mix in milkshake cups in an attempt to injure Tea Party members. (During the time of antifa and Trump supporter protests/rallies there was shit going around online about how to mix quick dry cement mix with fast food milkshakes to make a slurry that would cause severe chemical burns on people. Not sure if that was real or not.)
What did happen was that Comedy Central, who (we know now) had already been planning on holding a joke rally in DC to build hype for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s shows even befoe the Tea Party mess, started pushing online into the groups suggesting a separate counter rally.
The Rally to restore sanity (or to keep fear alive, as Colbert was advertising it satirically) started gaining a ton of traction online. At the least, it was an opportunity for fans of Stewart and Colbert’s shows to come out and have a laugh. At best it was a way to show that the Tea Party didn’t have power and was just a bunch of hot air.
I went to the Comedy Central rally. They made it a fum time with guests like Mythbusters, music, and speeches from Colbert (in character) and Stewart. What impacted me the most was the sheer amount of people. If you have a chance check out the bird’s eye photos of the two rallies. The rally to restore sanity easily outnumbered the Tea Party four times over. Thousands upon thousands of people there with joke picket signs, having a fun time.
Stewart’s closing speech has stuck with me, even now over a decade later. It pains me that it seems that even John Stewart himself seems to have forgotten it, or re-evaluated his stance.
I’ll share some the parts I find particularly important:
I can’t control what people think this was, I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear.
They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times.
And we can have animus and not be enemies.
But unfortunately one our main tools in delineating the two… broke.
The country’s 24 hour politico, pundit, perpetual panic “conflictinator” did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder.
The press could hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus illuminating issues here-to-fore unseen.
Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden unexpected dangerous flaming ants epidemic.
If we amplify everything we hear nothing.
There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats but those titles that must be earned…you must have the resume.
Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult not only to those people but to racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate.
Just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe not more.
[…]
the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false.
It is us through a fun house mirror and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead and an ass shaped like a month old pumpkin and one eyeball.
So why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin assed forehead, eyeball monster?
If the picture of us were true of course our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable.
Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our constitution, or racists and homophobes who see no ones humanity but their own?
We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is, on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing by hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done.
The truth is we do; we work together to get things done every damn day.
Most American don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives.
Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do.
Often something they do not want to do. But they do it. Impossible things that are only made possible through the little reasonable compromises we all make.
[Image of a packed highway on screen]
Look, look on the screen this is where we are, this is who we are: these cars.
That’s a school teacher probably thinks his taxes are too high, he’s going to work.
There’s another car, a woman with two small kids can’t really think about anything else right now.
There’s another car swinging, I don’t even know if you can see it.
The lady’s in the NRA and loves Oprah. There’s another car an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah.
Another car is a Latino carpenter. Another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist Obstetrician. Mormon JZ fan.
But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong beliefs and principles they hold dear.
Often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers.
And yet these millions of cars must some how find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile long 30 foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river.
Carved by people by the way that I’m sure had their differences.
And they do it, concession by concession, you go then I’ll go, you go then I’ll go, you go then I’ll go.
Oh my god is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? ahh oh that’s ok you go, then I’ll go.
And sure, at some point there’ll be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute; but that individual is rare and he is scorned and not hired as an analyst.
Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkenss and back into the light we have to work together.
And the truth is there will always be darkness.
And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the Promised Land, sometimes it’s just New Jersey.
Time and time again I see people with good intentions effectively saying that “making concessions for those hideous reprehensibles is tacitly supporting them” by allowing a group to have a space to speak, hell sometimes by even allowing a group to exist.
Yes, yes, the tolerance of intolerance paradox and all that. That’s valid and important. My point is that far too often I see people jump the gun.
Go ahead and deplatform people calling for your death. Don’t deplatform them because they don’t think your lifestyle choices aren’t valid/okay, and they are discussing that in a separate space from you.
Make an attempt to ignore them, live and let live, or an honest attempt at discourse in good faith as if you are dealing with other human beings.
Again, not if they are actively calling for the end of your life, but far too often I see people stretch that with “they support ideas that align with people who would deny me my existence” as if there’s some sort of idealogical purity standard we all need to adhere to lest we let the wrong opinions in and taint ourselves by the vaguest of “idealogical association”.
Should we be concerned that the majority of painters are nazis because Hitler liked to paint? Of course fucking not.
Most people are not purely the opinions they espouse online. Often there’s deep layers of nuance left unsaid, personal lived experiences causing them to draw different conclusions from what you think.
The world falls apart if everyone out in real life caused things to come to a screeching halt to shout someone down and call for deplatforming or shunning every time they encountered an opinion they found reprehensible.
I’m guess just tired of the extremism absolutely fucking everywhere. From people with offensice opinions and especially from well meaning people who are motivated by their feelings of righteousness to try and protect themselves and others. People insisting that if you don’t literally use every single opportunity you have to speak out against the wrong of the day, then you are actively supporting that wrong.
Just got a general day to day mood of “Sir, this is a Wendy’s”
Not sure if that was real or not.
Uh, no. It wasn’t, so it would be better to not repeat it as if it was credible.
Thanks for keeping me honest! I’ll edit it. Unfortunately comment edits don’t seem to sync across different instances consistently yet. I should probably be more careful before posting a comment for now.
Sure, not to try to slight you, just the “concrete milkshake” thing was something spread by Andy Ngo to try to pretend he was a victim and that “Antifa” was a wild anarchic hate group put to harm people.
The internet itself is far more to blame than either of the factors you cite. Why? Because it destroyed journalism’s traditional revenue model and in so doing murdered local news. Only the biggest legacy news organizations can still make ends meet through a subscription base, so the result is that everyone else is left churning out bullshit clickbait articles in a competition for views.
“Information wants to be free,” was the mantra of the early internet, and that’s nice as far as it goes, but good journalism is expensive and when we gut the revenue stream of an entire industry, we shouldn’t be surprised that what’s left kind of sucks.
That problem is not site-specific. Any website that becomes a hub for real information will be targeted by disinformation trolls. It’s how the fascists keep the ignorants chanting “both sides!”
I wrote this a couple of days ago here on my own feelings that reddit just turned all of us into such awful people and how much I hated everything about it but still can’t stay away from being a redditor.
It’s really long, I think it’s one of the best and worst things I’ve ever written. Give it a read if you’d like, I would really appreciate it.
https://lemmy.world/post/858027
I think my point is that we are not redditors anymore, we don’t belong there, and there is no place for hate or self-hate here.
And after being here, I’m honestly pretty indifferent towards reddit now.
Far left are the source of the problem.
people forget r/imgoingtohellforthis was a thing. Hate was always on reddit. It might have been disguised as something else, but it was there. Problem is its impossible to tell what’s satire and whats actually objectionable. There was a tipping point where imgoingtohellforthis switched from satire to objective racism. Reddit started its downward decline the day that sub got banned. I dont endorse what they became, but banning them proved reddit was no longer as open as they claimed.
Been on Reddit since the Digg debacle (2008 ? 2009 ?).
For me, it was the non stop posting about Musk-Trump-West-Rogan-Peterson-Shapiro-Kardashian that drove me insane and limited my Reddit use to only the subreddits I followed.
So I thank Spez for his decision to ditch third-party apps because it got me out of the septic tank that Reddit has become.
I was rounding out either year 12 or 13 on my account and got banned for ban evading. I made sure to double check on the actual rules before creating another account-- all they really said was to not comment where you were banned. Okay fine.
STILL got hit, despite never interacting with the sub that banned me after banning aside from saying ‘…why?’
“PlEaSe ReSpEcT mOdS sAyInG tHeY dOnT wAnT tO tAlK tO yOu.”
Look here, reddit-- I gladly will. But it is fucking dumb to get banned and then permabanned for asking why you were banned in the first place.
Fuck uspez
Maybe people should realise that they, too, have a life, just like Musk-Trump-West-Rogan-Peterson-Shapiro-Kardashians.
I dunno man. /r/fuckcars seemed pretty tame to me.
Only if you used it in a very mainstream, surface level way. Smaller, niche subs have always been where the best communities are because they don’t attract normies. None of the subreddits I used degraded in quality and I never had issues with moderation. These problems will develop in any online community that bleeds in to the mainstream social consciousness.
Only if you used it in a very mainstream, surface level way
Sure, but it’s still remarkable and it does change the tenor of the overall site.
At one point a couple of years ago I peeked at /all and I’m gonna say 85% of the top posts were from subreddits that were basically themed variations of “hey look at this asshole”
That shit definitely filters into the culture, and you see it in comment threads all the time where sometimes idea of a worthwhile contribution is just tagging iamverysmart or whatever
The whole site just primed itself into getting annoyed, pissed off, or outraged about anything at the drop of a hat
The whole site just primed itself into getting annoyed, pissed off, or outraged about anything at the drop of a hat
So… like tumblr?
checks notes
Yes.
As I say, that’s the way all these big social media platforms go eventually. At the moment we are fortunate that Lemmy has a relatively low number of users, so a larger portion of the people who are here are genuinely interested in having a good faith discussion and engaging more with their respective communities. For this reason I’d much prefer Lemmy to grow slowly over time, rather than have a mass influx of normie redditors who are only here because their app stopped working.
Just a point: don’t fall into the trap of thinking that high-intelligence or whatever you think is not “normie” is less prone to all of the very same emotion-driven bullshit as all others.
No matter how intelligent you are, you can’t out-smart your own subconscious because it’s just as “intelligent” as the rest of you.
It has nothing to do with intelligence. With everything, you have people who are passionate and everyone else who is just there to skim off the top. The latter don’t care about degradation of the thing because their interest in it never runs deep enough for them to notice or care.
That would make “normies” the ones “who are just there to skimming off the top” and “people who are passionate” non-“normies”.
Personally I would hesitate to go as far as saying that being passionate is abnormal. Maybe not the majority but not so out there as to be abnormal.
Further, I’ve seen plenty of dumb, negative or wasteful “being passionate about things” (including in myself, though I’m trying to improve). A sports fan fanatic about his or her team is passionate but if that means they’re constantly involved in tribalistic discussions that’s not a positive contribution in any way form or shape. Similarly in my profession (software engineering) the young an passionate types tend to be the most innefective of all (kinda like me swimming before I actually was formally taught how to do it - lots of throwing water all around for little in the way of results).
All this to say that I don’t think “being passionate” is abnormal or always positive.
That would make “normies” the ones “who are just there to skimming off the top” and “people who are passionate” non-“normies”.
That is what I just said, yes.
Well, anchoring your definition of “normative” to what is in the 2020s little more than a tech marketing word targetting the young and naive, is certainly an “interesting” take on mankind.
Not “normative”. Normie.
It varied for me. For example I lurked on /r/watches and would watch as the group mind ripped to shreds anyone who dared showing a digital that wasn’t Casio or a fashion watch. /R/PLC stayed good the whole time. I guess because we had a common enemy, everyone else in the universe.
I always felt the karma system fed the toxicity. People became more defensive and passive aggressive if someone had downvoted them, and there was a tendency for people to just mass downvote unpopular opinions instead of engage with the user in question. Personally I don’t like that Lemmy has an upvote/downvote system on comments either. Any time you give people a lazy way to say “I don’t like this comment” instead of actually explaining why they don’t like it, the quality of the conversation begins to deteriorate.
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 was also a Digg refuge so spend the last decade and a bit there the biggest gripe with what changed is everyone has the need to be contrarian and be “right” even if that’s making a comment about missing a comma or trying to do some six degrees of Kevin Bacon to get to a non-existent issue in a discussion. No one can just say I don’t enough about X they have to be the biggest nerd in the room at all times.
Then people just downvoted again, so they could feel “right” without anyone contributing to the discussion. So what should be a back and forth of good conversation between people who are interested in a thing becomes a black and white opinion point scoring game of imaginary internet scores.
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.
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
