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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
A lot of those people are here too, trying to recreate that outrage machine
Hey fuck you asshole I will literally murder you and your whole family. /s
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.
we are not redditors anymore, we don’t belong there
This is something that became very clear to me when I made the mistake of going back for a visit yesterday and found a lot of that "fear, derision, doubt, apathy" in one of the last places I expected to find it. It was heartbreaking but did make it clear that we (or, at least, I) really do not belong there anymore.
It is time to help build something new.
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!"
Its either the fascists, or people trying to make money from tribalism.
the concept of fediverse give a lot more ways to block hate, and there isn't any algorithm to spread hate for engagement
Yeah, I agree 100%. I remember Reddit from 12 years ago, where discussions were lively, but it was mostly trolls who would get downvoted. Now it’s just an ‘I disagree’ button. Sharing and discussing different opinions can be fun, even if they are different as long they are not hatefull. We shouldn’t hate on diverse opinions, that’s how we can learn from each other, in my opinion.
Hopefully, Lemmy will remain somewhat smaller so that we can have more quality discussions and not turn into an outrage machine, with people acting like they are holier than the Pope.
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.
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 hopeful Lemmy can avoid the hate/outrage/fear cycle. At the moment it feels very peaceful.
I often wondered if a need to sell advertising space and user data led to reddit pushing content that catered to anger, outrage and fear, as it drives engagement.
Post that trigger outrage are much more likely to be upvoted. Users feel good seeing their ideas reinforced especially in contrasting “us vs them” scenarios.
It's about 10 years ago they slowly began to forget their own reddiquette rules, 5 years ago they had almost vanished completely, although you can still find the rules on reddit, nobody upholds them anymore.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette
Originally these rules were actually observed, not just by mods, but by users in general, and if you violated them, you were reminded.
Today most people on reddit don't even know they exist, and the site has devolved more and more.
I absolutely agree in the hope the same doesn't happen here.
Strong emotions drive participation, which in a For-Profit Social Media site means more eyeballs for more time, hence more money from advertisers.
As it happens adversarial hate (i.e. two sides, pitches against each other, humans hating humans rather than just a hate for something generic like "poverty" or "light beer") is amongst the strongest and certainly one of the easiest to create.
My hope is that in the absence of a profit motivation and of popularity-score-keeping in the form of karma, the fediverse won't turn into that specific kind of swamp. That said, only time will tell.
Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram...their default content (your frontpage, your personal feed, etc) show you the content their algorithms have determined will make you most engaged and remain there longer to 1. Generate more free content for them to sell, 2. command your attention so they can sell that attention to advertisers. Corporate "social" media is technically "social exploitation" and has effects that reach into the real world. The behaviors they feeds spill into our interactions in real life.
The site just became so unbearable the last year or so.
Found it hard to have discussions on the bigger subs because it felt like it was just too easy for people to just swoop in and be a dick.
Once replied to a post about a student having to drive 2 hours home from college to visit. People were saying that was an insane amount to drive and that it wasn't reasonable. It was in Texas and they were just driving from Houston to Austin which really isn't insane. My college was the same amount of distance here and I drove back each weekend.
Had somebody angrily reply with how that was bullshit and I was a moron for thinking it was normal to drive like that. Also said I was what was wrong with the site (lol).
All I did was try to give my own personal experience with being in college im Texas when your university is 100 miles away and I got weirdly attacked. Like it was my fault for the size of my state lmfao
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.
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.
I'm telling myself it was terf and troll sock puppet accounts.
I'm very keenly waiting for captcha to be fixed, I hope most instances decide to make you fill out a captcha for EVERY post. That and paid instances will make a huge difference compared to Reddit. It will become way harder to spam and astroturf discussions, but I'm not sure how to handle legitimate bots.
I've seen that as well. I unsubbed from subreddits like r/badcopnodonut, r/leopardsatemyface, and r/hermancainaward months before the API debacle out of outrage fatigue. It's not that I don't care about the injustice, it's just that I got tired of the negativity from the spectacle du jour.
Roughly 5 years, so I joined when things alredy went to shit. But I still did notice a decline into utter shit.
What kinda pissed me off the most was the constant know-it-ally behavior. People were wrong but they still defended their standpoint not because they believed in it, but just out of spite. "I don't care about the truth, I only want to own the others big time!"
Reddit is a site fully of bratty children and adults acting like bratty children. The worst part about that is, it is toxic and before you know it you start acting that way yourself. Me included. This whole fuckening was a wakeup call and I am glad it happened.
I think the larger a community becomes, the more likely that will happen.
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.
Mods slowly realized they could turn s sub into an echo chamber with no pushback. You could even say something in sub A and get banned in sub B for it.
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.
It was very polarised. I found it hard to get along with the left subs, impossible with the right subs. People are increasingly less interested in making compromises and more so in having their way or the highway. Though I doubt this is a Reddit issue alone. The world stage has been moving, fast. No doubt sped up by the numerous global crises we just had or are currently having.
10 year user. I agree what used to be a place for discussion, jokes, fun comment chains, devolved into rage bait and vitriol. I definitely don't miss it.
While at first I was upset at the destruction of Reddit and lamented my routine, I am now so happy it happened. We all needed a new place to reset and be human again.
That's why every sub I moderated had a hard no politics, no incivility rule in place.
You'd be amazed how much of the nastiness goes away when you just ban anyone breaking either rule. Things turn chill and friendly. The posts and comments start staying on topic, and (eventually) users start most reporting when the rules get broken instead of getting nasty themselves.
As much shit as I would get in modmail and DMs, it was worth it to be able to go into a niche sub and just have these relaxing, friendly conversations.
The outrage machine, as you brilliantly name it, is the default now. But we can change that, and we can definitely keep it out of the fediverse as it grows, as long as we're vigilant and don't fall prey to it oursleves
To be fair to reddit, it really depends on the sub. If you go on /r/fightporn or /r/crazyfuckingvideos you're going to get a certain demographic that tends to be reactionary.
Then if you go on /r/politics or /r/socialism or /r/conservative you're gonna get clickbaity echo chambers
But there are subs with great discussion on niche topics. /r/zizek or /r/credibledefense or /r/askhistorians all have very little outrage and instead good discussions and analysis.
The problem is not unique to reddit. It's a side effect of a large enough community. The focus gets broad and the issue is that posts like Twitter screenshots or memes are easier to digest. Because they are easier to digest, more people click on them and upvote. Therefore these posts will almost always reach the top before articles or other long for articles.
This over time gives incentive for posts that can a) draw the most attention with a headline and b) is fast and easy to digest
Outrage porn is exactly that. You see an image "DeSantis passed a bill to out toxic chemicals in roads!"
People don't bother to do research on what the law says m and they immediately go to the comments and make jokes or berate the GOP/DeSantis
Nuanced discussion gets pushed to the bottom and once again people will downvote whatever they feel is against the narrative constructed by the OP.
Tldr: no reddit isn't getting worse in this regard. It's a function of large online communities. This website will likely see the same effect should certain communities get large enough.
What's great is that if specific instances get toxic they can get banned, but the power isn't concentrated in few hands like Reddit.
When Reddit was announcing the API changes I had a similar (but stupid) idea of using Blockchain to create something similar but that would be A) slow as fuck and B) problematic.
Lemmy is goated
I generally do appreciate the high quality of the posts here. I give it five to seven years before it degrades but then we'll have higher numbers of users and niche communities with higher quality of convo.
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.
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.
Welcome to 10'ish years ago, OP.