Reddit

Since 2015-16 hostile anti-democratic governments: Russia, China, Iran, to name a few and their allied western chaos operatives: Rogan, Musk, Peterson, Trump, Stone, to name a few, have been disseminating conspiracy theories, propaganda and disinformation designed to harm and divide humanity. It has worked. This has been going on for a long while, but 2015 is when things really got rolling. We can change this trend if the will is there.

Welcome to 10'ish years ago, OP.

I've been saying this for a couple of years.

My hope is the negative people are the ones using the main reddit app and they just stay there.

Let's keep good vibes here!

I've noticed, over the last month or so, a lot of right wing hate subs have started making their way to the front pages in r/all and r/polular.

You guys remember the old internet? Filled with Usenet trolls? Somethingawful doxxes? The bullying of Star Wars kid? Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project? I don't know if it's human nature but the outrage is in the bones of the internet.

So much outrage and doom. The algorithm rewarded people being more and more extreme, even about real problems.

Like, yes I lean left like reddit, but not every issue is the biggest scandal that has ever existed.

If you get swept up in that stuff, you'd think the world was about to end. And you'd frequently encounter people who think just so.

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 honestly don’t know, but my inclination is that people trend that way in any space if they don’t go touch grass and have a real conversation with people

It’s the humiliation spez deserves after such spectacularly bad management. Good luck with the IPO, dumbass!

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.

With the api changes it has exploded with posts misleading everyone with gifs that happened years ago with inflammatory titles, the racism and hate is just left to fester within comment sections etc... It's really sad to see how much the platform can be damaging to everyone visiting it without moderation. It feels like the funnyjunk website now, but somehow is getting worst. Seeing an entire feed only filled with hate, misinformation, and full of bots.

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

How do you think that Lemmy won't be any different as it scales and grows? I've already seen plenty of trolling and snark around here.

Their algorithm is designed to stoke hatred and conflict, so they get more user retention.

Which is probably the main reason they closed their source code.

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Just check out /r/politics here, it’s not reddit-specific.

Definitely noticed this as well. Another thing that pissed me off was the amount of repost, sometimes done by bot accounts. It became more apparent in small subreddits. Also, onlyfans models spamming most nsfw subreddit.

It was always like that, is the problem.

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.

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.