Reddit

The users of reddit in no way mirrored the real world. I consider myself an indepentant in real life, I vote based off of issues that are important to me, I get my news primarily from Reuters and the AP, but I found myself filtering out more and more subreddits as they became filled with hate.

Neutral sounding subreddits such as Politics and News became hate filled groups that attacked anyone right of the far left.

I've abstained from contributing to reddit for years due to this and hope Lemmy doesn't experience the same hate filled fall.

If you want to go way back, take a look at old BBSes or Usenet. The flame was commonly deployed. For many decades now people have used the internet to look at pictures of cats and also to talk trash or otherwise say horrible things. I don't think Reddit is different in any major way, except that on subs that were decently managed, many of the worst commenters were banned and the worst comments were often down voted into oblivion. It really did depend on the subreddit.

The fact that some people behave like assholes is not in itself anything indicative about a website working well or poorly. In real life some people behave like assholes some of the time too. Of course we have and should continue to take reasonable steps to deal with much of the badness, but we should never expect or aim for perfection on this front.

I don’t think it’ll happen. That’s why this will work, because the fediverse has controls for this. Say the folks over at another lemmy instance start hosting communities that are allowing hateful content, if you’re on lemmy.world you can count on the devs there to defederate that instance, and then it completely disappears from your view. It’s important to understand that you could still go directly over to the web portal for that instance and still see the content, but after they’ve been defederated, you’d have to a make an account on their server to interact with their content because all the reputable or safe instances will block them. So then it’s up to mods, like always. So if someone starts a community at lemmy.world then starts allowing hate speech in their community, I believe the devs at lemmy.world can simply nuke the whole community in one swipe, plus probably delete any accounts on lemmy.world that were engaging with the deleted community. I’m just learning so correct me if I’m wrong, but these sets of checks and balances seem to me to create an environment like a salty lake that will prevent certain things from growing, like the widespread douchebaggery that infested Reddit like a kudzu vine.

Reddit has so many people on it it behaves like society. If you're in a bad neighborhood (sub) you're going to deal with bad people.

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.

Right? I stopped viewing anything other than a few curated subs after a while because I realised all it was doing was making me angry and upset. It can't be healthy to be exposed to that constantly.

It's the politicization of the online space. Chances are it will happen here, or, perhaps worse, lemmy.world will end up filter-bubbling and everyone on the other side of the spectrum will make their own space where we both give the finger to a blank wall and pretend we're brave.

But yes, it did get worse, because it became less about life and more about the appearance of life, much like most social media.

It is same thing on every social media platform. The reason why I deleted Facebook and Twitter because I was getting angry all the time.

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.