Hate to be the one to tell you, but that’s not a Reddit thing. Thats an internet thing. Those clowns are here too.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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Yep. I've seen some top tier clownery in Lemmy. And there are some subreddits with really positive communities. The good communities are usually the smaller ones and Lemmy is smaller overall, so it hasn't really had time to be as bad.
No matter what you post, someone on the internet will find a way to be angry about it.
Shut your whore mouth! On occasion, a post might just slip by the assholes. Make another blanket statement like that and I'll swat your grandma live on 8chan.
8chan still exists? I though the feds shut that pedoswamp down years ago...
To tell the truth I don't know. It was the first internet shithole that came to mind.
It was a very pungent example of an internet shithole indeed. May its bytes be lost to /dev/null for all time.
I'm not angry, you're angry!
Excuse me what the fuck did you say to me??
You should start a Civ community!
Maybe, but im not really the community leadership type of person
I used to love reddit. Especially because it was so diverse. So many communities living side by side generally pretty well (except the well-known toxic communities of course that we all knew to stay away from). And the everything-goes attitude, like people discussing religion on the same site as people exhibiting their sex lives :P I used to love seeing that kind of diversity (ok and the exhibitionism too, I admit 🤭, I'm just into that.). I just loved the everything-goes feeling about it.
But two things went wrong as I see it. One was that US society got more and more polarised and toxic due to Trump and most of reddit's users are from the US. Even the people who used to be pretty nice are so triggered by anything you say "wrong", they always think you're trying to pull them into an argument for the "other side". It's like they have PTSD from being constantly attacked by the other side and it causes that knee-jerk reaction on anything that doesn't fall 100% into their narrative. I got so sick and tired of that hostility especially because I was not used to it locally. That thing you mention, where you say something and someone always claims you're making it up to make a point or karma or whatever is so familiar and tiring.
And the other thing was of course that idiot spez. Trying to clean up reddit for his precious investors by removing (or locking away) anything not above the belt, killing third-party apps, etc. I still go there once in a while to gather some information but I stay away from discussions and I rotate my accounts every couple of months. So I don't give a crap about karma because I kill my accounts anyway. In fact even when I did have a long-term account I used to "shreddit" it every couple of months so karma was not something I ever cared about.
The sad thing is that this Trump toxicity has now even blown over to my country (Holland). They elected a total fascist 2 months ago and the same thing is happening there now, there are lots of people claiming they were never heard and now their hero is going to drain the swamp and kick out all the refugees and all that same old blahblah. Several of my "friends" were caught up in this BS and I've had to break off all contact with them. 😡
Even Lemmy is not free from this, I joined lemmy.ml for a while but I found it pretty toxic too. Lemmy.world looked similar. This is why I came here and it's been great so far.
I don't believe this is a US problem. Dates do match with all the Trump nonsense but it happened pretty much worldwide. Look at UK, Australia, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico. All of them had the same divide in society with politics at the center. I think it's social media and the attention-hungry algorithms that do not care about the side effects. That is what is pulling people apart. Spending hours a day in an indoctrination environment just because 'clicks and ads and $$'. Laws to prevent this are waaaay too late. Damage is done. And what horrible damage these things did... What horrible damage these people did... And are still doing unchecked.
Reddit's always had a toxicity problem (see: Ellen Pao), but there was definitely a shift in 2015. It lines up with the political divide, but I think it was just a symptom of a larger problem. Because of a certain subreddit, a lot of new people were introduced to reddit. When they finally released an official app (lol, or rather they stole it and rebranded it as their own), there was a massive influx of users.
I'm not all "reddit was better when there were fewer users" because it wasn't. But there was a cultural shift when it became much more widely promoted by app stores and all. It got users from all kinds of backgrounds, but it also got... I don't know. Different. Maybe oversaturated, which kind of made it difficult to find more quality content.
The only good thing about reddit toward the end of my original time with it (I've been browsing lately, but not much because the app fucking sucks*) was niche communities, some funny content creators, and some NSFW subs (some of which have been absolutely gutted, if not banned entirely, since the incident).
A lot of those subs are irreplaceable. There's just too much previous content and a mass of users that won't ever migrate to something like Lemmy. Niche communities can still be kind of successful here due to inherently less users, but it still lacks diversity because those niche subs still had a really healthy dose of active users, which often exceeded the amount of users subscribed to some popular Lemmy communities.
A lot of them started turning to shit earlier, but they were manageable with filters and what have you. Plus the good mods were really good. Some left, some stayed, but the divide kind of fucked a lot of subs.
* Technically, there are other apps you can still use on Android without needing a paid subscription (eg. RedReader, Stealth, patching with Revanced), but they can be a bit finicky sometimes. Although, so can the official one, so it doesn't make much of a difference.
I noticed the same a couple months ago. After the API shutdown stuff happened, I largely left reddit. I would only go there for things I needed, like information and news related to my field.
But in October, I started going back more, and even commenting. And almost immediately, I got the "well ackshually..." comments and just so much unneeded aggression. People just looking to be right by ignoring 99% of the correct information in a comment and focusing on that 1% that's weak or, sure, wrong. And it was over dumb stuff, too.
After being on reddit for 13yrs straight, I guess I learned to be blind to it all. Like I knew it was happening, I saw it all the time, and ~~I'm sure~~ I know I even did it myself here and there. Hell, I was/am still a mod on a reddit; I saw it everyday. I did start getting tired of reddit and redditors about a year ago, but I just kinda brushed it aside.
Anyway, it wasn't until leaving and going to Beehaw and Tildes for a few months, and then going back, that I realized how bad it actually was on reddit. It's so glaring to me in threads all over the place. And that there was no desire to improve or change things. That that's just reddit's culture and that's how redditors like it.
As such, I've still kinda kept some distance from reddit. I'm still there, but I don't think I'll ever go back to how I was using the site pre-APIgate.
Further, I actually get angry when I see people on Lemmy engage in that redditesque way of just looking for confrontation and being smartasses. We left reddit; why are we bringing that mentality with us? If I saw someone on a Beehaw community acting that way, I call it out.
That's one of the reasons I support Beehaw potentially leaving Lemmy to do its own thing. I see Tildes and see how a standalone forum and community can exist and function well and productively, without all the "gotchas" and just unnecessary aggression. That's not to say Beehaw (or Tildes) is perfect. That behavior can be found everywhere. But at least there's a desire to try to stamp that out.
If I saw someone on a Beehaw community acting that way, I call it out.
That's one of the reasons I support Beehaw potentially leaving Lemmy to do its own thing.
I'd rather Beehaw didn't leave Lemmy, and instead "calling that kind of behavior out" got more popular on Lemmy instances... at least on the ones federated with Beehaw. But we'll see.
You just said most user who replied were fine, yet you fixated so much on the 2 abusive idiots instead of just blocking them and move on?
This, I think, may explain a lot of that mentality too. People tend to hyper-focus on things that stand out, and negative things stand out. Spending enough time steeping in that feeling definitely seems to be connected to rising levels of meaningless cynicism and jackassery.
I do think there's also something to be said for people who spend their whole lives glued to social media generally having pretty boring experiences when they're not being spoon-fed dopamine. If you don't go out and have your own adventures, the adventures you see in fiction are the only ones you'll be familiar with. It's hardly surprising that they're so incredulous of the stories of people who are getting out there and living life.
Doesn't take much bad to spoil the good, to me at least and OP it seems. Only so much letting go I can do and it's mostly focused on the state of the world rn
That sucks, I am always a bit confused why anyone would take time to post mean answers.
I've posted some mean answers in the past, so I may share some insights:
- Someone had a bad day. Maybe a client berated them, maybe they had a falling out with a family member, maybe they stepped into a dog poop on a rainy day and their umbrella got blown out before a passerby burned their hand with a lit cigarette (too specific? yeah, well...)
- Someone decided to self-medicate (booze and weed seem to be popular choices)
- Someone forgot to take their meds (high blood pressure can do it, the flu will do it, insomnia or psych meds will do it more)
- Someone got a series of the aforementioned.
Generally: people post mean answers when their sense of empathy is either inexistent, or beaten into oblivion.
Once there are enough people in a place, the chance of encountering at least one person in one of those situations, quickly grows to 100%. If the place doesn't actively discourage that kind of behavior because "engagement"... then you get the likes of Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and similar.
Hey, thanks for your very reflective answer! That all seems somehow valid. Guess I am just a very harmony-seeking person. Can't even choose the mean options in Video Games sooo...
Love to read some nuance on the topic. As much as we all repeat to ourselves to "remember the human", it still doesn't happen as often as it should.
Always good to remember that very few people are naturally and constantly toxic, most people are just normal folks and everyone has bad days.
Not even mean, borderline conspiratorial in terms of fake stuff. I guess people have been "burned" a lot by fake stuff in the past, but even when something's fake they bring out every pitchfork available. It's like they don't understand the concept of entertainment. Not everything has to be real to be entertaining.
I think I've seen more internet rioting over fake stuff than I have over genuinely bad things.
I just had someone here accuse me of being part of an astroturfing campaign because I disagreed with them about FOSS licensing. At that point I just stop responding because there's no use having an argument about whether my entire comment history is just a facade to cover for my secretly paid-for opinions about FOSS.
I think that the "post-truth" world that is blossoming in Right-wing political circles, where incorrect facts are hand-waved away as "differences of opinion", is causing people elsewhere to react defensively and be very guarded against any actual differences of opinion, and some are overreacting and treating any difference of opinion as immediately suspect or even malicious.
Lemmy has a specific tech slant problem where inevitably if you post anything which is even tangentially tech related (such as sharing a spreadsheet on google), you will inevitably get someone complaining or ranting about big tech, providing a FOSS alternative, and typically chastising you for not knowing/doing better. I would say a good third to half of all comments we remove for not being nice is something cussing out someone else over a tech disagreement, which is a pretty wild problem to have.
I went to Reddit today and in a subreddit, they were literally joking about firebombing someone and how it would be disappointing if someone did it.
Reddit is basically truth social 2.0 at this point
Lmao the hairpin river is cool.
Idk, once a community reaches a certain point, people are just there to be there. I know hating on reddit is so popular right now but look at Facebook.
Reddit close to 4chan and the like for being totally anonymous, so there's simply no consequences to being an asshat. There's just too many people there and relationships don't matter.
It happens here too. Generally not from beehaw users though. If beehaw moves platforms, that would be one advantage.
No longer are users a faceless being from the horde.
That's a general internet thing. The best advice I can give is try to ignore the worst ones, and focus on the rest. Focusing on the negative just drags you down into it.
Originally reddit was a niche site with few visitors that was full of knowledge and a strong sense of community.
Then during Gamergate (2014), several organizational subs were created by rancid basement dwelling mysogitrolls that soon found that not only did they not get banned for doxxing and harassing people, that they gathered even more rancid basement dwelling mysogitrolls to their ranks and realized they weren't as rare as they worried.
Then 2015 rolled around and a SHITTON of alt-right wastes of their own father's protein came around for the whole trumpfest that reddit became at the time.
And they never left.
On the other hand, a ton of people who created content and supported other users with meaningful replies all decided it wasn't worth the constant harassment, doxxing, malicious reporting, bigotry, botting and refusal of the admins to address said behaviors.
And we left.
So the only redditors still there are either shitstains or too emotionally invested to leave yet.
And that latter group will get smaller and smaller as the shitstains become louder and more emboldened.
So it's gradually becoming Truth Social. Got it.
Seriously though, I've been using Reddit since probably about 2012. I never really put time into analyzing it's demise. I didn't care enough. Thanks for the information. 🙂