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.

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.

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 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?

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!"

A lot of those people are here too, trying to recreate that outrage machine

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.

the concept of fediverse give a lot more ways to block hate, and there isn't any algorithm to spread hate for engagement

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.

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 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’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.

Anger is an extremely effective way to spread an idea.

Posts which incite emotion in you make you engage - upvote, comment and share. CGP Grey (a redditor himself) made a great video about this a while ago.

We can only hope Lemmy users are more self-aware, and choose to engage with things they enjoy more than things they hate. But given human psychology, it's unlikely...

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.

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.

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.

It's the removal of a down vote count. It's the same problem across all social media. People spew absolute outrageous comments... Get 3 likes or votes, and they think it's a positive score.

The reality is 10k down votes and 3 likes from bots.

It's really changed the internet landscape and ultimately society. We hide dissent.

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

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'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.

People ruin everything.

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.

They did this to themselves.

Part of it was corporate greed and incompetence by the Reddit team where they were trying to drum up numbers for their upcoming IPO. For a social media platform, member numbers is pretty much the only thing that matters, so connected with the other 2 issues, it probably was encouraged for them to ban users knowing full well that most of them would just create a new account - which of course that would let them say they have even more registered accounts when they would go to advertisers.

Part of it was various misinformation campaigns run by political parties and foreign governments to spread hate and instability. The "Smarter Everyday" YouTube channel specifically did a video about Reddit and "bad actors" a few years back on the phenomenon which I recommend everyone watch, but not sure how linking to videos is accepted on Lemmy, so I'll let you find it. The FBI keeps on warning us about "bad actors" trying to spread lies and it is only going to get more intense as we get close to the upcoming US elections.

Part of it was an echo chamber where no alternative views could be expressed without mods getting all uppity and banning users. Mods have ultimate say and there were no checks-and-balances to what mods could do. No real way to question a ban and no real way to question a mod. And the lack of alternative views is especially egregious because Reddit was obviously a very left leaning site. They were doing the exact same thing that they would make fun of right-wing media would do, namely create this echo chamber where only like-minded people were really allowed to speak. Now to be clear, I lean left on the vast majority of issues, but for fucks sakes, some of the nonsense that was accepted on Reddit would make even me cringe.

In the end, Reddit got too big for it's own good because most of these problems could be solved on a much smaller site, but Reddit got so big with so much money at stake and then it's size made it such a large target for people. It became just a toxic mess.

(sorry for the diatribe, I was going to write 3 bullet points and leave it at that, and then just kept on expanding it more and more)

I think the larger a community becomes, the more likely that will happen.

Roughly 5 years, so I joined when things already 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 full 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.

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.

my monkey brain reaction while reading the title

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.

A repeating pattern I noticed on Reddit: Whenever a video of a woman hitting a man was posted (which is of course wrong, not condoning violence at all!), the comments were always filled with hundreds of guys happily proclaiming their readiness to knock tf out a woman given the right circumstances. Just waiting for an excuse to get violent.

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.

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.

Unfortunately hate = engagement = advertising impressions = money

That's why it's important to like, and comment, and thank posters for positive posts.

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.

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.