i agree but man i wish some of the smaller comms on here were more active. don't get me wrong seeing the same people in most comment sections is nice because it feels more a community that way, but it bums me out whenever i go to a comm about an interest of mine and the last post was made a month ago with 3 upvotes and no comments.
I maintain two opinions:
One of the mods is in Benghazi.
The thing that makes all 3 of those places good is that the userbase is talking to each other authentically instead of writing comments to secure votes.
On the wider internet most people are writing their comments not for the person they're actually replying to, but for the audience that will be voting on the comment. Social media has now trained people into this mindset and it has produced a rancid style of inauthentic interaction.
Even with people I fucking hate and disagree with I prefer an authentic interaction where they're actually responding to me and having a real conversation compared to where they're responding for a perceived audience of voters. This is now almost impossible to find online.
I will say however, the times where that hasn't been the case here on Hexbear have been some of the most toxic experiences I've ever had online. When a hexbear turns bad-faith it gets really nasty.
It has been really nice to not have a platform filled with one-uppers and combative ppl trying to drive engagement and "go viral" with every comment. It also really helps to have mods that have our backs, and aren't going to allow stormfront/reddit-tier bigotry.
I think people are pretty combative here, viciously so sometimes. But it's still authentic, they have an exchange that is still very direct and not targeted at who is voting.
This is very different to anywhere else. I've actually attempted to recreate it in other spaces I moderate and I've failed so far, I don't exactly understand the criteria involved with getting people to act this way. It's very difficult to marshall people into it, particularly on reddit where the platform is designed specifically to cause people to soapbox for voters. I have no idea how it happened on CTH or TrueAnon. I suspect the culture of the space was primarily caused by the podcasts and not by the modteams or reddit.
I don't know what kind of places you moderate, but there plenty of factors involved, and a big one is the medium itself. Compare a chatroom or forum (incl imageboards) to reddit-like sites, and I'm sure you can already think of a few ways each pressures people to talk a different way - forum posts get more attention when they bumped with replies and that makes troll bait posts powerful. On Lemmy, those will get sunken to the bottom with downvotes and on Hexbear a troll doesn't even get the validation of downvotes. On the other hand, on these kind of sites, bland agreeable neutral posts tend to get the most upvotes/least downvotes, so the default front page will be contantly plastered with banal twitter platitudes and cute funny animal pictures.
These trends can and have been overcome, but it's tough without careful site design or an unusually disciplined userbase. (As in, won't respond to trolls)
Compare a chatroom or forum (incl imageboards) to reddit-like sites, and I'm sure you can already think of a few ways each pressures people to talk a different way
Even in chatrooms this occurs after your room crosses a threshold where it's large enough to start making people behave that way. They stop having conversations and start behaving more like they're in a sports stadium crowd. This is particularly annoying to deal with because overflow spaces don't work either, some people use them because they like a quieter space but the original space still typically stays above that threshold and so remains a problem.
These trends can and have been overcome
Yes and no. The different spaces produce different behaviours. But Trueanon, Hexbear and CTH all existed on spaces that overwhelmingly suffer from the problem and yet... The userbase does not. The userbase is different. If a userbase can be different despite being on spaces that would typically produce the problem, then conditions can be created in order to create that userbase. The issue is one of finding the correct method to produce those conditions, as owner of the space.
You make a good point that Trueanon and CTH exist/existed on reddit and yet were able to resist the structural tendencies of reddit's format.
Even in chatrooms this occurs after your room crosses a threshold where it’s large enough to start making people behave that way.
Definitely. In fact, I don't think I'm in any chatrooms of more than a dozen people because I want conversations or to help make things, not just yelling into a river.
The issue is one of finding the correct method to produce those conditions, as owner of the space.
Exactly. It's not easy, I've seen it done well and I've seen it devastate sites.
I also think it's surprising that those places emerged since, to put it bluntly, CTH pod is a prime example of 'dirtbag left', and in my experience many dirtbag communities are where trolls can have a great time and attempts at strong moderation (like forcing an ideological tendency, shutting down drama, censoring language) tend to dampen the community. Sometimes owners can't force conditions upon a community once it has an identity, if those conditions go against that identity, like imagine if a rogue moderator or even the whole staff wanted Hexbear to become a serious theory-focused community and banned what they saw as low-effort bits. It just wouldn't work without destroying the place, there are still ways for the owners or regular users to encourage education but it won't be done through moderation.
That's the kind of thing I mean about site culture and site design helping to overcome the format. What are the first things a new user sees? What values do the pinned sticky posts promote? What values does the sidebar impart? Will they even read that? If a moderation team is too overwhelmed with moderation duties, there's no real time to get much feedback or to design a good space, it's just reacting as crises come up.
just popping in to say fuck discord.
IRC but worse should not have been a winning idea
I kept saying it. Internet is an ocean of bigotry and ignorance. The worst possible place for an LLM to learn from.
I feel like eventually we'll see an "evolution" of LLMs where the big innovation will be cutting 90% of the Internet out of the training data without breaking the whole thing. Imagine if LLM output was as dry, neutral, and reliable as the average encyclopedia (yes I know those aren't perfect either but it's an improvement over reddit threads at least).
Pirating shit is becoming harder and harder and google is basically unusable now
dude i was looking for art reference images of an arcade cabinet on google images the other day and literally every single one was a modern product currently for sale, every single one for like the first 30 results had a little price tag icon on it and most were from arcade1up, i might as well have clicked the shopping tab, its so so fucked what theyre doing
Hexbear reminds me of the old internet. People being their authentic selves. Doesn't mean there's no nastiness but the ratio of performative or inflammatory bullshit to people talking is much lower than the average internet.
I also maintain that an extremely low tolerance for bad faith or cruel behaviour is necessary online. Since the regulatory mechanisms that govern social interaction elsewhere are not available.
Whenever I look at lemmy outside, or worse reddit, it's just performative grandstanding, normalised bigotry, garbled repetition, and in "jokes".
Yeah I'm sure glad we don't have incomprehensible repetitive in jokes. I'm gonna post a picture of a bean now.
Jokes aside, this is one of the few places on the Internet where you don't have to be a power user to feel like part of a community
I think a lot of that is because of size as well. Your post won't get buried under 20 copies of the same cliche joke (one with 850 upvotes, one with 23, and the rest at +1 or +2) everything is actually read by at least a few humans somewhere, and everything is presumably also written by humans.
hexbear is the only place on the internet ive joined where i had to tell them my political views and be approved first. something about creating a place where everyone fundamentally agrees with each other and differences in opinion are usually complex technical things probably makes it nicer. im in some private diϟϟcord servers that are really good, i think its about curating a group of people you know you'll get along with
I think what you're describing is not just political opinions, but shared values. Especially when it comes to upholding human rights, and dismantling systems of oppression that threaten human rights.
Right wingers don't really have any shared values, except obtain and hold power by any means necessary, so right wing forums are outrageously toxic to each other even when they technically hold the same political position.
That's why we have a "loneliness epidemic", as it turns out, being a genocide-supporting chud who doesn't know empathy also robs you of genuine human intimacy.
That's why we have a "loneliness epidemic", as it turns out, being a genocide-supporting chud who doesn't know empathy also robs you of genuine human intimacy.
i don't think that's sufficient to explain the loneliness epidemic. too many of us with humanity are also completely isolated and have no avenue to make friends or love someone
yeah real
hexbear is the only place on the internet ive joined where i had to tell them my political views and be approved first.
Buh? Do we have a new policy of account creation
For a long time, I think.
Dang I really need to make a new alt I just think this handle is really funny
It makes me laugh, honestly the username bits here are all 10/10
Some of the esoteric bullshit you people reference or pun… it’s fucking artwork is what it is.
Yeah, I’m trans and it’s depressing how hurtful every other social media is, can’t follow any trans creators because the comments are just hate speech that is totally okay and allowed by the site, apparently. And those same people being hateful will turn around and pretend the world caters to trans people and “you can’t say anything anymore!!1!1” Reddit is maybe okay when I stick to the subreddits I follow.
I used to visit reddit regularly in the past, and the ridiculous and monstrous stuff they always said had become normalized to me; I hated it, but I got used to it; but then I discovered chapo and LSC and now every time I go back for a visit, I'm reminded of how unacceptably awful and childish the people there are.
Reddit is so very libified. I got banned from r/politics for criticizing the US & Saudi war in Yemen while Joe Biden was visiting his dear friend MBS in 2021. I was being "a troll".
I wasn't even trolling! If Reddit was full of conservatives, it would be at least fun to troll. But it is just depressing.
The final straw for me with Reddit, and looking back I’m embarrassed it took so long, was a thread where people defended using the n-word and were getting upvoted. I decided I needed to delete the app to prevent hypertension after that one.
I used to have a bunch of cosy little forums to check out daily. They're all dead now and probably moved to Discord, and I hate Discord. Everything else is on Reddit or Twitter or any of the other massive social media platforms which are full of fascists.
I miss that about the old internet. I'd get home from school and read through a daily rotation of sites' articles, forums, and blogs. Most of them don't exist anymore or have completely gone to shit. Ones that are functional are overrun by terminally online chuds whining about minorities and women. Decades ago, they'd get banned for the things they say today or chased off by normalish people. Now, they're the majority of site users, so they get a pass.
/r/trueanon is pretty good but why do they insist on using the r-word all the time?
r/trueanon has the closest energy to the original cth but I really don't like how they started adopting the cumtown "I'm gay and my dick is small" bit it just feels tired
they're also not ideologically coherent and I've seen too much whinging over what they call identity politics over there, although I guess the old cth had that as well
America is cooked bro
I went today to a fall festival and they had literal ass children in police vests helping people park
Certain Fediverse instances didn't last long, including two Kitsu instances. I just wanted a good instance that lasts forever with good support.
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