There are a few subreddits I check out from time to time because Lemmy doesn’t have the volume of users required to keep those niche conversations active.
Wow, what a pain! There’s so much hostility and byzantine rules. It’s just not worth it.
That place really went to shit over the past year. Which is hardly surprising seeing how many good people were pushed away from the platform.
Good mods were replaced by power tripping shitheads and good posters and commenters were driven off when they couldn’t use their desired app and the subreddits they liked went to shit or were nuked. Meanwhile, bots are ruining everything else.
And let’s not even get started on the ads, the IPO shenanigans, the AI thing…
Reddit needs to be taken out back and shot. It’s the humane thing to do; we shouldn’t let it suffer like this.
It was taken out back months ago but didn’t die for some reason and exists in this weird zombie state now
Alternate viewpoint: Whatever was good about reddit died long ago anyway. Whatever’s left is just a useless cash-grab cesspool. I’m perfectly fine with letting it simultaneously decay and cannibalize itself. Watching it play out is funny.
The problem is that nothing left alive still will ever die now. They have too many visitors, and too much money, and it’s damned near impossible to spin up alternatives without State level funding now. None of the average internet users give a fuck about quality, nor are they willing to visit a site that doesn’t already have a fully established community. Since you can’t establish a community without users, and you can’t get users when you don’t have users, it’s a done deal. The internet is like 5 sites now, and those sites can’t fuck up enough to drive a critical mass of people away. I mean look at what Facebook has become. It’s completely fucking worthless as a social media site now, full of 98% sponsored bullshit, yet they still have 3 billion visitors per day. The good Internet is dead. The corpos stole it & killed it. We will never get it back.
Instead, Huffman will eat it from the inside out like a parasite devouring its prey.
And people will praise him for being such a “success” (at business), and will be outright shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED that the Reddit experience does not improve as he promised it would.
But hopefully some of us at least will choose to learn from the clusterfuck that was Rexit.
I’d argue that reddit has been on the decline for years. We are just now starting to see the impacts of it: power tripping mods, admins that don’t care about anything except click count and allow it, spez being a pedophile piece of shit who made the unofficial apps useless, the allowance of hate subs that only got banned due to the outrage, people leaving in droves etc. I do agree with you, it needs to be put out of its misery.
I recently finished season 2 of One-Punch Man and I looked to see if there were any announcements about a season 3. I came across a reddit thread about season 3 being announced and holy shit are people nuts. The animation of OPM season 2 wasn’t as good as season 1, but it wasn’t actually bad; it just wasn’t as good as season 1. However, the reddit thread would make you think it was animated by preschoolers.
To be frank, that’s not a trait exclusive to Reddit - it’s a common characteristic of many (most) online fan communities.
My pet theory is that it’s a result of the community members spending excessive amounts of time analyzing the minutia of their interest. From there, a combination of nostalgia and the tendency of people to focus on flaws creates a perfect environment for negativity to flourish.
Personally, I’ve tried to do my part to push back against that trend in the spaces I favor, but it’s not easy.
To be frank, that’s not a trait exclusive to Reddit - it’s a common characteristic of many (most) online fan communities.
I agree 100%
I am a patient anime watcher, which in a nutshell means that I usually watch stuff when it is about to end or have ended way ago… anyway, I like to read what people thought about specific episodes so I headed to MyAnimeList to see what people thought about some seasons of Attack on Titan, and countless episodes where shitting about the animations and the usage of CGI lol, like dude, it looks fine, can we discuss about the plot?
This comment is so refreshing to see. I thought I was going crazy for enjoying season 2 and thinking that the animation wasn’t bad.
Season 2 started really poorly but it got better during the season
I should revisit it then. I found the first couple episodes kinda boring and just didn’t continue. Loved the first season.
There’s so much hostility
Same here, to be honest. Except for Beehaw, every other place seems like a no-mod/no-remember-the-human land.
Fwiw, my own experience changed dramatically after I blocked lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net. Some people also block lemmy.ml but I like the memes so I do not go that far - yet when people do come back with the most inane shit replies, it is >90% from there.
The Fediverse does require curation to be halfway usable, but the fact that nice places exist here at all makes it very different from Reddit imho. That takes effort to maintain, and while mods may not always be perfect, consider the kind of person that would remain as a mod on Reddit after the protests… overworked, entirely unappreciated, and having to deal with the most childish people. When old-reddit gets further shut down (as it seems to have started to people say, e.g. when accessed via a VPN) it will degrade even further. The scabs will run the show, even more so than now. Just like happened with X.
Ofc, do as you please, but I hope this perspective helps:-).
Your first paragraph is spot on for me. I also haven’t blocked lemmy.ml yet, but I’m this fucking close man. Personally, I hope that lemmy grows, grows more diverse, and the politically toxic side of lemmy gets diluted a bit.
It is what it is. The original founding developer is a tankie, and offered everything he did entirely for free. Meanwhile after Reddit began to collapse there were several projects - like squabbles and discuit - who offered to let people come onto their instance but refused to offer their code as open source, presumably with the intention of using the standard approach to first disrupt the market and then later make a bunch of money (also used to lure in fish, set out the bait and then reel it in).
The closest one to Lemmy was Kbin, but that has its own whole entire set of drama, being open source but not sharing the development process with anyone else and then the singular founding developer being extremely slow to add new features or take things further or even maintain the existing instance in the meantime (there is the Mbin fork, but if Lemmy is early beta or late alpha stage software, Kbin/Mbin is still early alpha, plus Kbin repeatedly goes down for days to a week at a time).
Meanwhile, most people who just enjoy being “taken care of” by daddy spez remained on Reddit, which from a technical perspective (of like server uptime and whatnot) does objectively offer a better experience. At least until old-reddit is killed off, though in the meantime they seem to allow it due to their increasingly dire need for content creators.
So anyway I am saying that politics is very much entertwined with the entire existence of this place. People chasing profits have other Reddit alternatives that they turned to, so we are the odd ones who enjoy “sharing” (i.e. in the socialist sense) and are willing to put up with the significantly higher technical barrier to entry and greater share of problems, in order to preserve our freedoms and help set something up that has a hope of lasting in the future, as corporations enshittify themselves all around us.
But yeah, I want to ditch the toxicity side of it as well:-). Except I cannot change others, only myself, hence why I just block those and move on with my life, and let them do the same.
Some people also block lemmy.ml but I like the memes so I do not go that far
I’ve reported so many “memes” from there that aren’t anything close to a meme. They’re just hyper hostile political propaganda.
How much of that is due to it being one of the larger servers though? As well as one of the oldest. I don’t know that much about it - there’s the origin story but unlike searching for info about e.g. lemmy.world, I cannot readily find things about lemmy.ml like where it is located geographically. The closest description I’ve seen is here that only says “Server looks to be located in France”. But who knows if that is true?
Anyway, you get to know the servers on Lemmy after awhile - like I’ve rarely if ever had an issue with anyone at all from mander.xyz, but then lemmy.world is a mixed bag (that one b/c it’s so big), and lemmy.ml is decidedly lopsided. But it is not the only place that has trolls. Perhaps I will block it one day, but I did not want to take that extreme step without giving them as much of a chance as I could.
Which I did for both lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net as well - and ultimately decided that it was better for the sake of my sanity to block them than to leave Lemmy altogether (fortunately v.0.19 came out just then and made it possible and easy:-).
So now I want to tell people that they can DRAMATICALLY improve their experience on the Fediverse, just by blocking those 2-3 servers, in case it helps salvage their experience of it as well.
Hexbear and Lemmygrad got bans from me almost immediately (after a couple of days) because it was obvious that all of their content is extremist. Lemmy.ml has a pretty good mix, but their memes community specifically has a ton of propaganda. I haven’t noticed any of their other communities being reliably propaganda. I actually started out on Lemmy.ml. I heard they are leftist and I was like “oh, I’m a leftist too. I’ll go there”. But then after being there for a while I was like “uh… Maybe I’m not quite the leftist I thought I was”.
I would actually prefer to be exposed to multiple POVs wherever possible, if it were delivered in a respectful manner. Likewise I enjoy learning more about various religions, and cultures, and all manner of things. However, I must draw the line against trolling behaviors. So for me, it is not just that they contain “content that I may not agree with”, but that they outright encourage behaviors that have driven me and so many others away.
I got my start on Kbin.social, before it repeatedly kept going down for a week at a stretch, multiple times, and they had already defederated from those places, so fortunately I got to be exposed to the friendlier side of the Fediverse first, so I knew what was possible. But then after switching to try a couple of Lemmy instances, I gave serious thought to leaving the Fediverse entirely. There is so much else that I could do with my time, you know!? Read books, watch videos (like Hank & John Greene’s Crash Course series on YouTube), go outside and touch grass - I don’t need to be arguing with the emotional equivalent of toddlers online, acting as the recipient for their emo-venting aka vomiting all over me rather than having true conversations aka “communication”.
That said, I might understand what you mean about the memes - if they violate the community rules then they are being disrespectful to the recipients who would have to spend time reading them, rather than enjoyable content. And if there is enough spamming of such, it inches closer to “trolling” behaviors, as in the same kind even if not quite degree. Though oftentimes people from that server also engage in actual trolling as well, in the form of responses that do not care about how the recipient would like to receive.
Anyway, I left Reddit over that shit, and I would leave the Fediverse too if it came down to it, though fortunately it works to just block those 2-3 places and the rest becomes a MUCH better place to play around in!:-)
I think it goes beyond trolling, I think it is astroturfing. A lot of it seems too on the nose to just be some rando cranking out messages on his phone. But like you said, the rest of the fediverse is pretty okay.
I also like being exposed to alternative viewpoints, but it’s hard to find viewpoints online that aren’t extremist these days. Everything is so tribalistic that ideologies seem to become parodies of themselves.
I miss the authentic conversations that used to be common on forums, then Facebook, then early Reddit. You don’t find them very often on any of the remaining sites. But we’re kind of having one here, so I guess it still happens, just not as often.
Astroturfing: Maybe… but also, we don’t need to ascribe to malice what is explainable with just flat, sheer stupidity. Though it could be that too.
Between the two though, the latter is far more damaging imho. That gets perfectly illustrated in every zombie movie ever where the giant horde of zombies lies outside awaiting to devour everyone inside of a safe space, and inevitably someone who is just literally that dumb tells themselves “but surely they won’t eat my face off!?”, and proceeds to open the door, which promptly gets everyone inside killed, often while they are literally sleeping & thus absolutely defenseless, b/c they trusted the guards to protect them and thus let down their guard to rest.
The “other”, the “enemy”, can only do so much to harm us. It is when the call comes from inside the house that the real danger begins. Like, if you wanted to destroy something large - a nation, a religion, a movement - the best way is not to go at it with a gun, but to join it instead, and subvert it from the inside. Look at e.g. Google that “helped” the development of Android, or how people are releasing genetically-modified mosquitos to help combat malaria. So if e.g. Russia wanted to bring down e.g. the USA, it could… oh, I dunno, let’s say send over Fox News, then wait a few decades for that bomb to go off. It would be quite effective. Not only would it disable American interference in Russia’s agenda - e.g. as it conquers other nations such as Ukraine but also does many other activities e.g. in the Middle East - but that process could at best even convert your former foe into an actual, full-on ally. Even on purely theoretical grounds, what could possibly be more beneficial for your side than to not merely deny resources to your enemy but to actively increase your own capabilities? There are a LOT of advantages to having a friend, perhaps second only to e.g. doubling your own power (and even that only from the perspective that people such as Putin seem to ascribe to, whereas many people who think differently would actively prefer the opposite as in the former over the latter).
Russia is known for funding the extremes on both sides of hot-button issues. By making every movement into a grotesque version of itself, they foment division, and regardless of what those particular issues are (abortion, LBGTQIA+ rights, guns, who even cares), that division is the real point. For example, although this one is just me guessing, who came up with that name to “defund the police”?!? Democrats were talking about increasing funding, and listening to the very people who know the most about the situation - the police officers themselves - who unequivocally state that they feel unprepared to go in and handle the “mental health” types of scenarios. That is by far what gets the majority of police killed - like as you turn to arrest the husband that was beating the wife & kids, suddenly the wife is stabbing you from behind to defend him, even when she was the one who made the call in the first place. That shit is traumatic AF, and those officers that survive such a scenario most often quit. So how did the liberal movement to help police suddenly get twisted into sounding & even doing the polar opposite of that? And using statistics that are the exact opposite of true - e.g. Trump gained support among police by going around telling them the “feels like” statement that >90% of murders are due to interracial crime… except the true statistic is <9% iirc (specifically white-black at the time was I believe 3-6%).
For the anti-vax scenario, and this one I’m not guessing on b/c we’ve literally traced this propaganda back to Russian troll farms, they similarly warped the agenda not from “the vaccine is new and relatively untested, b/c of the unprecedented speed with which it was developed” but all the way over to “the vaccine is dangerous and if you truly cared about people you should even prevent them from taking it even if they desperately want it for themselves (e.g. by violently destroying the batches)”. How is that about “their” rights to not take a potentially “dangerous” substance, when they are actively preventing others from making that choice for themselves?
So anyway, yeah, even liberal propaganda can be as bad as conservative - even if Republican politicians are acting far more dangerously than Democrat ones i.e. obstructionism. I can never find this quote anymore, but at one point around the time when the pandemic status was being officially ended in the USA (despite how the WHO says that it is still on-going), someone (I thought it was the FDA Director, or something along those lines?) said that “the greatest killer in the USA today is stupidity”. Heart attacks from the way people eat, car crashes from the way we drive, soon we can perhaps add planes falling from the sky, obviously all the easily-preventable diseases where people barge into hospitals (sometimes, heart-breakingly, waving actual guns at the staff) demanding cures for despite having passed all the possibilities for such in the past by refusing to prevent it even knowing that no cure for it exists once the condition is entered into, and ofc we will soon need to start adding the effects of climate change e.g. heat exhaustion, and ofc already we can add senior abuse aka “excess deaths” during the pandemic that somehow “wasn’t real”.
Anyway, I kinda went off the deep end there didn’t I? :-P At the end, all we can do is our best, as we try to move forward.
Oh, and yeah, I used to try to have these kinds of conversations, but long before I left Reddit I had already long ceased that. There is only so much complaining at “walls of werds” you can hear before you realize that what you are offering is not being received, thus obviously the only friendly thing to do was to stop. I too would have GREAT discussions even on Facebook - I don’t know if I ever convinced anyone of anything, but even so it was wonderful to hear from e.g. a conservative who was an actual social worker and so who had the potential to inform me better than my more theoretical analysis of a subject (although my point in turn there was that stats do not lie, as in a few counter-examples do not mean that a trend in the opposite direction does not exist). Those kinds of discussions in full friendliness and mutual respect, regardless of the outcome, are part of the spice of life for me, and may I just say “fuck Reddit” once again for having spoiled them by enshittifying their platform, e.g. by turning away (and in some cases actively booting) the mods - which started to happen long before Rexit by continually ignoring the mods asks to allow even already-existing moderation tools, b/c it was not in line with their profit model:-(.
So, you can respond to any or all or none of this, in any timeframe, but in any case I do hope it was somewhat interesting:-).
“Centre-left” or “left of centre” are viable political position that may better describe your views. They tend to be a bit more “individualistic” (possibly the wrong choice of word) than full-fat socialism can be.
Did you go through my history or something? I don’t disagree with your observation, I’m just wondering how you arrived at it.
I’m not stalking you… honest ;-) “Left, right and centre” have always existed on a spectrum. Like you (I think) I’m left wing compared to an ultra nationalist, for example, but compared to a “tankie” I’m… whatever insult they want to throw my way. The key thing is “left” in itself is also a kind of spectrum; there’s an enormous difference between Stalin’s collectivisation of Soviet agriculture versus free school meals for all. You’ve met some socialists or communists etc and you seem to have realised/decided they’re a bit too left for you. Therefore it seemed reasonable to guess you were a little bit left as opposed to being full-on red flag waving left. This rant is just trying to say that there’s an entire sliding scale of left (and right) and it’s not about being 100% anything. Slightly or a bit left of middle seemed about where you might be.
I dunno, seems fairly chill to me. Maybe we subscribe to very different channels.
The list of people, communities, and instances I have blocked on Lemmy is like 20x longer than what I had blocked on Reddit. And every day new accounts and communities pop up that get added to the list. At this point the only reason I don’t go back to Reddit is out of principle. Because Lemmy, for as good of an idea as it is, is like a cesspool for people who believe politics/social politics is a personality trait. And Reddit was becoming that way too, but maybe its different now considering Lemmy is like a sponge for those kind of folk.
Lol, caring for society is definitely a personality trait. Not caring for it is literally a trait of sociopathy.
You’ve been here 9 months and haven’t witnessed it here?
To be fair, it’s another level on Reddit compared to here
Haven’t dealt with it so wouldn’t have a clue.
I’m not talking about users who make crazy comments. I’m talking about how I made a legitimate, on-topic, non-controversial post in good faith and it got removed with no explanation. Then when I followed the sub’s instructions about how to ask why my post disappeared, the mod replied with a bunch of passive aggressive snarky shit and muted me.
Yeah pretty ridiculous… which subreddit and about what?
Lemmy is what reddit was 12-15 years ago. There’s no comparison.
Wasn’t comparing it. I was really stating that humans are toxic… especially when anonymous and I’ve seen/witnessed plenty of it on here. I’ve even been an asshole quite a few times. There’s a lot of good moderation that may be hiding it from you. Especially on world.
On the topic of byzantine rules, I’d found out at sometime last year that a major subreddit had banned linking other subreddits…
In the 6 years I was there I thought that’s what Reddit was all about, but what do I know?
The Fediverse is perfectly set up for linking people to new communities they might not have come across on their own.
Trying to figure out which rule I broke on Reddit and when it was implemented from moderators was a pain. In contrast, Lemmy mods have messaged me when they want me to edit my comment to conform better to the rules which was great. Lemmy public modlogs are also a huge improvement since while it can’t stop tyrant mods/admins, it makes knowing how you crossed them much clearer for people.
FWIW subreddits that had that rule generally had it to prevent brigading
Never really understood that logic. It doesn’t stop brigading, just makes it a tiny bit more difficult.
I used to get shadowbanned all the time because I often posted lots of on topic links. I think it’s automated.
Consider for a moment where you live. Now consider how we live.
People are crushed all day at both their jobs. They have their livelihoods stolen away from them to increase the profits of mega sized corporations and the 1%ers that control them.
The bi partisan police state is stronger then ever despite the George floydd protests (this is the 1% telling us the protests didn’t go far enough by the way)
There is little representation to be had at the voting booth. You would think the conservatives would be happy since they can choose between two right wing parties, but even they want their shitty version of change.
This isn’t a great way to live our lives for the majority of the population. Deep down, most people understand how broken and toxic living like this is, and it gets expresses itself through this toxic behavior. Not that this is any excuse for said behavior.
However, if you live in the shitter multiverse, don’t be surprised shitty people are shitty after getting treated like shit by other shitters while living a exploitative shitty way of life. Shit.
Fuckin A right. Well said.
tbh I’ve had almost exclusively hostile(-ish) exchanges on lemmy as well, but obviously going back to that morally bankrupt place isn’t gonna be the answer.
Depending on the community, a lot of the hostility could be from Russian/Chinese/N.Korean bots
Question: can someone help me properly calibrate my Ender 3 Pro printer?
Answer: Your printer isn’t calibrated properly from the factory because capitalism bad and America bad.
We get a lot of the same shit here on Lemmy.
You know it’s bad when even a user named anticorp is complaining about it.
“Joebama made too many regulations, so you can’t properly calibrate your printer.” 🤣
I almost never see right-wingers in the wild these days. It seems that they’ve mostly retreated into their safe spaces. Or maybe I’ve just done a great job of blocking and avoiding most of the places they congregate.
Probably the latter. Right wingers don’t like spaces where there aren’t liberals to troll because that’s the point for them. They don’t wanna talk to other right wingers any more than you do because they’re mostly toxic people
Maybe some of them, but the r/conservative subreddit is huge, and they won’t let anyone except right wingers comment on almost everything. Only people with conservative flair can comment on like 95% of their posts.
The snowflaking and censorship in that subreddit is wild
Not as wild as their lack of self-awareness.
Tell us more
Genuine interest or just spezzing?
I want to know
I want to know
What love is~~~~~
I want you to show me~~~~~
Like look at this shit. They’re all throwing a fit because the poor guy said to not be so hard on the dog’s owner, you’d think it was their kid that died not his. https://www.reddit.com/r/Edmonton/comments/1bymgws/father_of_boy_killed_by_dogs_says_media_attention/
So, I used to be a redditor. For eleven years, to be precise. Back then, for the first few years I was there, things were awesome. But as time went on, things seemed to get worse. Reddit has been on the decline for a very, very long time now. The community has become very toxic at this point; if you have an opinion they don’t like, they’ll dogpile you over it. They let their mods get away with abusing their powers (/r/SteamDeck is a great example), and they used to allow massive hate subreddits until the backlash caught up to them as well. All in all, they don’t care about their users. All they care about is keeping those clicks up. I was recently permabanned because I criticized some mods who reported it as “harassment”. Reddit is not a good place anymore, but they sure like to pretend they are.
My last interaction had me answering someone’s question then getting a permaban from some insecure mod who didn’t like that reality made them sad. I just walked away after 16 years.
11 years here myself. It’s a damn shame.
Worse: the question was “why do people think that…,” and the answer was literally just why those people think that. That had me apparently advocating for the abuse of children for some reason. It was weird. When I asked, they went off, called me sick, told me to get help, etc. It was totally bizarre.
That’s classic reddit, naturally.
I’m officially labeling Reddit as Nazi sympathizers, this isn’t a joke I am completely genuine.
The reason I know about Lemmy is because a few days ago they permanently suspended my account for “glorifying violence”
The horrible thing I said was that “I should have a legally protected right to punch Nazis” in a post featuring a video where a big dude knocks a neo nazi the fuck out. They swiftly denied an appeal to this ban as well so fuck me I guess.
Even if you think that I shouldn’t be allowed to say that, (which is stupid), I don’t think it’s permanent ban sitewide territory, especially when far worse things are happening on that site.
Some fuckwit had to actually manually flag that, according to their obnoxiously long DM about it.
On top of everything else they had the balls to say I should “familiarize myself with the TOS” like bitch you just banned me from the whole ass site forever I think it’s pretty safe to wipe my ass with the reddit TOS at this point.
You endorsed violence, that is against terms of service, there is no clause for “it’s ok to endorse violence against people we don’t like”. If you think that a blanket ban against endorsements of violence makes them nazi sympathisers, then you have some growing up to do.
You only have yourself to blame and you should be careful that you don’t find yourself banned elsewhere.
Nah reddit can fuck off for this one mate, I don’t give a shit what you think about this sorry.
I too have been recently banned. I had the audacity to criticize some mods. It’s funny how you’re permanently banned for “glorifying violence” when “justice served,” for example, a sub full of violence glorification, exists. But the violence is directed at bad people, so I guess it gets a pass.
They’re hypocritical, is the thing, not much more to say.
Yeah, that’s really all there is to it. Hypocritical and ultra temperamental.
You get banned and muted even if you don’t follow the rules. Also many of these rules are just umbrellas to give mods reason to surpress your ability to be heard if they deem fit.
Come to @apple_enthusiast here and watch the haters play. I wish it were just reddit.
