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What factors do you think contributed to the "Reddit Hivemind"? How do you believe it can be avoided?

I’ve been seeing more often (and others have posted the same) that some of the elements of “Reddit etiquette” seem to be taking over here. Luckily I can still find discussion comments but it seems the jokes and general “downvote because I disagree” are slowly taking over.

So the question becomes is it the size or the functionality of the site? The people or popularity? What’s your thoughts?

edit: should I change it to Lemmy-hivemind? Exhibit A: the amount of downvotes without a single explanation (guessing it’s anything to do with Reddit being talked about).

PierreKanazawa ,
@PierreKanazawa@fedia.io avatar

All the factors. I think this is more likely not a discrete case

xilliah , (edited )

We need proper platforms for discussion. Reddit isn’t such a platform.

The reddit mechanic of using upvotes and using a sorting function optimized for engagement leads to unfavorable second order mechanics.

I’m not gonna share my thoughts on how to fix this. There are certainly experts out there who know more than me about game theory and rhetoric.

crimsonpoodle ,

I think one advantage lemmy might have is the possibility of expanding the number of sorting metrics allowing users to sort things the way they choose rather than a few monolithic sort options.

Fidel_Cashflow ,
@Fidel_Cashflow@lemmy.ml avatar

if we can avoid Lemmy’s most active city being Eglin Air Force Base, we just might be able to avoid the hive mind

sunzu2 ,

Shills bots and feds haha

When you got no friends, you can count on them to provide healthy engagement every single time

Kalcifer , (edited )
@Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works avatar

Imo, it likely was/is due to the voting system — and, in a similar sense, awards. Redditors want to increase their Karma scores and seem to, at least subconsciously, view it as clout. So, they’ll create posts with the intent of farming these points — ie they post things that they know will get a specific response from the masses. What also doesn’t help, and is something that Lemmy similarly suffers from, is that there generally is no established consensus on how votes should be used. An upvote could mean agreement, or that a post is funny, or that it’s good quality, or that it’s on topic for a community, etc. A downvote could mean that the person disagrees with the post, or that they think that it isn’t relevant or they simply don’t like the OP. In reality, all that votes do, at the fundamental level, is tell the algorithm where it should place posts (a personalized recommendation algorithm changes this a bit, but the effect is essentially the same) — a post with a large upvote to downvote to ratio gets shown higher up and, by extension, more than one with a smaller ratio. This creates a sort of feedback loop where the posts that get farmed for upvotes get shown more. People don’t want their post to be buried, so they’ll only post what they think will get upvotes. And since upvotes are usually used for things that illicit an “agreement” response, only posts that people agree with will be shown.

The solution to these issues, imo, is to create an obvious standard for how votes are used and change how they’re interpreted by the algorithm. Imo, Facebook was on the right track with how they were using emojis as the voting method. People generally react to posts with emotion, and an emoji is a good representation of that. You could potentially still have an up/down form of vote (alongside the emotional voting options), but it would be standardized to only be used as a metric for relevance/importance/correctness. This could be enforced by moderation, if votes were publicly viewable, by allowing moderators to remove people that are vote brigading (not including emotional votes). Emotional votes probably shouldn’t be considered by the algorithm so that emotional bias can be avoided. Or, at the very least, there should be different algorithms that take these voting types into account I’m different ways (eg if you only want funny posts, you could sort to primarily get posts with a laughing reaction). In addition to this, also removing the gamification aspect (not showing (at least not publicly) total scores on profiles).

interdimensionalmeme ,

Lemmy has the same deficient content sorting system. Just +1 or -1, no amplitude, no tagging just dumb total score plus hidden moderation interference shaping the discussion from the shadows.

LarkinDePark ,

I’m disappointed in Lemmy’s lack of experimentation or innovation here.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Yes, they are largely stuck in the toxic reddit mindset.

makingStuffForFun ,
@makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml avatar

The power triping mods. They made their way here. Twas indeed sad.

interdimensionalmeme ,

It’s mod revolt that was lemmy’s first big push. Unfortunately this means they are the major force shaping Lemmy in their image. They want unchanged reddit except they want their fiefdom secured and that’s all we’re getting. Lemmy is not the last stop in the slashdot->digg->reddit->Lemmy exodus. I just hope we’re not stuck here another whole decade again.

13esq ,

You’re right. Votes need to be used to encourage debate and not used to discourage wrong think.

Down votes should only be used for off topic/hateful/bad faith arguments etc and not just used because “I disagree”.

I know that realistically, that’s never going to happen but it would help!

systemglitch ,

Political correctness leads to hivemind 100%, because people are afraid to be ostracized.

selokichtli ,

Isolated communities sharing rigid points of view are a problem, but I think the voting system is to blame. When someone disagrees and downvotes as a consequence, it changes the way that comment is read by the next reader, this will likely generate inertia over the way the message is read in general through time.

I can’t explain why I do like to read other people’s comments. Most of the time I do not bother to engage in conversations with strangers, but Lemmy has several advantages over Reddit just because it doesn’t count or publish people’s “karma”. It’s a blessing that some instances of Lemmy can also hide the voting system altogether, which is the only way I can beat the anxiety of putting my thoughts out there. I think these elements make Reddit more addictive, because a “good” number in your comments and profile confirms your membership to a given community. I believe it also shapes a “correct” way of thinking.

i_stole_ur_taco ,

The universal problem is that there’s no shared definition of what a downvote represents. Is it “this is spam and should be removed”? “I don’t like this”? “This doesn’t belong here”? “I want to see less of this”? “I disagree”?

That’s not even a Reddit problem - it’s innate to any social media voting apparatus. Extend it to Facebook, even. Does the laugh reaction mean I’m laughing with you or at you?

Most comments and posts I’ve downvoted have been because I accidentally swiped too far right and my upvote changed to the downvote action and I didn’t even notice. So those downvotes don’t even mean anything!

I think the right answer is to stop worrying about votes. Even if they all mean the same thing they’re still meaningless. It’s better to change your post and comment sorting setting than to try to social engineer a way out of it.

can ,

Reddiquette says

Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.

13esq ,

If people followed that there would be no problem.

Unfortunately, the downvote button is mostly used as an “I disagree” / “I don’t like your opinion” button.

Vice versa, I think Reddit upvoted a lot of the same old boring memes/jokes with the idea that maybe they would benefit if they get there first then next time.

Any post related to WWII, Top comment: “I did nazi that coming” 10,000 upvotes.

It’s not that bad on Lemmy but I have noticed an up tick in non helpful very unoriginal jokes in threads with serious topics.

selokichtli ,

Someone replied to you with the expected use is the downvote button, but contrary to your comment, I believe there is a de facto use of the button and it more or less corresponds to your “I don’t like this” interpretation.

Now, they could have done something to address this issue, even completely eliminate the downvote button. I don’t think they will do it any time soon because it would affect their profit.

interdimensionalmeme ,

+1 and -1 is not representative of the full of ways you can feel about a content. This is what happens when convenience for the system outweights human expression.

Hupf ,
@Hupf@feddit.org avatar

+i

milkisklim ,

-1/12

apotheotic ,

Giving someone 1+2+3+4+5+… votes seems excessive

interdimensionalmeme ,

Normal humans would understand that by amplitude, I probably meant a x/10 score. And then the algorithm would put that in context of every other score your account has given out to properly weight relative to your baseline. Then perform sentiment analysis on that specific post relative to all the other posts you’ve passed judgement on as context and isolate your relative score with respect to that specific sentiment.

apotheotic ,

Dude, it was just a maths joke and I wasn’t even replying to you

-1/12 is the result of putting the sum of all the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc) through the Riemann zeta function.

Get off your snarky high horse and treat people with kindness.

“Normal humans” good gracious.

interdimensionalmeme ,

OK sorry but it sounds like your saying “votes with values other than +1 and -1 ? Ridiculous ! What next ? downvotes of amplitude -1/12 ? Cats and dogs living together ?”

Which I assume the reason the designers of these platform only give us binary +1 and -1 expression and that’s IF they don’t take away the negative option entirely.

In my defence I plead reddit brain

interdimensionalmeme ,

Thinking scores are “added” is part of the problem. 5000 people voting 1/10 is not equal to 500 upvotes.

Malgas ,

One thing I always liked about slashdot is the ability to tag votes with things like “funny” or “informative”.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Ultimately moderators do not wish to cede any discussion shaping power to the unwashed masses.

Hotspur ,

It makes me wonder—would the dynamic change if there was only an upvote? So you could choose not to upvote, but the default action would be a neutral one, and if you liked/wanted to support/etc you could signal that.

I see tons of posts on here now that are downvoted to oblivion, because they are a legitimate article that says something a group doesn’t like. There won’t even be comments on the post. So like a Reuter article that discusses Palestinian casualties and no comments and like -20. This doesn’t seem like a super useful mechanism. Or at least, it’s just functioning today as a content preference “I don’t want to see this typed content” as opposed to “this is bad info, out of line with the community, etc.”

And despite ranking my list by either hot, or top day/six hours, I still see the downvoted posts regularly so the mechanic doesn’t even really do anything in terms of visibility. Or possibly there’s just too little content on a given community for it to get filtered out.

sir ,

Not sure if you realize, but a lemmy instance can turn off downvotes for the entire instance. So we’ll see if instances with downvotes disabled will do better.

Hotspur ,

No I didn’t know that, would be interesting to see more of them try it, just for curiositys sake.

Kit ,

Blajah doesn’t have downvotes, so I can’t downvote anyone and also can’t see if anyone downvotes me. It has helped me break free of the Reddit hivemind and truly be myself.

electric_nan ,

Whenever I saw someone complaining about the “hivemind” over there, they were invariably whining about people not liking their unpopular opinion on something. When you say “hivemind” you are equating anyone with that opinion to insects/drones/NPC etc. Just because you’re different doesn’t mean you’re right.

UlyssesT ,

There’s an old saying about how if everywhere smells like dogshit, it’s best to check under one’s shoe.

I think some people accuse others of being in a “hivemind” in a way that’s like they brought the Reddit with them, in particular the presumed sense of superiority over the hivemind/sheeple/“NPCs”/whatever.

Cataphract OP ,

fair point, using negative language while looking for engagement and conversation isn’t the best start. Do you have a better descriptive I can use and possibly edit the post with? (genuinely asking, I would enjoy everyone’s opinion)

electric_nan ,

I think your premise is flawed. There’s no such thing as a “hivemind” or what it implies. Opinions will exist on a spectrum of popular to unpopular depending on the community they’re posted in. I would say that those descriptors are perfectly adequate as they are.

Cataphract OP ,

I’m finding it difficult to respond because of the “popular to unpopular” description you’ve applied. I feel like by definition that in itself is a “hivemind”. So maybe like you said the entire premise is flawed. For someone wanting lemmy to succeed as a place where discussions and opinions can be shared and open, whats a positive aspect that you feel could encourage that type of engagement?

electric_nan ,

I don’t really understand what it is you’re after. Do you want a place where people only get positive reception no matter what they say? Maybe that exists in a group therapy session, but I don’t think that’s what you’re asking for. Is it?

Is it about getting down voted? Who cares? You can’t control how other people react to your opinions and you shouldn’t try. Lemmy is diverse and it is federated. Each instance and community has its own rules and culture. If you don’t find any of the communities to your particular liking, you can always start some of your own.

Cataphract OP ,

For the first part, no not a group therapy session lol. “thoughtful reception” is probably a better apt description. You can definitely have a level of control for how your opinion is received with your attitude and how you engage in a conversation. A space and how conversation is conducted usually sets a precedence, the tools available to you with how you interact with that content is another part of it.

I was just looking for conversations about this style of social platform and the known problems that seem to inflict it. I want Lemmy to stay diverse and federated, I’m seeing a concerning trend of tribalism revolving around instance membership or interaction. As you said I can start a community if I’m looking for something else, which I have done. Starting a new corner of lemmy to stretch out in has been a wonderful experience and has helped me focus on something I want to be creative and engage with instead of wandering around Lemmy “all”.

But, I can’t help but wonder if that’s the downfall. I’ve been instance hoping a lot lately, it’s amazing to see what’s been hidden that I’m not seeing and as spaces become more condensed or closed off through defederation the stark contrast between instances is only going to grow. Basically mini-reddits (the negative parts of it), instead of spaces being smaller to allow more chances to not drown out a differing opinion. So am I contributing to this or refuting it by making my own community? Do I have a chance to avoid the main opinions becoming the mindset that others want to follow when engaging or is it just an uphill battle because of the format of this social platform. A lot of really interesting and thoughtful responses in this post, exactly what I’m looking for in community discussions and there’s been barely any hate or downvotes. It’s been refreshing and given me plenty to think about.

SparrowRanjitScaur , (edited )

Communities tend to attract like minded individuals. It’s not that everyone is exactly the same, but those that are very different or have very different opinions don’t generally stay for long. That said, even within those like minded individuals there’s a wide spectrum of opinions.

For me there are a handful of topics I know I’ll get down voted for sharing, because it goes against the majority. And that’s fine, it doesn’t stop me from sharing my opinion, and I don’t really mind the downvotes. I think in general though as long as you’re able to share your opinion with nuance and self awareness, and it’s not something mean or hateful people will hear you out.

otp ,

I had some subs that I spent a lot of time in.

People would occasionally complain about the hivemind in one in particular whenever they’d get comments deleted or downvoted.

I’d tell them, “No, there’s a significant portion of the sub that agrees with you – we see these debates here often, and have plenty of people on both sides, including yours. Your comment just sucks”. Invariably, they’d have broken some rule or were just being an asshole, and mods or the downvoters didn’t like it.

MelonYellow , (edited )
@MelonYellow@lemmy.ca avatar

Tildes is a good example of a healthy community that allows for differences while encouraging good faith discussion. They police for tone instead of wrongness and it’s been working out over there. People are generally happy with the discourse.

A lot of it is in site design, too. There aren’t downvotes, because they’re not needed. There’s a lot of proactive moderation coming from the community by using comment labels. Labels help push comments up or down, and some require you to type a reason why, which encourages thoughtfulness instead of knee-jerk hivemind reaction and pile on. The only publicly visible label is the “good” one, so it keeps things positive. The “bad” label alerts mods and has a cooldown time limit, so it’s less likely to be abused. I believe once it’s used on a comment, the person can no longer reply to it, which helps avoid negative back and forths.

Diva ,
@Diva@lemmy.ml avatar

Getting policed on tone sounds like hell. God forbid someone be angry at injustice.

MBM ,

Policing just tone is how you get very polite and nicely-worded conversations about exterminating untermenschen“human biodiversity”

EnsignRedshirt ,

The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

I’m not sure I agree that disabling downvoting really solves the problem. It might help, but not a huge amount. Because you still end up with people upvoting stuff they like and not upvoting stuff they don’t. So instead of being +1/-1 it becomes +1/+0. The stuff that they would have downvoted still ends up sinking towards the bottom, just perhaps not quite as quickly as otherwise.

I do think your thoughts about quote Xits are really interesting though. It’s a two-edged sword. On the one hand, by amplifying what you’re disagreeing with you do also provide an opportunity for more people (rather than less, as on Reddit) to be exposed to it, potentially changing their mind. On the other hand, it’s a tool ripe for abuse and creating more harassment, especially since the people you’re amplifying it to are usually primed to agree with you.

DearMoogle ,
@DearMoogle@lemmy.today avatar

A lot of the issues on Reddit is a human problem. I agree – solutions need to be built into the platform itself, by thoughtful design. It makes less work for the mods too.

LedgeDrop ,

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Actually, with enough interactions from different people (ie: enough data points) Lemmy should be able to determine if a comment brings value to the conversation (either positive or negative) or if it’s noise that should be ignored (and prioritized lower).

If you have 4 comments:

  1. Has 100 upvotes (in total)
  2. Another has 100 downvote (in total)
  3. Another has 50 upvotes and 50 downvote (100 in total with a 0 sum)
  4. The last was a new comment with 0 votes.

It’s obvious that 1 and 3 are providing more to the conversation than 2. 4 is a bit of an outlier, but probably provides more value than 2.

Regarding 3: The challenge would be that there’s a low chance that there will be such a wide margin of upvotes/downvotes. Due to the hive mind, the voting will probably look like 30 upvotes and 130 downvotes. So, there would need to be a weight accordingly, so those fewer upvotes had a greater impact (in terms of sorting and scoring comments)

Reddit has a “sort by controversial” algorithm that seems to be missing from Lemmy (or maybe it’s hidden in the “what’s hot" - I haven’t looked at the code).

It would be awesome (and resource intensive) if Lemmy could provide the federated instances with custom sorting algorithms. It would allow federated instances to be unique, provide some playful competition, and given the open source nature of Lemmy - I’m sure these algorithms would be open sourced, which would improve the entire Lemmy ecosystem as a whole.

UlyssesT ,

You’re assuming that downvotes only come from individual users with good-faith opinions there.

Relying upon an automated system to decide the “value of a conversation” is, and will continue to be, an open invitation to gamify, metagame, and manipulate such automated systems, just as it was on Reddit and elsewhere.

bazingabrain ,
@bazingabrain@hexbear.net avatar

How it took over: liberalism

How to defeat it: agressive communist mods

No need to thank me 😌

GarbageShoot ,

Reddit is notorious for astroturfing. The lemmy hivemind(s) is the lemmitor hivemind from people socialized on Reddit who came to lemmy and brought that shit with them. Same with other instances like .world, but worse because they have fewer legacy users.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

Reddit is notorious for astroturfing

The worst is when a business are the moderators of the subreddit about their business. This used to be against the rules, I’m pretty sure, but was never enforced and I think at some point they silently dropped that rule. It creates a gross conflict of interest.

ulkesh ,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

— Agent K, Men In Black

Zoift ,
@Zoift@hexbear.net avatar

Remove downvotes. Unironically, its a good idea. Requires people to actually engage with something if they disagree rather than just downvote and move on. Gets people talking & raises user engagement. Will be an uptick in shitflinging for a short while till all the assholes out themselves, get banned, and site culture improves from that alone.

selokichtli ,

One of my several Reddit accounts followed that principle: only upvotes allowed, no downvotes. Then, when I said that in a comment someone discussed with me how stupid they thought that practice was. They believe it was completely undesirable for Reddit, citing what happened in YouTube after they removed the downvote option. I didn’t care to understand, but that experience allowed me to develop a perennial restraint for hitting the downvote button. I use it scarcely against what I’m convinced are trolls.

eldavi ,

i’ve seen this in a few instances and i think it’s made them better

Alice ,

Unfortunately I think people downvoting things they disagree with is kind of inevitable. People are notoriously combative online, and if they’re given an option to drown someone out, they’re going to abuse it. And that makes it even easier for any sort of hivemind to kick in.

I personally don’t know a better system, but it’s not perfect.

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