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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).

MagicShel ,

I think the difference is when you have a small group everyone sort of considers themselves co-custodians of a space—lifting each other up and helping people integrate. But get enough people and it starts getting exhausting constantly trying to enforce norms against an ever growing community of people who don’t understand or respect them. It’s like social enshittification.

sbv ,

I think we need to consider the norms Lemmites enforce. From what I’ve experienced: it’s often nitpicks (“I think one thing you said is wrong”), or mild insults when an opinion is outside our slightly-left-of-centre POV. Disagreement is rarely friendly, gentle, or constructive.

From what I’ve seen, we’re great at getting the big stuff right - people react quickly against child porn or overt racism/insults. But we reply with the same anger if someone has an opinion different from ours.

I have a better time in small Reddit communities because people have more shared interests. Here our prime commonality is that we like FOSS and dislike Reddit.

Hawke ,

But we reply with the same anger if someone has an opinion different from ours.

Hey fuck you! That’s total bullshit and you know it!!

sbv ,

Not a single comma. Tch tch tch.

MagicShel ,

it’s often nitpicks (“I think one thing you said is wrong”)

I think this happens. I know I’ve done it but I’ve expressly stated my agreement with everything else but hey this one thing needs examination. I think sometimes people leave that part unsaid and maybe they forgot or maybe they just don’t have good arguments against.

Note I’m not mentioning anything else. It’s because I largely agree with what you’ve said or don’t think a counterpoint would be helpful.

sbv ,

At this point I start with a big “I agree” and state something about it, so we have some common ground. Then, if I have further questions/disagreement then I mention it.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

It’s the eternal September.

MelonYellow ,
@MelonYellow@lemmy.ca avatar

Too much growth too fast for sure! Much harder for Lemmy to create its own culture and maintain it. Much harder to discourage toxicity. Notice how healthy communities are often smaller.

Sucks for niche communities but they’ll get slowly spun up over time, and in the meantime they can be found in other places including Reddit. I don’t personally need everything to be a one-stop shop.

floofloof ,

I’m old enough to remember the start of eternal September. It hasn’t stopped yet.

MagicShel ,

I don’t recall when I first started using the internet. Late 80’s or very early 90’s. No WWW back then. It was all IRC and gopher and newsgroups and other things I don’t remember. I lived near MSU, so I could dial in for free because it was a local call.

And then once you got in, it was hard to find anything to actually do. It kinda felt like exploring Mars. But eventually I found things. Very exclusive club and very good times that I miss. No advertisements. No one trying to make a sale.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

It kinda felt like exploring Mars. But eventually I found things

Even the world wide web felt like that until shockingly recently. I remember circa 2005 just typing in random words .com and seeing what you’d find, or discovering a cool new website by word of mouth at school.

I remember vising pig.com and discovering a delightful page consisting of nothing more than a giant picture of a pig and the text “this domain is for sale” that lasted years. These days it’s probably one of those shitty for sale landing pages.

Blaze ,

Moderation and mods being accountable.

Public modlogs help a lot

Shdwdrgn ,

I was thinking the same thing. Reddit is a cesspool because communities shut out anyone who dissents with a group’s opinions, allowing the group to continue thinking “everyone” believes the same thing they do. Sure it’s a good thing for mods to be able to quickly block obvious troublemakers, but there needs to be an unbiased review process in place when someone is kicked out simply for disagreeing or asking legitimate questions. Echo chambers are bad.

Telling someone they’re disgusting for being POC or LGBT+ is a good example of an action that deserves an immediate ban. Asking someone what policies a political figure implemented that benefited you should NOT be a reason for a ban, especially if you’re only banning them because you can’t answer the question.

I’m not quite sure how the process works on Lemmy, but I feel like moderation should include incremental periods. Like the first time you get blocked for a day, then a week, then a month, and finally a permanent ban. And a person should be able to request a review of their ban, which would be judged by a panel of mods from random groups and instances to limit people of like minds all piling on for the same butt-hurt feelings. There should be ways to make things more fair than just reddit’s policy of an invisible admin making decisions based on their mood that day.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

On Lemmy the safeguard to mod abuse is instance admins. On Reddit this can take place, but rarely does. The only time admins on Reddit really step in is when mods are allowing illegal behaviour on their sub, or when mods are protesting against their own shitty behaviour. But on Lemmy it’s much easier to reach out to an instance’s admins if something is going wrong. Mod actions are all public, so you can create a post explaining what happened and it’s not just a “he said/she said” situation.

If they aren’t being responsive to feedback, the appropriate response is to start up a new community, preferably on a different instance. Or, in the extreme case, to block that instance entirely. You can even build a consensus to doing this with a “panel” consisting of…every user on the platform. That’s essentially how !tenforward became the de facto Star Trek meme community, rather than !risa, after the mods of the latter community were shown to be abusing their powers and the instance admins refused to take remedial action.

jimmydoreisalefty ,
@jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.world avatar

IMO: tribal thinking.

It comes down to “they do not think like I want them to or they won’t agree with me, so I will downvote posts.”

Controversial topics are even more downvoting just to downvote.

The self-built echo chambers are already constructed; self-censorship and anything outside of their views and sources are dismissed, labeled, and smeared so as to not think about the information being shared.

It happens everywhere; the status quo is welcomed, while anything outside of it will seem controversial or extreme.

I_Miss_Daniel ,

I suspect a lack of critical thinking. Respond first, ask questions later or not at all.

sbv ,

It’s friendliness of the community and willingness to treat randos with respect. Responses here seem to fit a general pattern of “I agree and…”, or “you’re wrong and stupid”.

I generally have a better experience on Reddit. I’m less likely to get responses, but I get fewer downvotes there and the responses are usually nicer.

alcoholicorn ,

There’s a number of instances that don’t have downvotes. Notably, it forces each person who takes issue with something you’ve said to respond to you if nobody else has said it. Whether that’s better is up to you.

sbv ,

In my experience the lack of downvotes does make for a better instance.

alcoholicorn ,

I’ve no strong feelings on the matter, but I can understand how some would feel 10 people telling you exactly how you’re wrong can feel worse than 10 downvotes.

I avoid this by simply being correct all the time.

sbv ,

I really need to work on that.

saddlebag ,

Gamifying the voting incentivises people to make low quality posts and comments. That’s why Reddit is now basically just rage bait fake stories with comment chains that all look exactly the same. And now it’s all just ai generated anyway.

I sometimes visit and read the AITAH type stories and I’m dumbfounded that people can believe or enjoy reading them. All the subtleties and nuances of the early days are gone and it’s a race to who can karma farm the hardest.

The other thing that made Reddit great in early days were the small communities being visible on the front page. It made the content varied and there were different types of posting hitting front page. I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.

Lemmeenym ,

Using scaled sorting really helps with getting smaller communities on the front page. I still see the political and news communities but I also see communities for cities and niche hobbies.

henfredemars ,

Indeed. When’s the last time we saw a well-thought-out, controversial opinion on Reddit?The system breeds behaviors that are in conflict with a high-quality, diverse discussion.

It is for the same reason that I’m very particular about my downvotes. They are reserved for low-quality content, not that which I personally disagree with. I’d like if we could all learn to be less judgmental and more constructive so that we may all learn something meaningful. I think this is incompatible with the way that Reddit operates.

mrnarwall ,

As someone who recently switch to Lemmy, I did notice that there is a general difference in the tone of conversation. This is the first time I’ve seen it put to words

floofloof ,

my downvotes. They are reserved for low-quality content, not that which I personally disagree with.

There was more of that in the early days of Reddit. At some point everyone abandoned that principle, and from them on every thread became more of a battle than a conversation.

dhhyfddehhfyy4673 ,

I wonder if separating relevant/irrelevant & like/dislike into two votes would have any success. Quite likely it would not, but might be worth trying.

Ardyssian ,

Would probably rename [ like / dislike ] to [ agree / disagree ] to avoid overlapping with [ relevant / irrelevant ]. To make it more robust, make voting for relevancy compulsory if voting for [ agree / disagree ].

But the reported stats is all moot if there’s bot manipulation anyway. Also, people would most likely say it’s relevant even if it’s actually not, just because they agree with it

scrubbles ,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

I remember when Reddit’s best “reading” threads just suddenly shifted. AITA, JustNoMIL, TalesFromTechSupport, TalesFromRetail, all of a sudden they went from realistic stories of real people venting to… just obvious rage bait. It was so disappointing. It was one of the best things to read on the bus, here’s someone going through something, can offer support, laugh about it, whatever.

It went from stories like “I had someone demand a manager when I wouldn’t offer them 40% off” to “someone pulled a gun on me at work, and my manager told me I should have punched them”. Just such horrible bullshit. That’s when I knew the site was going downhill.

Capitao_Duarte ,

I really agree with the excessive news e politics comunitties. I have a hard time setting a good feed 'cause of that

Blaze ,

I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.

I regularly suggest people to block those communities, or consider an alt to follow those

xmunk ,

We’ve absolutely got hive minds here - it requires extremely good and dedicated moderators to keep in check but one thing that might help is adopting my favorite hackernews rule… you are prohibited from downvoting any comments that are direct replies to your comment. That single block works pretty effectively to untrain the habit of “downvote what I disagree with”.

Lemmeenym ,

We also have a problem on lemmy that there is a subset of users who think that votes are how you curate your feed. They downvote anything that they don’t want to see instead of blocking communities that they aren’t interested in.

Tehdastehdas , (edited )
@Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world avatar

Consequence of lack of onboarding. Would be easily fixed by popping up instructions for voting and feed shaping the first time a new user votes.

Quora may be exacerbating the behaviour by automatically blocking topics when you downvote questions. They also downvote a question for you when you only want to report it for something. The downvote remains after the reported issue has been corrected.

ganymede ,

probably an unpopular view but tbh i think voting has ruined modern forums

firstly its much much easier to game, and for big platforms to fake

but more to the point, voting makes excellent sense when the topic is something with a clearly provable right/wrong answer. eg. technical questions are ideal for voting, where the wrong information does belong at the bottom because its simply wrong and in most cases most people can easily verify if it works or doesn’t work.

instead we get voting for everything now, so it merely becomes a poll of opinions not facts, but unfortunately our monkey brains sees the numbers and somewhat equates emotions with facts.

oldschool forums ALREADY HAD a poll feature, so when we wanted a poll we could get one. now everything is a poll, and when everything is a poll nothing is especially meaningful.

Cataphract OP ,

I feel so stupid lol. I’m on a bunch of random forums still that I’ve been visiting since the early 2000’s and trying to figure out why things go so bad socially (grouping/instance hating/etc) on platforms like this so quick. There’s no voting on any of them, it’s such a baked-in thing here and on reddit and so foreign on forums that I just didn’t consider it for some reason. There’s definitely dissent or butting heads but it usually just fizzles out and doesn’t carry onto other posts (unless two users really hate each other, always happens unfortunately).

ganymede , (edited )

aye exactly. since voting is apparently a big thing now, if we have to work within it, some ideas might help such as mentioned above where hackernews prevents downvoting replies to you.

some other ideas

  • permit upvoting but downvotes require a textbox reply (imo downvoting without a valid explanation is just noise, and we want signal over noise right?)
  • self posts not being upvoted (all posts start at 0)
  • i really like how lemmy shows both up & down rather than final value on alot of sites
  • no voting until you ‘earn your stripes’. not perfect, but somewhat helps at keeping voting within domain expertise.

eg. i ‘fucking love science’, but just because an answer feels nice to me on nuclear rocket surgery doesn’t mean my vote should count. let alone be equal to someone with expertise

UlyssesT ,

It may be impossible to prevent such community-wide erosion especially on an individual basis, but I think the best one can do to at least not contribute to that erosion is maintaining a sense of vigilance about the foundational idea at the heart of Reddit’s site-wide rot: “I am smarter than the out-group, and anything I do within the in-group to increase my score affirms that I am endlessly clever and funny.”

imaginepayingforred ,

Literally nothing can be done to avoid it. The “Reddit hivemind” is the human hivemind. When enough people start contributing to a certain community, certain ideas usually unanimously shared between individuals get boosted up to the top and become general consensus.

UlyssesT , (edited )

The “Reddit hivemind” is the human hivemind.

Reddit doesn’t represent the entirety of humanity. It represents a specifically self-selecting group of people that tend to come from a combination of converging material conditions that allow them access to the site, and site retention for each user depends on whether that user is likely to opt into that particular group’s increasingly-ossified norms that are provided superficial but effective incentives to continue doing so by the site’s owners.

Social groups can and do change over time, and some are better or worse off in varying ways, and they are not all “Reddit hiveminds” unless you are lazily equivocating all human social structures as “hiveminds.” What else is there? Some fantasy of rugged Randian individualism?

To say otherwise is useless fatalism, or at the least, false equivocation.

https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/29637d6f-865d-462b-808a-0bf8813443e3.jpeg

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

I think you missed their point. Yes, the specific beliefs held by the Reddit hivemind are specific to that platform. But the idea that Reddit has a hivemind is a natural human factor. So Reddit’s hivemind might be a centre-left liberal hivemind, HN’s might be more libertarian, and Lemmy’s is more leftist. But there’s some degree of hivemind on any platform that exposes users too each others’ content and where participating in those public discussions is the point.

A site like YouTube or Facebook lacks as much of a hivemind effect, because people aren’t on there for the discussion. They’re on YT for the videos, or on FB largely for their friends. Though both YT and FB comment sections are also proof that lacking a hivemind is also not a sign of quality.

bazingabrain ,
@bazingabrain@hexbear.net avatar

certain ideas usually unanimously shared between individuals get boosted up to the top and become general consensus.

Weird how those ideas of yours usually correspond with something western politicians and think thanks spout on the daily.

Weird how non western ideas that somehow survive deletion are usually downvoted to oblivion or flagged and hidden.

Weird how Reddit hired a literal CIA agent to manage their content even though said person had zero experience working that role.

Weird weird weird back-to-me

UlyssesT ,

But everything at all times is the Reddit hivemind. Nothing can change or improve. Reddit is inevitable. smuglord

ImplyingImplications ,

The hivemind comes from people caring too much about their votes or karma. Nobody likes seeing their post or comment downvoted to oblivion so they’ll play things safe and just post something they know everyone will agree with. I’m not sure you can have a voting system without having some kind of a hivemind.

quixotic120 ,

That shit goes back way before reddit. It was a problem on digg, on 4chan, somethingawful and other vbulletin forums, Usenet, etc. it will be a problem here and every place that comes after

It’s easier to just agree with the group than do critical thinking. It’s easier to just repost the same stupid tired joke someone else just made than to be clever. etc

veroxii ,

Yeah I’m going to show my age here. But I’ve migrated from fidonet (bbs days) to Usenet. To slashdot. To digg. To Reddit. To Lemmy. And I’m 100% positive one day I’ll migrate again.

Forums evolve and change. And once it changes go find your tribe again. Your peeps will still be out there especially this kinda tech leaning crowd.

I’ve stopped worrying about it. Humans are going to human.

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.

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

ulkesh ,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

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

— Agent K, Men In Black

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.

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