I am reading a lot more toxic discussion and really angry people here on lemmy than i did on reddit, which makes me sometimes think i might be at the wrong place. I blocked some of the communities that pull american politics in my feed but still. On reddit, i was good reading just my niche interest subs, but there is very little traffic here for niche stuff, so i end up reading the crazy talk too.
My experience is exactly the same. I find people way more toxic here, and way more extreme discussions. I still reddit more on my PC, RES makes reddit worthwhile, and I'm unsubbed to most of the very popular subreddits, so my feed is mostly tailored to my hobbies and interests, which don't seem to be either very active here, or don't exist yet.
Since I don't reddit on my phone anymore cause I can't use RIF, I use kbin. But it's rather lackluster to me.
That hints me that what people here is calling “toxic” is politics-related, since I’m a lemmy.ml user and I certainly would not say that my experience here is overall “toxic”.
And, funnily enough, most of the issues that I had were with users from either lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works; sometimes lemm.ee.
Got it - mostly politics, then. That explains a lot why you guys are seeing far more toxicity than I do, I don’t generally join political discussions. (And when I do, since I’m myself communist, perhaps I don’t even notice it.)
Yeah I think it’s because there’s so much less engagement here than on Reddit. The same toxic people would have been buried or down voted to hell over there, but here with far far fewer comments those toxic trolls will remain visible and take up a disproportionate amount of any comments section.
There’s also a selection bias thing going on, people who would get shadow banned or downvoted on Reddit find that they get engagement with their content here so stick around, the people who they put off will leave, which causes the toxicity ratio to go up and eventually the place will end up full of toxic commenters and posters. With a federated system this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve.
There’s some interesting musings on how this can affect the development of online spaces here which has stuck with me since I read it. eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/
You also have a few things Reddit did or could do that you can’t really do on Lemmy. You also have, with a few exceptions, a rather new moderation team on Lemmy without the years of experience that some Reddit moderators had.
Outside of the mass defederation of any Nazi instances, Lemmy has been a lot weaker on overall moderation.
I find Reddit way more toxic, especially post the purge from the lack of apps. It’s like their moderation ranked or something. It’s probably different in smaller pages, but I’ve found the front page over there is way worse than Lemmy nowadays in terms of quality of conversation.
If it’s just about intrusive off-topic political discussion, then I fully agree with you: it’s far more common in Lemmy than in Reddit, and sometimes it reaches a point that even people who’d otherwise enjoy discussing politics roll their eyes and say “not this shit again”.
However, if “toxic” includes other forms of undesirable behaviour, then Lemmy is probably less toxic than Reddit. For example: while sometimes you do see here disingenuous and deliberate stupidity, “waah TL;DR!!”, the “I don’t understand” conveying disagreement, or passive aggressiveness, in Reddit they pop up all the time.
So, what do you consider toxic? Depending on that, the other users’ experiences might be really similar or really different from yours.
But it seems to have a higher percentage of zealots. People go crazy and extreme over some weird stuff. You can’t have a casual opinion about Linux here for instance.
So much this. People seem to generally be fine here (I never found the reddit communities I interacted with to be toxic) but heaven forbid you purposefully use Windows or pay for software.
My wife and I have saved enough money that we might be able to move out of our apartment that we bought 10 years ago and into a family home and we plan on keeping the apartment and renting it out as an investment.
You’re spot on - I’m not feeling like I really care about either place these days. Maybe I’ve outgrown social media, especially if the content is high-school level Absolutism.
In my experience a significant portion of Lemmy lives in a fantasy world and really doesnt like this being pointed out.
Take videogames for example, if you were yo ask me what Lemmy thinks about videogames… “AAA devs should only release games they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into making once they are absolutely finished and bug free with no expensive future DLCs or microtransactions, absolutely no ongoing subscription costs for the absolute minimum price they think they can sell it for and not go out of business but it should also be DRM free and nobody should buy it anyway because its digital and you shouldnt feel bad downloading it for free because it doesnt cost money to make another digital copy its just corporate greed.”
God help you if you dont agree. I too would like to live in a post scarcity communist utopia, but we dont.
AAA devs should only release games they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into making once they are absolutely finished and bug free with no expensive future DLCs or microtransactions, absolutely no ongoing subscription costs for the absolute minimum price they think they can sell it for and not go out of business but it should also be DRM free and nobody should buy it anyway because its digital and you shouldnt feel bad downloading it for free because it doesnt cost money to make another digital copy its just corporate greed.”
Honestly I think it’s a lot more complicated and nuanced regarding this here than reddit. When I was a wee lad, I yo-ho-ho some sweet software and games via bbs’s but mostly went legit as I aged. I don’t think there’s more piracy justification here than reddit, but also, I think we’re in a ‘golden-shower-age’ of enshitiffication where services paid for won’t be rendered and that, justifiably, moves the sentiment.
That said, as a game dev, I don’t think people are asking for your proposed argument overwhelmingly - they just want AAA devs to treat their paying userbase better. Some of those considerations are unrealistic, but often they’re justified.
I’m finding Lemmy’s audience to be very similar to 2008 reddit, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than current day reddit and I thank the lemmy creators for having a viable alternative.
I raised the issue that if you want companies like CDPR or Bethesda to keep aiming high and investing 300+ million dollars you have to expect them to try and make their money back as soon as possible or as much as possible over time. 300 million is a HUGE gamble, especially on a video game. So they might rush to launch because the budget is running out, or the game wont be great until it has 2 or 3 expansions or at least a few large patches admittedly I have less sympathy for microtransactions or subscriptions but then thats on the players if they want to support that.
If they are really aiming for groundbreaking, massive, revolutionary… the gaming community needs to tone down the immediate rhetoric or we will just see more and more recycled “it always makes money” Marvel movie type shit.Madden77, Halo 26 and Battlefield 63…
Less out-and-out manosphere garbage than on Reddit, but man oh man have I seen some real incel adjacent shit pop up from time to time on asklemmy and nostupidquestions.
And they stay up too, because we’re too small to moderate effectively around the clock.
Echo chamber is just another way of saying people tend to group up with like minded people. I certainly don't want to interact with people on the internet that I avoid in real life.
Polite counterpoint: ‘echo chambers’ are more than that, I feel. It’s not that they are a group of like-minded people, so much as they police groupthink and don’t allow even moderately dissenting opinions.
See: r/conservative, and them permabanning anyone who so much as hints at a different mindset.
It really depends. If I run a queer friendly space, then part of being queer friendly is not putting people in the position to have to defend their existence every time they log in. Which means that anything I can see that even smells off gets removed immediately. If you come and whine about it instead of giving me a clear signal you understood, you’re getting banned.
I think in your case you’re definitely banning queerphobia/bigotry, which I hope most people agree is radically different from banning dissenting opinions.
Maybe the definition of an echo chamber should revolve more about what would be different if you weren’t in it? For example, I’d say I’m in a community that is an echo chamber if, when getting out of this community, I might change some of my views that previously seemed obvious. I hope that people in a queer community don’t start questioning their sexuality/worth once they’re outside of a queer friendly community - although after writing it out maybe some do :(
But then it’s not the same mechanics: if I come out of an echo chamber I might read up on some new evidence/arguments/opinions that challenge my thinking, while coming out of a queer friendly space is, as you’re saying, getting exposed to hateful comments and being weakened by these. It doesn’t seem right to say it’s an echo chamber, just like it doesn’t seem right to say there are “conspiracy-friendly” communities!
I think in your case you’re definitely banning queerphobia/bigotry, which I hope most people agree is radically different from banning dissenting opinions.
It’s a bit more than that. In order to enable people to just hang out and relax and be themselves, you have to make sure they are never put in a position to justify their existence.
You have to go in pretty blunt and nip stuff in the bud. That means banning not just bigotry, but a whole swath of topics and rhetoric that inevitably lead to “those kinds of discussions”.
This in turn leads to reactions like the other reply. “I was just asking questions”, “I was just explaining a point of view I don’t agree with”, “but you have to see it from their side”. Yes. Silly questions that have been asked many times before. We know that point of view, we don’t need you to explain it. No, we don’t have to see it from their side. Not here. Not now.
Don’t bring that negativity in here. Just leave us and let us enjoy our silly memes in peace.
That was my experience on blahaj. I’d never been banned from a community, let alone one I’ve been an ally to before. Such a pure echo chamber that even discussing why the outside world holds the views they have, even without expressing agreement, gets you labeled a transphobe.
Honestly, it soured me on lemmy as a whole since that was the content I had been enjoying the most.
That was my experience on blahaj. I’d never been banned from a community, let alone one I’ve been an ally to before. Such a pure echo chamber that even discussing why the outside world holds the views they have, even without expressing agreement, gets you labeled a transphobe.
That’s exactly what I described above right? Queer people made a space where they can be themselves without having to justify their existence. You could not manage to behave in such space. Ergo, you were removed.
Honestly, it soured me on lemmy as a whole since that was the content I had been enjoying the most.
You spend zero time familiarizing yourself with the mores of the community you were frequenting. And afterward, even now, you make it all about you and your experience.
You can see how that was never going to end well right?
I’ve been on the Internet specifically for the social aspects of it since 1990 and I honestly don’t see much difference at all between any specific site, forum, Usenet bulletin board, chat room, or service. Just the in-jokes are different and some terminology changes. People are people no matter where they are. The internet as a whole fosters a particular subset of people that even amongst their own different tribes, are fundamentally the same. A lot of outcasts and marginalized people that have no others of their particular group in reality to vibe with. I’m one of them, and I love the web because there are so many others like me here, everywhere I happen to go on it.
It’s not often I wish for awards to give on Lemmy, but I wish I could for this comment , it is exactly why I love the internet, all summed up perfectly.
On lemmy.ml and other outright tankie instances I’m sure this happens, but I’ve never seen it outside of that. Maybe it’s time to switch to a better instance?
That’s funny. My experience with lemmy is it’s overwhelmingly leftist. And anything that doesn’t reinforce their worldview is heavily downvoted. Every liberal who isn’t hanging out on lemmygrad is called a liberal as a slur or a reactionary.
The only things I’ve seen that are exclusively non-leftist is the conservative Lemmy that thinks Fox News and Newsmax is a credible source of information
The only things I’ve seen that are exclusively non-leftist is the conservative Lemmy that thinks Fox News and Newsmax is a credible source of information
The thing is that Democratic Socialism is not seen favorably by a lot of leftists, as they’re seen as being more loyal to the establishment than to revolution. Too leftist for the American Overton window, but not leftist enough for Lemmygrad types, basically
I don’t know that it’s too leftist for me - just a lot of the personalities are too much for me - i can’t listen to anymore Bernie-would’ve-won and Hillary’s-a-war-criminal 8 years later.
I also think Hillary would’ve been a great president for real, so no one likes me either.
I also think Hillary would’ve been a great president for real, so no one likes me either.
A lot of people think Biden is a great president, which shows you just how low the bar is these days. FDR had a literal plot on his life and still had the balls to rule as a socialist, and he was so popular he ended up the longest-serving president in US history.
We don’t rule in the US, we govern with the consent of the people.
But yes, FDR was the tits. And a native New Yorker. But he also was extraordinarily popular which is what allowed him to do what he did. He was also a wealthy elite with connections - his cousin was a president too.
because any criticism of Biden right now helps Trump to become president. Save your criticisms when there is an actual open primary (ie: 2027), it’s already too late for a challenge to Biden this year, as a majority of states ballot access filing deadline dates have already passed.
¯_ (ツ)_/¯ . I consider myself dem soc, I just see the necessity of pragmatism right now; when the alternative is a presidential candidate who reads Mein Kampf as an instruction manual.
I voted Biden in full knowledge very little would change because I thought we needed a cultural win against the rise of fascism here in the US.
Unfortunately, mostly through inaction, he’s aided its rise considerably. Most Americans are working multiple jobs to survive now, and housing is growing more scarce and expensive, and their grocery bills are still doubled or tripled. Trump is not going to have to lie about how bad the Biden presidency has been for the poor and middle class, and voters aren’t going to give a shit if someone’s a Nazi if they are the candidate of change.
Then, there’s social issues, like guns, or being unwilling to challenge Israeli genocide, or abortion, or police militancy, that are inextricably linked to fascism, and he’s done nothing to move the needle forward in a positive way. In fact, when Roe repeal was leaked, the Democrats used it to raise funds and nothing else, even though they had the presidency and Congress.
Long story short, I don’t know that I consider Biden a pragmatic alternative at this point. While he’s been laser-focused on sending more of our money to the war budget and keeping his embarrassing offspring out of prison, workers have suffered.
The biggest plus here is that Biden’s neglect of workers here in the US has gotten so bad its forced unions to become stronger.
Long story short, I don’t know that I consider Biden a pragmatic alternative at this point.
I get you, and you’re not wrong with the rest of what you wrote. The R’s have had a coherent game plan since Nixon and executed on it well enough (and had enough lucky accidents) to engineer exactly this kind of election.
The choice is whether or not the US continues as a representative democracy. This time it’s no hyperbole; it’s a truly binary decision for the future. And I’m afraid unless the D’s grow a real backbone, every election for the foreseeable future is going to be a response to an existential threat.
In America, you only have two choices. If you vote for something other that democrats or liberals, your vote is literally wasted. Both choices are considered “right” or “centrum right” in most European countries, there is no “left” choice. The system is utterly ridiculous and there’s no escaping it. The most usefull thing you can do with your vote is to choose the least evil party (or join the system and change it from the inside).
In America, you only have two choices. If you vote for something other that democrats or liberals, your vote is literally wasted.
That logic is why we are where we are. A 40-year loss of personal and economic liberty, because you and yours refuse to see the two parties for what they are.
It’s really hit or miss. The communities generally have most of the same downsides as those on the corporate competition, but with added issues due to the small size of Lemmy/fediverse and inherent features of a decentralized platform.
I mostly stick to bigger communities and instances on Lemmy, which was not a thing I did much on the r-word site, and I admit that makes it trickier to make a one-to-one comparison.
My hobbies and interests aren’t actually all that obscure, but the communities for them on Lemmy are functionally dead, fractured across multiple instances, or just plain non-existent as far as I can tell. Really little or no engagement. So, that sucks.
Another issue that seems especially apparent here is that it seems much easier for smaller groups with “loud” voices / strong opinions to overwhelm any kind of discussion or debate and give the appearance that their opinion is majority opinion, even if it is not. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen elsewhere, just that it seems especially pronounced here. People would complain about group think on the r-word site, but it’s often amplified here.
One thing I like about some of the bigger communities here is that it seems like it’s more visible when unprovoked rudeness and incivility are called out. Not that it never happened on the corporate r-word site, but I do run across that a bit more here.
I’m very new to this I thought the point of it was that all the decentralized bits are still linked. Do you mean there are duplicates of communities that are just named slightly different or what?
They’re not linked. Every instance/server can have it’s own version of “memes”. So you can have [email protected] and [email protected] the one at [email protected] is the most active one though. Imho federation doesn’t work for this. There’s always gonna be one community at the top. If that community goes rogue though, that’s when you can easily drop it and go to another.
Yes exactly. Because anyone can spin up their own instance and communities on that instance, there are many duplicates of traditionally popular communities from other social sites. It used to be worse here, but it’s still pretty bad around sports, politics, and many niche groups.
I tend to find that it needs about 10x the users, but I honestly don’t know if it could handle that at the moment. Generally I would assume one would use a social network for the social aspects, but right now the top (everything) post of the past 24 hours has something like a thousand votes and about a hundred comments, which is actually a pretty decent amount. But there’s maybe 1 other post with 100+ comments right now in the top of the past 24 hours that I can see. Go to a second page or scroll for a bit and you’ll see most posts have less than ten comments.
Is number of comments the most important metric? Probably not, but it is pretty important one since it’s kind of the main reason I would come here instead of just scrolling through Google News or whatever, and I’m guessing I’m not alone.
The only people who actually managed the migration in my opinion were the StarTrek.website people, and it took a clever coordinated effort in a community of people who probably skew more technical than most. For most communities that were interested in things like specific games, shows, hobbies, or whatever and not interested in a new computer toy to play with, they’ve essentially died out and are either ghost towns or full of bot posts.
In large part I think it’s because Lemmy’s discoverability is pretty trash, and while I get that it’s kind of on purpose it’s still an issue. The migration led to this explosion of communities but because finding them is harder than making them, it spread these relatively small communities out. The hope was that they would find each other and coalesce, but instead it seems like they took the path of least resistance and just slid back to their old haunts.
One of Lemmy’s key strengths is that it can act both as an aggregator that has a stream of news stories and comments but if tuned slightly differently it can act much more like an old school forum, but there’s really no way to bridge the two ways of interaction right now. I think one path forward is finding that middle ground, and slowly becoming a respiratory of useful discussions like old school forums, Facebook groups, and yeah even reddit. But to do that there needs to be a lot more searchable and discoverable and not just letting Google do it. Finding a way to both surface jokes and memes and whatever for quick consumption, but also having some way to keep those highly technical 130 page long forum posts where they reverse engineer an aquarium bubble pump or something available and simmering on the back burner, ready to be found in a few years and awakened when someone makes a breakthrough.
On a more personal note, I feel like I’m vibing less and less with Lemmy. The memes have slowed way down, the articles are interesting sometimes but the lack of any comments makes me less interested in interacting with them, and I feel like I hit the wall of reddit repost bots spamming thousands of sonic fan arts way quicker than I used to. It honestly feels a lot more like it’s dying from lack of meaningful user interaction pretty much everywhere outside the star trek memes. Half the time it feels like I’m just using Hacker News by proxy. Just like that line “butter spread over too much bread” it feels like the users are spread out over too many servers. I dunno, I’ve had a few so I’m rambling. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk I guess.
I blocked all of those repost bots a few months ago, and it really improved the experience for me. No longer are there seemingly interesting posts but with 0 engagement, with the real OP not even on Lemmy. It feels a lot more organic.
Certain communities are continuations of those that are/were on Reddit. The “post link to a paywalled article, everyone bitches about the headline” section of the world is a carbon copy. A lot of the technical space…I haven’t encountered as many “May God create a deeper, hotter hell for you and your family if you buy Intel over AMD” types here, though this may have been because I haven’t really found a substantial PC hardware community.
Commercial Republicanism doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as present. The folks with a mossy oak jacket instead of a personality…there’s a few of them here but the extremists actually seem to be Stalinites.
The various permutations of No Stupid Questions or Ask Lemmy aren’t as dick-in-hand horny as Reddit’s were (I’m guessing there’s fewer teenagers here), though there’s a lot more talk about the platform itself. slow turn to look at OP
Official discussion boards are completely absent. Nobody’s ending Youtube videos with “Go check out our Lemmy community.” I’ll use the example of Coffee Stain Studios’ game Satisfactory: Snut still occasionally mentions their subreddit, and while there is a community here, it’s A. unofficial and B. almost entirely dead.
The brain trust feels gone. Stuff like r/tipofmytongue or r/whatisthisthing or r/askhistorians just hasn’t happened here yet, possibly because of the lower population. I’m less confident that I can get an actual answer to “What’s this weird piece of bent metal I found in the back of my grandmother’s silverware drawer for?” or “What’s that movie where a guy pulls a nuclear bomb with an ATV and gets radiation sickness?” I don’t foresee AMA’s or anything like that, though it seems that was dying off on Reddit as well.
Moderators overall seem to be doing an amazing job, because the place seems well moderated, I don’t really notice the mods doing their jobs as much (possibly because Lemmy doesn’t do the deleted by moderator thing that Reddit did for some reason), and I’ve yet to see or hear about a mod being a human case of pink eye like you’d see so often on Reddit. Use Reddit for awhile and you build up a list of moderator names and the subs they ruin, the same list on Lemmy is still blank so far.
It’s still the internet, which means The Worthless are present and accounted for. You know, the “people” who didn’t get enough attention as children who exist only to make casual conversation via text impossible via interpreting every sentence as 100% true and literal. Say something like “Raiders of the Lost Ark was better than Last Crusade” and The Worthless are guaranteed to show up and try to lecture you about opinion versus objective fact.
I am all for having more people, but being an obscure “site” is a good filter imo.
The Voyager App has some bugs, but for what it is, I’m amazed by the polish.
On Reddit, all I did was look at memes from the top subreddits, spending my day filtering through the vastly unfunny majority. It’s also through memes that I kept up to date with the news.
On Lemmy, I decided to not fall into that sort of doom scrolling again. I blocked all meme communities. I browse through “All” to find any obscure community that peaks my interest, block the ones that don’t and add the ones that do to “Home” or “Favourites”.
This means my feed is much more curated than the slop I was ingesting on Reddit. I still doom scroll sometimes 😅, but it’s better now than it was before, I think.
I’ve found more far-left shitposting here than anywhere else on the internet, which might be some people’s cup of tea but I find incredibly obnoxious. I’m not even right-leaning. Glad I can block whole instances with the app I use at least