I have been on reddit for just about 12 years now. Something I’ve noticed over time is just how hateful the place has become. A complete outrage machine. Every single sub became filled with it. I’ve filtered so many subreddits over the last few years, it’s insane. I don’t know enough about this place to be sure, but I do hope it doesn’t become the same type of echo chamber of anger.
About 10 years here. That’s why I had Apollo. I filtered out all that shit. Everything you could imagine. Hundreds of things hidden.
Eventually I had a home feed of crafts, patientgamers, every cat sub you can imagine, bread, and a bunch of other peaceful things.
Before that I was just so angry all the time and arguing with redditors. I won’t go back to all that.
Don’t know how one could possibly use the site without filters from apps like that or RES. it’s so chaotic.
Exactly why I refuse to participate anymore among a dozen reasons.
My partner liked specific communities there but kept getting recommended upsetting stuff (got sucked into AmITheAsshole in a bad way, etc) so I uninstalled the official app and installed Apollo instead and their mental health greatly improved. But healthy satisfied people aren’t profitable for corporations.
I have mostly good things to say about Reddit and the more I read about it, the more I realize that that’s just because I always connected to it through Boost for Reddit.
As a European, the increasing cynicism and apathy to American politics of many users has made me really bad mood, maybe I should have cured my feed better, but now it doesn’t matter anymore as lemmy is my new home.
the concept of fediverse give a lot more ways to block hate, and there isn’t any algorithm to spread hate for engagement
This is key. I’m hoping that this platform can break the toxic social media cycle because it’s funded by the people who use it.
I remain concerned about bots. I don’t think there’s a silver bullet to that problem, and I understand that a lot of astroturfing involves making people angry. Eyeballs = money is only one factor that leads to this toxicity.
I can only hope that because the platform doesn’t have a financial interest beyond its users that it will truly grow to serve its users.
It would also benefit well with the fact that it’s open-source. I hope that one day I could also contribute to the project somehow. Hopefully OSS and decentralized social medias become the future. It’s time to stop letting billionaires make money by using our data.
Yes! Honestly, when people on the political right started throwing tantrums when Twitter blocked Trump, their “but muh town square”-rage felt like “finally they’re getting it!”, our marketplace of ideas should not be controlled by privately owned companies!
I think it’s really important to our democracies, that truly democratic means of communication be available online. Lemmy, Mastodon, the entire Fediverse is really one big toolkit to place the control over our data, our communication and thus, our political dialogue back in the hands of the users.
Sure, admins and instance hosters have a lot of power here, but way less than, for example with Big Tech.
Also, I want to add something: Beware of people fetishizing the fediverse as a cure-all to all or most of Big Tech and social media’s problems. Remember, the technology is rarely ever the problem, the humans are. So long as humans remain really clever apes, you are not going to solve hate speech, spam, or outrage.
In fact, it seems like outrage about Reddit is currently driving the majority of engagement on Lemmy so far, even though it’s been three weeks since the API protests. Just look at all of the most upvoted posts here. Discussions about how bad Reddit is currently and how Lemmy/fediverse will save everything and make everything good. On social media, moderation is still extremely important, and from the snark and trolling I’ve seen here and there, I hope the mod team doesn’t fall behind and I hope that the Lemmy developers create better mod tools, because if Lemmy does blow up, expect bots to show up. Expect propaganda. Expect automated trolling. All this shit hit Reddit as it got more popular.
Addressing the “it’s humans, not the tech”.
The tech established and designs an interaction and presentation system humans interact with.
Human behavior may be the problem, but it’s embedded in and influenced by the environment and systematic influences.
A simple voting without differentiation will always lead to people voting as agree rather than contribution worth or quality. It’s designed as a mingled mixed concern.
Anger is an extremely effective way to spread an idea.
Posts which incite emotion in you make you engage - upvote, comment and share. CGP Grey (a redditor himself) made a great video about this a while ago.
We can only hope Lemmy users are more self-aware, and choose to engage with things they enjoy more than things they hate. But given human psychology, it’s unlikely…
I wonder if the increase of porn will affect this. From past experiences I got the impression the people and/or the way they communicate changes when it becomes a platform to search for fapping material. Either because it attracts a different type of person or because it changes interaction between users.
