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Taking the fight to Reddit... FOR MONEY.
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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Reddit culture (and lemmy by extension) changed so much in a short time. Just a few years ago you weren't downvoted just because someone disagreed with your opinion. The polarization and culture war turned reddit users completely dogmatic and as immune to arguments or facts as magats.
The same is true of lemmy. Most users prefer to defederate from socialist instances because "tankies". Which really shows how right wing "limbrols" have become. They hate socialists with a different viewpoint on US empire more than they hate fascists. The fascists have succeeded in utterly destroying reddit and lemmy as a platform for useful political discourse.
We now have the vast majority of "liberals" on lemmy upvoting comments using racist slang terms for Russians to dehumanize them, just like they did for enemies in Japan, Vietnam or Korea. The fascists have made massive inroads.
The OP meme almost seems quaint to me now. The real culture war is elsewhere now.
To the degree that people bother to defederate from anything (most users don't) I would assume its because apologists for Putin and China are about as odious to talk to as MAGAs
Basically any anti-imperialist and anti-US empire critique is stamped as Putin/China apologism and downvoted or outright banned. You don't even have to be a socialist to be "odious". And of course the big instances have already defederated from the major socialist instances.
You have a right to speak but not a right to an audience that doesn't want to listen to you. I think certain groups are accused of harboring pro Putinistas because in fact they do actually feature them.
Lol what? What year did you join Reddit? As someone who's been there since 2008, I promise you that this is nothing new.
Yeah, I was on Reddit for 13 years and I don't remember that ever.
Reddit was very monoculture in the beginning. The neckbeards upvoted each other because they generally agreed on the same opinions. That gets mistaken for adherence to reddiquette.
It became a rhetorical tool to prove whatever an individuals political or social adversaries are dummies because they don't use reddit properly in current year unlike some glory day that never existed.
If they really did use reddit back in the day as they claim then all of the self referential satire about reddits pseudo-intellectualism must have gone over their head. It was like the second most popular type of content. Second only to the actual circle jerking.
Not sure what year but the culture definitely changed somewhere around 2008-2016. A big part was trump of course, but before that the rise in android and iphone and becoming more popular to a broader segment of the public (e.g. "boomers"). Before it was tech enthusiasts all on desktop PC. This was also before toxic gamer culture.
If you don't think it changed you must have trauma induced amnesia.
So you claim that people are too hyperbolic, then jump straight to accusing the person you replied to of brain damage, and this after jumping straight to the assumption that the majority of said problems were due to Boomers finding Reddit, not e.g. Millennials or Gen-Z or Alpha or merely a less technical audience. If you were attempting a joke there, that was not clear - and yes I saw the "e.g." but you only listed one, so really, this seems to be the best example that you had to convey? Boomers, who are well known for their toxic gaming culture, I suppose.
As mentioned by others, I for one do not user block instances bc "tankies", but rather bc they are an enormous waste of time. Although the very meaning of that word could also be phrased as "denier of historically accurate facts". I for one don't care if someone is a Boomer or a Millennial or whatever physical age, if they don't know or care that 1+1=2 and keep insisting that it's =3 instead, I'm blocking them and moving on with my life. Hopefully they'll open themselves up to the Truth one day, but I'm not waiting anymore, that's entirely on them to go at whatever pace and direction they want, including straight backwards if they so choose - but I am not going to entertain the notion that "all directions/facts are equally valid", they simply aren't.
It was meant lighthearted, but trolling by fascists (maga) or agitprop (putin) does have an mental effect. That is my point, the culture and attitude has changed. To say it hasn't changed is just factually incorrect.
This is the factually incorrect comment, heavily upvoted:
He's not just laughing at me, implying I'm some reddit noob, and then attempts to gaslight me. But I'm the meanie? Ohwee.
You're saying you don't waste time and when someone disagrees on facts, they are wrong and you move on. Could you imagine that if the mainstream constantly fed you one version of events, you might be the one being so sure that the historical events are one way that you end up saying 1+1=3?
You rely on facts being what they are because a google search results in sources trusted by you say so. All neoliberal sources fed by the US state department. And the dissident arguments and evidence just happens to be the same as a certain russian dictator - so they must be wrong. Which is called a genetic fallacy.
Luckily blocking, banning and defederation is easy on lemmy, so we can just live happily ever after in our echo chambers.
The culture definitely changed - you are right about that. I was not there at the start as you were, but ultimately, how could it not have? EVERY culture changes all the time, and e.g. the Rexodus surely had a large impact even since we all left it. Though the burden of expressing that point clearly I suppose is on you, and the burden of understanding you is likewise partially on them, i.e. communication is a 2-way process. The difference is that you spoke first, and then when others challenged you as to what you meant, you ramped the matter up by several notches and accused the other person of literal brain damage. This was hyperbolic, and attacking the messenger rather than the message, and after that many people stopped listening to you any further, seeing how you were speaking emotionally rather than logically, or challenged you still further. The responsibility for what they say is on them, but the responsibility for what you said is on you.
And yes, some people literally do seem to have brain damage, but intended as light-hearted or not, you did jump to that rather quickly... and while I am seeing that you do not enjoy being judged, yet you were very quick to offer your judgement to the other person... Why worry about what children are saying about you? But yeah, you did call them brain-damaged, and again that part is on your shoulders.
You catch more flies with honey than vineager. Do what you will with that thought.
so I'm not interested in this conversation but I do need to acknowledge that you're misusing the term "gaslighting". it matters. disagreement, or sharing a perspective you don't agree with, is not gaslighting.
gaslighting refers to a specific form of domestic abuse by which the abuser attempts to control their victim by making them doubt their own faculties of perception, question their grasp reality, and ultimately become dependent on the abuser.
in other words, if you say it was great weather yesterday and i say "what? were you in the park at noon? the weather was so hot!" that's not gaslighting. that's having a different experience. likewise if you ask if I went to the park and i say "No", but i really did go, that's not gaslighting. that's called "lying". lying is not, in itself, gaslighting.
now if you say "but i saw you! you were carrying a green parasol!" and this were true but I went and threw out the green one and got a yellow one and replied "no you didnt, i dont even have a green one, this is my parasol it's clearly yellow, are you sure you recognized me? maybe you are having some brain damage, let's make an appointment and get you checked out" that's getting closer to gaslighting. hey, that's actually sort of similar to what you said to me, although I dont think you were gaslighting me, i think you were just being a self-righteous american jerk.
I know this is irrelevant to what you were hemming and hawing about with that other commenter and you probably won't care, but this matters way more to me. please don't misuse words that we depend on for understanding IPV
I was wondering if gaslighting was the right term to use, but decided to use it anyway. Maybe it is not appropriate here, maybe I'm hypercritical of your words, but I'm very much aware of what it means.
Gaslighting is today used in political context because of Donald Trump. Definitions change. And I think it fits here maybe not specifically because of what you said, but for the context. It is not the first time I heard "reddiquette about upvoting never existed". It's not just 1984 style historical revisionism, it's self-righteous american jerks like you LOUDLY screaming "NEVER HAPPENED! LOL WHAT, ARE YOU ON COKE?" (paraphrasing you here, might have gotten your words slightly wrong)
If you look at other replies, you now also see a moving of the goalpost: It was just the monoculture of neckbeard circlejerks. Or it was just some "purists" who argued about it. But it's always been this way.
Except I was there (3000 years ago). I've seen comments not downvoted that were disagreeable but well stated. Sometimes it still happens. They were not made invisible because they contributed to a discussion. I remember it. And it's still in the long forgotten, now hidden reddiquette. Threads exists where this was argued about. Your comment is just wrong and it is rude. I am not insane.
Even when the fascists loose, they win. Gaslighting is now a routine tool of the liberals to reframe their narrative. Liberal was at war with Tankie; therefore Liberal had always been at war with Tankie.
I also see four lights, so maybe don't take my post too seriously.
Upvotes and downvotes have always been glorified agree/disagree buttons.
This is simply incorrect. It's true that they now evolved completely to that, but you are wrong stating that it was always like this. It's still in the reddiquette: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette
This used to be understood that people often treated it as agree/disagree but that you are "supposed to be better than that". And that made a difference.
It's historic revisionism to say it was always like this because clearly there was discussion about this if you go just 10 years back: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/search/?q=downvote
I was there. It was real. You're not crazy, a lot of us went by a kinda honor code for downvotes. You had to say something very irrelevant for me to downvote.
It was the best of times for internet forums.
Better discussions and the gags were limited and not belched out repeat jokes. Yes there were inside jokes but it wasn't like broken arms jackdaw molly rancher every damn thread. It got too popular and with that you drew the youtube comment types all trying to get the "funniest meta joke" per thread which translates to "most likes" for people not interested in genuine discussion. Couple that with echo chambers and astroturfing and well, now we're here.
Thanks, sometimes it does feel like going crazy!
I really wish we could design systems that allow to come closer to that old ideal again. But maybe that age has simply passed and all of our attitudes have changed forever. For example instead of just voting up or down, you could vote for example "funny" or "contributes" or "misinformation". Maybe there are even some clever statistical algorithms in the background aiding that. Somehow technology ought to evolve to further good discussion.
Personally I think it's just a problem that arises when too many people are in the room. Get enough people on board and it starts sliding towards catering to the lowest common denominator
Excellent references!
Btw, this article seems to perfectly describe the effects you are mentioning, e.g.:
It is a fantastic article and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Edit: also it helps explain why this isn't a problem seen merely with Reddit, but also Twitter/X, Facebook, Threads, and yes Lemmy (+Mbin/Piefed/Sublinks) too - it's apparently rooted in human nature, thus would require enormous pushback to try to counter, while in contrast monetary profits tend to go along with whatever most easily aligns with our most basal natures. Sex sells, greed moar so, but laziness most of all.
Thanks, really interesting analysis! I'd argue that profit seeking is significant in this change though. Polarizing content leads to anger and higher engagement. So any algorithm that is written or trained to increase profit from advertisement will encourage that outcome.
I believe there are other influences too, the fascists and putin trolls (agitprop) has led to some "automatic downvote and ban reflex". On lemmy the mods are basically power tripping non stop in trying to curate their fief into a single minded community that brooks no dissent. There is one narrative and anyone dissenting is a . On all sides, people are just sick of the bullshit and are on a hair trigger.
This seems to the be result of the last decade of mainstream media and social media being run for profit through engagement. I have no idea of how to reverse this.
Lemmy isn't run for profit - mostly (though there are some amounts of money involved, and moreover power & fame) - but being based off of Reddit still uses that identical model. And then similarly for Mbin, Sublinks, Piefed, Tesseract, etc. Someone would need to basically do all of having an idea for alternative mechanisms, and also write the code for it, and also start up an instance, and promote it to let others know, whereas a failure in any of those steps would prevent its acceptance by the global community. Plus while all of that is going on, all of Facebook, Threads, Xhitter, Bluesky, and yes Reddit can continue to innovate, possibly stealing the idea out from under someone and twist it to meet their profit-seeking needs, though conversely those also generate ideas that non-profit sources can steal from as well.
One example is Reddit's automated CrowdControl (an optional feature available to mods of all subs) - instead of a mod needing to outright "remove" an unpopular comment in a post, it simply gets collapsed by default, thereby working against the trends to maintain an echo chamber by allowing people to post dissenting opinions in the identically same space as the majority of the community, who control what they want to see with voting. Similarly posts that are too lengthy could be cut off after a point, needing you to click to continue reading, but thereby allowing you to scroll past something that you don't want to spend time on. But these are tiny things, and still many people wouldn't bother making all that many comments that they know in advance will be unpopular, b/c what would they even gain from such? (besides a brief relief to get something off their chest, but how many can keep coming that way, for weeks and months and years?)
One reason for that is the power dynamics, which regardless of for- vs. non-profit organizations, still offer greater power to one "side" or the other of a transaction. Voting for instance is anonymous, whereas posting is not, hence voters (even lurkers!) have more power than content creators. All someone has to do is spin up their own instance, or join one of the many that do not require even so much as an email sign-up, and they can generate as many votes as they want, for "free". As so many discussions have highlighted, "content creators" really are at a severe disadvantage, compared to unethical voters, mods, and ofc admins, especially for those first few vulernable minutes where it hasn't received any upvotes yet. After all, *I* may offer fewer than one downvote per day, maybe per week, and also routinely sort content by New, but that's not what others (seem to) choose to do. So should downvotes be rationed? Or the source made publicly viewable? Mbin does the latter btw, though as "reduces" not "downvotes" shared with Lemmy.
Which further illustrates the trend towards echo chambers: they tend to work, to cut out some of the bull crap - if you ban an agitator then all of their BS goes out the door with them, their downvoting, their harassment, their toxicity, etc. BTW speaking of harassment another example of unqual power dynamics is the sending of messages from different people - e.g. I did not know what ChapoTrapHouse was all about, so when I replied there and subsequently received messages from different users for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, and then again from something in lemmygrad.ml, I had no control at the time but to receive those notifications. I almost left social media entirely b/c that is an absolute waste of my time & attention, and by flooding me with unwanted spam they essentially took away from me the normal intended functioning of the notifications feature. But then the ability to block those instances was added, and now after blocking them + lemmy.ml, I enjoy myself here. The only way offered to me to not receive tens and tens and tens and tens of replies was to cut myself off from them, i.e. curate my feed which is if not full-on echo chamber at least is one step towards it. And yet... what other alternative is there? Ignore my notifications entirely? There are SO MANY of them, but only one of me, and this unequal power dynamic leaves me with no other choices - after all, it's not like I can apply filters to my notifications, where I could still receive messages from them but just not treat them as the same, absolute highest-priority status that is assigned to every other notification also. Also, prior to the blocking of the instance they had the ability to live rent-free in my head, as I would need to read every one of those before I could know what it was about. This is not "fair", nor equal, hence illustrating that echo chambers are not the absolute worst things in all of existence - rather, they are a poor solution to problems that are far worse (e.g. not having an echo chamber, perhaps rather having nobody at all in a community that remains willing to speak, or possibly even to lurk anymore, i.e. its death).
These are the tools that we have. If we want better, we need to make them. And this will require emotional intelligence that most of us seem extremely unwilling to ponder. e.g. one idea, which seems to sound to most people to be really bad, would be to implement what we already kinda do as humans, and assign greater weight to people based on their community-specific karma. This would be horrible for new people joining, but if someone has been posting half of a community's content but then ten new people join, not posting anything at all but instead harassing the existing users and downvoting everything they see that does not match what they want, then those votes should count as "lesser" than the pillars of the community whose votes should count for "more". New people can always start new communities of their own - ofc that gets back to the "discoverability" issue - but it would virtually eliminate some of the less-organized "noise" trends that so often pollute social media streams, similar to how anti-cheating or captcha devices work, as in if they can do as well as a human who knows the material, then that's arguably more of a success more than it is a failure? :-P
But it would also come at a severe cost, of tying together a community's content to its content creators. And yet... is that such a bad thing? It essentially distributes power from mods to the users, but not all users and rather those who contribute the most. But maybe this idea really is a horrible one - in which case, again, we would need to make a better one, somehow.
I'm surprised that you deduce from that article that echo chambers are a good thing or "work". If you're here purely for entertainment and funny memes instead of discourse, then that's fine. But you can honestly do that better on reddit, more niche communities as well.
And you seem to be advocating that everyone should defederate or block all three major socialist instances...
And that is what I meant, Lemmy has already failed. Because instead of seeing the actual enemy, the very real rise of fascism, nationalism and escalating war and genocide, they focus their aggression on the mythological tankie. Absolutely unwilling to tolerate any dissenting opinion outside the mainstream.
I can understand that people get a severe culture shock from the dirtbag left from chap traphouse because they are not well behaved, and there are boneheads in every movement, but even fucking lemmy.ml?
Nothing is ever so black and white or night and day as to be perfectly separable into binary categories - e.g. it tends to get dark at night, but a light sensor or timer could be confused by a moonlit night being brighter than a cloudy day, or like someone or an animal walking in front of the former and thus casting a localized shadow even on a fairly bright day.
Yes obviously echo chambers "work", or else they would not exist. They are imperfect solutions to some of the real problems that people face. Perhaps we can come up with better solutions, which will require even more work, not because they are binary="bad", but rather bc despite working to solve some problems (kicking out trolls reduces the effectiveness of their campaigns of harassment tactics), they do not work well for other issues, namely they leave someone vulnerable to be misled into believing whatever the owner/admin/mod chooses to feed their sheeple.
And make no mistake: similar to hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml, Lemmy.ml is also very much of an echo chamber, as too is Lemmy.world. Though also the Lemmy code being offered to the whole world free of charge is quite friendly - both are true at the same time.:-)
Also true is that Lemmy.world blocking some of the worst behavior present on the Fediverse is helpful, even while that happens at the expense of it being an echo chamber. At some point, if 1+1=2 but some people disagree and say that it =3, and I mean VEHEMENTLY - and more to the point abuse the power control systems like anonymous downvotes on EVERYTHING that someone posts regardless of its own content - then yes, such people need to be banned. Not bc of their toxic beliefs, but due to their abusive actions. That much isn't even evidence of an "echo chamber" effect - that's just mandatory keeping a community alive rather than allowing all the members to be harassed and thus everyone quits.
The real problem, afaik, comes from there being far too few volunteers to do all the necessary work, hence those that do step up tend to be power hungry dictators. And yes, again, Lemmy.ml admins are known for exactly this - don't pretend that everyone else is an echo chamber but they somehow are not.
Though personally the reason I blocked it is bc the users there, I guess bc they get used to talking only inside of their echo chamber provided to them, are far less well-behaved than the average across the Fediverse. I was able to delete so very many individual user blocks that I had made previously to blocking the entire instance, plus new people that now I don't have to have the displeasure of getting to know them first before not having to see them anymore. Me refusing to listen CONSTANTLY to "b-b-but 1+1=3", without my consent... okay call my solution an "echo chamber" if you like, but it's just not fun or worthwhile (and frankly, it's not an echo chamber, not quite, bc I discuss plenty of things that I do not agree with, with people who are polite:-).
Not all "opinions" are equally thought out or valid. And then yeah there's agitprop too but I've been ignoring the intentional stuff in order to focus on useful idiots who simply don't know themselves even what they are saying, but ofc agitprop would be an even more extreme version. Anyway, it's a personal decision not a defederation - I'm not making any decisions for anyone else, just stating a preference, and sharing that thought and yes advocating for others to know that they can similarly enact their preferences, even if theirs happen to differ from mine:-). e.g., perhaps they'll create an account on Lemmy.ml - that is their right and I would not dream of trying to stop anyone from such, though also I demand to be free myself to enact my own freedom of choices.:-)
Post from 13 years ago, basically agreeing that everyone ignored the "rule" and used upvote/downvote as glorified agree/disagree buttons:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/s/HAxw7Z9PE4
Your link directly contradicts that "everybody... always..." thought this since there is discussion about it. My point is that it's an attitude problem and the aspiration to do better has an effect. And this had an effect and that has changed.
I considered editing my post to say the vast majority instead of everybody, but I was hoping you weren't going to be that pedantic. It was very clear that 13 years ago, reddit was already having the argument because it was so pervasive that all the purists were upset about it.
Yeah, no, "downvote is jot a disagree button" has always been aspirational on reddit.
I would advocate for defederation based on idiotic politics but calling tankies socialist is disingenuous. Since when is genocide denial and or worship is an acceptable behavior?
The problem is that the mainstream is simply declaring historical events one way and any other dissenting viewpoint or evidence is suppressed. And there IS evidence.
The fascists (and Putin's propaganda trolls) have been successful in disruption any dialogue between people from the actual left: socialists. Not the neoliberal "democrats".
And now you do their work for them: You censor the socialists (marxist-leninist, maoists) because some "dirtbag left" troll once was mean to someone. You probably can't even link to an example of what you accuse entire group of. But this tankie slur gets repeated and amplified more and more. People simply call you tankie, downvote and everyone piles on without thinking.
The problem is that disinformation and post-truth doublethink on the so called "left" (=neoliberals) is almost indistinguishable from MAGA like OP.
If you check out lemmy from an instance that hasn't defederated from the socialist instances you'll see that basically half of lemmy activity is invisible - the socialist half. The result is rather predictable.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/13653122
here is an example of how these "socialists" behave check modlog for the actual convo.
Doesn't look like anything to me (lol)
He didn't deny the ills and the repression in the USSR but showed with sources that there were significant economic upsides. He states that Russia isn't communist or socialist any more. At no point does he deny Russia's invasion is illegal. He at no point denies genocide.
So what does make him a tankie? That he has a different analysis of the history about how this war came to be? Which wasn't even the topic of discussion! You can argue about the quality of the sources or survey - but you were already ready to call him an odious tankie and shitpost.
People equate anyone socialist or antiwar or anti US empire with being a tankie and putin apologist. Which leads to the wholesale censoring and defederation.
I do agree that mods are WAY too ban-happy on lemmy.
Arguably neither that post nor the political discussion belongs in that community.
genocide denial spotted again...
these comments don't get removed on lemmy.ml but counter points do...
You make no counter points just baseless and heinous accusations.
Sure buddy
Then you wonder why people scoff at this sort of "socialism"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor