I had to make sure I didn’t somehow write this in my sleep or something, it’s word-for-word exactly what I’ve been thinking for the past few years.

Many subs are solely focused on generating outrage, hate, anger, being infuriated, and just general discontent. Baiting people with strawmen of groups they dislike, obviously fake tweets/exchanges to get people riled up, etc.

Although none of this is particularly new, /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/____inAction, and other straight up racist subs were vicious to the point of some being banned years ago.

But now it’s more of a general ragebait machine that creeps onto /r/all regularly and can take over any subreddit completely without proper moderation.

Welcome to 10'ish years ago, OP.

It was always like that, is the problem.

I never did become an app Redditor, like I never used Apollo or any of that, so I was always using whatever their production interface was on browser. For a brief time they were allowing us to create filter lists for r/All so you could attempt to browse that beast looking for interesting communities without the sea of porn and hate groups, then they took that function away pretty quickly, I guess we were using it too much.

Eventually, the truth dribbled out that investors were breathing down their necks for user growth at any cost, since there was no profit. This is why bullshit like Coontown, fatpeoplehate, and just endless constellations of far-right hate speech communities were allowed to thrive and grow during the entirety of the 2010s. So long as they didn't do anything that put Reddit in legal jeopardy, Admin refused to chop off large parts of their precious user metrics.

This meant the rest of us dealing with a community where the Nazis were always in the walls, even if you were browsing subs about container gardening. Things like r/JusticeServed allowed populist hate groups to grow large and juuust barely mainstream enough that you could pretend they were something else. You were always tiptoeing around the hate groups, hoping that nobody in your container gardening sub posted something that would bring the Eye of Sauron upon you.

So, to be clear, it didn't become hateful, it's been like that for years and years. The rest of the internet was far more aware of it than I think the average habitual Redditor was, as far as they were concerned Reddit was just as toxic as 4Chan, but at least 4Chan is clever and influential, sometimes.

If you avoided r/All like the plague, and made a part-time job out of curating your experience, you could get a half-assed positive result that looked nice enough if you squint. It was true, there were some genuinely nice communities on Reddit - and they tended to be very practical in nature, like r/Excel - which didn't attract chuds. Any subreddit which gave some fool a chance to bitch about things they didn't like got big, fast, and ended up pinned to the top of All, where, again, anybody who wasn't already a logged-in user would see it, festering.

The only reason Reddit has persisted for so long is that it basically stole away the user bases that once filled all the individual forums of the internet, and came to hold them hostage. It was chill circa 2011, before the Digg migration, before they'd even rolled out subreddits, yet. It got nasty fast as the userbase grew and it started to attract average folk.

The only thing that Lemmy has going for it is that lack of commercialization. To be very clear, the Nazis are already here. They move in fast. Stormfront was one of the first big sites on the internet, period. People avoided Mastodon for a long time because the last they heard that's where the Nazis went when they started getting banned elsewhere. Whether it was true or not, the hate groups are already on the Fediverse.

The difference is that for now, we can block their communities from participating in our communities, which hopefully is enough. We couldn't do that at all on Reddit, admin just ignored thousands and thousands of reports and always had the final say on everyone's lives. Just don't go around thinking that hatefulness is something brand new, you must have been working hard to ignore it for a long time. That shit's been baked into Reddit for a decade.

Since 2015-16 hostile anti-democratic governments: Russia, China, Iran, to name a few and their allied western chaos operatives: Rogan, Musk, Peterson, Trump, Stone, to name a few, have been disseminating conspiracy theories, propaganda and disinformation designed to harm and divide humanity. It has worked. This has been going on for a long while, but 2015 is when things really got rolling. We can change this trend if the will is there.

That's why every sub I moderated had a hard no politics, no incivility rule in place.

You'd be amazed how much of the nastiness goes away when you just ban anyone breaking either rule. Things turn chill and friendly. The posts and comments start staying on topic, and (eventually) users start most reporting when the rules get broken instead of getting nasty themselves.

As much shit as I would get in modmail and DMs, it was worth it to be able to go into a niche sub and just have these relaxing, friendly conversations.

The outrage machine, as you brilliantly name it, is the default now. But we can change that, and we can definitely keep it out of the fediverse as it grows, as long as we're vigilant and don't fall prey to it oursleves

I've seen that as well. I unsubbed from subreddits like r/badcopnodonut, r/leopardsatemyface, and r/hermancainaward months before the API debacle out of outrage fatigue. It's not that I don't care about the injustice, it's just that I got tired of the negativity from the spectacle du jour.

10 year user. I agree what used to be a place for discussion, jokes, fun comment chains, devolved into rage bait and vitriol. I definitely don't miss it.

While at first I was upset at the destruction of Reddit and lamented my routine, I am now so happy it happened. We all needed a new place to reset and be human again.

Reddit has so many people on it it behaves like society. If you're in a bad neighborhood (sub) you're going to deal with bad people.

What's great is that if specific instances get toxic they can get banned, but the power isn't concentrated in few hands like Reddit.

When Reddit was announcing the API changes I had a similar (but stupid) idea of using Blockchain to create something similar but that would be A) slow as fuck and B) problematic.

Lemmy is goated

You guys remember the old internet? Filled with Usenet trolls? Somethingawful doxxes? The bullying of Star Wars kid? Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project? I don't know if it's human nature but the outrage is in the bones of the internet.

I've been saying this for a couple of years.

My hope is the negative people are the ones using the main reddit app and they just stay there.

Let's keep good vibes here!

How do you think that Lemmy won't be any different as it scales and grows? I've already seen plenty of trolling and snark around here.

I was also a Digg refuge so spend the last decade and a bit there the biggest gripe with what changed is everyone has the need to be contrarian and be "right" even if that's making a comment about missing a comma or trying to do some six degrees of Kevin Bacon to get to a non-existent issue in a discussion. No one can just say I don't enough about X they have to be the biggest nerd in the room at all times.

Then people just downvoted again, so they could feel "right" without anyone contributing to the discussion. So what should be a back and forth of good conversation between people who are interested in a thing becomes a black and white opinion point scoring game of imaginary internet scores.

Tbf lemmy just went through a huge wave of fuck spez posts not too long ago. And still is ongoing to some degree

With the api changes it has exploded with posts misleading everyone with gifs that happened years ago with inflammatory titles, the racism and hate is just left to fester within comment sections etc... It's really sad to see how much the platform can be damaging to everyone visiting it without moderation. It feels like the funnyjunk website now, but somehow is getting worst. Seeing an entire feed only filled with hate, misinformation, and full of bots.

I completely agree with you. I was in a conversation with someone in the comments section when they asked me to explain a group and their motto.. When I did they started calling me with names like I was a lowly person or I was in the wrong for supporting them when I never did. When I called them out for not reading my entire commnet and just blindly hating on me they got angry and reported me to Reddit authorities. I don't know what the authorities saw in the comment that they permanently suspended my account. Even after emailing them and saying I never said anything wrong or abusive they still didn't listen. At that point I had enough and just deleted my account

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Just check out /r/politics here, it’s not reddit-specific.

I'm new to Fediverse, just another reddit refugee, but in my short time here it's been refreshing reading through relatively balanced and thoughtful comments.

I think I'd almost forgotten what a mature online discussion looked like after years of autopilot reddit doomscrolling.

Feels weird only realising what was happening in retrospect, guess there's a learning in that for me somewhere.