What factors do you think contributed to the "Reddit Hivemind"? How do you believe it can be avoided?
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).
It was moderation and up/down votes influencing comment order.
On reddit you are punished very harshly for downvotes. Your comment gets put at the bottom, hidden and you get rate limited so you can only comment once every 10mins. Mods also nuke threads that go against their ideals and perm ban people in those threads.
Reddit culture shifted a lot during 2015 and the site mods felt they needed to control the discourse.
I don't know how we would fix that problem but I feel like instances and a modlog goes a long way
It can't be avoided. It's just how most people work. The joy of belonging to the tribe and the pain of not-belonging is just too great. There are a few weirdos who can resist the urge, but they are quickly banned.
Moderation is a big part. Heavily libbed up mods such as the Lemmy.World ones are only allowing one perspective to be posted. Which is why the place is slowly turning into Reddit
This is done in three ways:
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Restricting what content is allowed to be posted using made up metrics like MBFC or calling anything they don't like an opinion piece.
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Allowing users to insult those with differing opinions EG call them Russian bots or Trump supporters and only banning users when they insult those trolls back.
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.World/WorldNews style just banning anyone who doesn't have a Biden style Zionist worldview.
The centralization around .World is one of the biggest issues facing Lemmy right now.
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They hive mind is just as strong on lemmy as it is on Reddit. which has led me to wind-down my engagement on lemmy and will very soon drop it all together. going back to RSS I guess or might try nostr next.
Users upvoting/downvoting leads to a hivemind, even if the moderation is not complicit (which it often is).
There's 3 facets.
- Being "in" on the joke.
This is the meme comments, whether they are internet lore (a way to signify that you were there) or simply just in on the joke.
- Community expectations.
Some communities are made to be in on the joke. Some communities are made to be informational and analytic. Even the latter communities will eventually have some jokes that occur, which over time will create a caste of those who are "in" on the joke.
- Ethics and morals.
In smaller, usually hobby communities, this generally isn't problematic. However in the wider internet, it's not uncommon for hate to be the joke, and spreading it being "in" on the joke.
Therefore, the hivemind is not inherently bad, as it is just a nature of community expectations that are connected through shared experiences over time. But just like we've seen through history, this can be pretty easily manipulated and people who don't have humanitarian beliefs in mind perpetuating that rhetoric.
In any case, to combat this, I think the community just needs to set specific expectations. GameFAQs forums would be a great example of having mostly problem-free hivemind, as video games have a specific meta-game that is developed over time and jokes from that shared experience (git gud, don't get hit, etc). The whole point of these forums was to talk about the game, from meme (before memes) to painstaking min-maxing, and the discussions of the community would revolve around this. The rules of the forums made it pretty hard to be overtly mean or engage in discussion that wasn't centered around the goal of the community.
if we can avoid Lemmy's most active city being Eglin Air Force Base, we just might be able to avoid the hive mind
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.
The universal problem is that there’s no shared definition of what a downvote represents. Is it “this is spam and should be removed”? “I don’t like this”? “This doesn’t belong here”? “I want to see less of this”? “I disagree”?
That’s not even a Reddit problem - it’s innate to any social media voting apparatus. Extend it to Facebook, even. Does the laugh reaction mean I’m laughing with you or at you?
Most comments and posts I’ve downvoted have been because I accidentally swiped too far right and my upvote changed to the downvote action and I didn’t even notice. So those downvotes don’t even mean anything!
I think the right answer is to stop worrying about votes. Even if they all mean the same thing they’re still meaningless. It’s better to change your post and comment sorting setting than to try to social engineer a way out of it.
Whenever I saw someone complaining about the "hivemind" over there, they were invariably whining about people not liking their unpopular opinion on something. When you say "hivemind" you are equating anyone with that opinion to insects/drones/NPC etc. Just because you're different doesn't mean you're right.
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.
The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.
One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.
The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.
Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.
If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.
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".
We need proper platforms for discussion. Reddit isn't such a platform.
The reddit mechanic of using upvotes and using a sorting function optimized for engagement leads to unfavorable second order mechanics.
I'm not gonna share my thoughts on how to fix this. There are certainly experts out there who know more than me about game theory and rhetoric.
Imo, it likely was/is due to the voting system — and, in a similar sense, awards. Redditors want to increase their Karma scores and seem to, at least subconsciously, view it as clout. So, they'll create posts with the intent of farming these points — ie they post things that they know will get a specific response from the masses. What also doesn't help, and is something that Lemmy similarly suffers from, is that there generally is no established consensus on how votes should be used. An upvote could mean agreement, or that a post is funny, or that it's good quality, or that it's on topic for a community, etc. A downvote could mean that the person disagrees with the post, or that they think that it isn't relevant or they simply don't like the OP. In reality, all that votes do, at the fundamental level, is tell the algorithm where it should place posts (a personalized recommendation algorithm changes this a bit, but the effect is essentially the same) — a post with a large upvote to downvote to ratio gets shown higher up and, by extension, more than one with a smaller ratio. This creates a sort of feedback loop where the posts that get farmed for upvotes get shown more. People don't want their post to be buried, so they'll only post what they think will get upvotes. And since upvotes are usually used for things that illicit an "agreement" response, only posts that people agree with will be shown.
The solution to these issues, imo, is to create an obvious standard for how votes are used and change how they're interpreted by the algorithm. Imo, Facebook was on the right track with how they were using emojis as the voting method. People generally react to posts with emotion, and an emoji is a good representation of that. You could potentially still have an up/down form of vote (alongside the emotional voting options), but it would be standardized to only be used as a metric for relevance/importance/correctness. This could be enforced by moderation, if votes were publicly viewable, by allowing moderators to remove people that are vote brigading (not including emotional votes). Emotional votes probably shouldn't be considered by the algorithm so that emotional bias can be avoided. Or, at the very least, there should be different algorithms that take these voting types into account I'm different ways (eg if you only want funny posts, you could sort to primarily get posts with a laughing reaction). In addition to this, also removing the gamification aspect (not showing (at least not publicly) total scores on profiles).
All the factors. I think this is more likely not a discrete case
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.
How it took over: liberalism
How to defeat it: agressive communist mods
No need to thank me 😌
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."
Tildes is a good example of a healthy community that allows for differences while encouraging good faith discussion. They police for tone instead of wrongness and it's been working out over there. People are generally happy with the discourse.
A lot of it is in site design, too. There aren't downvotes, because they're not needed. There's a lot of proactive moderation coming from the community by using comment labels. Labels help push comments up or down, and some require you to type a reason why, which encourages thoughtfulness instead of knee-jerk hivemind reaction and pile on. The only publicly visible label is the "good" one, so it keeps things positive. The "bad" label alerts mods and has a cooldown time limit, so it's less likely to be abused. I believe once it's used on a comment, the person can no longer reply to it, which helps avoid negative back and forths.
Isolated communities sharing rigid points of view are a problem, but I think the voting system is to blame. When someone disagrees and downvotes as a consequence, it changes the way that comment is read by the next reader, this will likely generate inertia over the way the message is read in general through time.
I can't explain why I do like to read other people's comments. Most of the time I do not bother to engage in conversations with strangers, but Lemmy has several advantages over Reddit just because it doesn't count or publish people's "karma". It's a blessing that some instances of Lemmy can also hide the voting system altogether, which is the only way I can beat the anxiety of putting my thoughts out there. I think these elements make Reddit more addictive, because a "good" number in your comments and profile confirms your membership to a given community. I believe it also shapes a "correct" way of thinking.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I suspect a lack of critical thinking. Respond first, ask questions later or not at all.
“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”
— Agent K, Men In Black
Political correctness leads to hivemind 100%, because people are afraid to be ostracized.