What are the bad patterns of Reddit to never repeat on Lemmy?
What are the bad patterns of Reddit to never repeat on Lemmy?
A few examples include s*x questions on askreddit, "this" comments, nolife powermods, jokes being more frequent than actual answers
Not just frequent jokes, but those annoying ever-repeating jokes. Like as if 80% of users were the same person. Before opening any post on Reddit, there is a good chance to be able to correctly predict the exact content of a significant portion of the comments. I get that it can be funny to an individual to come across stuff like "I also choose this guys wife" or "And my axe" more than once. But for people like me, who did not just start using the website, it is really annoying to come across the same jokes literally hundreds of times.
This goes hand in hand with the general idea of a "Reddit hivemind". Depending on the subs you visit, you can see that Reddits userbase is actually really diverse. There are people from every demographic with all kinds of different life experiences. But in a lot of subs, anytime a woman is mentioned there is a flood of people acting like as if there are no women on the internet and as if no person using Reddit could have a girlfriend. Again, I get that it can be funny once or twice. But when the idea that every user must be a typical "Redditor" gets repeated all the time it's just annoying. Needless to say that I don't look forward to being called a "Lemming" on this site.
Also, repeating comments on the same post. Obviously you don't have to read all the comments if there are already hundreds of them. But if there are too many comments saying the exact same thing it just gets harder to read them all. So it would be nice if people would look whether the point they want to make maybe has been made already. They can increase that comment's visibility by upvoting. No need to make other people read the same content multiple times and by that make it harder to read different comments.
If you can't even get yourself to write the word sex, the questions on askreddit were probably not the issue..
I think the whole "no life mods" thing got a bit overblown. Reddit communities flourished generally due to the ones that had good active moderation. Setting a consistent theme and tone for the subreddit and keeping the bad actors out. It takes a lot of work, they did it for free and we benefited.
The issue is when some people are mods for tons of major communities. That's when it is overreaching.
Ragebait. It's boring and pointless, and it brings out the worst in everyone. I never understood the appeal of being a "troll" though, so idk.
Something else I don't miss, and maybe this is a little more personal, but often when I would try to participate in a conversation, my comment would get auto-removed for some rule/etiquette based reason I could never really wrap my head around. Like, derailing? I thought I knew what that meant, but had comments removed when I was like, "yeah that answer really resonates with me too! My 123 is xyz."
Lemmy so far has been much more welcoming to the neurodiverse and I appreciate the organic, freeflowing nature of conversation here.
Obviously, if someone's being provocatively hateful / an obvious troll, then nuke 'em.
But if people are just trying to join in on the conversation, don't be a pedantic dick about exactly what kind of conversation is allowed. It had gotten to the point where I was afraid to comment at all for fear I'd be doing it wrong.
Outrage bait. Too much of reddit was stories and videos of people acting badly.
Circlejerks / echo chambers. Do it for the discussion, not the points.
I don't get the issue with sex questions. If people enjoy reading them and answering them why should anyone stop them. If you don't like them, don't click the thread.
Karma farming bots reposting original user content as their own.
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Downvoting things that you don't like. Around 15 years ago, when Reddit was very very young, downvotes were almost never used, except to weed out bad advice, ignorant replies, abuse, etc. As more people got in, the downvote button became the dislike button; with people even arguing that that was the original purpose of the downvote button. Replying with a link to the reddiquette got you downvoted even more lol.
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Upvoting useless rubbish comments to the top.
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Growth for growths sake.
Not just at a platform level but at a community level too. Around 6 or 7 years ago I started to really notice people talking about growing their subreddits, making changes and tools designed to increase the subscriber count.
For what? There's nothing to gain.
The main subreddit I modded finally became impossible to moderate for quality when, despite our lack of "growth strategy", the influx of new users became too much for the communitys culture to persist and it slowly turned into a lowest-common-denominator topic-flavoured meme ghetto. And from the outside I saw many of my favourite subreddits fall to the same scenario.
So I would say, we should avoid or rethink the idea of growing lemmy for its own sake. Eternal September will come eventually, lets not rush it
This is 100% old-man energy, but I dipped back over to reddit after a week or so and man did I forget how many completely random acronyms get thrown around there... FW, TIL, ELI5, FWIW, IANAL...
Don't even get me started on ETA, which should mean "estimated time of arrival", but has instead been used to mean "edit to add", even though just putting EDIT means the same thing??
I see that kind of stuff a lot less here, and I'm assuming it's a mix of older audience and smaller user base, but so far it's been so much nicer actually understanding what everyone is saying here.
A few examples include s*x questions on askreddit
Says sex questions on askreddit were a problem
Doesn't even write the word sex
Yeah, I don't think the sex questions were the problem, mate.
Pretty obvious but just plain being rude to one another. I felt like I was stepping on eggshells every time I posted on reddit, like whatever I said was going to be given the least charitable interpretation possible. Let's be kind and polite to each other here
Cross community censorship: For example on Reddit you wrote a comment in subreddit A (maybe even a negative one for that topic!) and then subreddits B, C and D permanently ban your account. If someone starts with that crap again they should be shunned.
Oh and verified users only communities, that sucked too.
It's not so much a dark pattern, but an emergent property of the upvote system: usually the first commenters tended to have an advantage and late good comments actually would never get enough exposure to float to the top.
Karma farmers would just sit at "new", spam comments and get visibility for joke and outrage comments.
The solution may be to randomly order comments below a certain threshold and/or within an upvote range.
Reddit started to feel extremely consumerist after the mid-2010s, which I always kind of assumed had to do with the general demographic of users largely being people having disposable income for the first time in their lives. It’s hard to describe exactly, but there was a general feeling of fandom around specific corporations that just felt weird to me. I’d like to see more distrust of corporations in general here.
Reddit also felt very Centrist to me, with discussion being this golden ideal. I have no time for discussions with people on the right pretending to argue in good faith and people eating that up.
Also, as someone who doesn’t know much about China or have much love for it, the Sinophobia in unrelated threads was weird, too.
So far most of these have stayed away from Lemmy, but I see some creeping up here and there. The communities here seem generally good at keeping them down, though.
It's important to be aware that any negative community tends to snowball to a ridiculous level. If you make an "I hate spinach" community, it pretty quickly becomes ridiculous and likely more serious than you intended.
Some negative communities can be important, but you have to actively combat this snowball tendency. And it's usually better to just avoid it altogether.
Not having appropriate tools to detect and mod auto-generated or repetitive content submitted by companies trying to influence public opinion.
"Ladies of the lemmyverse, what's the sexiest sex you have ever sexed?"
I say don't try. One of the problems askreddit and other subs like showerthoughts had was that you had to follow an extremely restrictive set of posting guidelines to even have your post stay up.
I think we're better off just letting the community upvote/downvote to maintain quality, rather than trusting powermods.
Negativity. It's ok to criticize, but there was something about Reddit that encouraged people to bash each others until one side wins instead of agreeing to disagree and move on.
mistaking dialectal differences for bad grammar
I said this in a similar thread, and it relates to some of the comments here about echo chambers and the like.
Allowing users to suppress virality whenever the feed is sorted by “Hot” or “Active” or “Top” by weighing the value of a post by the popularity of the community it comes from. This way, posts with a small amount of upvotes from a small community can be considered as equally “Hot” as those from bigger communities.
Ideally it’s be an option in selecting the sorting of your feed, but I think even if users only use it sometimes it will help diversify feeds here … and be something Reddit never did too AFAIU.
If meta-communities were to also arrive and be combined with this, you could end up with a really powerful set of feed controls.
EDIT: spelling (vitality -> virality)
Posting for the sake of posting, this decreases the quality of posts significantly. Let's say there's a new meme trending, what would happen on Reddit (and other social media) is subs would be filled with uninteresting slight variations of the same meme. I'm not against memes, but we also should pay attention to whether what we are posting is minimally interesting, useful or meaningful. Lemmy does not have a "recommended", "trending" or "hot" feed, so this should help significantly in this regard.
Permanently Deleted
i really wish that most threads - such as threads on asklemmy or similar where "serious responses only" by default
coz otherwise all we'll see is the jokes being upvoted because people like to laugh. but... often you'd either have to read 200 comments to find a proper response, or you'd never find it.
alternatively, you can have a "seriousquestions" and a "askwhatever" community, so everyone is happy
Repetitive over posting of same content (looking at you Dadario) across channels/instances.
Fake stories made up for engagement (be it poop stories or fake cum-related bullshit aimed at mouth breathing teens)
I might be in the minority here (also maybe I don't want "DAE" questions coming either..), but it'd be nice if the political discussions stayed in their respective communities. It's important, but it was getting to the point where EVERY thread would deviate into childlike insults at the political level.
- I also chose this man’s ____, and my axe, “we did it”
- incessant reposts
- nazi’s / skinheads
- karma bait / outrage bait
- small handful handful of moderators overseeing hundreds of magazines. (Gallowboob situation)
Reddit started to feel extremely consumerist after the mid-2010s, which I always kind of assumed had to do with the general demographic of users largely being people having disposable income for the first time in their lives. It’s hard to describe exactly, but there was a general feeling of fandom around specific corporations that just felt weird to me. I’d like to see more distrust of corporations in general here.
Reddit also felt very Centrist to me, with discussion being this golden ideal. I have no time for discussions with people on the right pretending to argue in good faith and people eating that up.
Also, as someone who doesn’t know much about China or have much love for it, the Sinophobia in unrelated threads was weird, too.
So far most of these have stayed away from Lemmy, but I see some creeping up here and there. The communities here seem generally good at keeping them down, though.
Edit: I will add that the consumerism was also probably driven to some degree by companies figuring out they can use Reddit accounts to drive public opinion of themselves. While Lemmy is smaller it should be free of this issue.
Developing user cliques around fish names.
Tankies taking over left wing subs.
s*x questions on askreddit
Hopefully with LemmyNSFW instance, people would asked there instead on AskLemmy.
But one of the things I'm hoping for is less mean-spirited userbase and the "I am very smart" user. Sadly, it's unavoidable as it's the Internet and even irl, people act like that.
additions: karma, official app only (aka biting the hand that feeds you), bots
Especially in gaming subs: 'How is this fair' posts by starting users getting clobbered by vets (5y+ playing) while having no clue about the game's mechanics...
The biggest issue for me is honestly the no life power mods, as you say. The stereotype of the pale, insulin insensitive, multiple mental health issue, living in their mom's basement, mountain dew enjoyer is there for a reason.
These people are basically the result of kids who grew up on 4chan /r9k/ and decided that they were going to have a job one day.
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Downvoting things that you don't like. Around 15 years ago, when Reddit was very very young, downvotes were almost never used, except to weed out bad advice, ignorant replies, abuse, etc. As more people got in, the downvote button became the dislike button; with people even arguing that that was the original purpose of the downvote button. Replying with a link to the reddiquette got you downvoted even more lol.
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Upvoting useless rubbish comments to the top.
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Rampart...
Strict mods removing most posts that would lead to good discussion, locking threads, etc
Milking the deaths of beloved celebrities for fake internet points and people destroying their “F” keys as though someone just died in a video game, like r🤮ddit did with Carrie Fisher, Technoblade, Shinzo Abe, the Queen of England…
It’s just so pathetic and disrespectful.
The culture of misspelling lose with loose, excusing it and down-voting to oblivion anyone that dares point out the mistake. "Sorry, is that wrong? English is my second means of communicating with other Homo Sapiens and it was an honest typographical error on my part. Please accept my sincerest apologies." (original comment remains unedited to fix the typo)