Reddit slowly became filled with hate
Reddit slowly became filled with hate
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.
Unfortunately that hasn't been unique to Reddit. Outrage, hate, and conspiracies generate clicks and engagement on platforms. Recent events within the last decade gave rise to a lot of coordinated hate campaigns. User created subreddits were a double edge sword for this in both being able to filter out these groups but also giving them their own echo chambers to congregate and embolden one another. The transition from liberal freedom of speech to absolutionist right to hatred made social media companies millions simultaneously in accepting money to promote controversial topics and harvesting the resulting outrage on their platforms. Reddit and their staff effectively became one of many internet war profiteers giving all sides bases of operations.
To end on a semi-positive note, with the rise of federated services, instances may still give these extremists places to seethe but they can at least be 'sanctioned' or defederated from the rest of the larger fediverse very easily.
I remember a while back when the first comment was always someone debunking the clickbait article headline with a good source and succinct summary. Redditors famously never read the article, but the comments were often better than the article.
Now, you have to scroll down half the page to find any original thought. You see dozens of people spouting nonsense or even defending nonsense because they…don’t want to be wrong?
One example: an image from the 50s displaying a child with their hand caught in a fire pull with a caption explaining that the device would trap the kid at the spot to deter pranksters.
The device was indeed designed to deter pranksters, and it would attach to the user’s wrist, but it would come free. So you would know the kid who did it because they have a thing stuck on their hand.
I recognized the device and had a video demonstrating its proper, safe function. People were still arguing with me.
Why would anyone want to put any creative/intellectual energy into a place like that?
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.
I wrote this a couple of days ago here on my own feelings that reddit just turned all of us into such awful people and how much I hated everything about it but still can't stay away from being a redditor.
It's really long, I think it's one of the best and worst things I've ever written. Give it a read if you'd like, I would really appreciate it.
https://lemmy.world/post/858027
I think my point is that we are not redditors anymore, we don't belong there, and there is no place for hate or self-hate here.
And after being here, I'm honestly pretty indifferent towards reddit now.
I received the most incredibly chiding, condescending and critical reply on Lemmy the other day, for saying one sentence which was just adding some info to a reply chain. “Oh, that’s also called this”. I was told “pedantic much??” and then the person ranted for a paragraph about how I was a terrible person seeking to spread discontent, and various other bizarre insulting bullshit. Best part: they mod 6-7 subs on some instance. So… Lemmy isn’t a magic formula, unfortunately. The same people are excited to make it just as bad as reddit ever has been.
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...
Yeah, I agree 100%. I remember Reddit from 12 years ago, where discussions were lively, but it was mostly trolls who would get downvoted. Now it’s just an ‘I disagree’ button. Sharing and discussing different opinions can be fun, even if they are different as long they are not hatefull. We shouldn’t hate on diverse opinions, that’s how we can learn from each other, in my opinion.
Hopefully, Lemmy will remain somewhat smaller so that we can have more quality discussions and not turn into an outrage machine, with people acting like they are holier than the Pope.
Post that trigger outrage are much more likely to be upvoted. Users feel good seeing their ideas reinforced especially in contrasting “us vs them” scenarios.
To be fair to reddit, it really depends on the sub. If you go on /r/fightporn or /r/crazyfuckingvideos you're going to get a certain demographic that tends to be reactionary.
Then if you go on /r/politics or /r/socialism or /r/conservative you're gonna get clickbaity echo chambers
But there are subs with great discussion on niche topics. /r/zizek or /r/credibledefense or /r/askhistorians all have very little outrage and instead good discussions and analysis.
The problem is not unique to reddit. It's a side effect of a large enough community. The focus gets broad and the issue is that posts like Twitter screenshots or memes are easier to digest. Because they are easier to digest, more people click on them and upvote. Therefore these posts will almost always reach the top before articles or other long for articles.
This over time gives incentive for posts that can a) draw the most attention with a headline and b) is fast and easy to digest
Outrage porn is exactly that. You see an image "DeSantis passed a bill to out toxic chemicals in roads!"
People don't bother to do research on what the law says m and they immediately go to the comments and make jokes or berate the GOP/DeSantis
Nuanced discussion gets pushed to the bottom and once again people will downvote whatever they feel is against the narrative constructed by the OP.
Tldr: no reddit isn't getting worse in this regard. It's a function of large online communities. This website will likely see the same effect should certain communities get large enough.
Strong emotions drive participation, which in a For-Profit Social Media site means more eyeballs for more time, hence more money from advertisers.
As it happens adversarial hate (i.e. two sides, pitches against each other, humans hating humans rather than just a hate for something generic like "poverty" or "light beer") is amongst the strongest and certainly one of the easiest to create.
My hope is that in the absence of a profit motivation and of popularity-score-keeping in the form of karma, the fediverse won't turn into that specific kind of swamp. That said, only time will tell.
It's the removal of a down vote count. It's the same problem across all social media. People spew absolute outrageous comments... Get 3 likes or votes, and they think it's a positive score.
The reality is 10k down votes and 3 likes from bots.
It's really changed the internet landscape and ultimately society. We hide dissent.
Only if you used it in a very mainstream, surface level way. Smaller, niche subs have always been where the best communities are because they don't attract normies. None of the subreddits I used degraded in quality and I never had issues with moderation. These problems will develop in any online community that bleeds in to the mainstream social consciousness.
It's about 10 years ago they slowly began to forget their own reddiquette rules, 5 years ago they had almost vanished completely, although you can still find the rules on reddit, nobody upholds them anymore.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette
Originally these rules were actually observed, not just by mods, but by users in general, and if you violated them, you were reminded.
Today most people on reddit don't even know they exist, and the site has devolved more and more.
I absolutely agree in the hope the same doesn't happen here.
I was on Reddit since 2010 and it has always been a shit place. I stuck around for small subs, but Reddit at large was always a refuge for racists, misogynists, and reactionaries. I was around for the fall of violentacrez; anyone remember that disgusting creep and how Reddit gave him a stupid fucking golden Snoo for running an insane number of creepy and violent subs? Until the existence of r/jailbait became a scandal and liability, so they axed him, and the majority of users from what I could see were wailing and gnashing teeth over not being able to post sexual pictures of minors? Anyone remember the r/creepshots debacle?
Idk why y'all think there was some golden age of reddit. It was always a hellsite run by creeps and Nazi sympathizers that happened to also be an okay platform for niche forums (which, in my experience, were constantly getting trolled and harassed by the knuckle-draggers who formed the site's primary demographic). The only thing that surprised me about the last month's events were how many people were surprised.
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.
They did this to themselves.
Part of it was corporate greed and incompetence by the Reddit team where they were trying to drum up numbers for their upcoming IPO. For a social media platform, member numbers is pretty much the only thing that matters, so connected with the other 2 issues, it probably was encouraged for them to ban users knowing full well that most of them would just create a new account - which of course that would let them say they have even more registered accounts when they would go to advertisers.
Part of it was various misinformation campaigns run by political parties and foreign governments to spread hate and instability. The "Smarter Everyday" YouTube channel specifically did a video about Reddit and "bad actors" a few years back on the phenomenon which I recommend everyone watch, but not sure how linking to videos is accepted on Lemmy, so I'll let you find it. The FBI keeps on warning us about "bad actors" trying to spread lies and it is only going to get more intense as we get close to the upcoming US elections.
Part of it was an echo chamber where no alternative views could be expressed without mods getting all uppity and banning users. Mods have ultimate say and there were no checks-and-balances to what mods could do. No real way to question a ban and no real way to question a mod. And the lack of alternative views is especially egregious because Reddit was obviously a very left leaning site. They were doing the exact same thing that they would make fun of right-wing media would do, namely create this echo chamber where only like-minded people were really allowed to speak. Now to be clear, I lean left on the vast majority of issues, but for fucks sakes, some of the nonsense that was accepted on Reddit would make even me cringe.
In the end, Reddit got too big for it's own good because most of these problems could be solved on a much smaller site, but Reddit got so big with so much money at stake and then it's size made it such a large target for people. It became just a toxic mess.
(sorry for the diatribe, I was going to write 3 bullet points and leave it at that, and then just kept on expanding it more and more)
Roughly 5 years, so I joined when things already went to shit. But I still did notice a decline into utter shit.
What kinda pissed me off the most was the constant know-it-ally behavior. People were wrong but they still defended their standpoint not because they believed in it, but just out of spite. "I don't care about the truth, I only want to own the others big time!"
Reddit is a site full of bratty children and adults acting like bratty children. The worst part about that is, it is toxic and before you know it you start acting that way yourself. Me included. This whole fuckening was a wakeup call and I am glad it happened.
The site just became so unbearable the last year or so.
Found it hard to have discussions on the bigger subs because it felt like it was just too easy for people to just swoop in and be a dick.
Once replied to a post about a student having to drive 2 hours home from college to visit. People were saying that was an insane amount to drive and that it wasn't reasonable. It was in Texas and they were just driving from Houston to Austin which really isn't insane. My college was the same amount of distance here and I drove back each weekend.
Had somebody angrily reply with how that was bullshit and I was a moron for thinking it was normal to drive like that. Also said I was what was wrong with the site (lol).
All I did was try to give my own personal experience with being in college im Texas when your university is 100 miles away and I got weirdly attacked. Like it was my fault for the size of my state lmfao
I'm telling myself it was terf and troll sock puppet accounts.
I'm very keenly waiting for captcha to be fixed, I hope most instances decide to make you fill out a captcha for EVERY post. That and paid instances will make a huge difference compared to Reddit. It will become way harder to spam and astroturf discussions, but I'm not sure how to handle legitimate bots.
A repeating pattern I noticed on Reddit: Whenever a video of a woman hitting a man was posted (which is of course wrong, not condoning violence at all!), the comments were always filled with hundreds of guys happily proclaiming their readiness to knock tf out a woman given the right circumstances. Just waiting for an excuse to get violent.
I think the larger a community becomes, the more likely that will happen.
It wasn't just Reddit. The entire world has become more hateful and more violently aggressive. I mean, even just wearing the wrong colored hat or having the wrong skin color is enough to get you literally killed anywhere you go. Nowadays it seems like everyone is competing in the Oppression Olympics.
Been on Reddit since the Digg debacle (2008 ? 2009 ?).
For me, it was the non stop posting about Musk-Trump-West-Rogan-Peterson-Shapiro-Kardashian that drove me insane and limited my Reddit use to only the subreddits I followed.
So I thank Spez for his decision to ditch third-party apps because it got me out of the septic tank that Reddit has become.
Making comedy at the demise of others and this whole "equal rights, equal left" bullshit have been gaining traction on Reddit over the years. So many of the top subs are filled with rage content to satisfy the hate-boner of the incels. Lemmy is really a breath of fresh air. Let's hope it stays like this long enough to restore some of my faith in humanity.
Right? I stopped viewing anything other than a few curated subs after a while because I realised all it was doing was making me angry and upset. It can't be healthy to be exposed to that constantly.
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.
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.
Unfortunately hate = engagement = advertising impressions = money
That's why it's important to like, and comment, and thank posters for positive posts.
It was very polarised. I found it hard to get along with the left subs, impossible with the right subs. People are increasingly less interested in making compromises and more so in having their way or the highway. Though I doubt this is a Reddit issue alone. The world stage has been moving, fast. No doubt sped up by the numerous global crises we just had or are currently having.
This is an ongoing problem with our Information Age. The fediverse already has this problem, though to a much lesser degree than reddit. Look at the structure of titles of threads on the political magazines/communities here. They are designed to make you outraged, because the sources they come from made their titles with engagement in mind and that permeates over to here. My hope is that the group of people on the fediverse, who are more interested in the future of the internet than most, will give rise to an idea that helps combat this problem.
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.
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
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
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.
Welcome to 10'ish years ago, OP.
So much outrage and doom. The algorithm rewarded people being more and more extreme, even about real problems.
Like, yes I lean left like reddit, but not every issue is the biggest scandal that has ever existed.
If you get swept up in that stuff, you'd think the world was about to end. And you'd frequently encounter people who think just so.
I've noticed, over the last month or so, a lot of right wing hate subs have started making their way to the front pages in r/all and r/polular.
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
test
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.
Outrage breeds engagement. Same with Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, MySpace, AOL,Netscape....
people forget r/imgoingtohellforthis was a thing. Hate was always on reddit. It might have been disguised as something else, but it was there. Problem is its impossible to tell what's satire and whats actually objectionable. There was a tipping point where imgoingtohellforthis switched from satire to objective racism. Reddit started its downward decline the day that sub got banned. I dont endorse what they became, but banning them proved reddit was no longer as open as they claimed.
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.
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.
Definitely noticed this as well. Another thing that pissed me off was the amount of repost, sometimes done by bot accounts. It became more apparent in small subreddits. Also, onlyfans models spamming most nsfw subreddit.
What's great about Lemmy is that it isn't just one big community but a bunch of small ones that band together to share content. If a community gets too toxic there's a migration path to a new one without getting locked out of the system as a whole.
Back in the old days of the internet when a forum started to get too big they often started to get toxic. Since each forum was isolated leaving it would be pretty hard since you'd not want to lose the good with the bad. Lemmy improves in that in that you can leave for a new community but you don't get locked out of all the content from elsewhere so there's less lock in giving users more choice to find a community that works for them.
One thing that would help is account linking which would decrease lock in even more.
Reddit helped me a lot over the years with my doubts and issues. Whenever I had any doubt with anything, I always found atleast one or two posts about it with some helpful answers. But yes, Reddit is filled with nasty people with their criminal minds. People use downvote feature for their personal satisfaction. If they do not like your comment (even if it is true), they will downvote you and then constantly harass you until you delete the comment. Moderators delete your comment and block you without giving you any explanation or a chance to explain yourself. The best way to use Reddit is to use it without an account.
There's always a few subs that get shoved un your face which are straight up the most racist shitholes ever. Lately, I got served a lot of /r/2westerneurope4u and it is absolutely disgusting literal /pol/tier
I had to start sorting by controversial to find comments of interest in many threads since most the conversation was so generic and sanctimonious. That’s a big part of why this is a digg moment for me with reddit.
I completely agree with you, I was there for 10 years. The place definitely became hateful, the users changed, the culture changed. The site just feels horrid now unless you're in some super niche sub.
I don’t think it’ll happen. That’s why this will work, because the fediverse has controls for this. Say the folks over at another lemmy instance start hosting communities that are allowing hateful content, if you’re on lemmy.world you can count on the devs there to defederate that instance, and then it completely disappears from your view. It’s important to understand that you could still go directly over to the web portal for that instance and still see the content, but after they’ve been defederated, you’d have to a make an account on their server to interact with their content because all the reputable or safe instances will block them. So then it’s up to mods, like always. So if someone starts a community at lemmy.world then starts allowing hate speech in their community, I believe the devs at lemmy.world can simply nuke the whole community in one swipe, plus probably delete any accounts on lemmy.world that were engaging with the deleted community. I’m just learning so correct me if I’m wrong, but these sets of checks and balances seem to me to create an environment like a salty lake that will prevent certain things from growing, like the widespread douchebaggery that infested Reddit like a kudzu vine.
It is same thing on every social media platform.
It's the politicization of the online space. Chances are it will happen here, or, perhaps worse, lemmy.world will end up filter-bubbling and everyone on the other side of the spectrum will make their own space where we both give the finger to a blank wall and pretend we're brave.
But yes, it did get worse, because it became less about life and more about the appearance of life, much like most social media.
So many debate lords just looking to make arguments out of anything. They completely ignore what you say and read what they want to hear so they can argue against points they made up.
Even on Lemmy, I've been seeing a bit of this. Like on the front page, for a day or two, there was that meme from LemmyShitpost about US incarceration rates titled "Happy Freedom Day... I Guess"
Come on, do people genuinely want to shit on a country on the day of it's independence that millions of people look forward to celebrating? Can they not keep their negativity and hate to themselves? Any comment that called out this circlejerk was just downvoted and was told that "Lemmy isn't the platform for you" and that Lemmy is only for "People that live in reality". Verbatim.
It's just saddening to see, and it reminds me why I just curate my subscription feed and never look at the general front page. Like yes, a collective outrage at the Reddit admin is what drove the spike in users as of late, but it feels different when you're shitting on other people and the things they're passionate about, for something undeserved.
Seriously, thank you for this thread. I'm glad to hear it's not just me wondering this.
It's the day after the 4th of July in Seattle, so I thought see how many of my neighbors burned shit down by accident.
Instead I saw:
- A car driving around shooting fireworks at people.
- A young man getting stomp-mugged.
- A child in a spiderman costume getting absolutely humiliated and assaulted by his peers.
Realized I wasn't logged in and this was just first-page BS. FFS it's a total depression, rage, hate-machine.
Can confirm, I've grown to really hate redditors over the past 13 years.
The users of reddit in no way mirrored the real world. I consider myself an indepentant in real life, I vote based off of issues that are important to me, I get my news primarily from Reuters and the AP, but I found myself filtering out more and more subreddits as they became filled with hate.
Neutral sounding subreddits such as Politics and News became hate filled groups that attacked anyone right of the far left.
I've abstained from contributing to reddit for years due to this and hope Lemmy doesn't experience the same hate filled fall.
Whoa, don't you dare to disagree with the Reddit Hivemind.
I don't think it was gradual, it was an active admin corps that tried to build balance with progressive Redditors by allowing Nazi thugs free rein to brigade, troll, and spread their hate.
Yes it patently and profoundly idiotic to try and counter empathy with Aryan Christofacism.
And so we find ourselves in the Fediverse and hoping it won't go the same way again.
I think it's universal across the internet. I've seen the comments on ig get more an more aggressive too. I think we're all subconsciously anticipating conflict
To be honest, you can say the same about Twitter
If you want to go way back, take a look at old BBSes or Usenet. The flame was commonly deployed. For many decades now people have used the internet to look at pictures of cats and also to talk trash or otherwise say horrible things. I don't think Reddit is different in any major way, except that on subs that were decently managed, many of the worst commenters were banned and the worst comments were often down voted into oblivion. It really did depend on the subreddit.
The fact that some people behave like assholes is not in itself anything indicative about a website working well or poorly. In real life some people behave like assholes some of the time too. Of course we have and should continue to take reasonable steps to deal with much of the badness, but we should never expect or aim for perfection on this front.
Reddit's the new facebook. You're racist uncle will be talking about it the next Thanksgiving.
I found a lot of Reddit was around "This person bad" for whatever of a million reasons.
And, of course I got downvoted for saying so on Reddit.
While I agree, I feel like this is not a reddit problem and more a problem of the internet as a whole. The global population of english speakers on the internet has started trending to being madder and angrier over the past decade. I wonder if we make it out of this economic downturn and peoples lives become easier if it would start to get better? Fat chance of that happening though with Climate change going unaddressed and continuing to hurt the poorest of us.
It's not a great place anymore, mind you it hasn't been for some time but now it's a shit show!!
I remember that I got into Formula 1 because years ago that was one of the rare subredits without hate and fighting and than in a few years it become worse than stackoverflow and 4chan combined.
The rest of it similarly, some small subs were almost ok, but general feeling was just too aggressive.
Like others said, it can easily just be algorithm that is promoting hate since it is hunting for engagement and aggressiveness generates engagement. Similar to other social networks.
Reddit is almost complete toxicity.
You should check out the Apollo for Reddit sub. I had to unsubscribe from it lol.
I don't think I've experienced that in my 13 years on Reddit, then again I'm selective with what I sub to.
There's jerks everywhere. Just block them.
I joined when it was starting to go to shit and by the end of it, it was complete shit
Same! I couldn't even go into my regular subs without seeing some idiotic political post, or have someone flip out on me.
Reddit was only good for porn and low-effort trolling.
Who told you the internet was a safe space?
Far left are the source of the problem.
