this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
1825 points (98.4% liked)

Reddit

17809 readers
31 users here now

News and Discussions about Reddit

Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules


Rule 1- No brigading.

**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **

YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.



Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.

**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



:::spoiler Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 99 points 11 months ago (4 children)

This “the alternatives are great” gaslighting stuff has got to stop. We’ve all tried it and we’re all still here, for good reason. Reddit sucks but the fediverse sucks even more.

Oh the irony in this comment... The only person being gaslit is yourself.

And secondly - a lot of people don't know that you can now block instances individually and that defederation/blocking is not really that big of a deal anymore.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Reading the comments in that thread made me realise how little I miss Reddit. The sub is RedditAlternatives and there's a whole lot of people in there whinging that people are talking about alternatives to Reddit. Lemmy has it's problems, but Reddit is toxic AF.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago

I guess you could say the people who actually moved away from Reddit aren't on /r/RedditAlteratives anymore

[–] [email protected] 52 points 11 months ago (2 children)

if you think fediverse is worse than reddit you have issue

[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There's a certain demographic of people who crave a constant flow of outrage to fuel their social media addiction. I know because I've struggled with this myself.

Reddit has a slew of bots and artificially promoted posts to provide this to increase engagement.

I guess we have bots here too, but it's trivial to block them, and obvious spam/ads tend to be removed on sight.

There's far less outrage fuel here than on reddit, and also the comparatively slower flow of content encourages actual engagement and participation vs. merely consuming.

I can see why someone who's balls deep in reddit might be disappointed here.

I may also be completely wrong about some of this, but that's my observational take.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

As someone who went from a daily user of reddit for a decade and now hasn't used reddit basically since the app's red wedding, I really don't think this is it. As much as I hope the fediverse and Lemmy take off, currently I'm extremely pessimistic about that because if anything the problem is the reverse of what you describe. My current front page on Lemmy (all/active):

  • an article whining about Elon
  • an article about Fox News/trump
  • a post complaining about charging for XBL/PSN
  • an article about Tesla being banned from driving schools
  • an article complaining about DoorDash

and so on. And to get to this great non-rage bait content, I had to go through the trouble of even figuring out how to use the fediverse and which instance to sign up for (and then still hop instances a few times) and spend my first week just blocking like I was getting paid for it because language settings on this site mean nothing, more or less, and there are a few "communities" that pop up here that provide all of the intellectual stimulation of jamming a q-tip too far in your ear.

And if those posts alone don't paint a clear picture about who the user base is here, heading to the comments will. Most of the comments read like they're posted by "lefty white linux bro" or "communist trans linux they/them" who have decided that those are their entire identity/personality. While none of those things are bad and I tick a lot of those boxes myself, it creates a real echo chamber that borders on hostile to anyone that isn't in that category. The other side effect I've seen on this is that this place can offer up some real doozies of takes in a way that is likely to make anyone who actually knows anything just up and leave. I saw one the other day that was talking about greatest people in the FOSS space and uncritically lists RMS that was heavily upvoted. At least someone brought up why that's problematic in the comments, but imagine hopping over to the mainstream sites and talking about best musicians and seeing R Kelly on the list...

Anyway, while I don't mind an echo chamber now and then, if Lemmy in particular is to grow and be useful for anyone outside of this base, I'd suggest the community adopt something closer akin to "reddiquette" which is probably the main reason why reddit was able to get somewhat past this in the early days, and some of the "niche" communities were able to grow. I put niche in quotes here, because as it stands now Lemmy doesn't have even very vibrant communities for fairly mainstream things (music and TV, movies, etc.)

So while I personally choose to spend my time here instead of on reddit, that's mostly an ideological choice and I view as a sacrifice because I'm missing out on tons of other content that I enjoy. Even your post is a form of this – "reddit bad" (sure) "because of bots" (also sure) "and Lemmy has less outrage content and fuels engagement" (uh, no.) Lemmy has as much or more, and it's only fueling engagement on those that don't immediately bounce off, but since you posted "their team bad, our team good" you're getting upvotes and probably will continue to.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

That you accuse leftists and marginalized groups of "mAkInG iT ThEiR wHoLe IdEnTiTy" tells me everything I need to know about your privilege and worldview, and explains immediately why you'd prefer reddit, a notorious alt-right platform.

We're generally not welcome on reddit, so the fact that bigots and transphobes or right-wingers get immediately dunked on here is actually a good feature, and makes this far less toxic overall.

FYI I've blocked you, so I won't see any further hot takes from you and therefore won't respond. My time and sanity are far too valuable to waste on someone like you.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Ah perfect. Sets up a strawman, completely misses the point of my post, says one of the dumbest things I've ever heard (reddit being an alt-right website*) and then immediately moves to block in response to me saying this place is a hostile echo chamber. 10/10, no notes, illustrates the point I was trying to make better than I did.

Just to be clear for other readers, I was not saying that any of those things are bad I was saying that this place has a purity test that borders on stupidity which this post illustrates well.

* just how does one come to this conclusion? It's less lefty than Lemmy, but not by much. It's alt-right communities are usually either banned, quarantined, and regardless of the technicals of the website or how the admins run it, they've always been outcast and if you say "vote for trump" in any but the clearly right echo chambers, you're going to get downvoted to hell.

[–] balderdash9 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

It's fine for actual bigots to get dunked on. But Lemmy users will dunk on you: literally for liking the "wrong" piece of software. The echo chamber is real.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

I've not noticed. Can you provide an example? You mean Chrome?

Honestly, I wish more people would switch to Firefox, but I'd never dunk on someone for Chrome. I might try to talk them out of it though lol

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You perfectly illustrated the point

[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

"But I like my corporate cage 😭😭😭"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't know what current Reddit looks like but old reddit is still irreplaceable so far.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

People on Reddit are simply too addicted to the content. That's the only real reason I can see what could bind someone to the platform. It all boils down to that - content. (And you probably don't need me to repeat the usual "for more content we need more users" lol)

The old reddit is purely a technical thing at this point. I believe in the popular opinion that it's a matter of time before it gets shut down.

I've personally been a user of it on Apollo and Relay and to me it was the way to use it. Rarely have I interacted with the website. So I imagine it's a similar thing with the old mode users.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

a lot of people don't know that you can now block instances individually and that defederation/blocking is not really that big of a deal anymore.

I'll reshare my thoughts on this from a comment I left in a completely different context a few days ago:

My question about that option is: what effect does it have? My understanding is that if we defederate, they can see our content and reply to it, but only other users on their instance will see those replies.

Does an individual blocking them do the same thing? If so, perfect.

But if, as I suspect, it still allows them to see and reply to comments and everyone else in the fediverse can see it, I cannot support it as a solution to dealing with the kind of bad faith interactions which would make me want to block or defederate an instance. It allows them to continue peddling their rubbish without even enabling the person they’re cribbing off of to respond.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I'm so weary of this argument but you're dead right.

If I and all my neighbours close our curtains then we won't see all the garbage, rats, dead bodies, and other refuse piling up in our street, and then congratulate ourselves at the lovely community we share.

It's absurd. As though everyone expects that corporate encroachment into the fediverse is going to come with a big sign that says "threads" or some such.