I know you all who have been here longer than 3 days are probably sick of the whole “leaving reddit” post trend here, but I figured this would be a good thing to talk about because I didn’t really see it mentioned too much. A lot of people have spoken on here about poor moderation, the whole API debacle, a sort of downward cycle in terms of content quality etc. Plus, when I did bring these things up on my now-deleted reddit account, people mostly resorted to the whole “You hate capitalism yet you exist in it” argument. I also wrote a sort of summary for this in my application, so whoever read my application doesn’t really need to read this. I basically said the same shit just shorter.
But for me it was just because people got kinda mean? What I mean is that over the past 4 years (probably accentuated by the pandemic), it felt less and less like a place where you could just talk to somebody. With every post I made, it felt like I was in a competition not just in terms of karma but in terms of making something that pleased as many people as possible. Every title needed to be perfect for the grammar people, every fact needed to be perfect for the fact people, everything needed to be as apolitical as possible.
And even with all of these unwritten rules, I came to realize that there really are just two types of posts or comments on reddit. There’s jokes, and then there’s debates. Jokes ended up being a little more lenient in terms of unwritten rules so I think that’s why there’s so fucking many of them on reddit and it’s almost unavoidable to escape the pit of sarcasm in reddit comment sections. But with debates, it felt like with every comment I made, people came in expecting me to either agree with them or refute a point they made. And if I didn’t make “a point,” I wasn’t contributing. I couldn’t just go “Yeah I like Metal Gear Solid V, too,” I had to go “Yeah I like Metal Gear Solid V, too, and the guy you’re responding to is a fucking moron for not doing so,” or “No, you’re a dumbass, MGS4 is way better.” I remember one time I joined into a conversation and somebody actually replied bullying me for not “contributing” and for posting useless comments, as if I were somehow wasting their time by not trying to argue with them.
And what’s even worse is people just don’t seem to know how to be nice about it? Obviously with the internet, people are going to bully you at some point but on reddit it was just all. the. time. Every post I made, every comment I made there was somebody who didn’t like it and felt the need to tell me about it by insulting me or my family or my cat. Everyone was mean. It felt truly impossible to disagree with a person on reddit without insulting them, because that was the culture that was accepted there.
While I don’t use TikTok, I ended up stumbling upon this series of them by way of YouTube Shorts called “Average Redditor…” by The Slappable Jerk and I really think they perfectly encapsulate what it’s like to browse reddit, and I hate that it took me so long to realize that’s what my experience was like. I kept watching them and going “Nah, nobody’s like that,” but then the more I used reddit the more I realized “Yeah, it’s kind of everybody including myself.” As you can see in the video I linked, the guy is either joking or debating and he’s not nice about either one, and frankly that’s kind of how every single one of my reddit experiences has been so far. I can’t really remember the last time anybody has been nice to me on reddit. Maybe that’s my fault and my brain is suppressing me from realizing it, but I do think it’s a problem inherent in the system if I’m seeing other people doing it to each other also.
I got banned from reddit as a whole a week ago for reporting a guy for calling me a “spastic loser” after getting angry when another guy got angry for me not reading some deeper meanings in his 1 sentence post. I think that whole really weird run-on sentence should tell you all you need to know about my reddit experience these past few years. Funnily enough despite it breaking the subreddit’s rules against insults, it was “report abuse.”
I ended up hearing about Lemmy while browsing today and I deleted my account just now. I saw probably a couple dozen posts at most. It seems kinda slow here. But you know what I didn’t see at all? People fighting. Calling each other names. Insulting each other. I saw debates and arguments but I straight up didn’t see the same kind of debates and arguments that I saw on reddit. On Reddit I could probably go 3 or 4 posts without that happening, but even posts of 12 comments will always have rude jerks on them. Now I’m still new here, and I have heard that there are toxic and xenophobic instances of Lemmy that are on massive blocklists, but Beehaw so far has been nothing short of just plain joyful. It’s so wonderful to see people online just. talking. to each other. And while I see people swearing (I did it myself in this post), it really just haven’t seen it directed at other users on here. On reddit it seems like there’s such a big culture of if you’re gonna insult somebody you go for the deepest-cut insult possible. On here I just haven’t seen that.
TL;DR: People on reddit are mean. Beehaw (and some other instances of Lemmy I signed up for) are far from that.
/rant
I find myself less guarded on beehaw in some ways, and more guarded in others.
Firstly, I feel I can be more authentic. Discussions always seem to be in good faith, and I often come away learning something, reconsidering something, or just being more aware of other viewpoints. Whether I participate in the discussion or just read it.
It’s just more enjoyable overall.Which leads me onto how I am being more guarded. I am really trying to consider other viewpoints before even engaging with posts or discussions.
And I dislike that this is an effort for me.
But I like that I have realised it, and I now get to make an effort to be better.I think with the lower userbase, it’s much less easier to say something others would find abhorrent or rude and then sulk away into the shadows of millions of other users. People can see you and go “that’s that person who said some fucked shit.” So for me at least I’ve found myself being a bit more guarded, but I think that’s a good thing.
Good point. But perhaps I’m wrong- I think most people don’t pay much attention to usernames here (or on Reddit for that matter). Lemmy makes it easier to change the display username iirc? So even if such was the case, I could quickly change mine. It would end up just like reddit, in which unless you bother checking a user’s profile you probably won’t know who they are or what they’ve said last month.
I guess that makes sense. Still, the smaller community still has me watching my words.
Lol reddit brought out the absolute worst in people. It brought out the old argumentative teenager on new grounds I used to be and I would have been mortified if anyone I knew had found any of my posts hahaha!
…people came in expecting me to either agree with them or refute a point they made. And if I didn’t make “a point,” I wasn’t contributing.
Exactly this; towards the end, I was writing a comment every couple of weeks on Reddit, and most of the reason why is that I felt I didn’t have “enough” of a contribution to make.
I think the lack of global/account karma will help this in a way. Reddit was practically full of performers, doing tricks for treats. Jokes were easy tricks. There’s no real value in posting garbage posts/comments when there’s no long-term benefit for the user. I think we’ll see a lot less cruft here, especially as people deprogram themselves from that habit.
I don’t think people debated primarily for karma, but maybe with the rest of the performative aspects gone, people will stop feeling pressured to show off to others - publicly dunking on someone is another way to perform for an audience and receive validation points.
I am going to miss seeing my total karma go up after a zinger of a meme I created, though.
updoots=chuckles
updoots < chuckles
There have been several times I’ve wanted to post on here and haven’t because I’m worried about how people are going to treat me for a single post. It’s hard to come out of that thinking on here and actually participate.
I’ve only seen one instance of an argument where both people had 0 point comments all the way down. There’s a lot of positivity and thoughtfulness here with the early crowd - I hope it keeps up
Well for what it’s worth, you can’t be downvoted on Beehaw. Plus there are way more people here who aren’t dicks than there are on reddit, which helps too.
Cool - but I’m not on Beehaw (I’m on lemmy.world) to add to the confusion, and I see here both an up and down arrow…
Plus there are way more people here who aren’t dicks
Well there are just WAY less people here, and the barrier to entry is still pretty high - dicks (and millions of good people) are still filtered out by this.
Fun fact, when interacting with Beehaw, users from other instances can indeed click downvote, but it only updates on the client side, no downvote ever actually gets cast. if you’re on Android, the newest version of Jerboa no longer shows the downvote button in (most of) the places where it’s disabled.
I just installed Jerboa yesterday and still see the down vote button on Beehaw server content. When clicked it notes “down vote disabled”.
This is what it looks like on 0.0.34:
If your’re on 0.0.33 then you might want at consider adding the IzzyOnDroid repo to F-Droid.
Good idea. Looks like it is just a matter of close timing on my part.
You remind of people playing Deep Rock Galactic for the first time. When you ‘die’ one of your teammates has to come and get you up and with a lot of new people apologize profusely for getting downed as if they’re scared that I’ll yell at them or something. It’s like they have PTSD from toxic experiences on other online games.
It really sucks to see that, but it’s also really cool when they realize it’s okay that they died and they can finally start just enjoying the game.
Rock and stone!
I was also scared of doing the same thing but I just really had to rationalize that this platform isn’t reddit and therefore it wouldn’t be as hostile as reddit. I was scared to comment anything on the previous platform because of the same sentiments. This place is very chill tho
You’re suffering from PRSD (Post-Reddit Stress Disorder). That’s a joke, but not really…
I’m a reddit refugee, too. Just the other day, I misinterpreted a response to a comment I had made here on Beehaw. I (wrongly) assumed it was negative, so I explained my reasoning. The person who had responded replied, kindly explained that it wasn’t a criticism at all, and even talked about how they hated the nastiness on reddit.
How often did the average reddit user have a positive exchange like that? I can count experiences like that on one hand, over a span of years. This time, it happened my first week.
It’s soooooo nice to just be able to talk to people. “Be(e) nice” isn’t just a slogan; it’s the actual vibe around here. At this point, I wouldn’t go back to reddit, even if the people in charge came to their senses. The tech and the rules are a lot less important than the community, and I like this community MUCH better!
You will be fine. If you do post and I see it then I will definitely comment :D
So far what I have seen will a post in worst case just be up voted with maybe 2 or 5 votes. I posted for the first time the other day hoping to start off the pev comms…but sadly all my pev ppl seems to be on reddit :(
I agree with most everything you said. My personal take: all the Karma upvoting/downvoting stuff shaped community behavior to a sort of drastic degree - you either say something pleasing/sarcastic to the community and get upvoted or you got buried with downvotes for injecting an alternative viewpoint. After a while, I found myself going along with something just because a post had a massive number of upvotes… not realizing that the majority of readers very rarely go past the top 3-5 comments on a thread. So whatever was on top was usually the highest voted, and it was most often a sarcastic response to a legitimate question someone posted.
This is not terribly different from my experience. I was getting pretty worn down by the hive mind effect that some subs developed and how badly you could get downvoted or yelled at if you went against the grain. I think Reddit had become perhaps TOO big. There was just so many people on it that it felt like competing mobs.
I think that sites like Lemmy will start to take off, we just have to give them time. And I will need to figure out mobile with this site, cuz I’m on my phone right now and I can’t read any comments under a post 😂 I’ll get therr
The app called “Jerboa for Lemmy” works great for me on Android.
You hate capitalism yet you exist in it
Yeah i hear that
It is comments like these that makes me miss reaction buttons! I want you to know I laughed out irl when I saw your comment! And I can’t show that with out commenting. But writing only “hahaha” or 😂 feels a bit weird haha. But now you know 😂
Have you ever visited the comments section of Hacker News?
No, I’m not really a hacking person. You could call me more of a PC “hobbyist.” Never got into the nitty gritty stuff like hacking or programming.
The comment wars on those are absolutely insane! Reddit is pretty tame compared to those
I wouldn’t doubt it. A lot of my “hacker” buddies go pretty hard in the online discussions. They don’t really hold back.
One of the things that make me really sad is the demise of Hacker News and how I can’t really go to the comments section in there anymore. I find lobste.rs to be a good replacement, especially when you need somebody to recommend you first to get an account there. It’s sharply focused on tech, preferably Linux and Unix, and programming. No startup economy bs, no product launches, just tech.
Wow lobste.rs has a great UI, and also seem to not bother with the federation stuff, which makes it easier to use.
There is another aspect that you didn’t get into; I am on a lot of subreddits where I attempt to help people with questions. r/zfs, r/ceph, r/homelab and r/datahoarder are ones I frequent among others where if people have questions I and others attempt to help them. This is neither a debate nor humour, and is one area where Lemmy still has a lot of catching up to do… not least of which because the specialized communities don’t yet exist.
I haven’t left Reddit yet… I’m still watching and waiting but it IS nice to have Lemmy and Tildes as alternatives (though I’m more digging Lemmy so far).
I think those communities will eventually arrive on the fediverse. If anything, building the community yourself and gently guiding people to the alternative could help fence sitters who don’t understand the full implications of reddit’s new policies for the 1% of power users who actually create most of the content.
90% are lurkers, 9% will comment and upvote, while 1% of users generate content for the others.
Wait, we were the 1% all along?
I liked the “You hate capitalism yet you exist in it” … BS. Whoever said capitalism should decide policy, run the government, or our lives is nuts. It is up to us to define the rules under which capitalism runs not the other way around. Besides when essentially there is only 1 Reddit… we are talking about a monopoly not a competitive business anyway and a century ago this was decided to be bad. You do not have a true competitive market unless you have say 7 or so mostly identical players anyway… but of course we let everyone consolidate down to 3.
I agree but I wasn’t referring to it literally, lol. It’s just the type of thing people say to paint you as a hypocrite when they have no other valid arguments against what you’re saying. Basically it was “you hate reddit so much then why do you use it?”
The kind of statements that might make sense if you just ignore all other nuance.
I was constantly dragged into multi comment long debates on reddit where people would insult and attack me and my opinions. Like you said, Lemmy is much nicer.
My experience on reddit is very similar to yours. The more niche subreddits you could get away from it a bit but… yeah. the video you shared captures it perfectly.
As for beehaw, I’m not on there so idk. I joined kbin/fedia but my experience on the fediverse sounds similar to your own. Lots of people just chatting and talking about how it feels like “the old internet” and not really any of that reddit snark/heated debate.
I fart in your general direction, your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!
Really though, I was part of two private subs that were invite only. The smaller community and how users were “recruited” made a huge difference. I could post things there that I wouldn’t on public forums, mostly because of the increased anonymity, but also because there wouldn’t be any nastiness.
If lemmy gets big enough, it will be just like that. Your problem is not a Reddit problem but an Internet forum with nested threads problem. It’s much harder to hyperfocus on a comment in a flat comment structure.
An Internet … problem
Yeah, that’s 100% it. On the Internet in 2023, everyone needs to be right or win with their comment. It’s off-putting when you’ve been on the Internet longer than Gen Z has been alive.
Huge egos in some people today, despite no life experience whatsoever, and no accomplishments.
Being humble is not a goal.
Yep, there was a reason long time redditors used RES for the browser and third party apps to attempt to better curate content.
This is one of the reasons why mastodon doesnt have re-boosts, only boosts and replies.
I’ve been commenting on here tons that I feel like reddit has morphed into every thread being an argument or a meme-off. I used to love just shooting the shit in the comments of a funny/cool post. It’s been gone for years and so far it’s what I like most about Lemmy. Way fewer comments sure, but like I’ll go back and forth just talking with way more people.
I’m not at all concerned about the fewer comments. Most of the comments on reddit were just re-hashes (purposeful or not) of other comments. Like there’s only so many things you can talk about on any one topic.
