I’m a long time Lemmy lurker and occasional Redditor. Since the Reddit influx, I’ve watched the frequency of shitty Reddit-type behavior, e.g., combative comments, trolling, and unnecessary rudeness, just sky rocket.
I’m happy to have more content on Lemmy, but I wish the bad actors and assholes would have stayed on Reddit.
Yes, I realize the irony of posting this on a new community that’s basically a Reddit transplant.
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Humans and lemmings are natural enemies… Like humans and redditors… Or humans and other humans! Damn humans, they ruined humanity!
Do you remember the great day of suffering, when humans tricked some of our brothers and sisters off a cliff, just for their own entertainment! shame on humans.
remember, it’s only a war crime if you get caught … and the whistleblower doesn’t get a larger jail sentence.
^ Disney documentary makers, I believe…
Just like in the game lol. I would send the cover art of the lemmings game along this but I’m not sure if you can actually add a picture unless it’s a link.
Saints be praised! You’re from North Kilttown too?
You humans sure are a contentious bunch.
You just made an enemy for life!
Seeing the low-quality comments starting to appear is disappointing.
Ironic.
What makes your comment “high-quality” or are you to blame?
I think he was joking
this
Shut up nerd.
You forgot the /s.
Idk why you’re swinging for low hanging fruit. Your 10 day old account speaks to a Reddit migrant as well.
Ironic.
Honestly anyone with an account younger than lemmy.world I’d easily count as a reddit migrant.
Of course, federation makes it hard to figure out exactly when they first created an account anywhere, especially since lemmy.world has only existed since like June 2.
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I’m a long time Lemmy lurker and occasional Redditor
Lurker isn’t the same as contributer, but I don’t think OP fully counts as a reddit migrant
It’s an alt.
Who cares. They still have a point.
I came over in the reddit migration.
I have to admit, the thought definitely occurred to me when I first joined and had a look around, that the people that were already here before would be getting swarmed by masses of redditors that may well not have the same “site-culture” as the people who were here first. I’m actually surprised that this is the first post that I’ve seen complaining about it.
I mean it, I was legitimately expecting a ton of pushback from the existing fedi community over this, and was really surprised when it never seemed to materialize.
For my own experiences of being here (I’m on kbin), this place has been really good-natured, with a better level of well intentioned discussion than what a lot of reddit had, so it’s been a really nice experience so far. What I don’t have though, is any experience of what it was like before we all invaded en-mass, so I have nothing to contrast it with. I can totally see how someone wouldn’t be happy with what’s happened though, the migration has to have changed the space a lot for everyone that was here before.
One thing about my personal experience of how it is here though is that when I first joined I tried to do the thing that you first do with a reddit account, you know, where you immediately un-subscribe from all default subreddits and only join things you’re actually interested in (so, niche subs, etc). Found out that it isn’t quite how it works, but that the subscribed feed is pretty much exactly that but baked-in as standard. I’ve then spent almost my whole time on the subscribed feed since (unless actively looking for new stuff).
So the quality that I’ve experienced here is probably more down to my personal selection of subscribed communities rather than a more holistic view of the platform as a whole. There’s the caveat to everything I just said, I guess.
So yeah, I’m kinda sorry that this happened to you, and I’d also prefer if those people (I’m referring to the bad-actors and arsehole’s side of things) would have just stayed where they were too, but I’m not sure what to do about it other than just blocking/unsubscribing to the communities in question, or blocking the individual accounts of bad actors. I doubt that the second is even remotely scalable though if the userbase gets significantly larger.
The lack of pushback was because lemmy hadn’t really formed its own discrete culture and community. There just weren’t enough people for that to happen. Lemmygrad is probably the only exception, as they formed a community and have been around for a while. And yea, they’re looking at the rest of lemmy as a kind of Reddit hellacape now. Literally they post memes about people just shutting all over the place. And, they’re not entirely wrong, as you hint at.
It’s a little bit of a shame. As arguably it was necessary. But also, it’s arguably been too rushed. Building up communities and spaces is probably best down more slowly and organically. Lemmy probably went through two steps of growth in one short period. Mastodon by comparison had already had migration events prior to 2022 that had built up site-culture, though that has been somewhat overrun by some Twitter culture, but I think a cultural fusion is happening. Many parts of lemmy however are now basically subsets of Reddit culture. Not bad but not great.
Interestingly, the dynamics between tech and culture are manifesting, where the tech and and interface differences between Reddit and Lemmy (eg no karma) are forcing cultural changes, as is the federation aspect.
lemmygrads problems with the fediverse are not with combative comments, trolling and unnecessary rudeness, they gleefully partake in each
lemmygrads problems with the fediverse is liberals doing it too
I discovered Lemmy around 2019 or 2020 and loved the concept but was put off by the density of commies, so I didn’t create an account and participate but I would check the site around once a year to see if the community had taken off yet.
2020: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet? Nope, still commies and dead threads.
2021: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet? Nope, still commies and dead threads.
2022: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet? Nope, still commies and dead threads.
2023: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet?YES!
And I am so glad to never have to see the depressing and miserable “culture” that was Lemmy from 2019 to mid-2023 again.
“I mean it, I was legitimately expecting a ton of pushback from the existing fedi community over this, and was really surprised when it never seemed to materialize.”
I mean I joined pretty early, I think beehaw was topping the charts with 400, (4k?) Users. I’m pretty sure the complaints did happen but we’re pretty immediately drowned out
I disagree. I was here before the migration and I really wanted to like it. However, there simply wasnt enough content and most threads were barren. Now, there are full deep discussions everywhere about loads of different topics. I’ve come back to a far better product than I previously experienced, despite a few more bad actors.
Seeing the low-quality comments starting to appear is disappointing.
Omg this!
/s
I haven’t noticed it too much but I feel like everyone is so used to how Reddit was that it would take some work and a collective agreement between users on the fediverse to shun the low quality comments.
I do remeber that somewhat working on Reddit for a while, but yeah once it became big enough there was no stopping the shitty comments.
It sounds terrible but I hope the ux doesn’t improve, as it acts as a barrier to entry to a lot of the shit-tier Reddit users.
If you want to stop more people coming, just go and tell people on Reddit to come here.
The trick though is that when you do, give them url’s for both Lemmy and Kbin. From what I saw, doing that somehow made understanding this place so difficult that 95% of people would just start shouting abuse at whoever did it and refuse to ever entertain the idea of switching. :p
I got here
I think this is a symptom of having a scoring system for comments. If you gamify your social interactions, people will try to play the game (meaning low quality comments, dad jokes, or anything that will grant them easy votes) instead of having actual discourse.
That ignores the effect of bad actors who will do it regardless though. There may actually be something to using such a score, at least as a qualitative if not quantitative measurement of trustworthiness, like for anyone with a magazine-specific karma score in the negative and spread out over at least ten comments, start hiding their comments by default (like still visible but you have to click to expand now), and allow the mods to decide what their communities rules will be.
Irl it’s like: punch me in the face once, twice, three times, and eventually ten times, and maybe one day I’ll finally start to think about considering making a plan of action to help you realize that there may be consequences… one day! (maybe) That could help so that if a troll is popular in one place but always shits outside of where they live, those receiving the raw end of that deal could have a way to automatically deal with it?
On second thought though, it’s probably too easily gamified, especially by alts created for explicitly that purpose, like it’s not that hard to make 10 accounts. But aside from minor UI concerns, something like that could actually change whether/how often someone feels welcomed to go visit a site.
Even back in the old forum days, we had replies akin to “yes, this!” “agreed!” “no” that don’t contribute much to the discussion.
So I don’t think it’s the scoring system that is at fault, but rather it’s just human nature. Sometimes people simply want to be a part of something, and those meaningless phrases help to accomplish that.
Oh, definitely. However I’m not so sure that these are the low quality comments they’re talking about. I believe it’s the ones that are being posted just to get that quick upvote in order to feel more validated.
I came across one earlier that was about as low quality as it gets. It was a thread about some big car accident and the only reply was “/c/fuckcars”. No commentary on the actual article, no attempt at starting any actual discussion, just a pithy one liner that serves no purpose other than grabbing some upvotes and killing any chance of discussion. I still haven’t seen TOO much of that yet but I find it weird that someone would make the effort to come to the fedi just to do the same low effort shit they were doing on Reddit. It’s disappointing but at the same time, my short time on the fedi has been filled with far more actual conversation than most of my time on Reddit was.
Always downvote all bad content - that’s why the arrow exists.
Sometimes you want to support a post or comment but have nothing to say. Comments increase engagement scores on most platforms
In my experience the only ones caring about engagement scores are advertisers. If you agree with a post/comment you don’t actually have to press any button (upvote, like, heart, etc) or even reply to it. We’ve been conditioned to do it because they have found a way to profit off of our “uh huh” and “yeah that’s right”. I’m not suggesting it’s all bad, I’m trying to put it into context.
Sure and it might not be a thing here in Lemmy but there’s a lot of users conditioned to behave this way
It was necessary, unfortunately. Unless you just wanted Lemmy to stay this quaint little corner instead of being a significant player in helping the Fediverse reach its real potential out there.
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This 100%. I have read forums from back the 2000s and people still flame as if it was a Reddit thread, thrilling.
You’re absolutely right. Reddit was the source, but it really could have been people from anywhere.
I do wonder if Reddit’s culture does affect the attitudes of those coming over, though. One thing I saw all the time on Reddit was the unhelpful critic: the guy who was more than happy to tell you you’re wrong, whether or it not doing so is warranted, contextually inappropriate, or even makes sense, and only that you’re wrong - they add nothing else to the conversation. I’ve had a TON of those recently; there’s even one in this thread. I used to see them here every so often but never like this.
Seeing as your account is the same age as mine, it seems you’re a reddit refugee as well.
All we can do is behave well and try not to be a jerk. And not try and invite the same type of reddit behavior to lemmy.
Unfortunately I think this just reflects human nature. The more people you have the more people you have at the fringes who are aggressive, or trolling or even just selfish or insensitive.
Also it’s easy to come across rude when posting in text - anyone who works with colleagues via email will find the same problem of one meaning being intended but a different meanong (such as tone) being read by the recipient.
When you have a small community your names become familiar and there is something personal about the interactions. Once the you have a huge community people become anonymous and that allows bad behaviour to flourish. I barely ever saw a name twice on reddit and that’s happening here too. I got to the point on reddit where I’d post a comment but I wouldn’t ever read the replies as I was fed up with dealing with the negativity.
My hope for the fediverse is that there will be multiple versions of the same communities so that we can have closer knit versions of communities as alternatives to the 1m+ chaotic versions. Small communities are where you can achieve decency and kindness more consistently.
Also I assume that unfriendly behavior, and atmosphere it creates, discourage unaggressive or less typical posters from participating in conversations. So those insensitive people will end up being overpresented in the comment section.
That is expected isn’t it? Both sites are driven by people, and people can be an assholes. Doubt we can do too much to drive them out.
It’s not reddit’s people in my mind. It’s how the society is structured in general. The fediverse gets slowly adopted by more and more people so it’s natural that there is a annoying group of idiots.
I think they are always everywhere in a percentage. So the bigger the group the more Idiots.
It’s possible that this percentage is increasing to be fair.
And yes, I’m a disgusting reddit refugee.
Basically another Eternal September. Yes, I’m going to keep linking to it in these threads like the lazy bum I am.
I suspect part of it may be due to the type of content we’re seeing. It feels like low-effort meme and shitpost communities are dominating the feeds, and that’s going to attract a certain low-effort audience. I’ve been blocking them liberally but they just keep coming.
The best thing about decentralized networks is that you can just go to another instance if you feel like this. You’re not forced to interact with any communities that you’re not a fan of. Things change with time, of course, but that doesn’t mean you have to change your tastes.
I think that it’ll get better over time, for structural reasons: since Reddit is a big instance with lots of users and only a few admins, the admins give no fucks on how you behave there. (And if you’re banned by a mod, you create another username and problem solved.) Here however individual users are more precious for their instances’ admins, so admins have more reasons to keep their instances clean of people likely to piss off other people. And, even if they don’t, I predict that instances with notoriously rude individuals will get defederated. The net result is that those users will have low visibility for other users.
What concerns me the most is not combative, trolling, and unnecessary rude users. It’s the stupid - users who are able to reason but actively avoid it. It’s the context illiterates, the assumers, the false dichotomisers, the “I dun unrurrstand” [with either an implicit “I demand to be spoonfed as per my divine right”, or an “I disagree but I’d rather pretend that I’m a stupid than outright say it”] and the likes. People tend to pat those users on their heads and talk about esoteric stuff like “intentions”, but I don’t think that they should be socially accepted here, as they drive the dialogue level down and make the place less fun for other users.
I’d like to emphasize another advantage we have–the general sense of self-rule and control. We actually have a modicum of power here, we’re not just fueling profits for some spez. We can move around, organize however we wish.
This creates a naturally higher morale environment. I think things are a little, oh, excited right now, but I expect we’ll probably settle down a little bit over the next few months, as people settle in more.
The trolls, though, those are here to stay I’m afraid. Internet is the internet, you need a private community to truly guarantee none of them forever. And even that doesn’t always work. Hackers and bot attacks too, also here to stay. We’re big enough to be a decent target now.
The trolls, though, those are here to stay I’m afraid. Internet is the internet, you need a private community to truly guarantee none of them forever.
Can’t that be mitigated with blocklists, like with ads or spam calls? Like imagine if you could subscribe to a blocklist where it’s updated regularly. It could be self-maintaining. If 10 people block a certain account, it gets shadowbanned for every other subscriber.
Most of them, yeah, probably. Though you’d need anti-abuse measures to prevent it from being weaponized. Would be hard to balance. And particularly good trolls can’t be caught, too, that’s half the point. They can really only be smothered by superior content and not upvoted. You don’t really want to downvote them either, ideally.
Make them feel awkward and unengaged. That’s the strongest defense.
It might be different if there was noplace else for them to go. But why does EVERY place on the internet - Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Threads - all have to cater to it? Can’t there be just ONE place where we hold ourselves to a higher standard? Maybe this means we’ll see fewer posts / comments / “activity” - but is that a bad thing, necessarily?
Still, as I learned how to drive, I realized something: if you leave a space somewhere, someone will fill it. If we want to build something different, it will require expended effort to make that happen.
Because other people don’t care about your standard.
If you want to make an instance where it’s’ enforced, do so - that’s the whole point of the Fediverse. Just don’t be surprised when you have no users.
Just don’t be surprised when you have no users.
Depending on which are those standards, you might get a lot of users. We had examples of that even in Reddit, where a few subs (like r/AskHistorians) had fairly specific rules that boil down to “don’t be a moron” and they were still fairly popular, even in a site that could as well have as slogan "lasciate ogni ragione, voi ch’entrate"¹. That’s because not even the stupid benefit from the others’ stupidity, so they still gravitate towards environments with higher standards².
So what !OpenStars@kbin.social said might be actually viable; the Fediverse (or at least, some chunks of it) could hold itself to a higher standard. The question is how; perhaps through instances? User culture? Or even UX changes that make context harder to ignore and stupid shit sink to the bottom (against the Fluff Principle³)?
(At those times I really want a c/TheoryOfTheFediverse…)
- give up all reasoning, you who enter.
- I believe that this is one of the things that make well-kept gardens die by pacifism.
- “on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.”
First, actually reading before speaking? And going to the trouble of citing your references?! This is absolutely an example of what I was talking about in terms of holding ourselves to higher standards. I get it - it is outright fun to share memes and short quick snippets, and there is room and value for doing that too, in line with the context that is offered (some posts call for more serious discussions, memes call for just fun, but oftentimes an article/thread can have responses of both types), and I do that myself too even, but there should also be room for deeper thoughts as well? Which by their nature tend to be downvoted or at least ignored, b/c people are not always in the mood for a wall of text, even if thoughtfully and lovingly crafted.
One example could be to add to the upvote system (or on kbin there is a “boost” that is the true upvote, actual upvotes are not counted even though they are displayed - yes it is complicated!:-D) a new thing like “favorited” or “loved”. Yes, people would game that too, but maybe if you could only use one of those a day, or ten per month or some such, then people would have an incentive to hold those in reserve (people could still game it with alts, so like anything else, it may need some attention, but perhaps that is not enough of a criticism to simply not move forward and start doing it?). Netflix similarly now has “up=like”, “down=did not like”, but also “double up=LOVE”. Implementing that across the Fediverse could allow distinctions between content that you merely agreed with, vs. content that needs special distinction as being LOVED. Even Reddit allowed awards, to meet that same need. Btw, I nominated your comment in the m/BestOf magazine for a vaguely similar effect, except that magazine has extremely little traffic (I am not even subscribed to it myself, although in my defense I do keep trying but it always goes to a new page displaying the single word “Error” whenever I try), and also it is far too much effort to do for every post that is worthy of such distinction.
I almost hesitated to respond with these thoughts, b/c who am I to suggest something that I am not willing to implement into actual code? That said, my responding to your existing comment seems a different matter, since you do seem interested in this topic, rather than an entire post requesting/demanding that something be done.
I wrote out a somewhat long-winded I suppose explanation of my personal experiences that led me to believe what I do, but I exceeded the character limit so I will have to post it separately, at which point you can peruse it at your leisure or just skip it if you’d rather.
More importantly though, if you are interested, here is an - I think - extremely insightful article about the short-term blurting types of comments, which again I do myself, we all do, acting to drown out serious discussions: https://kbin.social/m/BestOf/t/113715/The-Ennui-Engine-or-how-chasing-short-term-gratification-drains-our. I am not sure that I hold out any hope for change, but at least I enjoy trying to educate myself on such things for the sake of my own sanity:-).
We mostly agree on memes and other “just for fun” material: it’s fine if it’s there (I like it too). The only problem is when it drowns the deeper content into a sea of fluff, as it often happens in social media.
but maybe if you could only use one of those a day, or ten per month or some such
What if its value decrease with usage?
For example. Let’s say that the feature is called “fav”. And that “favs” are taking into account, for sorting purposes. Each poster gets 100 “fav points” a day.
If the person “favs” a single piece of content, that content is boosted by 100/1 = 100 fav points. If the person favs two, each gets boosted by 100/2 = 50 points. And if the person indiscriminately favs 1000 pieces of content through the day, each is boosted by only 100/1000 = 0.1 fav points, so practically nothing.
This wouldn’t impose a hard limit on how much you can use the feature per day, contrariwise to your idea, but it still makes you use the feature consciously - because you know that favving one more piece of content will make all the others that you’ve favved through the day count less and less. I feel like this could address the fluff principle in a way that simple votes (or boosts, double upvotes etc.) don’t: not using the feature would backfire (the points go to waste), but using it indiscriminately would also backfire.
I’ve read the Ennui Engine article. I feel like the author touched a good point, perhaps this is all a result of us taking the internet as “it is not serious / real life, then it doesn’t really matter”. This mentality somewhat worked in the 00s? Not any more though. The proposed solution feels unfeasible though, as it expects people to do the right thing, that’s like herding all cats into the same direction; we might need smarter solutions than that. (Even then, thanks for sharing this text, I think that it bullseyes the problem on the descriptive level.)
Thanks for the nomination in the mag!
The question is how; perhaps through instances? User culture? Or even UX changes that make context harder to ignore and stupid shit sink to the bottom (against the Fluff Principle³)?
A simple and obvious solution is just to adopt the rules of communities on reddit that manage to maintain a average quality of content (askhistorians? r/science?), and building features that help with that (multireddits , so you will have different feeds for “fun” and “important”, or user tags) , reddit enhancement suite features could also be helpful.
adopt the rules of communities on reddit that manage to maintain a average quality of content
The problem I see is that those communities usually had very specific goals; e.g. r/askhistorians wasn’t intended for discussions, it was more like “ask something in specific, get a specific answer”, so it’s hard to apply the same rules for communities with other goals.
And frankly, r/science was a bit of a dumpster fire.
I might be wrong, but I feel like we need to instigate a different mindset here, so perhaps user culture would be the way to go? That means scolding users for acting as dumbarses, instead of playing along their entitlement (a la Reddit).
Fully agree on the features.
Federated networks are, by design, not able to be constrained by one set of rules and standards. The place you are looking for is Tildes, a centralized, invite-only, text-only website whose selling point is “high quality discussions” and very harsh moderation against anything that does not fit their standard of “high quality”.
I’m not sure if you want to hear this from me or not, but your answer seems to me to be an example of the Binary Fallacy, or Principle of False Dilemma, where you assume that there are only two sides, with no room for subtly or nuance in-between.
For instance, as on Reddit, here too individual communities could moderate according to different principles, depending on the magazine and what they wanted. At least, even Reddit used to have that, so I’m guessing it’s actually possible here as well.
So often when I get into a conversation about veganism it ends with the other person saying I’ve been an asshole when I’ve just been direct and honest… :(
