I feel like Fediverse users are nicer to each other and more generous with upvotes than reddit.

LemmyBe@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 2782 points –

i’m doing it because I want to make the fediverse more friendly place, in hopes of making it more welcoming for new users, and the nicer place in general. But I wonder how much is just less bots.

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I've seen more instances of "you're right, I'm being a dumbass" than I was prepared to.

The Old Place put a patina of grime on my soul. People are alright here.

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As they say in Texas. I’ll bet you couldn’t pour !@#$ out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won’t go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You’re a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformation. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly. You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You’re a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won’t have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. And what meaning do you expect your delusional self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral[size] equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meat slapper. On a good day you’re a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. You smarmy lager lout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oink artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don’t have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well... it didn’t really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative flame was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us ”normal” people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are ”challenged” persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn’t have been ”right”. Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you. P.S.: You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally NOT GOOD.

It’s just such an impressive array of insults. The variety, the scope, the diversity. There’s so much, I’m in awe

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I agree for the most part. However, in my effort to post content, I've gotten more than a few snarky or mean comments about the quality of the content. I get it if it's not for you but just down vote. You don't need to make the person feel bad for trying to help Lemmy grow.

I hope the haters won't succeed at discouraging you and thank you for your effort to help our place grow! I'm a bit shy to post too because I don't want to get those kind of comments, but so far it's been a positive experience.

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I stopped using upvotes/downvotes at all on Reddit. Unless you were on New, exclusively, it didn't matter how often you got on Reddit, anything you were seeing was at least fifteen hours old. Any conversation was already done. Any up/downvotes you put in wouldn't matter at all and probably just got ignored by the system. Anything you had to say would only appear to you, in reality it just dropped to the bottom of the sea, never again to be seen. Thousands had already spoken, somehow, and you were just walking through a snapshot of the past, already said and done.

For now, it's much smaller here. Sometimes I find myself upvoting a post just to let the person know that somebody actually came in here and gave a fuck about what they had to say, that they aren't talking to themselves in an empty room.

It makes sense to care a bit more, for a lot of reasons. We'll see how long that vibe can sustain itself.

My feeling exactly. Smaller communities nurture much more healthier engagement than bigger ones

Sure, for the main subs. But the smaller subs for hobbies (for example) didn't have this issue.

I didn't vote much either, though. So many posts were karma farmers reposting old material.

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Don't forget mods hiding your posts without a trace! There is no way from the reddit interface to tell.

Lost the link, but there's a site that shows all the posts you made that were hidden from the rest of the sub. LOL, they even let the guy do an AMA!

I was more than a little stunned. Dozens of posts, just gone, very recently, and I had no idea. Nothing controversial, nothing crazy, and for sure nothing right-wing that might have triggered any liberal mods. I'm certain someone was following me around, reporting everything they might get traction on, hiding my posts. All very disconcerting.

Just posted about being banned for "inciting violence" for the 3rd time in 2-months. And I'm now a lunatic after 11-years without issue? Not like I can see what I was banned for, or even appeal.

I'm out. How are you folks?

Friend, yesssssss!

Here it feels like interacting with the community matters. A comment will be one of ten or a hundred, not ten thousand or hundred thousand. Comment chains between two people with different views can be discussions, instead of flamewars where one person is dogpiled for disagreeing with the thread.

Let's all enjoy what we have here before it gets overtaken by chuds and/or AI :)

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It’s the same crowd and over time they will be identical. The power of moderation is the only thing that keeps nastiness in check.

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I upvote for general encouragement. But I upvoted this especially to be nice to you, OP. I also gave you a lil boost.

Just wanted to say that I upvoted to be especially nice to you for being nice, Janet. Have a good day!

Every platform is nice at the start, for mainly the reason you say: people who join early have an interest in the platform, so we actually try to keep it nice.

Then every successful new platform gets its own eternal september. A large influx of people who don't care about the platform at all, they just want to use it to talk to people. And of these, yes many are still nice people, but also many aren't.

You see this in all kinds of communities, not just online. If you're in a new or niche hobby, everybody there will have an interest in improving the hobby and the small community, so it will probably be very nice. When it gets mainstream (I'm looking at MTG here, but other people probably know other examples) then it starts to attract people who do nothing but complain.

Every platform is nice at the start

I submit that parler was never nice.

That was made for a very specific reason by a very particular crowd. Definitely an outlier.

This is it. I'm not sure how young the crowd is here but those of us that have been around for the start of a lot of platforms have seen this happen plenty. It's always nice to start with. Then that fades.

Fuck you. I hate you all.

Just kidding. I like it here. Sometimes a little boring but maybe that is a good thing. I have plenty of things to do. This is a nice break and not stressful like some other sites.

As long as we keep posting content and the users continue to slowly grow there is hope.

Because it’s easier to moderate smaller communities and the average idiot hasn’t discovered these types of communities. Reddit on the other hand has reached mainstream status, so the average idiot is going to sign up there and say stupid stuff or be idiotic. Every platform goes through this.

That's true, but Lemmy could potentially be different. The fact that it's a federation means some instances can go mainstream and become more like reddit, and others can be more exclusive and try to preserve their atmosphere/culture.

Yup, it happened to Facebook, then reddit. Overrun by idiots.

Sadly, you’re right; Lemmy’s quality will most likely tank just as hard as Reddit when it goes mainstream.

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Even when I argue here, it's very civil.

Yeah I actually enjoy the arguments.

Tbh, my upvote policy didn't really change when I moved to Lemmy.

Something has to be dangerously bad for me to downvote it.

I upvote anything that seems interesting or agreeable to me.

Same here. If I don't like it, I simply won't upvote. If it's overtly and obviously offensive, I will downvote (happened maybe 4-7 times on Lemmy thus far).

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It's great that this newfangled platform isn't filled with hate, but that's just because not that many people know about it yet. Give it time to grow, and the hostility will be more apparent. It's the sad reality.

But for the time being, I absolutely love this place.

You're a cool OP. Have an upwardpointingarrow, sir or madam

I downvoted your post and laughed, but then I took it back. Sorry

Yup here's an upvote.

I think a lot of us are into free software and Linux. Something about open free software social media platform is right up my alley.

I've started seeing the Reddit creep of petty Actually Guys arguing pointlessly to someone about the most dumbest shit and trying to be all high and mighty for it, like any of the discourse matters.

That was one of the best part of leaving Reddit; not having some insecure someone try to one up and fight you for saying, "Haha! Rabbits are cool!"

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I just jumped from reddit and hope this is true. I can't stand the toxicity there anymore.

Welcome! There are hot topics (I've noticed politics and inflation being spicy), but by and large great experience.

The smaller communities might be small, but they surprisingly don't lack in engagement IME. Basically everyone is new so when a community has 10 members, those 10 members have probably been online this week checking their feeds and messages.

Thank you, you make me hopeful! I won't lie, reddit is starring to affect my mental well being and I am not sure I am fully out of it. I have uninstalled the app so far and staying away from it, what I want is reading news and good conversations if they happen and less negativity as possible. Have you noticed an improvement in your relation with social media here?

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I've been somewhat active here since the blackout. It had been pretty rare to see downvotes unless someone is being exceptionally crude. Engagement is more organic. Tighter. It actually feels sort of like reddit did 15 years ago. Everything is new and shiny and buggy and beautiful.

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2 small theories as to why this could be:

  1. Down vote count is shown. On reddit, a down vote, unless it put total karma from a comment into the negative, was imperceptible. I felt less bad about abusing the functionality and downvoting opinions I disagreed with

  2. Lemmy is a lot smaller than Reddit. Whereas on Reddit I might see a low-effort post and go "get this garbage off my feed" on Lemmy I'm like "YEAH! Way to populate my feed!"

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Honestly the issue isn't Reddit, it's just people. Most people are decent to great, with a smaller group of bad to horrible. With more people on Reddit the pool of bad to horrible is bigger, and they tend to be the loudest of the bunch.

I remember reading about 'thread poison' where an otherwise friendly group can devolve into defensive and hostile vehavior just because one person comes along and makes a mean comment.

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I think reason for that is the community is still very small. I think as the fediverse will add more users it will attract advertisers, which will attract people who want to make money & game the system

Let's enjoy it while the bots and troll farms are working double time on Reddit

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The best part about Lemmy/Kbin etc now are that downvotes aren’t hidden, rightfully so. Just because a set of people don’t agree with you doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the same visibility as somebody that is more agreeable to a set of people.

Niceness… will change and evolve over time as more and more people join. :-)

New guy here. Reddit exodus. Got perma-banned today. Funny how after 11-years, I'm suddenly hateful and "promoting violence." 3 reports in 2-months. Huh.

This is gonna sound paranoid, but I think I pissed someone off and they followed me around reporting me.

Anywho, posts seem more mellow here, more thoughtful, fewer childlike reactions.

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It feels like I'm talking to real humans. Not some ultra sensitive sissy all the time. It's just so much less mentally taxing

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No they are not. You are in a echo chamber. :) (Happy face to show lack of hostility)

When people are rude to me here, which I admit is rarer than on Reddit, I block them a lot faster. Maybe that sort of goes against what you're saying because it means I'm less tolerant here than I was on Reddit, but I am determined to make Lemmy a more pleasant experience for myself.

Yes its nice when a fake internet point is really a fake internet point.

Tbh I never really commented or upvoted anything on reddit. I was always a lurker but when I started with the fediverse I feel like I can actually interact for some reason

Same! I used Infinity for Reddit without an account for a few years until the whole API controversy. The fediverse is more niche and caters more to my interests, so kinda glad that all happened tbh.

The Fediverse is still new and also confusing for a lot of folks. As it grows we will see more trolls and bots. Hopefully we all learn from the mistakes made with Reddit but for now, we should enjoy the calm and try to make it a good/better experience.

What fascinates me is how big the hurdles were even after I was fully sold on the idea and wanted to participate. Even when going out of my way to look for fediverse stuff and wanting to look for instances to join, there was no guidance. The first info I got was highly technical info on the protocols themselves. That would turn most people away immediately. This was many months ago though, it seems to be getting better every day as more people participate and contribute.

Edit: I forgot to add my theory to this, which is that non-capitalist entities don't have the same compulsion towards growth, so they don't emphasise the onboarding process the way capitalists will.

I fully expect though that as centralised capitalist social media continues to implode it will give way to the fediverse which seems better at building something more robust and long-lasting, and eventually it will gain the network advantage where people join because that's where everybody else already is.

I find that it very much depends. It was very positive a month ago, but day by day I see a lot more arguing, name calling, and petty downvoting.

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I think it's a night and day difference, I can actually post stuff here without getting attacked over some triviality.

I believe its mostly a product of the much smaller community. I think more negativity may creep in as popularity increases.

Anyway, yeah, have an upvote.

I feel the same. I wasn’t worrried about this post getting tons of downvotes for no reason, but I would have avoided posting it on reddit.

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I get the same sense. It has somewhat of a nostalgic "we're all in this together" feeling that using the internet in the mid/late-90's had, and the updoots appear to be a side-effect of that.

There was a guy posting literal gifs of shit and also DMing them to people and somehow I still prefer it over reddit.

Yeah I scrolled by one of those with bare genitalia in full view while waiting in my doctor's office. It would be nice to establish a NSFW spoiler tag as like... just common courtesy. Even reddit followed that rule most of the time.

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Disagreement and acceptance of controversial but well thought out opinions is really good here. I've seen it sour a little over the last few days, but considering just how contentious the overall topics themselves were, that's perhaps reasonable.

What I can say with certainty however is that even those I have most vehemently disagreed with seem like good people at the end of the day. They aren't bigoted trash nor do they delight in people's suffering. If I had interacted with them in another space, I couldn't have guessed we'd disagree so bitterly.

It's refreshing. On Reddit, the person/bot/shill would just consistently be awful. Here, I can have intense arguments with people about global issues but I can also see myself grabbing a casual beer with them afterwards.

I got a "who asked" amongst more productive banter this morning and I actually laughed and said "thank god, people can talk without a filter".

I'm okay with some stuff being toxic. Reddits moderation rules were so restricting that you couldn't have a genuine conversation or sometimes just post something that was clearly originally intended to be posted to a sub; moderation was too tight.

Freedom of speech shouldn't be inconvenienced by a fedora wearing subreddit mod. And if one Lemmy instance does, there's others you can enjoy!

This is why I started to hate reddit, even before the big API fiasco. It's clear all that was making it to the front page was the same liberal-pandering bullshit.. I don't mind seeing a little shad thrown at one side or the other every now and then, but when it's every 5 posts and it's always just 1 sides opinion it's incredibly annoying! I was already looking for other sources of entertainment. I'm kinda glad I found Lemmy. It's been a really cool experience so far.

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I totally agree. Folks are much nicer here and I feel more free to make a comment, no matter how mundane. I’m commenting and posting more than I ever would before because no one beats me up here. I still have the fear of posting anything because of the backlash, but I think that’s ptsd from the other site and I’m getting over it slowly but surely. I love this place.

I've made some dumb comments and posts and no one has yelled at me yet. It's really nice. I'm just here to chill and not get worked up.

Hope every else is having a good weekend.

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It seemed like a honeymoon for the first week or two, like everyone was in a good mood and would upvote whatever, and overlook things they disagreed or disapproved of. My least favorite reddit interactions were posting well intentioned, detailed comments, then it gets shadow-deleted by a mod or get a response like “no it isn’t lmao”. That entire thing of using “lol” or “lmao” to laugh at someone is really quite rude, like, it would be very confrontational to do that to someone in person.

Not sure about that, it was better a couple of months ago. Now I see an increase in negative and hostile content. Sadly.

Yeah I hope it's just users who are still used to Reddit that will eventually calm down, but I can see it going in either direction

That's not a shower thought you braindead, try hard, complete waste of a human.... Get off of here; there's no room for idiots here. Reported.

JK, just thought I'd channel my inner rage-commenter for old times sake. Welcome 😄

There is no concept of karma, or karma whoring here. And no reward system or reason to farm karma to pretend to be a RealLiveHumanPerson with feelings.

not yet anyways.

It seems that there is, and some people are again caring about that number. If I had written Lemmy i would remove any karma shit.

Until you have up and down votes there always will be someone making a tally.

The concept of Karma of other sites, to be fair, is not as simple as that. A lot of times the Karma is not a straight tally, there are algorithms to mitigate abuse (ex. Try to disregard mass voting, sudden influxes of votes, or known bots votes), or it is used to indirectly move the conversation to a preferred subject (ex. Making points obtained in some discussions or communities less valuable, or directly not considering them).

Luckily or not that kind of Karma is not present here, which basically makes the whole concept of total Karma pretty useless because you really can't trust the value to be kind of truthful and not manipulated.

Already with all the anti abuse, and it being calculated in a centralized platform, it was generally worthless. Here it is completely worthless. People should just be reminded of its real nature of an easily gamed system, and that it is not what they were used to.

We can only hope that in the long run they will drop it.

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Corporate social media drives engagement using controversy. It is literally a machine that operates to piss people off. You don't get that in the fediverse because there is no central interest puppeteering the outrage

BADABAMM BADABAMM

You are being watched. FAANG has a secret system. A machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know, because... I built it. I designed the machine to detect spikes of dopamine but it sees everything. Violent emotions involving ordinary people. People like you. Emotions upper management considered irrelevant. They wouldn't act so I decided I would. But I needed a partner. Someone without the spine to intervene. Hunted by privacy advocates, we work in secret. You'll never find us. But lurker or contributor, if we can rile you up, we'll find you.

I recognise some of that, what was the name of that series again? - just so I can binge watch it again. It was relevant way before it's time

it's person of interest, and hella yes. i haven't even got through the whole thing yet but it's awesome so far

The only A.I series well before ChatGPT. What an epic one too. I binged the entire thing & will probably do so again now that you've reminded me, thanks

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I’m with you. We need more positive thinking instead of the instantly thinking someone means the worst, like Reddit saw. Unfortunately, many people are just happy being sour and ruining everything.

I think it’s also easier to moderate right now. The communities aren’t massive and there isn’t a torrent of assholes that mods struggle to keep up with.

I am trying to be nice and polite here. Makes a more inclusive place for us to share content and information.

Have an upvote my fellow fedinaut

Same back to you, fellow Fedinaut :).

I don't want you to feel left out. Here's one to you too! Edit: the OP tag is a little too subtle in the LemmyConnect app... Now I feel dumb lol

It's almost like all the nice people with actual moral compasses have ditched Reddit for the likes of Lemmy, Tildes and Kbin. Reddit has been left to become a toxic shitshow.

I also have that perception. When people disagree, instead of becoming toxic, they stay oddly cool and nice to each other here. Let´s hope this lasts when more and more reddit users join ....

There is also no karma whore. So even if you say something offending to some, who cares?

Have you talked to the Atheists on here? Cantankerous bunch. They've been in their little bubble for so long they get triggered by the slightest perceived critique of capitalist materialism.

Wait. What does atheism have to do with capitalist materialism?

How does my belief, or non belief, in god affect my lust for a Playstation 5.

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Man have you talked to the Tankies? They attack you even if you try to promote the idea of Socialism (while applying flawless historical materialism). Some people just value circle jerking higher than the exchange of ideas.

Disagreeing with someone and still acknowledging the other perspective as 'correct from their perspective' just isn't something that that online communities can foster that easy. It requires effort and imo a kinda 'small' number of users.

This just happened to me. Even tried to use Albert Einstein as a “see, Socialism can work” even though the topic was about tankies specifically. It felt like gaslighting so I stopped engaging.

As a general rule I have rarely interacted with other self-professed atheists that are specifically pro-capitalism. I'm going to have to go scroll through the community here, and see that for myself because I'm having a hard time squaring that in my head.

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I think maybe as well it always became really heated with the Reddit bots when you would express a differing opinion to theirs. There were many times bots would pick a fight and then argue with you like it was their job (because it was). This feels more chill like the early days of Reddit and I hope it stays that way.

I guess as soon as Lemmy gets properly search indexes and if search engines starts putting weight behind results from Lemmy then commercial interest will arrive?

If a lobby organization thinks they will gain something by buying opinions on Lemmy, then they’ll try to do it?

I’m not sure how you can avoid it, but I hope Lemmy will be better than Reddit. Worst case it’s even easier to manipulate Lemmy since it’s mostly a lot of small instances run for free by people in their spare time.

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No, not really. Have a "wrong" opinion and see how it goes.

How wrong? Racist wrong or just "boiled eggs are tastier than fried eggs" wrong?

"Capitalism is good"

"Conservatives aren't completely selfish" (backed with links to leftist sources)

"NFTs aren't worthless"

"Making everyone people pay for rich people's college debt is wrong (and a net transfer of wealth upwards)"

"The central banks cause inflation on purpose"

Some are opinions, some are facts people don't like. All get down voted.

You're being proven right. You will get downvoted for these statements because a majority are just not factual.

The easiest to explain is NFTs are worthless. They have no legal validity for ownership. The largest portion of the NFT market is buying pictures, pictures which are hosted externally and can be taken down without respect to the NFT contract.

So in the majority use-case you neither have the picture stored, nor have exclusive legal ownership. So you're buying access to a very fancy, very energy intensive, url link.

That's not even getting into the politically charged arguments. The whole reason we have child labor laws, minimum wage, and OSHA requirements is because raw, unchecked capitalism was terrible for 99% of people.

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It is hit or miss. I just got into a fight with a MAGA troll claiming that wikipedia vote totals are completely made up. I thought I wouldn't have to deal with stupidity like that on lemmy.

The Internet is the Internet. As the Fediverse grows, it'll encounter all the same problems that the other social media platforms do, except one: People won't be locked into a single website controlled by a monolithic corporation. That's a big enough improvement in my books.

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I agree! It’s our choice what we want the culture to be around here. We can make it a friendly one :-).

Mods are certainly nicer, that's for sure, and thus far, except in in ugly instances, everyone here has been intelligent and thoughtful, even in disagreement.

I think that federation here really helps - seems like the toxicity seems naturally get siloed as instances defederate from bad actors and users are blocked, and it really dilutes the impact a power-tripping mod can have on content, as it's far to easy to find another relevant community or instance that will accept your post.

One thing that has concerned me a little is Reddit moderators that want to own the same community here on Lemmy, like genuinely feeling that it’s theirs.

In generalI I thought that was something I wanted to get away from, but I guess I also don’t know what it takes to “grow” a community into something through moderation.

I find everyone more open to discussion here and not snippy.

I wonder if it was just that Reddit was really polarized by the The Donald segment of its population and what happened with that community,, which don't seem to have come over here, since that made things rather hostile on Reddit. Whatever we are politically here seems to be pretty quiet this far, other than agreeing the insane stuff Republicans are doing in the US.

I know right! I often get more than 5 upvotes here, while on Reddit most of my comments would have only gotten 2, maybe 3.

For the most part, yes. But I have noted lately that I do get some snarky people coming in with dishonest and bad faith responses. They're at least not as rampant as it would've been on Reddit. It's discouraging and demoralizing when you've got, what feels like, 100 people downvoting you to hell and 50 of them are swiping at you before deleting their accounts and doing it again because they're of the tribal mindset and you've somehow offended a part of the hive.

Yeah in the last week or so I've noticed an uptic in snark / downright rude responses compared to when I joined ~2 months ago

I hope the trend does not continue

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I think this is normal with a smaller community. Also we are the ones that care more about a healthy community. The bigger a community gets, the more dickheads will exist in it.

Going to add some negativity here and sorry in advance. I'm hoping I'm being more sensible than mean. The biggest problem with lemmy for my personal experience is that there are are too many posts about itself. We have enough users to thrive as something good. Let's just do it and enjoy moving on from reddit. If new people come here and all they see are posts about lemmy, fediverse, reddit, they will feel like it's one note, but I feel like we all have more to offer. I think when there's some news or something that impacts the platform it's great to discuss. (Or if there are discussions around actual development and stuff.) In my opinion, there are just far too many.:"Lemmy people are less toxic", "isn't it nice here", "reddit is not as good", "lemmy just feels fresh","loving lemmy so far vs x". clogging the feed with low quality content. I just feel there are already enough existing posts people can comment on instead of starting new posts. I know the platform is new so it's to be expected, and I don't think negatively of anyone making these posts (i usually think positively of them as nice people), but if I didn't think it was actually hurting first impressions I wouldn't say anything.

I feel like that will even itself out in time. With a huge influx of Redditors, comparing the services is going to be a hot topic for awhile. The communities need to settle and the people who will stay will stay. Over time, it'll be less self-referential and more original content I think.

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I've already seen some, lets say disagreeable people floating around, but the moderators seem to be doing well to take care of it. Nothing is wrong with someone that has an opposing view, but being unnecessarily combative or straight up an asshole is too much.

Even in the hay day of online discussion forum websites you'd have trolls that derail threads and bring nastiness to the forefront.

Good moderation, clearly defined rules and quality of content are key- contributes to a quality forum.

The karma farming and bridgading of Reddit is not missed here. Now if we can get some of the niche forums more population.

The Lemmy homepage could do a random "Community Focus" where one random community is pinned for a day or 2 - or something like that. Just so people notice some of the tinier communities. I joined many when I 1st signed up but now my feed is full, so I hardly look for new ones anymore.

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Now if we can get some of the niche forums more population.

create any you find missing. you are automatically the moderator. boring unpaid responsibility which you can trash if it starts to irritate

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Oh how I wonder how the comments will be with this streisand effect

It depends where you go, surely?

I've met a fair number of numpties on Reddit but I've never had anyone tell me neckbeards are an oppressed group until I came to Lemmy 😂

Jokes aside, it's easy to avoid toxic people on here since they usually announce themselves loudly. It's easy to block users, communities, or even servers if you don't want to see something.

Nah, the main internet hive minds still exist.

I’m frequently downvoted for saying anything positive about my Tesla.

playing victim is something a tesla driver would do tbh.

I think your comment is a perfect example of the issue. In just a small sentence you

  1. stereotyped OP and put him in a group “all Tesla owners plays victim”,

  2. used ad hominem attack on the person claiming that they were a Tesla driver victim and use that as a character rebuttal instead of arguing against their hive mind statement,

  3. general dismissal by accusing them of playing a victim so you could ignore their experience and contribution.

Why?

New account, that’s the first comment, so I’m writing off as a troll.

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I will say it's good that:

  • You are normalizing electric cars for other drivers who see you on the road and for your family, friends, and neighbors
  • You are not using gas
  • You are saving money on fuel

That was a dose of niceness for this thread :)

I have a neighbor who has a Tesla and I legit feel bad for him for the scorn he is probably having to deal with in his circle (he bought it pre Twitter Musk and he works in politics on the left).

Yeah, see, I bought my Tesla when Elon was the “cool guy” on the internet. But I didn’t buy my car because of Elon, I bought it because it’s got the best charging network of all EVs.

I have solar panels on my roof, I have a second EV (F150 Lightning), so I make my own fuel for my vehicles. I’m doing more than the average person for the environment and saving money at the same time. But I say that one of the vehicles is a Tesla and the reeeeeeing starts. It’s stupid

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I feel some redditors have the downvote button as the sole mean of power in their lives. There are some who massively downvote to the point it's concerning

Haha prove it, bitch! I'm upvoting the hell out of you...

Typically, yes, but the brigaders have found their way here, so don't expect it to last long.

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Well Karma ain’t a thing here so there’s not that much reason for bots to exist. Where on Reddit people make certain karma bots to sell. So here! Have a updoot. 👍

Thanks for the upvote, and back at you. I’m thinking bots would be used to change discourse for whatever purposes.

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Im too new to tell if Lemmy is more left or right leaning or somewhere in the middle. But Reddit is extreme left wing, you can’t even make a (bad) joke without getting banned.

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Keep in mind bots are always nice. We can't be here only for be friendly but also to drop our unpopular opinions and sometimes fight and dealing with the fact that we can't like or be liked by everyone.

I have a conspiracy theory about Reddit and social media in general:

I think its algorithm not only puts up links but users and their comments in their view that are more likely to piss you off, and they measure this based on observing your post and comment history. I believe they categorize users by political affiliation and moral outlook by this method, and use that info to purposefully expose you to people who will cause you conflict to drive up engagement and therefore ad dollars.

I believe they also use chat bots to argue with people for that purpose.

Honestly I don't think an algorithm needs to work very hard to "be mean" like that. Sure, you can purposely put people with clashing views in each other sight on a place where people go to hang out and have fun. But you don't even need to go do that on purpose. To some extent, people naturally produce more "engagement" with stuff that's controversial/argumentative.

Imagine if I were to walk past you and say some completely innocent comment. Now imagine I were to walk past you and insult your favorite movie/show/song/game/whatever. You'd be far more likely to respond in the latter case.

So, as people respond, more activity is generated, and that makes the post "hotter". Simply boost what's hot, and you have a veritable litany of controversy.

I’ll admit, I’ve had far better experiences here than I have on Reddit; Lemmings aren’t as prone to argue on nonsensical topics as Redditors are.

That being said, there are still more than a few nasties here.

There's a lot less of us, we can't lose anyone.

Maybe on mainstream social media rude comments overhang the good ones, not by quantity, but due to the amount of dislikes, big techs strategies of evidence to keep the users engagement, probably dislike a comment is worst then just ignore it. Note I'm not saying that it happens on Lemmy. I think it should be interesting a mechanism that put at the end of the thread the most disliked comments.

Maybe the reddit admins add toxicity to improve engagement? Post/comment manipulation seems common on internet today.

Think again fuckface.

-throws the ball and runs away to cloud district-

I probably used this service more when it comes to upvotes and comments than Reddit I always used Libreddit

Then you haven't posted enough and/or love the "herd mentality" -- it's my 1 month in and I already been massively downvoted twice by randoms with multiple accounts.

In my experience it depends strongly on the comunity. Those meme comunitys are on their way to become reddit two, command wise. But most communities that are made to have a discussion have been realy nice so far.

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Tbh these instances feel alot more like an echo chamber than most subreddits did

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follow counts are a tw popularity contest. maybe others too? dunno. reddit made for interesting G results. didn't spend much time there. here there is a pretty good chance your post will scroll by whoever is on now. past is past. quit wasting time archiving old posts for reuse. sucked the first time

I mean, here's an upvote and a glass of filtered water. Anything else before I sit back down?