What do you NOT want to see replicated on kbin?

CynAq@kbin.social to Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 66 points –

Or the fediverse in general.

I wanted to ask everyone their personal least favorite communities on reddit.

Whic subreddits do you absolutely not (personally of course) want to see recreated as magazines here on kbin, or as fediverse communities in general?

My pet peeve is CMV. I always felt while the idea seemed doable on the surface, the implementation within that particular subreddit with the delta system, the requirement for the top level comments to oppose the OP even if the "view" is an established expert consensus on something like climate change made it impossible to have meaningful conversations.

I haven't checked if we have a CMV magazine here, but as soon as I see one, I know I'm blocking it.

What is your "instant block" community?

184

I wasn't ever a fan of UnpopularOpinions. It seemed like a license to say horrible shit and then feel good about the upvotes but people just upvoted because the opinion was awful.

Agreed.

It's kinda similar to what I dislike about CMV but blatant. I think CMV created this whitewashing effect on horrible opinions by presenting them as a discussion against them, while giving them a megaphone into the mainstream.

UnpopularOpinions is similar but a bit more honest, I guess, lol!

I don’t think it was all that bad… actually there were some pretty good discussions in there. That said I don’t think everyone engaged in good faith, and sometimes you’d get things like “CMV: women should have basic human rights (Delta(s) from OP)”.

It was one of those that started out as legitimately pretty good but was ruined when it got big. Almost as if there's a pattern here...

Agreed but for the opposite reason lol. Whenever I see UnpopularOpinions on All it's always very popular opinions being upvoted.

less likely for that to happen if theres no reason to karma farm

Pretty much all of the ironic "oh we're just pretending to be bad people lololol" ironic circlejerk subreddits. Best case scenario, they eventually attract people that don't recognize it's ironic, worst case the mask just falls off. PCM is probably the worst of the bunch. Writing fake tweets to mischaracterize political opinions you don't like is just such a bizarre hobby.

PCM in parts just became "women bad" for younger people lol

Please excuse my ignorance, what's PCM?

No worries! It stands for PoliticalCompassMemes. The political compass is a simple (but wrong, if we deep dive into it) model of representing political positions in the current political sphere in mostly US/western politics. People started a meme subreddit about it and it quickly turned rather right wing with memes that devolved to "Ugly woman is left-wing and bad, Chad man is right-wing and good" lol

Unless I'm thinking of a different sub, I never noticed that about it. Granted, I've only seen a handful of posts on the front page and browsed it a few times recently.

Political Compass Memes and he's bsing lol. Ironic people bash the hardest on one of the few non-toxic subs where you could at least have a little fun.

Yep have to agree PCM can be pretty funny and most of the people there understand that many of the worst takes and straw mans are jokes

Also, "ironic" use of fascist and Nazi tropes, like naming a subreddit "r/pcmasterrace". Yeeeeaaaaah, no.

American politics seeping into every damn thing. And to top it off, with a clear bias in one direction. I resent having the feeling like there's an astro-turfing effort going on, even when I agree with whatever stance is being pushed. Reddit is really tainted with that sort of thing.

Hopefully it doesn't take hold here, or at least stays contained so I can decline subbing to magazines that would pertain. I'd rather not have to swim in the "political party A is evil and political party B is angelic" muck in unrelated magazines.

That's hard to avoid on such a huge site where something like 50ish percent of the userbase is American. I totally agree with you though - it's super irratating to be on a sub, talking about friggin Spiderman's webfluid or something, and some dumbass in the comments has to relate the debate back to some American Republican talking points or something.

it's super irratating to be on a sub, talking about friggin Spiderman's webfluid or something

Having recently watched the latest Spiderman movie, wut?

I'm just making up a throwaway example. Once upon a time there was a debate about whether Spidey's webfluid should be organic or if he should have webshooters. I'm personally in the webshooter camp - it's one of the great examples we get of Peter being a genius who was so smart he could invent something so spectacular at such a young age with limited resources and no help. I really hated the organic idea. I thought it dumbed Pete down and was contradictory to the established character. And, I'm just saying, those kinds of discussions are the worst place to run into some idiot that can't help but interject their personal politics, or mention their favorite candidates/pols for no reason. I always thought it must be just exhausting to be so totally consumed with poitics that you have to try to bring it up in every conversation, no matter how much of a non sequitur it ends up being.

Also...

Organic spideyfluid would be A-OK if he shot it out of his ass! Shooting it out of wrists doesn't make any goddam sense!

If Spiderman shot webs out of his arsehole I might actually go and see one of those dumb films for a change

And, I'm just saying, those kinds of discussions are the worst place to run into some idiot that can't help but interject their personal politics, or mention their favorite candidates/pols for no reason.

Oh~ yeah, that sounds annoying af.

I said this the other day. Post on Reddit about English something. First comments were about american culture. Had to scroll until I found opinions from the UK.

Everything becomes murica. It's infuriating. I get reddit is basically America and it's a large population but so is India or China or Africa. Doesn't just need to be America all the time.

That's not just a Reddit thing, it's an Internet thing.

Americans absolutely dominate the English-speaking Internet.

But then the population of the US is greater than the population of Australia, the UK, New Zealand and Canada combined, twice over.

They were also the origin of the Internet. It is frustrating for me as a Latin American discuss about tech and being told by Americans to just buy cheap refurbished tech from eBay, Microcenter or something. The access to markets isn't remotely the same.

Funny thing on Reddit there quite literally was an astroturfing campaign paid for by CTR/Shareblue. That's why r/politics turned into the toxic cesspit it remains today.

I know some people enjoy them, but I personally tended to insta-block all the creative writing communities. Things like talesfromyourserver (all the talesfrom subs, to be honest), maliciouscompliance, prorevenge, etc. I find the majority of those types of subs to be toploaded with absolute bullshit. THe kinds of things where people have some kind of conflict they didn't deal well with in real life, and now they had a place to type out their wishful fantasies that make them seem clever and tough and quick witted, but in reality they formulated it all while laying in bed fuming about what actually happened.

I also had a love/hate relationship with AmItheAsshole/devil/jerk etc, and subs like r/relationshipadvice. I've long suspected that there's a loooot of posts on those types of subs that I suspect are not only fake stories, but are outright designed to trigger outrage reactions towards specific (often marginalized) groups. Like stories that are specifically crafted to make a woman look bad/evil/stupid for example. Just dog whistling, and purposely being divisive.

You sumarize my thoughts as well. Honorable mention to/r/BestofRedditorUpdates. Sometimes there was a nice/wholesome story in there, but most of it was nightmare fuel and a lot of it probably creative writing.

I could binge that sub just because seeing how the updates unfolded was super interesting some of the time. But it also had me feeling pretty negative, given how there were commonly toxic characters in the stories. I won't be rushing to recreate that scene here on the Fediverse.

BORU also had wayyyyy too many karma farming duplicate content posts. And their 1-year post rule just encouraged people to go back 1 year and then copy and paste posts with a lot of upvotes just to farm more karma.

It was good to have updates and stories consolidated in one place, I know. It just enabled too much repetitive copying and pasting due to the karma it provided.

I definitely get this sentiment, but as far as creative writing I really enjoyed good /writingprompts. Especially some of the better comments creating and expanding on the story in new and interesting ways. Hopefully something like that will be replicated here, though I'm no writer so definitely won't be leading the charge there.

In addition to what others have said: The endless, constant, relentless OnlyFans self promotion. I don't mind NSFW, I don't mind porn. But by god I lost brain cells each time I read

"I AM SUCH A YOUNG SLUT, OH WOE IS ME, WHERE ARE ALL THE OLDER MEN WHO WOULD WANT ME!?!?!?!?!?"
"COMMENT YOUR AGE IF YOU'D HAVE ME <3"

fixing exclusively to find people with money to reel in. Good lord... I get it, we all have to earn a living and darn if I were a pretty woman in this day and age, I might go down that same route. Yet... Can't stand it anymore. Same goes for the people engaging with such posts.

OnlyFans in general is a complete fucking racket. Most "creators", who are young and often vulnerable people, make nothing or next to nothing from subs, even while taking on risks they may not know about or be able to mitigate them if they do know about them.

The world would actually be better without it.

I was told that OnlyFans was started by the mods in some of the NSFW subreddits who used their position of power to recruit the early adopters from the highest upvoted posts in their subs.

Nah whoever told that was bsing you, It was started by Tim Stokely a British businessman.

Not to sound like a prude, but porn.

There's no shortage of it and most places have it in some way.

It'd be awesome to be a classier/more serious version of Reddit.

It'd be awesome to be a classier/more serious version of Reddit.

Those things are not mutually exclusive. You can have higher standards for the serious subs we host as well as having porn related subs as well.

Just subscribe to the ones you want and ignore the others.

This sounds like something the fediverse should be able to solve easily. For people who don't want to be anywhere near porn, you can start a fediverse site and just not aggregate porn, and then like-minded people can go there, and nobody has to be cut off from everybody else just because of differences of opinion about porn.

r/PublicFreakout's constant unrestrained 'isms, especially towards trans, women, and African descended. I only was subbed for the occassional interesting post and to call out the bs for those who couldn't see it.

r/JustUnsubbed's (iirc) noticeable political shift towards (i'mma say it; cover your eyes, children!) the Right after the recent situation with the game that shall not be named and she who shall not be named. Also, see above.

People shitting on and lying about subs specifically made for marginalized groups. e.g.: When r/BlackPeopleTwitter was blessed by Black Jesus with his "Country Club Thread" flair, people elsewhere started calling them racist and supported their claims by over exaggerating the filtration system as "only Blacks allowed" when there was a whole-ass stickied post explaining that people just needed to claim to be Black, BIPOC, or an Ally and prove it by whatever means the mods dictated. My Afro-ass asked if I could just get the Ally userflair and was told (privately and kindly) that, and I'm going off memory here, "Just like we don't allow Blackface we don't allow Whiteface." 🤷🏿‍♂️

Could probably go on, but I'm busy. ✌🏿

I didn't like the filter. I shouldn't have to submit a photo of my arm to "prove" I am mixed with black, my skin tone also isn't dark so I might as well be lying. I never participated because of the filter, it brings up painful memories surrounding my heritage and skin tone and childhood. I think it's an odd choice to prevent most of reddit from commenting and preserve a safe place. I get that it cut down on racists, still don't feel comfortable about it. I don't know what other tests they put people through, the photo test was the one talked about a lot.

There is an ally flair I remember seeing but I don't want it. I don't want a label because if I say I'm mostly Latino, I've had people tell me that makes me white and not a POC and will never know what racism is and I get basically shut out. But also I've had people, even family members, be racist to me about being mixed with black. I guess I don't belong in the conversation.

I've also had run ins with some of the black power mods, yellow rose, and she expressed not wanting me to participate at all because I believe while white people can't be systematically oppressed the same way in America, you can still be racist to them. She runs the main sub about racism on reddit, they only talk about white supremacy because that's the only type of racism in their minds. It makes me just not want to talk about my experiences because they aren't valid. I will never be black enough or white enough or Latino enough.

Shit, never thought about how the skin test could affect a mixed person. 🤔 Thanks for the comment.
I assumed the Ally tests were more thorough and harder to trick, but never looked into it.

Yeah~ I don't doubt anything you're saying. I'm visibly a brotha and "dark-skinned" (actually medium brown back home, but whatevs), so I was spared that shit. Definitely got some other shit, but 'eh. 😅

I will never be black enough or white enough or Latino enough.

Reminding me of (iirc) a Hispanic-American dude who explained a similar situation due to skin tone. As I recall it, he was "too light for the Black kids and too dark for the White kids," so he had nowhere to go growing up. Nobody wanted him at their table. 😐
Also, dat's fucked. Since we can't spoiler tag text, I'mma just speak my unsolicited opinion on it: You're racially all three and culturally which ever ones you identify with. How society treats you is a different matter.

You'd probably benefit from F.D Signifier's "I need a break so here's me reacting to Tik Toks" (timestamped) video and its many~ comments. Nebula version.
Also, here's his Black Men and Colorism on Screen video. Nebula version. Haven't watched it yet myself, but chances are it'll be... relevant atleast.

Thank you for being so understanding, I definitely relate the the guy you are talking about. It's embarrassing to admit for me, I was much darker as a kid (if you saw me at this time you would believe I'm a POC) because I went in the sun a lot and didn't cover up or use sunscreen but I lost what was a tan the whole time when I started avoiding going outside altogether. I will check out the links you sent :)

So~ having recently seen The Blackening (2023), I'm just gonna say that that movie will probably bring up bad memories, make you uncomfortable, and valid you at the same time. Happy Juneteenth.

Kinda the same reason I never participated there. I'm half white but before I had an obviously black hairstyle, I got "what are you?" a lot, so any kind of skin test would just be me once again having to prove I'm black enough to have an opinion. Fuck that.

Politics... Any politics. I like news to be informed. But those subreddits became echo chambers and spewed hate one direction or another.

I understand what you're saying. However, echo chambers aside, I found reddit very useful for political discourse. Even for subjects that had a hive mind response, there were often a few comments that presented the other side in a very well thought out way, with details and citations which would give some folks a reason to rethink their knee-jerk response.

In addition, one of the biggest problems in the US is that lack of political engagement by younger folks. So having those news articles and discussions on a popular forum gives them that visibility into the world of governance and allows them to both develop a desire to vote for change as well as having better knowledge of the issues and how different political figures have acted and what they really stand for.

So I welcome that discourse and having political subs.

This is a great point and a great thought. Having political discourses is important and accepting opinions from all angles without getting agitated.

What I saw in the all of the political subreddits were largely conformation to one side of an argument or another without real exchange, and if there ever was a contrary opinion, most of which were hateful themselves, and if they weren't, they were downvoted or banned.

Tin foil hat on for a second, I think this is due to how society is, as was mentioned above, and I think it's also somewhat led by various political groups to get to a hateful conclusion to galvanize supporters on such a big platform.

Politics in general has devolved into one-dimensional hate-slinging and I guess, I miss when Reddit was first starting out and there were more of those conversations, without the anger behind them. If we can't have civil discourse in our communities, and opinions are only presented as wholly-good or wholly evil, is there benefit to having those conversations?

These are tough questions. Like I said, you make excellent points, and maybe the answer isn't cut it all off. But I can't think of a way to foster the type of community you describe in our society without heavy moderation against anger and hate.

You're absolutely right that a good politics sub (I don't think I'll ever get used to the term "magazine", but "sub" is nicely generic) requires good moderation.

But if kbin largely consists of reddit's most active users and moderators - the ones who care about the community as well as principles and values, then I think we have an excellent start.

I hear you, but politics are literally unavoidable. Also, for some of us, especially members of minority groups conservatives have it out for right now, literally just existing openly in a space will sometimes have folks crying politics.

I understand the freedom and acceptance that you're wanting. And I think having those communities to help causes are important. So like was mentioned above, maybe the answer is not cutting it off, but fostering civil discourse to keep the hatred out for one side or another?

I guess the root of the problem is demonizing. For instance, I would caution against what you consider "conservative" and who is really coming after your rights. That mentality again, is supporting the belief that each side is morally monochromatic. If you want to substitute that with the Republican Party, I dont think that's inaccurate. But there are many who hold "conservative" views fiscally or in other areas that have no issue with supporting minority rights and actively champion those causes.

In my opinion, the greatest lie that the powers-that-be have performed this century, is that one side has all the right answers and you have to be on one side of the fence or the other. I dont think either political party are working for the benefit of their constituents and I think we as a people need to come together to find real solutions, instead of being fed our opinions by those political machines and blindly joining their ranks. There aren't 2 sides to any issue, nor are there only 2 options for solutions. There are always more to be considered.

I think replying to every single point you made would be way off topic, so I'm not going to.

What I will respond to is your very first comment. The far right, worldwide (not just republicans) is practically frothing at the mouth about trans people lately. Their rhetoric is borderline genocidal, with open calls to "exterminate transgenderism". No civil discussion can be had when one of the sides is literally out for blood.

There are many issues that you can take many perfectly reasonable differing opinions on, and have a civil discussion over, but this isn't one of them.

There was a definite change in the way discourse was had in r/politics, r/news, among others over the years. But I would say that’s just a societal thing as of late.

Unfortunately, I do believe it’ll happen here eventually.

There was a definite change in the way discourse was had in r/politics, r/news

There was a huge astroturfing campaign carried out by CTR/ShareBlue during the 2016 US election cycle. Someone even exposed this and was permabanned like 2 days later.

The idea of a network of related subreddits like EarthPorn,CityPorn,etc. If you want to control a bunch of communities on an instance then you might as well just start your own instance.

I think in many ways the repetition of posts and worse replies. I know there was a bit of a hive mind going on, and in some ways it could be funny and a force for good, but I'm enjoying not reading the same set top comments to things!

I hope to never hear "I also choose this guy's dead wife" unironically again

Hah, yeah I've got to wonder how many times I read that. Someone else reminded me of the amount of times I'd read red flag on reddit as well. Hopefully we can build a whole new community here, a fresh start!

I don't think I've heard the dead guy version but I have heard the "I choose this guy's wife" already.

Google en passant

Holy hell

New response just dropped

Actual zombie

Holy hell

Holy hell

Holy hell

Holy hell

... every single time

Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!

Even when there’s a specific prompt to send a private thank you message that gets sent to you via PM when you get the message telling you someone gilded you…it’s like nope, gotta make an edit instead!

bots

awww really, I had some truly loved bots, especially on certain fandom subreddits, e.g. Brandon Sanderson subs (won't say the name cos it's a spoiler). And /u/gifendor or whatever it was called that showed you the last frame of a gif was a fantastic service. I liked !RemindMe too.

I fully agree some of them were a problem, but imo this is a "baby with the bathwater" situation

They are probably talking about LLM comments that tried to appear human to get upvotes and then get sold on to advertisers/scammers, not Video-download-bot or Palpatine-bot.

Feeling negative/angry after spending 5 minutes on the front page.

Edit: OMG thanks for the gold kind stranger!!! This is my top upvoted post now!!!

Chuds. I know they're inevitable on any platform but my goodness we could do without their vile hatred. Any of the incel subs must stay gone. Also, cryptocurrency.

Depends on the sub. At least for me, r/IncelExit and its modteam helped me crawl out of a dark hole some time ago. That sub is an invaluable resource against radicalization.

I wasn't aware of that sub but yeah, anti-radicalization magazines/communities would be cool.

Lemme guess, they just bashed and berated you until you just cracked? No one who claims to be against incels actually offers any legitimate help for them. I am married, btw, just to preempt you likely calling me an incel.

I was lurking idiot, your comment shows you clearly never visited there at all.

Why would I need to? I'm married, I don't have an "inceldom" to exit. I just know how all "anti-incel" people are. You seem pretty upset that I am critiquing them, though.

Y'know, if that actually worked maybe the world would be a better place, but it doesn't.

The irony of bashing a decentralized platform..... while literally on a decentralized platform.

FTX and Binance are just about the farthest away from decentralized. It's in the hands of big money now.

Ahh yes, FTX and Binance = crypto.

It's a sad fact that they hold like 60% of all capital in the space. The hiccups of big tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum add such a high overhead cost to transactions. The average user (and their dollars) must enter through these platforms or else get fleeced by the infinite scams out there.

Cryptocurrency is a scam. It may be decentralized and open-source, but it's still a scam. I don't like scams.

It's real funny seeing the left flip from the largest crypto advocates to the biggest detractors just from a single lie. I remember wayyy back on the days of Google+ one of the largest and most cancerous leftists on the platform was the largest crypto advocate. I bet he smashed his rig lol.

Crypto advocates always were libertarians. "The left" as a collective ideology were always against crypto since its inception.

You sound like you are deluded, don't know what you're talking about or both. I'll go with both.

Crypto advocates always were libertarians. "The left" as a collective ideology were always against crypto since its inception.

Funny because I could have sworn that ackshully the left are the real libertarians and libleft is the only legitimate form of libertarianism. So are you saying that libleft doesn't exist, because in that case I would agree.

Being pedantic won't save you here.

Everyone knows what I mean when I say libertarians.

If there was ever one political ideology generalized to being crypto advocates, it was "the US version" of libertarians, aka right leaning anarcho-capitalist types.

"The left" never advocated for crypto. There were (again US style) liberals here and there who liked the idea, and a lot of people like to equate them with leftists for some reason even though they are center right, but I digress.

The "true libertarians" as you said, also never advocated for crypto. Lib-left, never advocated for crypto. If I have to say it again: the left, in the original, global definition of the left, never advocated for crypto.

bEiNg pEdAnTiC WoN'T SaVe yOu hErE.

You can take the Redditor off of Reddit, but you cannot take the Reddit out of the Redditor. Holy fuck the arrogance, you should go back to Reddit.

You literally used spongetext. Pot-kettle much?

Powermods automatically banning users based on where they post / comment.

This is partially covered here by public modlogs. The previous Reddit Powermods at least won't touch Kbin with this in place; Bardfinn even tried to claim public modlogs would violate the ADA. That's not to say other powermods who don't care about the public logs wouldn't come into play.

/u/the_donald or any communities that promote hate against any collective.

Both of us can be disappointed together. I noticed it when I was looking for more mags earlier this morning.

I hope /r/FemaleDatingStrategy will not find it's way to the Fediverse (or the male equivalent of it).
And for behaviour, I hope people will be more open and have a more open mindset and can understand people live differently in other parts of the world.

I think FDS has been, very thankfully, inactive for the better part of a year. They ragequit because they got triggered that the TOS applied to them for once.

Subs celebrating the number of subscribers. Because too many subscribers will ruin your sub. An audience which is too large will attract the wrong kind of content, just like a position of power will attract primadona.

I remember banning funny, adviceanimals, just because of the numbers alone. Also national subs like France or Italy, because it was the lease interesting content of all.

  • Hidden up/down totals

  • Hidden up/downvote names (I understand the concern about the info being scraped by advertisers, but it should stay visible at least to the person who left the comment and the magazine moderators)

  • Generally high amounts of toxicity

I disagree with you strongly about the up/downvote anonymity. That mechanic is meant to be anonymous, rather than comments, which are voluntary deanonymization. If they don't change to be anonymous, and soon, on kbin, I'm going to stop interacting completely.

It's meant to be anonymous on Reddit, but it doesn't seem to be meant to be anonymous here. Accountable downvoting seems to me like it's something that'll keep the conversation a lot less toxic, and discourage people from just quietly downvoting other people who are participating in the discussion but disagree with them.

Non-anonymous downvoting is a bad mechanic, particularly since downvotes are tied to a comment's prominence in the discussion. If you're too embarrassed to be seen downvoting something, maybe you're doing something wrong. I don't have any problem being seen downvoting bigotry or trolling, but if I downvote somebody for disagreeing with me and having a good point, maybe I ought to feel a bit ashamed of that.

You haven't seen how Facebook is then, people with their pictures and real names shown still being very toxic, especially with the laugh emoji. I prefer anonymity, otherwise I would just find a different platform. I don't feel bad for downvoting people, but I would feel bad if someone could go through my profile and take things out of context and further invade my privacy. At least with my words, I can explain myself. But how do you know why I downvoted something? It already felt creepy when people in reddit would dig through your history several months back to try to find something that would tarnish your character so they could "win" an argument. You want to make that worse? I'm not ok with the way Meta handles broadcasting everything you have ever liked or reacted to. I won't compromise my privacy just so some people feel safer engaging, thinking there is accountability when it just makes it easier to harvest personal data from you.

Calling a community [x]Porn that's just SFW high-quality photos of something (eg EarthPorn, RoomPorn, etc). Leave that naming convention in the 2010s.

EarthPorn was a great place, but BeautifulPlaces really would've been the better name.

It did get rather silly though, especially when you started getting things like "HumanPorn".

I could do without communities whose primary purpose it is to dump on other groups of people. That means the manosphere and far right subs, but it also means thinks like the various circlejerks and mendrawingwomen. Those kinds of places just serve as echo chambers for rage, and if communities like that start getting popular I'll start a server myself and filter them out for people who don't want to be exposed to it.

r/MenDrawingWomen didn't have a circlejerk feel overall. Quite a bit of disagreement and people saying "actually, I'm okay with this one >.>" while also being helpful. Some artists would submit their stuff for advice on "how to not end up here". People improving their work and others creating good examples of "men actually drawing women well" was celebrated. 🤷🏿‍♂️

You probably agree with their reasoning and general premise.

Now go back and suggest that there isn't a "good" or "bad" way to draw women, and that being horny doesn't make you a bad artist or a bad person, and see how that plays out. I bet you'll get banned, or at the very least downvoted into oblivion. Every dumping sub has some amount of debate about who they're dumping on, but that doesn't stop them from being a dumping sub.

Also, I've seen stuff get posted there just for beginner anatomy mistakes. Constantly looking for content to post and dump on (even if it's a poor fit) is the nature of that kind of sub, because rageboxes reward that behavior.

Edit: Also, most importantly, those kinds of subreddits leak. The most toxic people in the subreddit (even if the majority are absolutely wonderful people) are the ones who are nasty outside of the sub.

Now go back and suggest that there isn't a "good" or "bad" way to draw women

I mean... "bad anatomy" posts were common. So were "where's her spine?" comments. In this context, the issue was unrealistic realism for women but not for men. I'll give an example that comes to mind. At one point (maybe last year), One Piece got dunked on for how the vast majority of its women were drawn. And the fans' defense? (the post was brought up in r/OnePiece, so people were discussing it) "The men are unrealistic too. Most guys don't look like that!"
Before anyone starts, ask yourself what the difference between physique and body-ody is. Before y'all miss the point, were the male and female characters designed the way the were for everyone's enjoyment or for a single demographic's?

As for the both sides of it, when it comes to viewers who're children, there most definitely is a "bad" way to draw people in general. Friendly reminder that people getting the wrong idea about their genitals from pornographic media is common... for both sexes.
inb4 definition of "children" 🙄

and that being horny doesn't make you a bad artist or a bad person, and see how that plays out. I bet you'll get banned, or at the very least downvoted into oblivion.

I'm not gonna bother countering this.
As for the rest of your comment, you've got points.

Before y'all miss the point, were the male and female characters designed the way the were for everyone's enjoyment or for a single demographic's?

A single demographic, clearly.

My wife listens to books on tape basically all the time, and some of those books are pretty horny and treat the character designs of their men in words the same way that One Piece treats the character designs of women in pictures. As such, it seems to me that those particular books are also targeted at a single demographic; and while I don't think this has actually been studied by anyone that I'm aware of, it seems at least anecdotally that there's more current written fiction geared exclusively towards straight women than there is geared exclusively towards straight men.

My point here isn't "waddabout books, those are bad too"; it's to point out that the existence of media that's geared toward the enjoyment of some demographic or another is perfectly okay. One Piece doesn't need to be aimed equally toward every demographic. Anyone who wants to like it is allowed to like it. If someone doesn't like it because of the character designs, that's fine too; the authors of the series aren't obligated to alter their character designs to appeal to everyone. They can make it however they want.

This goes doubly for the random art that people post on reddit that r/mendrawingwomen frequently links to. Artists aren't obligated to appeal to everyone equally. First and foremost, they're trying to make something that appeals to them. And if people are positioned in a way that some people find attractive and other people find awkward-looking, if that's the intent of the art, then that's fine.

Now, you bring up kids, and I want to say that I think the idea of educating people about the difference between fantasy and reality is important, and that's how we need to be dealing with misconceptions coming from things like porn. r/mendrawingwomen is not the kind of subreddit that's ideal for doing the kind of non-judgmental education that needs to be done, though.

Yeah they're groups of people combined by hatred, they have no chance to ever evolve into anything nice

Ehhh I'm 50/50 on these. Some of those subreddits are the only good places to get hobby specific memes. Magic the circlejerking for example.

I do understand they tend to foster bullying etc though

I don't know that one very well. But my primary distinction is really be whether it's people making fun of themselves, or people making fun of other people, even within the same hobby. I'm sure there are some subs with "circlejerk" in the name that aren't like that.

Communities that revolve around a some class of meme format or joke are just the worst type of community.

Don't get me wrong. Memes are great. Jokes are great. Inside jokes are great. But I'd much rather see them in the wild than have them all curated in a folder like its some zoo or a butterfly collection.

Yeah, i think it started to become too much a lonng time ago. Too many highly specific meme subs like Lotr, prequel/OT/sequel star wars, marvel, etc all using the same 20 memes and 30 phrases in the comments. Then the bots would fill the comment section with even more inside jokes and it just got tiring seeing it over and over again.

Memes in general. Some are probably funny but I have not seen those yet. Most are low effort or done by a 14 year old. Maybe I'm just getting to old..

  • TwoXChromosomes : Just TERF subreddit by name alone
  • (Kotaku|Tumblr)InAction : I hate Kotaku but not for same reason peops in those subreddits hate them
  • Not so much confined to specific subreddits , but whol "(CHINA|RUSSIA) BAD" mindset : You don't have to believe everything they do's good , but can't trust peops to not be (sino|russio)phobic about it

TwoXChromosomes : Just TERF subreddit by name alone

I only lurked on the sub, but while the name was obviously bad, i remember it being very positive towards transwomen? Are there TERFs once you engage in the discussion or were there some big incidents that were transphobic?

I don't go on there bcus, again, name makes me think TERF subreddit . A name like TwoXChromosomes doesn't sound like it'd be welcoming for trans women.

Also is always possible they're just more crypto about their TERFyness

Since we are obviously all avoiding reddit now, we dont really have to think to much about it anymore. But for what its worth, their first sticky post actually addresses the problem quite well, imo.

TwoXChromosomes was kind of a victim of the fact that it was never in the history of Reddit made possible to change a subreddit's name without just starting over and losing all of the history (incl. top/all time sorting). When the subreddit was designed as a space for women and girls on Reddit thirteen years ago, they picked the name because of 2010 Reddit's very "science rules!" culture and wanted to evoke not just "women and girls" but "geeky women and girls that use the geek site for nerds, Reddit". They were trans-inclusionary over a decade ago, despite the name. Their current pinned post says specifically "Trans women are women. TERFs can fuck right off" in giant bold text.

I get being made uncomfortable by the name, but 2XC was trans-friendly before a lot of other more mainstream feminist spaces were.

2XC was welcoming to trans people which I found weird because of the name. Maybe they should have migrated to a different sub that doesn't reference chromosomes and instead has women in the name. 2XC would then become a sub about science and genes lol

(Kotaku|Tumblr)InAction : I hate Kotaku but not for same reason peops in those subreddits hate them

iirc r/TumblrInAction was one of the documented hate groups I got massbanned for participating in. lul That's when I knew.

I’d really appreciate not having to see any of the shitposting/edgy humor communities. The majority of the content posted is mostly misogynistic (see women ☕️ “meme”) or dismissive of the LGBTQ+ community. I think there’s already a self titled “shitposting” community on here and from the little I’ve seen of it, it seems ok. Only time will tell if that community becomes rife with the same dumb & edgy content from the subreddit equivalent. Also, no more FDS/Incel or just generally hateful communities.

Really not a big deal, but the fight to say something witty/funny and unhelpful on more serious/non joke threads. Like not relevant or useful. I hated having to scroll multiple comment threads to find the answer/explanation for something. Related, but also the circle jerk or the same “in jokes” that get repeated over and over verbatim.

Yeah I disliked that too. It was unfortunate someone would have to tag their post as [serious] to discourage joke replies. Even then, depending on the moderation that's still all you'd get.

For me all the dank* and *circlejerk subreddits.

Counterpoint: I'm a fan of highly specialized memes, and they worked well to drag the shitty content away from the main subreddits. tf2circlejerk kept me invested in my lost love for the game.

Low effort posts and low effort comments in every thread. It was to the point where Reddit felt like call and response to me.

Also, there was no way to contribute to the posts on the front page because they were overloaded with comments. There was always an arms race on who got the top comment on a post that had the potential to get a lot of traction— which means the quippiest comments were always the first.

It’s intellectual junk food.

I don't want to see ad-supported instances. If you like using an instance (pixelfed, mastodon, bookwyrm, kbin, lemmy etc.), chip in. Keep the fediverse free from ads.

Huh. I kinda thought CMV did a good job of encouraging actual view changing.

What I don’t want to see replicated is communities like UnpopularOpinion, where all the top posts are popular opinions, AITA, where all posts are one-sided retellings of stories meant to elicit “NTA” responses, and Confessions, where everything is total fiction.

It was already bad enough indulging racist/sexist/transphobic shitheads with platforms just so they could have "polite debates" (that they didn't actually care about, they just wanted pulpits); having a place specifically for them to come and have more debates they don't actually care about was an especially stupid idea.

As I said in reply to another comment, my issue with the CMV formula is the enormous megaphone it gives to very backwards opinions with the added bonus of wrapping a veneer of honest discussion around it.

It does encourage the appearance of changing views through its rules, but in practice, the longer a thread with a bigoted (or otherwise unpopular) OP kept up the appearance of an honest discussion without giving deltas and closing the discussion, the more primetime exposure it got.

Of course, this is my personal opinion, and I concede that the mods would sooner or later lock the thread anyway, but I always felt that it did more harm than good.

Sinophobia and racism against Chinese people. Yeah I know sinophobia means exactly that, but I wanted to mention it again because I feel like it.

Every single thread about China(non-political) turns into “China bad” and it’s so freaking annoying to see.

Huh I wonder why the general opinion on China would be negative.... /s

Sorry, I don’t know what you want to imply here.

It's hard for an outsider to separate Chinese people from the Chinese government. I got to see both in my third world country. The people who immigrated were mostly just hard working and didn't deserve whatever racism was being thrown about. But knowing that your country is almost selling out to the CCP is infuriating. Knowing that your country is nothing more than a political pawn in the Belt and Road initiative is infuriating. But the people? They do nothing wrong.

@sincle354

Oh, absolutely! I'm from an authoritarian third-world country and have personally experienced racism. I am well aware of the actions and ongoing activities of the CCP. I'm perfectly fine with people roasting the CCP or discussing China's politics in relevant threads. However, racism is where I take issue.

On Reddit, every thread about the things happening in China (or outside of China but related to Chinese people) turns into Sinophobia. Even a thread about floating road over water turns into sinophobia(I'm not sure if I'm using the word correctly lol). Ridiculous don't you think?

So, I'm just saying that it would be nice if we don't have that here but that’s highly unlikely since the whole world is against China and Russia right now. And like you said, an average person is pretty racist and cannot separate between CCP and the Chinese people (even the ones who are born outside of China).

I just want to see to see less racism in the world.

Sorry if my thoughts are all over. I find it challenging to express myself clearly, and it's not something I'm accustomed to. English being my second language doesn't help.

I thought you expressed yourself very clearly, and your English was perfect.

Haha thank you. I actually used GPT’s help for improving some part of my comment.

It's hard for an outsider to separate Chinese people from the Chinese government.

Uhhh no? You would be hard pressed to find someone who legitimately conflates every Chinese citizen with the CCP.

Well, I'm a Lemmy visitor but still it applies to both of us:

  • Corporation sponsored instances
  • Bot nests and bots talking to each other
  • Unfunny circlejerk subreddits
  • Karma whoring and the same 5 unfunny jokes repeated endlessly
  • Ad backed instances
  • Defederation walled garden rugpulls

I hate ads and aggressively block them, but I think eventually there going to start showing up.

I don't think any large business will touch this with a 10 foot pole but could be great for smaller businesses if they can respect the community.

Reposts like this one

I checked the first five pages of threads on this mag before posting. If there was a thread there, I wouldn't post it.

Also if we're being like that, your answer doesn't fit the thread. I'm asking about communities. Since when are reposts communities?

You read the title, skipped the post entirely and submitted an irrelevant comment to this discussion.

Why not use this honeymoon period of changing how you interact with social forums in a more positive manner?

A constant stream of memes romanticizing and/or normalizing depression, alienation, hopelessness, or any other of those dark states of mind. Often after switching from Home to All, I'd scroll and just keep bumping into these damned things.

It's the volume that I find corrosive and even suspicious, to the point that sometimes I've suspected that the prevalence of these memes may be a deliberate, artificially inflated thing, just one more bot tool in the box for bad-faith actors to nudge as many people as possible to a passive, apathetic, unengaged state of mind.

That is the best way I've seen this written and mirrors how I've felt about Reddit for a while now. Everyone is terminally despondent, and the sheer volume of posts like that seem either intentional or like people are trying to fit in by being as depressed or more so than everyone else.

Also I think that many creators of those memes didn't/don't understand correctly what depression even means in comparison to sadness.

What is "CMV"?

a subreddit called Change My View.

You post some opinion on something with as much detail as possible as to why you have that opinion and the commenters try to change your view in some way.

The rules are; the OP has to demonstrate they are open to changing their view in some way, the top level comments must be aimed at challenging the OP's view so you can't say you agree with it, and the overall discussion must be civil. The partial or complete view changes have to be certified with a delta, a kind of award unique to that subreddit. The OP or other users are required to reply to the comment which changed their view with a description of how their view changed and the command !delta, which awards a delta to the user who posted the parent comment.