Why are conversations on Reddit often so hostile and toxic now days?
Maxcoffee@kbin.social to 
Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 116 points – Reddit used to be a great platform to discuss some topic and get different points of few in a friendly but factual manner. However, slowly it seems like the platform has become a lot more like Facebook, where it's been invaded by toxic people that are constantly looking for opportunities to shit and hate on others.
The change has been gradual so I really didn't notice it creep up on me. It's become super evident now having used Kbin and others for a week or so where people generally seem to be more friendly again and willing to actually discuss things in a usually civil way.
The difference is stark too. Today I replied to a comment saying that I hope things turn out better for them and wound up in a weird comment chain about how people were apparently insensitive for wanting to get a basic haircut that they for some reason couldn't afford themselves. Meanwhile, Kbin and the Fediverse feels like a refreshing place to actually converse with people once you get past the clunk and figure it out.
I think Reddit may well have reached that main stream social media saturation point where it very objectively now sucks. It happened originally with the internet itself thanks to the rise of the smartphone and this is just another iteration of it. I feel like Spez might as well get that bag at this point because they've ruined what used to be the platform people went to for social media without the bullshit, without algorithms to drive "engagement" and to avoid the toxic culture that has prevailed.
Thanks for reading my rant.
Wow, there's a lot of finger pointing at different generational demographics here over something that's structural to Reddit.
Stupidly big forums + up/down votes dictating what actually gets seen is a recipe for dunking, sarcasm, and generally shitty behaviour.
Onces there's more people in a community than people can actually remember the name/pfp of, then other members stop being people and start being either an audience or cannon fodder. Couple that with the fact that people love a good snarky comment or rhetorical thrashing, and that leaves busy spaces as prime real estate for smack talk showdown.
On top of that, there's simply the fact that anyone not trying too hard to get noticed just doesn't get heard at all. Taking the time to post something thoughtful when literally no one is going to see it is a fool's errand, and not worth anybody's time. So, you either waste your time and become increasingly embittered, or you don't, and just say vapid but snappy bullshit.
Then there's the fact that moderators are overwhelmed by groups that large, and will default to mental self-defense by doing things like banning without warning, not being transparent, not attempting deescalation, etc. This creates a gulf between the community and the community managers, which furthers the dehumanizing dynamics (and leads to people seeing moderators as power tripping narcissists, rather than tired and fed up people).
We simply didn't evolve to empathize with, listen to, or manage 600,000 people at once. We did, however, evolve to try to win popularity contests and define in-groups and out-groups.
You make great points, and style bonus for good turns of phrase.
ETA: I think you touched on a structural element that is also interdependent on demographics. Not age related, necessarily, but what are certain people looking for.
At some population density tipping point, Reddit stopped catering to thoughtful discussion, and became a place for memes and doomscrolling, bumper sticker slogans and reposts. Feedback loops developed, because people were coming for that content. Reddit became the place to find it.
Now, it's not that I don't partake of those sometimes, but I appreciate keeping those instances (subs) separate from the more interactive and human part.
if you can grasp this concept then the entire internet makes a lot more sense. And politics.
AMAs likely had something to do with it. Simple path in for the masses.
@Maxcoffee
Here is what I honestly think happened: a lot of older gen x and boomers saw their reputations destroyed on Facebook during the Trump Era.
The people who didn't leave Facebook because of them just put them on mute. They only had other old people to communicate with. This didn't satisfy them though, because really their entire ideology is wrapped around triggering other people.
So they went to reddit and discovered that anonymous shit posting was safer and their Facebook went back to livelaughlove largely.
Speaking as an older person who's been on the internet since it became a public thing, I don't think it's necessarily older folks' fault. Most of the crappy interactions I had on there were with young "edgelord" male gamers.
I think it's more nuanced than any one group.
Basically, if you build it they will come refers to the dross, who come in droves once something is a recognizeable "thing" and then we all have to abandon ship for greener pastures and more measured discourse.
You see this happening on Reddit now when anyone mentions the Fediverse at all. Plenty of replies comparing it to NFTs and other junk from dipshits who will come flocking over to this especially if the stuff Meta is doing takes off.
I really hope they are kept in check. No karma, no corporations, no problem. I hope Meta's EEE attempt crashes and burns. They are not welcome to the Fediverse.
I bought a Meta Rift 2 the other day and the thing is a piece of crap. The Kinect was better.
I think the Meta-verse will crash and burn too.
Far as I know, facebook's crowd skews older and I'm going to assume not necessarily more tech savvy or they'd be somewhere else. So I'm wondering who they're planning to sell this to.
On the one hand, the more easily accessible the introduction is, the more people will flock to it for the same reasons I and others went with kbin over lemmy. So they may at least become a jumping off point the way internet explorer/edge will always be the "downloading a better browser" browser.
On the other hand, they're trying to sell everyone's grandma the entire fediverse. There's no way that's going to be a smooth ride if it ever succeeds at all. It took a bit for me to parse everything when I first got here. I think we're more or less safe atm from my dumbass cousin no matter how hard they push their product simply because I'm not sure it can be made less daunting after a certain point.
Also, nobody (fb included) wants their aging relatives to see that amount of porn, especially when they're the one posting it. Facebook is going to have a choice to make if they want to save their christian Minecraft server.
Add to that, if a user's instance is one their family would find unacceptable, the only options are to keep family-oriented alts (annoying) or to pretend irl to have no knowledge of the fediverse at large. The second one is easier, so there's a real chance they may start out being shunned a bit.
I don't think the two things mesh very well, with the userbase and reputation fb currently has. It might be something and it might even become a household name if they throw enough money at it, but it feels unlikely that anything they do will ever be the go-to thing again purely because of who they've been courting these years.
I will brace myself for the inevitable storm to come.
Reddit's far left can be pretty toxic too. As an old liberal myself, I don't believe that there are any good kinds of hate or discrimination, but if you argue against that kind of crap, the absolute worst people come out to defend it. A good chunk of my negative interactions have been with those people.
That being said, the Eternal September is real. I don't know anyone in real life who actually thinks like that. The trouble is, if you have ten million users, a tenth of a percent of them could be assholes and that's still 10,000 obnoxious assholes.
This. Reddit left will be talking shit about how violent right wingers are then in the next thread be calling for violence against them. I am pretty left on most issues before anyone jumps in to call me a fascist lol
As someone who remembers the first September and the time before it, I have to agree. OTOH, when I'm wearing my tinfoil hat, I think about the human tendency to rubberneck online slapfights, and wonder whether some of the conflict on Reddit is astroturfed clickbait.
Would agree. Also, despite what much of Reddit seems to believe, there are plenty of conservative and moderate young adults and youngsters. Reddit is not a general good representation of public opinion at large. It’s very obvious when elections roll around and many subreddits are calling for landslides that never seem to occur.
This is so true. I have friends that are teachers and they have to deal with these young "conservative" brats at every grade level.
It's complicated and a lot of nuance can easily be lost when talking about it. When looking at voting behaviour and political beliefs various factors are at play:
And even with all of that, in different online spaces certain demographics can have outsized influence in various ways, so it can appear that one type of person is more common than it actually is (and this applies in all directions, not just left-wing spaces).
I remember when reddit made it seem like Bernie was going to win the first time. RIP universal healthcare.
Yeah, I'm another old school early adopter who was on the internet since the '80s. No way the enshittification and souring of Reddit was caused by boomers and Gen xers. Most of them wouldn't know how to get on, and those who would... Honestly, I'm the only boomer I know who is on there. Well, unless you go to some of the subreddits that are specifically for people over 50. And those people are incredibly nice! One of the few things I will really miss about Reddit.
That’s how the Fediverse feels like right now! The earth internet.
I remember forums where people where genuinely just trying to connect to others…and how the internet became when everyone got easy access…the scum seeking riches took over…
When I joined Reddit 10+ years ago there was no "old.reddit.com" it was just reddit. The "new" UI was designed to basically entice users who found the original threaded discussion forum a bit daunting. But that (barely) complicated looking format kept a lot of lazy minded fools away from the place.
It's that way with literally every "scene". The easier it becomes to join, the more diluted the quality of the music/activity/discussion/hobby.
So....that's what happened. Reddit made reddit more palatable to a wider audience, and that wider audience includes a wider spread of the bell curve that is humanity. Sucks, don't it.
I don't know if you've seen the official phone app for Reddit but its an even worse version of that. There's no "hot" etc of your subscribed subs, rather it's now a firehose of whatever the algorithm thinks will piss you off enough to interact more with it.
I still can't believe people are okay with an algorithm choosing what they see on social media, let alone a completely private one where you have no clue how it works. Like, obviously because it's a bright-red flag that they're going to try to manipulate you. But even if you don't care about that, like, I want to see posts from communities and creators I've chosen to follow. Not have my feed flooded with garbage from random creators / communities.
I feel the same way about stuff like Netflix recommendations. You watch one horror movie and all it shows you is horror movies. Like bruh, I have varied tastes as do most humans
I first joined Reddit in 2007 when it was a genuinely friendly and informative place. The first big change came with the Digg exodus which brought mainstream meme culture. I think at that point, Conde Nast starting putting serious pressure onto management for Reddit to become more of a social network. This then led to the broken UI changes which, as you say, brought the wider bell-curve of humanity with it.
The problem is that Reddit simply didn't have the security controls/moderation in place for that type of activity. By 2016, Reddit was being widely manipulated by outside sources -- Large corporations were hiring troll-farms to shill their products; Nation-state actors were doing the same; political activists were trolling/abusing Reddit's systems in any way they could -- doxxing, death threats, extreme trolling...
And the friendliness and trust were gone forever. And instead of having discussions, it's now just everyone shouting over each other.
Now the management just want to cash out and using Reddit is now like writing a college essay while sitting in a McDonalds basmement eating a stale three-hour old Big Mac.
Also, there are so, so many bad faith actors on reddit that at some point, you start assuming everyone around you is arguing in bad faith. So you don't even try to engage in conversation any more, you either jump straight to insulting / trolling them, or just downvote/report/block without even interacting.
You're absolutely right. It's become a huge problem and not one that I think Reddit can easily solve given their infrastructure.
I've always had a fondness for Reddit, but I think its time is really over...
When a group or community becomes mainstream and starts appealing to the common denominator, it's the beginning of the end for that group. In the end, the downfall of reddit was bound to happen.
Further, I think people running into argumentative people led to them expecting people to be argumentative, and if you go looking for trouble, you're going to find it.
What a bizarre take. No I don't think this is true at all, but I do think it's an interesting read into the assumptions we, as people, make of faceless strangers on the internet. We invent faces for them that fit the stereotypes we have in our head.
I think there are multiple reasons, but one I want to highlight is Reddit's shift towards driving engagement at all costs.
I used the "new" Reddit for a while, and I noticed that more and more it was trying to recommend posts and communities to me. "Popular with users in your area," "Similar to another community you visited," "You visited this community before". A lot of the time, these would be posts and communities that I didn't like or want on my feed.
I would venture to guess that these recommendations are putting people into contact with communities they wouldn't normally seek out, and since they're not a member of that community (and may even be hostile towards it), you get more people breaking community norms or trolling or antagonizing people, etc...
Hit the nail on the head with this. The phone app makes this especially apparent as the front page is a feed of stuff you're not subscribed to but rather what the algorithm thinks will drive engagement. The website with the new interface has the same approach but for now still retains the old functionality too or I think they would have had yet another riot on their hands.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the popularity of subs that are about disliking things or groups of people. That kind of shit drives engagement but turns communities toxic really fast.
I use(d) RIF, which let me filter subs out of my feed and the experience has been a lot less horrid, except for when those subs leak their toxic waste into other discussions, which happens way to often.
I had to do a culling of all those subs. I'm happy I don't even remember half of them now, but like choosingbeggars, aita, etc. Just pure negativity and toxicity but wildly popular.
To be fair, I do see some signs of it here as it's grown. It wasn't like this even five days ago, where you would see downvotes on comments that weren't inherently just toxic or just being assholes. But lately, I see more downvotes for people stating a differing opinion to the majority, or even asking questions. To me that's usually the start of the toxicity.
Check the modlogs too, I’m seeing censorship from mods for petty reasons. Everyone can see what every mod is doing via the modlogs.
That's a feature I didn't know about. Will definitely keep an eye on that
Definitely will make things more transparent here and root out the power hungry bad mods.
Absolutely, there's been a large influx of people so it's sadly inevitable somewhat.
It got too big and too accessible. Productive conversation became harder to have as they'd get pushed down by low effort comments from people trying to earn internet points and do little else. That also led to echo chambers which leads people to react rather than discuss. That's not the whole reason but in my mind that's a big part of why it degraded so badly.
The karma system was great until it wasn't. People become so overly attached to fake internet points it's embarrassing.
And the awards as well. I mean the amount of new awards I have seen introduced in Reddit just in the past 3 years has excessive and kind of cringeworthy tbh.
The awards system immediately lost all meaning it might of had the moment they implemented it.
Reddit silver jpgs were still the best award system that ever was on that website.
It's not just the toxicity but the intense hivemind. I flicked back to check some news and saw an article about Pete Davidson crashing a vehicle into a building and to my recollection it was really the only controversy he'd been a party to, but because he's on the Reddit's Most Hated list every comment was picking apart every perceived slight, calling him terrible names saying he was washed up, waste of space it was just like... guys take a fucking breather. He's a human person, sorry he dates celebs.
We are at war with cancel culture and they don’t like the fediverse.
Because Reddit got a reputation for being lenient on people who are toxic. I gave up on general, current affairs or regional subs a long time ago it's only smaller communities I'm leaving now.
Think of r/incels or r/The_Donald, r/GenderCritical, r/NoNewNormal etc - and they're the examples from recent, more generally appealing years after the subs named after slurs were nuked. These are the subreddits that got mainstream attention, they may no longer be on Reddit, but their members are, and anyone who would be drawn to them is still signing up, on the other hand lots of people have been turned off the site by those associations. It's not just that there's lots of people joining the site, it's who those people are.
In the same vein it's a really easy site to astroturf and there's no doubt in my mind that the "culture wars" are being stoked there because of it. Because there's a market for aged accounts for use in political astroturfing or general product shilling there are companies running the same shitty repost bots everywhere to produce them. It's a cycle that seems to be getting shorter and shorter.
My conspiracy theory is that almost no genuine posts have made it to the front of r/all in years. The only way to gain the tens of thousands of upvotes you need in the narrow window of time you have to get on rising is to have a botnet mass-upvoting your post in those first few critical seconds.
It would explain why r/all nowadays is half lazy reposts of unfunny memes, and half obvious agendaposting.
Its a blend of critical mass and the userbase. Some Reddit subs have subscriber counts in the millions, you're inevitably going to reach a lot of eyes on your comment if you post in the right thread and not get drowned out. Additionally, high quality comments and positive discussions take a lot of energy and thought to write out, while low effort brigading, trolling and regurgitating sarcastic jokes are quick and easy to do.
The larger subs have a high amount of low effort trolling, where the good answers tend to get lost in the noise of funny jokes. The smaller subs often have a high level of autism and people that take their passions way too seriously. They can get triggered over differing opinions or nit pick a misplaced comma for way longer than reasonable. Good positive discussions still exist, I think just due to the sheer size of Reddit now it just gets a bit hard to fight through the noise before getting downvoted into oblivion.
Right now on Lemmy, we've managed to escape the bots, jokers and trolls of the masses and are reaching crowds of techy headed first adopters that are much more willing to grow the community and are used to forums and threads. It's a wonderful thing to be a part of and something that's become quite rare on Reddit. It's very refreshing to be able to just comment and know the commenter will see your answer and even reply. This makes it much easier to put some effort in rather than chuck out a cheap joke for some upvotes.
Great take on it and exactly what I'm noticing too.
The barrier of entry to the Fediverse is currently working like a filter for these muppets and the longer it stays like that the better imo.
It's a gate* worth keeping in my opinion. Either you want to join badly enough that you learn something new and become the kind of person worth conversing with, or you don't ...and you stay away. It doesn't feel great to admit that's the case but .... I mean at some point it's worth expressing.
Its highly topic dependent:
On political things, speaking for myself, frankly, I learned a few hard lessons over the last 8ish years:
So off the bat my preference is for reasoned discussion, sure. But at the first use of the buzzword-of-the-week ("woke" most prominently right now) you pretty much need to throw all that out on the principal of "you can't win a chess game against a pigeon". You can just walk away, sure. But if you're going to continue to engage you need to be aware that you aren't actually arguing with the person, you're performing for an audience and trying to show that the other guys position makes him look stupid, and maybe make him feel stupid too... hopefully if that happens a lot he'll take a different position (but it'll be 100% based on feelings, not reason). And this isn't just online, this is in real life too. I realized that I'm too inclined to just walk away from a stupid argument, which these people view as a "win". Instead, now I more regularly rudely and publicly make my point and make things socially awkward for everybody. It sucks and I hate it, but they'll never shut up otherwise and that sucks too so it's like ripping a bandaid off.
Here's the thing: typically I'm not going into a discussion on social media with the aim to change people's opinions or even to argue with them.
But what ends up happening is that they immediately assume it's a bad high school debate and things quickly devolve into bad faith arguments, attempts to nitpick and just general toxicity.
Reddit became too popular, and in general the average person using the internet just wants to be nasty to feel better about themselves.
It's an easy trap to fall into. I try to avoid doing it myself.
I honestly think social media platform algorithms like Facebook/Insta/Twitter have actually trained us to do it more, too. Basically they're optimized for whatever keeps eyeballs on their platforms longest and it turns out that generating outrage is an easy way to do that, so they prioritize showing you stuff that's gonna get you to engage by pissing you off and/or making you feel self-righteous. And then that 1. makes people think that's just how people act cos that's what gets put in front of them and 2. encourages that behavior because it does numbers.
I've quit twitter twice (made it stick the second time) because no matter how hard I try, whenever I end up engaging I end up with people sniping at me and eventually I start sniping back. It just encourages me to be my worst self and it sucks.
Social media requires engagement to get adsense, and what gets engagement? Rage bait and inflammatory comments. Unfortunately, I think "traditional" social media is a huge cause of modern "toxic" online discourse.
I cut my teeth on /r/politics. You want my take on it? You aren't arguing with real people. Reddit is botted to hell and full of paid shills that do nothing but corner you into an endless argument just to frustrate and piss you off. They have no purpose but to parade around and spam up the subreddits with hate and vitriol. This serves two purposes. To distract the liberals who probably should be spending their time on literally anything else other than arguing with these idiots. Then they have propaganda to spread. They have to appear to be large in numbers. So they go around and pick off the people who are willing to join them or follow them down an endless rabbit hole of logical fallacies and conspiracy theories.
I've long suspected this is the case. Even Facebook publishes reports saying their platform is rife with paid corporate shills and government agencies pushing agendas and Reddit appears to be no different. I mean you can even test this by posting about a competing product and watch as they all come out to downvote you to oblivion and trash everything about it.
I think genuine and thoughtful discussion takes a lot more effort than shit posting, and when you mix that with a karma system that encourages one-upmanship and a few echo chambers, it can get toxic real quick.
More toxic communities mean more activity. More activity means bigger numbers to show to investors, advertisers, etc. No, they don't care that a large portion of those comments are just calling each others names.
Let's hope that kbin/lemmy won't get too toxic. It's inevitable at some level, but we can combat it with proper moderation.
For me, it just depends on the subreddits. The bigger ones naturally include more a-holes. Over 11 years on there, it did get worse over time. On the big subreddits I simply read the headlines and ignored comments. Smaller subreddits were where I spent my time, typically helping people with medical advice, camera advice, computer, etc. Humans in large groups are stupid, so I just never thought much of it I guess.
The real answer is that smart tech savvy people were first one reddit. Then the masses came. Then it sucked. This happened with literally every platform.
The early adopters at kbin are thoughtful, articulate, and considerate. Very welcoming.
A big part of it is people are just angry and stressed in general because the system we live in is fundamentally broken (pretty much no matter where you are in the world, though I am speaking through an American lens since the majority of Reddit is American).
Everyone can feel the effects of an economy and government that just doesn't work for them. We're fundamentally divided on how to fix it. Minorites are directly under attack and that manages to leach into most conversations, either directly or sideways. It makes people incredibly defensive.
The fediverse has a higher barrier to entry and, statistically, tech-minded people skew liberal. We're a self-selecting community that is just more likely to agree -- for instance -- that trans people are people.
Further, since these services are decentralizedv and self-hosted, we can literally make hate groups unwelcome/banned from our instances because there is no profit motivation for hand-wringing like there is with Reddit.
I really hate how much certain groups constantly dog whistle about transgender people as if it's the new scary gay people that are coming for your kids or something. Meanwhile, the average person would be lucky to even run into a transgender person and even realize it on any given day.
The tone and volume of comments has me not wanting to chime in. Though on the fediverse I find I am more comfortable putting my 2c in
I'm not sure it was, unless you actively sought it out.
Lots of communities were nice and pleasant, with little to no animosity. The politics subs invite debate and discussion, so naturally argumentative people gravitate there. But most of Reddit was fun
Online discussions can be toxic anywhere. You don't have to take part in a community and don't have to be dragged into dramw. There's always somewhere more welcoming.
As I've seen posted before, one of the reasons is due to enshittification. Feel free to peruse at your leisure. Greed is certainly the biggest contributing factor, but there's another, lesser talked about effect happening here that "compliments" enshittification if you will.
It's a sort of "reverse gentrification" of a social media platform that has just crested in popularity/usability, which in turn creates a snowball effect (or in the interest of the aforementioned process, a "shitball" effect). It's when the good posters, the ones that actually READ the articles, the ones that make educated or otherwise well thought out comments and actually take time to speak to the person behind the computer instead of using anonymity as a means to be vile or rude or nasty, all migrate off of the platform. They see the writing on the walls, and so they leave. This leaves behind more and more of those that don't really care about details or politics or social causes, nor care about anything other than their instant gratification (i.e. we don't care about the blackouts we just want everything to open back up so we can get back to our memes).
In other words, as more decent people leave a social media platform, all that's left are the ones that make the platform undesirable to begin with, thus causing more people to leave and the decline deepens. We saw this with Facebook. All that's left on Facebook are people who are out of touch with reality and those who use the platform as a propaganda machine.
We're also seeing a rise in what I can only describe as "Corporate Apologists" - People who constantly make excuses for companies that shouldn't be defended or are otherwise indefensible. It is pretty disheartening to see so many people rush to the side of businesses that are openly exploiting their workforce (in some cases the defenders are the exploited, which boggles the mind). People who defend Elon Musk and his handling of Twitter, people who defend Reddit and think the blackouts were always going to be useless so why bother (those people missed the point entirely), people who defend anti-union tactics or businesses that don't want their employees to have living wages. All of these are because the person has some self-image or interest that is tied to that business/platform. A part of (sometimes a large part of) their identity is defined by a product and so they won't even entertain the idea of trying to go against it, lest that product or company be taken away (and a part of their identity with it). There are people who really pride themselves on their number of followers, their internet karma, other useless tokens that they attribute to personal self-worth.
Anyway, I've ranted long enough. I'm tired so some of what I said probably doesn't make sense and I apologize. Maybe I'll come back later and clean it up a bit once I've rested.
I think it depends on the subreddit. Some subreddits I used were civil.
But now I don't want to use Reddit because of their hatred of their users. So I'm not using it for the moment.
I think it's also true to say shitty people have more time on their hands and put more time into things like hating on others because it makes them feel better about themselves and whatever bad situation they're in that they feel powerless to change. That can cross generations, personality types, political spectrum and anything else.
Big subreddits haven't been a good place for conversation for years. Within an hour or less any popular thread has thousands of comments, anything you might write and add to it will be so far down the list, it'll never be seen. The reddit hive mind is very rigid in it's thinking and yes can be quite toxic sometimes.
I've only used reddit as a news aggregator and meme scroller for a long time now. Occasionally I'll pop over to a specific subreddit and maybe get a few words in but it's rare, I can easily do the same here too so I plan to give the fediverse a solid chance for the next few months.
Any forum that is bigger attracts more people like that. Which subreddits ?
can we Please stop talking about my ex while we're dating?
I can't help it. I wanna know! Gimme all the juicy details!
My father did warn me never to stick my dick in crazy.
Sadly I was not a smart man.
I'm an old fucker, to me it seems like the tipping point started in 2008, and really started to get bad in 2016.
I was already chatting on online forums in the late 90s, and on slashdot starting around 2000. There was lots of discussion, some of it first, but it was just discussion. Not a lot of politics per se.
In September 2001, al queda attacked the world trade center, the Pentagon, and another plane was flown into the ground. This led to lots of discussion online and a massive increase in political conversations.
In 2003, America went to war in Iraq. This was a generational event, and it fundamentally changed internet conversation. Partisanship really started to show up, in part thanks to George W. Bush's "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists" rhetoric.
At some point along the way, I stopped using slashdot. I tried using kuro5hin for a while, then Digg, and eventually landed on Reddit.
Two fundamental changes that happened in 2008 were the election of Barack Obama, and the Ron Paul revolution. In both cases, internet ground game ended up having an outsided impact on politics. Barack Obama ended up being an internet sensation, and his Democrats got the presidency and both houses of Congress by a wide margin. Ron Paul didn't come close to winning any primaries, but the shadow of this campaign cast a long shadow over the Republican party, arguably leading to the tea party faction taking over the party for a time.
This made everyone perk up in politics. Where a few candidates realized before that this Internet thing could be powerful, 2008 showed that it could fundamentally change the game.
While reddit was highly political in 2008, there were many factions. That's what made it a fun place to be -- there were right wingers, religious people, libertarians, liberals, socialists, and social justice advocates. I think at this point, however, forces started to work to take over the discourse. By 2015, subtle changes had taken place to really make anyone who wasn't part of a specific ideology feel unwelcome, including a differential treatment of different groups. Most brigading subs were handled by admins (by shutting them down), but notably /r/shitredditsays which brigaded "bigoted" comments was allowed to stay up. Powermods were previously a problem on Digg, eventually the same problem seemed to start occurring on Reddit where a small group of mods were controlling hundreds of subreddits.
By the time I left for good, it was clear to me that reddit wasn't anything like the place it used to be. Many subreddits either through social engineering or through bots would see posts that were not part of the mandatory orthodoxy immediately hammered into the dirt. "The downvote button is not an I disagree button" clearly didn't apply anymore. Until that point, I was deleting my account every few months and making a new one because doxxing was a growing problem and I didn't want to have my real life destroyed for having an opinion people disagreed with, but eventually the site lost all value to me since I knew you couldn't have discussions on the discussion site any longer.
The successful election of Donald Trump put everything into hyperdrive. Controlled subreddits became graveyards of dissent, and polarization became total as people picked sides. At that point I no longer returned to reddit in any regard because there was just no point.
The cultures of the different highly polarized sides became quite different, all toxic in their own ways. The left became ridiculously authoritarian to keep outsiders out, the right became ridiculously offensive to keep outsiders out. The fact that there was one website (whatever that website was) meant that you could kinda play for keeps -- take over a website with authoritarian moderation or with extreme offensiveness, and you win that front.
My hope is that the decentralized nature of the fediverse helps. When Lemmy.ml or beehaw go too authoritarian, people can just find something else on the same platform that's more reasonable. If certain websites are too crass and offensive, people can go find something else on the same platform that's more reasonable. In it's built-in diversity, the fediverse is set up so everyone can have their space, and the worst that can happen is someone shunts you out of theirs (but you get to keep yours).
I've found the fediverse actually deradicalized me a lot. There are still people I disagree with, but I get to participate in discussions that remind me that whatever the "other side" is has some good ideas, and also I get to see that I actually disagree with extremists of all kinds. Being exposed to bad ideas doesn't make me agree with them, it helps illustrate how bad they are regardless of source.
Zoomer toxicity it's unbelievable, maybe the frustration of being of the crystal generation makes them anonymously hate in the internet.
Nah I disagree, perhaps cause I am a zoomer but all the zoomers I know and communicated with online have been way more civil and understanding than previous generations. They even apologize to each other when a conversation goes way out of hand. Toxicity can go across every generation, but the millennial internet was/is a lot worse.
It's funny, I have a best friend who is a zoomer and I definitely see some older millennials absolutely NOT getting zoomer "deadpan/apathy" memes and getting all bent out of shape about it. It reminds me of boomers and how if you use any expletives they won't engage with someone at all and decide the point being made was invalid.
I agree with you that we can't forget that 4chan and a lot of the early really bad harassment was millennials, who now are adults complaining about an atmosphere they created not being a space they want to be in now that they are older.
This is not just Reddit imho. Look at Twitter, everyone is mad all the time over there. I'm not sure how to explain what is happening but it's all over the board imho. People get offended for everything, they seem to fail at empathy, they love to hate, it makes them feel good about themselves, every topic is somehow black or white too.
Nah, it's people and algorithms. The algorithms we see today in certain social media apps etc encourage certain behaviours and patterns of use.
Not all algorithms or systems necessarily encourage productive and rational discussion or "information hunting" for practice and forward thinking.
Consider that brainwashing and warmongering propaganda is still alive and well used today in many parts of the world, the reality is that nobody is immune, but we can at least make ourselves aware of the "drug" that these systems give our brains and avoid allowing ourselves to become a victim to the system by being aware of someone else's dogma or agendas.
Totally agree with you. I went back to reddit and the contrast between there and here is stark. Reddit has become a total cesspool of the worst and most annoying types of posters lol