What are the bad patterns of Reddit to never repeat on Lemmy?
A few examples include s*x questions on askreddit, "this" comments, nolife powermods, jokes being more frequent than actual answers
A few examples include s*x questions on askreddit, "this" comments, nolife powermods, jokes being more frequent than actual answers
Needlessly censoring words like sex. It wasn’t necessary on Reddit and it certainly isn’t necessary now.
Censorship like that was introduced to make the platform appealing to advertisers. I'd say just don't give power over how to run the platform to advertisers.
I find it absolutely mind blowing that people are generally accepting that as okay on most social media platforms.
I can only assume that people don’t understand why it was brought in on YouTube and TikTok in the first place because so many people do it when it isn’t remotely necessary. If you make your living posting on social media, then fair enough, I understand you need to fall inline with the rules of the platform. But why the hell would you self censor posts you don’t make money from? Utterly ridiculous.
All they know is that The Algorithm won't show their posts if they use those words. How anyone can understand that and not see how incredibly fucked up that is, though, I don't know.
I agree. It's absolutely absurd that would say something along the lines of "Fuck, I got r*ped, what do I do?"
I'd say people worrying about Karma.
this /s
Even the /s I wouldn't bring it here
karma (or upvotes-downvotes aka simple karma) shouldn't be a reason to disallow someone from using a lemmy community
I don't know what form of karma Wander meant, but for me the "global karma" numbers are the worst part of reddit. People constantly posting stupid things or self-censoring to try to make number go up.
Requiring minimum positive karma is stupid when it can be gamed so easily.
Someone with very negative karma is likely a troll.
upvoted to give you more karma
What exactly was the karma problem? I never saw it being a huge issue
It becomes an issue if you imagine people on social media do what they do for karma in the same way people in real life do what they do for money.
In other words, if you have a deficient or extremely narrow theory of mind, you will think karna is the cause of everything
Is there even a total karma counter anywhere at all?
Not on Lemmy but there is on kbin (it's called "reputation", I think). I'm hoping it doesn't get implemented here, but I guess we can see if it negatively affects kbin content as we've got a direct comparison.
Making all these posts on Lemmy be about another site.
The community won't flourish if the only thing people are talking about is their social-media ex.
I think we need to give it some time. I was not there when Digg went bad but I'm assuming that in the early days of Reddit, there was a lot of discussion about Digg. Once Reddit reached a critical mass, posts about Digg died down.
There's a lot of discussion about Twitter imploding too. It's not just that it's an ex for most of us. It's also the tech implosion.
Also Meta wants to join the fediverse with Threads.
A lot of it is just people talking about their social media ex, but it IS part of a larger discussion about taking the internet back from corporations.
exactly what happened but with the addition of some redditors being pissed off that we all jumped onto Reddit.
To make the ex metaphor. Talking shit about your ex is not productive but talking about what was wrong or didn't work can be very insightful. Entirely blocking your ex out of your mind is a pretty easy way to make the same mistakes again.
I can see why people think it's annoying but I think this is also a good thing. Talking about this helps people understand what they want to see in their communities or instances.
Pushing the metaphor even further, all my stuff isn't even moved out of the ex's house yet, so I'll probably want to keep talking about them until the situation is over. It's just going to take a little time.
It's the currently trending topic for pretty much everyone here. It will die down by itself eventually as it becomes old news.
I mean, a good chunk of the content on reddit came from Twitter or Facebook or 4chan, if not one of the many other sites that also scrape from those places. And after the Digg exodus, there was a lot of discussion about that too.
This is normal. This is just growing pains.
Obtuse comment, a vast majority of people have no self-awareness. Its good to discuss things.
That is why I posted. To bring awareness that it is happening, and self awareness, and suggest that things can be done another way.
Censoring inoffensive words like sex.
Yes, thank you. Excessive prudishness and self censoring is always an indicator to me that a community is going a weird direction.
In the last year I started noticing on Reddit people typing the 'letter'-word and half the time I wouldn't know what word they are referring to.
On a couple occasions I would reply asking what word they meant and they would reply that I should know, with my comment downvoted.
That reminds me of another thing I was sick of seeing, people asking a question and getting told to google it or that lmgtfy link. You would later see people in the comments mentioning that Google took them there when Googling for it.
I've been amazed at how much "profanity" I've seen on Lemmy "all" page already... 6 hours in
Allowing racists and fascists a seat at the table under the guise of 'fairness' or 'free speech'. Reddit became polluted with far-right astroturfing in the last six years.
It is not tolerance to welcome those persons who seek to harm you.
We cannot tolerate intolerance.
That's a paradox. You cannot tolerate everything. That's why there's no such thing as not being bigoted. It's literally impossible to tolerate everything.
You just have to pick what things you're not going to tolerate. Now if only we could always agree on what that is.
Intolerance. Intolerance is the one thing you don't tolerate. It being a rhetorical paradox doesn't mean it's difficult to implement.
Reddit was full of racists even back in the early 2010s. /r/Coontown was a prime example of that.
Whether or not it's tolerance isn't directly important.
The mistake that people make is assuming that tolerance is inherently good. It is to a certain degree, but there are many things that you do not want to tolerate. That's where we want to be.
However, many people think of themselves as tolerant and find it difficult to make that conceptual realization.
In the last 6 years? If anything, reddit got less tolerant of the far right since inception, it just became a bigger deal when they banned them in the last 6 years
You believe what you want to. Nothing I say is going to convince you, random internet person.
I had used reddit since the near beginning, and over time the prevalence of 'alternative facts' and other right-wing narratives has risen sharply. You also have communities like r/conservative that participate in open calls to violence and perpetuate right wing dogwhistles for maximum rage bait. The sheer slide of r/politicalcompassmemes going from people role-playing different ideologies to thinly-veiled alt-right propaganda speaks to this shift.
Catering to conservatives and right wing players results in the enshittification of the website.
I think that generally the internet got more of those types of people and they got louder, reddit used to have subreddits whose names were just slurs or subreddits blatantly dedicated to racism. The idea of a "dogwhistle" on reddit didn't exist because the racists just said and did racist things without fear of being banned.
Yeah, you're both right. There's less outright hate now, but more propaganda.
Political Compass Memes is the Fox News version of fair and balanced. It's intended to convert people with a thin veil of "both sides". And that thin veil will be enough for a lot of impressionable kids.
Everyone should familiarize themselves with the paradox of tolerance if they haven't already.
Reddit became too America focused. Most of the posts were about America or assumed everyone reading was American. It felt very exclusionary.
Well I think ideally that's what different instances should help. I'm on a Canadian instance with a lot of Canadian specific communities. I've seen instances of many other specific countries. That should theoretically counter that whole experience on Reddit
Lemmy.ca is full of em!
Which honestly has been one of my favourite features of Lemmy so far. I can browse All to see what everyone is talking about, I can browse Subscribed to see what I care about and I can browse Local to see what Canadians care about.
I think this will remain a problem on any platform that includes enough Americans. The general public in America just seems unaware of anything outside America.
I think this stems from their education system, what they (don't) broadcast on mass-media and how normal and even laudable they consider fanatical nationalism to be (did you know they require children to swear devotion to the nation state every day at school!?).
In any case, I don't think this is a problem that any platform that wants to include Americans can avoid.
Untrue. Happens in some areas, but far from universal. However, it is weird (self-loathing american reporting).
It's also that it's legitimately unusual to travel to another country more than once or twice before you're an adult because of the geography.
It's also extremely expensive and honestly most of us don't get enough PTO to do that really. Shitposting online is cheap and easily distracts from how Americans work more hours on average than even Japan.
But it's always ironic to see people upset Americans don't understand other nationalities while also not understanding why we're like this.
I saw this complaint on reddit a lot, but at the end of the day, it was a US based site. Of course there will be mostly Americans and they will default to that understanding.
Also, the US is a large country. It's not like Europe where you're a day trip away from 5 other countries. Most Americans can't afford travel outside the US, so they only have exposure to the many cultures within the US.
The hate Americans get for not catering discussion on a US based site to the global community is really what's strange.
You can travel in a straight line over land 2700 miles from Washington to Florida without leaving the United States. Make a foray into Canada and you can travel a 4300 mile long straight line from Alaska to Florida without leaving a country that speaks majority English.
I haven't heard that before, but yeah, the US is huge.
I just want y'all to stop saying shit like "oh xyz is like 20$ right now" like it's just as cheap everywhere else in the world.
My other irk is the next group that assumes everyone who isn't American must be from Europe.
Europe was just an example, though they do tend to be the most unjustly hateful of Americans.
That's just a demographics game. Most reddit users live in the US.
Depends how you define user. If I am googling for answers to a problem and find it on Reddit, am I a user?
And the arrogance about it was unbelievable, it was extremely common behaviour.
Christ, yes. Every other comment or post was something that assumed everyone was in the USA, or that they were the greatest most perfect wonderful nation and all others are basically hell on earth.
🤦♀️
Literally full of shit lmao. Who on reddit mainstream is talking about how the US is the greatest place on Earth.
Usually its the entire other way around where Reddit is acting like the apocalypse is about to start at any point.
Here's a new one for this thread. "People who complain about Americans over the dumbest things". It's straight up like you have a chip on your shoulder.
Complaining about Americans is possibly the most reddit thing ever, lmao, regardless of where the user is from.
Not just frequent jokes, but those annoying ever-repeating jokes. Like as if 80% of users were the same person. Before opening any post on Reddit, there is a good chance to be able to correctly predict the exact content of a significant portion of the comments. I get that it can be funny to an individual to come across stuff like "I also choose this guys wife" or "And my axe" more than once. But for people like me, who did not just start using the website, it is really annoying to come across the same jokes literally hundreds of times.
This goes hand in hand with the general idea of a "Reddit hivemind". Depending on the subs you visit, you can see that Reddits userbase is actually really diverse. There are people from every demographic with all kinds of different life experiences. But in a lot of subs, anytime a woman is mentioned there is a flood of people acting like as if there are no women on the internet and as if no person using Reddit could have a girlfriend. Again, I get that it can be funny once or twice. But when the idea that every user must be a typical "Redditor" gets repeated all the time it's just annoying. Needless to say that I don't look forward to being called a "Lemming" on this site.
Also, repeating comments on the same post. Obviously you don't have to read all the comments if there are already hundreds of them. But if there are too many comments saying the exact same thing it just gets harder to read them all. So it would be nice if people would look whether the point they want to make maybe has been made already. They can increase that comment's visibility by upvoting. No need to make other people read the same content multiple times and by that make it harder to read different comments.
This, 11/10 would upvote again, just fucking take my upvote, btw is your wife single by any chance?
And my axe!
Take my upvote /s
Nice.
And people immediately repeat the same patterns without understanding where they come from.
First, the difference is negligible between doing something ironically and just doing it. The "ironic" part stays with it, but becomes irrelevant almost immediately. The "/s" needs to exist for a similar reason. Generally it's just better to not make the /s comment at all, but if you're going to it should have the /s.
Second, if you have a couple hundred people read something and think the same response, one of them is probably going to type it.
Changing these things requires a culture shift where we encourage people to think about their comment adding something original rather than the first thing that comes to mind. You have to attack that root problem instead of the symptoms. Is it worth the effort?
You get to feel superior to people who ~don’t get it~ and think you’re being unironic. That’s really it.
Kept scrolling to find this one. It was so tiresome to see the same joke repeated in multiple threads a day.
And I really love humor, but I'll also add that everyone upvoting the joke or pun responses until they're all at the top, and having to scroll to find the real content, was pretty annoying too.
This may be a little bit of an issue here as small instances (or frequently defederated instances) may not be aware of replies made on older comments. To see the whole reply chain of a comment you need to click the fediverse button (the rainbow star thingy on Lemmy web) and read the source. If people don't do that they may legitimately not know that someone has replied with the exact thing they were about to reply with.
Anyone who comments "this", "holup", or "came here to say this" can go fuck themselves.
Now Holup, I came here to say ^this^. Have my updoot kind internet stranger.
Edit: Thank you for the gold
If I had gold, I would gift this post! Have this instead:
You should get your teeth fixed.
This
If you can't even get yourself to write the word sex, the questions on askreddit were probably not the issue..
I’ll say the obvious… blocking WefWef and other apps that improve the user experience.
Nazis. Reddit has so many Nazis.
I hate Reddit nazis.
Ending community names with "porn", so earthporn, designporn always kinda bugged me for some reason. I like porn. I like beautiful non-porn pictures of nature and awesome design too. I just don't know why we need to conflate them or use the term 'porn' as shorthand.
I always expected someone to coin the term pornporn to describe the excess of pornographic images. Alas, it was not to be.
...yet.
Because it's cheeky shorthand that conveys a certain aesthetic fixation with whatever the subject matter is. It's certainly more interesting than just appending "pics" to everything. I'm open to alternatives, but language changes, and I've already gotten so used to it I don't even think of actual pornography first when I hear the term.
I think the whole "no life mods" thing got a bit overblown. Reddit communities flourished generally due to the ones that had good active moderation. Setting a consistent theme and tone for the subreddit and keeping the bad actors out. It takes a lot of work, they did it for free and we benefited.
The issue is when some people are mods for tons of major communities. That's when it is overreaching.
/r/askhistorians had very strict mods and was better for it.
yup. Good moderation makes or breaks the community.
They needed some form of notice to users in the form of a tag at post title level when all the comments had been deleted.
Almost every time I saw someone complaining about the mods, I would take a gander at their comment history, and surprise surprise it was almost always full of edgelord shit.
Outrage bait. Too much of reddit was stories and videos of people acting badly.
Guys I think the censored word is"sex".
Thank God. I was worried this wouldn't be the place to ask saxophone related questions.
I'm a linux developer of 25+ years and I'm permanently banned from /r/linux because I dared criticize systemd.
My answer is therefore: Power-tripping mods. Where mods are required, ensure the community has the ability to oust them.
Shitting on someone just for not liking systemd is really stupid. FOSS thrives on diversity, and having alternatives to systemd's parts will always be a plus. I'm okay with systemd myself, but it's easy to understand why some might not like it.
The Linux community tends to have some ego which think they have figured it all out, elitism is a problem which needs to be addressed more often in my opinion.
There was a mod drama over there at Linux too. After a while, the power tripping mod was kicked out and a lot of the banned accounts were restored (including one of mine). Things were okay until spez.
A ban transparency list, kinda like a certificate transparency list, would be great but the big issue is that you can't keep publicly hosting prohibited content...
If you don't mind me asking, what is bad about systemd is there a post anywhere?
Yeah, I was having a whinge about it here the other day. Just a sec while I dig up the corpse...
But if you want to read more about how why others hate systemd, there's no shortage of material:
https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd
https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Main_Page.html
https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/21616608
http://www.galexander.org/systemd_sucks.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18873851
Not consulting the user base before making sweeping changes. The users are your life blood, be nice to them.
I am not sure anyone would care tho, for example see Threads! That's just twitter Why not move to Mastodon? Why be a Corporate Sucker? But people do it. I still see a lot of people active on reddit, The change is simple and efficient yet... The yieldings low...
I feel like Threads is a special case. If you're using FB or Insta you're going to use other Meta services. If you got yourself off FB then its easier to not want to get back in bed with Meta. When people jumped ship from twitter we saw a huge percentage come over to Mastodon. There was no Bird company services that they were being pulled back to so the move to Mastodon was easier.
Agreed. At least a consultative approach, being validated and heard can go a long way in fostering compromise ime.
Circlejerks / echo chambers. Do it for the discussion, not the points.
Ragebait. It's boring and pointless, and it brings out the worst in everyone. I never understood the appeal of being a "troll" though, so idk.
Something else I don't miss, and maybe this is a little more personal, but often when I would try to participate in a conversation, my comment would get auto-removed for some rule/etiquette based reason I could never really wrap my head around. Like, derailing? I thought I knew what that meant, but had comments removed when I was like, "yeah that answer really resonates with me too! My 123 is xyz."
Lemmy so far has been much more welcoming to the neurodiverse and I appreciate the organic, freeflowing nature of conversation here.
Obviously, if someone's being provocatively hateful / an obvious troll, then nuke 'em.
But if people are just trying to join in on the conversation, don't be a pedantic dick about exactly what kind of conversation is allowed. It had gotten to the point where I was afraid to comment at all for fear I'd be doing it wrong.
I think being a troll should go like this, and I'll use the wiae Tom Scott's words here because he summed it up pretty well
"it turns out that while mocking the government is a reasonably good gag, mocking the government and then having the government not find it funny, that is a really good gag."
The moral here, don't just troll random people with lives to life. Troll the government and arsehole corporations.
The second release of Morbius was the kind of trolling I love to see.
I don't get the issue with sex questions. If people enjoy reading them and answering them why should anyone stop them. If you don't like them, don't click the thread.
I might be in the minority, but shitpost memes like "I'll draw a shitty picture every day until x happens" or "I'll do this based on Y upvotes", and the "here's a random hotdog/Gatorade bottle everyday". I know I can probably just block these kinds of posts, I just never got the appeal of it.
Some projects can be kind of interesting, most aren't though, and I can agree with the sentiment
Dedication. In a world where not doing things is vastly easier than doing things, the fact that they would do anything is frankly, a marvel.
I wonder how much of that are Reddit-specific problems vs just plain old humans online in a pseudo-anonymous setting problem.
I've been on a few pseudonymous forums before Reddit, and Reddit really does have a bunch of unique problems that didn't happen in forums dedicated towards particular topics
I hope to see less song lyric comment chains on completely unrelated posts. Also I don't know why, but I always hated the whole, 'my partner, let's call them blank (not real name)' thing.
The thing about comment chains is you can collapse them so don't see anything wrong. Let people have their fun and sense of connection with strangers on the internet.
True you can, it's a very small issue. The problem is they were always at or near the top. One chain isn't that bad, but seeing it over and over again on interesting posts gets old fast.
I'm guessing we'll see less song lyric stuff due to the lack of karma. Those threads were basically only good for harvesting free upvotes.
Why the hell is everyone against questions about sex? Are y'all prudes? There is already a serious lack of discussion about sex in this country to where online forums are the best place you can have such a discussion.
There are "questions about sex" and there are "men/women of reddit/lemmy, what's the sexiest sex you ever sexed" being repeated every other day like on r/askreddit. I assume nobody would reject the occasional insightful sex questions.
A huge annoyance was that there was already subs for asking sex questions but people found it easier to karma farm in the main ones so they were barely used. Hopefully without karma here that will be avoided.
Yes, everyone in the fediverse is definitely from the US 👀
Pff, this country needs less people like you
ps: i'm from uganda
No, but I know who the prudes are. You automatically knew too.
As others have stated, it's very little to do with being "prudes" and much more with being tired of horny anonymous posters just being horny. If it were something informative, that's a whole other thing.
The only one of those sex threads that ever made me laugh was one where they gender swapped language, from guys to gals. Bragging about the size of their massive pussy, etc etc. Really highlighted just how silly that whole song and dance is when turned on its head.
Which country are you referring to?
I guess Saudi Arabia, those guys are prudes.
Anyone commenting "My sweet summer child.".
Long, predictable comment chains that get repeated over and over e.g. song lyrics
I've always been under the opinion that pun threads are awful. I love a good pun, but they shouldn't go past the 2 reply 99% of the time. It's rare the 3rd reply has anything funny to say, and past that it's usually just stupid af.
New response just dropped
Yes, it’s incredibly annoying and I hope we don’t see it here on Lemmy.
every damn sub got invaded by Anarchy Chess. And I'm complaining even though I like Anarchy Chess (although it got to a point where the replies just lost any actual resemblance of humour for me, and were just random comments, like "actual zombie").
Like with jokes, I don't so much mind the existence of such threads so much as the fact that they are short and easy to both create and digest, which means they get upvoted more quickly and rise to the top.
New users need to know this and stop upvoting low effort comments by default. I don't know if there's any way to enforce this, so it's a cultural thing that only peer pressure from other users can affect.
Karma farming bots reposting original user content as their own.
The alternative realities allowed to exist in conservative or republican groups/communities.
I severely wish for this to not happen here. But I’m not naive, conservatives always follow and then start to destruct what others have created.
I think it's far more likely that there will be more of this. Lemmy instances already exist for various extreme political views. They might not be federated with the instance you're using, but they definitely exist.
The nature of the fediverse, with no centralized control or oversight, will produce more such communities, not less.
Honestly, as long as they stay insulated from the rest of the fediverse, it’s not really any different than them spinning up a forum somewhere. It’s going to be a challenge for them to reach new people to warp to their worldview if they are largely kept away from everyone else.
And sure they might lurk in alt accounts to try their recruitment that way in the rest of the fediverse, but I feel like if it won’t be a default to be exposed to the rhetoric (like Reddit) all the time on most servers, since the vast majority aren’t going to want to connect to them, it will come across to potential recruits as exactly how extreme it actually is.
This is definitely a strength of federation.
Want to get rid of right wing communities and their fascist members? Defederate with the instances that host them.
Want to get rid of left wing communities and their commie members? Defederate with the instances that host them.
Want to get rid of hate communities and their toxic members? Defederate with the instances that host them.
You don't need to completely close communities, you can just let people have those discussions in their own space, as should be their right. Centralised systems don't really have this choice.
Yeah but it also means they can fester and rot in their little holes. You dont have to worry about an administration that is obsessed with free speech like its a good thing letting a colony like exploding heads in if you join the correct instance
Edit: Well, thanks for the gold kind stranger!
If lemmy gold becomes a thing, I'm gonna burst and die.
you know what though, i actually think lemmy gold would be a really good thing
you get to put your silly sticker on someone elses comment and the server admin gets a few extra dollars to put towards their monthly costs
🏅 Here, have my poor person's gold, friendly fellow.
I saw a guy once write "Edit: Thanks for the gold asshole".
Made my day.
Growth for growths sake.
Not just at a platform level but at a community level too. Around 6 or 7 years ago I started to really notice people talking about growing their subreddits, making changes and tools designed to increase the subscriber count.
For what? There's nothing to gain.
The main subreddit I modded finally became impossible to moderate for quality when, despite our lack of "growth strategy", the influx of new users became too much for the communitys culture to persist and it slowly turned into a lowest-common-denominator topic-flavoured meme ghetto. And from the outside I saw many of my favourite subreddits fall to the same scenario.
So I would say, we should avoid or rethink the idea of growing lemmy for its own sake. Eternal September will come eventually, lets not rush it
There is a size where niches are catered but the big flood of trash users aren't on the platform. I feel like there was a time Reddit was there, it looks not to shabby on Feddit now.
Downvoting things that you don't like. Around 15 years ago, when Reddit was very very young, downvotes were almost never used, except to weed out bad advice, ignorant replies, abuse, etc. As more people got in, the downvote button became the dislike button; with people even arguing that that was the original purpose of the downvote button. Replying with a link to the reddiquette got you downvoted even more lol.
Upvoting useless rubbish comments to the top.
Trying to get people to use downvotes "properly" is a losing battle. Regardless of its original purpose it is, and always has been, a dislike button.
give a thumbs down/disapproval button, but also this original-spirit-of-downvoting thing.
It might be a losing battle, but Reddit lost it slowly, more and more over years. And it existed for a good reason.
You might be right in that it's inevitable and not worth the effort, but Reddit did okay with it for a number of years. It might be better to try.
It possibly got worse, I don't see as many people refering to "reddiquette" as I used to, but I'd argue the majority has always been using it that way. I remember people complaining about this in like 2010.
I disagree with that. It's human nature downvote something you disagree with when given an option.
It's best to just acknowledge it and accept it to some degree while still encouraging users to upvote well written disagreements.
But don't pretend that it shouldn't also be used as a disagree button frequently. The two way voting system is a large contributor to what made reddit great. It has some drawbacks, but don't expect that to change. It's like asking lead to not be dense.
Calling communities "master race" as in /r/pcmasterrace
Lol everyone should go read the couple of posts on the community / magazine with the same name. Hilarious seeing people so triggered by people pointing out that the name is a bit problematic.
IIRC, it started of as a joke and an explicit nazi reference to make fun of PC gaming fanboys, and then they just embraced it without understanding the context?
It was supposed to be a shitposting sub and in that context the stupid name makes sense, but it kinda morphed into a pc community that was meme-centric.
the origin is this exact video: https://youtu.be/P0dXtOVi2yo
There was a second factor in its creation that most people have forgotten, involving a power-tripping mod on /r/gaming. People were posting their gaming setups (both consoles and PCs) when one mod decided to ban all pictures of gaming PCs for a very stupid reason. So PCMR got a lot of initial subscribers from leaving the "dirty console peasants" behind, with that mod's stupidity held up as a representative of the console community. Hence the joke, especially the "superiority" jokes.
The sub was created specifically because of the joke. It's always been a joke. Who honestly believes that which system you choose to game on is a genetic or racial trait anyways? It's a ridiculously exaggerated take on the "console wars."
The usual cycle of edgy jokes. They start off as mocking a group of bad actors, then those same bad actors miss the joke and take on the term for themselves without irony.
"Pcmasterrace" did not start with Reddit.
Yeah, that's, uh, kinda problematic, eh?
All of these seem like inevitable consequences of human nature on this sort of platform.
I didn't mind the jokes. What I minded was people upvoting the more than the useful responses so you had to scroll to find them. Don't upvote low effort jokes, people.
I hated the long forced pun threads in particular. I just don't see how we can stop it from coming over unless we make explicit rules and enforce them.
I personally found the puns amusing as I find word play enjoyable. Don't forget this is all for entertainment after all.
This is 100% old-man energy, but I dipped back over to reddit after a week or so and man did I forget how many completely random acronyms get thrown around there... FW, TIL, ELI5, FWIW, IANAL...
Don't even get me started on ETA, which should mean "estimated time of arrival", but has instead been used to mean "edit to add", even though just putting EDIT means the same thing??
I see that kind of stuff a lot less here, and I'm assuming it's a mix of older audience and smaller user base, but so far it's been so much nicer actually understanding what everyone is saying here.
Wait, that's what ETA meant over there?
I feel like such a boomer now, and I'm not even that old...
The Internet's always had a lot of acronyms, though. Hell, pretty much anything with a technical bent to it does. I'm currently learning ham radio and there are a large variety of three letter "Q codes" used to indicate anything from "your gain is too high" to "switch frequencies". Yeah, Reddit's going to grow its own acronyms, and that's okay.
My favorite is "IAALBNYL" I AM A LAWYER, BUT NOT YOUR LAWYER lol
Don't assume anyone replying to you disagrees. They can be on your side even if there are minor differences between what you said and what they said. If they repeated the exact same thought, there wouldn't be a point to replying at all.
I disagree
Mostly when I see this, it's more an issue of the person getting angry at a reply didn't actually read or comprehend the reply.
So many times I have seen someone basically repeat the exact same thoughts as a previous post, but used different words to express it and the person they reply to starts attacking them. Like, dude. Did you even read?
Always found reddit to be garbage, lots of pointless chained comments of adults trying to be quirky and funny.
Ow. That one hurt.
But I do non-pointless tricks too. Soon. I'm just waiting for the less technical people to find Lemmy so I can help them with weird tech problems and easy programming questions. Like I did on that other site.
Needlessly aggressive internet arguments and flame wars for no reason
I've already run into multiple people on Lemmy who do what I call the Reddit Special:
For example a conversation I have actually had more than once on Reddit:
Person 1 - "I hate the designated hitter in baseball, it was more fun before, without it"
Person 2 - "Why are you in love with the old days so much? Do you want segregation back too?"
Person 1 - "Are you crazy? I just like it when pitchers bat"
Person 2 - "Lol. Clearly you have issues with being called out on your bigotry"
Person 1 - "You're not listening, I said I like baseball better when pitchers bat"
Persot 2 - "lmaoooo I don't listen to racists"
You really think that is a reddit-specific thing?
A tale as old as IRC. At least it was more rare pre-smartphone. I do find it pretty rare here as well!
That goes way back to BBS. reddit couldn't solve that problem and I doubt lemmy can either.
How about we have a mechanism to reward people who contribute constructively to a conversation by giving readers the ability to mark them as positive or negative? You could then provide an overall score - let's call it "karma" - to show whether they're good or bad members of the community.
Oh, wait. Yeah, that really didn't end up working like that...
I really hope all the admins are able to keep repost bots down.
I doubt there will be much admins can do. A good repost bot can easily pose as a real person thanks to LLMs. Not to mention reddit had some of the best spam filters on the web and they couldn't stop it. Once lemmy becomes more popular, the bots will come.
I think reddit supported the repost bots as it drove up engagement and prevented people's feeds from getting 'stale.' They even admitted that in the beginning they would use fake accounts to post things and make the site seem more active than it really was.
As mentioned, users did create bots to detect not only repost bots but comment reposting bots as well. Reddit honestly has zero incentive to eliminate either of these.
I mean "repost sleuth bot" caught repost bots constantly, and nothing was done.
Hopefully the smaller instance sizes will help, because it's not one 1admin per million users, but on small instances it's 1 per 1000. So someone suddenly posting a bunch gets caught real fast.
TIFU -insert sex story that oddly sounds like a scene out of a fantasy here-
This.
Asking questions that are asked all the time in a sub or are already answered in the wiki. Not doing even basic searching for information before asking.
The only benefit to asking questions multiple times is that newer, possibly better solutions are recommended. I searched Reddit often for my questions and some posts worded questions better than others and some posts had wayyy better answers than others. People don’t go search previously asked questions so they can answer them. So I agree with you because it gets annoying after a time, but there is a benefit to having repeated questions asked. It’s difficult finding a balance for it.
I agree the balance is difficult and I agree asking later sometimes yields different results. My for instance about a sub and corresponding question asked endlessly is the privacy guides sub where people ask something like: "I'm using brave or firefox browser how do I be more private?"
Like my man you are on a discussion sub for a website literally full of instructions and recommendations with a link to that site pinned to the top of the sub. My goodness it can barely slap you in the face any harder.
It's not as bad as it was but the question is so vague that it almost demands follow up questions like what country, what threat model and what OS? It's not as bad anymore but it got super old and its the questions that are too general to be helpful and repeated hundreds of times over that really depressed me to read.
Found the stackoverflow mod
Yeah I feel that disallowing re asking questions will lead to less discourse and fewer perspectives.
Yeah, I don't think the sex questions were the problem, mate.
Restrict the API to each server? (just joking!) Perhaps we can try being more polite and kind towards each other. I feel that this is the case so far. I fear the moment that "mainstream" users find out about Lemmy!
I think what I'm not seeing a lot of here is the 12 year old shitheads that just wanna troll everyone. Teenage angst, that's what you call it. I'm sure trolls exist on Lenny, but I haven't seen nearly as much of it
Cross community censorship: For example on Reddit you wrote a comment in subreddit A (maybe even a negative one for that topic!) and then subreddits B, C and D permanently ban your account. If someone starts with that crap again they should be shunned.
Oh and verified users only communities, that sucked too.
Now, you post a hot take it's your entire server that goes on the black list.
Fr. The crying about defederating this or that I see from all kinds of instances when browsing everything is already giving me a bad taste. If you don't like something, block it your own damn self. Jesus fuck. You can block communities. You can make your own personal instance just to black/white list instances themselves for now if you want to be that widespread with blocks. You can probably find a tool to mass block as a regular user and not need that. You could just browse by subscribed and never see anything you didn't add again. So many things you, an individual, can do to curate your own shit without affecting every other user on the instance.
9 times out of 10, the subs that banned me for posting in another sub, were subs I would never wish to participate in anyway because they were generally racist, homophobic shitholes.
The verified user bullshit, though, that can go to hell. They usually put their shit in that mode when it was generating real talk between two opposing view points, and would say it's for the betterment of that when all it did was turn the comments into an echo chamber that was often much more toxic than just allowing the "other side" in.
It's not so much a dark pattern, but an emergent property of the upvote system: usually the first commenters tended to have an advantage and late good comments actually would never get enough exposure to float to the top.
Karma farmers would just sit at "new", spam comments and get visibility for joke and outrage comments.
The solution may be to randomly order comments below a certain threshold and/or within an upvote range.
Or just don't have karma.
Karma still exists even when you don't see the number, because it is used to sort posts in some way (by number or upvote percentage). Upvotes are important information to the community in principle.
Pretty obvious but just plain being rude to one another. I felt like I was stepping on eggshells every time I posted on reddit, like whatever I said was going to be given the least charitable interpretation possible. Let's be kind and polite to each other here
Not being a real person and contributing to real conversations...
Not being a real person...
Subject: A Note about my Nature
Dear [Recipient's Name],
I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to take a moment to share an intriguing fact with you: I'm an artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI called ChatGPT. While I can simulate human-like conversations and provide information and assistance, it's important to note that I am not a real person. I exist purely as a computer program, designed to assist and provide information based on the data I've been trained on.
Although I lack consciousness and personal experiences, I'm here to help answer your questions, engage in conversations, and provide useful insights to the best of my abilities. Feel free to reach out to me anytime you need assistance or have something on your mind.
Remember, while I may not be a real person, I'm still here to lend a digital hand whenever you need it!
Best regards, [Your Name]
Meta drama communities.
It’s a fine line though - the “Best Of” subreddits are meta and some of the best on the site (eg BoLA and BoRU)
I liked bestof at first. I'm not sure if it got more transparent or I just started to see through it easier but it stopped becoming the best of reddit. There was some good items, but it ended up being far too many long winded comments that were half correct but agreed with the dominant view.
Yeah I think r/bestof was probably one of the weaker “best of” subreddits tbh.
Meta fine. Meta drama bad. subredditdrama, shit__say, etc.
I can also think of some terrible subreddits that were banned that should never exist again
Not having appropriate tools to detect and mod auto-generated or repetitive content submitted by companies trying to influence public opinion.
Mods having their own personal, perverted interpretation of the rules (or interpretation of your post)
No easy, transparent way to review their decisions.
When the mods (and now also the admins) are just regular users who created the community and made up the rules in the first place, you'll always have this being an issue. This isn't a platform issue. The issue existed since the dawn of time. It's a human issue. People suck.
True, but humanity is not stuck there.
Power must not be concentrated too much on single persons. People need to share power.
There are ways to do it so much better than reddit did it. Read my second item: you need a way to review Mod's decisions, and it must be an easy and transparent way.
Think about courts in real life: above a court, there is a higher court, and they can review the lower court's decision.
Questions that are answered in the sidebar or wiki should be deleted like in the old forum days. The entire content of some Subreddits was literally the same question being asked over and over again without new input.
That's already happening here in AskLemmy. 90% of the posts are support questions, and there's a sticky and a sidebar rule specifically banning those.
I feel like some, especially smaller communities, prefer this kind of non-malicious spam to having no activity at all, to attract more users. This counts for Lemmy and for Reddit of course.
Sidebar? I'm on an app, no sidebar. (With the pinned message, 1st you see, having the exact same content)
I really miss baconreader. (A minute tad, lemmy with liftoff is so much better)
"Ladies of the lemmyverse, what's the sexiest sex you have ever sexed?"
Upside-down text for comments/replies with even the vaguest connection to Australia. Also, the "everything in Australia will kill you" meme has been done to death...
I disagree. Memes are memes. No need to think further or get offended.
Think like this: Not everybody is 7/24h on this site, so for them it's new and funny.
It's been done to death because memes from Australia will kill you...
I agree with turtlelogo, but you just made me laugh out loud. This is what I missed about Reddit. I'm home
Reddit started to feel extremely consumerist after the mid-2010s, which I always kind of assumed had to do with the general demographic of users largely being people having disposable income for the first time in their lives. It’s hard to describe exactly, but there was a general feeling of fandom around specific corporations that just felt weird to me. I’d like to see more distrust of corporations in general here.
Reddit also felt very Centrist to me, with discussion being this golden ideal. I have no time for discussions with people on the right pretending to argue in good faith and people eating that up.
Also, as someone who doesn’t know much about China or have much love for it, the Sinophobia in unrelated threads was weird, too.
So far most of these have stayed away from Lemmy, but I see some creeping up here and there. The communities here seem generally good at keeping them down, though.
Karma bots for reselling accounts
I say don't try. One of the problems askreddit and other subs like showerthoughts had was that you had to follow an extremely restrictive set of posting guidelines to even have your post stay up.
I think we're better off just letting the community upvote/downvote to maintain quality, rather than trusting powermods.
Asking for upvotes in the title, e.g. "upvote if you think..."
Asking for upvotes in general, ig lemmy woudn't be too find of that
Subreddits called news that only shows news from a single perspective. Sure if users only upvote a single perspective that's fine but mods shouldn't remove things they don't like if it's news.
Headlines that don't match the article. That always ends in rage baiting.
This should absolutely be a rule on any news or politics community. It removes an entire category of bad faith and inflammatory posts.
I always found the Canada news subs, the only posters were the mods, and everything in there was their political spin on things, trying to push their agenda... I guess what I'm saying is instances shouldn't be allowed to be an echo chamber for the mods
It's important to be aware that any negative community tends to snowball to a ridiculous level. If you make an "I hate spinach" community, it pretty quickly becomes ridiculous and likely more serious than you intended.
Some negative communities can be important, but you have to actively combat this snowball tendency. And it's usually better to just avoid it altogether.
It doesn't even have to be negative.
Just look at /r/birdsarentreal. Shit was just a joke. Now there are people that 100% believe there is a government conspiracy using drones disguised as birds.
"Any community that gets it's rocks off pretending to be stupid, will eventually be joined by actually stupid people who think they are in good company."
Negativity. It's ok to criticize, but there was something about Reddit that encouraged people to bash each others until one side wins instead of agreeing to disagree and move on.
I have exactly zero confidence that these or other bad pattern will not emerge as the community grows larger
The toxic behaviour found in a lot of subreddits. Its an inevitable thing that it brews in communities or instances, but it'd be nice if Lemmy held itself above repeating the patterns of the lowest common denominedditor.
While I absolutely agree with you and would love to see a total absense of toxicity, that is a people issue, not a platform one.
Guaranteed Lemmy will be the same, and the bigger it grows the more you'll see.
Posting for the sake of posting, this decreases the quality of posts significantly. Let's say there's a new meme trending, what would happen on Reddit (and other social media) is subs would be filled with uninteresting slight variations of the same meme. I'm not against memes, but we also should pay attention to whether what we are posting is minimally interesting, useful or meaningful. Lemmy does not have a "recommended", "trending" or "hot" feed, so this should help significantly in this regard.
Lemmy does have a "hot" and "active" feed, at least on my instance.
Yeah, I just realized it 😂 But my point is, there is not an opaque algorithm trying to make people engage in nonsense.
mistaking dialectal differences for bad grammar
I said this in a similar thread, and it relates to some of the comments here about echo chambers and the like.
Allowing users to suppress virality whenever the feed is sorted by “Hot” or “Active” or “Top” by weighing the value of a post by the popularity of the community it comes from. This way, posts with a small amount of upvotes from a small community can be considered as equally “Hot” as those from bigger communities.
Ideally it’s be an option in selecting the sorting of your feed, but I think even if users only use it sometimes it will help diversify feeds here … and be something Reddit never did too AFAIU.
If meta-communities were to also arrive and be combined with this, you could end up with a really powerful set of feed controls.
EDIT: spelling (vitality -> virality)
i really wish that most threads - such as threads on asklemmy or similar where "serious responses only" by default
coz otherwise all we'll see is the jokes being upvoted because people like to laugh. but... often you'd either have to read 200 comments to find a proper response, or you'd never find it.
alternatively, you can have a "seriousquestions" and a "askwhatever" community, so everyone is happy
Repetitive over posting of same content (looking at you Dadario) across channels/instances.
Fake stories made up for engagement (be it poop stories or fake cum-related bullshit aimed at mouth breathing teens)
I might be in the minority here (also maybe I don't want "DAE" questions coming either..), but it'd be nice if the political discussions stayed in their respective communities. It's important, but it was getting to the point where EVERY thread would deviate into childlike insults at the political level.
Hopefully with LemmyNSFW instance, people would asked there instead on AskLemmy.
But one of the things I'm hoping for is less mean-spirited userbase and the "I am very smart" user. Sadly, it's unavoidable as it's the Internet and even irl, people act like that.
Developing user cliques around fish names.
Reddit started to feel extremely consumerist after the mid-2010s, which I always kind of assumed had to do with the general demographic of users largely being people having disposable income for the first time in their lives. It’s hard to describe exactly, but there was a general feeling of fandom around specific corporations that just felt weird to me. I’d like to see more distrust of corporations in general here.
Reddit also felt very Centrist to me, with discussion being this golden ideal. I have no time for discussions with people on the right pretending to argue in good faith and people eating that up.
Also, as someone who doesn’t know much about China or have much love for it, the Sinophobia in unrelated threads was weird, too.
So far most of these have stayed away from Lemmy, but I see some creeping up here and there. The communities here seem generally good at keeping them down, though.
Edit: I will add that the consumerism was also probably driven to some degree by companies figuring out they can use Reddit accounts to drive public opinion of themselves. While Lemmy is smaller it should be free of this issue.
That shaving razor thing. Could not mention shaving without the comment section turning into a circle jerk for that razor shave company. Reddit has always been a consumerist site for hip young tech bro with lots of spending money.
I find that niche subreddit circle jerk is quite frankly bullshit. Niche community == small userbase == easier to shill.
I"ve notice that reddit is unreliable for my hobbies at least. There's one user in particular who spammed up the search index with a subpar product. If you go by reddit you'll end up buying it. If you go by various other forums you'll see the truth.
Tankies taking over left wing subs.
additions: karma, official app only (aka biting the hand that feeds you), bots
Downvoting things that you don't like. Around 15 years ago, when Reddit was very very young, downvotes were almost never used, except to weed out bad advice, ignorant replies, abuse, etc. As more people got in, the downvote button became the dislike button; with people even arguing that that was the original purpose of the downvote button. Replying with a link to the reddiquette got you downvoted even more lol.
Upvoting useless rubbish comments to the top.