Why are conversations on Reddit often so hostile and toxic now days?
Why are conversations on Reddit often so hostile and toxic now days?
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.
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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.
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.
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
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:
- Geographic location
- Age
- Gender
- Education level
- Tendency to vote
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.