The influx of Redditors has had a detrimental effect on Lemmy.
The influx of Redditors has had a detrimental effect on Lemmy.
I'm a long time Lemmy lurker and occasional Redditor. Since the Reddit influx, I've watched the frequency of shitty Reddit-type behavior, e.g., combative comments, trolling, and unnecessary rudeness, just sky rocket.
I'm happy to have more content on Lemmy, but I wish the bad actors and assholes would have stayed on Reddit.
Yes, I realize the irony of posting this on a new community that's basically a Reddit transplant.
I disagree. I was here before the migration and I really wanted to like it. However, there simply wasnt enough content and most threads were barren. Now, there are full deep discussions everywhere about loads of different topics. I've come back to a far better product than I previously experienced, despite a few more bad actors.
Idk why you're swinging for low hanging fruit. Your 10 day old account speaks to a Reddit migrant as well.
Ironic.
Honestly anyone with an account younger than lemmy.world I'd easily count as a reddit migrant.
Of course, federation makes it hard to figure out exactly when they first created an account anywhere, especially since lemmy.world has only existed since like June 2.
BUT I WUZ HERE WHEN IT WASNT EVEN COOL
I’m a long time Lemmy lurker and occasional Redditor
Lurker isn't the same as contributer, but I don't think OP fully counts as a reddit migrant
Who cares. They still have a point.
It's an alt.
Shut up nerd.
You forgot the /s.
It's not reddit, it's body count. I used bbs's in the late 70s, fidonet in the 80s/90s, internet when gopher was new, and it's all sweetness and love when the crowd is small and gets "worse" when more people show up.
That's in quotes because it's not worse, it's more. Aside from trolls who require the anonymity etc, assholes are just people you don't like. Their friends like them.
It's why scaling is so important and to have tools to keep communities small and manageable.
Facebook's moderating one billion people is a stupid made up problem that will be solved by it dying of bloat.
This 100%. I have read forums from back the 2000s and people still flame as if it was a Reddit thread, thrilling.
You're absolutely right. Reddit was the source, but it really could have been people from anywhere.
I do wonder if Reddit's culture does affect the attitudes of those coming over, though. One thing I saw all the time on Reddit was the unhelpful critic: the guy who was more than happy to tell you you're wrong, whether or it not doing so is warranted, contextually inappropriate, or even makes sense, and only that you're wrong - they add nothing else to the conversation. I've had a TON of those recently; there's even one in this thread. I used to see them here every so often but never like this.
Unfortunately I think this just reflects human nature. The more people you have the more people you have at the fringes who are aggressive, or trolling or even just selfish or insensitive.
Also it's easy to come across rude when posting in text - anyone who works with colleagues via email will find the same problem of one meaning being intended but a different meanong (such as tone) being read by the recipient.
When you have a small community your names become familiar and there is something personal about the interactions. Once the you have a huge community people become anonymous and that allows bad behaviour to flourish. I barely ever saw a name twice on reddit and that's happening here too. I got to the point on reddit where I'd post a comment but I wouldn't ever read the replies as I was fed up with dealing with the negativity.
My hope for the fediverse is that there will be multiple versions of the same communities so that we can have closer knit versions of communities as alternatives to the 1m+ chaotic versions. Small communities are where you can achieve decency and kindness more consistently.
Also I assume that unfriendly behavior, and atmosphere it creates, discourage unaggressive or less typical posters from participating in conversations. So those insensitive people will end up being overpresented in the comment section.
That is expected isn't it? Both sites are driven by people, and people can be an assholes. Doubt we can do too much to drive them out.
Seeing the low-quality comments starting to appear is disappointing.
Always downvote all bad content - that's why the arrow exists.
I think this is a symptom of having a scoring system for comments. If you gamify your social interactions, people will try to play the game (meaning low quality comments, dad jokes, or anything that will grant them easy votes) instead of having actual discourse.
That ignores the effect of bad actors who will do it regardless though. There may actually be something to using such a score, at least as a qualitative if not quantitative measurement of trustworthiness, like for anyone with a magazine-specific karma score in the negative and spread out over at least ten comments, start hiding their comments by default (like still visible but you have to click to expand now), and allow the mods to decide what their communities rules will be.
Irl it's like: punch me in the face once, twice, three times, and eventually ten times, and maybe one day I'll finally start to think about considering making a plan of action to help you realize that there may be consequences... one day! (maybe) That could help so that if a troll is popular in one place but always shits outside of where they live, those receiving the raw end of that deal could have a way to automatically deal with it?
On second thought though, it's probably too easily gamified, especially by alts created for explicitly that purpose, like it's not that hard to make 10 accounts. But aside from minor UI concerns, something like that could actually change whether/how often someone feels welcomed to go visit a site.
Even back in the old forum days, we had replies akin to "yes, this!" "agreed!" "no" that don't contribute much to the discussion.
So I don't think it's the scoring system that is at fault, but rather it's just human nature. Sometimes people simply want to be a part of something, and those meaningless phrases help to accomplish that.
I came across one earlier that was about as low quality as it gets. It was a thread about some big car accident and the only reply was "/c/fuckcars". No commentary on the actual article, no attempt at starting any actual discussion, just a pithy one liner that serves no purpose other than grabbing some upvotes and killing any chance of discussion. I still haven't seen TOO much of that yet but I find it weird that someone would make the effort to come to the fedi just to do the same low effort shit they were doing on Reddit. It's disappointing but at the same time, my short time on the fedi has been filled with far more actual conversation than most of my time on Reddit was.
Omg this!
/s
I haven't noticed it too much but I feel like everyone is so used to how Reddit was that it would take some work and a collective agreement between users on the fediverse to shun the low quality comments.
I do remeber that somewhat working on Reddit for a while, but yeah once it became big enough there was no stopping the shitty comments.
Sometimes you want to support a post or comment but have nothing to say. Comments increase engagement scores on most platforms
In my experience the only ones caring about engagement scores are advertisers. If you agree with a post/comment you don't actually have to press any button (upvote, like, heart, etc) or even reply to it. We've been conditioned to do it because they have found a way to profit off of our "uh huh" and "yeah that's right". I'm not suggesting it's all bad, I'm trying to put it into context.
Seeing as your account is the same age as mine, it seems you're a reddit refugee as well.
All we can do is behave well and try not to be a jerk. And not try and invite the same type of reddit behavior to lemmy.
I came over in the reddit migration.
I have to admit, the thought definitely occurred to me when I first joined and had a look around, that the people that were already here before would be getting swarmed by masses of redditors that may well not have the same "site-culture" as the people who were here first. I'm actually surprised that this is the first post that I've seen complaining about it.
I mean it, I was legitimately expecting a ton of pushback from the existing fedi community over this, and was really surprised when it never seemed to materialize.
For my own experiences of being here (I'm on kbin), this place has been really good-natured, with a better level of well intentioned discussion than what a lot of reddit had, so it's been a really nice experience so far. What I don't have though, is any experience of what it was like before we all invaded en-mass, so I have nothing to contrast it with. I can totally see how someone wouldn't be happy with what's happened though, the migration has to have changed the space a lot for everyone that was here before.
One thing about my personal experience of how it is here though is that when I first joined I tried to do the thing that you first do with a reddit account, you know, where you immediately un-subscribe from all default subreddits and only join things you're actually interested in (so, niche subs, etc). Found out that it isn't quite how it works, but that the subscribed feed is pretty much exactly that but baked-in as standard. I've then spent almost my whole time on the subscribed feed since (unless actively looking for new stuff).
So the quality that I've experienced here is probably more down to my personal selection of subscribed communities rather than a more holistic view of the platform as a whole. There's the caveat to everything I just said, I guess.
So yeah, I'm kinda sorry that this happened to you, and I'd also prefer if those people (I'm referring to the bad-actors and arsehole's side of things) would have just stayed where they were too, but I'm not sure what to do about it other than just blocking/unsubscribing to the communities in question, or blocking the individual accounts of bad actors. I doubt that the second is even remotely scalable though if the userbase gets significantly larger.
The lack of pushback was because lemmy hadn’t really formed its own discrete culture and community. There just weren’t enough people for that to happen. Lemmygrad is probably the only exception, as they formed a community and have been around for a while. And yea, they’re looking at the rest of lemmy as a kind of Reddit hellacape now. Literally they post memes about people just shutting all over the place. And, they’re not entirely wrong, as you hint at.
It’s a little bit of a shame. As arguably it was necessary. But also, it’s arguably been too rushed. Building up communities and spaces is probably best down more slowly and organically. Lemmy probably went through two steps of growth in one short period. Mastodon by comparison had already had migration events prior to 2022 that had built up site-culture, though that has been somewhat overrun by some Twitter culture, but I think a cultural fusion is happening. Many parts of lemmy however are now basically subsets of Reddit culture. Not bad but not great.
Interestingly, the dynamics between tech and culture are manifesting, where the tech and and interface differences between Reddit and Lemmy (eg no karma) are forcing cultural changes, as is the federation aspect.
lemmygrads problems with the fediverse are not with combative comments, trolling and unnecessary rudeness, they gleefully partake in each
lemmygrads problems with the fediverse is liberals doing it too
I discovered Lemmy around 2019 or 2020 and loved the concept but was put off by the density of commies, so I didn't create an account and participate but I would check the site around once a year to see if the community had taken off yet.
2020: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet? Nope, still commies and dead threads.
2021: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet? Nope, still commies and dead threads.
2022: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet? Nope, still commies and dead threads.
2023: Is it the year of the Federated Reddit yet?YES!
And I am so glad to never have to see the depressing and miserable "culture" that was Lemmy from 2019 to mid-2023 again.
"I mean it, I was legitimately expecting a ton of pushback from the existing fedi community over this, and was really surprised when it never seemed to materialize."
I mean I joined pretty early, I think beehaw was topping the charts with 400, (4k?) Users. I'm pretty sure the complaints did happen but we're pretty immediately drowned out
This is something we as mods for communities can combat. It's a rule I enforce across my communities, posters who engage in hostility and attack people have their comments removed. Simple as.
People can discuss things, that's fine but the second conversations devolve into personal attacks that is not okay.
We have the power to decide how we want the communities we have to grow and what behaviour we want to discourage. Sometimes people just need a little push in the right direction.
We can also all do our parts without mod intervention by being just decent and not engaging in the same toxic behaviour. You can also report comments to mods. It really helps us out to get reports in for comments/posts that break the rule as we may not always see it due to our instances etc...
As one of those redditors, I take offense to that.
And yet, I totally agree.
Former redditor also checking in, side eyeing my own existence.
Reddit -> Lemmy transplants are circlejerking about how evil Spez is, how Reddit is "doomed", or how much they hate people like Musk.
Oh my God, yes. It's like hanging out with thousands of recent divorcees. They just. Won't. Shut up.
It'll be interesting to see how this progresses but I'm hoping the asshole fraction gets bored and leaves. We've always had assholes and trolls but not like this. I've been just calling the assholes on their shit, hopefully it helps drive them out.
I think that it'll get better over time, for structural reasons: since Reddit is a big instance with lots of users and only a few admins, the admins give no fucks on how you behave there. (And if you're banned by a mod, you create another username and problem solved.) Here however individual users are more precious for their instances' admins, so admins have more reasons to keep their instances clean of people likely to piss off other people. And, even if they don't, I predict that instances with notoriously rude individuals will get defederated. The net result is that those users will have low visibility for other users.
What concerns me the most is not combative, trolling, and unnecessary rude users. It's the stupid - users who are able to reason but actively avoid it. It's the context illiterates, the assumers, the false dichotomisers, the "I dun unrurrstand" [with either an implicit "I demand to be spoonfed as per my divine right", or an "I disagree but I'd rather pretend that I'm a stupid than outright say it"] and the likes. People tend to pat those users on their heads and talk about esoteric stuff like "intentions", but I don't think that they should be socially accepted here, as they drive the dialogue level down and make the place less fun for other users.
It might be different if there was noplace else for them to go. But why does EVERY place on the internet - Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Threads - all have to cater to it? Can't there be just ONE place where we hold ourselves to a higher standard? Maybe this means we'll see fewer posts / comments / "activity" - but is that a bad thing, necessarily?
Still, as I learned how to drive, I realized something: if you leave a space somewhere, someone will fill it. If we want to build something different, it will require expended effort to make that happen.
Federated networks are, by design, not able to be constrained by one set of rules and standards. The place you are looking for is Tildes, a centralized, invite-only, text-only website whose selling point is "high quality discussions" and very harsh moderation against anything that does not fit their standard of "high quality".
I'd like to emphasize another advantage we have--the general sense of self-rule and control. We actually have a modicum of power here, we're not just fueling profits for some spez. We can move around, organize however we wish.
This creates a naturally higher morale environment. I think things are a little, oh, excited right now, but I expect we'll probably settle down a little bit over the next few months, as people settle in more.
The trolls, though, those are here to stay I'm afraid. Internet is the internet, you need a private community to truly guarantee none of them forever. And even that doesn't always work. Hackers and bot attacks too, also here to stay. We're big enough to be a decent target now.
That's how humans in general work. Bad actors and assholes are everywhere (specially in the internet), not just Reddit.
I suspect part of it may be due to the type of content we're seeing. It feels like low-effort meme and shitpost communities are dominating the feeds, and that's going to attract a certain low-effort audience. I've been blocking them liberally but they just keep coming.
It was necessary, unfortunately. Unless you just wanted Lemmy to stay this quaint little corner instead of being a significant player in helping the Fediverse reach its real potential out there.
Tech hipsters have a detrimental effect on everything they touch. Please stop.
Tech hipsters aren't here yet. This is the disaffected normies.
The irony of someone with your handle calling anyone a tech hipster is immeasurable with today's technology.
Regardless, the post is about shitty Reddit behavior, of which your comment is a sterling example. If doesn't actually add anything useful to the conversation, you're just being an ass. Why? Who knows, but it just makes the place more unpleasant than before.
It's not reddit's people in my mind. It's how the society is structured in general. The fediverse gets slowly adopted by more and more people so it's natural that there is a annoying group of idiots.
I think they are always everywhere in a percentage. So the bigger the group the more Idiots.
It's possible that this percentage is increasing to be fair.
And yes, I'm a disgusting reddit refugee.
The thing with the combative comments/rudeness, in my experience, mostly looks like someone being direct and then a bunch of readers being offended by the bluntness. Whether it was on Reddit, here, or forums and Usenet back in the day. So many problems with "tone" in text is caused simply by the reader reading it in a combative tone that the writer never intended.
Putting that entirely on the reader is unfair. The author of a comment or post has some level of responsibility to manage their side of the communication as well.
There's a reason that, as a species, one of the first things we invented after digital communications was emoticons and eventually shorthand terms to convey emotions (lol, lmao, wtf).
Body language, audible tone, syllable emphasis, or the rest of the damn near endless list of minor things we use to communicate, we needed to make sure we could avoid being accidentally combative by default.
I'm not so sure about that sometimes. It's definitely true, but many people are bad at inferring tone in text because they have no ability to read between the lines. And I've noticed trendy little catchphrases or code words have caught on in Reddit and Twitter. People love to throw around the words "gross," "yikes," and "disgusting" when talking about something they find slightly morally questionable. They'll punctuate a sentence with "full stop" when they want to decisively shut down an argument. Things like the cry-laugh emoji and the clapping hands after every word (I'm on my laptop right now, sorry I didn't just type the emojis). These things are meant to illicit an exact emotional response, and you almost never run into people speaking so boldly in real life. People have become such caricatures online that it's insufferable to even try to have a real conversation.
Reddit is definitely full of shitheads who seem to get all their emotional discharge out of the way online. Personally, I haven't really noticed it here anywhere near the level of Reddit. Even the act of downvoting a comment seems nearly unheard of from what I've observed.
So often when I get into a conversation about veganism it ends with the other person saying I've been an asshole when I've just been direct and honest.. :(
The best thing about decentralized networks is that you can just go to another instance if you feel like this. You're not forced to interact with any communities that you're not a fan of. Things change with time, of course, but that doesn't mean you have to change your tastes.
The Beauty of the Fediverse™
Lol definitely an unpopular opinion I'll give you that
I’ve definitely noticed things change a LOT in my 5 or 6 weeks here.
IMHO, instances like BeeHaw still have that old vibe. Less shit posting, less zinger comments, more people having reasonable conversations about things.
My guess is that we’ll end up having a split between instances like that, and instances that are basically trying to be fedi Reddit.
If only we could all live side-by-side in harmony.
Shitosting is vital to keep an interwebs society alive. We literally live in a society. If you want dour conversation, may I siggest Wikipedia's talk page.