I have been on reddit for just about 12 years now. Something I’ve noticed over time is just how hateful the place has become. A complete outrage machine. Every single sub became filled with it. I’ve filtered so many subreddits over the last few years, it’s insane. I don’t know enough about this place to be sure, but I do hope it doesn’t become the same type of echo chamber of anger.
I remember a while back when the first comment was always someone debunking the clickbait article headline with a good source and succinct summary. Redditors famously never read the article, but the comments were often better than the article.
Now, you have to scroll down half the page to find any original thought. You see dozens of people spouting nonsense or even defending nonsense because they…don’t want to be wrong?
One example: an image from the 50s displaying a child with their hand caught in a fire pull with a caption explaining that the device would trap the kid at the spot to deter pranksters.
The device was indeed designed to deter pranksters, and it would attach to the user’s wrist, but it would come free. So you would know the kid who did it because they have a thing stuck on their hand.
I recognized the device and had a video demonstrating its proper, safe function. People were still arguing with me.
Why would anyone want to put any creative/intellectual energy into a place like that?
It certainly became degrading after a while. I have had some amazing conversations on Reddit, but as time went on they became more and more sparse.
I haven’t thought back on Reddit much until lately with all the bullshit that’s been happening and man, being in this space reminds me of why I enjoyed Reddit in the first place.
I can relate in so many instances on Reddit where I recognized something and would explain it, but people would argue against (like you said) or my comment would get overlooked entirely as it wouldn’t create enough buzz.
I think the fediverse is just the soft reset that the internet needed.
Don’t forget the same low effort pun threads cropping up over and over. Or someone writes a pretty decent joke and the replies immediately have at least one person repeating it in a worse form. It’s not as bad as the contrarianism for its own sake or the aggressive strawmanning, but goddam. So much about discourse on Reddit had been exhausting for fucking years.
About 10 years here. That’s why I had Apollo. I filtered out all that shit. Everything you could imagine. Hundreds of things hidden.
Eventually I had a home feed of crafts, patientgamers, every cat sub you can imagine, bread, and a bunch of other peaceful things.
Before that I was just so angry all the time and arguing with redditors. I won’t go back to all that.
Don’t know how one could possibly use the site without filters from apps like that or RES. it’s so chaotic.
Exactly why I refuse to participate anymore among a dozen reasons.
My partner liked specific communities there but kept getting recommended upsetting stuff (got sucked into AmITheAsshole in a bad way, etc) so I uninstalled the official app and installed Apollo instead and their mental health greatly improved. But healthy satisfied people aren’t profitable for corporations.
I have mostly good things to say about Reddit and the more I read about it, the more I realize that that’s just because I always connected to it through Boost for Reddit.
I haven’t used either but I think boost has a lemmy app. I’m pretty sure it’s made the same dev(s) but I’m not fully sure
This is the way. Though despite all that I started to keep my Reddit browsing a secret as the average person considers a “redditor” a pretty negative thing to be.
Tbh kinda glad in that sense that the API fiasco revealed the true colors of the company and gave me a very clear reason to leave. It hadn’t felt “good” in a long time and now I know why.
the average person considers a “redditor” a pretty negative thing to be.
Redditors consider a redditor a negative thing to be. It works because no redditor believes they are one. It’s everyone else who’s a part of the gross hivemind, not me. Reddit thinks this and reddit does that, but not me. I’m different and special. Not one of them.
It’s also the case that several things can be true at once. Like, maybe you are part of the reddit mob-mentality, but on certain issues you have opinions that very much go against the grain.
I read the post the same way. In the few times Reddit has come up IRL I just ask, “Have you heard of Reddit?” Then it’s either yes or no then we move on.
No one in the real world gives a shit about being a “redditor.” Which to your point, means nothing.
I feel like most of the comments were from people who were doing Internet as a lifestyle.i mean, I wouldn’t know a better way to get depressed and bitter…
Yep. I was more loyal to Apollo than to Reddit. I paid for Apollo premium but would not do that for Reddit. Also I hated the UX on Reddit’s website old or new. Now my issue with Lemmy and Kbin is to wait for an app that matches Apollo.
Am I the only one who never looked at a general feed on Apollo? I would open the app which was set to open to a particular sub and then I would navigate back to the list of favorite subs and pick which one to check in on. I would prefer an app that shows me that list of favorite communities at launch but haven’t found it yet.
Definitely not. I would peruse Home for just a little bit, but mostly I’d swipe over and go to specific subs. The past 3 months I only logged in to upload chapters of a story. Reddit had become pretty stale for me.
Same. Years ago when I first got on Reddit I was very politically active and my subs were a ton of political, economic, societal etc subs. But I just got sick of opening up Infinity and seeing nothing but doom and gloom as far as I could scroll. I transitioned away from that over time and at the end my subs were mostly cats, some specific TV show and game (meme) subs, and some niche hobby subs.
It was so helpful to block users, especially in my local cities subreddit.
City subs were always some of the most contentious, full of trolls and hostility. My theory is it’s because rather than bringing people together purely from common interests, they gathered people purely based on geographic location.
I went to a sun for a local municipality recently. Someone made a post about something sort of silly. Responses were good natured like “uh… that’s silly” so OP was there “waiting for the next STUPID comment”. Yeah, great. I don’t really need to participate in that.
As a European, the increasing cynicism and apathy to American politics of many users has made me really bad mood, maybe I should have cured my feed better, but now it doesn’t matter anymore as lemmy is my new home.
I received the most incredibly chiding, condescending and critical reply on Lemmy the other day, for saying one sentence which was just adding some info to a reply chain. “Oh, that’s also called this”. I was told “pedantic much??” and then the person ranted for a paragraph about how I was a terrible person seeking to spread discontent, and various other bizarre insulting bullshit. Best part: they mod 6-7 subs on some instance. So… Lemmy isn’t a magic formula, unfortunately. The same people are excited to make it just as bad as reddit ever has been.
This is because people are people. Some of us are “good”, some of us are "bad, most of us are in between. But anyplace that people congregate is going to see at least some of the bad.
Sadly it seems to aways happen to sites that get too big.
Anger is an extremely effective way to spread an idea.
Posts which incite emotion in you make you engage - upvote, comment and share. CGP Grey (a redditor himself) made a great video about this a while ago.
We can only hope Lemmy users are more self-aware, and choose to engage with things they enjoy more than things they hate. But given human psychology, it’s unlikely…
If Lemmy stays just niche enough to keep the hoardes of angry internet users away, I think we might just have a goldmine.
Reddit didn’t always use to be such a cesspool of hate. I think as things grow and attract the masses, they attract the type of people that are only on the internet to be driven by their emotions. The up/downvote system solidifies that too.
My thinking is that you can have a campfire with 20 people around it and still have meaningful conversations. Put 1000 around that same campfire and shit will go sideways.
The up/downvote system solidifies that too.
I keep saying this even as former reddit users keep wanting the same damn karma system here :( this isn’t reddit and I don’t want it to be. I hope lemmy’s friendlier culture survives the influx.
I think the old forums had it right and I hope we can see that persist here. Don’t need karma or algorithms to surface content, just mid-size/smaller communities and good moderation.
I’m mainly lemmy.world right now and have a few federated subscriptions, but I imagine at some point I’ll branch out and spend more time on the local feed of some other instance because I’ll be chasing that mid-size population.
I wonder if the increase of porn will affect this. From past experiences I got the impression the people and/or the way they communicate changes when it becomes a platform to search for fapping material. Either because it attracts a different type of person or because it changes interaction between users.
It’s the removal of a down vote count. It’s the same problem across all social media. People spew absolute outrageous comments… Get 3 likes or votes, and they think it’s a positive score.
The reality is 10k down votes and 3 likes from bots.
It’s really changed the internet landscape and ultimately society. We hide dissent.
That’s not how Reddit works. It would show a comment score of -9997.
Also, I want to add something: Beware of people fetishizing the fediverse as a cure-all to all or most of Big Tech and social media’s problems. Remember, the technology is rarely ever the problem, the humans are. So long as humans remain really clever apes, you are not going to solve hate speech, spam, or outrage.
In fact, it seems like outrage about Reddit is currently driving the majority of engagement on Lemmy so far, even though it’s been three weeks since the API protests. Just look at all of the most upvoted posts here. Discussions about how bad Reddit is currently and how Lemmy/fediverse will save everything and make everything good. On social media, moderation is still extremely important, and from the snark and trolling I’ve seen here and there, I hope the mod team doesn’t fall behind and I hope that the Lemmy developers create better mod tools, because if Lemmy does blow up, expect bots to show up. Expect propaganda. Expect automated trolling. All this shit hit Reddit as it got more popular.
I was on Reddit since 2010 and it has always been a shit place. I stuck around for small subs, but Reddit at large was always a refuge for racists, misogynists, and reactionaries. I was around for the fall of violentacrez; anyone remember that disgusting creep and how Reddit gave him a stupid fucking golden Snoo for running an insane number of creepy and violent subs? Until the existence of r/jailbait became a scandal and liability, so they axed him, and the majority of users from what I could see were wailing and gnashing teeth over not being able to post sexual pictures of minors? Anyone remember the r/creepshots debacle?
Idk why y’all think there was some golden age of reddit. It was always a hellsite run by creeps and Nazi sympathizers that happened to also be an okay platform for niche forums (which, in my experience, were constantly getting trolled and harassed by the knuckle-draggers who formed the site’s primary demographic). The only thing that surprised me about the last month’s events were how many people were surprised.
I never saw this side of Reddit. I have no idea of who you are talking about either. I was there for awhile and my take was that it was an anonymous chill place to discuss things.
I learned about some things I never would have guessed and was exposed to sides of life I never would have known otherwise. There were some good times and bad. I can see an increase in aggression and bots. I do agree that taking away the down vote changes things. But I have changed too. So I don’t see it as a cause and effect. It’s just website. It’s not my singular reason for existence.
Reddit was a washed down 4chan. For those who came from a forum life in the 00’s and knew 4chan too, Reddit made sense.
That kind of content will keep happening and popping, and there will be a lot of people supporting it. Because we’ll always have teenagers eager to see fringe stuff, and social misfits that want to be seen/heard.
I think that we need to understand that Lemmy and the Fediverse can hold such things, but they aren’t at fault for that. Reddit was faulty as a corporation, but not as a platform. And because Lemmy, the Fediverse and ActivityPub are techs free to anyone, they aren’t liable for this, but the owners of the instances of these techs are.
We have already seen how this plays out, thankfully. We’ve seen a lot of instances defederating exploding-heads.com, and this is good. The same with many people saying to defederate from Meta’s new social network.
I think we need to understand that, profoundly, human beings are very heterogeneous. We’ll always have nice and bad people. And that communities reflect that. Having everything in one instance (Reddit) is not a very good solution. Having them in different instances and each one with their own ethos, makes more sense as a society. Especially because we behave like that. I usually don’t mingle with douchdbags.
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They did this to themselves.
Part of it was corporate greed and incompetence by the Reddit team where they were trying to drum up numbers for their upcoming IPO. For a social media platform, member numbers is pretty much the only thing that matters, so connected with the other 2 issues, it probably was encouraged for them to ban users knowing full well that most of them would just create a new account - which of course that would let them say they have even more registered accounts when they would go to advertisers.
Part of it was various misinformation campaigns run by political parties and foreign governments to spread hate and instability. The “Smarter Everyday” YouTube channel specifically did a video about Reddit and “bad actors” a few years back on the phenomenon which I recommend everyone watch, but not sure how linking to videos is accepted on Lemmy, so I’ll let you find it. The FBI keeps on warning us about “bad actors” trying to spread lies and it is only going to get more intense as we get close to the upcoming US elections.
Part of it was an echo chamber where no alternative views could be expressed without mods getting all uppity and banning users. Mods have ultimate say and there were no checks-and-balances to what mods could do. No real way to question a ban and no real way to question a mod. And the lack of alternative views is especially egregious because Reddit was obviously a very left leaning site. They were doing the exact same thing that they would make fun of right-wing media would do, namely create this echo chamber where only like-minded people were really allowed to speak. Now to be clear, I lean left on the vast majority of issues, but for fucks sakes, some of the nonsense that was accepted on Reddit would make even me cringe.
In the end, Reddit got too big for it’s own good because most of these problems could be solved on a much smaller site, but Reddit got so big with so much money at stake and then it’s size made it such a large target for people. It became just a toxic mess.
(sorry for the diatribe, I was going to write 3 bullet points and leave it at that, and then just kept on expanding it more and more)
Yup, that’s the video. 3 years ago and almost 1M views and people still don’t really take the threat of “bad actors” seriously enough.
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I find it difficult to take your complaints seriously when you - by your own admission - were posting anti-trans dog whistles.
Nobody is obliged to host your shitty views - even on Lemmy.
This is the problem.
I’m not anti-trans. Be whoever you want to be, I don’t care.
But people like you, online, think any sort of questioning about what spaces non trans women (oh god why do I have to even qualify that. They’re women ffs) deserve to have is somehow transphobic.
Women have been terrorized by men trying to invade their space for generations. What are their rights?
r/gamingcirclejerk sounds like a unlikely place to find mods who are open to opinions. I’m at the point where I’ve conditioned myself not to comment on big subreddits because if I know not enough people will side with me about something it’s pointless to say it. That I feel like a lot of people sense in intellectual debates. They think you’re all on camera and this is for the front page of a newspaper or something and you have to have full time editors proof reading it. It never was meant to be like that though, and it creates an information suppressed community.
I’ve conditioned myself not to comment on big subreddits…
Doesn’t that defy the whole point of having free expression?? Having to always walk on eggshells is total bullshit. If you get downvoted, that’s one thing, I am more than fine with taking the hit if others don’t agree with my comment, but getting banned for something that is simply an alternative viewpoint is nonsense. And I obviously get why banning people is needed sometimes (spam, totally hateful comments, sexual links, etc), but bans should be for a limited time (like say a 24 HR ban) so as not to force a user to needlessly create a new account every other week because of some out of control mod.
Yep, I was talking more about downvote hivemind and getting hidden/shadow banned. Not the same conversation I guess… But it is a symptom of the behaviour reddit has turned into. I remember I used to not feel so judged online when I was in highschool for expression, but Reddit now adays is an angry place to be in sometimes.
But if it’s on r/all, shouldn’t that be an expectation to have a differing view point expressed on a controversial topic?
Also, the mods didn’t ban me from the sun, the admins account banned me completely from the entire site.
“Banned by reddit”
Not
“Banned by moderator”
Except for egregious issues (endless spamming, posting onlyfans links, and just totally hateful posts all the time) there should almost never be a total and complete permanent ban.
Someone’s first offense should be a 24 hr ban. Basically a cooling-off period. No big deal. Go outside for a bit. If you get banned again, maybe it is then 48 hrs. And there should be some stipulations where the same mod can’t ban you again (to keep them from abusing the rules). And then it goes up from there by a day with every new ban. The whole permanent ban thing needs to go away except for extreme cases.
I have no idea how Lemmy works, but I really hope they are open to a system like this.
I know a streamer who also got banned for a personal message he sent to a fan. He had the word bastard in it but it was in jest. On his own subreddit… He talked to the fan on a stream and he even denied reporting him, which means Reddit watches your messages and you can be banned for a week for saying “bad words”. Reddit is dead lol.
What a shithole
my monkey brain reaction while reading the title
I want to start an argument. The sky is obviously blue and water is wet.
Oh yeah? What about when the sun sets you ignorant bitch?!?!? And water isn’t wet: water MAKES STUFF WET.
Whatever, I don’t kinkshame
The sky is indeed reflecting blue light wavelengths and water is definitely damp and moisty.
A repeating pattern I noticed on Reddit: Whenever a video of a woman hitting a man was posted (which is of course wrong, not condoning violence at all!), the comments were always filled with hundreds of guys happily proclaiming their readiness to knock tf out a woman given the right circumstances. Just waiting for an excuse to get violent.
I see you’ve been to /r/ActualPublicFreakouts (I don’t think what you say here necessarily is true, but if you go to the one I mentioned or any other violent sub, like /r/FightPorn, the comments will be dominated by the kind of people who likes the type of stuff the sub is made for.)
I had to make sure I didn’t somehow write this in my sleep or something, it’s word-for-word exactly what I’ve been thinking for the past few years.
Many subs are solely focused on generating outrage, hate, anger, being infuriated, and just general discontent. Baiting people with strawmen of groups they dislike, obviously fake tweets/exchanges to get people riled up, etc.
Although none of this is particularly new, /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/____inAction, and other straight up racist subs were vicious to the point of some being banned years ago.
But now it’s more of a general ragebait machine that creeps onto /r/all regularly and can take over any subreddit completely without proper moderation.
To be fair to reddit, it really depends on the sub. If you go on /r/fightporn or /r/crazyfuckingvideos you’re going to get a certain demographic that tends to be reactionary.
Then if you go on /r/politics or /r/socialism or /r/conservative you’re gonna get clickbaity echo chambers
But there are subs with great discussion on niche topics. /r/zizek or /r/credibledefense or /r/askhistorians all have very little outrage and instead good discussions and analysis.
The problem is not unique to reddit. It’s a side effect of a large enough community. The focus gets broad and the issue is that posts like Twitter screenshots or memes are easier to digest. Because they are easier to digest, more people click on them and upvote. Therefore these posts will almost always reach the top before articles or other long for articles.
This over time gives incentive for posts that can a) draw the most attention with a headline and b) is fast and easy to digest
Outrage porn is exactly that. You see an image “DeSantis passed a bill to out toxic chemicals in roads!”
People don’t bother to do research on what the law says m and they immediately go to the comments and make jokes or berate the GOP/DeSantis
Nuanced discussion gets pushed to the bottom and once again people will downvote whatever they feel is against the narrative constructed by the OP.
Tldr: no reddit isn’t getting worse in this regard. It’s a function of large online communities. This website will likely see the same effect should certain communities get large enough.
Zizek is a sexpest obsessed with comparing everything to rape and his followers are a cult of personality. This is a very strange one to include in your list of non-echo chambers, particularly as he and his audience are political partisans just like the first three you criticised.
The inclusion here seems more like snifffff ideeeology, as he would say.
I admit my inclusion is ideology- I am trying to subconsciously convert people to Stalinism. You will be the first to get sent to the gulags.
On a more serious note, it’s obviously partisan but it’s not click baity and it’s a small community that’s actively moderated. Posts are kept on topic so the focus of the sub doesn’t get too broad and lead to the phenomenon in question.
For a sub that got wrecked, check out /r/chomsky
Before 2016 it was a place to post long form articles, interviews with Chomsky, nuanced discussions, etc. Afterwards it was placed on some astroturfing list and now it’s just a generic center left Twitter screenshot type sub. Get similar content as /r/politics or /r/whitepeopletwitter
Which brings me endless amusement to find out when most people on the sub actually hate Chomsky’s belief in freedom of speech or his opinion of the Ukraine war
I don’t think the Chomsky sub going to shit matters much given the Epstein connections now tbh. Left needs to move on from him just as much as zizek
I think you focus too much on the messenger and not enough on the message, which is ironic that you complain about cult of personality. Manufactured Consent would be just as valuable even if Epstein write it himself.
Have you read any works by either Zizek or Chomsky? I don’t ask this in a “gotcha” attempt. I’m genuinely curious if you have, and if yes what specifically do you take issue with? I’m a fan of both although Chomsky hates Zizek. I think Chomsky has done a massive public service cataloging and broadcasting US War crimes, while Zizek is a bit more theoretical
I think you focus too much on the messenger and not enough on the message
Should the left say the same about Stalin?
Serious question. I want to know if you apply this logic consistently or if you see an issue with it now.
Have you read any works by either Zizek or Chomsky?
Of course I have this is a strange question to be asking unless you think I’m a teenager new to the left or something, these people are very entry-level cringe-leftism 102 stuff, they were good gateways into various things for their time but nothing more radical because to be so would be to lose the platform and “prestige” they both covet provided to them by capitalists. Neither of them have made significant contributions to the left that were not made first by other people, Chomsky’s most known work Manufacturing Consent is just a rehash of Parenti’s work Inventing Reality, while Zizek on the other hand is focused on philosophy of ideology and media literacy rather than action.
I think Chomsky has done a massive public service cataloging and broadcasting US War crimes, while Zizek is a bit more theoretical
You have these backwards. Zizek is not theoretical, Zizek is philosophical. Theory can be applied as action, that is not what Zizek does.
Would you mind posting some good authors or thinkers to move forward from Chomsky please? I’m only familiar with him and would like to broaden my knowledge. I see you mentioned Parenti so I’ll look them up.
Can do. Some suggestions:
Blackshirts and Reds is your starting point with Parenti.
You should look into Vincent Bevins. His Jakarta Method is a serious wakeup call about the use of mass murder against the left around the world and what last resort capitalism is willing to go to.
Vijay Prashad should also be on your list. He wrote Washington Bullets and continues to be extremely valuable and influential in the left today. He’s also a really fucking good speaker, like Parenti.
Oh and anyone who considers themselves to still be a socdem (rather than an anticapitalist of some sort) should read Imperialism in the 21st Century by John Smith.
Chomsky & Herman didn’t “rehash” Inventing Reality. Parenti didn’t provide a model by which the propaganda system operates. Concentration of media ownership, advertising revenue, and reliance on government sources are methods by which Chomsky’a model operates whereas Parenti focuses on the ideological underpinnings - essentially trying to debunk the myth of liberal bias in media.
These are similar topics but they are not rehashes. I think Chomsky’s has more value personally and there’s a reason it has had a much broader impact on the left and society as a whole.
I also personally prefer Chomsky’s matter of fact style.
Having said all that, like I said - my question wasn’t an attempt at a gotcha. You just never know who you’re talking to - I don’t trust people just because they say things confidently. You do seem well read so I respect your opinion.
As for Zizek being philosophy- that’s a given. His works are theoretical though, and I don’t really want to argue the semantics. Zizek has a lot to say and I think he’s right that we need to be reinventing leftist ideology for the 21st century.
Tldr: no reddit isn’t getting worse in this regard.
Post-API, reduction in good moderation might be a factor, though.
r/politics and r/conservative should be the same sub to create some balance.
Either that or force r/politics to merge with r/progressive or r/liberal or r/socialism or r/far left or something
r/politics not having a conservative voice was my biggest “wtf” when I first joined reddit
The sub name is so misleading
Ya /r/politics should be /r/centerlefttwitter
I think the idea of mixing subs is cool. There’s a sub… /r/capitalismvssocialism which I liked. Basically people from different perspectives actually discuss things.
I hate echo chambers
I remember /r/debatefascism too before it got banned. I would go on there and talk to fascists. I don’t understand why they banned it. Better to have them out in the open instead of hiding in dark spaces of the internet
In fairness, I don’t believe in debating fascists; I believe in stomping them out given they historically trend toward wanting my whole race either liquidated or enslaved. There’ll never be a day where I’m talking cordially to a known brownshirt.
Really the debate is for the fence sitters. You can’t convince a fascist but you can convince someone entertaining fascism.
Forcibly suppressing ideas doesn’t have a great track record historically, unfortunately. No easy way to prevent fascist ideas from spreading in open societies. Look at the massive Nazi rallies in NYC right before WW2
Look at the massive Nazi rallies in NYC right before WW2
You’ve gotta remember how many Klansmen existed in Amerika during that point in history. Which I still think should’ve been fought and suppressed, en masse, as soon as it first started cropping up. Fascism is like a strangling weed; the best time to deal with it is before it’s sprouted and started growing. Otherwise, it’s gonna get messy with exponential speed.
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Unfortunately that hasn’t been unique to Reddit. Outrage, hate, and conspiracies generate clicks and engagement on platforms. Recent events within the last decade gave rise to a lot of coordinated hate campaigns. User created subreddits were a double edge sword for this in both being able to filter out these groups but also giving them their own echo chambers to congregate and embolden one another. The transition from liberal freedom of speech to absolutionist right to hatred made social media companies millions simultaneously in accepting money to promote controversial topics and harvesting the resulting outrage on their platforms. Reddit and their staff effectively became one of many internet war profiteers giving all sides bases of operations.
To end on a semi-positive note, with the rise of federated services, instances may still give these extremists places to seethe but they can at least be ‘sanctioned’ or defederated from the rest of the larger fediverse very easily.
This was also part of the strategy of foreign influence in western politics. Britain, France, and The United States got hit by this, hard. Driving anxiety pushes people to the political extremes and prevents actual political process from happening. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a degree to which outrage is warranted. The economy has yet to fully recover from 2007 and looks to be taking another dip now, police violence, a broken binary political system in America, you name it. There are all sorts of stuff to be frustrated with. But Russia and China feed that. Reinforce it. Encourage us all to hate each other
You used to be able to tell who the bots were, but now we have political movements espousing the same thing the bots are because they are both feeding off the same source.
What really broke hope for me is the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, before the vaccines or effective treatment, n95 masks were the best protection. This should not be a controversial statement, just one of fact. A former Republican candidate for Governor of Connecticut, helped to get free masks distributed to every community in the state. His economic policies were way too conservative for me to consider him as a candidate, but he stepped up to help when it counted, so points to him. Unfortunately, after the worst of the pandemic, he ran again and while he never officially endorsed the anti-maskers, but he didn’t denounce them either, and went to rallies cosponsored by them. He knew what the right thing to do in 2020 was, but when he ran in 2022, the outrage machine was in full effect with countless “unmask our kids” groups and instead of doing what he knew was right, he did what was easy and convenient. He still lost, because the Democratic governor of the state who had led the state through the pandemic had done a good job. Propaganda turned something that was common sense into a political statement.
A simple and easy thing that would help prevent needless deaths became a political football kicked around by the right. Much of the anti-vaccine rhetoric (some now being spewed by a “Democratic” candidate 🤦♂) originated in Russia and was meant to keep the population there from seeking western vaccines when the Russian vaccine was shown to be inferior. But because everything gets pushed into political framing, public health and science became team red vs team blue instead of humans united against a virus that kills. When we get a really nasty virus (COVID isn’t that deadly compared to an avian flue), the world is screwed because so much anti-science has been pushed in order to generate engagement in media and social media.
It was around the 2016 election that things started to change. Before that, there was still a mentality of open and genuine discourse in most subs. But after the election that started to die, people started realizing bots and alt-righters had no interest in open discourse, on the contrary they would see to abuse such channels as a platform for their hate, and would use such hate and anger in an attempt to shape and suppress discussions. This forced the community to become far more jaded and less open, realizing just how vulnerable the community was to radicalization and firehouse misinformation.
On the early internet, we all had this vision that free access to information would free everyone, that unlimited information could only do good. Most of those people now understand how nieve we were, unlimited information means unlimited disinformation, and that organizations would always see to weaponize information the way they weaponize everything else. We are in a different internet age, now.
As a non US person I was reading your post and thinking how right you are and how international politics also got into the same problem of increased anger. And than got to:
But Russia and China feed that. Reinforce it. Encourage us all to hate each other
As proof it is really working even on aware people. It is a big problem seeing thing just from one perspective, that “feeding” even if intentional actually started from west. Just look at the movies, Russians and Chinese are always bad guys, for decades. What do you think they will think about west if they grow up looking how west is seeing them? How will they react?
How will someone in Afghanistan support west when someone from west destroyed their country and killed family and friends, maybe with good reason and couldn’t be done differently, but I am talking about individuals here.
I don’t think there is ultimate truth, but we can try and see events from a bit wider perspective.
That and an effort to apply that wider perspective to the party you perceive to be the good/bad guys would do wonders
Unfortunately that hasn’t been unique to Reddit. Outrage, hate, and conspiracies generate clicks and engagement on platforms.
Yesterday I stumbled upon this post. Really sad.
Their mention of signal:noise struck a chord for me.
Ever since this gelled for me a few years ago, I have been on a miserable (and obviously impossible) mission to find places to see and discuss useful, HUMAN information with other useful HUMAN people on the internet.
Blocking whole forums on topics I really enjoy is mechanically easier than curating the contributors to those conversations on an individual basis. It hurts my heart to do it, but it is impossible to keep the noise out without wholly ignoring signal that I enjoy.
Even people I used to really enjoy talking to have had to be ignored. They stopped caring about nuance, and got intellectually lazier. They switched from reading to skimming, and the well thought out comments got shorter, and more hostile.
This is undoubtedly the snake eating it’s own tail.
They filter their inputs so heavily, and have done battle with bad faith for so long that their outputs resemble the very thing they were trying to avoid.
Unsure what my point is other than commiseration with OP. It’s utterly disheartening to realize that the technology that was created to connect us all has been co-opted and subverted - transforming it into a hideous monster of hate, and misery that forces us all to internally disconnect from entire parts of it.
That’s not to say that it couldn’t have been expected… but I have no fucking idea how it could’ve been prevented.
I’ve never been a Twitter user, but this makes me wish I could follow Mastodon users from here
You can. This is the admin of the server where I am.
EDIT: I forgot that you’re on a Lemmy instance. My bad.
Tbf lemmy just went through a huge wave of fuck spez posts not too long ago. And still is ongoing to some degree
Its justice when villains like spez and trump get their daily dose of hate.Hate only deserve to bad people.
“Hate is worse though. It’s poison that corrodes it’s container: more damaging to the one who hates than the one hated”
Unfortunately Lemmy is not immune to this behavior. I made a comment about what I think of the current general political situation in the U.S. and some loon flew off the handle, throwing around the standard anti Fox tropes and name calling
Some people just can’t help themselves. Especially when it comes to politics and the like. They are incapable of having a discussion and all they do is attack and name call. Their identity is wrapped up in their political views and they can’t think for themselves. They come from every side and are everywhere.
Right? I stopped viewing anything other than a few curated subs after a while because I realised all it was doing was making me angry and upset. It can’t be healthy to be exposed to that constantly.
