Chat

7499 readers

12 users here now

Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

AskBeehaw

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

remington

alyaza

182

Another reason to leave Reddit: I forgot how hostile it can be (self.chat)

submitted 1 year ago by xray to c/chat

125 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've mostly left reddit and switched to beehaw, but I posted on somewhat of a niche tech-related subreddit today since there really isn't a community for that here yet. And wow, I got instantly downvoted twice and the first comment response was rude and hostile. All I posted was a feature suggestion for software that I thought would be useful and that a good amount of people would like based on other feedback I've heard. This is not the sort of topic that should be controversial or aggravating, and it wasn't like I made an ignorant post suggesting a feature that already existed or otherwise wasn't well researched.

This type of instantly hostile response has happened numerous times on reddit for various different topics, but I just haven't posted for a while, so I forgot just how shitty it can feel. It makes me really appreciate how friendly and respectful the community is here on Beehaw and on Mastodon. People seem to have good faith in one another similar to how the internet used to be in the old days.

Have you had similar experiences with Reddit and similarly opposite experiences here on Beehaw/Lemmy?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Kuroneko 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Too many morons use the downvote button as a “Dislike/Disagree” button. It’s why I like that downvotes are disabled here. If you disagree with someone, you’re encouraged to actually have a discussion instead of lazily pressing the downvote arrow and leaving.

[–] Plume 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yup.

I've seen it used quite effectively as a way to supress discussion, actually.

In the France subreddi, which I was quite active in, as I'm French, if you sorted by controversial, you would often find Queer related topics. Especially Trans issues related threads. Just downvoted to oblivion. But, It's not like people were disagreeing or anything, all of the few comments on there were positive. It was just a really effective way to suppress discussions about those topics.

As most people sorted by Best, all it would take was a couple of initial downvotes on your thread to bury it for the vast majority of people.

And it worked. Every so often, I would check what was in controversial that day, or that week. Without fail, I would see some of those topics on there, topics which were rarely discussed in this sub, because it was actively being suppressed by the downvotes.

Once I noticed this pattern, I began to check some subreddits, and I noticed the same thing happening on a bunch of them. Often, targeting the same subjects.

[–] xray 10 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I’m really loving the downvote feature being gone. I’ve been on another forum that had a noticeable decrease in toxicity when they removed their dislike reaction too.

[–] GhostMagician 5 points 1 year ago

Voting is also public, so when people do use them they need to be prepared to stand by it a opposed to using it with anonymity.

[–] dolphone 2 points 1 year ago

I'd suggest not calling them morons. Maybe people don't know how stuff works. That's normal, and it's up to the people who do, to provide some guidance.

If I'm being called a moron for being ignorant I can easily get defensive, and other people might turn aggressive. It just fuels the vicious cycle.