I came over with the initial reddit defector wave. I loved it here. You could have civil conversations, even when you disagreed with someone else. It honestly felt like the forums of the early 2000s again. Then it started getting more aggressive, and all the "well....aksually" type replies started happening. I find myself hardly on lemmy/kbin/beehaw anymore because of it.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Have you found another landing spot?
Sadly no. I guess it’s a good thing. I’m just not on any social media much now.
That's been me, too. I'll pop in here sometimes, but overall the whole thing has ended up making me realize that social media as a whole just... Isn't that great, actually. It's a constant stream of little things, many of them things to be upset about that I can't do anything about.
I've been spending more time instead on things like reading, that require prolonged focus on one thing, and damn if I don't feel better this way.
Also... Beehaw and lemmy in general seems to have gotten even more tilted into hardcore FOSS/privacy/Linux culture, which is the opposite of what I hoped would happen. Privacy is important to me but I dislike Linux and I just don't prioritize it in the way that a lot of people here do, such that they're talking about it what feels like all the time to the exclusion of other topics.
Still, I remain here enough to type this comment. shrug
I want to try Tildes instead maybe but I think that's still invite-only.
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I have had this feeling too recently. One thing I did which has helped me is to unsubscribe from most news/politics except here at Beehaw.
Yeah I think it might be time for me to admit I've found enough communities and stop browsing all of them to find the new communities. I might designate a day once a week to visit the all feed to find something new
Your one day a week is a good idea, I think I'll copy it.
What I really want yo do is to be more creative community member again instead of a passive content consumer. Not sure what form that will take yet.
Politics discussion seems to bring out the worst part of a lot of people
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There are outright attacks of putting illegal images that have caused major problems the past few days on the biggest Lemmy instances...
Hating Reddit was not necessarily a great motivation for people to create original content here. Hating Elon Musk and Twitter to x, the introduction of Threads generated more hate. It's been kind of hate burnout lately.
Yea ... even more broadly, there's definitely some weird psychology in the whole phenomenon of leaving a platform for another, none of which is talked about much, and which probably feels weird to talk about because for many we're generally not yet comfortable admitting how important these platforms have become for us.
It's probably a little bit like work where if you count the amount of time you spend there it'd force you to recognise how important it is to actually be as happy there as you can.
And so, as you say, in doing something drastic like hate-quitting a platform which was actually much more important and sentimental to us than we're willing to admit, all to go to a smaller and different place over which we might have some decent "buyers remorse", we end up with feelings we don't know what to do with, and as lame as it might sound.
The scorching of previous content I also found rather destructive... people were deleting 10 years worth of posts and content.
My personal approach has been that the history of the internet is fragile enough as it is. I've left reddit for good. I don't need to burn Reddit down in protest. I'm fine with it having a passive rather than active death
I understand this take. For me, though, I wasn't willing to let reddit to continue to make ad revenue from my posts/comments (e.g. from their turning up in google search results) or sell them for LLM-shenanigans (of course, my comments can be scraped off lemmy just the same, but at least a megacorp isn't claiming ownership over them).
I don't regret it at all, either. It feels rather refreshing to not have that trail floating around on the internet anymore (well, mostly. I'm sure I didn't catch everything.)
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As a result of the attacks, lemmyworld temporarily turned off open sign up and switched to an application process. I saw a comment asking if this made it more likely for beehaw to refederate. 😂 They only turned off open sign up because of the mass posting of CSAM on their instance, idk about y'all but that's not exactly making me jump to refederate...
It was mainly a moderation tools issue that led BH defederate from LW and SIJW, so I don't think this changes anything.
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I think you're onto something. We ran out of hate for Spez, Elon, and Zuck and moved onto hating eachother (as a collective, not saying anyone here, specifically)
You aren't alone. Just this past day or two there's been a big incident on Lemmyworld that Beehaw luckily was insulated from, so people are on high alert there. Also big news about Inmate #P01135809, Elon Musk, AI and stuff can put people on edge.
Definitely many Redditisms are back in Lemmy than before. I'm guilty of some of them on occassion still, but I try to counterbalance it by spreading kindness and appreciation around when I can.
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I think it varies and is highly dependent on what community you are venturing into. Some are more heavily moderated than others from what I can tell. I don't think it's any more or less than it was on Reddit (I'd argue for the most part it's still great in comparison), but I think it just is a lot more noticeable due to the user count being so small right now.
Most of people, if not all, come from Reddit (me included). Depending on how you behaved there, that behaviour can be brought to other places, like Lemmy/Kbin. People have the right to defend their own ideas or opinions, but that doesn't mean they have the right to be rude, argumentative, mean or whatever.
Most of communities/magazines have rules to avoid people be very out of boundaries, like no bigotry or no hate speech, and I'm happy that those rules are enforced and respected. But I think a big mistake of moderators is that they stop writing more rules because bigotry and hate speech are the real evil. What about good manners? What about being nice to each other, even when disagreeing? What about remembering the human? If I were on lemmy.world and you were on lemmy.ml, and I called you stupid because you like oatmeal... is that bigotry? Is that hate speech? What is it? How do you define that behaviour to write a rule not to follow?
Beehaw is great because there is one single general rule to all communities: be(e) nice. Other communities can put other rules to be more specific about what is tolerable and what is not, but being nice is always at the top. I wish other communities/magazines/instances did the same thing.
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Well... yes.
I have to humbly admit that I just got myself banned on LW, for going berserk in a discussion I shouldn't even have started. 😓
I've recently commented to someone who was making fun of Beehaw's rules, that they're not only to have everyone else "be nice" to me, but also to remind myself to "be nice" to others. On some instances, with other rules, it's just too easy to forget myself and try to "one up" others until shit happens.
I'm afraid as more people join Lemmy, and they get more confident at using the platform, more of the old Reddit bad habits will seep in... except hopefully on Beehaw.
It seems to be both common wisdom and substantiated by some studies I've heard of ... bad apples really do ruin the bunch ... toxic behaviours infect and corrupt.
I think if we care, admitting that we can go too far ourselves (as you did, and as I'll admit myself too) and then trying to be vigilant in maintaining a culture are the best we can do.
Calling out rude behavior might be a way for us to help govern the kind of behavior we want.
Sometimes I wonder whether an online community made of anonymous individuals who don't and won't ever know each other, nor even recognize each other, isn't a fool's errand. People are all-too willing to shout carelessly into the mist, as if their words can't affect real people. At least with irl communities, there is a pressure not to insult each other to one another's faces.
This isn't to say social media is all bad, not at all. But I wonder if "community" is really possible in any kind of meaningful way, or in the long term.
All my favorite internet forums held on by being small and having solid rules and moderation, and then as they grow, and more and more strangers join the mix, it slowly falls apart.
If you've seen other posts that I have made you might've noticed that I'm interested in this exact problem and I have been super focused on research that shows having efficient information networks (i.e. centralized networks, a network where only one or a few voices matter, or fully connected networks, a network where everyone can see everyone else opinions) can lead to much lower collective intelligence for the group and having inefficient information networks (networks that have fewer connections, maybe 4-6, and everyone has an equal amount of connections) can lead to a group being able to solve more complex problems.
So in relation to what you pointed out big online communities actually might be making our collective intelligence weaker even though it makes us more connected.
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I've also noticed an uptick of reactionary content as well, which only serves to make people upset.
I think it just comes in waves, it got bad when when the reddit API finally shuts down, then it slowly calmed down, now in the last week or so it's starting again.
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You’re not the first to ask as far as I’ve seen, and it also seems you’re not alone. Dunno how real the effect is, but I’ve seen it it or felt it too.
Mine was until I decided to exercise my block button a lot more. Certain instances have a higher proportion of trolls and jerks, so that's been frustrating. Though, it's still worthwhile to see all the stuff and then let me curate it.
The block button's availability without needing to file a specific report is the very best feature here
I haven't noticed it. People are much nicer than on reddit. However I don't look at politics communitys (because they think the world is the USA) so that could be it.
the comments look more like the comments from reddit
bound to happen when a community is expanded out of hate and negativity. the second people couldn't redirect all of their anger towards reddit they turned towards others.
Reddit too, since I use both parallel until the API subscription is enforced. I think it's because US elections, people get very sensitive in that time period.
I think it also doesn’t help that we lived thru a pandemic and most people don’t have the ability to actually confront the trauma that has brought
Yes I am still grieving my dead, and grief can make it harder to connect with others I think.
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Also explicit astroturfing. Reddit is huge and has been targeted with extra helpings of extra angry politics since 2015 at the very, very latest. There's a lot of political posting here too, but it's possible (if annoyingly hard) to prune most of it.
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That’s the magic of federation. You can curate to create any vibe you want. Since I am on a solarpunk instance, the only ‘hate’ I see is for climate change denial.
Slrpnk is where my alt is! Its a great instance and I found it because i liked the people I was running into from there. I think its notable that your instance is literally tied to your identity
Yes, I was happy to find it. I immediately found several kindred spirits and the moderators are conscientious without being overly controlling.
The message of realism combined with hope just hits right.
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Has anyone noticed that downvotes have become more common too? Back when I first joined, I hardly saw any downvotes and now you see them in almost every single comment.
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Yeah I've noticed it too. A couple weeks ago people were nicer. The mean people are trying my patience
Not particularly, and intentionally rude comments tend to get downvoted. You can't prevent random people from being a dipshit, but the community seems to tolerate it a lot less than other places.
Maybe depends on what your following. I mostly follow Beehaw stuff plus a few not very heated and mostly technical topics elsewhere. So I have not experienced issues. I also do not follow the general feed, just my subscribed stuff.
Personally I do not think that different opinions and experiences are agumentitive or rude either. Deliberate personal attacks or a patterns of personal attacks on the other hand even if not deliberate is different. I have not seen that myself.
It depends on the topic. Some threads you can read the tilte and you already know the comments are going to be arguing. My favorite part of the threadiverse is seeing people argue their point. I think its great that we can have back and forth arguments with long form comments. I'd get bored if every thread was uniform positivity and agreements.
I think there has to be some social awareness otherwise you end up arguing with people who don't want to argue and this can cause the person to feel like they are being attacked.
I, too, have noticed that actually putting forth logic and reasoning in your arguments is a lot more effective than it was on Reddit. It gives me back some faith in humanity.
I've definitely read a lot of really interesting and perspective changing posts here but I've also experienced that a lot on reddit (pre 2016) after 2016 not so much.
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