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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
It got too big and too accessible. Productive conversation became harder to have as they’d get pushed down by low effort comments from people trying to earn internet points and do little else. That also led to echo chambers which leads people to react rather than discuss. That’s not the whole reason but in my mind that’s a big part of why it degraded so badly.
The karma system was great until it wasn’t. People become so overly attached to fake internet points it’s embarrassing.
And the awards as well. I mean the amount of new awards I have seen introduced in Reddit just in the past 3 years has excessive and kind of cringeworthy tbh.
Its a blend of critical mass and the userbase. Some Reddit subs have subscriber counts in the millions, you’re inevitably going to reach a lot of eyes on your comment if you post in the right thread and not get drowned out. Additionally, high quality comments and positive discussions take a lot of energy and thought to write out, while low effort brigading, trolling and regurgitating sarcastic jokes are quick and easy to do.
The larger subs have a high amount of low effort trolling, where the good answers tend to get lost in the noise of funny jokes. The smaller subs often have a high level of autism and people that take their passions way too seriously. They can get triggered over differing opinions or nit pick a misplaced comma for way longer than reasonable. Good positive discussions still exist, I think just due to the sheer size of Reddit now it just gets a bit hard to fight through the noise before getting downvoted into oblivion.
Right now on Lemmy, we’ve managed to escape the bots, jokers and trolls of the masses and are reaching crowds of techy headed first adopters that are much more willing to grow the community and are used to forums and threads. It’s a wonderful thing to be a part of and something that’s become quite rare on Reddit. It’s very refreshing to be able to just comment and know the commenter will see your answer and even reply. This makes it much easier to put some effort in rather than chuck out a cheap joke for some upvotes.
Great take on it and exactly what I’m noticing too.
The barrier of entry to the Fediverse is currently working like a filter for these muppets and the longer it stays like that the better imo.
It’s a gate* worth keeping in my opinion. Either you want to join badly enough that you learn something new and become the kind of person worth conversing with, or you don’t …and you stay away. It doesn’t feel great to admit that’s the case but … I mean at some point it’s worth expressing.
Zoomer toxicity it’s unbelievable, maybe the frustration of being of the crystal generation makes them anonymously hate in the internet.
Nah I disagree, perhaps cause I am a zoomer but all the zoomers I know and communicated with online have been way more civil and understanding than previous generations. They even apologize to each other when a conversation goes way out of hand. Toxicity can go across every generation, but the millennial internet was/is a lot worse.
It’s funny, I have a best friend who is a zoomer and I definitely see some older millennials absolutely NOT getting zoomer “deadpan/apathy” memes and getting all bent out of shape about it. It reminds me of boomers and how if you use any expletives they won’t engage with someone at all and decide the point being made was invalid.
I agree with you that we can’t forget that 4chan and a lot of the early really bad harassment was millennials, who now are adults complaining about an atmosphere they created not being a space they want to be in now that they are older.
To be fair, I do see some signs of it here as it’s grown. It wasn’t like this even five days ago, where you would see downvotes on comments that weren’t inherently just toxic or just being assholes. But lately, I see more downvotes for people stating a differing opinion to the majority, or even asking questions. To me that’s usually the start of the toxicity.
Check the modlogs too, I’m seeing censorship from mods for petty reasons. Everyone can see what every mod is doing via the modlogs.
That’s a feature I didn’t know about. Will definitely keep an eye on that