I made a post on r/civ (Civilization games subreddit) showing a really funky shaped randomly generated river I saw and most comments were fine but one guy was convinced that I went through the comparatively monumental effort of opening the map editor and changing the river for karma, as opposed to just starting the game and taking a screenshot.
And just to top it off another guy saw the fact that my scout unit was in the far north of the map and went on an obscenely condescending diatribe about how “ackshually” I should be placing my units in the far south of the map because that way I can explore better and whatever the hell. Dude did not stop for one second to consider that maybe the scout that was in the far north was exploring the cool river and that I didn’t waste any production points on him because I got him for free from a tribal village…
God every time I go on that website (because let’s be honest not a whole lot of good communities here for what I’m interested in) I get excited to share something super innocent and then some total loser has to come and ruin it all.
Some people aren’t able to imagine or consider other peoples’ experience, they assume that the way they would act is the way everyone would act. They’re projecting. When you encounter people like that I find the best thing to do is realise that they are telling on themselves, and then scroll on and ignore what they have to say (or block them, if it’s really vile). Because it isn’t relevant to me (or you), it’s 100% about them and we are not obligated to care what some random stranger has to say about themselves… ¯\(ツ)/¯
I used to love reddit. Especially because it was so diverse. So many communities living side by side generally pretty well (except the well-known toxic communities of course that we all knew to stay away from). And the everything-goes attitude, like people discussing religion on the same site as people exhibiting their sex lives :P I used to love seeing that kind of diversity (ok and the exhibitionism too, I admit 🤭, I’m just into that.). I just loved the everything-goes feeling about it.
But two things went wrong as I see it. One was that US society got more and more polarised and toxic due to Trump and most of reddit’s users are from the US. Even the people who used to be pretty nice are so triggered by anything you say “wrong”, they always think you’re trying to pull them into an argument for the “other side”. It’s like they have PTSD from being constantly attacked by the other side and it causes that knee-jerk reaction on anything that doesn’t fall 100% into their narrative. I got so sick and tired of that hostility especially because I was not used to it locally. That thing you mention, where you say something and someone always claims you’re making it up to make a point or karma or whatever is so familiar and tiring.
And the other thing was of course that idiot spez. Trying to clean up reddit for his precious investors by removing (or locking away) anything not above the belt, killing third-party apps, etc. I still go there once in a while to gather some information but I stay away from discussions and I rotate my accounts every couple of months. So I don’t give a crap about karma because I kill my accounts anyway. In fact even when I did have a long-term account I used to “shreddit” it every couple of months so karma was not something I ever cared about.
The sad thing is that this Trump toxicity has now even blown over to my country (Holland). They elected a total fascist 2 months ago and the same thing is happening there now, there are lots of people claiming they were never heard and now their hero is going to drain the swamp and kick out all the refugees and all that same old blahblah. Several of my “friends” were caught up in this BS and I’ve had to break off all contact with them. 😡
Even Lemmy is not free from this, I joined lemmy.ml for a while but I found it pretty toxic too. Lemmy.world looked similar. This is why I came here and it’s been great so far.
Reddit’s always had a toxicity problem (see: Ellen Pao), but there was definitely a shift in 2015. It lines up with the political divide, but I think it was just a symptom of a larger problem. Because of a certain subreddit, a lot of new people were introduced to reddit. When they finally released an official app (lol, or rather they stole it and rebranded it as their own), there was a massive influx of users.
I’m not all “reddit was better when there were fewer users” because it wasn’t. But there was a cultural shift when it became much more widely promoted by app stores and all. It got users from all kinds of backgrounds, but it also got… I don’t know. Different. Maybe oversaturated, which kind of made it difficult to find more quality content.
The only good thing about reddit toward the end of my original time with it (I’ve been browsing lately, but not much because the app fucking sucks*) was niche communities, some funny content creators, and some NSFW subs (some of which have been absolutely gutted, if not banned entirely, since the incident).
A lot of those subs are irreplaceable. There’s just too much previous content and a mass of users that won’t ever migrate to something like Lemmy. Niche communities can still be kind of successful here due to inherently less users, but it still lacks diversity because those niche subs still had a really healthy dose of active users, which often exceeded the amount of users subscribed to some popular Lemmy communities.
A lot of them started turning to shit earlier, but they were manageable with filters and what have you. Plus the good mods were really good. Some left, some stayed, but the divide kind of fucked a lot of subs.
* Technically, there are other apps you can still use on Android without needing a paid subscription (eg. RedReader, Stealth, patching with Revanced), but they can be a bit finicky sometimes. Although, so can the official one, so it doesn’t make much of a difference.
I don’t believe this is a US problem. Dates do match with all the Trump nonsense but it happened pretty much worldwide. Look at UK, Australia, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico. All of them had the same divide in society with politics at the center. I think it’s social media and the attention-hungry algorithms that do not care about the side effects. That is what is pulling people apart. Spending hours a day in an indoctrination environment just because ‘clicks and ads and $$’. Laws to prevent this are waaaay too late. Damage is done. And what horrible damage these things did… What horrible damage these people did… And are still doing unchecked.
It happens here too. Generally not from beehaw users though. If beehaw moves platforms, that would be one advantage.
No longer are users a faceless being from the horde.
It’ll happen here too
Reddit close to 4chan and the like for being totally anonymous, so there’s simply no consequences to being an asshat. There’s just too many people there and relationships don’t matter.
I noticed the same a couple months ago. After the API shutdown stuff happened, I largely left reddit. I would only go there for things I needed, like information and news related to my field.
But in October, I started going back more, and even commenting. And almost immediately, I got the “well ackshually…” comments and just so much unneeded aggression. People just looking to be right by ignoring 99% of the correct information in a comment and focusing on that 1% that’s weak or, sure, wrong. And it was over dumb stuff, too.
After being on reddit for 13yrs straight, I guess I learned to be blind to it all. Like I knew it was happening, I saw it all the time, and
I’m sureI know I even did it myself here and there. Hell, I was/am still a mod on a reddit; I saw it everyday. I did start getting tired of reddit and redditors about a year ago, but I just kinda brushed it aside.Anyway, it wasn’t until leaving and going to Beehaw and Tildes for a few months, and then going back, that I realized how bad it actually was on reddit. It’s so glaring to me in threads all over the place. And that there was no desire to improve or change things. That that’s just reddit’s culture and that’s how redditors like it.
As such, I’ve still kinda kept some distance from reddit. I’m still there, but I don’t think I’ll ever go back to how I was using the site pre-APIgate.
Further, I actually get angry when I see people on Lemmy engage in that redditesque way of just looking for confrontation and being smartasses. We left reddit; why are we bringing that mentality with us? If I saw someone on a Beehaw community acting that way, I call it out.
That’s one of the reasons I support Beehaw potentially leaving Lemmy to do its own thing. I see Tildes and see how a standalone forum and community can exist and function well and productively, without all the “gotchas” and just unnecessary aggression. That’s not to say Beehaw (or Tildes) is perfect. That behavior can be found everywhere. But at least there’s a desire to try to stamp that out.
If I saw someone on a Beehaw community acting that way, I call it out.
That’s one of the reasons I support Beehaw potentially leaving Lemmy to do its own thing.
I’d rather Beehaw didn’t leave Lemmy, and instead “calling that kind of behavior out” got more popular on Lemmy instances… at least on the ones federated with Beehaw. But we’ll see.
That sucks, I am always a bit confused why anyone would take time to post mean answers.
Not even mean, borderline conspiratorial in terms of fake stuff. I guess people have been “burned” a lot by fake stuff in the past, but even when something’s fake they bring out every pitchfork available. It’s like they don’t understand the concept of entertainment. Not everything has to be real to be entertaining.
I think I’ve seen more internet rioting over fake stuff than I have over genuinely bad things.
I just had someone here accuse me of being part of an astroturfing campaign because I disagreed with them about FOSS licensing. At that point I just stop responding because there’s no use having an argument about whether my entire comment history is just a facade to cover for my secretly paid-for opinions about FOSS.
I think that the “post-truth” world that is blossoming in Right-wing political circles, where incorrect facts are hand-waved away as “differences of opinion”, is causing people elsewhere to react defensively and be very guarded against any actual differences of opinion, and some are overreacting and treating any difference of opinion as immediately suspect or even malicious.
Lemmy has a specific tech slant problem where inevitably if you post anything which is even tangentially tech related (such as sharing a spreadsheet on google), you will inevitably get someone complaining or ranting about big tech, providing a FOSS alternative, and typically chastising you for not knowing/doing better. I would say a good third to half of all comments we remove for not being nice is something cussing out someone else over a tech disagreement, which is a pretty wild problem to have.
I’ve posted some mean answers in the past, so I may share some insights:
- Someone had a bad day. Maybe a client berated them, maybe they had a falling out with a family member, maybe they stepped into a dog poop on a rainy day and their umbrella got blown out before a passerby burned their hand with a lit cigarette (too specific? yeah, well…)
- Someone decided to self-medicate (booze and weed seem to be popular choices)
- Someone forgot to take their meds (high blood pressure can do it, the flu will do it, insomnia or psych meds will do it more)
- Someone got a series of the aforementioned.
Generally: people post mean answers when their sense of empathy is either inexistent, or beaten into oblivion.
Once there are enough people in a place, the chance of encountering at least one person in one of those situations, quickly grows to 100%. If the place doesn’t actively discourage that kind of behavior because “engagement”… then you get the likes of Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and similar.
Hey, thanks for your very reflective answer! That all seems somehow valid. Guess I am just a very harmony-seeking person. Can’t even choose the mean options in Video Games sooo…
Love to read some nuance on the topic. As much as we all repeat to ourselves to “remember the human”, it still doesn’t happen as often as it should.
Always good to remember that very few people are naturally and constantly toxic, most people are just normal folks and everyone has bad days.
I guess it’s pretty well established that a lot of people push others down in order to feel better about themselves. It’s not surprising that many of these people will struggle to make friends in real life, and end up spending a disproportionate amount of time posting their garbage on the Internet.
Wow how pathetic you make a fake story up about reddit in order to come here and garner sympathy /s
Idk bro people suck it isn’t just a reddit thing
When overwatch was pretty new i checked out the overwatch subreddit. I saw a post about how good the voice lines are in arabic of the newly launched hero Ana was, and their whole interaction with phara. Other people pointed out how accurate other voiclines of different languages were. So i took a shot at it and said that it’s weird that the mercy character who is from from Zurich, Switzerland speaks german, and not swiss german.
People were shitting their asses about my comment. People explained to me that german and swiss german is the same thing, and people in Switzerland speak german. I respectfully explained that i lived in zurich, switzerland for 25 years and people simply do not speak german with each other.
That did not matter tho and people from all over the world gave their two cents about what they think they know about the place where i grew up in.I’m curious to know a bit about Swiss German now. Would the average German speaker from Germany understand it? Is there any desire to just call it “Swiss”?
Switzerland has four official languages, so just calling it Swiss would sort of confuse matters.
It depends. People from southern germany would understand it mostly. But the more north you go the less they understand it. People from austria tend to understand it pretty well. But we have a lot od different accents as well. But it also depends on the accent. Some thick accent is really hard to understand.
Not so sure about the “all over the world” part - I think it’s pretty common knowledge in Europe even among non-German speakers that Swiss German is a bit of a different animal, and I don’t imagine many people from Asia or Africa joining in with strong opinions about this either.
Not pointing any fingers, but I have my suspicion where those people came from.
Yeah, I’m suspicious of the French as well!
Yeah all over the world was a bit hyperbolic, most were american by default some pointed specifically out they were from sweden and Finland for some reason
I just googled “what language do they speak in zurich” and the first result is Swiss German
That sounds incredibly annoying
Google is wrong though. They simply speak German. I’ve only been there once, briefly, and you don’t know that, but you should trust me anyway.
That’s wrong. I’ve also been there once, and they only spoke English and some gibberish. I don’t speak German, so I should know.
Why google when you know things.
Why know things when you can simply trust your intuition?
I have heard that complaint more recently and it wasn’t downvoted or anything, so I’d like to think you made an impact!
It wasn’t even a complaint, it was more like everyone was praising blizzard for being so culturally appropriate and 100% accurate (lol) and i was just mentioning that it’s not true for this character.
Before overwatch i played team fortress 2 and i was used to a way more wholesome community and somehow never thought that it doesn’t carry over.
I thought it’s really funny when i made a post that it shouldn’t be possible for Reinhardt and mercy to get out of her ult and as far as i remember no one agreed and i caught a lot of shit for even bringing it up. They later changed that and no one seemed to complain ever about it. I think at this point i realised that reddit isn’t really for me
You should start a Civ community!
Maybe, but im not really the community leadership type of person
Which is funny, considering the game you like hah
Hate to be the one to tell you, but that’s not a Reddit thing. Thats an internet thing. Those clowns are here too.
Yep. I’ve seen some top tier clownery in Lemmy. And there are some subreddits with really positive communities. The good communities are usually the smaller ones and Lemmy is smaller overall, so it hasn’t really had time to be as bad.
Also just a human thing because people do that in real life.
Get enough people in the same place and they will be there, blathering and not shutting up.
I went to Reddit today and in a subreddit, they were literally joking about firebombing someone and how it would be disappointing if someone did it.
Reddit is basically truth social 2.0 at this point
I’ve seen open calls for murder here too, with lots of upvotes and hours old
Outright hate speech as well, with plenty of upvotes.
Those people will get banned if they are in a subreddit where people will report it. It’s pretty easy to get banned from reddit if you don’t follow certain social conventions and beliefs.
Especially the social convention and belief of not firebombing other people. That one of pretty high on the list.
I got banned from a subreddit for being to aggressive when calling out people who were justifying and calling for fire bombing of churches.
I’m pretty sure that was also used against me when I got banned from the whole platform but I’ll never know for sure.
Lmao the hairpin river is cool.
Idk, once a community reaches a certain point, people are just there to be there. I know hating on reddit is so popular right now but look at Facebook.
No matter what you post, someone on the internet will find a way to be angry about it.
Shut your whore mouth! On occasion, a post night just slip by the assholes. Make another blanket statement like that and I’ll swat your grandma live on 8chan.
I’m not angry, you’re angry!
Excuse me what the fuck did you say to me??
Reddit has always attracted a bunch of “ackchually”-ers, people who just may not be all that good at relating to others for various reasons, people looking to start shit, people looking to push agendas, people looking to one-up others over any old shit, people who have fuck all else to do, etc.
Looking at the actual post and the actual comments you must be referring to, one is just being a twat and is even getting downvoted for it, as they should be. The guy pointing out the exploration seems to have a point and be trying to help. I’m not sure I see the condescension.
