When I first started using Lemmy it seemed like such a nice place with interesting discussions. It seemed like the first group of people to join after the app exodus were being quite careful to be respectful of the existing culture.
Now, it seems as though the culture from Reddit has completely replaced it. Toxicity and all. I will say I do follow a lot of communities from a wide range of instances so it’s clearly not everywhere.
Am I the only one who’s feeling like we’ve just stormed in and bulldozed Lemmy?
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Can you link to a few comments or posts that you think represent this nasty reddit culture?
You mean the circle-jerk of six tankies talking about how the West is the definition of evil? Is that the former Lemmy culture you’re talking about? I don’t remember there being anything worth mourning.
🤓
It’s scale.
Scale is the enemy of social networks. All of them, including Lemmy.
Let’s say 0.1% of the population are just straight up assholes who ruin everything.
If you only got 100 people on a site, no one is an asshole.
1000 people? Well now you got that asshole Andy in the group. Fucking Andy. But we can deal with him.
But we scale up to 1,000,000? Well now you got 1000 fucking assholes to deal with!
If my math is right, it should be 1,000 assholes at the end.
Yeah. Morning math got me stupid. lol. Edited!
Stop being an asshole Andy!
I don’t want to be that asshole Andy. But 0.1% of 1,000,000 is 1000. :P
Derp! Thanks!!
Well, thanks a bunch, Andy.
So you’re saying it’s proportional all the way up and not a big deal, or people love assholes and upvote all their material and comments for greater proportional impact?
If anything I would argue that the first and early adopters are less likely to be assholes, to where eventually you reach that tipping point and move back towards the average, which feels worse in what is a collection of niche communities, because the average engages slightly different content than early adopters.
Moreso, I think it’s just confirmation bias. OP is hyper sensitive to a change in the culture so every example of it weighs a little more.
To be clear, like most things, I don’t think it’s one thing or another; a little from A, a little from B, and probably a slew of other factors.
I want to jump in and say that people do love assholes. You need look no further than celebrities and the people that hang on their every word.
The bigger an asshole someone is, the more theyre going to comment…
One asshole is just one asshole, but 100 assholes are going to make more comments than 1,000 normal users.
Which makes it look like there are 10x as many assholes as there really is.
lemmy.ml on a good day had like 15 to 30 upvotes on the front page. There wasn’t much of a culture before.
See the traffic in April this year, a little over 4 months ago. Lemmy.world only been around for like 2 and a half months now. That’s the most active it’s been since before the exodus. The exodus definitely helped jumpstart the site.
Yeah, my answer to “has the Reddit exodus killed the former Lemmy culture” is “what culture lmao”
Not that i was on Lemmy before, but i was on Mastodon before Elon bought Twitter and it was a ghost town.
It’s quickly getting more toxic and aggressive. But we’re not counting karma, so as soon as you recognize that someone is arguing with you in bad faith just block them.
It’s quickly getting more toxic and aggressive.
Exactly. About a month ago your most likely negative reaction would be I’m not sure if I would agree with that because of x and y but I could see why you would say that. Maybe you get ± 2 votes
Now they have to die on every hill to prove you wrong no matter what you bring to the table and magically it’s -10
And you go through their history and they have a two week old account with 27 fights picked.
Hopefully they’ll get bored of making new accounts and the block lists stay strong.
Beehaw is still pretty nice :) The moderation is part of why I joined it. I’ve definitely noticed other community getting toxic comments in the past few weeks, though
If a place is moderated so heavily that is has no nasty comments, I wonder what else is being moderated away?
Just look at the modlogs and you can see what is deleted
Lol k
I don’t think so. I used to post every day so there would at least be some content. Now I don’t feel like that’s necessary anymore. I like it more now.
This is such an “us vs them” mindset and it just doesn’t work that way.
Reddit dominated internet culture for ~15 years. Reddit culture is just what internet culture is now. Any internet community that grows to a sufficient size will begin to exhibit the dominant internet culture.
Things aren’t black and white.
Reddit used to be “nice”. Then it became toxic. And now the toxic asshats are here and the moderators do nothing.
Feel free to report toxic behaviour. I do, and usually see toxicity removed and/or banned
Yup, moderators need to know!
I’m one of those Reddit refugees. I can’t say anything about how things were before I got here, but I would like to add that I treat Lemmy a whole lot different from Reddit. When I joined there was plenty of talk about the lack of content, people only upvoting but not commenting, that kind of thing.
So I took this as a sign that I should be more of a participant and not the three-posts-to-my-name lurker that I was at Reddit. And I saw similar motivations with other users. So I do hope that at least part of the refugees have added a positive influence, and more so than they ever did when they were still using Reddit.Same here. I vote on almost every post I see, even if I’m not interested, based on if I think it’s a good fit for the community. On Reddit I just upvoted things I liked
Votes don’t matter much here, because there isn’t enough content in the first place. Votes mattered on Reddit because there was too much content, and small posts would never be seen unless you’re browsing by new. Also, people farmed karma so that they could resell their accounts, or access karma-restricted subs. No such incentives here.
I meant more like writing comments and posting things, but I like that you’re making a conscious effort to do better so do whatever you feel comfortable with :)
Also, to add to this: culture is a living thing, like people and ecosystems. Change is inherent and healthy.
It’s totally reasonable to debate whether an event brings good change or bad change, but complaining about a community being different is, imo, not healthy or rational.
We can, through collective effort, precipitate change away from or reverse negative change, and the first step to that is complaining about it.
Yes it has. You can see this in political discussions very easily. There are too many people (mostly Americans) who are accusing everyone of being a Russian bot. This did not exist a year ago.
People very often decide and insist that someone is a “repost bot!” with absolutely no evidence, as if someone couldn’t do that manually. Repost? Sure. Automated? Not necessarily.
I haven’t seen a platform that can have political discussions in good faith.
American here and I’ve seen it. The biggest turnoff is “tankie” bashing.
I had heard the term before, but I never figured out wtf a “tankie” was supposed to be until about a month ago when I joined Lemmy. It seems to be part of the Europification of US politics, which is interesting but perhaps not a positive trend.
My point is, you don’t have to accept an idea to consider it. I’ve heard good and bad from them. You know, like most people.
When I see the term “Russian bot” I can’t help but think of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEDOR and that video of it awkwardly and inflexibly shooting guns
Everyone wants to pretend like the ones who left reddit where the good guys. Most of them just want the same thing: attention, controversy and bad memes. We where a part of reddit and as such, we brought reddit here too. Maybe is not you or me, but there’s people out there who will bring their toxicity everywhere they go. Be it Reddit, Twitter or Lemmy
Yes. The old culture has completely been replaced. I still haven’t formed an 100% opinion on whether that’s good or bad. Maybe it’s neither.
The important thing to understand is that Lemmy doesn’t have an inherent culture. Nor does Reddit, or Twitter, or Mastodon, or any other platform.
They are communities, and communities naturally change as they scale.
So yes, of course Lemmy had changed. But I’d argue that the inherent strength of the whole concept of “federation” is that any one particular instance only has to witness as much or as little of that change as they want to.
If you don’t like where Lemmy as a whole is going, find (or create) an instance that agrees with you and de-federates from most others. win-win.
The point is that you are responsible for your own particular Lemmy experience in ways that you never were on Reddit.
You aspects of Reddit’s toxic culture have you observed on Lemmy?
I’ve noticed trends like AttackBunny has described. Either you post a copy and paste response in a thread or risk the wrath of like 4 or 5 people just waiting to shit on your beliefs. Certain people aren’t looking for discussions just opportunities to stroke their egos.
SFW community with a “-porn” suffix. “updoot”.
I came to Lemmy from reddit and I find it an incredibly nice place to be, full of polite discussions and fun posts. I haven’t seen any of what you’re saying.
When the rightwing communities started getting defederated, their users started making alts on the main instances.
Then you’ve got lemmy.grad which I still have trouble believing aren’t just all trolls.
I’ve never seen a logical comment from any of them. And they agree with the rightwingers waaaaay to often for it be a coincidence.
Like, there was a thread the other day filled with people saying Islam is a violent religion and no other religion encourages violence. And all 1.7 billion Muslims support terrorist extremists.
Maybe because China and Russia have also been oppressing them for centuries so lemmy.grad has to act like that’s the right move?
lemmygrad existed before all the reddit people
Just like the rightwingers instances…
They never federated each other, so they were nice to their own in their safe spaces.
Then normal people started joining on “mainstream” instances. And both groups don’t tend to do well with an average person. Because they’ve had their echo chambers so long, they’re usually the ones complaining that Lemmy has “changed” when they venture out of their own instances.
Their safe spaces are still the same, they just want all the new instances to conform to what their Lemmy experience has been instead of just sticking to their safe space where it’s still like what they remember.
Ha same. When I first started lemmy, every time I would accidentally stumble upon a lemmy.grad post I would be so confused. At first I thought it was trolls, i thought it was satire.
And yeah I also remember that post from yesterday, all the comments underneath were people telling eachother to fuck off and that every single Muslim was a violent terrorist who wants to oppress woman. I think these people probably don’t get outside much is my best guess . I have noticed quite the lack of civility in some of the threads here…
Like, there was a thread the other day filled with people saying Islam is a violent religion and no other religion encourages violence.
Any links for that one?
No idea how to link so other instances see it on theirs but:
https://lemmy.world/post/3293542?scrollToComments=true
There was like double the comments from last time I looked at it tho, it’s been a couple days
Thanks!!
I’m struggling to find any anti-Islamic sentiment in there from lemmygrad users?? (which is what I was interested in seeing … ordinary Christianity > Islam isn’t too surprising to see anywhere I’d say, however shallow it is).
EDIT: All I could find was this one comment from a lemmygrad user (along with a small exchange afterwards) that seemed to me entirely sympathetic to the Afghans and not at all anti-islamic.
Internet leftist gets spooked when they see comments that don’t perfectly subscribe to their cult. Their brains don’t know what to do but call them right-wingers and Nazis. This really is reddit.
I’m honestly not sure what you’re talking about, but I think you could work on being respectful and sincerely engaging.
No kidding. Talk about toxicity.
Aaaaand there’s the troll we were talking about
No idea how to link so other instances see it on theirs but:
I’m not sure there is a way right now.
Seen this. I commented on the lemm.ee meta discussion about considering defederating from Hexbear. I mentioned some of the things I’ve seen from Hexbear users and that I wish they’d just take a chill pill. Cue Hexbears (I assume), refusing to take chill pills.
People I disagree with all around me!! Oh the horror!!
I guess I’m just not seeing that part. Hopefully the admins do something.
I don’t feel like I see that many people from the alt right or tankies with my instance being defederated from theirs, so I don’t think them creating alts is that much of an issue, but maybe it’s because I don’t see that much political content on All/top 6h 🤔
I disagree with you in a snide and condescending tone while missapropriating your argument.
Let’s fight.
:(
I agree. Came from reddit in June. Lemmy has been a very friendly place. I just posted for advice with a typo in the title. Noone even mentioned it. No belittling advice or bickering. Just kindness and helpfulness.
Firefish is also incredibly sweet. Honestly the fediverse makes me feel good about the Internet for the first time in years.
Did the same and was helpfully informed that unlike Reddit, you can edit the title if there’s a typo in it :)
same i suppose
I did see some anti Islam memes on the atheist community but that’s not really unexpected, they’re anti all religion.
“We’re egalitarians, we hate all of you equally!”
