I’ve been seeing more often (and others have posted the same) that some of the elements of “Reddit etiquette” seem to be taking over here. Luckily I can still find discussion comments but it seems the jokes and general “downvote because I disagree” are slowly taking over.
So the question becomes is it the size or the functionality of the site? The people or popularity? What’s your thoughts?
edit: should I change it to Lemmy-hivemind? Exhibit A: the amount of downvotes without a single explanation (guessing it’s anything to do with Reddit being talked about).
We need proper platforms for discussion. Reddit isn’t such a platform.
The reddit mechanic of using upvotes and using a sorting function optimized for engagement leads to unfavorable second order mechanics.
Quite frankly Lemmy does it too. This hive mind is against LLMs for example and spouts claims without backing them up. People act like it’s obvious.
I’m not gonna share my thoughts on how to fix this. There are certainly experts out there who know more than me about game theory and rhetoric.
I think one advantage lemmy might have is the possibility of expanding the number of sorting metrics allowing users to sort things the way they choose rather than a few monolithic sort options.
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I’ve already seen hivemind votes on some Lemmy comment threads. It’s just inevitable. Hopefully most Lemmy communities can be better about the banning thing though.
How it took over: liberalism
How to defeat it: agressive communist mods
No need to thank me 😌
In group/out group dynamics are fueled by insecurity and ignorance. Reddit (the internet/humanity) is full of people who are scared of being outcasts and do not know themselves well enough to be confident. Often for good reason because there are swathes of people who will punish them for not going along with the group. The punishments are almost always disproportionate to the transgression, and continually escalate as the in-group feels completely justified in their actions due to confirmation bias.
In the case of reddit’s main demographic these are young, typically nerdy men who have experienced being outcasts, and not a whole lot else - who now relish the thought of finally being part of the in-group. They will go far out of their way to prove they belong, even if it means handling themselves in a hypocritical manner and giving up their unique interests to mirror the majority of the group. Those who do not either leave, get labeled as contrarian (and summarily dismissed) or actually go fully contrarian (not like the other girls~~)
The entirety of modern social media being built around Trends™ is all you need to see how weak people’s identities really are. It’s part of why people who are authentically themselves (Trump, Walz) are viewed as strong depending on which side of the divide you fall on. People are so busy faking it to fit in (in fear of real consequences), they’ve outsourced their entire being to the trends of the group they mostly identify with.
It’s fully baked in to small town American identity, and even those who can see how absurd it is will still be forced to choose between unjustified torment, conformity, or leaving. One of those options is safe, the other two are risky or outright dangerous. All three options reinforce the belief of the in-group that their choice is the way it’s meant to be.
In short: people are really weak and we live in a culture that has preyed on this for centuries under the threat of violence.
I think the difference is when you have a small group everyone sort of considers themselves co-custodians of a space—lifting each other up and helping people integrate. But get enough people and it starts getting exhausting constantly trying to enforce norms against an ever growing community of people who don’t understand or respect them. It’s like social enshittification.
Too much growth too fast for sure! Much harder for Lemmy to create its own culture and maintain it. Much harder to discourage toxicity. Notice how healthy communities are often smaller.
Sucks for niche communities but they’ll get slowly spun up over time, and in the meantime they can be found in other places including Reddit. I don’t personally need everything to be a one-stop shop.
I’m old enough to remember the start of eternal September. It hasn’t stopped yet.
I don’t recall when I first started using the internet. Late 80’s or very early 90’s. No WWW back then. It was all IRC and gopher and newsgroups and other things I don’t remember. I lived near MSU, so I could dial in for free because it was a local call.
And then once you got in, it was hard to find anything to actually do. It kinda felt like exploring Mars. But eventually I found things. Very exclusive club and very good times that I miss. No advertisements. No one trying to make a sale.
It kinda felt like exploring Mars. But eventually I found things
Even the world wide web felt like that until shockingly recently. I remember circa 2005 just typing in random words .com and seeing what you’d find, or discovering a cool new website by word of mouth at school.
I remember vising pig.com and discovering a delightful page consisting of nothing more than a giant picture of a pig and the text “this domain is for sale” that lasted years. These days it’s probably one of those shitty for sale landing pages.
It’s the eternal September.
I think we need to consider the norms Lemmites enforce. From what I’ve experienced: it’s often nitpicks (“I think one thing you said is wrong”), or mild insults when an opinion is outside our slightly-left-of-centre POV. Disagreement is rarely friendly, gentle, or constructive.
From what I’ve seen, we’re great at getting the big stuff right - people react quickly against child porn or overt racism/insults. But we reply with the same anger if someone has an opinion different from ours.
I have a better time in small Reddit communities because people have more shared interests. Here our prime commonality is that we like FOSS and dislike Reddit.
But we reply with the same anger if someone has an opinion different from ours.
Hey fuck you! That’s total bullshit and you know it!!
Not a single comma. Tch tch tch.
it’s often nitpicks (“I think one thing you said is wrong”)
I think this happens. I know I’ve done it but I’ve expressly stated my agreement with everything else but hey this one thing needs examination. I think sometimes people leave that part unsaid and maybe they forgot or maybe they just don’t have good arguments against.
Note I’m not mentioning anything else. It’s because I largely agree with what you’ve said or don’t think a counterpoint would be helpful.
At this point I start with a big “I agree” and state something about it, so we have some common ground. Then, if I have further questions/disagreement then I mention it.
Moderation and mods being accountable.
Public modlogs help a lot
I was thinking the same thing. Reddit is a cesspool because communities shut out anyone who dissents with a group’s opinions, allowing the group to continue thinking “everyone” believes the same thing they do. Sure it’s a good thing for mods to be able to quickly block obvious troublemakers, but there needs to be an unbiased review process in place when someone is kicked out simply for disagreeing or asking legitimate questions. Echo chambers are bad.
Telling someone they’re disgusting for being POC or LGBT+ is a good example of an action that deserves an immediate ban. Asking someone what policies a political figure implemented that benefited you should NOT be a reason for a ban, especially if you’re only banning them because you can’t answer the question.
I’m not quite sure how the process works on Lemmy, but I feel like moderation should include incremental periods. Like the first time you get blocked for a day, then a week, then a month, and finally a permanent ban. And a person should be able to request a review of their ban, which would be judged by a panel of mods from random groups and instances to limit people of like minds all piling on for the same butt-hurt feelings. There should be ways to make things more fair than just reddit’s policy of an invisible admin making decisions based on their mood that day.
On Lemmy the safeguard to mod abuse is instance admins. On Reddit this can take place, but rarely does. The only time admins on Reddit really step in is when mods are allowing illegal behaviour on their sub, or when mods are protesting against their own shitty behaviour. But on Lemmy it’s much easier to reach out to an instance’s admins if something is going wrong. Mod actions are all public, so you can create a post explaining what happened and it’s not just a “he said/she said” situation.
If they aren’t being responsive to feedback, the appropriate response is to start up a new community, preferably on a different instance. Or, in the extreme case, to block that instance entirely. You can even build a consensus to doing this with a “panel” consisting of…every user on the platform. That’s essentially how !tenforward@lemmy.world became the de facto Star Trek meme community, rather than !risa@startrek.website, after the mods of the latter community were shown to be abusing their powers and the instance admins refused to take remedial action.
It’s friendliness of the community and willingness to treat randos with respect. Responses here seem to fit a general pattern of “I agree and…”, or “you’re wrong and stupid”.
I generally have a better experience on Reddit. I’m less likely to get responses, but I get fewer downvotes there and the responses are usually nicer.
There’s a number of instances that don’t have downvotes. Notably, it forces each person who takes issue with something you’ve said to respond to you if nobody else has said it. Whether that’s better is up to you.
In my experience the lack of downvotes does make for a better instance.
I’ve no strong feelings on the matter, but I can understand how some would feel 10 people telling you exactly how you’re wrong can feel worse than 10 downvotes.
I avoid this by simply being correct all the time.
I really need to work on that.
Gamifying the voting incentivises people to make low quality posts and comments. That’s why Reddit is now basically just rage bait fake stories with comment chains that all look exactly the same. And now it’s all just ai generated anyway.
I sometimes visit and read the AITAH type stories and I’m dumbfounded that people can believe or enjoy reading them. All the subtleties and nuances of the early days are gone and it’s a race to who can karma farm the hardest.
The other thing that made Reddit great in early days were the small communities being visible on the front page. It made the content varied and there were different types of posting hitting front page. I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.
I remember when Reddit’s best “reading” threads just suddenly shifted. AITA, JustNoMIL, TalesFromTechSupport, TalesFromRetail, all of a sudden they went from realistic stories of real people venting to… just obvious rage bait. It was so disappointing. It was one of the best things to read on the bus, here’s someone going through something, can offer support, laugh about it, whatever.
It went from stories like “I had someone demand a manager when I wouldn’t offer them 40% off” to “someone pulled a gun on me at work, and my manager told me I should have punched them”. Just such horrible bullshit. That’s when I knew the site was going downhill.
Indeed. When’s the last time we saw a well-thought-out, controversial opinion on Reddit?The system breeds behaviors that are in conflict with a high-quality, diverse discussion.
It is for the same reason that I’m very particular about my downvotes. They are reserved for low-quality content, not that which I personally disagree with. I’d like if we could all learn to be less judgmental and more constructive so that we may all learn something meaningful. I think this is incompatible with the way that Reddit operates.
I wonder if separating relevant/irrelevant & like/dislike into two votes would have any success. Quite likely it would not, but might be worth trying.
Would probably rename [ like / dislike ] to [ agree / disagree ] to avoid overlapping with [ relevant / irrelevant ]. To make it more robust, make voting for relevancy compulsory if voting for [ agree / disagree ].
But the reported stats is all moot if there’s bot manipulation anyway. Also, people would most likely say it’s relevant even if it’s actually not, just because they agree with it
As someone who recently switch to Lemmy, I did notice that there is a general difference in the tone of conversation. This is the first time I’ve seen it put to words
my downvotes. They are reserved for low-quality content, not that which I personally disagree with.
There was more of that in the early days of Reddit. At some point everyone abandoned that principle, and from them on every thread became more of a battle than a conversation.
Using scaled sorting really helps with getting smaller communities on the front page. I still see the political and news communities but I also see communities for cities and niche hobbies.
I really agree with the excessive news e politics comunitties. I have a hard time setting a good feed 'cause of that
I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.
I regularly suggest people to block those communities, or consider an alt to follow those
We’ve absolutely got hive minds here - it requires extremely good and dedicated moderators to keep in check but one thing that might help is adopting my favorite hackernews rule… you are prohibited from downvoting any comments that are direct replies to your comment. That single block works pretty effectively to untrain the habit of “downvote what I disagree with”.
We also have a problem on lemmy that there is a subset of users who think that votes are how you curate your feed. They downvote anything that they don’t want to see instead of blocking communities that they aren’t interested in.
Consequence of lack of onboarding. Would be easily fixed by popping up instructions for voting and feed shaping the first time a new user votes.
Quora may be exacerbating the behaviour by automatically blocking topics when you downvote questions. They also downvote a question for you when you only want to report it for something. The downvote remains after the reported issue has been corrected.
probably an unpopular view but tbh i think voting has ruined modern forums
firstly its much much easier to game, and for big platforms to fake
but more to the point, voting makes excellent sense when the topic is something with a clearly provable right/wrong answer. eg. technical questions are ideal for voting, where the wrong information does belong at the bottom because its simply wrong and in most cases most people can easily verify if it works or doesn’t work.
instead we get voting for everything now, so it merely becomes a poll of opinions not facts, but unfortunately our monkey brains sees the numbers and somewhat equates emotions with facts.
oldschool forums ALREADY HAD a poll feature, so when we wanted a poll we could get one. now everything is a poll, and when everything is a poll nothing is especially meaningful.
I feel so stupid lol. I’m on a bunch of random forums still that I’ve been visiting since the early 2000’s and trying to figure out why things go so bad socially (grouping/instance hating/etc) on platforms like this so quick. There’s no voting on any of them, it’s such a baked-in thing here and on reddit and so foreign on forums that I just didn’t consider it for some reason. There’s definitely dissent or butting heads but it usually just fizzles out and doesn’t carry onto other posts (unless two users really hate each other, always happens unfortunately).
aye exactly. i’d rather see it gone tbh, but since voting is apparently here, and if we try to work within it, such as mentioned above where hackernews prevents downvoting replies to you.
some other ideas
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permit upvoting but downvotes require a textbox reply (imo downvoting without a valid reason is just noise, and we want signal over noise right?)
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self posts not being upvoted (all posts start at 0)
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no voting until you ‘earn your stripes’. not perfect, but somewhat helps at keeping voting within domain expertise.
eg. i ‘fucking love science’, but just because an answer feels nice to me on nuclear rocket surgery doesn’t mean my vote should count.
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It may be impossible to prevent such community-wide erosion especially on an individual basis, but I think the best one can do to at least not contribute to that erosion is maintaining a sense of vigilance about the foundational idea at the heart of Reddit’s site-wide rot: “I am smarter than the out-group, and anything I do within the in-group to increase my score affirms that I am endlessly clever and funny.”
IMO: tribal thinking.
It comes down to “they do not think like I want them to or they won’t agree with me, so I will downvote posts.”
Controversial topics are even more downvoting just to downvote.
The self-built echo chambers are already constructed; self-censorship and anything outside of their views and sources are dismissed, labeled, and smeared so as to not think about the information being shared.
It happens everywhere; the status quo is welcomed, while anything outside of it will seem controversial or extreme.
Literally nothing can be done to avoid it. The “Reddit hivemind” is the human hivemind. When enough people start contributing to a certain community, certain ideas usually unanimously shared between individuals get boosted up to the top and become general consensus.
certain ideas usually unanimously shared between individuals get boosted up to the top and become general consensus.
Weird how those ideas of yours usually correspond with something western politicians and think thanks spout on the daily.
Weird how non western ideas that somehow survive deletion are usually downvoted to oblivion or flagged and hidden.
Weird how Reddit hired a literal CIA agent to manage their content even though said person had zero experience working that role.
Weird weird weird
But everything at all times is the Reddit hivemind. Nothing can change or improve. Reddit is inevitable.
The “Reddit hivemind” is the human hivemind.
Reddit doesn’t represent the entirety of humanity. It represents a specifically self-selecting group of people that tend to come from a combination of converging material conditions that give then access and means to the site that then opt into that particular group’s increasingly-ossified norms and are provided superficial but effective incentives to continue doing so by the site’s owners.
Social groups can and do change over time, and some are better or worse off in varying ways, and they are not all “Reddit hiveminds” unless you are lazily equivocating all human social structures as “hiveminds.” What else is there? Some fantasy of rugged Randian individualism?
To say otherwise is useless fatalism, or at the least, false equivocation.
I think you missed their point. Yes, the specific beliefs held by the Reddit hivemind are specific to that platform. But the idea that Reddit has a hivemind is a natural human factor. So Reddit’s hivemind might be a centre-left liberal hivemind, HN’s might be more libertarian, and Lemmy’s is more leftist. But there’s some degree of hivemind on any platform that exposes users too each others’ content and where participating in those public discussions is the point.
A site like YouTube or Facebook lacks as much of a hivemind effect, because people aren’t on there for the discussion. They’re on YT for the videos, or on FB largely for their friends. Though both YT and FB comment sections are also proof that lacking a hivemind is also not a sign of quality.
I have a conspiracy theory take on it; I think Reddit is run by fascist admins trying to push a fascist ideology and that’s why it’s so toxic. I think techbros that run corporate social media platforms are all fash.
We talk about it as a hive mind, but I think it is actually a problem of large numbers of users and an algorithm that needs tweaking, plus some shady mods.
You post but you’re too late, or you have a legit opinion that needs a few sub comments, but it’s too late.
Or you get trolled, you respond in a similar vein, and the mod bans you but not them, because the mod likes their opinion more. And I don’t blame mods for being soft in general, because it is a shit job. But sometimes it’s frustrating.
That shit goes back way before reddit. It was a problem on digg, on 4chan, somethingawful and other vbulletin forums, Usenet, etc. it will be a problem here and every place that comes after
It’s easier to just agree with the group than do critical thinking. It’s easier to just repost the same stupid tired joke someone else just made than to be clever. etc
Yeah I’m going to show my age here. But I’ve migrated from fidonet (bbs days) to Usenet. To slashdot. To digg. To Reddit. To Lemmy. And I’m 100% positive one day I’ll migrate again.
Forums evolve and change. And once it changes go find your tribe again. Your peeps will still be out there especially this kinda tech leaning crowd.
I’ve stopped worrying about it. Humans are going to human.
