I have been on reddit for just about 12 years now. Something I’ve noticed over time is just how hateful the place has become. A complete outrage machine. Every single sub became filled with it. I’ve filtered so many subreddits over the last few years, it’s insane. I don’t know enough about this place to be sure, but I do hope it doesn’t become the same type of echo chamber of anger.
I was on Reddit since 2010 and it has always been a shit place. I stuck around for small subs, but Reddit at large was always a refuge for racists, misogynists, and reactionaries. I was around for the fall of violentacrez; anyone remember that disgusting creep and how Reddit gave him a stupid fucking golden Snoo for running an insane number of creepy and violent subs? Until the existence of r/jailbait became a scandal and liability, so they axed him, and the majority of users from what I could see were wailing and gnashing teeth over not being able to post sexual pictures of minors? Anyone remember the r/creepshots debacle?
Idk why y’all think there was some golden age of reddit. It was always a hellsite run by creeps and Nazi sympathizers that happened to also be an okay platform for niche forums (which, in my experience, were constantly getting trolled and harassed by the knuckle-draggers who formed the site’s primary demographic). The only thing that surprised me about the last month’s events were how many people were surprised.
I never saw this side of Reddit. I have no idea of who you are talking about either. I was there for awhile and my take was that it was an anonymous chill place to discuss things.
I learned about some things I never would have guessed and was exposed to sides of life I never would have known otherwise. There were some good times and bad. I can see an increase in aggression and bots. I do agree that taking away the down vote changes things. But I have changed too. So I don’t see it as a cause and effect. It’s just website. It’s not my singular reason for existence.
Reddit was a washed down 4chan. For those who came from a forum life in the 00’s and knew 4chan too, Reddit made sense.
That kind of content will keep happening and popping, and there will be a lot of people supporting it. Because we’ll always have teenagers eager to see fringe stuff, and social misfits that want to be seen/heard.
I think that we need to understand that Lemmy and the Fediverse can hold such things, but they aren’t at fault for that. Reddit was faulty as a corporation, but not as a platform. And because Lemmy, the Fediverse and ActivityPub are techs free to anyone, they aren’t liable for this, but the owners of the instances of these techs are.
We have already seen how this plays out, thankfully. We’ve seen a lot of instances defederating exploding-heads.com, and this is good. The same with many people saying to defederate from Meta’s new social network.
I think we need to understand that, profoundly, human beings are very heterogeneous. We’ll always have nice and bad people. And that communities reflect that. Having everything in one instance (Reddit) is not a very good solution. Having them in different instances and each one with their own ethos, makes more sense as a society. Especially because we behave like that. I usually don’t mingle with douchdbags.
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