In the past week and a half, I’ve noticed Reddit behaviors starting to try and poison all of the places that people are taking refuge in to get away from the toxicity, myself included. They’ve started to DDoS Lemmy for a while, which is a Reddit thing to do and what they’re notorious of doing whenever they feel they don’t like something.
And now they’ve been trickling in numbers, these incredibly toxic users that behave as they would on Reddit. The reckless shitposting, derailing open civil discussions with unfunny and irrelevant jokes. The downvote brigading and banding together to get you banned. This exact thing has happened to me on Lemmy, that I had to leave because the toxicity was gradually building.
We should reject Reddit toxicity in general, tell them they don’t have a place here or anywhere. They know where they can dump their shit in, but they feel that because they’ve made mountains of it, that they’ve got to come over to other places and do it all over again.
I left Reddit because the toxicity levels have gotten unbearable. I really am yearning for a place where I can talk in and not be antagonized. I’m sure others are too.
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OP goes
I left Reddit because the toxicity levels have gotten unbearable.
And then seriously goes around disagreevoting replies like this one. Can we say “part of the problem”? Can we not foster a community where every counterpoint is met with that small but constant hostility? Be the change you want to see, OP, and reserve that shit for straight-up unproductive comments.
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I can block people on kbin, does lemmy not have that?
Of course, it’s more an “I don’t want to see this user” than “I don’t want this user to see me,” but it keeps you from ever engaging with people who prove themselves little bitches more than once at least.
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This. The internet is just fucking toxic now. And wherever you go, we’ll… there you are.
Honestly? It has been for ages and ages.
In 1989 a grown-ass grad student at our flagship state university tried to get my 14 year old friend to visit him downstate. (She told me all of this via a handwritten letter, mind you, but she was communicating with this creep - who wouldn’t admit his actual age - via an early text only messaging system.)
I remember the 1990s as a weird free for all, but also very gate-keepery. Oh, and those chat rooms/IMs out of nowhere were just… not even a thin veneer of “normal people doing normal things.” (I’m OK with that, but let’s not pretend).
The 2005-2010 era was all about collaboration (wikis) and forums and LORD ALMIGHTY, that almost always ended as a shitshow. Highlights from my memories of one wiki mashup:
- One kid from Slovakia faked his own online death, came back a month later and held a memorial for himself under the guise of a real-life friend of the kid. No one was buying it, and he lost his shit over the lack of mourning. It was cringe, but people were pretty mean about it.
- Another kid from Louisiana (if you believed his bio he was 11 and lived in a trailer park) was attacked by two adult men for “trying to score contribution points” on the wiki… by adding valid information to the wiki.
-An unhinged person in the Philippines threatened me with death, violence, and the destruction of generations worth of my family. That threat was delivered with the added terror-inducing information that her husband was a “lecturer at the university.”
-One of the site admin’s/owners (a Russian dude who was the equivalent of Reddit’s Spez), banned a guy… this is so stupid and complex… mainly stupid… I feel stupid just typing this out. It was Russian Spez’s birthday and a few people on the forum wished him a happy birthday. (Myself included. I mean, have a nice b-day dude. Typing costs me nothing and maybe it’ll dislodge whatever’s up your butt.) Another guy on the forum (let’s call him Derf) called us birthday-wishers “suck asses.” Whatever. Anyway, Russian Spez freaked right the fuck out, banned Derf, and started whining in broken English about why it’s unfair that we “think it’s OK that people call him suck ass.” And although I’m generally a nice person, I took this opportunity to call Russian Spez a thin skinned moron. (Seriously - I’m a 30 something woman and I’m not pitching fits over a childish taunt, but you are? And it wasn’t even directed at you? To his credit, Russian Spez didn’t ban me.)
-Was creeped on like it’s 1989 once people on that forum realized I wasn’t a dude.
-There were internecine disputes over formatting, where people in the US banded together to create a local standard that made no sense globally, people in the EU banded together to make standards that made a little more sense globally but pissed everyone in the US off because they preferred to say “Kentucky” vs. “KY”, people in Finland created their own insular state of affairs and refused to enter a debate over site-wide standards, and everyone else around the world just glowered and waited it out.
-Then there were the geo-political warriors. There were people in Iran and Iraq who fought an online proxy war over whether the Persian Gulf should be called the Persian or the Arabian Gulf. There was some drama over the South China Sea that I never really delved into. A single man in the middle east made 200 sockpuppets to defend 20 meters worth of sand in the Sinai peninsula that defined the border between Egypt and I-forget-the-hell-who-but-it-wasn’t-even-Israel.
That got into HobbyDrama territory, but the point is: Shitshow. Always has been.
People just sort of suck. And when their natural impulses towards suckiness run up against site rules? Shit gets lost. When someone calls them out it becomes a personal grievance. The lawbreaker becomes the victim.
In the end, no one can have nice things.
Wow thanks for the history lesson. That was genuinely interesting. You should write a book about your internet memoirs:-P
The thing about Russian Spez made me laugh. I’m glad you decided to keep typing it out even tho it felt stupid writing it haha
We should reject Reddit toxicity in general, tell them they don’t have a place here or anywhere.
Wait, so you’re saying we should kick out all ex-Redditors?
First they came for the Redditors, and I said nothing
Then they came for the Facebookers, and still I said nothing
Then they came for the Instagramians, and still I said nothing
Then they came for the Twits, and I laughed and laughed and laughed until I vomited
Then they came for the OnlyFans, and I think they’re still comingdeleted by creator
you should get over yourself, and not worry about calling other people names
Where and who am I calling names to? What’s this preemptive judgment of yours? See, you’re behaving exactly similar to the behaviors I’ve talked about.
Maybe it’s you that should get over yourself, you know, heed your own advice. The internet deserves to be a place to interact without the likes of you. infesting it. You just don’t like that idea and feel you’ve got to be the center of some attention somewhere.
your entire post is instructions for calling people names, you drama queen… with all the yearning and what not…
They didn’t call anyone any names. You are taking this post very personally, do you feel personally attacked by it?
that’s it, man… that’s why i’m going to all this trouble to explain myself…
Goodbye.
we’ll always have Paris… we didn’t until you said that…
your entire post is instructions for calling people names, you drama queen… with all the yearning and what not…
Could you please quote where the OP had these instructions?
check the title, smarty pants
check the title, smarty pants
“Be wary of spiteful Reddit users” is not instructions for calling people names.
OP added an adjective to describe a specific class of Reddit users. The body of the OP made it clear it doesn’t apply to all users and therefore isn’t a title.
Can you please quote where in the body or the title the OP placed instructions for calling people names?
Nope, you’re wrong. He is exactly right in his op and about you.
very well… having pronounced judgement, you, Scary_le_Poo will now pass sentence and name my punishment… my punishment for obviously being a Spiteful Reddit User™… show no mercy… be sure to make an example… that’s the only way you’ll be safe…
because your name is perfect for the job, Scary_le_Poo
Well, those certainly are words.
that’s more like it
I think maybe you are on the wrong instances. Find some better people or start your own community. And we are Lemmings not Redditors anymore.
Kbinaut here. I’m still wondering if Kbinite or Kbinaut will win out lol.
Meanwhile poor OP is apparently being haunted by the shadows of redditors calling him out for toxicity on two different websites lol.
If it smells like shit everywhere you go…
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Kbinaut here. I’m still wondering if Kbinite or Kbinaut will win out lol.
Kbean.
Honestly like this the most
How about kbinian?
I actually agree with OP. Maybe DDOS-wise it’s very instance-specific but in terms of toxicity, it’s very apparent across federated content. I mean, there are some pretty bad behaviors on lemmy.world communities already.
One option is everyone starts calling out assholes for their behavior and otherwise not engaging. It probably won’t change their behavior but it’ll at least annoy some enough they they’ll leave.
Just called one out recently. I agree everyone should be vigilant, but I also recognize what OP is saying reflects my experience (at least the toxicity part).
No, I’m not going to be told that I’m on the “wrong side” of anything just because intolerant people inhabit where I’d like to interact with. Why is it so hard for people like you to ignore others?
So tell us more about these toxic users you encounter.
“Why is it so hard for people like you to ignore others?” Why is it so hard for you to ignore the toxicity that others produce? You seem to be a bit of a hypocrite…
The fucking irony lol.
Care to explain what “people like you” means?
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The toxicity is just emanating from you.
Have you thought about joining Beehaw? They’re slightly stricter on rules but have fostered a friendly and welcoming space imo.
Kbin and Lemmy are better built than Reddit in several ways to handle those behaviours to a certain point:
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Karma: it’s hidden on Kbin, and I can’t find it on Lemmy. So, there is no pressure to post or comment something. Do you know that feeling on Reddit when you have 500 karma, you write a comment, and later you have 480 karma? That’s what I’m talking about.
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Instances with their own rules: every instance has its own administrator(s), and they can set different rules for them and apply them. Some are more tolerant than others, so in the end,your experience depends on what instance your account is. Besides, some instances don’t have downvotes, so that’s a big plus too.
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People: we all, or the most of us, know how situation was on Reddit, how we struggled to make our experience be positive, with no success. Because we know that, we don’t want that situation to replicate on these places. It’s difficult sometimes, but we do what we can.
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Defederation: as someone said here, if situation inside an instance is too hard to tackle, to the point that those bad entities harass users on other instances, then defederation is key, until the situation comes back to normal.
And there are other things, like algorithm (or lack of), code open sourced to fork if you wish, etc.
Karma: it’s hidden on Kbin, and I can’t find it on Lemmy. So, there is no pressure to post or comment something. Do you know that feeling on Reddit when you have 500 karma, you write a comment, and later you have 480 karma? That’s what I’m talking about.
Eh?
You have 3140 karma (“reputation”). It’s not hidden.
I cannot see it unless I go to my profile page, so it’s hidden to me. It’s not like on Reddit, where you could see it at the upper right corner, no matter the Reddit page you where on.
I really don’t see the purpose of karma and why places like Lemmy and Kbin feel that they have to implement. Karma isn’t my concern, it has only been my concern when it comes to Reddit because they tie karma directly to your account to where it affects how much you post and where. If that doesn’t happen at all in either Lemmy or Kbin - why have it at all?
Quite frankly, karma systems across all walks of all social media platforms is it’s own disease. Even if it serves no purpose, it has a hold on many people to think and act in reflection to how much karma they’ve accumulated. I’ve noticed the more karma someone has, the more narcissistic they become, the more that they feel they’ve above someone and feeling untouchable. Why, because their count outnumbers yours. People with low karma count don’t really care, because unless you’re on Reddit, no affects. However that routes back to my earlier point.
I can talk about a similar (karma-like) system on another site. It was a wiki-style site popular from 2006-2010.
Their original system counted a user’s creations and edits. There was the expected amount of drama around who had more creations vs edits. Creators tended to add a lot of high volume but low effort crap. Editors would get a lot of grief over ‘stealing’ entries because the idiots who created the site put the username of the last editor at the bottom of the entry.
It got worse.
Around 2008 the idiots reimagined the site and expanded the scope. They kept the shitty idea of keeping the last editor’s username, but they added a points system tied to how many new features were added. For example: if you added a town you were awarded 1 point, but if you added a street or river you were awarded 1 point for each kilometer of road or river. Shit got real weird.
It was a race towards crap. AngrySteve59 was no longer at the top of the list. He was replaced by GamerJoe84 who had racked up shit points using the new system.
Points just seem to make people crazy. “Rate me! Evaluate my work” - Lisa Simpson
Most of these are very good things except the downvotes thing. Or at least if I understand correctly, it could be the same as with tutorials after youtube removed dislikes.
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You can block users, communities and even complete instances on kbin.
Blocking entire instances still seems to be bugged, in my experience. I’ve blocked a handful of German-language instances because I speak 0 German, but still see posts from those instances every now and then.
(Tagging @Maestro for visibility)
That’s because we don’t have Instance blocking on kbin. We have domain blocking, which is not the same thing nor does it provide the same function.
Instance blocking is supposed to be coming soon however according to comments on codebase (no idea on an ETA).
What’s the difference? If I block a domain, none of the communities or posts from the instance hosted on that domain show up, right?
No. That’s what the instance block will do when we get it. Right now with the domain block, the point of it is for example, say you hate imgur.com. Why? Doesn’t matter, you just do. You can block the imgur domain so nothing from imgur, regardless of where it’s posted, will appear in your feed on kbin. If I post a picture linked from imgur on m/gaming, you won’t see it when you browse that magazine.
If you try to block an instance with that same method, posts and comments still come through fine. I’ve blocked a bunch of European instances due to language issues but the posts still sometimes comes through regardless (and many other people have commented saying the same over the last month, hence why we’ll be getting a proper instance block soonish).
Thank you
This was very helpful to know, thank you!
When I posted a few weeks back about doing the same, someone pointed out that feddit.de (the biggest German instance) also hosts quite a few English language communities. So, I just blocked the few big German communities that kept popping up in my feed instead. Maybe consider doing the same?
Vielen gruss aus Deutschland! Wilkommen und herzliche Wiedervereinigung mit uns. Wir sprechen gern Computor mit ihr!!
(Sorry to all involved about that thing that just happened there. I’m actually enjoying the German instances that I can understand about 35-65% of. IEL)
You can block users. I use the Memmy mobile app and just click on the user name and then the three dot menu on the upper right.
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Maybe switch to the normal lemmy.world interface when you want to block someone. It’s right there.
Can do right now on Kbin, FYI.
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The only real toxicity i have noticed on here comes mostly from lemmygrad
Reddit had t_d, here we have lemmygrad. I see it as a nice change of pace while making the place oddly familiar.
I went to Reddit today for a simple, politly asked question. First time in 51 days. It turned into a shitshow within 2 hours, with people being incredibly mean toward me and others. Man, Reddit has become everything I hate about social media. I use to like it because it was easy to have civil discussion, but thats gone now.
This is the Twitter effect.
The more the engaging and respectful leave for greener pastures, the more concentrated the bile left behind is… the more someone trying to be engaging or respectful is compelled to leave.
The only way out of the death spiral for Reddit is to either totally revamp the way they engage the community (not going to happen) or else to completely give up to being a mil-deep platform primarily for advertisers, trolls, and bots.
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You can’t even rant and vent about anything on there anymore. There’s like a group of self-proclaimed curators going around that is judging what’s a validated rant or not. There’s just a lot of stupid characters people play themselves up as on Reddit and even on other platforms like this one. They must live incredibly boring lives to go the lengths they’ve had to act like this, while still proclaiming the people they’re targeting, are the problem.
Even if everything you have said in this post is 100% true (and in my opinion, it is not), then the good news is that both Lemmy and kbin (and really most federated spaces I’ve joined) have excellent blocking tools. Block freely, block safely, block often if these other posts are bothering you.
I quickly looked at your kbin account, and it seems like every post you’ve made so far has to do with social networks and apps and people being mean. I know it sucks that you’ve just lost a very large community, but trust me, just let it go and you will be happier.
I have no way to know if you’ll do this, but just as an experiment: next time you see a post here that you think either comes from or belongs to The Old Place, block it immediately, and then open up Magazines (or channels if you’re in Lemmy) and pick a topic that normally would not interest you at all. Birds, movies, books, architecture, science, stamps, etc. Browse that for a few minutes and try to involve yourself in one topic. Just one. Even if you know nothing about it, ask an insightful question. It doesn’t really matter if you get any response at all or not.
Do that a handful of times every time you see something you do not like here. I’d be curious if it helps you (or anyone else that tries this) in any way. I have done this myself, and it has helped me, but that doesn’t prove anything.
KBin does not have the perfect blocking tool. A perfect blocking tool would be is if nobody saw my profile and I wouldn’t see them replying that includes a string of what they’d be saying, that’s adding fuel to the fire on purpose. That to me, is a flawed tool that needs to be fixed.
I don’t need such advice as that’s what I’ve been trying to do. But again, the blocking tool is insufficient. All users, I believe, deserve tools to lock their own threads and block. But, that’s be “bad” according to some, well, boo hoo. They wouldn’t tell anyone that they’d do the same at any given time if they found someone they didn’t like.
And I’m not fooled either, I know now that I have stalkers who’re going to follow me in every way. Just like they did referring to that Lemmy post, because it’s not stalking when they do it, but stalking if someone else did it. And I do presume there’s going to be spiteful engagements, forget about the downvoting, because that doesn’t mean anything on here.
However, I’m forever going to be the demonized one, despite the huge contrast.
When it got to the final days of reddit I began very liberally blocking people who respond with general negativity.
Might have to start back up.
Discourse? Disagreements? Discussion? Fine. But just being a dick? Nah, I don’t need your opinions on anything, really.
That’s how it’s been in my experience. The blocking ratio just amped up more than engaging. This whole thread is probably the most invested I’ve ever gotten in a long time, probably just out of morbid curiosity meets trying to find an understanding in something I already know what to expect based on previous experiences. Otherwise, the blocks have been trickling more now. Anytime I start having to have block parades on any platform, I just know that my experience on any platform is going to be limited.
People just suck at being rational people.
My recent comment history is one with obvious brigading.
A user by the name of CarlsMarks going around pretentiously presuming people are unfamiliar with Karl Marx.
Just not the energy I’m looking for.
Let Reddit go, it’s making you a bit irrational.
The idea that Reddit is staging some nefarious conspiracy to “poison” fediverse spaces … is losing the whole plot.
OP’s straight up writing fanfiction trying to cast a site they just left as villains in some swashbuckling coming-of-age story. It’s a nine-hour-old account, and they’re already embracing the Us vs Them mentality and trying to sell it with prose.
I don’t know how OP managed to pick fights within a couple hours of signing up for their account, but I’d suggest that if they left Reddit for “toxicity” only to immediately find it here too … maybe they’re carrying it around with them?
