Why it’ll only get worse from here.

  • When I read comments on Reddit I often see a lot of frustrated and burned out people with short tempers who might not have someone IRL who will listen to them vent. Like you said it makes sense, but that doesn’t make it any better.

    What makes me optimistic about decentralized social media is that the communities are (hopefully) small and varied enough where mods and admins can keep an eye on everything much easier, and step in an say “Hey, you’re not being nice right now” when someone isn’t. It’s one thing for communities to have rules, but you can’t make enough rules to maintain a culture of amicability. We ultimately need humans for that.

    • In my Reddit sub (20k subscribers), we have like a bot or maybe just a collection of people who regularly (daily) brigade the sub, mass-downvoting every single comment entirely in a post regardless of content. I literally have screenshots of people calling for it to be done - but Reddit admins do nothing. Tbf it happens to a larger version of us (200k subscribers) as well, so it’s just Reddit being Reddit: someone who is pissed off and sharing their toxicity with the entire world. At least it’s just down-votes rather than shooting up a school or something:-(.

      Whereas with down-votes being public here, something could be done about such scenarios, and mods could remove people for that behavior. Like Reddit admins, except being a member of the community that they moderate, they would actually care and act to do something.

      THIS place is totally different than THAT one, in every way that matters.