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.

    • 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?

      • I’m 99% sure OP has made multiple accounts to try to sell their 'ex-Redditors are evil" schtick. I saw a post this morning from someone with a similar name pretty much saying the same thing.

      • Painting Reddit as a monolith in general is a problem, too. “Reddit is toxic?” Some subs, sure. But certainly not the ones I subscribed to. Some of them might have had bad actors here and there. But they were usually dealt with by the mods.

        In the end, the only toxicity that drove me away from Reddit was the toxicity from the CEO.

      • Do you just love living a life, where you think you know everything and place people in some little organizer that you define people as, personally? Because you’re doing exactly the same thing as you’re claiming as to what I’m doing, just to make yourself look better and righteous.

        That’s the kind of mentality I see all around Reddit as also. Nobody is accountable for their own behavior, it’s always the other person’s fault and it’s always the other person who is the toxic one. Somehow. Someway. Despite condemning evidence to the contrary for all to see, how it’s all of the people pegging rocks at them. It’s exactly how it is in school, with bullying, only it’s amplified online. Does it make you feel superior? Does it make you feel better? What is the precise reason do you feel, that you have to behave this way?

        I’m pretty confident it is some insecurity within you that you shroud so well, but I can see the cracks already just by your reply alone. May I advise that maybe you should take some time outdoors, instead of like, making up characters out of baseless assumptions to satisfy your pseudo intelligence?

        • I criticized you for jumping to conclusions and fabricating narrative to support them. And apparently you got so offended by the criticism that … you went and did it all over again, targeting me, committing even harder to the bit.

          You just wrote a bunch of wild fanfiction about me and then tried to have an argument with that imaginary version of me. Might as well just yell at ghosts in the shower if you’re that desperate to feel like you’ve snatched some petty victory from the jaws of self-inflicted defeat that is this thread.

          You’re the problem with your own experience.

          This response is hugely excessive for the “provocation” and yet I’m sure you’ll storm off imagining that I’m the big meanie here and you were some completely reasonable and utterly justified saint of good behaviour - for absolutely going off on someone who gently mocked your very serious demands for everyone to be nicer to you and meaner to the people you dislike. And you’ve done that to everyone who wasn’t fawningly positive towards you in this thread - that you started by being hateful and childish towards a site you just left and the userbase of the site you just joined.

          Even with the tiny sample size I can see why you have so many encounters with “toxic” people. You antagonize and attack people, then pretend they were the toxic ones if they defend themselves.

          It’s not hard to miss that you’ve just happened to call me all of the things that other people have told you about yourself in this thread. Hell, this whole little speech would have been far more appropriate as something someone said to you, if they were trying to hurt your feelings; so given how off the mark it was when directed at me, it’s easy to wonder if maybe you’re projecting a little here.

  • 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 coming

  • Are you the same person as this guy? You seem to keep making new accounts and posts to hide your post history and complain about redditors.

    I certainly can’t know whether what you’ve experienced is actually toxicity or just criticism, as I can’t see your post history. But any site with sufficient mass will be flooded with people like this. All the way back to 1993.

    Part of being online anywhere with open signups and free discussion is just dealing with that sort of thing. The only way to prevent it is to spin up your own defederate instance and only allow people to join who you deem worthy of conversation with.

    • Oh nice, stalkers. Cool, said no one.

      And no I disagree, the only way to prevent toxicity is for a moderation team to give a damn and maybe for the toxic users to realize that they won’t be tolerated. I’ve never understood this stance where the “best” way to deal with something is to just find your own gathering. I don’t have a following and I don’t want to develop some following so I feel like I can talk. Everyone should have the privilege to talk where they want without the pressure of being antagonized.

      The problem isn’t the other people. The problem is the individuals who get confrontational and pose problematic behaviors. Not the other way around.

      • If you keep trying to change human nature you’re going to be disappointed.

        Complaining that other people do not live up to your standards is tiresome.

        Easier to go where you are comfortable than to insist others change their behavior.

        • Who says I’m trying to change the entirety of human behavior?

          What standards?

          I’ve been hopping an awful lot from platform to platform at this point, trying to find this “comfort”. You and other people have been encouraging this idea of isolation which isn’t healthy on the human mind, just so you know, so you’re coming off as blatantly unhelpful.

          Changing people’s behaviors isn’t my goal, infact, I am having difficulty finding this invented problem you’ve made about changing people’s behaviors. When, all I’ve said up and down, that I’ve noted of said behaviors and that I advocate we should not welcome it. Where are you getting this concept, besides inventing it, that it is about changing behavior? You can’t change an asshole’s behavior, they’re going to be assholes regardless. All I’m saying is to reject it and make them unwelcome because they have no place in ecosystems where we’re all trying to collectively be contributing and civil whereas, they’re not.

      • The problem isn’t the other people. The problem is the individuals who get confrontational and pose problematic behaviors. Not the other way around.

        No one else has been confrontational in this discussion except you.

        You are using Kbin, which means you can block not just magazines/communities, but instances, and individual users.

        I imagine increased moderation will come in time, to some communities on some instances, but frankly one of the benefits of the Fediverse is the control it gives you over who can and cannot make it into your feed. This is a lot of foot stomping about something you can largely control yourself.

        • You are using Kbin, which means you can block not just magazines/communities, but instances, and individual users.

          This. I really think they haven’t got their head around what kbin is, yet.

  • Kbin and Lemmy are better built than Reddit in several ways to handle those behaviours to a certain point:

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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

    • You’re overshooting the problem and I really doubt you care about me so drop the act. You didn’t even read a single word of what my post was about, so you’re just like the few here who’re running off baseless assumptions, twisting contexts and regurgitating through your own filter to come to the conclusion you’ve made.

  • People on Lemmy can be a bit rude at times, but it’s not like they’re actually toxic. A huge proportion of Lemmy (and mastodon) users have tech background, and this demographic are often very direct and don’t mince their words when posting online, which can appear to be rude and unwelcoming. Just keep your head cool when talking to them.

    That being said, toxic people do exist here though, the kind of people that downvotes and do personal attacks when people post something they don’t like instead of doing civilized discussion like normal people. Most people here probably know who I’m talking about lol.

  • 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.

    • 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.