I’ve mostly left reddit and switched to beehaw, but I posted on somewhat of a niche tech-related subreddit today since there really isn’t a community for that here yet. And wow, I got instantly downvoted twice and the first comment response was rude and hostile. All I posted was a feature suggestion for software that I thought would be useful and that a good amount of people would like based on other feedback I’ve heard. This is not the sort of topic that should be controversial or aggravating, and it wasn’t like I made an ignorant post suggesting a feature that already existed or otherwise wasn’t well researched.
This type of instantly hostile response has happened numerous times on reddit for various different topics, but I just haven’t posted for a while, so I forgot just how shitty it can feel. It makes me really appreciate how friendly and respectful the community is here on Beehaw and on Mastodon. People seem to have good faith in one another similar to how the internet used to be in the old days.
Have you had similar experiences with Reddit and similarly opposite experiences here on Beehaw/Lemmy?
Have you had similar experiences with Reddit…
Countless. It’s one of the reasons that I am devoted to Beehaw.
one of us
And we appreciate you!!
This is the biggest reason I left reddit. It made me never want to post anything, and reading the comments section most of the time just made me angry. People are much nicer here!
I didn’t realize how afraid I was to comment or post until being on here. Almost low-key traumatized. Really has been making me question what social media can ‘bee’ and how many people resort to lurking when perhaps they’d rather engage
I totally get it. When you get that kind of reaction to just trying to contribute or you read a toxic comments section, it makes you wonder why you should contribute or be there at all!
Also more willing to engage from what I’ve seen
Your father smelt of elderberries! :P
Indeed, it’s especially challenging within programming subreddits, as they can often appear anti-community. If you introduce a novel project, the immediate response can be insulting and berating. Criticism is often targeted towards those who dare to take a different approach, rather than contributing to existing projects.
As a result, I’ve largely withdrawn from Reddit and turned to alternative services for updates within the programming community. Maintaining an honest dialogue on Reddit can be tough without others attempting to derail the conversation. Any slight mishap, such as a misspelled word while responding on a phone, is seized upon and used to insult and belittle, thereby undermining any chance of relaxed discussion.
Beehaw isn’t without its issues, either. However, these are growing pains and it falls to the moderators/administrators to steer the community in a direction that fosters a welcoming environment for honest dialogues.
Any slight mishap, such as a misspelled word while responding on a phone, is seized upon and used to insult and belittle,
Ah, the grammar nazis.
Don’t miss them 😀
Fucking hell. Yes I made a typo or used the wrong their your while hastily rattling off my post. IT DOESNT MATTER. You’re being a pedantic jerk and your reply is not entirely relevant to anything I said. No you arent being helpful, and I wish I could fire your bot that autoreplies needlessly into a fucking cannon.
Right? I’d see a couple of notifications pop up in my browser and my first thought would be “Oh, fuck, what did I say that pissed everyone off this time?”
It’s actually be kind of hard to turn off “reddit mode” when I comment here; I honestly didn’t notice how I’d started to enter every comment thread with defensiveness and verbal aggression/threat displays right off the bat, as an anticipatory maneuver. There’ve been a couple of times where I re-read something I commented here and said “Oh, that was an unnecessarily aggressive way to phrase that. I hope nobody sees it before this edit goes through.”
Oh gosh, I don’t miss that feeling of dread every time I see a reddit notification
I really think there are more bots than people realize.
yeah, it’s a lot nicer here
Your mother was a hamster!
Come to think of it, I too, notice the difference. How nicer people are on here.
Here’s another thing that I don’t miss about Reddit. I am glad there is no downvotes on Beehaw, there is not this constant passive aggressive downvoting which was really frustrating.
But yeah, I guess that what I don’t miss the most is it’s comment section. I don’t miss the constant hostility for no reason. I don’t miss the whole comments section being filled with masturbating monkeys every time there is a women in a picture. And I know, it sounds like I’m a fucking white knight or whatever, but that used to bother the hell out of me!
Every time, EVERY TIME you would see a photo with a woman as the subject of the photo, the common section would be unbearable to read…
Same thing, I also don’t miss seeing a video or a picture with a black person on it and seeing that the comments section has been locked. And I don’t even have to wonder why, I know why.
I don’t miss the frets that are political in nature, talking about things like racism or queerphobia, going on there, and just seeing a locked comment section, with giant, sprawling discussions, of just deleted comments after deleted comments, with entire threads being nuked.
…I guess I just don’t miss the bigotry and people being all around assholes.
You know, I’m writing this, and I’m just realizing how horrendous that place was, actually.
I guess, overtime, you end up getting used to it, or maybe, just getting numb to it. And you should never get number to seeing stuff like that, that’s not normal. Bigotry, people acting like assholes, it should be outrageous, it shouldn’t be just something that you’re so used to seeing that it makes your roll your eyes. But I know that here, when I see a bad take, when I see someone behaving like an ass, it sticks out, it jumps out of me. I see it immediately, and I get frustrated with it. Because I am not numbed to it, because it isn’t common here.
Maybe I am now in a bubble, in a safe space. Maybe. Screw everything else, I’m not leaving. I like it here. Real life is already stressful enough for me to be annoyed by people on Reddit.
I thought I would miss it. I don’t. I haven’t returned ever since I made an account here. The only times when I check read it, is if I’m looking for something, like, I have an issue with a game, something like that, I look it up on my search engine, and often, I would get linked to a Reddit thread about it. But that’s it. Other than this, I don’t go on it, I don’t interact with it, I don’t log into it. And I don’t miss it.
This was like leaving social media for me, when I left Twitter and all of that, good fucking riddance.
I uninstalled RiF about a month ago. I needed to find some documemtation for an Assembly project so I checked the subreddit sidebar on desktop.
My god. It’s just a toxic shithole of bots and perpetual rage posts. I’m so happy to be anywhere else. This place is and the Lemmy instance programming.dev is too. I’m on Tildes and Bluesky because, why not? I’m not hesitant to post or comment at all anymore.
It was like leaving an abusive relationship I didn’t know I was in.
This. I used to be embarrassed sometimes as I knew what the comments would be like. Why any woman would include herself in a photo on there was beyond me. It was like they were setting themselves up for a hard time.
And I don’t miss it either. Beehaw is a breath of fresh air. Long may it continue.
Maybe I am now in a bubble, in a safe space. Maybe. Screw everything else, I’m not leaving. I like it here. Real life is already stressful enough for me to be annoyed by people on Reddit.
I think reddit has, in a way, the worst of real and digital worlds. As in the real world, there’s a lot of people who react, let’s say, not nicely; the digital angle provides anonimity and distance, which emboldens people. Combined with the fact that the top upvoted comments in reddit tend to be non sequitur jokes, and you get a lot of people trying to one up each other in their snarkiness.
yeah, i noticed since leaving reddit and coming here in the last month or so, my tolerance for that kind of bullshit has gone down. and that’s a good thing, i think it’s better than being so exposed to it that you become numb. inclines you more towards action
I agree with you, I gradually became more lurky because the interaction with others was terrible. I hated talking to people.
So far on beehaw it’s been overwhelmingly positive, and my dumb questions didn’t receive snarky remarks or vitriol. Sometimes, people just want to ask a question and create a discussion. That’s mostly me, I’m sure I can find a lot of answers myself, and usually do, but every so often I just want to talk about something with someone, so I’ll repeat a question which was asked 2 years ago.
Besides, asking the same question again could lead to a different discussion anyway. It’s terrible to tell people to “just Google it”. Yeah, they could do that, but its such a negative response. Could easily just say “Hey I found this link on Google, here you go. Try looking into x, y or z and include that in your future searches, let me know if you have any other questions”
Not to mention, the “just google it” comment is also terrible even if it was made in good faith considering how bad Google seems to have gotten at providing actual useful search results. Hence, why so many people add “Reddit” to the end of their search query, just making everything full circle. You’re providing the content people are googling by making your post.
I find it interesting that while I don’t yet have many posts/comments on beehaw yet, I find myself significantly more motivated to interact with the community than I ever did on reddit. I think it’s that the community tends to legitimately want to have a conversation rather than seeking validation or wanted to feel superior to others.
It’s terrible to tell people to “just Google it”. Yeah, they could do that, but its such a negative response. Could easily just say “Hey I found this link on Google, here you go. Try looking into x, y or z and include that in your future searches, let me know if you have any other questions”
I felt that to the core. I’m a mid-level software engineer (and by no means do I claim to be an expert on anything) and I sometimes find myself getting frustrated with some of the newer developers when they seem to continue asking the same question to me. That being said, I don’t think I’ve ever been deliberately mean to any of them, maybe just short with them if I’m under a lot of stress (which is something I’ve been working a lot the past year or two).
Telling someone to “just Google it” is very deliberately being mean or rude just to be mean or rude. I’d rather have an empty thread that no one replies to over being talked to like that. No matter how green or nieve someone may be, they still deserve some level of respect.
I ask forums AFTER I’ve Googled, I don’t want the first answer on your search results either, didn’t you read my post? I already tried that:-(
Too many morons use the downvote button as a “Dislike/Disagree” button. It’s why I like that downvotes are disabled here. If you disagree with someone, you’re encouraged to actually have a discussion instead of lazily pressing the downvote arrow and leaving.
Yup.
I’ve seen it used quite effectively as a way to supress discussion, actually.
In the France subreddi, which I was quite active in, as I’m French, if you sorted by controversial, you would often find Queer related topics. Especially Trans issues related threads. Just downvoted to oblivion. But, It’s not like people were disagreeing or anything, all of the few comments on there were positive. It was just a really effective way to suppress discussions about those topics.
As most people sorted by Best, all it would take was a couple of initial downvotes on your thread to bury it for the vast majority of people.
And it worked. Every so often, I would check what was in controversial that day, or that week. Without fail, I would see some of those topics on there, topics which were rarely discussed in this sub, because it was actively being suppressed by the downvotes.
Once I noticed this pattern, I began to check some subreddits, and I noticed the same thing happening on a bunch of them. Often, targeting the same subjects.
Yeah, I’m really loving the downvote feature being gone. I’ve been on another forum that had a noticeable decrease in toxicity when they removed their dislike reaction too.
Voting is also public, so when people do use them they need to be prepared to stand by it a opposed to using it with anonymity.
I’d suggest not calling them morons. Maybe people don’t know how stuff works. That’s normal, and it’s up to the people who do, to provide some guidance.
If I’m being called a moron for being ignorant I can easily get defensive, and other people might turn aggressive. It just fuels the vicious cycle.
It got so bad on reddit that I would hope my posts wouldn’t hit the front page of a sub, and often when I’d comment I’d immediately disable inbox replies.
Someone in another community linked an archived reddit thread, and the unnecessary hostility and toxicity were readily apparent since I hadn’t been on reddit for a while.
What’s scary is how I started to feel numb to it and even feel like I started to become like that myself.
Oh man, that’s intense. I know what you mean about that kind of hostility fostering more hostility even within yourself. It’s not a good environment for anyone.
I got into the habit of disabling notification of comments and posts of anything I submitted back on reddit. Didn’t feel like getting caught in a chain of arguments.
Sometimes I’d feel exhausted just imagining the potential arguments that even my most milquetoast comments would often attract.
Sometime in the past few years I feel like reddit devolved into an argument fest. It seems like the only thing anyone is interested in is arguing or saying rude or hateful shit in the comments. It turned me off to commenting tbh and even pre-api nonsense made me realize I didn’t enjoy reddit the way I used to.
It’s nice here still, and hopefully stays that way. Sometimes I’ll write something that I realize could be taken as rude and I’ll feel like an absolute asshole until I fix it. Like I’m worried I’ll upset someone when I didn’t mean to… I haven’t given something like that a second thought on Reddit in years.
Also if anyone reads a comment from me and I sound like an asshole, please let me know! It’s almost certainly not intended, especially anywhere on Beehaw.
Also if anyone reads a comment from me and I sound like an asshole, please let me know! It’s almost certainly not intended, especially anywhere on Beehaw.
This kind of energy is why I like it here on Lemmy, and especially Beehaw. Being nice should be the default. On Reddit, I got downvoted so many times just for asking a question in good faith. Then if getting downvoted bothers you, you get mocked further. “It’s just the internet, grow up” kind of stuff. Downvoting may not be a big deal to some people, but some don’t understand that it can have an effect on your mental health to feel rejected so much. You don’t know what other people are going through, having a heavily downvoted comment could even be a last straw for someone. Getting constantly insulted and downvoted can feel like the whole world is against you if you’re in a bad place. And a lot of people are in a bad place, especially since 2020. A lot of people are lonely and only have the internet to talk to, and if the internet rejects you too? It hurts. It’s not that hard to be nice, especially to people who mean well. I hope Lemmy stays like this as much as possible.
I would also like to be notified if I sound like an asshole about anything. It sounds dorky, but spreading even small moments of positivity really does have an effect on our world. We can see the damage that rage bait has done to people. Little things add up and they do have an effect on all of us. Let’s try to spread kindness as much as possible.
I’m reminded of the Monty Python Argument sketch ;-)
It depends on the instance in my experience. Beehaw is a good one though, I feel.
Yeah It’s really instance dependant. And I really like that about Lemmy. If I want to have a nice corner of the internet I can be on beehaw and if I want to have the most content but with less cozyness I can use lemmy.world.
I agree with OP and the general consensus of the comments here.
This may sound corny, but all I really wanted to add to this thread is…thank you. Thank all of you for being so kind. So human.
I really hope the positivity of this platform continues on, as it’s truly been a bright spot slipping through the dark clouds of the internet.
Rock on, Beehaw. Rock. On.
Honestly, Reddit was really good at the start, but they took too long to react to communities like: FatPeopleHate TheDonald FemaleDatingStrategy The child porn reddits
These people stretched their tendrils or worked around the admins, and eventually, were deeply engrained in reddit.
I’m not even sure why they didn’t react immediately. But, I feel like allowing these communities to fester for years had real life consequences too.
I don’t like that we can’t make communities in Beehaw ourselves, but maybe, it is neccessary until later to prevent communities from showing up
I’ve read that Aaron Swartz was tolerant of free speech in any way shape form, thus the acceptance of anything under the sun.
I’m not sure about that, but definitely possible (free speech always sounds great, until the racists take over)
But, I did love how the toxic bigoted crowd all turned on Ellen Pao thinking she was stifling their speech (and probably because she is a woman), only to discover she had seemingly actually protected a lot of it, and then getting their communities banned soon after (not to the extent Steve needed to ban them though of course)
Agreed 100%.
Mastodon and Beehaw, generally, lack the severely aggressive bent in the comments sections. I’ve run into one person who seemed to enjoy that sort of thing, and blocked them outright. I’ve been on Mastodon since October and can count on one hand the number of people I’ve blocked.
The Fediverse is nicer.
It’s nice as long as you don’t want to talk about major world events on major worldnews communities which are infested with little pinks. Then you just end up banned for not being communist enough.
Off topic. But is your username an FFVIII reference?
It absolutely is. 🙂
Between that and my Griever tattoo, I guess I’m a bit of a fanboy.
Oh man. I love that game. At this point I play through it a couple times a year. I don’t have any tattoos. But I have a plan to get the Jumbo Cactuar Triple Triad card tattooed eventually.
Have you shared your tattoo on the Final Fantasy community? I’d love to see it.
I haven’t, but perhaps I should head over there…
I was always apprehensive about asking questions on any programming subreddits. If I got any help, it would be buried under dozens of “RTFM” comments, or worse comments that made me feel like I hadn’t earned my programming dues because I was asking for help rather than being clever enough to figure it out myself. The things that annoyed me about this type of response were firstly, why did the subreddit exist if not to help. And secondly I kept thinking about the young programmer who was starting out asking questions just being put off by the hostility.
Unfortunately it seems like every programming forum ends up like this in some respect - reddit just gets the most distilled hate-train version of it. It’s a real bummer since much of the time teaching someone properly would take just as much time as being a jerk and it’s just as fulfilling if you let it be.
You’re absolutely correct. I remember years ago I was stuck on a bit of VB script that was vital for my work and a guy basically rewrote my code and put passive aggressive comments like
//another person who thinks he’ll learn programming by getting somebody else to do all the work for him//
And this was all over my code, that i had struggled over for days. What annoyed me the most was my question was about a specific point in the code that was broken. I think of how much effort went into that answer.
Did the person even respond specifically what the question was about? I assume they re-wrote the program because they couldn’t be bothered to explain a complicated exception.
I don’t envy you from the past - VBA is difficult to write in a way that is both clean, easy to debug, and easy to maintain. We have some legacy VBA apps deployed at customers that just won’t die.
He did answer the question - I can’t recall what the actual problem was. I’d taken some VB script written by an old colleague, that parsed a few thousand rows of data and had to do a number of things to it. There were a number of conditions that had to be met and then certain records were modified and sent to another spreadsheet where a mail merge was then set up to send out reports individually. I had no experience of VB, but worked my way through it and was stumped by an error that was being thrown half way through.
The most annoying thing about responses like this dude is that I had kind of liked solving this VB problem and I may well have stuck with it further. But being a little younger and less mellow I kind of solved the problem with his help and never looked at VB again. And to be clear, they didn’t rewrite the script, they just took the time to put comments up and down where things were done that were not going up to his standard. Imagine being a beginner coder having your code taken apart by an obviously experienced programmer sarcastically. Let’s just say I’m glad there’s a place here where I might be able to ask for help
Hmmm well this is one area that Reddit SHOULD be good at.
My experience was more with Linux, where people will go to Reddit not having a clue how to request help, and not bothering to join their distribution forum.
Sometimes the best answer is simply a link - like RTFM
Effort goes into answering repeated questions, writing guides etc.
So people expecting too much to be done for them can be slightly wearing… sometimes the best solution is actually for people requesting the help to learn to
entice people to help yourather than expect it as if it’s their job.r/firefoxCSS was a good example of this - where people were keen to solve your problems.
The hostility was exhausting and constant, but equally so was knowing I would have to bake in a bunch of qualifiers into my post to try to head off common bad faith arguments at the pass. When you’re doing this for the very real problems you’re having just existing in society as a minority, it’s absolutely soul-sucking. Even if you know it’s by design, you’re still just one person dealing with a lot of weighty garbage in real life who then has to deal with redditor JAQing/name calling/strawmanning the minute you try to talk about it to try to offset even a fraction of the emotional burden.
I am pretty happy to watch reddit die. Less happy when I think about how this can further distill the abuse within a lot of current discourse.
Oof yes, the bad faith arguments. Especially plucking out six words at a time, and treating them like standalone comments devoid of context. The comments feel so smug - perhaps they’re supposed to be.
And if you make your comments 3x longer to remove as much ambiguity as possible, they instead complain that it’s too long to be worth reading. Either way they’re clearly better than you, so why try talking to them 😅
I can relate to that a lot. I usually also comment on niche subs with a help question. Not sure what it is about reddit that makes the common redditor act like a hostile person with a superiority complex. It’s very irritating, like they do the opposite of touching grass 24/7 and hate you for posting.
Beehaw and Lemmy are much smaller so that’s also why the quality of the people here is just overall better. the moderation style in beehaw also helps. It also helps me feel like I can freely comment the way I want to.
For reasons I already pointed out several times (and which I don’t mind pointing out again), I had severe anxiety and rejection sensitiveness when I wrote comments on Reddit, fearing their responses. Sometimes those fears were correct, and sometimes don’t, but the fact that I suffered those things was enough to feel myself in danger. Twitter, Reddit, all was the same shit regarding interaction with other people.
Since I joined the fediverse and became more active, those fears were lowering. That, and the fact that I’m taking medication for my ADHD. But a good environment and friendly human interaction help too.
This very much resonates with me as well. As someone with anxiety issues, it’s the reason why I almost explicitly lurked on Reddit. But I feel much more comfortable conversing and contributing to the fediverse (especially Beehaw) due to how friendly and conversational it is comparative to the mainstream, proprietary social media sites.
I was a chronic lurker on Reddit. I remember only posting on r/r4r, r/ADHD and r/StratteraRX most of the time. I don’t remember having posted on any other subreddit. About commenting, the sample was wider, but still not significant. Two years on Reddit and 2800 karma. Fuck karma.
Are you me? I felt the exact same way. Then if it hurts, you have to hide those feelings too because people will make fun of you for being “too sensitive.” “It’s just the internet, get over it.” Rejection sensitivity is real and it sucks. I quit commenting on Reddit because of that. I never understood why people think the internet isn’t a real place, so it’s okay to be cruel. We may be somewhat anonymous here, but we’re still people with feelings. If you’re mentally in a bad place, little things can really feel big. They add up.
I recently got on meds for my ADHD, too. It’s helping me a lot, I hope you’re having good luck with yours too. :)
You absolutely didn’t have to show your feelings, that would have made things worse. And no, it’s not just the internet, it’s the fucking real life, and the internet is one part of that real life. People should behave on the internet in the same way they behave on the street with other strangers, especially when those strangers have disorders or disabilities.
My medication seems to be working, but it’s really hard to tame. It’s atomoxetine, and I think that says a lot.
Yes, totally. There is a real sense of hostility on most subs. (Larger ones anyway) It’s so hostile I’d always think twice about speaking my mind about anything. Like going back to high school or something.
Thinking twice is right. I’d often write out a comment and decide to scrap it instead of posting. It wasn’t worth a potential headache if I caught someone on a bad day.
Did you go back to high school? I recommend it; although, the one downside is that if you then go to post-secondary after, all the first year courses will just be repeating what you already learned. At least for my experience in Canada.