this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Anyone else notice how friendly, calm, and civil the posts and discussions have been away from Reddit? This place reminds me a lot of the early days.
Frankly, I think it's entirely because of the self-selected nature of the people migrating, and the fact that the whole federation thing is mildly confusing so only people who have made sense of it and worked out how it works are here. If/when it becomes more obvious and popular beyond early-adopters, it'll be targeted by all the same bots and propagandists and chudiots as anywhere else.
It's practically the same reason reddit and other online communities were so much better a decade ago - idiots simply couldn't find their way to them / it was "icky nerd shit"
It makes me giddy to think of how fast people are working on readers/apps for Lemmy that will make all of this way easier for more people to adopt.
Yeah, but i feel there's a lot to be done in the base lemmy protocol too - such as migrating your account to another server - should the current one fall etc etc
Of course mastodon is the most mature in this regard, I hope lemmy does too
But since we can make our own instances easily, we can get rid of the rif raf more easily than on reddit
I really hope this doesn’t lead to people forming their own echo chambers and instances become “teams”
Well, it's bound to happen to some extent (e.g.: instances blocking lemmygrad), but you have a lot of power to mitigate this effect as an individual user. By default, nothing's blocked, so it's on you as a user if you choose to "live" somewhere that's interested in proscribing undesirables.
It's not a perfect solution. Perhaps leadership changes (or you change) and suddenly your interests are no longer aligned. Nobody wants to get stranded! Eventually maybe user migrations will be a thing, but for now we'll just have to do our best to choose our home-bases wisely based on our own ideological and practical needs (SDF represent!)
I already found my way, commented and subscribed to other instances from beehaw and I wasn't even aware I did it at first, tbh. I don't know if they all connverse seamlessly like that, but hopefully we will be able to keep it nice and civil.
Can you though? There have to be communities to join, and they are what get polluted. As I understand it, switching instances won't help.
Someone then has to police a community if you want to "get rid of the riff-raff" and they will follow who-knows-what criteria for their policing. Just look at all the right-wing subreddits for an example of how policing doesn't necessarily raise the quality of discussion.
I think you’re right. It seems like there’s a pattern for every new platform.
Early adopters make the the site fun, valuable, and worth while
People start to notice and the platform grows, becoming slightly worse, but still pretty cool.
Platform explodes in popularity and it goes to complete shit.
It’s happened with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. I’m sure that day will come for this place as well. I guess we’ll just need to enjoy it while it lasts.
I think the instance thing makes botting a bit easier to avoid if they make them in a new instance. Idk
It really is a breath of fresh air, and has highlighted for me how dumb and angry so much of Reddit has become.
I think the major turning point was around 2016. That’s the first time I began to feel like my guard needed to be up with every single comment from there on.
A few small pockets of civility survived here and there, but everything else has drowned in bots, ads, and trolls for so long that it's shocking to come here and be able to click on a random post and see civil discussion as the default. That tone needs to be set and maintained. Basic decency and civility are really not that hard, even when people disagree. We lost that somewhere along the way.
It's so nice to not see GPT-3 bots replying to literally everything, like they have been for like 2 years now on Reddit.
It felt like every other comment on popular subs (like r/AmITheAsshole) was a bot calling out another bot for having scraped and stolen a comment from someone farther down the comment chain. It makes me think that a significant portion of the traffic being seen still active on Reddit is just bots talking to each other. That, and porn subs, probably.
This is interesting. I had no idea this was a thing!
Yeah the problem with GPT is that is soo convincing that's not easy to spot, unless you try to force it to say something unethical then it tells it can't :D
It was more prevalent in cryptocurrency subs earlier on I think, but all the accounts shared a similar format for usernames and their replies would always just restate what the comment they're replying to said, just worded slightly different. Has been going on for a long while before the OpenGPT/ChatGPT stuff blew up near the end of 2022.
It’s been so enjoyable!