I’m an old fucker, to me it seems like the tipping point started in 2008, and really started to get bad in 2016.

I was already chatting on online forums in the late 90s, and on slashdot starting around 2000. There was lots of discussion, some of it first, but it was just discussion. Not a lot of politics per se.

In September 2001, al queda attacked the world trade center, the Pentagon, and another plane was flown into the ground. This led to lots of discussion online and a massive increase in political conversations.

In 2003, America went to war in Iraq. This was a generational event, and it fundamentally changed internet conversation. Partisanship really started to show up, in part thanks to George W. Bush’s “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” rhetoric.

At some point along the way, I stopped using slashdot. I tried using kuro5hin for a while, then Digg, and eventually landed on Reddit.

Two fundamental changes that happened in 2008 were the election of Barack Obama, and the Ron Paul revolution. In both cases, internet ground game ended up having an outsided impact on politics. Barack Obama ended up being an internet sensation, and his Democrats got the presidency and both houses of Congress by a wide margin. Ron Paul didn’t come close to winning any primaries, but the shadow of this campaign cast a long shadow over the Republican party, arguably leading to the tea party faction taking over the party for a time.

This made everyone perk up in politics. Where a few candidates realized before that this Internet thing could be powerful, 2008 showed that it could fundamentally change the game.

While reddit was highly political in 2008, there were many factions. That’s what made it a fun place to be – there were right wingers, religious people, libertarians, liberals, socialists, and social justice advocates. I think at this point, however, forces started to work to take over the discourse. By 2015, subtle changes had taken place to really make anyone who wasn’t part of a specific ideology feel unwelcome, including a differential treatment of different groups. Most brigading subs were handled by admins (by shutting them down), but notably /r/shitredditsays which brigaded “bigoted” comments was allowed to stay up. Powermods were previously a problem on Digg, eventually the same problem seemed to start occurring on Reddit where a small group of mods were controlling hundreds of subreddits.

By the time I left for good, it was clear to me that reddit wasn’t anything like the place it used to be. Many subreddits either through social engineering or through bots would see posts that were not part of the mandatory orthodoxy immediately hammered into the dirt. “The downvote button is not an I disagree button” clearly didn’t apply anymore. Until that point, I was deleting my account every few months and making a new one because doxxing was a growing problem and I didn’t want to have my real life destroyed for having an opinion people disagreed with, but eventually the site lost all value to me since I knew you couldn’t have discussions on the discussion site any longer.

The successful election of Donald Trump put everything into hyperdrive. Controlled subreddits became graveyards of dissent, and polarization became total as people picked sides. At that point I no longer returned to reddit in any regard because there was just no point.

The cultures of the different highly polarized sides became quite different, all toxic in their own ways. The left became ridiculously authoritarian to keep outsiders out, the right became ridiculously offensive to keep outsiders out. The fact that there was one website (whatever that website was) meant that you could kinda play for keeps – take over a website with authoritarian moderation or with extreme offensiveness, and you win that front.

My hope is that the decentralized nature of the fediverse helps. When Lemmy.ml or beehaw go too authoritarian, people can just find something else on the same platform that’s more reasonable. If certain websites are too crass and offensive, people can go find something else on the same platform that’s more reasonable. In it’s built-in diversity, the fediverse is set up so everyone can have their space, and the worst that can happen is someone shunts you out of theirs (but you get to keep yours).

I’ve found the fediverse actually deradicalized me a lot. There are still people I disagree with, but I get to participate in discussions that remind me that whatever the “other side” is has some good ideas, and also I get to see that I actually disagree with extremists of all kinds. Being exposed to bad ideas doesn’t make me agree with them, it helps illustrate how bad they are regardless of source.

I think genuine and thoughtful discussion takes a lot more effort than shit posting, and when you mix that with a karma system that encourages one-upmanship and a few echo chambers, it can get toxic real quick.

Its highly topic dependent:

On political things, speaking for myself, frankly, I learned a few hard lessons over the last 8ish years:

1. Lots of people don’t want to think and didn’t think themselves into supporting what they support.
2. Lots of people are dishonest about why they support/think what they do, even with themselves.
3. Unless somebody is exceptionally rational, you’re not going to change their opinion in a short online argument.

So off the bat my preference is for reasoned discussion, sure. But at the first use of the buzzword-of-the-week (“woke” most prominently right now) you pretty much need to throw all that out on the principal of “you can’t win a chess game against a pigeon”. You can just walk away, sure. But if you’re going to continue to engage you need to be aware that you aren’t actually arguing with the person, you’re performing for an audience and trying to show that the other guys position makes him look stupid, and maybe make him feel stupid too… hopefully if that happens a lot he’ll take a different position (but it’ll be 100% based on feelings, not reason). And this isn’t just online, this is in real life too. I realized that I’m too inclined to just walk away from a stupid argument, which these people view as a “win”. Instead, now I more regularly rudely and publicly make my point and make things socially awkward for everybody. It sucks and I hate it, but they’ll never shut up otherwise and that sucks too so it’s like ripping a bandaid off.

Wow, there’s a lot of finger pointing at different generational demographics here over something that’s structural to Reddit.

Stupidly big forums + up/down votes dictating what actually gets seen is a recipe for dunking, sarcasm, and generally shitty behaviour.

Onces there’s more people in a community than people can actually remember the name/pfp of, then other members stop being people and start being either an audience or cannon fodder. Couple that with the fact that people love a good snarky comment or rhetorical thrashing, and that leaves busy spaces as prime real estate for smack talk showdown.

On top of that, there’s simply the fact that anyone not trying too hard to get noticed just doesn’t get heard at all. Taking the time to post something thoughtful when literally no one is going to see it is a fool’s errand, and not worth anybody’s time. So, you either waste your time and become increasingly embittered, or you don’t, and just say vapid but snappy bullshit.

Then there’s the fact that moderators are overwhelmed by groups that large, and will default to mental self-defense by doing things like banning without warning, not being transparent, not attempting deescalation, etc. This creates a gulf between the community and the community managers, which furthers the dehumanizing dynamics (and leads to people seeing moderators as power tripping narcissists, rather than tired and fed up people).

We simply didn’t evolve to empathize with, listen to, or manage 600,000 people at once. We did, however, evolve to try to win popularity contests and define in-groups and out-groups.

As I’ve seen posted before, one of the reasons is due to enshittification. Feel free to peruse at your leisure. Greed is certainly the biggest contributing factor, but there’s another, lesser talked about effect happening here that “compliments” enshittification if you will.

It’s a sort of “reverse gentrification” of a social media platform that has just crested in popularity/usability, which in turn creates a snowball effect (or in the interest of the aforementioned process, a “shitball” effect). It’s when the good posters, the ones that actually READ the articles, the ones that make educated or otherwise well thought out comments and actually take time to speak to the person behind the computer instead of using anonymity as a means to be vile or rude or nasty, all migrate off of the platform. They see the writing on the walls, and so they leave. This leaves behind more and more of those that don’t really care about details or politics or social causes, nor care about anything other than their instant gratification (i.e. we don’t care about the blackouts we just want everything to open back up so we can get back to our memes).

In other words, as more decent people leave a social media platform, all that’s left are the ones that make the platform undesirable to begin with, thus causing more people to leave and the decline deepens. We saw this with Facebook. All that’s left on Facebook are people who are out of touch with reality and those who use the platform as a propaganda machine.

We’re also seeing a rise in what I can only describe as “Corporate Apologists” - People who constantly make excuses for companies that shouldn’t be defended or are otherwise indefensible. It is pretty disheartening to see so many people rush to the side of businesses that are openly exploiting their workforce (in some cases the defenders are the exploited, which boggles the mind). People who defend Elon Musk and his handling of Twitter, people who defend Reddit and think the blackouts were always going to be useless so why bother (those people missed the point entirely), people who defend anti-union tactics or businesses that don’t want their employees to have living wages. All of these are because the person has some self-image or interest that is tied to that business/platform. A part of (sometimes a large part of) their identity is defined by a product and so they won’t even entertain the idea of trying to go against it, lest that product or company be taken away (and a part of their identity with it). There are people who really pride themselves on their number of followers, their internet karma, other useless tokens that they attribute to personal self-worth.

Anyway, I’ve ranted long enough. I’m tired so some of what I said probably doesn’t make sense and I apologize. Maybe I’ll come back later and clean it up a bit once I’ve rested.

Nah, it’s people and algorithms. The algorithms we see today in certain social media apps etc encourage certain behaviours and patterns of use.

Not all algorithms or systems necessarily encourage productive and rational discussion or “information hunting” for practice and forward thinking.

Consider that brainwashing and warmongering propaganda is still alive and well used today in many parts of the world, the reality is that nobody is immune, but we can at least make ourselves aware of the “drug” that these systems give our brains and avoid allowing ourselves to become a victim to the system by being aware of someone else’s dogma or agendas.

deleted by creator

The real answer is that smart tech savvy people were first one reddit. Then the masses came. Then it sucked. This happened with literally every platform.

A big part of it is people are just angry and stressed in general because the system we live in is fundamentally broken (pretty much no matter where you are in the world, though I am speaking through an American lens since the majority of Reddit is American).

Everyone can feel the effects of an economy and government that just doesn’t work for them. We’re fundamentally divided on how to fix it. Minorites are directly under attack and that manages to leach into most conversations, either directly or sideways. It makes people incredibly defensive.

The fediverse has a higher barrier to entry and, statistically, tech-minded people skew liberal. We’re a self-selecting community that is just more likely to agree – for instance – that trans people are people.

Further, since these services are decentralizedv and self-hosted, we can literally make hate groups unwelcome/banned from our instances because there is no profit motivation for hand-wringing like there is with Reddit.

Because Reddit got a reputation for being lenient on people who are toxic. I gave up on general, current affairs or regional subs a long time ago it’s only smaller communities I’m leaving now.

Think of r/incels or r/The_Donald, r/GenderCritical, r/NoNewNormal etc - and they’re the examples from recent, more generally appealing years after the subs named after slurs were nuked. These are the subreddits that got mainstream attention, they may no longer be on Reddit, but their members are, and anyone who would be drawn to them is still signing up, on the other hand lots of people have been turned off the site by those associations. It’s not just that there’s lots of people joining the site, it’s who those people are.

In the same vein it’s a really easy site to astroturf and there’s no doubt in my mind that the “culture wars” are being stoked there because of it. Because there’s a market for aged accounts for use in political astroturfing or general product shilling there are companies running the same shitty repost bots everywhere to produce them. It’s a cycle that seems to be getting shorter and shorter.

@Maxcoffee

Here is what I honestly think happened: a lot of older gen x and boomers saw their reputations destroyed on Facebook during the Trump Era.

The people who didn’t leave Facebook because of them just put them on mute. They only had other old people to communicate with. This didn’t satisfy them though, because really their entire ideology is wrapped around triggering other people.

So they went to reddit and discovered that anonymous shit posting was safer and their Facebook went back to livelaughlove largely.