I have been on reddit for just about 12 years now. Something I’ve noticed over time is just how hateful the place has become. A complete outrage machine. Every single sub became filled with it. I’ve filtered so many subreddits over the last few years, it’s insane. I don’t know enough about this place to be sure, but I do hope it doesn’t become the same type of echo chamber of anger.
Only if you used it in a very mainstream, surface level way. Smaller, niche subs have always been where the best communities are because they don’t attract normies. None of the subreddits I used degraded in quality and I never had issues with moderation. These problems will develop in any online community that bleeds in to the mainstream social consciousness.
Sure, but it’s still remarkable and it does change the tenor of the overall site.
At one point a couple of years ago I peeked at /all and I’m gonna say 85% of the top posts were from subreddits that were basically themed variations of “hey look at this asshole”
That shit definitely filters into the culture, and you see it in comment threads all the time where sometimes idea of a worthwhile contribution is just tagging iamverysmart or whatever
The whole site just primed itself into getting annoyed, pissed off, or outraged about anything at the drop of a hat
As I say, that’s the way all these big social media platforms go eventually. At the moment we are fortunate that Lemmy has a relatively low number of users, so a larger portion of the people who are here are genuinely interested in having a good faith discussion and engaging more with their respective communities. For this reason I’d much prefer Lemmy to grow slowly over time, rather than have a mass influx of normie redditors who are only here because their app stopped working.
So… like tumblr?
checks notes
Yes.
Just a point: don’t fall into the trap of thinking that high-intelligence or whatever you think is not “normie” is less prone to all of the very same emotion-driven bullshit as all others.
No matter how intelligent you are, you can’t out-smart your own subconscious because it’s just as “intelligent” as the rest of you.
It has nothing to do with intelligence. With everything, you have people who are passionate and everyone else who is just there to skim off the top. The latter don’t care about degradation of the thing because their interest in it never runs deep enough for them to notice or care.
That would make “normies” the ones “who are just there to skimming off the top” and “people who are passionate” non-“normies”.
Personally I would hesitate to go as far as saying that being passionate is abnormal. Maybe not the majority but not so out there as to be abnormal.
Further, I’ve seen plenty of dumb, negative or wasteful “being passionate about things” (including in myself, though I’m trying to improve). A sports fan fanatic about his or her team is passionate but if that means they’re constantly involved in tribalistic discussions that’s not a positive contribution in any way form or shape. Similarly in my profession (software engineering) the young an passionate types tend to be the most innefective of all (kinda like me swimming before I actually was formally taught how to do it - lots of throwing water all around for little in the way of results).
All this to say that I don’t think “being passionate” is abnormal or always positive.
That is what I just said, yes.
Well, anchoring your definition of “normative” to what is in the 2020s little more than a tech marketing word targetting the young and naive, is certainly an “interesting” take on mankind.
Not “normative”. Normie.
It varied for me. For example I lurked on /r/watches and would watch as the group mind ripped to shreds anyone who dared showing a digital that wasn’t Casio or a fashion watch. /R/PLC stayed good the whole time. I guess because we had a common enemy, everyone else in the universe.
I always felt the karma system fed the toxicity. People became more defensive and passive aggressive if someone had downvoted them, and there was a tendency for people to just mass downvote unpopular opinions instead of engage with the user in question. Personally I don’t like that Lemmy has an upvote/downvote system on comments either. Any time you give people a lazy way to say “I don’t like this comment” instead of actually explaining why they don’t like it, the quality of the conversation begins to deteriorate.