Just putting that out there. While we might have struggle sessions over bullshit, the larger internet zeitgeist is putrid and rancid.
Just putting that out there. While we might have struggle sessions over bullshit, the larger internet zeitgeist is putrid and rancid.
The thing that makes all 3 of those places good is that the userbase is talking to each other authentically instead of writing comments to secure votes.
On the wider internet most people are writing their comments not for the person they’re actually replying to, but for the audience that will be voting on the comment. Social media has now trained people into this mindset and it has produced a rancid style of inauthentic interaction.
Even with people I fucking hate and disagree with I prefer an authentic interaction where they’re actually responding to me and having a real conversation compared to where they’re responding for a perceived audience of voters. This is now almost impossible to find online.
I will say however, the times where that hasn’t been the case here on Hexbear have been some of the most toxic experiences I’ve ever had online. When a hexbear turns bad-faith it gets really nasty.
It has been really nice to not have a platform filled with one-uppers and combative ppl trying to drive engagement and “go viral” with every comment. It also really helps to have mods that have our backs, and aren’t going to allow stormfront/reddit-tier bigotry.
I think people are pretty combative here, viciously so sometimes. But it’s still authentic, they have an exchange that is still very direct and not targeted at who is voting.
This is very different to anywhere else. I’ve actually attempted to recreate it in other spaces I moderate and I’ve failed so far, I don’t exactly understand the criteria involved with getting people to act this way. It’s very difficult to marshall people into it, particularly on reddit where the platform is designed specifically to cause people to soapbox for voters. I have no idea how it happened on CTH or TrueAnon. I suspect the culture of the space was primarily caused by the podcasts and not by the modteams or reddit.
Not sure if I just somehow miss those threads but I rarely get people trying to pick fights with me here, whereas when I was on Reddit long ago almost every discussion was a fight. I guess I also don’t often get riled up about much here myself, though it does happen occasionally. This site really is pretty pleasant, for me at least.
Maybe you’re just too wholesome and nice to fight with
Bless your heart, yeah things can get bad.
I tried not to argue with people too much and when I do I try to stay productive and discussion focused by I’ve definitely felt the pull of the void and have had others succumb to it when talking with them. I tend to blame myself in those instances for everything but the highest level of effortposting from me being irony-poisoned though.
I don’t know what kind of places you moderate, but there plenty of factors involved, and a big one is the medium itself. Compare a chatroom or forum (incl imageboards) to reddit-like sites, and I’m sure you can already think of a few ways each pressures people to talk a different way - forum posts get more attention when they bumped with replies and that makes troll bait posts powerful. On Lemmy, those will get sunken to the bottom with downvotes and on Hexbear a troll doesn’t even get the validation of downvotes. On the other hand, on these kind of sites, bland agreeable neutral posts tend to get the most upvotes/least downvotes, so the default front page will be contantly plastered with banal twitter platitudes and cute funny animal pictures.
These trends can and have been overcome, but it’s tough without careful site design or an unusually disciplined userbase. (As in, won’t respond to trolls)
Even in chatrooms this occurs after your room crosses a threshold where it’s large enough to start making people behave that way. They stop having conversations and start behaving more like they’re in a sports stadium crowd. This is particularly annoying to deal with because overflow spaces don’t work either, some people use them because they like a quieter space but the original space still typically stays above that threshold and so remains a problem.
Yes and no. The different spaces produce different behaviours. But Trueanon, Hexbear and CTH all existed on spaces that overwhelmingly suffer from the problem and yet… The userbase does not. The userbase is different. If a userbase can be different despite being on spaces that would typically produce the problem, then conditions can be created in order to create that userbase. The issue is one of finding the correct method to produce those conditions, as owner of the space.