Just putting that out there. While we might have struggle sessions over bullshit, the larger internet zeitgeist is putrid and rancid.
i agree but man i wish some of the smaller comms on here were more active. don’t get me wrong seeing the same people in most comment sections is nice because it feels more a community that way, but it bums me out whenever i go to a comm about an interest of mine and the last post was made a month ago with 3 upvotes and no comments.
I maintain two opinions:
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One of the mods is in Benghazi.
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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.
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)
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
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.
These trends can and have been overcome
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.
I think people are pretty combative here, viciously so sometimes.
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.
hexbear and grad are the only spots ive ever felt comfortable commenting, i’ve never really had public social media and even on stuff like reddit i barely commented (i doubt i have 500 comments total across every other social media site, my first ~6 months of using hexbear and grad im pretty sure i had over 1k comments. I dont feel quite as welcome here as I used to but even still this site is the only one I will actually engage on.
Hexbear reminds me of the old internet. People being their authentic selves. Doesn’t mean there’s no nastiness but the ratio of performative or inflammatory bullshit to people talking is much lower than the average internet.
I also maintain that an extremely low tolerance for bad faith or cruel behaviour is necessary online. Since the regulatory mechanisms that govern social interaction elsewhere are not available.
Whenever I look at lemmy outside, or worse reddit, it’s just performative grandstanding, normalised bigotry, garbled repetition, and in “jokes”.
Yeah I’m sure glad we don’t have incomprehensible repetitive in jokes. I’m gonna post a picture of a bean now.
Jokes aside, this is one of the few places on the Internet where you don’t have to be a power user to feel like part of a community
I think a lot of that is because of size as well. Your post won’t get buried under 20 copies of the same cliche joke (one with 850 upvotes, one with 23, and the rest at +1 or +2) everything is actually read by at least a few humans somewhere, and everything is presumably also written by humans.
This is so completely true. I tried out the r/cth discord around the time it was banned and it’s like the chat in an MMO, moving so quick you literally can’t have a conversation. Why even bother at that point?!
yea discord is the worst. like drinking from a firehose
Le pun thread
if there is one defender of corny shitty puns on this earth it is me
Redditors don’t make puns, they regurgitate them
Certain Fediverse instances didn’t last long, including two Kitsu instances. I just wanted a good instance that lasts forever with good support.
/r/trueanon is pretty good but why do they insist on using the r-word all the time?
cumboy holdovers
My theory is that a lot of people who got banned from here for one reactionary thing or another end up there.
that place is in the general sphere of the ‘dirtbag left’ and the roots of that shit sunk deep into the ethos of how some people conduct themselves very early on because you get to eat your cake and have it too. its a reactionary caramel center youll find in pretty much anyone who tries to convince you nick mullen could totally be the next dane cook if he tried lol
I would never wish such a horrible fate on DSA president Nick Mullen
Ditto the other reply, I am not happy with the comparison you make about a close personal friend of mine. Also I am gay and my dick is small.
Comparing somebody to Dane cook is violence.
yeah his humors more comparable to rob schneider
just popping in to say fuck discord.
I hate how it has subsumed all hobby forums.
I thought Reddit already did that
discord accelerated it and it’s not even searchable! Reddit at least leaves a public record.
Being able to find advanced knowledge on extremely niche topics was what made the internet good. That sucks.
I’m sure feds can search it though 😮💨
Only feds get to have hobbies.
IRC but worse should not have been a winning idea
I can’t stream video, direct drop files, use custom emotes, or see at a glance which of my friends are online across servers on IRC, so I don’t see how Discord is worse.
id have to say it is the spying
The centralised private ownership and inability to extricate data are also up there.
Discord is shit and I hate it, but it’s still better than the other large platforms
Yeah, I’m trans and it’s depressing how hurtful every other social media is, can’t follow any trans creators because the comments are just hate speech that is totally okay and allowed by the site, apparently. And those same people being hateful will turn around and pretend the world caters to trans people and “you can’t say anything anymore!!1!1” Reddit is maybe okay when I stick to the subreddits I follow.
There was one transfem content creator who was a good friend of mine, she turned against me when her medical condition got even worse.
I used to visit reddit regularly in the past, and the ridiculous and monstrous stuff they always said had become normalized to me; I hated it, but I got used to it; but then I discovered chapo and LSC and now every time I go back for a visit, I’m reminded of how unacceptably awful and childish the people there are.
Reddit is so very libified. I got banned from r/politics for criticizing the US & Saudi war in Yemen while Joe Biden was visiting his dear friend MBS in 2021. I was being “a troll”.
I wasn’t even trolling! If Reddit was full of conservatives, it would be at least fun to troll. But it is just depressing.
I got banned for saying conservatives should be shot lol
The final straw for me with Reddit, and looking back I’m embarrassed it took so long, was a thread where people defended using the n-word and were getting upvoted. I decided I needed to delete the app to prevent hypertension after that one.
hexbear is the only place on the internet ive joined where i had to tell them my political views and be approved first. something about creating a place where everyone fundamentally agrees with each other and differences in opinion are usually complex technical things probably makes it nicer. im in some private diϟϟcord servers that are really good, i think its about curating a group of people you know you’ll get along with
I think what you’re describing is not just political opinions, but shared values. Especially when it comes to upholding human rights, and dismantling systems of oppression that threaten human rights.
Right wingers don’t really have any shared values, except obtain and hold power by any means necessary, so right wing forums are outrageously toxic to each other even when they technically hold the same political position.
That’s why we have a “loneliness epidemic”, as it turns out, being a genocide-supporting chud who doesn’t know empathy also robs you of genuine human intimacy.
That’s why we have a “loneliness epidemic”, as it turns out, being a genocide-supporting chud who doesn’t know empathy also robs you of genuine human intimacy.
i don’t think that’s sufficient to explain the loneliness epidemic. too many of us with humanity are also completely isolated and have no avenue to make friends or love someone
yeah real
hexbear is the only place on the internet ive joined where i had to tell them my political views and be approved first.
Buh? Do we have a new policy of account creation
For a long time, I think.
Dang I really need to make a new alt I just think this handle is really funny
It makes me laugh, honestly the username bits here are all 10/10
Some of the esoteric bullshit you people reference or pun… it’s fucking artwork is what it is.
I really like yours btw - I actually referred to someone as a “grouchy grouse” irl the other day and it received a very positive response (it was to a biologist). I probably need to spend less time on this site lol
Aww thanks, I’m a sucker for alliteration and birds crack me up so I’m pretty sure my next will be Unpleasant Pheasant
Hang onto it, it’s gold
Yours might be the best here. Every time I think about it, I start laughing again.
It is really funny. I think you’re good, you can just check the “create account” button to see the questions without making a new account if you like.
Huh, I’ve definitely run into other explicitly Marxist-Leninist places online where you have to fill out a political questionnaire. Some just want to weed out reactionaries, ultras, Trots and adjacent cranks, and such, some are probably full of academic cranks and Second Internationale types and want you to answer extremely complicated theory questions because they want only well read Marxism nerds, they don’t want to deal with people still learning the intricacies of the theory, or people who don’t quite “get” Dialectical Materialism but still think MLs are right about a lot of practical day to day stuff. (When you gotta copy the questionnaire into a text document and fill it out, in order to keep the question and answer numbers straight, you know the theory discussions are going to be over the smallest minutiae, or the admins are sick of banning baby leftists for stupid takes and want to just screen them all out at the questionnaire.)
I love that one of Hexbear’s rules is against sectarianism, but we all still
against TrotsIt’s like when the Catholics, the Orthodox, and the Anglicans all get together and rag on Evangelical Protestants. Which is also something I really enjoyed participating in as a kid. (It’s called sectarianism for a reason. We’re worse than the churches sometimes.)
There’s sectarianism, and then there’s dunking on people the entire left agrees are just plain wrong and tend to be crank magnets.
At least for me, as a former trot, it’s like 70% a joke. A lot of them are either cranks or NATO-leftists (or both) but a lot of them are also basically normal
My desk is already overflowing with zines - if you add a newspaper in there it might explode!
i didnt mean to say there arent other places that do that, i just havent been to any
I wasn’t accusing you of saying that, just saying I have been to some.
swag, it was interesting to read
Pirating shit is becoming harder and harder and google is basically unusable now
dude i was looking for art reference images of an arcade cabinet on google images the other day and literally every single one was a modern product currently for sale, every single one for like the first 30 results had a little price tag icon on it and most were from arcade1up, i might as well have clicked the shopping tab, its so so fucked what theyre doing
If you search “mustang”, for example, all the results are trying to sell you the car. You have to go several pages deep before you see results about the horse that the car is named after. Stuff like that bothers me.
I kept saying it. Internet is an ocean of bigotry and ignorance. The worst possible place for an LLM to learn from.
I feel like eventually we’ll see an “evolution” of LLMs where the big innovation will be cutting 90% of the Internet out of the training data without breaking the whole thing. Imagine if LLM output was as dry, neutral, and reliable as the average encyclopedia (yes I know those aren’t perfect either but it’s an improvement over reddit threads at least).
reddit was actually good for a bunch of how-to kinda shit that would never be in an encyclopedia. the trick is sifting the “hey you might have a carbon monoxide leak” from the “it’s cool to throw car batteries into the sea”
I don’t know if it’ll be framed as an innovation, per se, but that’s going to be the main utility for this technology. Small, focused models that can help you turn a large amount of pre-qualified data into something usable. That would be pretty cool. Wasn’t ever going to be anything more than that, but we’ll have to watch a trillion dollar market bubble pop before people start to narrow their ambitions and actually make something useful out of these things.
It’s such a depressingly stupid time to waste a bunch of information and digital tech so you can have Racist Google instead of what it was 20 years ago. We’re on the cusp of environmental changes brought about by wasting resources. That they built a giant wasteful bubble is the least surprising part of their behavior.
In diffusion, this has already been done. Most models that were made after SD1.5 have a “handpicked” input dataset. I guess its because most of SD1.5 input had garbage quality, which transferred over to the output.
I have to check that out at some point, models like Gemini and GPT take up all the space in the room and it’s easy to forget that there’s others
The other person was talking about image generation models, not LLMs. I think that the only LLMs with super curated input sets are tiny and less useful. Unfortunately it takes a lot of data for LLMs to be trained so it’s hard to find enough good quality data if you’re curating it.
America is cooked bro
I went today to a fall festival and they had literal ass children in police vests helping people park
Oh America is not cooked, stop being so dramatic. They just needed to give those children protection against handgun rounds in case … oh
I used to have a bunch of cosy little forums to check out daily. They’re all dead now and probably moved to Discord, and I hate Discord. Everything else is on Reddit or Twitter or any of the other massive social media platforms which are full of fascists.
I miss that about the old internet. I’d get home from school and read through a daily rotation of sites’ articles, forums, and blogs. Most of them don’t exist anymore or have completely gone to shit. Ones that are functional are overrun by terminally online chuds whining about minorities and women. Decades ago, they’d get banned for the things they say today or chased off by normalish people. Now, they’re the majority of site users, so they get a pass.
Oh yeah, that’s another thing I miss, sites with articles on them, now everything is a video, livestream or podcast. More than once after watching a YouTube video I’ve been left with the thought ”that was just a person reading a bunch of wiki articles and summarizing them”.
RSS feeds were awesome back then.
I went full circle and now just read the local communist newspaper. They’re libs, but yknow
