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.

@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.

I think there are multiple reasons, but one I want to highlight is Reddit’s shift towards driving engagement at all costs.

I used the “new” Reddit for a while, and I noticed that more and more it was trying to recommend posts and communities to me. “Popular with users in your area,” “Similar to another community you visited,” “You visited this community before”. A lot of the time, these would be posts and communities that I didn’t like or want on my feed.

I would venture to guess that these recommendations are putting people into contact with communities they wouldn’t normally seek out, and since they’re not a member of that community (and may even be hostile towards it), you get more people breaking community norms or trolling or antagonizing people, etc…

To be fair, I do see some signs of it here as it’s grown. It wasn’t like this even five days ago, where you would see downvotes on comments that weren’t inherently just toxic or just being assholes. But lately, I see more downvotes for people stating a differing opinion to the majority, or even asking questions. To me that’s usually the start of the toxicity.

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.

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.

It’s not just the toxicity but the intense hivemind. I flicked back to check some news and saw an article about Pete Davidson crashing a vehicle into a building and to my recollection it was really the only controversy he’d been a party to, but because he’s on the Reddit’s Most Hated list every comment was picking apart every perceived slight, calling him terrible names saying he was washed up, waste of space it was just like… guys take a fucking breather. He’s a human person, sorry he dates celebs.

It got too big and too accessible. Productive conversation became harder to have as they’d get pushed down by low effort comments from people trying to earn internet points and do little else. That also led to echo chambers which leads people to react rather than discuss. That’s not the whole reason but in my mind that’s a big part of why it degraded so badly.

I cut my teeth on /r/politics. You want my take on it? You aren’t arguing with real people. Reddit is botted to hell and full of paid shills that do nothing but corner you into an endless argument just to frustrate and piss you off. They have no purpose but to parade around and spam up the subreddits with hate and vitriol. This serves two purposes. To distract the liberals who probably should be spending their time on literally anything else other than arguing with these idiots. Then they have propaganda to spread. They have to appear to be large in numbers. So they go around and pick off the people who are willing to join them or follow them down an endless rabbit hole of logical fallacies and conspiracy theories.

Social media requires engagement to get adsense, and what gets engagement? Rage bait and inflammatory comments. Unfortunately, I think “traditional” social media is a huge cause of modern “toxic” online discourse.

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.

Reddit became too popular, and in general the average person using the internet just wants to be nasty to feel better about themselves.

It’s an easy trap to fall into. I try to avoid doing it myself.

More toxic communities mean more activity. More activity means bigger numbers to show to investors, advertisers, etc. No, they don’t care that a large portion of those comments are just calling each others names.

Let’s hope that kbin/lemmy won’t get too toxic. It’s inevitable at some level, but we can combat it with proper moderation.

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.

For me, it just depends on the subreddits. The bigger ones naturally include more a-holes. Over 11 years on there, it did get worse over time. On the big subreddits I simply read the headlines and ignored comments. Smaller subreddits were where I spent my time, typically helping people with medical advice, camera advice, computer, etc. Humans in large groups are stupid, so I just never thought much of it I guess.