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.
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.
On most of reddit you can’t say anything, no matter how innocuous, without people trying to tear you down and argue about it. You could say “People need to breathe oxygen to survive” and you would get downvoted and argued with. The only thing reddit is good for is the threads about creepy experiences and glitches in the matrix, I still read reddit for that alone.
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.
You make a good point that Trueanon and CTH exist/existed on reddit and yet were able to resist the structural tendencies of reddit’s format.
Even in chatrooms this occurs after your room crosses a threshold where it’s large enough to start making people behave that way.
Definitely. In fact, I don’t think I’m in any chatrooms of more than a dozen people because I want conversations or to help make things, not just yelling into a river.
The issue is one of finding the correct method to produce those conditions, as owner of the space.
Exactly. It’s not easy, I’ve seen it done well and I’ve seen it devastate sites.
I also think it’s surprising that those places emerged since, to put it bluntly, CTH pod is a prime example of ‘dirtbag left’, and in my experience many dirtbag communities are where trolls can have a great time and attempts at strong moderation (like forcing an ideological tendency, shutting down drama, censoring language) tend to dampen the community. Sometimes owners can’t force conditions upon a community once it has an identity, if those conditions go against that identity, like imagine if a rogue moderator or even the whole staff wanted Hexbear to become a serious theory-focused community and banned what they saw as low-effort bits. It just wouldn’t work without destroying the place, there are still ways for the owners or regular users to encourage education but it won’t be done through moderation.
That’s the kind of thing I mean about site culture and site design helping to overcome the format. What are the first things a new user sees? What values do the pinned sticky posts promote? What values does the sidebar impart? Will they even read that? If a moderation team is too overwhelmed with moderation duties, there’s no real time to get much feedback or to design a good space, it’s just reacting as crises come up.
Exactly. It’s not easy, I’ve seen it done well and I’ve seen it devastate sites.
The issue I run into is it’s like stacking blocks, except the blocks you stack at the start can’t be removed later to change them if they were the wrong blocks. Once a community moves down a certain path, you can’t really undo elements of its growth towards what it becomes, you can’t pull out a block and install the block you should have originally installed.
So in trying to reach the same endpoint those spaces have, you can try something, but if there’s a mistake along the way you’re shit out of luck, you can’t force a community built with the wrong blocks to become something different. It collapses a community.
I say that tentatively of course, I have had success in changing communities through force but only in the ideological sense. Mass baiting of liberals to purge them and build a communist community is totally viable, but the behaviour of those communists will still be shaped by the original blocks. You are limited in what you can and cannot force to happen.
What are the first things a new user sees? What values do the pinned sticky posts promote? What values does the sidebar impart? Will they even read that? If a moderation team is too overwhelmed with moderation duties, there’s no real time to get much feedback or to design a good space, it’s just reacting as crises come up.
Yes this is what I mean with building blocks you lay down.
just popping in to say fuck discord.
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.
- Streaming video can be done with Jitsi Meet
- Voice chat via mumble.
- sharing files can be done via pastebin site (if text form) or through other third party (like imgbb).
- custom emotes can probably be done by extending the IRC protocol to allow for embedding tiny images. IRC allows for users to send commands so I don’t see why this couldn’t be done.
- IRC can support this in a network.
- An IRC network can run on a computer the size of a shoe.
Discord meanwhile:
- Is only compatible with itself so if your system doesnt support the client or the web interface well you’re boned.
- Has very little content moderation.
- heavy advertisements via promotions and NitroTM (their subscription service to access basic features like recoloring the interface).
- terrible UI.
- spyware and data harvesting
- no support for encrypted messaging.
- Network effect so groups and orgs feel compelled to choose discord just because its popular and relatively frictionless.
- shadowy corporation that the public doesnt really know the inner workings of.
- Streaming video can be done with Jitsi Meet
- Voice chat via mumble.
- sharing files can be done via pastebin site (if text form) or through other third party (like imgbb).
How is the ability for software that isn’t IRC to do things a point in favor of IRC? It’s faster and easier to set up one account, one run program, and get everyone together on that program than it is to do the same across 3 or 4 of them.
- Is only compatible with itself so if your system doesnt support the client or the web interface well you’re boned.
I’ve used Discord on a variety of systems and never run into this problem.
- Has very little content moderation.
It has the same content moderation as IRC: whatever the local server admins set up.
- terrible UI.
Your mileage may vary, I suppose. I was able to learn the UI pretty quickly.
- Security and privacy concerns
These are a valid point and the one thing that prevents me from really recommending 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.
Discord is shit and I hate it, but it’s still better than the other large platforms
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).
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.
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”
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.
Pirating shit is becoming harder and harder and google is basically unusable now
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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I wasn’t accusing you of saying that, just saying I have been to some.
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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
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.
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.
RSS feeds were awesome back then.
I went full circle and now just read the local communist newspaper. They’re libs, but yknow
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”.
/r/trueanon is pretty good but why do they insist on using the r-word all the time?
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
cumboy holdovers
My theory is that a lot of people who got banned from here for one reactionary thing or another end up there.
r/trueanon has the closest energy to the original cth but I really don’t like how they started adopting the cumtown “I’m gay and my dick is small” bit it just feels tired
they’re also not ideologically coherent and I’ve seen too much whinging over what they call identity politics over there, although I guess the old cth had that as well
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
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Certain Fediverse instances didn’t last long, including two Kitsu instances. I just wanted a good instance that lasts forever with good support.
don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good
- Joseph Stalin
Ahh, Hexbear. Where every poignant quote gets attributed to Stalin. Y’all are nothing but a bunch of Stalinist tankies.
Just like me. I love this place!
