Way more arguments on Lemmy seem to end with the two users stop down voting each other, and then basically concluding ‘that I see your point but still think you’re wrong because youre over emphasizing x or y’.
Way more arguments on Reddit just end with an endless loop of insulting and talking past each other.
I think the effect is probably like 30% selection bias of people coming to Lemmy more intentionally, and 70% lack of bots. Between paid influence campaigns, and Reddit’s own use of bots to juice engagement, my gut feel is that most of those endless arguments are either directly arguments with bots, or indirectly people who have grown so frustrated arguing with bots in other threads that they’re no longer capable of rational discussion.
Yeah, I agree.
On reddit it seems the remaining human commentators are those who have taken over the mannerisms of the bots and adjusted to talking to the bots.
And you always get stuck in these endless loops of hostile disagreement.
That’s just not how normal humans argue. Even on the internet.
Normal humans either agree to disagree or just give up. In both cases ending the conversation after all useful things have been said.
It is not "rational discourse" so much as "emotional vomit", assuaging loneliness with robots.
The only ones who win that game are the investors in Reddit, who sell more advertisements by using the "engagement metrics" that such argumentation ramps up.
Normal, satisfied people stop talking eventually, which lowers the profit incentive so they can't have that, now can they?
It's like gambling but worse - it's not mere dollars that can stop upon running out of them, but people's time that gets bled away moment by moment, until all the other opportunities they could have been spent on are gone. Taking advantage of people's mental illnesses, which they help foster in the first place.
reddit also has tons of troll bots, and bot farms to do it. Ru has targeted lemmy yet.
OpenStars@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
The average age of a Redditor started to go down even several years ago, long before Rexodus, in large part as the platform changed things to encourage speaking even without bothering to read anything at all.
Thus I decided to leave Reddit regardless, and only fortuitously decided to come here. Some things simply are not worth the trouble.
Flagstaff@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
How so? I don’t remember this.
OpenStars@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
As a mod of a small(-ish) gaming sub, I noticed.:-)
One example is how on r/Android, people would ignore the daily posted and pinned (or perhaps it was weekly?) mega thread, and constantly ask questions like "what phone should I buy?", "which Android device should I purchase?", "should I get an Android and if so, which one?" Setting aside how these are impossible without sufficient details e.g. what price range, what country is the OP from, are there relevant sales they are eyeing that would make the calculations different than from simply reading the existing posts that all ask precisely the same question ⁉️... anyway in addition to all that, it made it extremely difficult to have discussions of any real substance.
Combine this with the engagement algorithms and Reddit pushes all that crap (bc it's "new") above even extremely highly rated content, even if it was merely a few days old.
Post flairs helped, except that submitters entirely ignore those rules just like they do everything else. User flairs as well, except... same.
About the only thing that really worked was writing your own moderation bot. Ofc the disruption of the 3rd-party tools by making the API cost irl money 🤑💰💵💸 stopped that from working as well.
In short, you must have been in some very well-moderated spaces, possibly also niche, and if you did not browse r/all (or rather r/pop) then yeah, you could miss that trend. But it was definitely happening, and people talked about it in the subs dedicated to moderation.
It did not help that Reddit continually made changes that made it worse over time - practically hiding the rules from new posters to a community, seemingly in an effort to switch the focus away from the roots (before I joined Reddit) of having multiple forums on one combined platform - e.g. each having their own design, like CSS elements (I even made some of these!:-), to having all forums be part of one giant interconnected space, with efforts to erase divisions when moving from one community to another.
i.e. the endless streaming of "content", but ENCOURAGING interaction via commenting or at least voting, despite whether the audience has any business doing so, e.g. whether their interactions add, do nothing to, or even detract from the conversation.
^THIS
I also choose this guy's wife
And my bow
etc. To be fair, a little of that is just plain funny, and I hope we can allow for such here on Lemmy (it seems we do actually, when offered with respect?), but when the comments are just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of such in a row, such that it becomes impossible to find anything ELSE besides that... that is when a line has been crossed, and the platform becomes more difficult to read than it is worth. Imagine walking past a preschool on your way to work, and no matter how old you get (30, 40, 50, 60), they always remain the same - babbling as they play. Which they NEED, and hopefully you can enjoy engaging with it yourself. But at some point... don't you need to get on over to work? When the noise crowds out the signal entirely, making more adult conversations next to impossible, then the only solution is to leave.
Or kick the kids out, i.e. moderation, but that requires enormous efforts. Some subs still do it, but the more Reddit enshittifies the harder it becomes.
And it's not merely Reddit, it's simply the nature of the game: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.
Flagstaff@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
Gotcha. Yes, I stuck to my own mini-feed of a multireddit comprising about 30 subreddits (even though I’m subscribed to probably a hundred). I could not stand the random nature of the ADHD-inducing main feed. For example, instead of /r/Android, I was exclusively in either /r/fossdroid or my own phone model’s specific sub. /r/buyitforlife is awesome as well as /r/zerowaste. I just followed my own interests, haha, and I guess that’s how I ended up with my overall continually positive experience of Reddit (on average lol).