This is a pretty great, long form post about the structure of Bluesky, and how it’s largely kinda pretending to be decentralized at the moment. I’m not trying to make a dig at it. I’ve enjoyed the platform myself for a while, but it’s good to learn more about how it actually works.
This article was shared on Mastodon via its author here.
People on Reddit do circlejerks about their feeling of “actually discussing real things”, except it’s only a feeling.
It’s a bit like with printed media in societies that saw rapid growth of literacy, people literate in the first generation would trust anything printed as if it were solid fact. And many people still trust anything printed and kinda official as if it were fact and think that being critical of that is backwards and worth irony. It’s really impossible to talk to such.
In this case - the Web has mostly moved to formats disadvantaging any exchange of normal texts, and things like Reddit (or Lemmy) seem, for people not used to that, automatically better for nuanced opinions. They are not.
Just like you can print any text, My Struggle and Elders of Sion and The Capital included, you can make any bullshit look appealing on Reddit with sufficiently eloquent or smart-looking text.
FFS, people actually reading books and writing something knew this since before Gutenberg. How did we even come to this miserable situation.
Reddit was hated and still is hated because people actually challenged eachothers views (mostly) constructively while also organizing and fighting for change when possible. Upvoting, downvoting, commenting, and engaging all equally mattered. Until one day spez and all the reddit mods decided to let their platform eat shit.
There were places that circlejerked, no doubt about it, but what everyone fails to realize is that reddit was a place for pretty much everyone. So if you thought that subreddit was a circlejerk, feel free to join or make a different one. Like open source software getting forked.
All these different social medias want us to be trapped in some sort of bubble through the illusion of choice. The short character limit is also what causes these sites to always be inferior to places like reddit and lemmy whether they like it or not. No one has a chance to fully expand on what they actually think or cite sources instead of being blasted immediately after their first post by getting blocked, cancelled, or moderated to oblivion.
Before I left Reddit, for some time it had started to feel like every comment thread would quickly devolve into a chain of “um actually”. So much so that I stopped commenting. I didn’t need the hit to the ego and I have no interest in getting into internet arguments. I haven’t had that experience here, and ir’s encouraged me to participate far more than I did there.
This!
That…became an all too common upvoted reply. At one point Reddit was good, but for years it’s been sliding into enshitification.
You’re free to have that choice but the good thing about you making that choice is allowing others to discuss without asking you. Ill admit I didnt comment often either before coming here but the reason for that was I already would read similar comments to what I was thinking. Dogpiling was a problem on reddit but thats with all social media and even life in general.
Dont go on stage if you cant handle the crowd.
No, like I said, it’s an illusion among Redditors.
Both actively harmful due to the way human brains are wired. Putting pressure onto people actually having a spine, and provoking ape behavior from the rest.
It wasn’t one day. Soft censorship in favor of China and Democratic party and what not became a thing much earlier.
They all very circlejerks of some kind. The paradigm works this way.
Length of text and softness of moderation are good, but do not change the fact that any fool can write a long elaborate smart-looking text, that has nothing to do with honest discussion.
Agree to disagree about the rest of your points. However I disagree 1000% on the engagement argument because when youtube decided dislikes shouldnt exist it was an immediate reaction that it was bullshit.
The pressure is necessary no matter what. If you post some dumb shit dont expect to have just 2 likes. Expect to have 50 dislikes and 2 likes. It helps without even needing to add context, and if you felt especially strong about it then you can reply with that context. This “ape behavior” is called having an opinion without needing to state that you have an opinion all the time. Let the numbers speak for themselves.
You get likes for dumb shit. You get dislikes for angry dumb shit. You get a lot of likes for dangerous vile dumb shit.
What you get a lot of dislikes for is nuance and something that could sober the crowd up if they listened. Possibly dumb shit too, but correctly positioned to irritate the comfort of dangerous vile dumb shit.
No, opinions can only be expressed in a friendly conversation. Opinions are a systems of thought with all the accompanying context. You can’t possibly express an opinion while fighting someone.
I’ve just described what they say.
EDIT: BTW, about instincts - I’ve just turned off scores on Lemmy. You should try that, you’ll feel that you unexpectedly need to have your own opinion, very often - which means that with scores displayed you would not think.
Downvoted. And when you downvote me I wont take it to heart. But being a contrarian under the guise as a free thinker then burying your head in the sand is the reason we’re in the mess we’re in.
When you get downvoted on some of your future posts and wonder why not many reply or interact with you dont get pissed off when others like myself use the data to be informed. You make a lot of generalizations and excuses for something that has been a vital part of the internet for decades.
This sentence doesn’t make any sense. In a discussion all sides are equally contrarian.
This also doesn’t make sense ; any person providing a useful answer would read the comment itself and not trust crowd vote.