cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37870004
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
Humans gonna human.
We all have biases, the important thing is to know (some)what what they are, so that they sway us less than they otherwise would.
I have actually changed my positions based on friendly dialogue online. But not here - it’s far too toxic to discuss any matter of importance here. Here, even when I agree with someone I often nope out of a conversation bc it is simply too draining arguing alongside someone with the tact of a brick wall.
Tbf, it became somewhat like that on Reddit too, even before the APIcalypse, so it might be an inevitable consequence of being on social media. Here, the average quality of conversation is much lower, but it is still at least possible to have a good one (or was, a couple years ago, especially on Kbin when that existed). Also, the longer your blocklist becomes, the higher the average quality rises. (Edit: the “average quality” depends heavily on whether you visit the largest communities here, and whether your instance has defederated from hexbear.net and/or lemmygrad.ml - which these days most have but I was on multiple that had not in the past. After blocking the triad though, the average quality here is WAY higher than on Reddit. You can always visit those places if you want to read their views, but arguing with incels rarely brightens my day, and I love being able to remove that from my experience, even if it must be opt-out and sadly was not opt-in, which chases so many people away from here. Seriously, block early and often, for the sake of your sanity!!)
So now, I suppose my time of being open to new ideas is in the past? At least as far as being online in the Fediverse / Threadiverse is concerned - though I still hold out hope for such irl.
I’m just so tired of talking with someone who will only talk AT rather than with me, and who values (their own) “free speech” immensely but cares not one tiny bit about listening or even common courtesy or decency.
But again, corporate enshittified platforms are even worse these days, so online discourse free of “alternative facts” trolls seems a thing of the past everywhere. I think it’s just a consequence of what social media does to people’s brains: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.
I fully agree with you about the fact that some people care about free speech and openess only when it serves them.
It’s true that I should have thought about blocking the people I’ve had bad experiences with.
Luckily, it only happened to me once in maybe 3 years.