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What factors do you think contributed to the "Reddit Hivemind"? How do you believe it can be avoided?

I've been seeing more often (and others have posted the same) that some of the elements of "Reddit etiquette" seem to be taking over here. Luckily I can still find discussion comments but it seems the jokes and general "downvote because I disagree" are slowly taking over.

So the question becomes is it the size or the functionality of the site? The people or popularity? What's your thoughts?

edit: should I change it to Lemmy-hivemind? Exhibit A: the amount of downvotes without a single explanation (guessing it's anything to do with Reddit being talked about).

126 comments

  • Moderation and mods being accountable.

    Public modlogs help a lot

    • I was thinking the same thing. Reddit is a cesspool because communities shut out anyone who dissents with a group's opinions, allowing the group to continue thinking "everyone" believes the same thing they do. Sure it's a good thing for mods to be able to quickly block obvious troublemakers, but there needs to be an unbiased review process in place when someone is kicked out simply for disagreeing or asking legitimate questions. Echo chambers are bad.

      Telling someone they're disgusting for being POC or LGBT+ is a good example of an action that deserves an immediate ban. Asking someone what policies a political figure implemented that benefited you should NOT be a reason for a ban, especially if you're only banning them because you can't answer the question.

      I'm not quite sure how the process works on Lemmy, but I feel like moderation should include incremental periods. Like the first time you get blocked for a day, then a week, then a month, and finally a permanent ban. And a person should be able to request a review of their ban, which would be judged by a panel of mods from random groups and instances to limit people of like minds all piling on for the same butt-hurt feelings. There should be ways to make things more fair than just reddit's policy of an invisible admin making decisions based on their mood that day.

      • On Lemmy the safeguard to mod abuse is instance admins. On Reddit this can take place, but rarely does. The only time admins on Reddit really step in is when mods are allowing illegal behaviour on their sub, or when mods are protesting against their own shitty behaviour. But on Lemmy it's much easier to reach out to an instance's admins if something is going wrong. Mod actions are all public, so you can create a post explaining what happened and it's not just a "he said/she said" situation.

        If they aren't being responsive to feedback, the appropriate response is to start up a new community, preferably on a different instance. Or, in the extreme case, to block that instance entirely. You can even build a consensus to doing this with a "panel" consisting of...every user on the platform. That's essentially how !tenforward@lemmy.world became the de facto Star Trek meme community, rather than !risa@startrek.website, after the mods of the latter community were shown to be abusing their powers and the instance admins refused to take remedial action.

  • The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

    One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

    The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

    Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

    If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.

    • The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

      Actually, with enough interactions from different people (ie: enough data points) Lemmy should be able to determine if a comment brings value to the conversation (either positive or negative) or if it's noise that should be ignored (and prioritized lower).

      If you have 4 comments:

      1. Has 100 upvotes (in total)
      2. Another has 100 downvote (in total)
      3. Another has 50 upvotes and 50 downvote (100 in total with a 0 sum)
      4. The last was a new comment with 0 votes.

      It's obvious that 1 and 3 are providing more to the conversation than 2. 4 is a bit of an outlier, but probably provides more value than 2.

      Regarding 3: The challenge would be that there's a low chance that there will be such a wide margin of upvotes/downvotes. Due to the hive mind, the voting will probably look like 30 upvotes and 130 downvotes. So, there would need to be a weight accordingly, so those fewer upvotes had a greater impact (in terms of sorting and scoring comments)

      Reddit has a "sort by controversial" algorithm that seems to be missing from Lemmy (or maybe it's hidden in the “what's hot" - I haven't looked at the code).

      It would be awesome (and resource intensive) if Lemmy could provide the federated instances with custom sorting algorithms. It would allow federated instances to be unique, provide some playful competition, and given the open source nature of Lemmy - I'm sure these algorithms would be open sourced, which would improve the entire Lemmy ecosystem as a whole.

    • I'm not sure I agree that disabling downvoting really solves the problem. It might help, but not a huge amount. Because you still end up with people upvoting stuff they like and not upvoting stuff they don't. So instead of being +1/-1 it becomes +1/+0. The stuff that they would have downvoted still ends up sinking towards the bottom, just perhaps not quite as quickly as otherwise.

      I do think your thoughts about quote Xits are really interesting though. It's a two-edged sword. On the one hand, by amplifying what you're disagreeing with you do also provide an opportunity for more people (rather than less, as on Reddit) to be exposed to it, potentially changing their mind. On the other hand, it's a tool ripe for abuse and creating more harassment, especially since the people you're amplifying it to are usually primed to agree with you.

    • A lot of the issues on Reddit is a human problem. I agree – solutions need to be built into the platform itself, by thoughtful design. It makes less work for the mods too.

  • If users were able to migrate their accounts that could help against centralization

    • What is that you care to preserve? Can't you just register a new account and kill the old one? (genuinely curious)

      • Many users have stated they would like to keep their comment history and subscriptions. Move their account to a different instance. Having to start from scratch is a big hassle.

        The fediverse concept is great but users are locked into the instance they create their accounts on. With so many instances it is better to just start somewhere and figure out what's what later.

        So far I am happy with my instance. But if I ever change my mind it would help if migration was simple.

  • It was moderation and up/down votes influencing comment order.

    On reddit you are punished very harshly for downvotes. Your comment gets put at the bottom, hidden and you get rate limited so you can only comment once every 10mins. Mods also nuke threads that go against their ideals and perm ban people in those threads.

    Reddit culture shifted a lot during 2015 and the site mods felt they needed to control the discourse.

    I don't know how we would fix that problem but I feel like instances and a modlog goes a long way

  • There's 3 facets.

    1. Being "in" on the joke.

    This is the meme comments, whether they are internet lore (a way to signify that you were there) or simply just in on the joke.

    1. Community expectations.

    Some communities are made to be in on the joke. Some communities are made to be informational and analytic. Even the latter communities will eventually have some jokes that occur, which over time will create a caste of those who are "in" on the joke.

    1. Ethics and morals.

    In smaller, usually hobby communities, this generally isn't problematic. However in the wider internet, it's not uncommon for hate to be the joke, and spreading it being "in" on the joke.

    Therefore, the hivemind is not inherently bad, as it is just a nature of community expectations that are connected through shared experiences over time. But just like we've seen through history, this can be pretty easily manipulated and people who don't have humanitarian beliefs in mind perpetuating that rhetoric.

    In any case, to combat this, I think the community just needs to set specific expectations. GameFAQs forums would be a great example of having mostly problem-free hivemind, as video games have a specific meta-game that is developed over time and jokes from that shared experience (git gud, don't get hit, etc). The whole point of these forums was to talk about the game, from meme (before memes) to painstaking min-maxing, and the discussions of the community would revolve around this. The rules of the forums made it pretty hard to be overtly mean or engage in discussion that wasn't centered around the goal of the community.

  • IMO: tribal thinking.

    It comes down to "they do not think like I want them to or they won't agree with me, so I will downvote posts."

    Controversial topics are even more downvoting just to downvote.

    The self-built echo chambers are already constructed; self-censorship and anything outside of their views and sources are dismissed, labeled, and smeared so as to not think about the information being shared.

    It happens everywhere; the status quo is welcomed, while anything outside of it will seem controversial or extreme.

  • “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

    — Agent K, Men In Black

  • In group/out group dynamics are fueled by insecurity and ignorance. Reddit (the internet/humanity) is full of people who are scared of being outcasts and do not know themselves well enough to be confident. Often for good reason because there are swathes of people who will punish them for not going along with the group. The punishments are almost always disproportionate to the transgression, and continually escalate as the in-group feels completely justified in their actions due to confirmation bias.

    In the case of reddit's main demographic these are young, typically nerdy men who have experienced being outcasts, and not a whole lot else - who now relish the thought of finally being part of the in-group. They will go far out of their way to prove they belong, even if it means handling themselves in a hypocritical manner and giving up their unique interests to mirror the majority of the group. Those who do not either leave, get labeled as contrarian (and summarily dismissed) or actually go fully contrarian (not like the other girls~~)

    The entirety of modern social media being built around Trends™ is all you need to see how weak people's identities really are. It's part of why people who are authentically themselves (Trump, Walz) are viewed as strong depending on which side of the divide you fall on. People are so busy faking it to fit in (in fear of real consequences), they've outsourced their entire being to the trends of the group they mostly identify with.

    It's fully baked in to small town American identity, and even those who can see how absurd it is will still be forced to choose between unjustified torment, conformity, or leaving. One of those options is safe, the other two are risky or outright dangerous. All three options reinforce the belief of the in-group that their choice is the way it's meant to be.

    In short: people are really weak and we live in a culture that has preyed on this for centuries under the threat of violence.

126 comments