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Reddit slowly became filled with hate

I have been on reddit for just about 12 years now. Something I've noticed over time is just how hateful the place has become. A complete outrage machine. Every single sub became filled with it. I've filtered so many subreddits over the last few years, it's insane. I don't know enough about this place to be sure, but I do hope it doesn't become the same type of echo chamber of anger.

489 comments

  • Unfortunately that hasn't been unique to Reddit. Outrage, hate, and conspiracies generate clicks and engagement on platforms. Recent events within the last decade gave rise to a lot of coordinated hate campaigns. User created subreddits were a double edge sword for this in both being able to filter out these groups but also giving them their own echo chambers to congregate and embolden one another. The transition from liberal freedom of speech to absolutionist right to hatred made social media companies millions simultaneously in accepting money to promote controversial topics and harvesting the resulting outrage on their platforms. Reddit and their staff effectively became one of many internet war profiteers giving all sides bases of operations.

    To end on a semi-positive note, with the rise of federated services, instances may still give these extremists places to seethe but they can at least be 'sanctioned' or defederated from the rest of the larger fediverse very easily.

    • This was also part of the strategy of foreign influence in western politics. Britain, France, and The United States got hit by this, hard. Driving anxiety pushes people to the political extremes and prevents actual political process from happening. And don't get me wrong, there's a degree to which outrage is warranted. The economy has yet to fully recover from 2007 and looks to be taking another dip now, police violence, a broken binary political system in America, you name it. There are all sorts of stuff to be frustrated with. But Russia and China feed that. Reinforce it. Encourage us all to hate each other

      • You used to be able to tell who the bots were, but now we have political movements espousing the same thing the bots are because they are both feeding off the same source.

        What really broke hope for me is the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, before the vaccines or effective treatment, n95 masks were the best protection. This should not be a controversial statement, just one of fact. A former Republican candidate for Governor of Connecticut, helped to get free masks distributed to every community in the state. His economic policies were way too conservative for me to consider him as a candidate, but he stepped up to help when it counted, so points to him. Unfortunately, after the worst of the pandemic, he ran again and while he never officially endorsed the anti-maskers, but he didn't denounce them either, and went to rallies cosponsored by them. He knew what the right thing to do in 2020 was, but when he ran in 2022, the outrage machine was in full effect with countless "unmask our kids" groups and instead of doing what he knew was right, he did what was easy and convenient. He still lost, because the Democratic governor of the state who had led the state through the pandemic had done a good job. Propaganda turned something that was common sense into a political statement.

        A simple and easy thing that would help prevent needless deaths became a political football kicked around by the right. Much of the anti-vaccine rhetoric (some now being spewed by a "Democratic" candidate 🤦‍♂) originated in Russia and was meant to keep the population there from seeking western vaccines when the Russian vaccine was shown to be inferior. But because everything gets pushed into political framing, public health and science became team red vs team blue instead of humans united against a virus that kills. When we get a really nasty virus (COVID isn't that deadly compared to an avian flue), the world is screwed because so much anti-science has been pushed in order to generate engagement in media and social media.

      • As a non US person I was reading your post and thinking how right you are and how international politics also got into the same problem of increased anger. And than got to:

        But Russia and China feed that. Reinforce it. Encourage us all to hate each other

        As proof it is really working even on aware people. It is a big problem seeing thing just from one perspective, that "feeding" even if intentional actually started from west. Just look at the movies, Russians and Chinese are always bad guys, for decades. What do you think they will think about west if they grow up looking how west is seeing them? How will they react?

        How will someone in Afghanistan support west when someone from west destroyed their country and killed family and friends, maybe with good reason and couldn't be done differently, but I am talking about individuals here.

        I don't think there is ultimate truth, but we can try and see events from a bit wider perspective.

    • Unfortunately that hasn’t been unique to Reddit. Outrage, hate, and conspiracies generate clicks and engagement on platforms.

      Yesterday I stumbled upon this post. Really sad.

      • Their mention of signal:noise struck a chord for me.

        Ever since this gelled for me a few years ago, I have been on a miserable (and obviously impossible) mission to find places to see and discuss useful, HUMAN information with other useful HUMAN people on the internet.

        Blocking whole forums on topics I really enjoy is mechanically easier than curating the contributors to those conversations on an individual basis. It hurts my heart to do it, but it is impossible to keep the noise out without wholly ignoring signal that I enjoy.

        Even people I used to really enjoy talking to have had to be ignored. They stopped caring about nuance, and got intellectually lazier. They switched from reading to skimming, and the well thought out comments got shorter, and more hostile.

        This is undoubtedly the snake eating it's own tail.

        They filter their inputs so heavily, and have done battle with bad faith for so long that their outputs resemble the very thing they were trying to avoid.

        Unsure what my point is other than commiseration with OP. It's utterly disheartening to realize that the technology that was created to connect us all has been co-opted and subverted - transforming it into a hideous monster of hate, and misery that forces us all to internally disconnect from entire parts of it.

        That's not to say that it couldn't have been expected.. but I have no fucking idea how it could've been prevented.

      • The longer you think about that scenario the more fucked up it gets. Google argues that it's a problem of scale, which is outrageously BS when you consider Google of all companies let their own account system be easily botted, and don't use any of the ludicrous number analytical tools purpose built for detecting spam trends (3rd parties use them all the time to spot political spam).

      • I've never been a Twitter user, but this makes me wish I could follow Mastodon users from here

  • I wrote this a couple of days ago here on my own feelings that reddit just turned all of us into such awful people and how much I hated everything about it but still can't stay away from being a redditor.

    It's really long, I think it's one of the best and worst things I've ever written. Give it a read if you'd like, I would really appreciate it.

    https://lemmy.world/post/858027

    I think my point is that we are not redditors anymore, we don't belong there, and there is no place for hate or self-hate here.

    And after being here, I'm honestly pretty indifferent towards reddit now.

  • I received the most incredibly chiding, condescending and critical reply on Lemmy the other day, for saying one sentence which was just adding some info to a reply chain. “Oh, that’s also called this”. I was told “pedantic much??” and then the person ranted for a paragraph about how I was a terrible person seeking to spread discontent, and various other bizarre insulting bullshit. Best part: they mod 6-7 subs on some instance. So… Lemmy isn’t a magic formula, unfortunately. The same people are excited to make it just as bad as reddit ever has been.

  • I blame the 24 hour news cycle and end of the Fairness Doctrine. It has allowed editorializing and "spinning" of news stories as opposed to being factual and objective.

    • People give the fairness doctrine far too much credit, it only applied to your local over the air news channels. Not cable, and it wouldn't have applied to the internet.

    • Not sure about the Fairness Doctrine's role, but it saddens me that people don't seem to be nearly as aware of the damaging effects of the news cycle anymore. People seem even less aware that getting your news online, or through social media, doesn't protect you from it either.

      If you'll excuse the ramble: Years ago when the Tea Party (arguably one of the first big far-right movements in the open) started gaining traction in the US, they held a rally in DC. People were apalled, but to my knowledge there weren't issues where anti-Tea Party counter protesters were attacking Tea Party members with bike locks or concrete mix in milkshake cups in an attempt to injure Tea Party members. (During the time of antifa and Trump supporter protests/rallies there was shit going around online about how to mix quick dry cement mix with fast food milkshakes to make a slurry that would cause severe chemical burns on people. Not sure if that was real or not.) EDIT: I've been informed the concrete milkshake thing wasn't real.

      What did happen was that Comedy Central, who (we know now) had already been planning on holding a joke rally in DC to build hype for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's shows even befoe the Tea Party mess, started pushing online into the groups suggesting a separate counter rally.

      The Rally to restore sanity (or to keep fear alive, as Colbert was advertising it satirically) started gaining a ton of traction online. At the least, it was an opportunity for fans of Stewart and Colbert's shows to come out and have a laugh. At best it was a way to show that the Tea Party didn't have power and was just a bunch of hot air.

      I went to the Comedy Central rally. They made it a fum time with guests like Mythbusters, music, and speeches from Colbert (in character) and Stewart. What impacted me the most was the sheer amount of people. If you have a chance check out the bird's eye photos of the two rallies. The rally to restore sanity easily outnumbered the Tea Party four times over. Thousands upon thousands of people there with joke picket signs, having a fun time.

      Stewart's closing speech has stuck with me, even now over a decade later. It pains me that it seems that even John Stewart himself seems to have forgotten it, or re-evaluated his stance.

      I'll share some the parts I find particularly important:

      I can’t control what people think this was, I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear.

      They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times.

      And we can have animus and not be enemies.

      But unfortunately one our main tools in delineating the two… broke.

      The country’s 24 hour politico, pundit, perpetual panic “conflictinator” did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder.

      The press could hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus illuminating issues here-to-fore unseen.

      Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden unexpected dangerous flaming ants epidemic.

      If we amplify everything we hear nothing.

      There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats but those titles that must be earned…you must have the resume.

      Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult not only to those people but to racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate.

      Just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe not more.

      [...]

      the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false.

      It is us through a fun house mirror and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead and an ass shaped like a month old pumpkin and one eyeball.

      So why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin assed forehead, eyeball monster?

      If the picture of us were true of course our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable.

      Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our constitution, or racists and homophobes who see no ones humanity but their own?

      We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is, on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing by hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done.

      The truth is we do; we work together to get things done every damn day.

      Most American don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives.

      Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do.

      Often something they do not want to do. But they do it. Impossible things that are only made possible through the little reasonable compromises we all make.

      [Image of a packed highway on screen]

      Look, look on the screen this is where we are, this is who we are: these cars.

      That’s a school teacher probably thinks his taxes are too high, he’s going to work.

      There’s another car, a woman with two small kids can’t really think about anything else right now.

      There’s another car swinging, I don’t even know if you can see it.

      The lady’s in the NRA and loves Oprah. There’s another car an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah.

      Another car is a Latino carpenter. Another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist Obstetrician. Mormon JZ fan.

      But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong beliefs and principles they hold dear.

      Often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers.

      And yet these millions of cars must some how find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile long 30 foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river.

      Carved by people by the way that I’m sure had their differences.

      And they do it, concession by concession, you go then I’ll go, you go then I’ll go, you go then I’ll go.

      Oh my god is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? ahh oh that’s ok you go, then I’ll go.

      And sure, at some point there’ll be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute; but that individual is rare and he is scorned and not hired as an analyst.

      Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkenss and back into the light we have to work together.

      And the truth is there will always be darkness.

      And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the Promised Land, sometimes it’s just New Jersey.

      Time and time again I see people with good intentions effectively saying that "making concessions for those hideous reprehensibles is tacitly supporting them" by allowing a group to have a space to speak, hell sometimes by even allowing a group to exist.

      Yes, yes, the tolerance of intolerance paradox and all that. That's valid and important. My point is that far too often I see people jump the gun.

      Go ahead and deplatform people calling for your death. Don't deplatform them because they don't think your lifestyle choices aren't valid/okay, and they are discussing that in a separate space from you.

      Make an attempt to ignore them, live and let live, or an honest attempt at discourse in good faith as if you are dealing with other human beings.

      Again, not if they are actively calling for the end of your life, but far too often I see people stretch that with "they support ideas that align with people who would deny me my existence" as if there's some sort of idealogical purity standard we all need to adhere to lest we let the wrong opinions in and taint ourselves by the vaguest of "idealogical association".

      Should we be concerned that the majority of painters are nazis because Hitler liked to paint? Of course fucking not.

      Most people are not purely the opinions they espouse online. Often there's deep layers of nuance left unsaid, personal lived experiences causing them to draw different conclusions from what you think.

      The world falls apart if everyone out in real life caused things to come to a screeching halt to shout someone down and call for deplatforming or shunning every time they encountered an opinion they found reprehensible.

      I'm guess just tired of the extremism absolutely fucking everywhere. From people with offensice opinions and especially from well meaning people who are motivated by their feelings of righteousness to try and protect themselves and others. People insisting that if you don't literally use every single opportunity you have to speak out against the wrong of the day, then you are actively supporting that wrong.

      Just got a general day to day mood of "Sir, this is a Wendy's"

      • Rally to restore sanity was a blast. The whole reddit team (myself included, at the time) were there, and Raldi wrote a neat little QR code network feature, where you could scan other redditor's QR codes, and after it was done we released a graph showing the network effects, who met whom at the rally, or the minor rallies across the country.

        That was back when reddit was actually fun. I can't imagine, nor would I attend, any modern rally event with the purpose of meeting redditors

      • Not sure if that was real or not.

        Uh, no. It wasn’t, so it would be better to not repeat it as if it was credible.

    • The Fairness Doctrine only ever existed due to the way the broadcast airwaves were divvied up. It had no bearing on cable's CNN, etc.

    • Oh? I don't know about the "fairness doctorine".

    • The internet itself is far more to blame than either of the factors you cite. Why? Because it destroyed journalism's traditional revenue model and in so doing murdered local news. Only the biggest legacy news organizations can still make ends meet through a subscription base, so the result is that everyone else is left churning out bullshit clickbait articles in a competition for views.

      "Information wants to be free," was the mantra of the early internet, and that's nice as far as it goes, but good journalism is expensive and when we gut the revenue stream of an entire industry, we shouldn't be surprised that what's left kind of sucks.

  • It's the removal of a down vote count. It's the same problem across all social media. People spew absolute outrageous comments... Get 3 likes or votes, and they think it's a positive score.

    The reality is 10k down votes and 3 likes from bots.

    It's really changed the internet landscape and ultimately society. We hide dissent.

  • I've seen that as well. I unsubbed from subreddits like r/badcopnodonut, r/leopardsatemyface, and r/hermancainaward months before the API debacle out of outrage fatigue. It's not that I don't care about the injustice, it's just that I got tired of the negativity from the spectacle du jour.

  • Roughly 5 years, so I joined when things already went to shit. But I still did notice a decline into utter shit.

    What kinda pissed me off the most was the constant know-it-ally behavior. People were wrong but they still defended their standpoint not because they believed in it, but just out of spite. "I don't care about the truth, I only want to own the others big time!"

    Reddit is a site full of bratty children and adults acting like bratty children. The worst part about that is, it is toxic and before you know it you start acting that way yourself. Me included. This whole fuckening was a wakeup call and I am glad it happened.

  • They did this to themselves.

    Part of it was corporate greed and incompetence by the Reddit team where they were trying to drum up numbers for their upcoming IPO. For a social media platform, member numbers is pretty much the only thing that matters, so connected with the other 2 issues, it probably was encouraged for them to ban users knowing full well that most of them would just create a new account - which of course that would let them say they have even more registered accounts when they would go to advertisers.

    Part of it was various misinformation campaigns run by political parties and foreign governments to spread hate and instability. The "Smarter Everyday" YouTube channel specifically did a video about Reddit and "bad actors" a few years back on the phenomenon which I recommend everyone watch, but not sure how linking to videos is accepted on Lemmy, so I'll let you find it. The FBI keeps on warning us about "bad actors" trying to spread lies and it is only going to get more intense as we get close to the upcoming US elections.

    Part of it was an echo chamber where no alternative views could be expressed without mods getting all uppity and banning users. Mods have ultimate say and there were no checks-and-balances to what mods could do. No real way to question a ban and no real way to question a mod. And the lack of alternative views is especially egregious because Reddit was obviously a very left leaning site. They were doing the exact same thing that they would make fun of right-wing media would do, namely create this echo chamber where only like-minded people were really allowed to speak. Now to be clear, I lean left on the vast majority of issues, but for fucks sakes, some of the nonsense that was accepted on Reddit would make even me cringe.

    In the end, Reddit got too big for it's own good because most of these problems could be solved on a much smaller site, but Reddit got so big with so much money at stake and then it's size made it such a large target for people. It became just a toxic mess.

    (sorry for the diatribe, I was going to write 3 bullet points and leave it at that, and then just kept on expanding it more and more)

  • Been on Reddit since the Digg debacle (2008 ? 2009 ?).

    For me, it was the non stop posting about Musk-Trump-West-Rogan-Peterson-Shapiro-Kardashian that drove me insane and limited my Reddit use to only the subreddits I followed.

    So I thank Spez for his decision to ditch third-party apps because it got me out of the septic tank that Reddit has become.

    • I was rounding out either year 12 or 13 on my account and got banned for ban evading. I made sure to double check on the actual rules before creating another account-- all they really said was to not comment where you were banned. Okay fine.

      STILL got hit, despite never interacting with the sub that banned me after banning aside from saying '...why?'

      "PlEaSe ReSpEcT mOdS sAyInG tHeY dOnT wAnT tO tAlK tO yOu."

      Look here, reddit-- I gladly will. But it is fucking dumb to get banned and then permabanned for asking why you were banned in the first place.

      Fuck uspez

    • Maybe people should realise that they, too, have a life, just like Musk-Trump-West-Rogan-Peterson-Shapiro-Kardashians.

  • Unfortunately hate = engagement = advertising impressions = money

    That's why it's important to like, and comment, and thank posters for positive posts.

  • That's why every sub I moderated had a hard no politics, no incivility rule in place.

    You'd be amazed how much of the nastiness goes away when you just ban anyone breaking either rule. Things turn chill and friendly. The posts and comments start staying on topic, and (eventually) users start most reporting when the rules get broken instead of getting nasty themselves.

    As much shit as I would get in modmail and DMs, it was worth it to be able to go into a niche sub and just have these relaxing, friendly conversations.

    The outrage machine, as you brilliantly name it, is the default now. But we can change that, and we can definitely keep it out of the fediverse as it grows, as long as we're vigilant and don't fall prey to it oursleves

    • There were some political subs that were civil and conversely there were a lot of non-politics subs that posted ragebait all the time. I was 10 years in Reddit and through that I filtered hundreds and hundreds of subs to the point where my r/all was almost tailor-made for me, with a focus on my mental wellbeing and some of my politics allowed but even lots of political subs I agreed with filtered as to not doom my daily mood. And something curious I noticed was that in the last year or so there has been an uptick in ragebait videos specifically in video-focused subreddits that were pretty chill before. It almost felt like some people were coordinating from Discord or something to post these videos at the optimal hours and boost them with the initial upvotes and everything. One by one a lot of subs were colonized by these types of videos. Many times pushing race anxiety issues. I only noticed because every 2 o 3 weeks I had to filter another one: PublicFreakout, JusticeServed, fightporn, WinStupidPrizes, Whatcouldgowrong, dankvideos, DocumentedFights, CrazyFuckingVideos, Unexpected, NextFuckingLevel, etc.

    • I do understand the concept that getting angry about things doesn't do anything to change them. There is little point in spending your life furious about the injustices of the world without taking action, but I do find what you just said quite strange.

      If people can't talk about these things without risking a ban, aren't you just complicit in enabling those injustices? Like if we all bury our heads in the sand and never get animated about anything then nothing ever changes for the better? Am I making sense?

      Take the reddit exodus for example. I find this all to be overwhelmingly positive, and a step in the right direction. It wouldn't have happened without a core group of very pissed off people shouting from the rooftops in every available space.

      I just fundamentally disagree with the approach to moderation that you described. I get it, you don't want to know about politics - your landlord does, the police do, your boss does. Ya dig?

  • This is an ongoing problem with our Information Age. The fediverse already has this problem, though to a much lesser degree than reddit. Look at the structure of titles of threads on the political magazines/communities here. They are designed to make you outraged, because the sources they come from made their titles with engagement in mind and that permeates over to here. My hope is that the group of people on the fediverse, who are more interested in the future of the internet than most, will give rise to an idea that helps combat this problem.

  • It was always like that, is the problem.

    I never did become an app Redditor, like I never used Apollo or any of that, so I was always using whatever their production interface was on browser. For a brief time they were allowing us to create filter lists for r/All so you could attempt to browse that beast looking for interesting communities without the sea of porn and hate groups, then they took that function away pretty quickly, I guess we were using it too much.

    Eventually, the truth dribbled out that investors were breathing down their necks for user growth at any cost, since there was no profit. This is why bullshit like Coontown, fatpeoplehate, and just endless constellations of far-right hate speech communities were allowed to thrive and grow during the entirety of the 2010s. So long as they didn't do anything that put Reddit in legal jeopardy, Admin refused to chop off large parts of their precious user metrics.

    This meant the rest of us dealing with a community where the Nazis were always in the walls, even if you were browsing subs about container gardening. Things like r/JusticeServed allowed populist hate groups to grow large and juuust barely mainstream enough that you could pretend they were something else. You were always tiptoeing around the hate groups, hoping that nobody in your container gardening sub posted something that would bring the Eye of Sauron upon you.

    So, to be clear, it didn't become hateful, it's been like that for years and years. The rest of the internet was far more aware of it than I think the average habitual Redditor was, as far as they were concerned Reddit was just as toxic as 4Chan, but at least 4Chan is clever and influential, sometimes.

    If you avoided r/All like the plague, and made a part-time job out of curating your experience, you could get a half-assed positive result that looked nice enough if you squint. It was true, there were some genuinely nice communities on Reddit - and they tended to be very practical in nature, like r/Excel - which didn't attract chuds. Any subreddit which gave some fool a chance to bitch about things they didn't like got big, fast, and ended up pinned to the top of All, where, again, anybody who wasn't already a logged-in user would see it, festering.

    The only reason Reddit has persisted for so long is that it basically stole away the user bases that once filled all the individual forums of the internet, and came to hold them hostage. It was chill circa 2011, before the Digg migration, before they'd even rolled out subreddits, yet. It got nasty fast as the userbase grew and it started to attract average folk.

    The only thing that Lemmy has going for it is that lack of commercialization. To be very clear, the Nazis are already here. They move in fast. Stormfront was one of the first big sites on the internet, period. People avoided Mastodon for a long time because the last they heard that's where the Nazis went when they started getting banned elsewhere. Whether it was true or not, the hate groups are already on the Fediverse.

    The difference is that for now, we can block their communities from participating in our communities, which hopefully is enough. We couldn't do that at all on Reddit, admin just ignored thousands and thousands of reports and always had the final say on everyone's lives. Just don't go around thinking that hatefulness is something brand new, you must have been working hard to ignore it for a long time. That shit's been baked into Reddit for a decade.

  • Reddit has so many people on it it behaves like society. If you're in a bad neighborhood (sub) you're going to deal with bad people.

  • I've noticed, over the last month or so, a lot of right wing hate subs have started making their way to the front pages in r/all and r/polular.

  • So much outrage and doom. The algorithm rewarded people being more and more extreme, even about real problems.

    Like, yes I lean left like reddit, but not every issue is the biggest scandal that has ever existed.

    If you get swept up in that stuff, you'd think the world was about to end. And you'd frequently encounter people who think just so.

    • ...or that da ruthless librul snowflakes are coming to take your guns away and turn your masculine christian baby boy into a girl.

      Meanwhile, these very same assholes cheer when their orange dictator throws immigrants' children into cages. Their personal nightmares are just in their minds. Yet the nightmares they create are very real.

      • ... did you legitimately just miss the point of the post you're replying to?

        The habit of overblowing events into crisis is not unique to either side, and neither is either sides' reactions to those imagined crisis causing harm.

        The damage from the Antifa rallies to the communities they occured in is very real too, despite your feelings on the neccessity of those rallies, whether you think the people causing damage were false flag plants, etc.

        And no, I'm not going to engage you in some sort of discussion trying to determine which side is worse. I'm also not trying to say that both sides are equal either. It's just disingenuous to pretend this is localized to any specific idealogical group.

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