I was also a Digg refuge so spend the last decade and a bit there the biggest gripe with what changed is everyone has the need to be contrarian and be "right" even if that's making a comment about missing a comma or trying to do some six degrees of Kevin Bacon to get to a non-existent issue in a discussion. No one can just say I don't enough about X they have to be the biggest nerd in the room at all times.

Then people just downvoted again, so they could feel "right" without anyone contributing to the discussion. So what should be a back and forth of good conversation between people who are interested in a thing becomes a black and white opinion point scoring game of imaginary internet scores.

people forget r/imgoingtohellforthis was a thing. Hate was always on reddit. It might have been disguised as something else, but it was there. Problem is its impossible to tell what's satire and whats actually objectionable. There was a tipping point where imgoingtohellforthis switched from satire to objective racism. Reddit started its downward decline the day that sub got banned. I dont endorse what they became, but banning them proved reddit was no longer as open as they claimed.

With the api changes it has exploded with posts misleading everyone with gifs that happened years ago with inflammatory titles, the racism and hate is just left to fester within comment sections etc... It's really sad to see how much the platform can be damaging to everyone visiting it without moderation. It feels like the funnyjunk website now, but somehow is getting worst. Seeing an entire feed only filled with hate, misinformation, and full of bots.

Outrage breeds engagement. Same with Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, MySpace, AOL,Netscape....

Just check out /r/politics here, it’s not reddit-specific.

I'm new to Fediverse, just another reddit refugee, but in my short time here it's been refreshing reading through relatively balanced and thoughtful comments.

I think I'd almost forgotten what a mature online discussion looked like after years of autopilot reddit doomscrolling.

Feels weird only realising what was happening in retrospect, guess there's a learning in that for me somewhere.

Definitely noticed this as well. Another thing that pissed me off was the amount of repost, sometimes done by bot accounts. It became more apparent in small subreddits. Also, onlyfans models spamming most nsfw subreddit.

I've been on Reddit going on 15 years now and it's absolutely nothing like what was a decade ago. This is what happens when millions of people invade a site, mods become control freaks and the executives don't care about anything other than dollar signs.

I'm seeing the same hateful content here in the politics subs, but that's to be expected. People really get heated over politics. I've been blocking more and more subs for this reason. I only really need to be subbed to hobby subs anyway

Reddit helped me a lot over the years with my doubts and issues. Whenever I had any doubt with anything, I always found atleast one or two posts about it with some helpful answers. But yes, Reddit is filled with nasty people with their criminal minds. People use downvote feature for their personal satisfaction. If they do not like your comment (even if it is true), they will downvote you and then constantly harass you until you delete the comment. Moderators delete your comment and block you without giving you any explanation or a chance to explain yourself. The best way to use Reddit is to use it without an account.

Some subs are awesome, r/olkb, r/linuxmint to name 2. But bigger more general subs.... They can be shocking, I generally didn't bother with them.

What's great about Lemmy is that it isn't just one big community but a bunch of small ones that band together to share content. If a community gets too toxic there's a migration path to a new one without getting locked out of the system as a whole.

Back in the old days of the internet when a forum started to get too big they often started to get toxic. Since each forum was isolated leaving it would be pretty hard since you'd not want to lose the good with the bad. Lemmy improves in that in that you can leave for a new community but you don't get locked out of all the content from elsewhere so there's less lock in giving users more choice to find a community that works for them.

One thing that would help is account linking which would decrease lock in even more.

I completely agree with you, I was there for 10 years. The place definitely became hateful, the users changed, the culture changed. The site just feels horrid now unless you're in some super niche sub.

There's always a few subs that get shoved un your face which are straight up the most racist shitholes ever. Lately, I got served a lot of /r/2westerneurope4u and it is absolutely disgusting literal /pol/tier

I had to start sorting by controversial to find comments of interest in many threads since most the conversation was so generic and sanctimonious. That’s a big part of why this is a digg moment for me with reddit.

Their algorithm is designed to stoke hatred and conflict, so they get more user retention.

Which is probably the main reason they closed their source code.

I dunno man. /r/fuckcars seemed pretty tame to me.