The Fediverse can be pretty toxic
drewdevault.com

Social networks are not good for you. The Fediverse brought out the worst in me, and it can bring out the worst in you, too. The behaviors it encourages are plainly defined as harassment, a behavior which is not unique to any ideological condition. People get hurt on the Fediverse. Keep that in mind. Consider taking a look in the mirror and asking yourself if your relationship with the platform is healthy for you and for the people around you.

He's not wrong tbh, I wonder for how much longer I'll stick around this place, seeing as its the last form of social media I actually use

  • Pirate [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    But it’s still just a Twitter clone, and many of the social and psychological ills which come with that are present in the Fediverse.

    I've seen discussions about this but they don't usually result in much. I think part of it might be that FOSS projects are mostly chasing after what they are trying to replace. Twitter came up with retweets and Mastadons probably just copied it without stopping to reconsider.

    Lemmy correctly identified the psychological effect of karma and avoided it but what else should be reexamined? Do we need to see the upvote count of our comments/posts? We aren't chasing karma but are we chasing upbears?

    Does the fighting happen because people forget about the "human behind the screen"? We don't have territorial disputes because we aren't part of the fediverse but we can see what that might look like by looking at the current state lemmy is in since genzedong relocated there.

    A couple of weeks ago @Awoo was talking about the need for some gamification but what would be the right amount? How much gamification do we already have?

    • KiaKaha [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Like any social grouping, you can choose what gets rewarded and what doesn’t. Design helps do that.

      On 4chan, design rewarded people replying to your posts and comments. A reply bumps the thread to the top of the forum, and gives your comment a nice link to the reply. And so the more provocative you are, the more you’re ‘rewarded’.

      On Reddit (especially post-downvote-view-count-removal), design rewards posting content that gets the highest upvote to downvote ratio. This rewards witty content in-line with the ‘hive mind’, and discourages anything that rocks the boat.

      On Hexbear, we started out with both up and downvotes visible. But we quickly discovered that having visible downvotes made people feel bad, especially in such a small community. So we went a step further than Reddit, and removed downvotes entirely. (A trend in line with YouTube.) The incentive here, ironically, is closer to 4chan than to Reddit, as the interface rewards inflammatory content with more responses, and messaging that runs counter to the mainstream isn’t suppressed by downvotes. This is counterbalanced by frequent mod intervention. If you post things that are too inflammatory (or, possibly even upvote them) then you get hit with a ban. This also has a broader chilling effect on inflammatory posting. Ultimately though it will have difficulty scaling.

      My point is, even if you try to ‘de-gamify’, your social system still has incentives, and those will influence behaviour. Interaction itself, (even negative), can be a reward, and people will shape their behaviour to get it.

      4chan has no persistent user identity, and yet it and its spin offs have spawned multiple mass shooters. In one case it was quite literally described as an IRL effortpost.

        • KiaKaha [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah, one way around the ‘scalability’ problem is to limit the size of each community and just make it easy for more people to set them up.

          The issue is, that still places an upper bound on a community of ‘however many mods necessary to read every communication in real time’. You can try to make it more efficient by having mods only look at reported content, I guess.

          Actually, that tends to resemble moderation on reddit itself. It’s easy to create new communities, and mods mostly just look at reported content. It helps too that they only really have to catch the edge cases of undesirable vote-positive content, rather than all content.

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think it's very much a process of experimentation. There are certain elements of gamification that I have seen online that has been motivating that I've never seen anyone have a negative experience with.

      For example, I don't think forum titles based on total post count ever caused any negative outcomes other than perhaps raising the number of junk posts a few users made to pad post count as they chased titles. This is largely a non-issue on a site like this in my opinion and I'd go as far as suggesting that more fluffy engagement is not a bad thing, encouraging people to interact in ANY way at all seems good to me and runs in contradiction with reddit philosophy which has always been "don't interact unless you've got something genuinely worthwhile to add" at least in the old days.

      I also don't think the trophy system on reddit is bad. They're essentially like military medals given for distinguishing yourself in service. This can definitely be done to encourage (and reward) extremely high effort posting. The parameters for it can be kept a secret as well so that admins can hand them out personally for certain things on a case by case basis (without ever admitting to doing so).

      There's definitely elements of gamification I would not want to go near and care in the specific things that are explored is needed so as not to upset the ecosystem. With that said though the removal of downvotes was a DRASTIC change in direction for the site and I think very few people would argue it was a bad choice now. I think the community has a lot of trust in the team and is willing to let it experiment a bit and decide if certain things are good or bad after testing.

    • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
      ·
      2 years ago

      the voting system is a fundamentally bad way to organize a message board. forums with chronological threads ordered by latest reply worked perfectly fine. the only reason reddit had votes is because digg had votes, because it was designed as a news aggregator, but when reddit transitioned to being more forum-like, it retained votes just because it was a unique feature that had the appearance of democracy.

      • comi [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Kill comment upbears :AC-AnarKitty: