The karma/upvote/downvote system encourages engagement and gives users an idea of how others perceive their posts. It also encourages people to think about their posts and it helps keep garbage from clogging up the feed.

The problem is that posts are now “attention-centric” and that might lead to people posting stuff that’s more controversial or even “rage-bait” because it gets a reaction.

But honestly though, the toxicity was always there. It’s just that now people express it with an arrow click instead of a flame post calling out the OP’s mom.

I think anonymity or at least the perception of it on the internet breeds toxicity because it’s easier to hurt someone when neither party has to look each other in the eye.

Just like multi-reddits used to do.

Then the admins will just override them and force the subs public. They’ll also remove the mods and appoint new ones. The only thing anyone can do is stop posting and leave.

But at least we are doing everything we can to inform everyone about what’s going on, why it’s bad, and why we’re upset. We also let them know that there’s a place to go where we can rebuild what’s lost.

We didn’t lose. Reddit lost us and will continue to lose.

Reddit offers nothing without its (human) users. They can chatGPT all the posts they want to try and look busy, but people are gonna notice the lack of original thoughts and leave. It will be slow and it won’t be complete, but it is happening.

Fediverse services need to lead with the “all” feed. People don’t want to be pressured to pick a server without knowing what’s on it or where everyone else is. When you go to reddit, the first thing you see is the r/all feed. The posts and content is what gets people to join.

They may have fell for the astroturfing campaign or just don’t see the issues due to not having the traffic that larger subs do. Even if they did, if they never show up on r/all, the only people that would care that they went dark, are their small communities.

Then there’s the results. Mod teams got completely gutted and replaced in the bigger subs. Why would they risk their positions and community for a site where they post for free?

Maybe they polled too. If the communities didn’t want to stay private, what’s the point?

They destroyed trust. It will take a lot of work and time to get that trust back. If that’s their strategy, their investors need to be in it for quite a long haul!

I’m only explaining the behavior. There’s very good reason for it, and I very much also want to see both Lemmy succeed and Reddit fail.

I’m hopeful but it will take a while. I want to see where we are in 6 months from now. Apps need to be pushed to the stores (at least on iOS).

That being said, it needs protocols for migrating instances when an instance is dead or about to die. Then there are some privacy concerns and such. It’s also not clear how it all can sustain monetarily except via donations.

But seeing the recent growth spurts and increase in new posts, I am still hopeful that this place has staying power.

It’s classic tribal or “sports team” mentality. Ex-redditors want to see reddit fail just as much as Lemmy succeed.

Communities need ways of adding restrictions to posting. Some reddit communities used stuff like Karma counts to prevent bots from joining or even account ages. Eventually bots and spammers found ways around it such karma farming using reposts or using tools like chatGPT to generate post topics that might trick legitimate posters to upvote..

I don’t know of a foolproof way to prevent all spammers, but some kind of tooling is needed to help moderate communities and filter out obvious spammers and trolls

The large instances usually subscribe to most of the others but not every instance is equal. You should go to other instances (you don’t have to join) and check their “all” feeds. You’ll definitely see differences.

A few last minute loopholes were carved in according to comments in this post

• some apps have gotten a temporary reprieve such as Narwhal
• Some apps have gotten an exception for access for visually impaired.
• the NSFW block is exempt for mods so if you start your own sub, you can still see all content or so it seems (I’m not quite sure because Narwhal still seems fully functional in this regard and I am not a mod)