I see it just as extension to “cancel culture” in IRL society. Nothing complicated just same stuff pushed from media comes to the web. Much helped by algorithms that are supporting it.

It is not only reddit, whole public internet is just an echo chamber, with no critical opinion allowed.

Every topic in current society (at least Europe+North America, I don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the world) is either black or white and no in between. Very scary place we are in currently. And people put you in some category just based on one sentence, one though, one idea.

I don’t see anything special here or on reddit that is not happening in other parts of our society.

Maybe fediverse is so clean you can see it happening live, just look at any defederation request and what they think of different opinions. Different opinion is forbidden. I never thought we will ger to this point, I believed internet will give us freedom of speech and freedom to discuss. But so many topics have become dangerous.

Isolated communities sharing rigid points of view are a problem, but I think the voting system is to blame. When someone disagrees and downvotes as a consequence, it changes the way that comment is read by the next reader, this will likely generate inertia over the way the message is read in general through time.

I can’t explain why I do like to read other people’s comments. Most of the time I do not bother to engage in conversations with strangers, but Lemmy has several advantages over Reddit just because it doesn’t count or publish people’s “karma”. It’s a blessing that some instances of Lemmy can also hide the voting system altogether, which is the only way I can beat the anxiety of putting my thoughts out there. I think these elements make Reddit more addictive, because a “good” number in your comments and profile confirms your membership to a given community. I believe it also shapes a “correct” way of thinking.

if we can avoid Lemmy’s most active city being Eglin Air Force Base, we just might be able to avoid the hive mind

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

— Agent K, Men In Black

Users upvoting/downvoting leads to a hivemind, even if the moderation is not complicit (which it often is).

Unfortunately I think people downvoting things they disagree with is kind of inevitable. People are notoriously combative online, and if they’re given an option to drown someone out, they’re going to abuse it. And that makes it even easier for any sort of hivemind to kick in.

I personally don’t know a better system, but it’s not perfect.

Whenever I saw someone complaining about the “hivemind” over there, they were invariably whining about people not liking their unpopular opinion on something. When you say “hivemind” you are equating anyone with that opinion to insects/drones/NPC etc. Just because you’re different doesn’t mean you’re right.

I suspect a lack of critical thinking. Respond first, ask questions later or not at all.

All the factors. I think this is more likely not a discrete case

Gamifying the voting incentivises people to make low quality posts and comments. That’s why Reddit is now basically just rage bait fake stories with comment chains that all look exactly the same. And now it’s all just ai generated anyway.

I sometimes visit and read the AITAH type stories and I’m dumbfounded that people can believe or enjoy reading them. All the subtleties and nuances of the early days are gone and it’s a race to who can karma farm the hardest.

The other thing that made Reddit great in early days were the small communities being visible on the front page. It made the content varied and there were different types of posting hitting front page. I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.

I have a conspiracy theory take on it; I think Reddit is run by fascist admins trying to push a fascist ideology and that’s why it’s so toxic. I think techbros that run corporate social media platforms are all fash.

Stop over-policing people. Just because you disagree with something someone says, doesnt mean you have a right or duty to shut them down

I have a hypothesis that all the good people with a moral compass left Reddit in disgust over the API changes, and effectively being forced into using the official Reddit app. What remains of Reddit are the sociopathic assholes.

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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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