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

  • 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.