This is going to be a short and sweet little history of Reddit. Reddit was founded in 2005.
Take a look at what Reddit looked like in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20061206235353/http://reddit.com/
Note that it didn’t have subreddits back then because the user base was too small.
Look at Reddit in 2008 (December 31): https://web.archive.org/web/20081231080128/http://www.reddit.com/reddits/
Politics had just 72,314 subscribers. Technology had 85,678 subscribers, and the “Nicher” Food subreddit had only 4,438 subscribers.
Lemmy/Kbin follows the same path. Initially, generalist communities like Politics and Technology will have the most momentum and gain subscribers, just like Reddit did back then. As the user base grows, “niche” communities will be able to sustain themselves.
Let’s not think about the Reddit of today, let’s think about Reddit of old. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
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Shills, activists, trolls, state actors, and advertisers follow the eyeballs. They don’t give a crap if it is on the fediverse or some other platform.
If the fediverse capabilities can’t evolve to provide controls, then it’s doomed to failure. It’s already bad enough that bot accounts will create a new community then spam the crap out of it to appear on the “hot” view. Expect this to be turbocharged as the US enters another election cycle.
r/politics problem isn’t that it’s infested with maga nonsense….idk what you’re even talking about.
R/politics problem is that it’s a doomer cesspool that doesn’t actually like talking about politics, but likes to complain and talk about Trump all the time.
I’m a borderline socialist, so pretty left leaning, and that subreddit is way too toxic for me. I’m not interested in that type of discourse.
Let me clarify because I can tell I implied too much and it just ended up not being communicated. That’s on me.
My point is an issue with moderation. The simple fact is toxic behavior is allowed because mods/admins/etc. on forums tend to be too cautious with the ban hammers unless a rule is explicitly violated. If someone is disruptive to the community and constantly starting fights, even if they don’t “break a rule on the side bar,” the mods at /r/politics needed to just show them the door but never did. I don’t know if it’s a well meaning but misguided commitment to “Free Speech :TM:” or concern about the optics to the community or whatever, regardless if there is someone in your hen house riling up all the hens every day, it doesn’t matter if they’re a wolf or a hen. Kick them out.
At present I have not seen many admins with the stomach to enforce like that. But if we want to actually not be reddit all over again, that’s what it will take. Beehaw I think has some decent ideas about how to handle this problem via defederation, and I think it’s a real solution that needs to be explored more, but ultimately admins need to just kick people out when they’re particularly toxic and disruptive.
The reason I mentioned the “stop the steal” crowd in particular is because 100% of the time it is just a horrible flame war the moment they pop in. Dozens of removed comments and just insults hurled everywhere.
Admins did take steps against far-right instances. But I didn’t even mean politics, but more stuff like Redditors coming here and trying to import toxic stuff that Reddit used to allow, the whole “I’m gonna stalk you and downvote you everywhere” retaliation mentality because of karma, the low-effort comments and the flame baits (which Reddit loved since it created more engagement) etc…
I’ve already seen a couple of downvote-you-everywhere people being called out for doing it (votes are accessible in ActivityPub, and public in kbin).
I don’t think it’s as easy for them to flourish here.
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