Asklemmy

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 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.

In group/out group dynamics are fueled by insecurity and ignorance. Reddit (the internet/humanity) is full of people who are scared of being outcasts and do not know themselves well enough to be confident. Often for good reason because there are swathes of people who will punish them for not going along with the group. The punishments are almost always disproportionate to the transgression, and continually escalate as the in-group feels completely justified in their actions due to confirmation bias.

In the case of reddit's main demographic these are young, typically nerdy men who have experienced being outcasts, and not a whole lot else - who now relish the thought of finally being part of the in-group. They will go far out of their way to prove they belong, even if it means handling themselves in a hypocritical manner and giving up their unique interests to mirror the majority of the group. Those who do not either leave, get labeled as contrarian (and summarily dismissed) or actually go fully contrarian (not like the other girls~~)

The entirety of modern social media being built around Trends™ is all you need to see how weak people's identities really are. It's part of why people who are authentically themselves (Trump, Walz) are viewed as strong depending on which side of the divide you fall on. People are so busy faking it to fit in (in fear of real consequences), they've outsourced their entire being to the trends of the group they mostly identify with.

It's fully baked in to small town American identity, and even those who can see how absurd it is will still be forced to choose between unjustified torment, conformity, or leaving. One of those options is safe, the other two are risky or outright dangerous. All three options reinforce the belief of the in-group that their choice is the way it's meant to be.

In short: people are really weak and we live in a culture that has preyed on this for centuries under the threat of violence.

Literally nothing can be done to avoid it. The "Reddit hivemind" is the human hivemind. When enough people start contributing to a certain community, certain ideas usually unanimously shared between individuals get boosted up to the top and become general consensus.

Imo, it likely was/is due to the voting system — and, in a similar sense, awards. Redditors want to increase their Karma scores and seem to, at least subconsciously, view it as clout. So, they'll create posts with the intent of farming these points — ie they post things that they know will get a specific response from the masses. What also doesn't help, and is something that Lemmy similarly suffers from, is that there generally is no established consensus on how votes should be used. An upvote could mean agreement, or that a post is funny, or that it's good quality, or that it's on topic for a community, etc. A downvote could mean that the person disagrees with the post, or that they think that it isn't relevant or they simply don't like the OP. In reality, all that votes do, at the fundamental level, is tell the algorithm where it should place posts (a personalized recommendation algorithm changes this a bit, but the effect is essentially the same) — a post with a large upvote to downvote to ratio gets shown higher up and, by extension, more than one with a smaller ratio. This creates a sort of feedback loop where the posts that get farmed for upvotes get shown more. People don't want their post to be buried, so they'll only post what they think will get upvotes. And since upvotes are usually used for things that illicit an "agreement" response, only posts that people agree with will be shown.

The solution to these issues, imo, is to create an obvious standard for how votes are used and change how they're interpreted by the algorithm. Imo, Facebook was on the right track with how they were using emojis as the voting method. People generally react to posts with emotion, and an emoji is a good representation of that. You could potentially still have an up/down form of vote (alongside the emotional voting options), but it would be standardized to only be used as a metric for relevance/importance/correctness. This could be enforced by moderation, if votes were publicly viewable, by allowing moderators to remove people that are vote brigading (not including emotional votes). Emotional votes probably shouldn't be considered by the algorithm so that emotional bias can be avoided. Or, at the very least, there should be different algorithms that take these voting types into account I'm different ways (eg if you only want funny posts, you could sort to primarily get posts with a laughing reaction). In addition to this, also removing the gamification aspect (not showing (at least not publicly) total scores on profiles).

How it took over: liberalism

How to defeat it: agressive communist mods

No need to thank me 😌

Reddit is notorious for astroturfing. The lemmy hivemind(s) is the lemmitor hivemind from people socialized on Reddit who came to lemmy and brought that shit with them. Same with other instances like .world, but worse because they have fewer legacy users.

It may be impossible to prevent such community-wide erosion especially on an individual basis, but I think the best one can do to at least not contribute to that erosion is maintaining a sense of vigilance about the foundational idea at the heart of Reddit's site-wide rot: "I am smarter than the out-group, and anything I do within the in-group to increase my score affirms that I am endlessly clever and funny."

Remove downvotes. Unironically, its a good idea. Requires people to actually engage with something if they disagree rather than just downvote and move on. Gets people talking & raises user engagement. Will be an uptick in shitflinging for a short while till all the assholes out themselves, get banned, and site culture improves from that alone.

The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.

IMO: tribal thinking.

It comes down to "they do not think like I want them to or they won't agree with me, so I will downvote posts."

Controversial topics are even more downvoting just to downvote.

The self-built echo chambers are already constructed; self-censorship and anything outside of their views and sources are dismissed, labeled, and smeared so as to not think about the information being shared.

It happens everywhere; the status quo is welcomed, while anything outside of it will seem controversial or extreme.