Did you ever have that feeling on reddit of “I better word my post just right, otherwise AutoMod will take it down”? Some subs had such strict auto moderating that it was a crap shoot to post something. Not so here. I know there’s value in moderation, and I’m sure Lemmy/kbin/etc. will add more of it with time. But, for now, it was just nice to not be nervous when I was submitting a post here.
I didn’t post a lot but I was definitely anxious about commenting because if it wasn’t worded just right, someone would take it out of context and be offended by it or downvote it to hell. I remember telling someone that I loved their poems - downvoted. I corrected someone about the difference between ESAs and service dogs - cue arguments when they can just literally read the ADA (law). I apologized for getting something wrong - insults and talked down to. I also remember being told that latinx is what trans Latinos want people to use, I used it and was greatly talked down to and told I’m not a real Latino. It felt like reddit was just really hostile no matter what I did. There were many times I wrote a comment but then discarded it.
The secret to commenting fearlessly is to not read your replies. Most reply-thread conversations are people aggressively talking to themselves to feel like winners. The alternative to engaging like that is to embrace the tendency to self-talk, turn a sensitive thread into an essay prompt for yourself, and don’t look back, unless you really feel like getting in an argument that day.
Sometimes you miss good faith engagement that way, but if it’s important to keep that, you can add another point of contact.
This is what ended up happening to me. I ended up going almost an entire year without checking my inbox, instead I would only read replies by revisiting a thread and manually checking comments, and only if I was super interested in a reply or discussion. It was tiresome, and I basically ended up treating reddit as a journal for myself to gather my thoughts on a variety of subjects, to find out how I really felt. In that context, reddit succeeded, but so far, my lemmy experience has been much more social, while also being a place to sort my shit out.
Or read it but if you feel it’s being too aggressive just (try to) ignore it. Don’t reply and feed into their arguments, no matter how right you may actually be.
Debate bro culture is real. It has permeated every form of social media we currently have, and in time it will be here as well, if it isn’t already. The best thing to do is to figure out when people are being disingenuous when engaging with you, and if they are, ignore them. Of course that’s easier said than done.
You’ve got a bunch of nerds whose sole positive trait they ascribe to themselves is being smart, so they’ll do anything to prove that - it’s the only thing keeping them going. That was reddit.
Always remember that people on any social media platform could be intoxicated and replying to stuff. You can walk on egg shells and just absolutely piss someone off whose drunk and they’ll tear into you. They’ll never admit they’re wrong from embarrassment
I didn’t care about down votes I just didn’t want to get involved into an argument because I used to spend a dumb amount of time and effort rebuking some replies including searching for sources and making sure I was clear and would use well thought out reasoning and arguments like in debate class… it’s a waste of time. A waste of time and it just puts you in a bad mood and makes you defensive. I shouldn’t have to be defensive about common sense.
This is so true. The mocking and hostile replies were enough for me to not even bother most of the time
My favorite part is when people would argue with your comments for things you never said. They would take an illogical leap from my actual words and get angry about it.
I think this was worse in the bigger/more general subs. I mostly stayed in technical/science-y subs and people would correct each other without too much fuss. But then the intent was usually to actually learn things and being corrected (sometimes incorrectly, leading to a bigger discussion) was just more opportunities for everyone to learn more.
Some subs on Reddit are ridiculously complex to post in. It put me off posting things that I thought were interesting so many times.
@DeathWearsANecktie aka r/showerthoughts
Truegaming was like that: you had to make a post that fostered a discussion…but you couldn’t frame it in any was as something that could possibly be asking readers a question, or imply a demand for reader input.
So, you had to write something that people would reply to and not reply to at the same time…
I’ve used that mechanism as a moderator intentionally.
Some subs just get a lot of low effort, low quality posts, by setting certain automated rules, you can filter out people that don’t read any submission instructions. In practice those are nearly always low effort.
A simple example is “set post flair to X before clicking on submit” and if they don’t do that, just autoremove the post and tell them why and to contact the mods if they disagree.
Anyone that cares will delete and resubmit correctly. Anyone that doesn’t really care will move on to something else.
The bots are incoming imminently. Which subs will use them, is less certain. Obviously beehaw will be like a straitjacket, but i think anywhere else should be ok
This, to me, is the really cool thing!
Yeah… I remember posting multiple times on some subs EVERY time I wanted to post because I thought I understood the rules… I mostly comment nowadays because of it tbh! Posting anxiety is a solid way to put it
I definitely gave up on many subs over the years because apparently I couldn’t figure out how to post just the right way to not get auto-moderated. Can’t use X-word, or post included a link or whatever. Too many rules, and I gave up.
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I never had posting anxiety because I stuck mostly to small subs but I despised how automod could just do that. That said, it would be cool if we had a (smaller) automod here, before things get out of hand. We don’t need bots and trolls to ruin everything.
Yeah posting is like walking on eggshells. Too many rules that aren’t always obvious/easy to find. Or that time I got auto banned from r/news for responding to someone on r/conservative with my liberal perspective…
A huge and important sub like r/news really shouldn’t be banning people for those reasons. Not defending conservatives, but even they should at least be able to participate in the default news sub. This has big “go back to your echo chamber where you belong, how dare you broaden your perspective, heathen” vibes.
It gets harder when you realize that an awful lot of conservatives (well, in the US at least) literally tie their personality to being bigoted. They simply can’t not say offensive things. Even if it’s completely irrelevant, they gotta slide something in somehow.
(Then again, as Mastodon has shown, there’s the tenderfolk on the other side, but at least they’re a pretty small group and don’t make too much noise overall.)
Yup, was at a party last night and of course someone had to mention the holiday in the US tomorrow (Juneteenth) with “A most ridiculous excuse for a holiday, but that’s another discussion” right in the middle of a harmless conversation. Like he just had to say it.
Fk AutoMod. There were some subreddits I actually couldn’t post, even though I wanted to (League of Legends being one example).
I’ve made https://kbin.social/m/lolesports if you want to discuss all things League of Legends esports! This includes fantasy (no betting), fanart (no NSFW), post-game match discussion, roster news, really anything!
Omg yes. I always felt like more of an editor than a writer, even when commenting. I could never quite get to the point, or would have to approach in a super round about way. Also, my inbox was great source of anxiety. I actually started straight up ignoring it.
I’m not gonna sugar coat it…fediverse>reddit for me.
Fuck the bots, I’m so glad they’re gone. Reddit constantly hides your posts for no reason. Someone can post in a support subreddit, and they’ll wonder why they don’t get any replies for hours. Cuz reddit fucking hidden it without notifying them. Imagine how sad a suicidal person must be to see no replies when they’re desperately seeking for advice.
I wasn’t posting but I commented a lot. I can’t say I had any anxiety regarding commenting.
I had 105k comment karma so I must’ve been used to it at least, right?
I remember in some communities when I was posting where I hadn’t submitted a new post before (I commented much more than posted), going back and forth to the rules over and over again to make sure I didn’t miss something, only to have my post removed by auto mod or a regular mod anyway, for not following some rule that wasn’t in the list of rules.
I got used to not caring about downvotes on comments much, and to not caring about hostile replies, but not the new post “did I somehow violate a rule that wasn’t in the list?” anxiety. I will not miss that at all.
(To be clear, I’m not anti-moderation or anti-mod at all, this is limited to this specific situation, which happened more often than you’d think, sadly.)
It started to get really overdone on the moderation side for sure.
Glad I’m not the only one noticing this! Didn’t realize how much it had affected me. It took me days to dip my toes in when I came here, and I still felt that ‘twitch’ waiting for the automod to slap my post down, or feeling the insta-flames or downvote parade in some of the big subs.
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