What place/places (physical, online, personal) did you leave later than you should have?
Someday when I leave for good, I'll very likely say r/politicalcompassmemes. The place has always had a right-wing presence but at some point pretty long ago it just became the dominant POV and the place is now solidly a no-go for minorities and 95+% of leftists unless they were turned into a term of 'endearment' on 4chan first like how 4chan users call themselves autists and whatever. The place is also pretty bad at sourcing the articles it posts about purported leftists doing ridiculous things. I have mostly looked at the place from the POV of "rightwingers saying stuff" for quite some time now, but I haven't gotten around for leaving for good because occasionally there's a moderately critical post of the sub and that I am accustomed to the jargon used more often there that's less commonly used elsewhere.
Do you mind if I ask where this happened? This sounds eerily similar to something that happened at the college near me.
Probably reddit. I just.. stopped checking. Gradually less and less and now it's once every few weeks when I am really out of stuff to do, for all of 3 minutes until I remember how much that site sucks.
Online places like these, they rot your brain if you let them. I know it's an easy thing to say but the thing is, your are what you read just as much as you are what you eat. The things you learn from your environment become physical parts of you. Make your environment healthy. Hang out with people smarter than you, in places that challenge you, etc.
Now if we're talking emotional places: a six year long engagement that was going nowhere. Boy did i let that go on far too long ...
I used reddit for over a decade and have had my fill of niche subs. But between the shit UI and the overall decline of the user base, those aren't a redeeming feature anymore either.
Reddit's current/new UI would be fine if it weren't so user hostile, littered with CTAs reminding you you're an idiot for using the site instead of the app, bad hit targets so you misclick tons of things, atrociously slow on desktop, and so on...
You can still use the old reddit UI. Theres a setting to default to it, but old.reddit.com instead of 'www' will use it. If they didn't have old reddit, I would leave and never look back.
The old ui is shit on mobile. And i am not particularly looking for reasons to stay; Reddit is not worth tweaking your config for.
By the way, re-reading my previous message i didn't mean to make it sound hostile, sorry in case it came across that way! Appreciate the advice, i just don't care about reddit anymore. I don't have words for how much it's not worth it anymore.
No worries - I agree on the UI being not great on mobile. I don't often use reddit on my phone (too easy to spend hours time-wasting), but when I do I use the compact mode by appending
.compactto the URL. But as you said, if you aren't looking to actually use reddit, then UI tweaks aren't going to help.Honestly... I need to leave reddit. Just dropped on Tildes for the first time in forever today because what's happening to reddit is really frustrating me.
What’s stopping ya?
The use of an app, mainly.
Reddit is much more accessible.... For now, until RIF is gone.
Gaming forums. Specifically, the kind of places that seemingly couldn't let Anita Sarkeesian for about a decade. I think she got a new thread there every week or so, and almost all of them by the same person. Apparently I couldn't recognize the early red flags and leave, not even when Gamergate became the most stupid and hateful Gamer outrage of all time. I guess my life was just too boring at the time. Regrettable and self-destructive, but I suppose it helped pass the time that might've otherwise been spent dwelling and further descending into madness.
Also, boarding school. Should've swallowed my stupid pride and gone to the school with ASD support instead.
I was really involved in a gaming community (for World of Warcraft: r/wow and the related discord) for a long time. At the beginning of this year I left. It was overdue; it has freed up time but also made me much more mentally healthy. I actually enjoy the game more (though it is currently by no means "good") and I don't really spend much of my free time worrying about a community of 2M+ people and how they're going to act.
In a broader sense, reddit is also the answer for me, as it is for others.
There was a gym that I stayed at too long in my 20s. It was a real "bro" zone, which is not at all my style. I hated it, but it was close and cheap. I stayed too long, and then grew a real hatred for going to the gym, and now I don't go to the gym. I should have realized a lot earlier that it was this specific gym that was awful, and not every gym, and given up on it. It would have been better for my lifelong health.
I've left numerous gaming forums over the years. Most notably NeoGAF and ResetEra. For those unaware, ResetEra is a shoot-off from NeoGAF due to forum drama/the founder being a creep. For a brief period of time, I was more obsessed with gaming news than I was about playing them. I was looking for a sense of community, and in some ways I found it talking about console sales figures from Japan and elsewhere.
Over time, I realized that I felt worse participating in these forums than when I hadn't. I had split away from NeoGAF after the big migration and spent a good few years in ResetEra before I got tired of it. There was a lot of "holier-than-thou" attitudes, constant dogpiling, and little valuable discussion going on over time. The off-topic forum was not a fun place and the console wars stuff was embarrassing the older I got. There were just conversations and "debates" about inconsequential stuff from people who weren't even experts in what they were commenting about. Eventually, I went through my account and wiped out all my comments and deleted the bookmark. I realized that if I spent all my time wasting on useless internet forums on things that matter and make a difference, I could be more fulfilled. It is a shame because I was really wanting a place that didn't take itself too seriously but was welcoming/friendly with a mature attitude.
I lurked ResetEra for a while. After the pain of spending years in multiple different internet communities that each gradually shifted rightward and eventually jumped the shark into embracing the right-wing deep end, I really liked the idea of an explicitly progressive forum because presumably it would be immune to that same creeping shift. But it seemed like something was a little wrong with the formula there. I think the problem was that it felt like any amount of hostility was allowed if it happened to point in a leftward/progressive direction, even against people for the same goals. (Admittedly I think it's a problem that's not super clear-cut: one community I followed in the past before was completely against hostility to a fault, even in reaction to a self-described nazi pushing racist nazi ideals, if the nazi was being "polite" in conversation, and the nazi would be allowed to stay. But surely it's possible to draw a line somewhere so that hostility against self-admitted nazis is okay, and hostility against someone who is debating a subtle point while in broad agreement on goals is not okay.)
My enthusiasm for it fully died when ContraPoints and Lindsay Ellis had their separate controversies, and I saw the ResetEra threads on them which seemed to exemplify the issues I was feeling with the site. (If you aren't familiar, both of these people are YouTubers who happen to be LGBT and have made videos pushing progressive causes, but in separate instances were ... uh, each accused of abiding bigotry in some small ambiguous way. I'm going to admit my bias here and say that I've been a big fan of both, and both of their linked videos here talking about their situations are great.) Both threads were extremely polarized and unreasonably critical of ContraPoints / Lindsay Ellis and also anyone at all including people in the thread that defended them in any way. Many of these critical posts were very hostile, admitted to not knowing the whole context, refused to watch the video the thread was about by the person, and often even pushed points that were responded to or fully rebutted within the video. Some very emotionally bundled their positions with their trauma from overt bigotry in their life despite little specific similarity to the situation. And then lots of people pushing back on the more unreasonable criticisms, including ones directed at themselves, got banned for their position supposedly downplaying the bigotry talked about by the other person. Admittedly some of the banned people were pretty rude and those bans probably would have been necessary to cool the thread down, but almost nobody on the critical side got banned no matter how rude they were, so the thread was never pushed to cool down. There wasn't any nuance able to pass on a topic that was in desperate need of it.
I think there's good intentions behind the rules and the moderation that happens there, but the specific combination they have adds up in a way with certain blind spots that fails to keep the space productive and safe.
I agree with this assessment.
Most of my experiences of working with other leftists IRL gave me a sense that the defining characteristic between left and right, in most cases, was the ability to feel empathy. I have my ideals because I believe in fairness, equity, and the general betterment of society. It takes hard work to parse through the nuance of complex issues and to place yourself in the shoes of someone who is different than you. It was something I naively thought as a young adult that was shared among other liberals/leftists. ResetEra actually changed that opinion for me and showed me that the stereotype "smug liberal who knows what's better for you while talking down to you" was a very real thing. And also that a liberal/leftist can just as easily be swept up in the wildfire that is hate/anger and use that to lash out at others and justify their actions, just as much as conservatives. The Democratic Presidential primaries were the breaking point for me. I volunteer and work hard each election cycle to get progressives elected yet the very-online-people on this forum, who reportedly were as left as they could get, would do nothing but snipe at each other, trying to score internet points, and drag other people down. No activism or volunteering or organizing at all. It became clear to me this wasn't the space filled with people who shared the same ideals and work ethic of making the world a better place, but rather just another internet gaming forum filled with in-groups and out-groups and a heavy moderation policy that happened to have people who vote for liberals (or not vote at all). I'm not a free speech absolutist in any sense but I do believe even well-intentioned moderation policies can create echo chambers, and echo chambers are a great breeding ground for intellectually bankrupt radicalism.
As an aside, there is a concept in workplace Psychology called Organizational Justice that I think is relevant to forum moderation (and other rule-based communities). Most notably, procedural justice:
I believe that the situation you outlined regarding ContraPoints and Lindsay Ellis is a godo example of poor procedural justice.
Reddit was definitely an online place I should have left a long time ago. Making moves to do so now, place is garbage and has been for a long time.
In regards to IRL, probably my last job. I enjoyed it from time to time but it absolutely obliterated my mental health. I was in the job for 7 years as a relationship manager for a financial company. I built some great relationships and I loved the people I worked with but nothing gave me anxiety like financial advisors chasing up payments of money to clients when our timescales were poor, which they often were.
I left that job last year and now work for the public auditor for cental and local government and it's great. The work keeps me busy but timescales are managed effectively, my colleagues are great, I'm in control of my own development and I get 42 holidays a year!