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Why do we find Tildes (and Lobsters) more interesting than the alternatives?
I frame this in the affirmative because we would not be here if we did not agree. I have only been engaging actively with Lobsters and Tildes recently but find it more enjoyable than Lemmy, Piefed, Mastodon, etc.. Why is that? I believe the fediverse is a cringe circle-jerk of Linux and echo-chamber liberal-not-leftists. Lobsters has the same tech-leaning of the fediverse but it is much more interesting and technical. What then makes Tildes more interesting? Quality or lack of fediverse cringe?
Curious what you all think?
Since getting into Reddit since 2014 or so, that is been my main source of forum activity. Since Reddit proved to not be a good site, I have tried to find alternatives.
I want to recognize people. I want to care about them and see what they have to say. This has meaning in and of itself.
Smaller forums have self-selected audiences who care about specific things and are more caring about those things as you have mentioned.
More importantly I don’t want to have to shovel through 500 mostly identical comments to try to find something actually meaningful or unique. Especially when those comments are negative, hurtful, angering, or simply stupid. User moderation, for the most part, simply doesn’t work.
This is what I dislike about reddit in general. There are too may threads that blow up quickly and there is really no conversation.
However, several niche sub reddits are great where you can still have a conversation with other people
A lot of the “big” subreddits now too are just a bunch of reaction gifs as comments, which is even worse than bad discussion.
Very much agree with this sentiment. Reddit is certainly such and the fediverse can also be quite toxic.
All that.
Tildes reminds me of all the time I spent on forums from the mid 90s into the 00s. I like that I recognize people. I like that it's text only and that there's a variety of topics to discuss; it's not just a bunch of hot takes, one liners and non-sequiters. There's no memes, little low effort posts, etc.
First place I refresh in the morning and last one at night.
Reddit is too corporate and focused on monetization and growth without regard to product quality. They have some practices that feel anti-user, especially around mobile. The moderation policies seem historically inconsistent at best.
The fediverse/mastadon is too small, too difficult, and the decentralization solves problems I don't care about enough to accept those tradeoffs. It's pretty hard to find compelling content on some of those platforms, and the drama can be high.
I also think that platforms that don't operate on invite systems are likely too vulnerable to spam and bots. It doesn't completely solve the problem but it does introduce a barrier and an audit trail.
With my social media / news platforms I want transparency, privacy, and generally benevolent centralized ownership. Socially responsible business structures are a huge plus as well if they can be (such as a PBC, Nonprofit, etc..).
@Akir's opening comment is a big part of if it for me:
It's also that people simply treat each other better here. It's usually trusted that we're arguing in good faith, and trolling mostly doesn't happen. When people disagree, it's likely to be civil and respectful.
I do think this is changing somewhat, which bothers me. But for now I think the above statements are still generally true.
They're different types of social media. Lemmy, Mastodon, and Piefed are all microblogging sites like Twitter was - they're designed around fast-moving content where you follow individuals based on what they post. Tildes and Lobsters are link-aggregator type sites where you follow a general topic and discuss posts that are usually not created by whoever shared them. The way the content is created and organized discourages scrolling and encourages conversation, especially design decisions like putting the comment box at the bottom here on Tildes.
Why we like sites like Tildes and Lobsters could be an interesting discussion but shitting on the Fediverse is a needless sidetrack. The Fediverse is what you make it. If you get cringe content that's because that's the kind of people you followed. There is no algorithm pushing it in your face.
Or more accurately the Fediverse is what people, left to their own devices, make it.
And that's the problem. In a vacuum, the majority of people will tend towards being reasonably rational and kind. But it only takes a handful of people, in a given space, to change the vibe. Once people start getting triggered, reasonable and kind are the first things to go. It's just biology.
In addition to that, even a fairly low percentage of negativity and triggers is enough to put off most of the first timers you actually want to keep. So it becomes self selecting, over time you end up with a higher and higher percentage of people who are just there for the drama. Trolls and troll feeders essentially.
So any space that doesn't actively work to discourage people's worst instincts eventually succumbs to them. Not because people generally suck, but because people have built in systems that make them suck temporarily when they're in triggering environments.
The fediverse has the reputation it does for a reason and I think anyone who's interested in supporting and improving it should be taking it seriously, because what you're seeing is a selective process pushing away a lot of the people you probably want to stick around.
Which is why self moderation and "free speech" ethos have never really worked on the internet.
I haven't used any of those, or even really never heard of any of those besides mastodon until just now.
I do still use reddit but I am only subscribed to several very small and niche subs and a few local subs.
I like Tildes mainly because it feels like a small community, it reminds me a lot of reddit circa 2008 or Digg circa 2006.
One thing I like that I didn't see anyone else mention is that I feel like there are a lot of very knowledgeable and experienced people here. Especially considered the relatively small size of the community. So there's often interesting and nuanced takes on many topics.
Does anyone have a recommendation for other sites like tildes? I’ve noticed a significant drop off since the “sunsetting” conversation, so I’d like to see what other smaller sites exist. (Lobsters seems to be tech-focused, so of less interest to me personally.)
I also spend time on Discuit, which might scratch your itch. It's similarly small, general topics, and community-centered.
I do find Tildes interesting, perhaps because it's a small community where there's high trust in people putting in effort and bringing their genuine self to discussions.
I actually don't find Lobsters that interesting, and read hacker news instead despite hating it and getting psychic damage from reading it every day. For as much as I find the people atrocious and the discussions lacking, the reason I read it instead of Lobsters is because of the sheer number of comments. I do, for this one instance, actually want to read what hundreds of selfish and deluded assholes have to say about vaguely tech related (and other) articles. Lobsters does seem to have much higher quality discussions about some of the same topics, but then I'm just reading like 20 posts about something I could have got much of the meat from the article about, instead of 300 weirdos.
I would frame the behavioral differences between social platforms mainly as a question of what sort of incentives each platform is centered on. These used to be more diverse. Or rather, the incentive used to be more simple and more universal: to socialize. It's been a long time coming, but especially in the last few years we've seen a pretty severe shift across almost every major social platform to reorient themselves entirely around the incentive system of 'engagement'.
I think that without maybe putting it in so many words, the main thing many of us seek from social platforms is a dialogue: We want to communicate our thoughts and actions to others, and we want others to reciprocate. This is a long-winded way of describing the basic concept of human interaction in general, but my point is to contrast this with the core invariant of the typical social platform, and how alienating this invariant basically is.
There is a fun equivocation of words lurking behind 'engagement', because the way in which it is used in the context of something like social media is actually very different from the common meaning of the word. These platforms do not favor engagement in the typical sense of attentive, purposeful interaction. For them, engagement is signal, a piece of information about a consumer which they can then commodify. This is their business model, and I'm convinced the reason for the sharp degradation of quality across most of the social internet is due to these businesses realizing that this perverse kind of engagement really is ultimately just a numbers game.
What I mean is that if you think about it, once a user has engaged with a piece of content in any way at all, even just clicking on the thread or leaving a reaction, the platform has already obtained the valuable part of the signal. They've gotten a piece of information that says "This user saw this post and it caught their attention/made them feel happy/angry/sad". Maybe the user spends another 10 minutes going through the thread on a post, but this is a diminishing return for the platform. It's simply not in their interest to incentivize a deeper engagement. The most valuable thing for them is for you to continue moving through your feed, producing as many signals as possible, and so maybe without realizing it right away, you'll find that most of the content placed in front of you is actually devoid of content.
Although the phrase 'attention economy' is in vogue, these platforms aren't really trying to hold your attention at all-- it suffices just to capture it for a second, and then to keep you scrolling. This is why it would be possible for me to have scrolled through a hundred posts on Reddit in the time it's taken me to write this comment, and I think it's the reason we're on tildes instead of Reddit: Because we know that we wouldn't remember a single thing about any of those posts, but Reddit would remember a hundred new datapoints about you.
Conversely, on tildes, this thread did engage me, in the actual meaning of the word, and I thought about the question enough to write this blog-post-like comment. Hopefully someone thinks a bit about this comment too.