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Seeing a notification about a new reply on Tildes gives me more pleasure than it did on Reddit
Getting a reply to your comment or post on Reddit was always a double-edged sword, it could be a helpful reply or just someone saying "THIS." or commenting on your punctuation. On Tildes I feel much more certain that it's a well thought out reply every time I press the red link.
Thanks for being a great community and thanks to @Deimos for keeping the place civilized.
This!
(Just kidding.) I completely agree. The depth of each comment on this website is much better than that of Reddit. No more scrolling though 100 of the same joke before finding the next reasonable comment. I've collapsed threads on Reddit with hundreds of comments and thousands of votes because I couldn't find anything meaningful in there. Here, the threads are short enough that I can read all of it, and I'll usually get something from it as well.
Reddit encourages noise. In the short time I've had an account on Tildes, I have made very few comments, and that's fine. Good even. I'd usually have left a dozen or so comments on Reddit, most of which would not have added anything.
More pleasure, but also way less trepidation when seeing a new notification as well. Seeing a notification on reddit used to genuinely give me anxiety, especially back in the days when I moderated a bunch of big subreddits. I would often leave my notifications unread for hours or even days until I was mentally prepared to read something awful. People were often just so fucking needlessly cruel, insulting, and/or bigoted on reddit. :(
I haven't ever had that same fear when seeing a new notification here on tildes though. And the very few times someone has replied with something mean, cruel, or bigoted here, Deimos has always taken care of it, usually by removing their comment, and sometimes even kicking that person off the site if their behavior was egregious. This may not be a totally "safe space" but I do feel much safer here than I ever did on reddit, since Deimos genuinely cares about this community, the well-being of the people in it, and has very little tolerance for cruelty and bigotry.
It's absurd, but I've left reddit replies unread for months. I think the biggest number of unread notifications I had was around 550 at a certain point.
The really sad thing is that many of those replies were perfectly nice conversations with reasonable people. I didn't go around reddit constantly antagonizing people, and I believe most of my comments were reasonable and located in friendly subreddits. The problem is whenever I did get negative, aggressive responses, it was enough that it conditioned me to be worried about any response, and I just stopped enjoying engaging there in general.
And boy do I feel foolish, now that I've been hanging around here for almost a couple months. I have been able to have tons of reasonable, polite discussions - which are actually discussions, since I read and engage with the replies happily and without anxiety. I've come across a few people who disagreed with me, but they've done so politely, and without attacking my character or resorting to insults. In a way, those conversations are actually what have changed my perspective the most and given me hope about interacting with people. Because of course, I want to interact with people who disagree with me, I don't want to be in an echo chamber. I just want people to be polite and consider the human they're speaking with. I also think I have some things to improve on myself, but I suspect the further I move away from reddit, the less defensiveness I'll tend to carry with me in online conversations.
I feel like people here treat me how I've always wished to be treated on the internet, and how I've always tried to treat others. Giving people the benefit of a doubt, not assuming ill intent right away, acknowledging what we do agree on in addition to what we don't agree on, and never resorting to insults. Generally, treating online discussions a bit more like how we would speak to each other if we had met in real life.
100% agree. It was only when I started visiting Tildes that I realized how low quality the comments on Reddit had become. Once I became aware of it, I realized I collapse the first dozen comments on a reddit thread now before finding one with actual substance.
Over the last few years on reddit, I started clicking 'disable inbox replies' on each and every comment I made because so many times when I had a new message it was a reply that took my comment in the worst possible way and went from there. It never ceased to amaze me how it seemed like some people would scan a comment for a phrase or sentence, ignore all the rest of the context, and go off on a small aspect of the overall point. I eventually came to understand that so many people on social media just want to be mad about something, and anger = engagement so of course it's encouraged by all platforms.
It's enjoyable reading replies here because for the most part people put thought into their words and don't just assume the worst automatically. I definitely appreciate it and I'm glad you do too.
This is a great callout, and something that I've become pleasantly aware of on Tildes as well.
With Reddit, I would turn off reply notifications as a standard practice. I'm not a fan of most push alerts, and generally reserve those for things that actually require my immediate attention like a phone call, text, or IM. Obviously those mechanisms exist for engagement purposes, but IMO they also carry a psychological cost, not only due to the increasingly-shrill dunk culture prevalent on Reddit, but because they also imply an unfilled obligation to continue a discussion, immediately. I prefer the old school forums approach, where if I want to follow up on a thread, I can do it when it suits me, not when my attention is demanded.