Just putting that out there. While we might have struggle sessions over bullshit, the larger internet zeitgeist is putrid and rancid.
The thing that makes all 3 of those places good is that the userbase is talking to each other authentically instead of writing comments to secure votes.
On the wider internet most people are writing their comments not for the person they’re actually replying to, but for the audience that will be voting on the comment. Social media has now trained people into this mindset and it has produced a rancid style of inauthentic interaction.
Even with people I fucking hate and disagree with I prefer an authentic interaction where they’re actually responding to me and having a real conversation compared to where they’re responding for a perceived audience of voters. This is now almost impossible to find online.
I will say however, the times where that hasn’t been the case here on Hexbear have been some of the most toxic experiences I’ve ever had online. When a hexbear turns bad-faith it gets really nasty.
just popping in to say fuck discord.
IRC but worse should not have been a winning idea
I can’t stream video, direct drop files, use custom emotes, or see at a glance which of my friends are online across servers on IRC, so I don’t see how Discord is worse.
id have to say it is the spying
The centralised private ownership and inability to extricate data are also up there.
- Streaming video can be done with Jitsi Meet
- Voice chat via mumble.
- sharing files can be done via pastebin site (if text form) or through other third party (like imgbb).
- custom emotes can probably be done by extending the IRC protocol to allow for embedding tiny images. IRC allows for users to send commands so I don’t see why this couldn’t be done.
- IRC can support this in a network.
- An IRC network can run on a computer the size of a shoe.
Discord meanwhile:
- Is only compatible with itself so if your system doesnt support the client or the web interface well you’re boned.
- Has very little content moderation.
- heavy advertisements via promotions and NitroTM (their subscription service to access basic features like recoloring the interface).
- terrible UI.
- spyware and data harvesting
- no support for encrypted messaging.
- Network effect so groups and orgs feel compelled to choose discord just because its popular and relatively frictionless.
- shadowy corporation that the public doesnt really know the inner workings of.
- Streaming video can be done with Jitsi Meet
- Voice chat via mumble.
- sharing files can be done via pastebin site (if text form) or through other third party (like imgbb).
How is the ability for software that isn’t IRC to do things a point in favor of IRC? It’s faster and easier to set up one account, one run program, and get everyone together on that program than it is to do the same across 3 or 4 of them.
- Is only compatible with itself so if your system doesnt support the client or the web interface well you’re boned.
I’ve used Discord on a variety of systems and never run into this problem.
- Has very little content moderation.
It has the same content moderation as IRC: whatever the local server admins set up.
- terrible UI.
Your mileage may vary, I suppose. I was able to learn the UI pretty quickly.
- Security and privacy concerns
These are a valid point and the one thing that prevents me from really recommending Discord.
I hate how it has subsumed all hobby forums.
I thought Reddit already did that
discord accelerated it and it’s not even searchable! Reddit at least leaves a public record.
Being able to find advanced knowledge on extremely niche topics was what made the internet good. That sucks.
I’m sure feds can search it though 😮💨
Only feds get to have hobbies.
Discord is shit and I hate it, but it’s still better than the other large platforms
I kept saying it. Internet is an ocean of bigotry and ignorance. The worst possible place for an LLM to learn from.
I feel like eventually we’ll see an “evolution” of LLMs where the big innovation will be cutting 90% of the Internet out of the training data without breaking the whole thing. Imagine if LLM output was as dry, neutral, and reliable as the average encyclopedia (yes I know those aren’t perfect either but it’s an improvement over reddit threads at least).
I don’t know if it’ll be framed as an innovation, per se, but that’s going to be the main utility for this technology. Small, focused models that can help you turn a large amount of pre-qualified data into something usable. That would be pretty cool. Wasn’t ever going to be anything more than that, but we’ll have to watch a trillion dollar market bubble pop before people start to narrow their ambitions and actually make something useful out of these things.
It’s such a depressingly stupid time to waste a bunch of information and digital tech so you can have Racist Google instead of what it was 20 years ago. We’re on the cusp of environmental changes brought about by wasting resources. That they built a giant wasteful bubble is the least surprising part of their behavior.
reddit was actually good for a bunch of how-to kinda shit that would never be in an encyclopedia. the trick is sifting the “hey you might have a carbon monoxide leak” from the “it’s cool to throw car batteries into the sea”
Pirating shit is becoming harder and harder and google is basically unusable now
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If you search “mustang”, for example, all the results are trying to sell you the car. You have to go several pages deep before you see results about the horse that the car is named after. Stuff like that bothers me.
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I think what you’re describing is not just political opinions, but shared values. Especially when it comes to upholding human rights, and dismantling systems of oppression that threaten human rights.
Right wingers don’t really have any shared values, except obtain and hold power by any means necessary, so right wing forums are outrageously toxic to each other even when they technically hold the same political position.
That’s why we have a “loneliness epidemic”, as it turns out, being a genocide-supporting chud who doesn’t know empathy also robs you of genuine human intimacy.
That’s why we have a “loneliness epidemic”, as it turns out, being a genocide-supporting chud who doesn’t know empathy also robs you of genuine human intimacy.
i don’t think that’s sufficient to explain the loneliness epidemic. too many of us with humanity are also completely isolated and have no avenue to make friends or love someone
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hexbear is the only place on the internet ive joined where i had to tell them my political views and be approved first.
Buh? Do we have a new policy of account creation
For a long time, I think.
Dang I really need to make a new alt I just think this handle is really funny
It makes me laugh, honestly the username bits here are all 10/10
Some of the esoteric bullshit you people reference or pun… it’s fucking artwork is what it is.
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Aww thanks, I’m a sucker for alliteration and birds crack me up so I’m pretty sure my next will be Unpleasant Pheasant
Hang onto it, it’s gold
Yours might be the best here. Every time I think about it, I start laughing again.
It is really funny. I think you’re good, you can just check the “create account” button to see the questions without making a new account if you like.
Huh, I’ve definitely run into other explicitly Marxist-Leninist places online where you have to fill out a political questionnaire. Some just want to weed out reactionaries, ultras, Trots and adjacent cranks, and such, some are probably full of academic cranks and Second Internationale types and want you to answer extremely complicated theory questions because they want only well read Marxism nerds, they don’t want to deal with people still learning the intricacies of the theory, or people who don’t quite “get” Dialectical Materialism but still think MLs are right about a lot of practical day to day stuff. (When you gotta copy the questionnaire into a text document and fill it out, in order to keep the question and answer numbers straight, you know the theory discussions are going to be over the smallest minutiae, or the admins are sick of banning baby leftists for stupid takes and want to just screen them all out at the questionnaire.)
I love that one of Hexbear’s rules is against sectarianism, but we all still
against TrotsIt’s like when the Catholics, the Orthodox, and the Anglicans all get together and rag on Evangelical Protestants. Which is also something I really enjoyed participating in as a kid. (It’s called sectarianism for a reason. We’re worse than the churches sometimes.)
There’s sectarianism, and then there’s dunking on people the entire left agrees are just plain wrong and tend to be crank magnets.
At least for me, as a former trot, it’s like 70% a joke. A lot of them are either cranks or NATO-leftists (or both) but a lot of them are also basically normal
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I wasn’t accusing you of saying that, just saying I have been to some.
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Hexbear reminds me of the old internet. People being their authentic selves. Doesn’t mean there’s no nastiness but the ratio of performative or inflammatory bullshit to people talking is much lower than the average internet.
I also maintain that an extremely low tolerance for bad faith or cruel behaviour is necessary online. Since the regulatory mechanisms that govern social interaction elsewhere are not available.
Whenever I look at lemmy outside, or worse reddit, it’s just performative grandstanding, normalised bigotry, garbled repetition, and in “jokes”.
Yeah I’m sure glad we don’t have incomprehensible repetitive in jokes. I’m gonna post a picture of a bean now.
Jokes aside, this is one of the few places on the Internet where you don’t have to be a power user to feel like part of a community
I think a lot of that is because of size as well. Your post won’t get buried under 20 copies of the same cliche joke (one with 850 upvotes, one with 23, and the rest at +1 or +2) everything is actually read by at least a few humans somewhere, and everything is presumably also written by humans.
This is so completely true. I tried out the r/cth discord around the time it was banned and it’s like the chat in an MMO, moving so quick you literally can’t have a conversation. Why even bother at that point?!
yea discord is the worst. like drinking from a firehose
Le pun thread
if there is one defender of corny shitty puns on this earth it is me
Redditors don’t make puns, they regurgitate them
I used to visit reddit regularly in the past, and the ridiculous and monstrous stuff they always said had become normalized to me; I hated it, but I got used to it; but then I discovered chapo and LSC and now every time I go back for a visit, I’m reminded of how unacceptably awful and childish the people there are.
Reddit is so very libified. I got banned from r/politics for criticizing the US & Saudi war in Yemen while Joe Biden was visiting his dear friend MBS in 2021. I was being “a troll”.
I wasn’t even trolling! If Reddit was full of conservatives, it would be at least fun to troll. But it is just depressing.
I got banned for saying conservatives should be shot lol
The final straw for me with Reddit, and looking back I’m embarrassed it took so long, was a thread where people defended using the n-word and were getting upvoted. I decided I needed to delete the app to prevent hypertension after that one.
Yeah, I’m trans and it’s depressing how hurtful every other social media is, can’t follow any trans creators because the comments are just hate speech that is totally okay and allowed by the site, apparently. And those same people being hateful will turn around and pretend the world caters to trans people and “you can’t say anything anymore!!1!1” Reddit is maybe okay when I stick to the subreddits I follow.
There was one transfem content creator who was a good friend of mine, she turned against me when her medical condition got even worse.
I used to have a bunch of cosy little forums to check out daily. They’re all dead now and probably moved to Discord, and I hate Discord. Everything else is on Reddit or Twitter or any of the other massive social media platforms which are full of fascists.
I miss that about the old internet. I’d get home from school and read through a daily rotation of sites’ articles, forums, and blogs. Most of them don’t exist anymore or have completely gone to shit. Ones that are functional are overrun by terminally online chuds whining about minorities and women. Decades ago, they’d get banned for the things they say today or chased off by normalish people. Now, they’re the majority of site users, so they get a pass.
RSS feeds were awesome back then.
I went full circle and now just read the local communist newspaper. They’re libs, but yknow
Oh yeah, that’s another thing I miss, sites with articles on them, now everything is a video, livestream or podcast. More than once after watching a YouTube video I’ve been left with the thought ”that was just a person reading a bunch of wiki articles and summarizing them”.
America is cooked bro
I went today to a fall festival and they had literal ass children in police vests helping people park
Oh America is not cooked, stop being so dramatic. They just needed to give those children protection against handgun rounds in case … oh
/r/trueanon is pretty good but why do they insist on using the r-word all the time?
cumboy holdovers
My theory is that a lot of people who got banned from here for one reactionary thing or another end up there.
r/trueanon has the closest energy to the original cth but I really don’t like how they started adopting the cumtown “I’m gay and my dick is small” bit it just feels tired
they’re also not ideologically coherent and I’ve seen too much whinging over what they call identity politics over there, although I guess the old cth had that as well
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Certain Fediverse instances didn’t last long, including two Kitsu instances. I just wanted a good instance that lasts forever with good support.
don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good
- Joseph Stalin
Ahh, Hexbear. Where every poignant quote gets attributed to Stalin. Y’all are nothing but a bunch of Stalinist tankies.
Just like me. I love this place!
