I have been on reddit for just about 12 years now. Something I’ve noticed over time is just how hateful the place has become. A complete outrage machine. Every single sub became filled with it. I’ve filtered so many subreddits over the last few years, it’s insane. I don’t know enough about this place to be sure, but I do hope it doesn’t become the same type of echo chamber of anger.
This is an ongoing problem with our Information Age. The fediverse already has this problem, though to a much lesser degree than reddit. Look at the structure of titles of threads on the political magazines/communities here. They are designed to make you outraged, because the sources they come from made their titles with engagement in mind and that permeates over to here. My hope is that the group of people on the fediverse, who are more interested in the future of the internet than most, will give rise to an idea that helps combat this problem.
I don’t think it’s just that. Politics has seen the trend going right for a while now, and not just the US. When there are people in power saying they’ll do dumb shit that’s even dumber than before it’s bound to get more outrages. And even putting politics aside you’re getting corporates that are getting greedier and greedier, and serious problems that have been festering without sufficient effort to solve for years like climate change showing up with the consequence (and still not enough is being done). So, in general, we as a whole haven’t been doing enough to solve existing problems while making new ones. Problems just keep on piling and that’s what we are seeing.
Well. “Back then” not everyone had that level of access to the internet. Also keeping it limited.
And yeah. It is always up to the community.