I made a post on r/civ (Civilization games subreddit) showing a really funky shaped randomly generated river I saw and most comments were fine but one guy was convinced that I went through the comparatively monumental effort of opening the map editor and changing the river for karma, as opposed to just starting the game and taking a screenshot.
And just to top it off another guy saw the fact that my scout unit was in the far north of the map and went on an obscenely condescending diatribe about how “ackshually” I should be placing my units in the far south of the map because that way I can explore better and whatever the hell. Dude did not stop for one second to consider that maybe the scout that was in the far north was exploring the cool river and that I didn’t waste any production points on him because I got him for free from a tribal village…
God every time I go on that website (because let’s be honest not a whole lot of good communities here for what I’m interested in) I get excited to share something super innocent and then some total loser has to come and ruin it all.
I used to love reddit. Especially because it was so diverse. So many communities living side by side generally pretty well (except the well-known toxic communities of course that we all knew to stay away from). And the everything-goes attitude, like people discussing religion on the same site as people exhibiting their sex lives :P I used to love seeing that kind of diversity (ok and the exhibitionism too, I admit 🤭, I’m just into that.). I just loved the everything-goes feeling about it.
But two things went wrong as I see it. One was that US society got more and more polarised and toxic due to Trump and most of reddit’s users are from the US. Even the people who used to be pretty nice are so triggered by anything you say “wrong”, they always think you’re trying to pull them into an argument for the “other side”. It’s like they have PTSD from being constantly attacked by the other side and it causes that knee-jerk reaction on anything that doesn’t fall 100% into their narrative. I got so sick and tired of that hostility especially because I was not used to it locally. That thing you mention, where you say something and someone always claims you’re making it up to make a point or karma or whatever is so familiar and tiring.
And the other thing was of course that idiot spez. Trying to clean up reddit for his precious investors by removing (or locking away) anything not above the belt, killing third-party apps, etc. I still go there once in a while to gather some information but I stay away from discussions and I rotate my accounts every couple of months. So I don’t give a crap about karma because I kill my accounts anyway. In fact even when I did have a long-term account I used to “shreddit” it every couple of months so karma was not something I ever cared about.
The sad thing is that this Trump toxicity has now even blown over to my country (Holland). They elected a total fascist 2 months ago and the same thing is happening there now, there are lots of people claiming they were never heard and now their hero is going to drain the swamp and kick out all the refugees and all that same old blahblah. Several of my “friends” were caught up in this BS and I’ve had to break off all contact with them. 😡
Even Lemmy is not free from this, I joined lemmy.ml for a while but I found it pretty toxic too. Lemmy.world looked similar. This is why I came here and it’s been great so far.