For the last few weeks we enjoyed a much better content on kbin than we had on reddit for a long time.
But it is coming to an end as more and more people will be leaving reddit for kbin. With them the trolls, the spammers and the ultrapoliticized americans. They want to push their ideology and there are legions of them.
Even though kbin is not american anymore, the sheer numbers and obsession of american people with their politics will quickly outnumber any other content here. The voting system will make your post about pertinent news sink to the bottom of the frontpage. Lost under the “Trump he said/she said” routine. The same thing that happened on reddit will happen on kbin: people will come for the politics and then spread in others magazines for a quick, uninteresting meme reply.
The articles on the web are still designed to infuriate the readers, so they react and create free ragecontent, and they will do it here. They will get infuriated here, just the same as they did on reddit. This mechanics hasn’t changed by changing platform.
The NSFW content is coming, the political memecontent is coming, making the idea of federating this instance with any respectable other pole of interest impossible. If we are to name the federations, this one will become the greentext type of federation. Not a dangerous anarchist federation but certainly a pariah one.
That’s why if you really are interested into discussing with people, you would be very well inspired to do it on another instance than kbin.social. Do it on a local instance, where the news are directed by people of your geographical region. Your default instance can only be a regional one, I can’t see a global instance like “kbin.social” being not raided by americans with a political agenda. But they won’t step a foot in madrid.social or berlin.social. In a sense it’s even better if kbin.social can polarize and hold the kind of population which is hypnotized by number and popularity. The right usage of the fediverse should be to pick a local instance near you and only subscribe to niche magazines in different instances based on your specific needs.
The fediverse project will be tested with very high numbers of users now, and I don’t think that the implicit federation model which is to accept everything by default and block some will survive the waves of political trolls. The federations will split and specialize, and will defederate en masse. The most sought after federations will become the technology ones, which will probably become picky on the creation of random magazines, like news and politics, since it attracts the worst in content creators. The kbin.social experiment will lead to a more strict moderation model in other instances and probably different way to count votes. I don’t think that kbin.social will ever come back from being a perpetual testbench of a social platform.
So don’t fall in love with your account on kbin, instead you should get ready to jump to another instance which will inevitably open on a server near you.
Welcome to how the Internet work? The thing you don’t seem to be realizing is that this isn’t an ‘American obsession’ thing. It’s a population thing. kbin.social is advertised as an English discussion forum/link aggregator. It just so happens that the largest English-speaking country on the planet is the US, and by a lot too. The next-biggest is the UK, which has a population 1/5th the size of the US. Canada is even smaller, at about 1/10th the population of the US. Even if people post things at the same rate, you’re going to get 5 US-related posts for every UK post, and 10 US-related posts for every Canadian one. There are simply more Americans online. This kind of thing is going to happen on any widespread English-language discussion forum on the Internet, and has been this way since Usenet in the 1980s.
The US crowd is a specific crowd. Only in the US could the pizzagate be a thing. Don’t equate the USA as “another country but bigger”. The weaponization of the american media is perfectly visible and understood and honestly I expected better from people who left a platform like reddit. I was wrong. Only a small minority was able to produce interesting conversations before Jim interrupted the finer things club.
Also just because you are american doesn’t mean that you have to post about american politics. There is a whole world out there and american would be well inspired to look at what is happening beyond the ocean. I was talking about https://ground.news a few minutes ago. Great tool to find foreign stories in english from all around the globe.
I don’t think you quite realize how much craziness is in the world at large. There are have been instances of pizzagate levels of craziness in my home country, as well as in the other countries whose news I follow.
You also don’t seem to grasp how discussions on the Internet work. People will post about things that interest them. Telling people not to post things that are of interest to them because you don’t like it is counterintuitive and borderline offensive. I told you the reason you’re seeing much more US-centric posts. You have quite a lot of options if you don’t want to see that stuff, but telling everyone else not to post it is not one of those options.
Are you sure that you are answering to the right post or are you just jumping on the bandwagon of another post? You address nothing of what I mentioned about the federation system and the solution I’ve given.
I don’t think you quite realize how much craziness is in the world at large. There are have been instances of pizzagate levels of craziness in my home country, as well as in the other countries whose news I follow.
Give some example which show the magnitude of the pizzagate. I’m not talking about a follower of qanon making noise for views, I’m talking about the pizzagate with everything that it includes.
You also don’t seem to grasp how discussions on the Internet work. People will post about things that interest them. Telling people not to post things that are of interest to them because you don’t like it is counterintuitive and borderline offensive.
I thought that you were serious for a moment, I was wrong. Or you answered to the wrong post.
One idea is to create your own single user instance rather than signing up at another. I’ve started working on that, see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/92059/Why-we-need-to-move-on-from-kbin-social#entry-comment-393077 (bug in the comments means it just takes you to the front page for now but go to the last page and you’ll see my comment).
I asked https://kbin.social/m/FindAKbin/t/104416/A-magazine-to-discuss-and-trade-tips-on-setting-up but it seems there’s no magazine yet for folks who want to do this, so I created one, https://kbin.social/m/CreateAKbin and will be posting my updates there soon.
I agree that a lot of politicized content is shit. Yesterday I checked reddit and an article was titled ‘ultra-rich reminded of pitchforks if they don’t share’ or some asinine bullshit. I would enjoy not having this relentless ragebait spam here.
I do however think, that I can just block them right? And I can read the German instances via my kbin account, so I don’t see why I should switch. I think you are right to caution but maybe a little over the top.
I agree that a lot of politicized content is shit. Yesterday I checked reddit and an article was titled ‘ultra-rich reminded of pitchforks if they don’t share’ or some asinine bullshit. I would enjoy not having this relentless ragebait spam here.
@news is like 50% american political news. The newcomers are reproducing what they did on reddit. It’s news material to them.
I do however think, that I can just block them right?
You cannot block the content they upvote. You can block a magazine, but why would you block @news? Why should it be the de facto american political channel? Also the content induces a type of comment. If the frontpage is made of rageclick then subscribers will be rageclick consumers.
So we have reenacted the reddit process. Except we did it way faster.
I think you are right to caution but maybe a little over the top.
It’s only the beginning, the worse is yet to come as today is the last day for apollo and co.
The newcomers are reproducing what they did on reddit.
Yup. Two words: anime titties.
(Edit: for those who weren’t from reddit, r/anime_titties was a running in-joke being the name of world news that specifically avoided a US and European focused POV.)
Jim?
