I’m starting to feel like all this hate and division is manufactured

Even putting aside biases or conspiracies, mass media and (for-profit) social media has an economic incentive to get people passionate and interested and viewing more ads. So there are systematic factors at play, which I'd say are enhanced by digital technology.

Good question. Especially since a lot of these are things I only notice in hindsight.

• Volunteer to implement helpful hints at a systematic level, even small things like linking the join-lemmy.org documentation on the signup page by default, and adding placeholder text for instance and community admins to see and tweak for their own rules. I say 'volunteer' because the devs were, and are, far too busy to do everything themselves.

• Create and share around image/infographic guides on why Lemmy is different to reddit. This could actually have been a good promotion tool too, back when we really needed it. I actually hastily made a quick one during the sudden migration, but I don't think it's worth digging up, it was very basic and not well thought-through.

Then again, some people had no real problems with reddit except for the API stuff. The people who came here earlier often had complaints about reddit's overall community trends, you know, people replying to headlines and clearly not reading the actual article at all, empty fluff like a random pun being the three highest rated comments, buttloads of junk replies like 'wow', 'this', 'i wish i could upvote twice' to scroll past. And I don't think there's much I myself could do to fight things like that, without putting in far too much time and effort (this site isn't my life!).

Honestly, I regret not putting more effort into setting up a good foundation here before the API drama hit. There was a chance to fix many of the problems of reddit, and poor communication just let people import all the problems right back.

Hell, people are still calling communities 'subs'. Even basic stuff like that. And I'm not blaming people for coming into a place without learning about its culture, unfortunately that's just normal and it happens. I'm just annoyed we didn't create ways to educate them easily, like guidebooks and introductions on the sign-up page.

Since Aussig and Parabola are banned, I doubt Leftypedia would stand up again.

Aussig, apart from whatever they did on the discord, was pretty irrelevant to the actual wiki. Account created April 30, made a dozen edits, then for whatever reason RedParabola promoted them. I don't know if they're a sockpuppet, or friends or negotiated something on discord, whatever, but they're a "literally who?" before today.

As for Parabola, they made a bunch of contributions but the wiki won't be much different without them, just a bit slower. It's not like they were critical to the site. Like you and that admin said, probably Wisconcom anyway.

In my month staying in there, it is a gold mine of bullshit

I believe that. An archivism project I was in a while back was victim to petty discord drama causing two different coups and ending up getting the whole thing nuked. I can't help but see it as a drama site for any project-based chat, attracting people who just want to climb to the top and become lords of tiny fiefs.

For what its worth, the leftypedia staff have just removed the discord server from their site, as being "no longer affiliated with Leftypedia users". I'm not sure what to make of that since I stay away from discord like plague.

Looks like the site staff have banned Aussig and made an update post: https://wiki.leftypol.org/wiki/Leftypedia:Community_hub

edit: And disavowed the Discord server.

I've done that. You just bring something appropriate to carry it in.

Although now that I live closer to a smaller grocer, I just walk twice.

Like some of the top-ranking comments here are saying, that place has a very large proportion of people who were coming from the banned subreddits like The Donald, various straight-up hate communities, and typical alt-right groups. So naturally, alternatives that were founded by anarchists and socialists (raddle, lemmy.ml) were almost always disregarded there, possibly with the exception of the Wolfballs admin (I can't remember too well if they got much attention with the 'they're not all like that' line)

It's always funny to me to see newer users complain about a lot of political (incl. FOSS) users in an inherently political project, which was picked by many precisely because its political values prevent the for-profit shittery that reddit.com has been doing for 15 years, and that alt-right social media alternatives frequently do whenever they get enough users. Yes, we're going to voice our concerns when people show up at the door and want this to be just like reddit was, or bring over the uncritical mainstream ignorance we came over here to avoid.

Even I the anglophone am jealous of Cyrillic-script languages. Phonetic languages, where you say what you see, sound so convenient. Even worlds like anglophone have dumb gimmicks like 'ph' = 'f'. The grass is always greener on the other side.

But even then, illiteracy often also means they can't read basic English, so it's not even them misspelling weird words like..... 'misspelling' and 'weird.', a large proportion of the USA would seriously struggle to understand our conversation [see replies to this]. And when our alphabet is 26 symbols (52 including capitals) with 10 digits and a handful of necessary punctuation symbols, Chinese script is off by magnitudes.

And having seen some documentaries interviewing people in my country overcoming adult illiteracy, you realize this includes clearly intelligent people who within weeks could begin reciting their own small written speeches, who were often just neglected by the education system and then too embarrassed to seek help or reveal their inability.

Obligatory The Simpsons lecture excerpt

The Dems sure weren't thinking of the poor old GOP in the 42 years they simultaneously held both reps and senate in that era (58% of 72 years). The system needs stupid, illiterate people to tolerate it.

On behalf of /c/fuck_cars, yes, I would not download a car.

Well ok I would but only to seed to deprive manufacturers of profit.

Well, while it is surprising it's all happening within a year or so, it's not unexpected at all.

They're ultimately for-profit companies. They have openly demonstrated the obvious truth that when push comes to shove, users don't matter to them, at least not as much as money. Our attention was the product.

These companies have proven time and time again that a quick moneygrab will win over retaining the people who make the site work. capitalism 101 baby.