orcrist

If you want to go way back, take a look at old BBSes or Usenet. The flame was commonly deployed. For many decades now people have used the internet to look at pictures of cats and also to talk trash or otherwise say horrible things. I don’t think Reddit is different in any major way, except that on subs that were decently managed, many of the worst commenters were banned and the worst comments were often down voted into oblivion. It really did depend on the subreddit.

The fact that some people behave like assholes is not in itself anything indicative about a website working well or poorly. In real life some people behave like assholes some of the time too. Of course we have and should continue to take reasonable steps to deal with much of the badness, but we should never expect or aim for perfection on this front.

I remember when Google Chat added XMPP support. I already ran my own server but some of my friends we’re happy enough to use Google. And that was good for a while, but at some point Google had enough people running its own chat that it could simply shut off external XMPP traffic. That was a sad time, because we could have had a federated decentralized chat protocol that dominated the internet, much like email does for its particular purpose, and instead we got fragmented chaos.

The same thing could happen with the fediverse in various ways. So hey, if some commercial entity wants to run their own server, that’s cool, but we need to keep reminding our friends of the dangers of relying on that commercial entity.

The best solution is to stop reading Canadian media. Those companies knew exactly what was going to happen, enough of them supported it, and they deserve to lose their readers.