It’s really hit or miss. The communities generally have most of the same downsides as those on the corporate competition, but with added issues due to the small size of Lemmy/fediverse and inherent features of a decentralized platform.
I mostly stick to bigger communities and instances on Lemmy, which was not a thing I did much on the r-word site, and I admit that makes it trickier to make a one-to-one comparison.
My hobbies and interests aren’t actually all that obscure, but the communities for them on Lemmy are functionally dead, fractured across multiple instances, or just plain non-existent as far as I can tell. Really little or no engagement. So, that sucks.
Another issue that seems especially apparent here is that it seems much easier for smaller groups with “loud” voices / strong opinions to overwhelm any kind of discussion or debate and give the appearance that their opinion is majority opinion, even if it is not. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen elsewhere, just that it seems especially pronounced here. People would complain about group think on the r-word site, but it’s often amplified here.
One thing I like about some of the bigger communities here is that it seems like it’s more visible when unprovoked rudeness and incivility are called out. Not that it never happened on the corporate r-word site, but I do run across that a bit more here.
I’m very new to this I thought the point of it was that all the decentralized bits are still linked. Do you mean there are duplicates of communities that are just named slightly different or what?
Yes exactly. Because anyone can spin up their own instance and communities on that instance, there are many duplicates of traditionally popular communities from other social sites. It used to be worse here, but it’s still pretty bad around sports, politics, and many niche groups.
They’re not linked. Every instance/server can have it’s own version of “memes”. So you can have memes@lemmy.world and memes@lemm.ee the one at memes@lemmy.ml is the most active one though. Imho federation doesn’t work for this. There’s always gonna be one community at the top. If that community goes rogue though, that’s when you can easily drop it and go to another.
Less trolls, skills, and spammers. And bots.
But it seems to have a higher percentage of zealots. People go crazy and extreme over some weird stuff. You can’t have a casual opinion about Linux here for instance.
In my experience a significant portion of Lemmy lives in a fantasy world and really doesnt like this being pointed out.
Take videogames for example, if you were yo ask me what Lemmy thinks about videogames… “AAA devs should only release games they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into making once they are absolutely finished and bug free with no expensive future DLCs or microtransactions, absolutely no ongoing subscription costs for the absolute minimum price they think they can sell it for and not go out of business but it should also be DRM free and nobody should buy it anyway because its digital and you shouldnt feel bad downloading it for free because it doesnt cost money to make another digital copy its just corporate greed.”
God help you if you dont agree. I too would like to live in a post scarcity communist utopia, but we dont.
Post scarcity communist utopia
You mean Star Trek?
Its a better example than anything else.
AAA devs should only release games they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into making once they are absolutely finished and bug free with no expensive future DLCs or microtransactions, absolutely no ongoing subscription costs for the absolute minimum price they think they can sell it for and not go out of business but it should also be DRM free and nobody should buy it anyway because its digital and you shouldnt feel bad downloading it for free because it doesnt cost money to make another digital copy its just corporate greed.”
Honestly I think it’s a lot more complicated and nuanced regarding this here than reddit. When I was a wee lad, I yo-ho-ho some sweet software and games via bbs’s but mostly went legit as I aged. I don’t think there’s more piracy justification here than reddit, but also, I think we’re in a ‘golden-shower-age’ of enshitiffication where services paid for won’t be rendered and that, justifiably, moves the sentiment.
That said, as a game dev, I don’t think people are asking for your proposed argument overwhelmingly - they just want AAA devs to treat their paying userbase better. Some of those considerations are unrealistic, but often they’re justified.
I’m finding Lemmy’s audience to be very similar to 2008 reddit, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than current day reddit and I thank the lemmy creators for having a viable alternative.
FUCK SPEZ.
I raised the issue that if you want companies like CDPR or Bethesda to keep aiming high and investing 300+ million dollars you have to expect them to try and make their money back as soon as possible or as much as possible over time. 300 million is a HUGE gamble, especially on a video game. So they might rush to launch because the budget is running out, or the game wont be great until it has 2 or 3 expansions or at least a few large patches admittedly I have less sympathy for microtransactions or subscriptions but then thats on the players if they want to support that.
If they are really aiming for groundbreaking, massive, revolutionary… the gaming community needs to tone down the immediate rhetoric or we will just see more and more recycled “it always makes money” Marvel movie type shit.Madden77, Halo 26 and Battlefield 63…
So much this. People seem to generally be fine here (I never found the reddit communities I interacted with to be toxic) but heaven forbid you purposefully use Windows or pay for software.
Hahaha, You want to see hate?
My wife and I have saved enough money that we might be able to move out of our apartment that we bought 10 years ago and into a family home and we plan on keeping the apartment and renting it out as an investment.
Hey everyone, they’re a landlord! Get em!!
Back off!
Waves lease aggressively
I’ll seek rent from you! I’ll fuckin do it!
procs Deposit
Or Apple. /c/technology is an Apple hatefest.
You’re spot on - I’m not feeling like I really care about either place these days. Maybe I’ve outgrown social media, especially if the content is high-school level Absolutism.
Yeah you kinda nailed it.
Lemmy taught me that I wasn’t just running away from Reddit, but from the kind of content sites like Reddit engender.
The fuck did you say about Linux?
I am reading a lot more toxic discussion and really angry people here on lemmy than i did on reddit, which makes me sometimes think i might be at the wrong place. I blocked some of the communities that pull american politics in my feed but still. On reddit, i was good reading just my niche interest subs, but there is very little traffic here for niche stuff, so i end up reading the crazy talk too.
I find Reddit way more toxic, especially post the purge from the lack of apps. It’s like their moderation ranked or something. It’s probably different in smaller pages, but I’ve found the front page over there is way worse than Lemmy nowadays in terms of quality of conversation.
Given the purge was due to moderator access to API’s, I’m not surprised.
Same. And I like some disagreement as that brings discussion. Lemmy can be pretty toxic if you don’t echo back the expected.
I’ve noticed an ebb and flow to that. It seems like anger goes down when activity goes up, which is the opposite of what I would usually expect from the internet but that’s how it’s been on here. I have an account where I filter/block things and one where I don’t so I can see what’s really going on, and when there’s too much hate and rage content on the front page I take a break from lemmy for a while.
I think most of the people who say lemmy isn’t toxic at all are probably people who found a bubble where people don’t push back on their personal brand of toxicity very much.
It depends a lot on what you consider “toxic”.
If it’s just about intrusive off-topic political discussion, then I fully agree with you: it’s far more common in Lemmy than in Reddit, and sometimes it reaches a point that even people who’d otherwise enjoy discussing politics roll their eyes and say “not this shit again”.
However, if “toxic” includes other forms of undesirable behaviour, then Lemmy is probably less toxic than Reddit. For example: while sometimes you do see here disingenuous and deliberate stupidity, “waah TL;DR!!”, the “I don’t understand” conveying disagreement, or passive aggressiveness, in Reddit they pop up all the time.
So, what do you consider toxic? Depending on that, the other users’ experiences might be really similar or really different from yours.
intrusive off-topic political discussion
Yeah that is pretty much what i meant.
The halcyon days lasted about month. After that each post sounded more and more like that 14 year old atheist reading the bible meme.
I miss some of the communities I used on reddit that are still either quiet or very quiet over here, but I also recognise that unless I ramp up my participation in them, I haven’t really got grounds to feel negative about that. Besides, using social media less is a plus to me.
I love there’s no ads, tracking and ‘suggestions’ - in short, no algorithm. The apps are (mostly) open source and the community are appreciative of that.
I used to get news from reddit and can get it here too, there’s no difference in quality or quantity. Politically, I appreciate the de-emphasis on hateful content and it helps I’m on an instance where the Admin is on top of their game in that respect. It is noticeably more left-wing on here but since I am too I guess that’s not an issue for me. It’s certainly way better than Reddit in that respect where I’d stumble across fairly extreme right-wing opinions in (supposedly) non political subs every day.
People seem, by and large, much calmer and more reasonable here and less inclined to attack en masse. I’ve noticed a distinct improvement in my overall mental health but I think that might have more to do with not being on reddit than being on here.
Lemmy is what we make it. For those of us who came over in the Summer, Lemmy/KBin is less than 6 months old. Let’s not paint it into being one thing or another just yet.
I’ve been on the Internet specifically for the social aspects of it since 1990 and I honestly don’t see much difference at all between any specific site, forum, Usenet bulletin board, chat room, or service. Just the in-jokes are different and some terminology changes. People are people no matter where they are. The internet as a whole fosters a particular subset of people that even amongst their own different tribes, are fundamentally the same. A lot of outcasts and marginalized people that have no others of their particular group in reality to vibe with. I’m one of them, and I love the web because there are so many others like me here, everywhere I happen to go on it.
It’s not often I wish for awards to give on Lemmy, but I wish I could for this comment , it is exactly why I love the internet, all summed up perfectly.
At times like this I like to give out a Lemmy Lemon 🍋
Did you know that lemons aren’t natural and happened when humans crossbred citrons and sour/bitter oranges?
Life never actually gave us lemons. We gave ourselves lemons!
I think this nails it.
It’s fine. I like that it’s normal for people to post multi-paragraph comments in response to a post. Gives me plenty of material to read when I’m bored, and this place. Is still small enough that you recognize people in different threads. It’s cozy, but some communities could use improvements.
Also, the other things I’ve noticed is that many of the people complaining about Lemmy being toxic are some of the most argumentative ones themselves,if you don’t believe me, you can go to their user page and more often than not find examples of them being rude or unpleasant on the first page.
Misery loves company, after all.
Loved you in Oppenheimer
Eh. Credit is credit, I’ll take it.
omg can i have your autograph?
I may have made a rude comment that is visible on my first user page but that is generally not my style.
I also did not complain about lemmy being toxic, or more toxic than reddit, i said that compared to reddit, i am seeing a lot more angry people and toxic discussion because i look further than just my niche interests since they have hardly any traffic. That is still my honest take on the topic.
I try to participate more actively on Lemmy than I did on reddit, where I was really just a lurker. I decided to do so in order to support the platform at least a little. I have the impression that a lot of lemmy users feel similar and really do want to care for this project. And that’s really cool, I think.
In my opinion, however, the biggest issue with Lemmy has unfortunately changed little in the past 6 months: I think there is still pretty little original content. What’s more, the little OC there is easily gets lost in the flood of reposts or screenshots from other platforms. At least that’s the impression I get from most of the larger communities (besides from /pics). I think that’s a shame since this makes it hard to find and appreciate the content someone took quite some time to make.
As far as interactions with others are concerned, it sometimes bothers me that a whole bunch of Lemmy users seem to have really fixed opinions on certain topics. Those guys don’t seem to take arguments into account at all but rather seem to be on some sort of propaganda mission instead. So it seems to me that there are multiple topics that simply can’t be discussed in a meaningful way on Lemmy. I think that’s a shame as well.
But all in all, I quite like Lemmy for what it is.
At the start it was better, but for about a month now I think there have been more negative interactions than positive ones.
The biggest problem imo is that since Lemmy’s userbase is mostly made up of people who left Reddit, they bring their mentality with them. And the two plaforms have hugely different userbases size wise, so if someone says something really stupid on Reddit you can ignore/ block and you can do that with 1000s of people. On Lemmy if you block 1000s of people, you basically just blocked most people who post/ comment.
/rant over
Yeah basically my biggest problem is with how small the userbase is. ( then again I have a few other problems besides that)
I’m asking because I’ve personally found it far more hostile than Reddit (the only other platform I’ve put much time into). What I’ve mostly seen is that people downvote quickly and tend towards eliteism relative to Reddit. That said, I recognize that this could be just by instance or community, so I’m curious how others have found it.
Yeah idk, I’ve tended to see the exact opposite. I rarely downvote and I think most people I interact with on here do the same.
What kind of communities do you frequent? For me it’s a pretty curated c/home with most chill communities and then I’ll browse c/all and even on there most people seem chill.
So long winded but to answer your question I think most people are nice, the elitist comments might not get drowned out as much since there’s less people.
Edit: wanted to add that the people here on lemmy seem to be older and techy and that demographic tends to be more clear and blunt. However, that might be something that comes off hostile but really isn’t.
The problem is not just that it’s hostile, but it’s also full of people that know jack shit.
On Reddit you go to r/whatever and there’s a good chance the guy answering your question is the actual godfather of whatever. Those guys didn’t make the move to Lemmy because they are hardcore into whatever, but casually into Reddit. What we got are the people that were hard core into Reddit, and casual into whatever.
So we have a bunch of blind leading the blind dilettantes getting all pissed off about shit they know fuck all about.
That’s actually a really great point that was hitting on something I felt but didn’t understand about my interactions and I think it really sums it up. It feels like every community is a general community here - explaining how technology works on reddit to someone on a general purpose sub was expected, but here you get people posting clickbaity anti-capitalist anti-tech shit in tech communities that are factually wrong and getting absurd upvotes and agreement from people who agree with the politics and that’s all.
Knowledge is low, sire.
On Reddit you go to r/whatever and there’s a good chance the guy answering your question is the actual godfather of whatever.
There was also a good chance they were another Unidan.
Who was pretty knowledgeable about biology and contributed a lot before he developed a serious case of Reddit brain.
I forgave his sins and allowed myself to miss him. The magpies in my back garden agreed with this.
I’d say there are fewer hostile people, but the ones that are hostile are really hostile.
I do notice users here snapping back at jerks a lot more.
There’s far less of a chance of being banned for it here. Unless you’re snapping back at a mod or admin directly. Calling an idiot an idiot when they say idiotic things or a jerk a jerk when they are being a jerk on Reddit counts as harassment.
My experience is the opposite. I’m mostly on startrek.website & lemmy.world, while keeping local in the former and going for all in the latter.
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I don’t have an issue with downvotes on the face of it - I came from Reddit, and found their system pretty good. The issue I have is that it seems to be used as a “disagree” button a lot more here, which discourages discussion regardless of the quality. For example, even on this post, anyone who said they’ve had a negative experience has been downvoted.
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ive found it incredibly diverse. there are many instances, and some are known for nice folks. beehaw is friendly… midwest.social has been nice to me. lemmy.world is a taunting wasps nest of nonsense… the bigger the community the more… rough… you may find it.
I just wish there was a single leftist community on the internet which was academically engaged with contemporary political science instead of simping for shitty autocrats because they want to relitigate the cold war.
There is no leftist community on the internet that will ever be good because there will necessarily be people with clandestine motives weather they’re doing so for work or fun. Every actual organization ive been in on the left operates under the assumption that some of our members are plants. The secret US orgs have been disrupting leftist anything for as long as they’ve existed and so long as they exist a real online community for serious leftist thought will always be under attack. Actually organizing in the actual community is the only remedy, and even then the bad actors are still there, they just can’t be faceless and as inflammatory.
See, my view is that this would be very easy to spot if leftist communities were more academically engaged and rejected a lot of the more mindless revolutionary rhetoric to begin with. That kind of rote populism where everything western is irredeemably evil and must be burned to the ground is the part which is ripe for exploitation, while the bits about economic egalitarianism and labor unity are broadly popular. My entire gripe is that if leftist communities focused on the latter, wed deny the provocateurs oxygen to begin with.
I don’t think it’s that easy. The academics of the left still leave plenty of room for subterfuge, even studied scholars don’t always agree and even bicker at times. More over the academics aren’t what draws people to leftism, direct action and engaging the communities we want to engage is what wins people over, academic first orgs end up looking like insular book clubs with slow and little growth in my experience and from the opinion of others I’ve read in books about organizing.
I think it serves the left better to meet the acute needs of their local communities, which to me serves as the center of organization. Very hard to argue against initiatives like the BPPs Breakfast Program. Which by the way was exactly what put them on the Feds radar, because my guess is the feds have accepted what I describe here as true, or at least best revolutionary practice. I also find organizing around the needs of the community to be very agreeable, I’ve been in orgs where they itemize our goals and use approval voting to rank them, and mutual aid items are more than usually very agreed upon.
I’d love a honest academic space, but even then our movement is a communal one, and if you’re able to help in a ‘boots on the ground’ capacity but you only engage in academics instead, you likely won’t really make to much material impact. Hell I’d love to be wrong about it being near impossible to have an honest leftist space too, and I don’t want to give the feds more credit than they deserve for even the ills of the movement, we learn nothing that way, but it’s really hard to cut through the noise when they specialize in noise. I’d wager some of these noisemakers have even read more anticapitalist books than some of the people who actually are anticapitalists.
I do think you’re onto something though, the average understanding of the academics of leftism (why we do the things we do), is less understood among leftists than ever before. My guess is the increase in the number of leftists and how acceptable the beliefs are seen as being these days helps foster leftism among people who don’t exactly read their heads off about theory.
It’s like to see more stuff about leaning and organizing that knowledge. Keep the sniping and bullshit out of it. Just have a link to something like The Reactionary Mind and a quick blurb about how it makes an argument about conservatism is a new movement because it has to react to enlightenment and give a reason why a group of people deserve a privilege.
It blew my mind to learn that after the French revolution there was some dude arguing to put a king back. Like holy shit. They just killed a king. Some fucked really thinks that’s a good idea? It was fun to drive into that head space and listen to someone’s argument that there are some people that are better and deserve to rule. Gross, but interesting.
It’s led me to learn more about Jefferson and Burr and some of the early American history where some of those guys thought the same way. That they should dress up in wigs and shit and thought they were better. I’m probably mis remembering which names, but I remember the first vice guy was all about that class shit.
Speak to some Scandinavians? Maybe a Finn.
A Finn signing in. What are we discussing?
Do all you guys like dwarves and death metal?
I don’t have anything in particular against dwarves as such, but why would I like them?
I can’t stand most metal, especially the death/black/whatever subgenres. Symphonic maybe once in a decade or so.
Maybe I’m thinking of sweeds on the dwarf thing.
Definitely, who knows what those degenerates are into during the winter months.
Jokes aside, my mother tongue is Swedish but I was born in Finland. I’ve lived in both countries and speak both languages and I prefer Finland by far. Swedes are just… all up in your business all the time. In Finland privacy is preferred, mostly.
Try saying vote 3rd party.
I use Linux btw
But are you using Firefox??!?
Whta about hydrogen powered public transit?
Yes! Of course I also make sure it is installed with Flatpaks instead of Snaps.
You should actually be using de-googled Libre Wolf with uBlock Origin and your own DNS server. You’ve let me down. /s
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When HBomberguy made his last video, all reddit and discord communities seemingly knew of it without being directly told. Here, I’m not so sure anyone even knows
That’s weird because I was immediately struck by how everyone seemed to know about it here.
Maybe we follow different communities.
It has zero niche reach. Unfortunately, that’s really important for the people who try to switch from Reddit. You can’t compete with Reddit when your favorite hobby sub there has 20,000 members or even many more and meaningful daily activity.
The people here are mostly more techy and nerdy which leads to niceness but also holier than thou attitudes everywhere.
The content here turns over slower, which is another big sticking point, but the bones of the site are good.
It’s suffering from being new and different. If it can hang on long enough for Reddit to go full Facebook, maybe it can hit a stride and prosper but I honestly don’t know.
It has zero niche reach
People can’t expect a Reddit-clone. I thought when I saw the proliferation of UK communities that they are going to end up dead. They did. My old Reddit account is 15yo so I saw Reddit grow organically and it went like this:
1-2yr old Reddit Top level subs: e.g. AskReddit 3-5yr old Reddit: Secondary level starts: r/unitedkingdom r/ukpolitics 6+ years third level: UKFood, AskUK, CasualUK.
Each time Reddit grew subs were created organically after main subs got fed up with a certain type of post. AskUK formed in response to users getting fed up with questions in UnitedKingdom and people wanted UK specific questions of AskReddit. UnitedKingdom spawned as more UK users visited. CasualUK spawned when some people wanted less politics.
It was organic and subs spawned when required. So subs rarely died because they only came into existence when there was demand.
“I feel thin like butter scraped across too much bread”
When there’s fewer people you can afford to shove everything into higher level subs and if you want it to be specific put it in the title like this:
- Brits - what’s your fave tea?
- [Yanks] Whats your fave eagle?
Putting posts into communities with 3 people that never gets viewed is pointless. I basically stalk just a few subs and make sure anything I’d ask in a more specific Reddit sub gets posted in the most generic but relevant I can find. E.g. I asked about HaikuOS on the Linux community - it’s not even a Linux distro but it’s open source and it’s the closest-big community that would know anything about it.
People need to treat Lemmy like early Reddit. Don’t think you can clone reddit’s vibe and operation in a year.
I think oldschool Redditors need to WAKE UP and remember wtf it used to be like before the Digg exodus exploded Reddit into mainstream.
N.B. everyone’s comments are worth a shitton more here because there’s fewer comments. You aren’t shouting into a storm, your voice gets heard here. Embrace that people. Stop with the low-effort humour to get karma and put some thought into what you want to say. If nothing else it’ll improve your mental health.
This is such a great point that your voice gets heard. When I read that, it finally clicked with me. When I click through, it’s rare that I don’t read every comment. On Reddit, I rarely did because there were so many comments. Here, I’m usually reading them all. Your voice is being heard. Nice.
You aren’t wrong, the problem is much of lemmy is against anything that could lead to growth to hit levels where nice communities could exist.
It’s suffering from being new and different. If it can hang on long enough for Reddit to go full Facebook, maybe it can hit a stride and prosper but I honestly don’t know.
I’m starting to lose faith, but we’ll see in the long run once Meta enables federation. It may be bad for the fediverse, or it could force unprecedented growth. My main fear is that activitypub ends up the way of e-mail, regulated by the big players. I’m too dumb to figure out if it can happen, though.
I tend to find that it needs about 10x the users, but I honestly don’t know if it could handle that at the moment. Generally I would assume one would use a social network for the social aspects, but right now the top (everything) post of the past 24 hours has something like a thousand votes and about a hundred comments, which is actually a pretty decent amount. But there’s maybe 1 other post with 100+ comments right now in the top of the past 24 hours that I can see. Go to a second page or scroll for a bit and you’ll see most posts have less than ten comments.
Is number of comments the most important metric? Probably not, but it is pretty important one since it’s kind of the main reason I would come here instead of just scrolling through Google News or whatever, and I’m guessing I’m not alone.
The only people who actually managed the migration in my opinion were the StarTrek.website people, and it took a clever coordinated effort in a community of people who probably skew more technical than most. For most communities that were interested in things like specific games, shows, hobbies, or whatever and not interested in a new computer toy to play with, they’ve essentially died out and are either ghost towns or full of bot posts.
In large part I think it’s because Lemmy’s discoverability is pretty trash, and while I get that it’s kind of on purpose it’s still an issue. The migration led to this explosion of communities but because finding them is harder than making them, it spread these relatively small communities out. The hope was that they would find each other and coalesce, but instead it seems like they took the path of least resistance and just slid back to their old haunts.
One of Lemmy’s key strengths is that it can act both as an aggregator that has a stream of news stories and comments but if tuned slightly differently it can act much more like an old school forum, but there’s really no way to bridge the two ways of interaction right now. I think one path forward is finding that middle ground, and slowly becoming a respiratory of useful discussions like old school forums, Facebook groups, and yeah even reddit. But to do that there needs to be a lot more searchable and discoverable and not just letting Google do it. Finding a way to both surface jokes and memes and whatever for quick consumption, but also having some way to keep those highly technical 130 page long forum posts where they reverse engineer an aquarium bubble pump or something available and simmering on the back burner, ready to be found in a few years and awakened when someone makes a breakthrough.
On a more personal note, I feel like I’m vibing less and less with Lemmy. The memes have slowed way down, the articles are interesting sometimes but the lack of any comments makes me less interested in interacting with them, and I feel like I hit the wall of reddit repost bots spamming thousands of sonic fan arts way quicker than I used to. It honestly feels a lot more like it’s dying from lack of meaningful user interaction pretty much everywhere outside the star trek memes. Half the time it feels like I’m just using Hacker News by proxy. Just like that line “butter spread over too much bread” it feels like the users are spread out over too many servers. I dunno, I’ve had a few so I’m rambling. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk I guess.
I blocked all of those repost bots a few months ago, and it really improved the experience for me. No longer are there seemingly interesting posts but with 0 engagement, with the real OP not even on Lemmy. It feels a lot more organic.
Is there a list anywhere with those bots?
Honestly there’s like three or four which post a lot, if you just block the ones you see and it’ll make a huge difference very quickly.
I see, thanks
It seems nice and scratches the itch to be approximately social, but suffering through seeing the same 5 articles posted nearly back to back by bots is deeply annoying. And the lack of content when sorting by 6hrs means I inevitably have to spam block the weird porn/fetish stuff that decides to crop up in-between lol.
