For the threads with the older one on the left: https://lemmy.world/post/14859950
(Thank you @Nelots@lemm.ee )
IMO it’s gotten markedly worse since the 3rd party app debacle. Perhaps combined with the advent of AI added to bots has made it obvious. Yeah, it’s been on a decline for quite a bit with the repost bots repeating everything from posts to replies, but people would call them out. Now it’s like it’s bots all the way down or the remaining participants have resigned themselves to the decline.
Small subs still seem mostly safe, but anything with decent participation is pretty bad.
Yeah the only real reason for Reddit for me anymore is sports discourse. E.g. the Baltimore Orioles are my MLB team. /r/Orioles on reddit has almost 80k members. Currently on the page there’s 62 people actively in the sub and that’s at 10am on a Wednesday, not during a game. The two Orioles communities on lemmy are Orioles@fanaticus.social and Baltimore Orioles@lemmy.world and they have 133 and 131 subscribers, respectively. There’s a bot posting game day threads and 0 comments in all of them. The only post not by a game day bot was 21 days ago.
Yeah I feel you, at least the Orioles team is super stacked rn though (speaking as a Yankees fan 🫠). !yankees@fanaticus.social is equally dead.
My current thought process is that if we can get a decently active generalized baseball community going, it could provide a stepping stone to increasing the activity in the team-specific communities. I’m trying to be active on !mlb@lemmy.ml and !baseball@fanaticus.social as much as possible.
There is already a latent population of sports fans on Lemmy, but it’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the communities aren’t active so people assume there must be no other fans.
My other thought on this topic is that although I do miss the active fan discussion and game threads, the subreddits for essentially all of my teams were indisputably toxic cesspools. The whining, armchair GMing, scapegoating, and just completely idiotic takes were out of this world. So it’d be nice to have activity, but too much activity can also degrade the quality of discussion to the level of Twitter and just create a very toxic environment where fans are constantly arguing and complaining.
