And even then back in 2014 the discussions were so much more organic, I still remember a specially niche forum back then brimming with activity. It is alive and well but the userbase is reduced to a tenth of what it used to be. Fediverse platforms seem to be a return to form since corporate influence has been stripped away from them.
the discussions were so much more organic
Yeah, that’s one of the main reasons I really just lurked on reddit and never commented. For every post that showed up in top/hot sorting, I already knew what the top 10 comments would be before I even clicked. And it’s not even like echo chamber type comments, but more just the same old reddit-isms that would get used over and over again. Like every “discussion” is basically a race to see who can be the first to say the thing, and somehow those comments always end up getting the most upvotes. I’ve already seen a few getting used here on Lemmy. Hopefully the community will learn to stop encouraging that kind of behavior.
