It doesn’t matter how many people or what kind of people moved from Reddit. I was there 14 years (Digg 4.0 exile here). They have a new group of people now. My wife and kids now use Reddit, but it’s not the same type of user interaction I experienced there in the past. It’s very much a mix of scrolling through TikTok videos and sparse reading of comments on an /r/askreddit thread. It’s casual browsing and video content. There are still some holdouts, which I think mostly contribute to what’s left of the comment section, but that’s it. It sucks, because I miss the discussions there. Lemmy kind of scratches that itch, but the content is slow to come in, and the comments so few. I’m doing my part, and I am much more active here than I ever was on Reddit.
IMO the quality of discussion here is about the same on reddit. Which is to say, not very good, or very deep. It’s shallow observations, memes, and one liner gut reactions to headlines. People have been conditioned over the past decade to not engage with long replies or complex thoughts. It might have to do with social media becoming more or less defined by people engaging with it on mobile devices, which don’t really enable that sort of engagement. But it might also be people genuinely not giving a shit anymore and only wanting that minor degree of superficial interaction.
I get better responses here on Lemmy with my longer replies, which is great. Reddit feels overall dumber now where people will try and argue that your comment with sources is somehow less compelling than someone else’s sourceless opinion (true story).
I’m having far better interactions on Lemmy.
My favorite thing about Lemmy is that you can comment on an article that’s several hours old and get responses. Reddit was so big that if you didn’t comment on major articles within a couple minutes of being posted, your comment would get buried under a thousand other comments and would never be seen. Commenting became a game of which top level comment you could possibly sneak your comment as a response to, even if it wasn’t really a “response” to what the person had said, just to get your comment seen and have a chance at sparking a discussion.
Honestly, the worst thing about Lemmy is Lemmy users thinking it’s better than Reddit simply by the virtue of it not being Reddit.
The platform? Yes, absolutely, a much better solution with built in checks and balances to stop one greedy company eating everyone’s lunch.
The content? It’s identical! (Bar a few cosplay communists that stir up drama occasionally). And some things are significantly worse like the quality of content curation and moderation.
For every person writing an “ugh you must be a Redditor”/“I thought I left this behind on Reddit” type comment,I bet there are many more people rolling their eyes and at least a few of them that end up abandoning the platform entirely.
Also let’s not forget that Reddit has duration as an advantage. I can look back 10 years on a tv show that is no longer airing and there will still be discussion threads from when it came out. That’s literally impossible to manufacture overnight, so Reddit has a huge edge.
For every person writing an “ugh you must be a Redditor”/“I thought I left this behind on Reddit” type comment
Oh my God right? This bull shit.
I want to like lemmy because I don’t want to support a web platform that so clearly thinks so little of its users and aims for monetization that involves literally just paying for comments you want to hear.
But this self assured that lemmy is the hottest shit stuff needs to cool off. I mean look at who started this platform and the large communities of people with super simplified garbage takes on anything with an iota of complexity and you realize that people here just want to be superior without doing anything superior. But that is a great way to be lonely forever.
People have been conditioned over the past decade to not engage with long replies or complex thoughts
I think this has two parts. One, it’s just so easy for any long/complex comment to attract ‘attacks’ that will target some small minutia. The internet in general seems to find pedantry of grammar and small inconsistencies (in an allegory, for instance, which is not supposed to be an exact match for the tale it’s telling) to be the height of humor and the best way to ‘counter’ an argument.
Second, I think people in general are more demanding of having their space be as comfortable and similar to them as possible. My friends of nearly three decades and I have plenty of things we disagree about, and even argue about, but it seems as if differences are no longer accepted. Let’s pick a common and slightly humorous one from Lemmy: if you and I were to disagree about the extent of how evil a conservative is (not even that they are evil, or do evil, or whatever else), one or the other of us would be blocking the other, haranguing the moral turpitude that is said different belief, etc.
It combines to make anything but short, bland or ‘act like they are acting’ comments a headache to actually post. I’ve found myself typing up a response to a biology article somebody had posted, and eventually just hit the cancel button because it wasn’t worth the bother.
The people that think they are being clever by ignoring the entire conversation and just responding with Strawman! or Ha! You misspelled that so you don’t know what you are talking about! offer so little to actual conversation that they don’t even realize why no one wants to talk to them. They seem like they are just repeating what they saw people before them do without awareness or understanding of why or even what their words mean.
The internet is such a microbubbled place now. Each niche divided and divided again so that everyone can have exactly what they want and nothing more or less until each of them might as well be a homunculus living as a single entity if wasn’t for the ability for someone to advertise or sell a product to that group.
I thought it is good if everyone has their own specific thing but we still need to be able to interact as a whole, and that generalized communication is a dying skill apparently. Or maybe we are just to many steps away from the original products that the internet is becoming full of Cargo Cults that just copy without reason… I dunno.
I think it has a lot to do with longer messages seeming “elitist” in addition to the tendency of trolls to find one phrase they don’t like and derail the entire topic over it. You write 3 paragraphs, most don’t read past the first sentence and vote based on that, and some troll starts nitpicking your use of “us” vs “we” instead of the actual topic. Over time you see putting the effort into a comment as pointless or outright adversarial, and you stop. It’s the trolls and the low effort people that make having quality conversations frustrating. Not trying to gatekeep, but I firmly believe that once a site becomes popular enough that all the “Lowest Common Denominators” join, quality drops. The signal to noise ratio just becomes too much. Popularity is a death sentence on the Internet.
Also there’s this legit tactic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop that sometimes is employed by the trolls themselves to basically DDoS people. Preferring shorter comments at all become a legit behavior if there’s too many comments like that. If there’s long af comment, usually I’d like to see the replies or upvotes first to defend against that.
I was on reddit a couple times past couple of days for some specific purposes (like looking up Minecraft seeds). Checked the front page and stuff out of curiosity and I genuinely don’t know if the content was already as bad when I left or if Lemmy just gave me new standards or something, but Jesus Christ. It’s all just ragebait and TikTok reposts, even though everyone on reddit always claims to hate TikTok. It’s like if you collected all the lowest tier posts from every other site and then gathered them in one.
Same thing for me here, so much rage bait. I was asking a specific question on Google and a reddit post had a very good answer, curiosity sent me to r/all and it is so clearly meant to get under your skin.
It’s all “TikTok” now. I see TikTok, YT Shorts, Reddit video clips, Facebook video clips, IG video clips, etc. They are all TikTok in my head, and I don’t care enough to check them each out to differentiate between them and change my mind. This must be what getting old feels like.
Exactly how I felt there too. Reddit was different. It wasn’t the place where you could come and chat with strangers about things you enjoy, even the most positive subs were littered with spam and comments usually devolved into arguments.
Not saying it didn’t happen here but the vibe is for sure better. Haven’t logged into my reddit account since spez killed Sync.
Wasn’t Digg 2.0 the time of the Great Exodus? Or has my memory of these arcane events become clouded throughout the eons of enshittification?
Yea I remember it went to shit around 2018 or somewhere there about. I had been hoping for a viable alternative for a while. I should thank Spez in retrospect.
Reddit very much depends on the subreddits you subscribe to.
Browsing /r/askhistorians or /r/programming isn’t really the same experience as r/memes or whatever. Not logging in to reddit makes it way worse since you only see the popular low-effort threads instead of better niche content.
Maybe I am part of that new group? I’m just here for the memes. Lemmy is amusement for me and a way to kill some time. If I want to have deep or meaningful discussions I’ll talk to people I actually know (and then I’ll also know I’m not wasting my time arguing with a troll). The “casual browsing” content is also lower quality here than on Reddit, but I can’t complain, because I don’t really contribute, I just lurk.
It’s a war of attrition. Slow and steady will win this race.
Lemmy, just like Mastodon has seen spikes followed by users leaving. But every spike leaves more users on Lemmy/Mastodon than previously.
Truthfully, in the event another Reddit Exodus, which will happen, we need to try and be more of a content-oriented system during that era. Making more posts and focusing on adding to niches.
Reddit is about Niche communities and Content Saturation. Lemmy isn’t really about that, but it can be for moments at a time to pull users in. At some point we’ll reach a critical mass of users that leads to easier justification for new users to join.
We just need a group of extremely disorganized and disagreeable people to organize and and agree on this.
oh no
Reddit also gets a little bit worse every spike, too. There are few mods remaining on Reddit who are doing anything more interesting for their communities than basic spam removal. Automod does all the work when all the largest subs just repost the same content and fake stories anyway.
It’s not like going to implode or anything anytime soon but the quality (from my perspective at least) has totally flatlined since June because why would anyone in their right mind invest creative energy into cultivating a unique community? I think that eventually a Lemmy community will pop up that simply couldn’t exist on Reddit and will serve to illustrate why I believe this model is better.
Another hurdle is getting game devs to treat Lemmy instances for their games as official points of contact, which is definitely something reddit still has that Lemmy doesn’t, unfortunately.
I think Lemmy would either need to find a way to wean Redditors off of their dopamine machine or replace that dopamine machine long-term to sustain an exodus from Reddit. Either that, or Reddit will need to break their dopamine feedback loop. There are some cracks showing, and that might have already killed the platform in the long term, but it’ll keep going from pure momentum for a while. Maybe as long as months or years.
Seems like there’s more sexists and racists than I used to see over there, which is definitely offputting. I’ve found communities that are supportive of thoughtful discussion are more appealing, and Reddit definitely lacks that lately, outside of some small, relatively niche communities.
I like your optimism but theres not a lot of great examples of the little guys winning lately. I’m not sure exactly how, but I predict things end badly for Lemmy. Just seems like a more likely outcome in today’s world. Guessing reddit does ok everyone just ends up a bit more miserable than before. Sorry for being a turd, I just think your prediction is statistically unlikely.
Except Lemmy isn’t a single Lemmy.com that will one day run out of money and implode into nothingness.
Lemmy, Mastodon, and other ActivityPub based Fediverse Networks are muliti-node systems.
This is just pure nihilism without a hint of thought put into it. Nothing short of the world exploding and human annihilation will kill Lemmy, And even then, there are bots.
Bonkers. There is a critical mass that keeps people willing to support it. I can run an original Quake server and find a few people to play with, but distrubuted multinode systems don’t mean a damn without a critical mass user base. Lemmy is far from bulletproof.
My search results keep wanting me to go to Reddit. I’m trying to avoid it, but it keeps calling.
I’m not scrolling there like I did before the “Spez killed the 3rd party app migration”. I miss the level of engagement and ease of finding communities. Lemmy is decent, but the post volume is lacking. If I scroll new now, and again 12 hours later, there’s not much new stuff before I see the stuff from last time.
I have a similar experience, only visiting reddit for stuff like tech problems and very niche communities. I had never willingly visited the reddit homepage since.
There are a lot of posts now on lemmy compared to before the reddit fiasco but is not like the activity on reddit. The good thing though is that it made me stop my habit of mindlessly scrolling through endless content.
yeah having switched to linux recently it’s pretty much impossible to go without reddit. sure, superuser and generally linux forums do have a bunch of answers, but a lot are on reddit as well.
I still find most Linux answers on SO.
It’s pretty rare that a search leads me to Reddit, though it does happen on rare occasion.
What distro(s) are you searching for that lead you to Reddit?
Too many top linux answers are gone now and i dont really find reddit very usefull for finding answers to linux problems anymore unless its a brand new problem with alot of people suddenly posting about it.
Because everyone is only half in and going to Reddit still like crack addicts
Not everyone.
If sit down at my desk and use my pc I’ll click the old Reddit bookmark and go on for about 5 minutes. That has only happened about 3 times since Apollo shut down. I almost exclusively used my phone for Reddit before that. Now I bounce between Voyager and YouTube. YouTube for background noise while I’m working, Voyager when I’m idle.
bros talking like we’re fighting some kind of battle my man ur browsing short form content on the internet calm down
ur not better than anyone and nobody is better than you while yall be death scrolling this brain rot
I just want non monetized media to survive in the future. not everything has to be designed to be addictive and for profit so it’s just sad that people couldn’t hold out from reddit long enough to make a difference or just plain don’t care
Lemmy will dethrone reddit once you are able to google a question and the Lemmy link is at the top as opposed to reddit
Reddit also had the ability to just type in my address bar “/r/obscurefandom” and be taken directly to the subreddit for it. Lemmy doesn’t have those smaller subs yet and you have to hunt for the right instance if it does.
Even TV shows that have been off air for a decade often have a thriving community. Merlin, the BBC show, has several posts per day. Similarly with Smallville. Lemmy’s communities are smaller and tend to be broken up across instances.
I feel like there needs to be instance aggregation for Lemmy to really work in the long run (and really this is probably true of the fediverse in general). Having to add communities across multiple instances, and not being able to browse them in a centralized way, really detracts from the experience. On Reddit, I subbed to the stuff I wanted and just lived off that feed. With Lemmy, I feel like I have to stay in unfiltered view to get anything of interest–the fragmented niche communities are just too limiting.
Reddit will have active subs for specific board games. The general board games magazine on Lemmy has 1 post a month.
So ya, if I want to read comments on the latest episode of Loki to see what things people picked up on that I missed Reddit is currently the only place to find that.
I just started using lemmy today, so I definitely could be wrong. But doesn’t the website browse.feddit.de kind of do this for you already?
Whelp, better get to asking questions… Someone ask me a question to an answer someone may want to search for
I’ll start with something wholesome:
What’s the best way to make someone smile?
Is there anyway to control how high I want my android phone to charge? I would like to set it to 90%.
Not without rooting it or the manufacturer including a custom option for it, but if it has adaptive charging, you can set an alarm and it will charge the phone up to 80% and then wait to charge it the rest of the way to coincide with the alarm so that it isn’t at 100% for a long time.
Even then, Reddit has accumulated so much technical advice over the years, I hope I can still find archived posts this way, if ever it truly does crash and burn.
Which is never going to happen because you can’t click this /c/books
And fine an agglomeration of all /c/books on all lemmy servers Ina single location.
This cripples any network effect and any benefice of decentralization and federation
Bro, it’s so fucking frustrating that I need to be subbed to 5 different Android communities just to get my news.
I can’t sub to just one because I miss news if I do.
My only hope is that Boost brings multi-reddit support to Lemmy, so I can just click on “Android” and get the news from all 5 Android communities.
“multi Reddit” like feature do not fix the problem.
First, like on Reddit, less than 5% of users will use it as a non default feature which needs to be configured.
Second, even of those people who use the feature, they will have different sets of differently configured “multireddit”.
The end result is a fragmented audience that has no shared experience and never aglomerates to critical mass.
If you have 1725 /c/books communities, that does not make one cohesive books community. These people have nothing in common.
Practical end result, one books community on one Lemmy instance, is “the one big community” and almost every other gets 1 post per year on average, which is never seen by anyone.
For every big community, every once in a while, the moderation dictators sell out or otherwise piss off the community enough that it fragments. That works as well as the current transition from Reddit to Lemmy.
Each schism doesn’t create a new, better community, it creates a smaller, less active community at the expense of the larger one.
There needs to be a single point of agglomeration, which works by default for any community name.
And moderation needs to be something dive by every user and moderation needs to be a filter that you subscribe to.
Yeah, reddit admins won. Most people don’t care and at this point its hard to see what the admins could do to start a real exodus. Hell, my reddit usage is way down, but I still go there for niche subjects (anime, philosophy) because nowhere else is comparable.
Anime has more broad appeal but the philosophical community on Lemmy seems virtually non-existent. Reddit even had graduate students/professors answering questions on r/askphilosophy. And r/askhistorians had even more success. It’s going to take a while for that to be replicated here.
they may have won this battle but the war is still ongoing. reddit is a public company, and it is a modern website, which means it is going to get shittier and shittier and it is never going to stop. i still go there for sports and news but anything of substance or merit i try to share here instead because fuck them. i think over time it’ll hollow itself out even more.
reddit is a public company
I don’t think they are public yet, the reason they pulled their little stunt in the first place is to prep for their IPO release. I think the general uproar probably set them back a while, but I’m sure the IPO is coming.
Oh after all this shit, did they still not do their IPO they were talking about forever? Jfc that place is a joke.
I cant say they won all around. As a tech guy, now when i look up tech info and click on a reddit link 90% of the top answers are deleted(including all mine from the last 12 years).
Before the exidus, Reddit was already a painful hassle to use, unable to view many normal subreddits now, 80% of my screen taken up by login and cookie warnings, forcing logins, asking if you want the app multiple times. Slow, clunky, broken UI.
IF i want to give info to the Reddit people, i only post links to topics over on Lemmy.
IMO reddit won but only by engaging a new audience. It removed the 1 post per subreddit on the front page without an announcement, modified the upvote algorithm to make upvote numbers seem larger than they are, and comments per upvote are lower than 10 years ago. Basically engagement is way down for people who use it like a forum aggregate. But engagement is way up by people who are migrating off of Instagram and similar platforms. I used to feel weird about being on reddit but now I have my wife’s 20 mostly female coworkers asking me about it. Reddit has a new audience it appeals to and it’s creating a weird issue because for some dumbass reason they thought the unpaid engagement generators would stick around after they fucked everything up for a few short term dollars.
