Earlier this year I s/twitter/mastodon/ to good effect. I don’t think s/reddit/lemmy/ will happen anytime soon; the numbers are too small for any real network effect.
For example, the subreddit I spend the most time in has >2million readers. There are enough posts daily that my niche interests come up regularly and I contribute to those discussions.
Yup, that’s how I ended up on reddit back in the day, when digg did some stupid shit, that I don’t even remember wat was any more, but something similar to what reddit is doing now.
Tbh I have no idea, I stumbled across Lemmy from a random Reddit post. However, getting out of Reddit for a bit and looking around what’s here now, it reminds me of the early days, and maybe I’m just old, but I think they were better. Maybe at Reddit’s scale + the way the web is now just isn’t something that scratches that itch for me. If not Lemmy I hope to find another alternative for that. But in order for this to work, you’re right, it does need a certain number of users, we’ll have to see how that pans out I guess.
I think this is a general problem of mass media. A capitalist firm operates under the imperative of unlimited growth. It is not enough to succeed at something, it must expand. We can see this effect take place everywhere from Hollywood movies to AAA video games to news and social media. In order to optimize the marketability of a piece of media, it must be as inoffensive as possible, until you end up with the fully lobotomized outputs of the major studios which never say anything of consequence about history, politics, philosophy, or current events, lest they offend 1-2% of Nazis or landlords on the fringes. You end up with pure slop.
The same goes for social media sites. Platforms like Reddit and Twitter would rather expand then send the Nazis to the virtual gulag. They will only take action if, by their calculation, inaction will impact their ability to expand. Likewise, they dull the edges on all political and philisophical discussion, lest the Marxists make the Liberals too uncomfortable. You end up with hermetic political discussion boards like r/Politics where the topics are limited to the latest WaPo/NYT perspectives on parliamentary masturbation - where labor strikes and political rallies are categorically deemed non-political unless someone like Bret Stevens blesses them with a rambling op-ed.
I personally see the small userbase of lemmy as an advantage as well. Reddit is too popular now, it’s full of karma-farming bots and commercialized, mass-appealing content. Those things are worthwhile on sites with millions of users, but not here. We just need enough active users to get things going. The app devs of Reddit clients might be of great help.
Earlier this year I s/twitter/mastodon/ to good effect. I don’t think s/reddit/lemmy/ will happen anytime soon; the numbers are too small for any real network effect.
For example, the subreddit I spend the most time in has >2million readers. There are enough posts daily that my niche interests come up regularly and I contribute to those discussions.
Everything started somewhere. I think (could be way off here) that Reddit became popular because of some unpopular stuff Digg was doing.
Yup, that’s how I ended up on reddit back in the day, when digg did some stupid shit, that I don’t even remember wat was any more, but something similar to what reddit is doing now.
Tbh I have no idea, I stumbled across Lemmy from a random Reddit post. However, getting out of Reddit for a bit and looking around what’s here now, it reminds me of the early days, and maybe I’m just old, but I think they were better. Maybe at Reddit’s scale + the way the web is now just isn’t something that scratches that itch for me. If not Lemmy I hope to find another alternative for that. But in order for this to work, you’re right, it does need a certain number of users, we’ll have to see how that pans out I guess.
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I think this is a general problem of mass media. A capitalist firm operates under the imperative of unlimited growth. It is not enough to succeed at something, it must expand. We can see this effect take place everywhere from Hollywood movies to AAA video games to news and social media. In order to optimize the marketability of a piece of media, it must be as inoffensive as possible, until you end up with the fully lobotomized outputs of the major studios which never say anything of consequence about history, politics, philosophy, or current events, lest they offend 1-2% of Nazis or landlords on the fringes. You end up with pure slop.
The same goes for social media sites. Platforms like Reddit and Twitter would rather expand then send the Nazis to the virtual gulag. They will only take action if, by their calculation, inaction will impact their ability to expand. Likewise, they dull the edges on all political and philisophical discussion, lest the Marxists make the Liberals too uncomfortable. You end up with hermetic political discussion boards like r/Politics where the topics are limited to the latest WaPo/NYT perspectives on parliamentary masturbation - where labor strikes and political rallies are categorically deemed non-political unless someone like Bret Stevens blesses them with a rambling op-ed.
I personally see the small userbase of lemmy as an advantage as well. Reddit is too popular now, it’s full of karma-farming bots and commercialized, mass-appealing content. Those things are worthwhile on sites with millions of users, but not here. We just need enough active users to get things going. The app devs of Reddit clients might be of great help.