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).
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.
I’ve had the same experiences actually. It’s also a lot more common (at least from what I’ve experienced) to find people being more composed here even in the face of some divisive or provocative content.
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.
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.
Yeah I’ve seen some pretty benign comments get downvoted to hell here on Lemmy if they’re even just a tiny bit out of line from the consensus which is no better than Reddit.
Have you been on reddit recently? The average discussion on Lemmy may not be super deep, but the comment sections of larger reddit threads have become downright painful to read. It honestly feels like every negative cliché about reddit has been dialed up to eleven.
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.
They all repost to each other anyway. Some creators will just post directly to several of them, but there’s also entire content factories designed around stealing other peoples creative works and reposting them on a different platform.
Ill never understand the appeal of short form video. I watch YT for episodic content ~10-20 mins or deep tutorials about some niche technical thing Im doing or interested in doing
Fellow Digg exile, previous Fark, previous Slashdot, etc.
I still go back to Reddit for several niche groups that just don’t have enough users to transition - would likely disappear if people moved elsewhere (Lemmy or Discord)
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.
I mean, it’s kind of always been shit, but it was “our” shit. Now it’s a different crowd, and their “shit”. I don’t want to deal with their “shit”, so I don’t really go there anymore and treat it like Ravenholm.
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.
Lenmy is brilliant as platform and concept, but the truth is it simply can’t compare to Reddit where there are 1000x more user and 100x more comments/activity.
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 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.
I’ve had the same experiences actually. It’s also a lot more common (at least from what I’ve experienced) to find people being more composed here even in the face of some divisive or provocative content.
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.
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.
Yeah I’ve seen some pretty benign comments get downvoted to hell here on Lemmy if they’re even just a tiny bit out of line from the consensus which is no better than Reddit.
Have you been on reddit recently? The average discussion on Lemmy may not be super deep, but the comment sections of larger reddit threads have become downright painful to read. It honestly feels like every negative cliché about reddit has been dialed up to eleven.
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.
They all repost to each other anyway. Some creators will just post directly to several of them, but there’s also entire content factories designed around stealing other peoples creative works and reposting them on a different platform.
Ill never understand the appeal of short form video. I watch YT for episodic content ~10-20 mins or deep tutorials about some niche technical thing Im doing or interested in doing
Fellow Digg exile, previous Fark, previous Slashdot, etc.
I still go back to Reddit for several niche groups that just don’t have enough users to transition - would likely disappear if people moved elsewhere (Lemmy or Discord)
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.
I mean, it’s kind of always been shit, but it was “our” shit. Now it’s a different crowd, and their “shit”. I don’t want to deal with their “shit”, so I don’t really go there anymore and treat it like Ravenholm.
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?
It was v4.
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.
Right. And to my point, newer users are doing the latter.
Lenmy is brilliant as platform and concept, but the truth is it simply can’t compare to Reddit where there are 1000x more user and 100x more comments/activity.
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.