I joined reddit on the tailwind, so it was all echo chamber, we hate newcomers, gatekeeping, automod frenzy, too many rulebreakers, too many rules, etc I could be wrong, but thats what I imagine it used to be like.
I was on Reddit since almost the beginning and I would not say it’s similar, but I also don’t think that culture exists on the internet anymore, closest thing might be tildes?
What I really miss is the intelligent conversion and actual debate in the comments. People don’t really lay out arguments anymore, complete with sources and logical conclusions. Back in the early days of Reddit you’d be downvoted and told off if you made a claim without evidence. Anecdotal evidence, speculation, and bias were called out. There were still jokes and light comment sections, but comments aiming to make a point were essays where you could actually learn something. Might sound exhausting to some, but it feels like the internet has turned into just upvoting whatever confirms your bias, whether there’s evidence of it or not. I’m sure you can find some excellent comments in the old r/bestof posts.
The content was a lot different too, the community was just a lot more scientific. Studies were posted over articles, and clickbait articles (before they were even clickbait) were called out as not having substantial content or evidence. Even studies were heavily scrutinized by identifying the bias in the methodology.
There were a lot less communties (subreddits) too, which I think lead to healthier discussion overall and less of an echo chamber effect. It was still always criticized as being a “hive mind”, but it felt less like one to me back then anyways.
I guess overall it feels like the main difference is everything nowadays is meant to radicalize you, or get a reaction out of you. Back in the day if something political or scientific was being shared it was shared with the intention of changing minds, not confirming bias.
Downvoted.
Not a laid out argument, complete with sources and logical conclusions. This is anecdotal, speculative, and biased information.
Serious note : Love your perspective about the old reddit I’m always curious to know what made internet what it was. I wonder if that’ll happen again.
Source or gtfo!
My favorite was old days of Reddit you’d be skewered for posting a .jpg instead of a .png of the image had text.
JPG should be killed off. We don’t need a lossy image format anymore were not on dialup.
heard of 3g? theres better compression out there now anyways
Asking what’s the difference got a response about three paragraphs long.
I wrote some of them.
Kinda pain in the ass to add links and formatting on a phone which most of us use. Early days of reddit was all Desktops.
Yeah good point, that’s probably part of it! Reddit was probably used more during active time than passive time (while shitting). Gave you time to properly research a topic and structure arguments.
/r/askhistorians was the last bastion of this approach. I loved that sub and really hope they migrate to a lemmy soon.
I appreciate this take, and I strive to make intelligent conversation here on Lemmy.
yea that reminds me when facebookk first came out and it was only for college, my friends would post stuff like that
deleted by creator
People don’t really lay out arguments anymore, complete with sources and logical conclusions
I only joined reddit like a year or so ago and have recently ditched it. I was never a fan of someone just spamming links to studies and condescending to me while doing so. I think people use links to sources as a way to control conversations. Or at least, that’s all I ever saw it used as.
I find Lemmy to be an echo chamber more than Reddit was. Depends on the community but Lemmy can be pretty caustic if you don’t agree with something.
That being said, is fine there is different opinions. Creates discussion.
Honestly, the fact that Lemmy displays upvote and downvote counts (like reddit, at least with RES, used to) makes it a lot friendlier. If you say something unpopular, better to see +10/-4 than just -6 - if you’re saying something unpopular but true, at least you’re seeing some positive reaction.
This alone makes it worlds less toxic and less circlejerky. People won’t automatically groupthink themselves into disregarding you if they realize that your comment was divisive instead of wrong.
+15/-45 gets that across better than -30
YouTube/Google also made this mistake. Or, I’m sure it is tested to make some KPI look good. But, certainly not the ability to discern “is this video garbage/scam” at a glance.
Sure, I’m clicking more videos to find a relevant one. So, probably “increases engamement”, but also reduces my willingness to pay for the service. But, I suppose it’s mostly driven by ad impressions.
And when you know it’s going to be unpopular, that +1 feels better than the -12 feels bad. You got through to someone!
This must depend on which app you’re using.
Sync just shows the total, I’d prefer if it didn’t show at all.
Haven’t used Sync but I bet they carried a lot of the UI stuff over from reddit and didn’t update that. Default web UI for lemmy shows the up and down.
I was around when reddit first started. There were Nazis. It seemed fine, because Nazis were useless idiots, and people told them to go fuck themselves.
Reddit in 2016 actively helped install a fascist who eventually tried to overthrow American democracy.
Reddit now is a place where “fuck off, Nazi” is punished more reliably and more harshly than being a goddamn Nazi.
This service feels familiar - but not for the reasons I’d like. The fools in charge of every popular instance think scolding “be polite!” and punishing rudeness instead of trolling are a force multiplier for trolls. If you can just keep saying dumb shit until someone says a no-no word - they get the boot, and you win.
I want a forum where “here is why you’re an asshole” is moderated based on whether the explanation is correct.
I actually got told by Reddit Staff that they’d contact law enforcement if I made anymore references to “punching Nazis”, then they banned me for “Report Abuse”
They never did a damn thing about the trolls who kept flagging any post referencing me being trans or anything positive about transpeople as “Suicidal” or “Promoting Self-Harm”
Got those “A redditor has asked us to reach out to you concerning…” all fucking day.
The worst sin of reddit mods was demanding “report and move on!” and then never doing anything about reports. Or scolding you for messaging the subreddit instead of using the report button.
Either do the fucking work or let people talk.
The worst part of that is they started banning people for “Report Abuse” even though I checked, “Report Abuse” is not even mentioned in the TOS.
How the fuck, are you gonna tell me to “Report and move on”, if you ban me for reporting.
Incidentally, guess why I had to stop using Reddit…
They banned me for very obviously joking that someone else should punch the fascist attorney general of Indiana in the face and it was some sort of punny reply based on something he said. They only reinstated me because a bunch of mods from multiple subreddits took my side.
They ban for “won’t someone rid me of this turbulent priest” comments apparently.
You understand that idiom, but not ‘go on, make my day?’ Even when it’s patiently explained to you?
What?
You didn’t say “go on, make my day” there. That’s a lie. That phrase doesn’t even appear. What a bizarre thing to lie about when anyone can just look.
It’s in semiquotes because it’s paraphrasing. Jesus. This level of rigid demand makes sense if you’re on the spectrum or ESL or something - otherwise, what the fuck?
I said ‘Go on, tell me this one’s synecdoche.’ (Again: paraphrasing.) You said ‘It is synecdoche, though.’ I said ‘Correct. They both are.’ And then you started litigating like I’d insulted you, or contradicted myself. Even when I directly paraphrased what you wrote, to agree with it.
You missed a common idiom - had it laid out for you in detail - repeatedly took offense over nothing - and I’m guessing reported it. So I’m a little surprised to see you elsewhere in my replies, frustrated at overzealous moderation, when it’s your indirect implications in question.
You’re wrong about those too, by the way. “Turbulent priest” comments are a call to violence. That line was prototypical stochastic terrorism. Not directly saying “kill that prick” - but clearly communicating that you’d like that prick killed. Even in the twelfth century people recognized this was a flimsy excuse.
Oh, I got that once. What’s the idea, I don’t get it ?
Same here, I read it was supposed to be a way of trolling, didn’t get the intention for my situation, but was just so fucking stupid anyway
There’s a negative stereotype that Transpeople kill themselves all the time, studies have shown this number to be dropping and the suicides to be caused by abuse from others and denial of transition related care.
The Far Right ignores this and goes “Lol transpeople kill themselves because transpeople dumb”
So it became a thing to report anyone Trans on Reddit, for “Suicidal Behavior”, which Reddit never looks into the validity of, they just send you a bunch of suicide hotline links… which is well intended, but there really should be a mechanism in place to find out if they’re trolling.
Eventually when it became common knowledge that it’s so exploitable it became a more in general method of griefing others.
I got an account banned from Reddit for saying “the only good nazi is a dead nazi” and frankly I’m fine with being banned from any community that doesn’t agree with that message.
Reddit in 2016 actively helped install a fascist
you can install a fascist?
can you uninstall one too or?
You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
I feel like political discourse didn’t start on Reddit until after subreddits were added
Haha, no. There’s a reason /r/Atheism was one of the default subs. All that Ron Paul didn’t come out of nowhere.
They say Atheism is to having a religion in the same way that not having a car is the same as having a car.
The same cannot be said of r/Atheism, the most dogmatic place on the whole fucking internet.
Indeed.
Big ‘/r/Politics is just like /r/Conservative!!!’ energy.
Shut.
hey I’m doing my best to be rude, scabulous, irascible and misanthropic out here.
There are antibiotic creams for scabulousness these days, how advanced is your case? 🧟♀️
Ed Sheeran level. He’s too far gone
/j
ha. typo. I meant scabrous.
My dick looks like a pepperoni pizza.
We appreciate your work.
I thought you were going to say, full of weirdos, degenerates and outcasts. 🤣
I feel like you might be looking at early Reddit through rose coloured glasses. 😆
At least when CP is posted here it’s a malicious attack instead of a Reddit Approved Top Sub.
All the tales of Eden have been told by those who stayed till the fall
Yep, having jailbait as one of the top subs is not a good look. But in other places it’s more pleasant. I miss the novelty accounts before the coming of bots.
i miss when spacedicks would make some gross disgusting shit get to the front page 😂
full of weirdos
“There are no sane people, only underdiagnosed” - soviet doctor probably
Wasn’t there comments that people didn’t like the fact the comment feature arrivée at one point?
my experience so far is people are as, if not more toxic then reddit. honestly I feel like half the people here were sick of people blocking them on reddit and decided to attack people with their stupidity here instead.
If you’re reading this, please go back to reddit, they need you so much more over there.
This is my experience as well, lemmy.world has been quite toxic IME.
Report those being toxic. We are quick to react.
You have no idea what you’re talking about, if you think people here are bad you must be the most fragile little snowflake who ever lived.
Go curl up and jerk off in your safe space.
/s for those who weren’t sure.
Now my safe space is filled with cum
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Ur toxic
:-P
It’s already like that here, friend.
Lemmy might be friendlier on the surface but has a much stronger hivemind-y aspect to it where you agree with it or else.
It’s already like that here, friend.
Lemmy didn’t take off until well into May 2023, despite being online and open source for over 4 years. The quantity of posts, communities, comments was very small for 4 years online.
Then everyone flocked out of hate and anger of an API money matter with Reddit.Then crowds got hate-filled and angry when Threads was launched by Meta/Instagram/Facebook on July 5. And crowds became hate-filled and angry over Elon Musk rename of Twitter to X on July 23.
Outside big growth in memes and shitposts, there haven’t been big numbers of people flocking here out of organic goodness on organized topics. It has largely been a HiveMind of hate as a motivation to come here since May.
Some good seeds have been planted since May, but the atmosphere of hate motivates change is pretty much Mob Mentality / reactionary.
Your timeline of events is intriguing to see and makes sense to me, even if I had a different experience. Thanks for that.
Definitely, you can also see that on certain communities, there are very strong opinions which don’t allow for discussion.
Say anything that goes against the grain and you will be shunned immediately.Also - not that that is always a bad thing but Lemmy is extremely left leaning and you just can’t discuss certain topics here at all.
(Guns are always bad / Cars should all be banned and traded for bicycles / traveling by plane is bad and you should feel horrible for destroying the environment…)
What I enjoyed about early reddit was the tech/nerd focused community that did not try to push their political opinion into every thread.
Basically the worst part of reddit is already here, just that the echo chambers are smaller for now.Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about it.
As someone who was on Reddit when it was young I am going to disagree with you here. Young Reddit was absolutely full of political ideology. It was a Ron Paul, legalize weed, atheist, soft anti feminist, cypher punk, USA style libertarian pool of ideology.
All places have an ideology. We are all constantly swimming in ideology. It’s just when an ideology matches you (either you being molded by the ideology or you joining a place with a matching ideology) you don’t notice it. A fish only has to think about the medium it is in after it is pulled out of the water.
It was a Ron Paul, legalize weed, atheist, soft anti feminist, cypher punk, USA style libertarian pool of ideology
It’s funny that I wasn’t even on reddit back then but I remember that time and the kind of people who existed back then and they were definitely redditors.
It’s why Reddit Enhancement Suite was so valued on desktop for its filtering abilities and third party apps.
And the longer people used the reddit the more likely they were to avoid going to /r/all and unsubscribe from most if not all default subreddits.
Filtering is becoming just as important on the fediverse.
deleted by creator
Indeed. Watch me attract downvotes. *ahem*
Linux sucks, and Windows 11 is a great OS.
I respectfully disagree with you.
Very funny.
🐧Must… DOWNVOTE… BLASPHEMY!!! /s
I do like to debate. I try not to use the downvote button if someone has caught my interest enough to engage.
I, too like to debate, and I do invite people to disagree with me if they can discuss in good faith. Easier to do in some communities than others.
Honestly the lack of content helps people mellow out.
I like the fact that I’m not doom scrolling and being fed rage bait by algorithms. I also like the fact that I’m reasonably sure most people here are actual people and not bots or paid actors.
The vast majority of people on Lemmy right now are directly from Reddit and they act exactly like the bog standard Redditors they are. Stop deluding yourself.
Who are you interacting with that has been so lame? I’m having a way better time in these comnunities than on reddit.
Anything even vaguely political is a shitshow since people are just as toxic as on reddit, but there is way less moderation
I think it depends on the instance.
You know, I’ve felt there’s a sizable difference now in the kinds of discussion you tend to see depending on your home instance. Lemmy.world really feels like Reddit in both good and bad ways. Lemmy.ca is cool with local news and a smattering of other communities. But I what I really love beehaw.org. There are few places like it, and I hope if people join there, they don’t bring their Reddit tendencies with them. Slow down a bit, think of each other and enjoy real, thoughtful discussion.
I’d say less so. There wasn’t much by way of disinformation campaigns and bots back when Reddit first started so the posts and comments felt more genuine and organic. Even with Kbin/Lemmy being much smaller, there’s still a ton of weird shit that gets posted here or comments that feel really suspicious. It would be nice for that kind of environment to make its way back, but it seems those days are over.
We just had an incident of CSAM on the largest instance and of course there is the pool of shit that is explodingheads and to a much lesser extent hexbear.
And the ddos’ n child porn aren’t too nice either
I feel Lemmy is like reddit without the normies making this infact more reddit than reddit
I miss the ‘normies’, I interact with enough tech people in my daily life
I block almost every tech community and tech is still 50% of my feed here
This is exactly how Reddit started too. It was the digg migration that brought in all the normies.
Others credit the GameFAQs forums closing. Which really tells you how long reddit’s been around.
A bunch of websites circa 2008 basically won the internet, and would be dominant essentially forever if they hadn’t all started lighting themselves on fire circa 2020. Apparently because of interest rates. I am no ardent anti-capitalist, but I can definitely say, this specific arrangement has been thoroughly fucky, and its collapse has been deeply stupid.
Digg collapse was very similar. Digg was very clearly the “winner” at that time in terms of user numbers, but killed themselves in a very similar way as Reddit does now.
The word enshittification didn’t exist at the time, but the concept predates either website. It nearly predates the web. Stop talking to each other and start buying things.
wait, warm? cuddly? can you show me this magical fairy-tale corner of lemmy?
Warm and cuddly until you say something negative bout China or Russia, then they come hauling ass…
I could never understand how you could be attached to china’s government that intensely. their government has fully betrayed communism, so extensibly that tech giants with no public control, (control the public instead) are fully formed.
Edit: i forgot my original intent but I do want a discussion and not just a roast of led astray MLs.
LLMs, useful idiots, and a couple effective propagandists overseeing the whole thing.
And you are correct. Capitalism with beasty grin.
Yeah they’re a pretty fucking braindead group.
im a woman of taste, i like butt they can haul all they want, see if i care
Putin is a militant pensioner from St. Petesbugrg garages. Fuck Putin.
Well, technically it is not negative about Russia. And I think I’ve yet not seen trolls from Olgino(or whereever they currently are)
Or say something in support of conservative American policies. Or say something in support of organized religion.
Warm and cuddly right here my friend. Lemmy give you a hug!
now thats an attitude i can respect virtual hugs can work
Lemmy just point out that this comment is underrated.
You’re underrated!
Lol no Lemmy is just as bad as Reddit
deleted by creator
I left reddit for lemmy and have yet to have the same experience here that I did on reddit.
Not in my experience.
Where are these warm and cuddly people? If you express viewpoints that are not central dogma to the left of center folk, you’re just as ostracized here as you would be on Reddit.
I’m left of center and I get yelled at by a communist at least once per thread I engage with, on average.
I’m at a point where I’m just blocking them as they pop up.
Yeah, it’s much worse here.
I’d argue that it is actually more so the case here if anything.
Not to leave out mods deleting posts altogether here.
This is just how it seems to go, before reddit there was Digg, after Digg went down, everyone went to reddit, now that reddit is going down, people are migrating to alternatives, with Lenmy being the most prominent one right now. I think Lemmy’s ability to have multiple instances will help cement its popularity though
