I don’t remember what caused the Voat’s origin, except it involved Reddit HQ. And then it went under in 2020.
What’s different about this time and with Lemmy to make it a feasible alternative to Reddit? Is it random chance?
I don’t remember what caused the Voat’s origin, except it involved Reddit HQ. And then it went under in 2020.
What’s different about this time and with Lemmy to make it a feasible alternative to Reddit? Is it random chance?
Voat died because they took a max free speech approach, even allowing racism and stuff. Lemmy does not have a central administration that can make decisions like that, as each instance gets to decide if they federate with another instance or not.
There’s no doubt going to be a banlist that gets shared amongst the biggest, most popular instances to get rid of the trolls.
It wasn’t “even allowing racism and stuff”. It was created pretty much solely to be a safe space for assholes.
Turns out that doesn’t keep the lights running.
On top of that, Voat got their main population-spike around the time reddit was cracking down on racist and extremist subreddits, so those are the type of users who shaped the culture of Voat. Lemmy, on the other hand, is getting their population spike from enthusiast users, I.E. the 10% of people most responsible for voting, commenting, posting, and just in general contributing to the site. Therefore, those are the people shaping the growing culture of Lemmy, doing so in a mostly positive way.
There is a phenomenon known as the “Eternal September”. In the earliest internet, the vast majority of internet users were college student. Therefore, every September when freshmen started school, the online communities would get a massive influx of new users; These new users were often poorly behaved or disruptive to the culture of the communities, but over time they would acclimate to the local culture and become just more normal users, and things would settle back to normal. This was known as the “September Effect”.
And then one year the internet started gaining small mainstream attention, and suddenly these chatrooms were being constantly flooded with new, ill-behaved users all the time; And because this “September” never ended, the culture of these communities ended up being washed away by the new people, and irreversibly changed forever; hence the “Eternal September”.
The moral of the story, too many new people to a community too fast can overrun the existing cultural dynamic, and so either you need to be restrained in how quickly you let new people join so they can gradually assimilate, or you need the people joining to already share the same culture you desire.
That sounds like an argument against immigration too
Just replace culture with labor market.
Plus the kinds of people that migrated to Voat were… Not good people. IIRC, it was particularly the banning of FatPeopleHate that got many to move to Voat. The kind of people who’d quit a website because they said to stop harassing people for being fat are not good people. By comparison, this time, we’re migrating because Reddit is being disrespectful towards frankly all their users, but also particularly mods and the visibility impaired.
I migrated to Voat over the AMA stuff, and noped the fuck out about 4 days later.
It cannot be stressed enough how core this was to Voat’s identity, and also how much it poisoned the entire platform. When even objecting to bigotry is against the ethos of the site then there’s no way to build a healthy community, much less an inclusive one.
Also if anyone is curious how much of a cesspool Voat became, here’s the most “upvoated” for the month just six months before the site shut down. Warning: lots of bigotry.
If that showed up on some Lemmy instance, you’d still have people saying “Defederation is bad! Marketplace of ideas! Just block them and move on! It’s just one person!” :sigh:
Chances are they’d be screaming it into the void with how fast their instance would get defederated though. :P
That’s not bigotry. That’s flat out lunacy at this stage.
Holy shit, that’s bad. Who would want to be liable for hosting deplorable stuff like that?
I need to take warnings a lot more seriously on this site. That’s the second time I disregarded a warning and hate myself for it.
I remember when voat happened, I only wish it took more of Reddit (and maybe a ceo) with it.
I only had to read the post title before noping out. Jfc that’s bad.
Same. I don’t even understand how you can hold such comically evil fucking viewpoints… Like, Disney villains aren’t that atrocious.
Yeah, I see people advocating for that here, but the truth is that most people don’t want to deal with constant hate and trolls. People want to feel welcome in a community.
It turns out that people stop valuing things like “free speech” and “tolerance” when people try to use those values to force them to tolerate assholes.
Voat was also competing with reddit during a period of growth by appealing to the more toxic elements of the communities. There wasn’t enough of them to sustain an entire service and remain solvent, and they didn’t bring anything new to the experience. It was just a reddit clone.
The big difference now is that reddit corp has decided to alienate a severe chunk of their userbase.
I also suspect there were a lot of people who wanted to be part of certain communities, but weren’t thrilled with the reddit format. There just wasn’t anything else.
Those users are now open to alternatives like Lemmy, or Discord or another federated service. Reminds me of IRC in the 90s. If you got bored of efnet, connect to another network.
And a lot of the users Reddit decided to alienate are mods…Aka the ones who put in the effort to grow their subs in the first place…
Voat was the worst of Reddit while this exodus has the chance to be the best of Reddit.
I don’t know, I was there in the beginning. I think it died because it had no real content, compared to reddit. And, all anyone talked about was reddit, or reposted stuff from reddit, just like we’re seeing here. I think this might stick a bit better because reddit is way bigger than it was back then, so even if the same super small % of users came over, it would still be quite a bit more content.
For comparison of how negligible all the Lemmy fediverse is, there are ~40k active users this month. Reddit has over 50 million active users. So, that’s around 0.1% of reddit users. Literally 99.9% of reddit are not here.
I think it’s probably doomed. It’ll never overtake reddit. But, it’ll be a nice, quiet, alternative.
edit: I was part of this attempted migration, not the hate one. This isn’t the first blackout for reddit being shitty.
The reasons were less tangible before. Taking away popular apps will have a much bigger impact than some subreddit drama.
Taking away popular apps to a social network that doesn’t have any yet? What?
We would have to see the user stats related to reddit app usage, to talk in an informed way about this, along with the assumption that reddit doesn’t improve their app, which will probably be forced onto spez.
edit: Here’s a quick litmus test. How many times have you gone to reddit today?
None.
Ok, now let’s ask the 99.9% of Redditors that aren’t here. You take the left 25,000,000, I’ll take the right, meet back in 5. Go!
edit: Oh man, I’m out of breath. We might need help. How about every single lemmy user helps us! That’s only about 1,300 people we each have to ask! Well, 1,299 for me. At 4 seconds each, that’s should only be about 1.5 hours. See you all soon!
Should we care that other people still use reddit?
Do you have to chose one or the other?
Why are people so hell bent to “take over” Reddit?
I found an alternative in Kbin and Lemmy that suits my needs and focuses on user experience and growing communities instead of growing the pockets of a handful of people.
I decide to not use Reddit anymore because the upper echelon can go fuck themselves.
Is it so weird to have a set of values and stop using a service/product, because they cross the boundaries one has set for themselves?
I have used Reddit for more than a decade and I haven’t missed it all.
I am here because I enjoy it and not because I have a deeper desire for Reddit to evaporate out of nowhere.
I think most of the answers to your questions can be answered by the question that this comment section is responding to, to understand the framing that I’m commenting in:
But, this is the first and last Reddit related thread that I plan on participating in, so I’ll be cheering with you, if we ever get the miracle of reddit evaporating. Although, I would be worried where they would all end up.
It is Random chance.
I have read your comments;
“I think it’s probably doomed. It’ll never overtake reddit. But, it’ll be a nice, quiet, alternative.”
No one knows if it is doomed.
You have to start somewhere but you can’t expect a platform that has seen an huge influx of users the past weeks to immediately operate on the scale of what Reddit does.
“I humbly apologize for my personal, speculative, opinion about the unknowable future. The downvotes have made me realize my math was wrong, my opinion is wrong, and I am wrong. My corrected opinion is that Lemmy will overtake Meta, Mastadon, Twitter, and Google (wtf is reddit!?), and every upvote will be worth $1000, making everyone rich! Or, we can have fun guessing, and wait and see how things go. I hope they go well!”
Who is claiming the above?
The fun thing is that Mastodon is in your list and before the fuckery with Twitter it didn’t really have traction.
Why can’t lemmy/Kbin be the same in a year from now?
The problem for Reddit, is that it made people actually look for alternatives. It is stupid for a competitor to make it’s customers aware of the competition, but Reddit did exactly that.
Maybe it flops, maybe it stays “niche”, maybe it explodes in popularity.
I think it is indeed random chance and just being at the right place at the right time.
I haven’t logged into reddit since overwriting and deleting 12 years of content. So, I dunno man. I also haven’t logged into Twitter since Musk took over.
I think that you’re right, that reddit won’t die. But I think that things like this, if not this exact thing, are going to be reasonable alternatives for many people.
Honestly - I agreed with the first paragraph of your comment and was going to upvote, but all the edits made me reconsider; this is a place to share our thoughts, not worry about how many people up/down-ticked our comment.
Throw out a thought and forget the “karma”!
I suspect your downvotes are due to your ridiculous all or nothing speculation. No one can base the future on what’s happening right now. Yet you’re speculating it’s already failed. What a shit take.
We don’t know if the fediverse will succeed yet on a larger scale. Sometimes migration is instant, like with digg, sometimes it takes time, like with Facebook exodus which is continuing as i type this. Not to mention people weren’t prepared for this migration so none of the tools to make it a replacement have been in place. But now people are actively working on building out the community. Maybe we’ll know in a couple years if this is a successful endeavor on a Reddit type scale. But we don’t know yet.
How is it ridiculous? It’s my 2 cent opinion, lightly founded in observation of when this happened several times in the past, with reddit and several other platforms, to a question, in a forum of less that 1k people, that requires speculation about the future.
Are you going to downvote all of the people saying it will succeed? Wtf? What is the correct answer to this question? And who’s allowed to give it? There’s not a correct or incorrect answer here, just a bunch of idiots guessing. If you don’t understand that everyones opinion for this answer is fairly worthless here, then you’re emotional and/or tribalistic. Feel free to influence the future with downvotes though. I’ll continue enjoying reading what people have to say.
I used the internet since 1998 and I remember when Reddit was this little known site with not a lot of users. It took years for Reddit to get where it is right now.cl Lemmy will likely take that trajectory or perhaps, be a second Reddit but with better discussions.
For Lemmy, if all goes well, will take years to have a significant amount of active users. Perhaps subreddits will slowly deteriorate, pushing more people toward Lemmy… No one knows what the future holds…
I do not know how to solve this but the disagree = down vote thing has gone crazy. It seems to have become next to impossible to have a civil discussion online nowadays about an alternate opinions. It feels like everyone just wants to have their beliefs confirmed and never have their opinions questioned.
Or maybe up and downvotes are meaningless and karma has no value. I think it’s a way of polling opinion on a topic. Lemmy is not Reddit. Users have no accumulated karma, downvotes don’t hide comments and Post’s default comment sort is by New.
People are really bent out of shape with others disagreeing with them. You aren’t being silenced, you’re being polled and that’s not a problem.
Now if you are harassed because of it, that’s a different subject than a simple downvote
tbh the culture here is reddit in its purest form right now. once they start sanitizing everything here again I’m out. One opinion allowed ONLY and if you dont align you’re a NAZI and FAR RIGHT TROLL
I’m seeing red whistles and hearing dog flags coming from you! Am I doing it right?
Perfect. ‘Downvote’ me too so you can really show it to me how WRONG I am.
If you want to see what happens if this culture permeates here just look at Mastodon. Negative growth, barely any interaction and it’s the same few people shouting into the void. I checked some mutuals who proudly announced they’d move to Mastodon and most haven’t posted anything this year. Still posting regularly on Twitter tho :clownface:
A lot of users here are the same, ‘move’ here to show they’re protesting and then stop posting in a few weeks or months and back to reddit.
Some clown mod made over 50 magazines/subs on kbin. Hasnt posted 1 comment since a little over a week. Bio reads: ‘Proud owner of xxx communities.’ lol
If there is no unique culture/point to this platform and it’s just reddit 2.0 then people will simply go back to reddit.
Oh it certainly wasn’t free speech. Tons of users trolling neo-nazis got banned.