I think the influence on Reddit was deeper than a lot of people have considered. The hivemind was so strong it made it difficult to have decent and useful discussion, even the puns that muddied down nearly every post’s comments achieved that end. The amount of posts I’ve seen of people feeling much more comfortable actually interacting on Lemmy, in my mind, lends weight to how Reddit wasn’t a place for objective dialogue. That’s why it felt so adolescent, like sitting at a high school lunch table.
Reddits culture has become so…tiring. My interaction dropped significantly in recent years and more often than not I delete my comments as I’m typing them because I already know the response.
I’m so happy I haven’t read a single pun or lyric/TV show spam thread since coming here. They were becoming unbearable, even worse then the proliferation of video shorts.
I wouldn’t say it felt adolescent. Adolescence is full of misunderstandings about the world, but usually there’s at least some internal logic where you can see how a wrong understanding is logically taken to the wrong conclusion. The start and end are both wrong, but the steps from the start to the end are right. At least that was what I remember from my days of adolescence.
Reddit actually felt more lazy than adolescent. It’s like most people just couldn’t be bothered to think (or read for that matter). The vast majority of comments just felt low-effort or even no effort (like the case where people just comment “This”) and opinions are formed solely on “what’s the first feeling I get” than then get defended into absurdity, because changing your opinion with new information is a cardinal sin on Reddit. Sometimes you could get an intelligent discussion but, especially in recent years, you get the equivalent of a thumbs up if someone agrees with you or just straight up hate if someone disagrees.
When I was a kid I thought grown ups were annoying, when I was in my 20s I thought teenagers were annoying, in my 30s I think people in their 20s are annoying. People will always have something to complain about others. “Kids” is just a different group for different people.
I’m 32 and indefinitely can relate. Every generation has been worse than the last since time immemorial, apparently.
For me it is lack of commercial interests (ads hidden in post), lack of bots, and lack of "funny meme and jokes’ posts.
lack of "funny meme and jokes’ posts
This is it for me. The Pavlovian posting and upvoting of shitty jokes in every. single. thread. I haven’t bothered with reddit’s comment section in years because of it. Here, the comments so far seem chill and appropriate for the posts.
The Narwhal bacons at midnight, fellow hydrohomie
I too choose this man’s hydrohomie
I hated this one the most
Yes, I hope Karma won’t be as prominent as on reddit, limiting jokes to those that are appropriate.
The same shitty jokes at that, over and over and over again.
Agreed. On top of this I noticed a pretty hard decline in Reddit once the CCP bought a portion of reddit. Keeping business out of Lemmy will keep it honest for sure.
I missed that, they bought a stake in Conde Nast or how come?
We can always make funny memes
i’d rather have quality content though.
all of you are wrong. lemmy looks like it does now because it’s first of all and most importantly small.
the reason why it’s small is that there are barriers for entry, be it effort needed to understand federation for the first time or choosing instance. “ooh just choose anything it’s not that hard” shut the fuck up. it’s a barrier because you can see that numbers are quite low, and just because you’ve come through it already doesn’t mean it’s not there
but there’s bigger issue. depending on instance and how do you count, some 95%+ of new active users could have been rexxiters. this means that by coming there they have to leave reddit, and that means leaving communities that were there
average person isn’t stupid or malicious or unenlightened plebeian. average person is just. average. because of small lemmy’s size people there are subject to strong selection bias, namely on gaussian distribution of “how much do you care about moving there” that’s far right tail that sits there. what are reasons for that, for every person that would be a bit different. some of these are FOSS enthusiasts or techlibertarians or softcore anticapitalists, this has some serious implications. some were banned from reddit but want replacement (some of these were shown door already, like exploding-heads).
now, crossection of “people who cared to come there” and “programmers” is reasonably big, as evidenced by programming.dev, but for any other unrelated topic there’s much less. crossection of “people who care” and “people who are good at identifying mushrooms” or “aviation fans” or whatever is small, maybe too small to form new community. these people would need to leave reddit and their community and come there, doing nothing because they have no other fellow mushroom identificators to talk to. so, many don’t. there’s also probably negative selection of specific kind of people like some conspiracy theorists, at least for now
if you want to see lemmy grow, you would see dilution of that concentrated techbro sentiment with people who are otherwise average, but these people are also there to form new, specialized communities. you might want to gatekeep them out with some eternal september scenario, but it most likely won’t work. personally i think that lemmy needs to grow a few times over for these diverse “unrelated communities” to form, and then things will get pretty sustainable
another thing is that there’s no ads and no selection for hostile content or conspiracy theories, and that might be related to how lemmy’s algorithm is not driven by engagement, at least that’s how it looks like. and also bots, i’ve seen entire subreddits written by chatgpt or some dude who tried hard to do something similar by hand, and i hope to avoid this here at least for some time. the kids are alright
Great post. Lemmy right now reminds me of Reddit 15-16 years ago. Mostly tech workers or tech hobbyists who know far more than an average person and thus aren’t put off by something new and different. I don’t think Lemmy is very complicated as a concept and it boggles my mind that people are saying “making a new account on Lemmy.world or Kbin.social is too complicated for normal people.” Yet I see it written all the time, sometimes here but mostly on reddit. And who knows; maybe the latter is a disinformation campaign since we know reddit pulls sneaky shit like that all the time (and targeting Lemmy, like with the warnings they placed on links at one point).
Lemmy’s barriers to entry also somewhat remind me of early Facebook after they expanded to several universities. You needed to have an email address from one of those univerisities in order to create an account. So, not so much self selection in that scenario but another gate to keep people out.
I can respect Tildes’ decision to become invite-only (with a very limited number of invites) for that reason. Lemmy, I think, is prioritizing growth at the potential cost of future community. Tildes is doing the opposite. I don’t think one is necessarily more correct. And, with Lemmy, there are tons of alternatives waiting in the wings. Hopefully a balance can be struck.
I think the real test comes when the first wave of good third party apps are released. Sync, in particular, seems very promising given the developer’s reddit app. Anything that can make it easier for people.
i think the biggest barrier is leaving fully formed communities on reddit, not technicalities of lemmy
for more information, please re-read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
No kids? I am a kid
It’s past your bed time. Stay off my lawn. Get a jawb! Cut yer hair! Stop smokin’ the devil’s grass!
I’m ostensibly an adult and I love the devil’s lettuce.
I’m a coffee and cannabis in the morning type person. Some people may find it slows them down, but it helps me with creativity and seems to wake me up more than just coffee.
God bless
I disagree. Terrible take. It’s never wise to discount, alienate, or exclude our youth. Growth is the name of the game and they’re the ones who are going to be ushering in hopefully a better future. Who will they learn from if not us? You want them stewing with each other?
No. We maintain whatever nebulous internet “culture” we like and establish rules. Anyone, young or old, who doesn’t adhere can suck eggs. That way young people learn how to act and we can hear them tell us about all the ways we need to better society.
Truly I believe that the children who develop during this time of overstimulation and rapid technological advancement will emerge maybe a bit… maladapted but better than us. Humans can be so resilient especially under supportive circumstances. Our intelligence is adaptive. So if you want to make a great internet community, maintain your respect for our kids.
So im new here for the obvious reason. This is my first comment here.
I hope to find more people with your mentality. It was nice to see a good reasoned response to a situation. So i guess i just wanted to say thank you for giving me hope that reddit shitting the bed is going to be the best thing since digg shit the bed
Ciao!
Lol omg thank you!!! That is really nice of you to say!! Weirdly, you replied to MY first comment here so welcome fellow newbie! We’ll try to keep this place one we’d like to be in together.
Wholesome AF but I agree. It’s my first comment using wefwef anyway, maybe 2nd or 3rd on lemmy? I was going to reply “this is the way” to your other quote lol. But you’re spot on, and honestly, anyone who disagrees probably underestimated the number of young folks on Reddit, Digg, etc. in the first place. I’ve been on the interwebz since IRC days and showing new folks how to act is the way you build communities. It doesn’t matter how old they are and nobody would ever know if they were lying about their age anyway. Cultivate good hoomans. Soooo tl;dr cheers!
Yes!! Cultivate good hoomans 100% we are on the same page.
Kids should never have been on Reddit, imo. Not because of their comments or the content they produce. But Reddit, and I guess social media in general, is for someone who can think critically and has some experience in life. Because there is so much garbage on there.
There are absolutely kids under 10 using Reddit right now, and they’re getting introduced to the adult world by some of the sleaziest dysfunctional adults around. And even if they don’t get that deep into Reddit, it’s still not a healthy place for them. It’s not healthy for adults, we all know that, but kids on Reddit are growing up with it as a major contributor to their worldviews.
You know, it’s basically GIGO. Adults can, in theory, understand that what Reddit says is opinion (often extreme and bizarre opinion) and not fact, but kids won’t.
Not just fewer kids. But fewer conservatives too.
Gosh, I love it here.
Conservatives love having corporate masters, so they’re all staying on reddit.
You know, it’s so funny (though obviously not in an enjoyable way per se) how those folks are so selective and picky about freedom. Like freedom is OK when it’s the freedom to enter a supermarket without a mask, but it’s not OK when it’s the freedom to express your gender. And as in this example, when it comes to corporate masters…
Don’t you just love capitalism? And don’t you just loooooove capitalists? It’s honestly frightening how reminiscent it is to the way the fascists took power in 1930s Germany.
And by the way, I’m noticing a parallel with how much they not only embrace conservative evangelical Christendom, but also act like it’s the epitome of freedom and liberty - the American Dream, if you will. If you attend one of the US’s most notorious fundie schools, you’re not allowed to stay up late, mingle with the opposite gender too much, attend dances, or be pretty much anything other than cishet (and implicitly, cishet white male). The irony of how said school is named “LIBERTY” University never seems to die on me.
Conservatives love giving lip service to freedom, but they hate anyone actually exercising their freedom.
Basically they only care about appearances and are devoid of any actual substance. That’s why they scream “virtue signaling” so much. Since they have no real virtue, they can’t conceive of anyone else having any either.
Sounds like a win-win for everyone.
Fewer conservatives, yes. If it wasn’t for the harcore tankies and trolls it would really be perfect. But it’s very close, much better than Reddit.
A lot of the political discussion I’ve read on here has also been pretty well thought out. I feel like people are taking time to explain their perspective more and even if in general it’s been more left leaning there is definitely more nuance. I was surprised by the quality of some of the discussion around the end of affirmative action.
Lemmy is so good right now because there’s no commercialization here.
My ublock has been at a constant “0” on this site since I’ve started. A youtube tab will have over a hundred by the end of a 10 minute video.
The reasons to develop it also are ideological and not ecological ones.
I’m a teenage FOSS enthusiast and I’m of the opinion that there are a lot more of us here than you seem to all think.
not speaking for OP but when I think about not wanting “kids” around, I mean immature people. I’m looking to be part of something like the reddit prior to them buying Alien Blue.
As a fellow teenager and a FOSS enthusiast, Linux user and Linux tinkerer and hobbyist, I’m glad to see there are more people my age getting into the FOSS space.
There are dozens of us!
Much more than dozens haha
Same same, it is mostly the matter of your FOSS knowledge, if you were a FOSS nerd you would most likely to switch from reddit in some way or another… (16 btw)
Same, also 16, and the ‘mentally kids’ excuse is more insulting than they may have realised.
Booyah high five! Glad you’re here
It’s so good because a lot of people have been waiting for a viable alternative to Reddit for half a decade or longer. It’s non-corporate internet, the way it should be.
Non corporate internet, just like the days of old 🥲
It was like Mastadon and twitter, once they meseed up they got replaced, and alternative services become popular.
Unfortunately reddit was the de facto place to find information and ask questing and be sure to find an answer, now the communities are actually split in half.
I really hope Lemmy will get better over time, we could create briedges like matrix for some popular sub*s
how do you do, fellow adults?
my back hurts
I have a headache
I sneezed too hard and now I have a sharp pain in my neck
… Back in those days we’d tie an onion on our belt
Just had my yearly colonoscopy
We do a bit of adultery
I don’t support age shaming. Let’s not be those people.
Yeah the kids these days have some weird memes and I’m here for it. So much better than the rage comics from when I was their age
Reminds me of Reddit around 2010.
I’m so happy to find a new community. Looking around quickly this seem like a much better group of people to interact with than reddit.
I can’t express enough how glad I am this place exists and I can be done with reddit forever
Hiiiiiii guys! ~
I’m new heeereeeee! Am 12/f/cali looking for cutey cutey fweends!!! Uwu
i cant remember the last time i saw anyone do ASL that wasnt in their 30s now
My immediate thought too. Nobody under 40 is pulling out the ASL
