From my own POV, and something I noticed from the beginning here, is that in the wake of Reddit (and other places) treating its users as assets, it was important to grow a userbase across the Lemmysphere and Fediverse with a strong community spirit. To me that means more participation, more content-creation, and more willingness to be civil and cooperate. Not that these things didn’t happen to a significant extent, but it seems like a lot of .ee users and visitors, while willing to hang out at the place, were moreso just willing to soak up the content without putting in much effort to help make the place work. Or even just being toxic and destructive, as above.
A lot more could be said and debated about the whole situation, but sites like Reddit, as draconian as they might be at times, and whatever their other flaws, have proven that they’ve been able to establish a system that works stably over the long haul.
I guess it’s not really surprising, though. The Lemmy userbase is much smaller and very skewed towards certain types of people with extremely strong opinions and low levels of tolerance for anything that goes against their worldview. I don’t think reddit is necessarily doing anything better in that regard, it just benefits from having such a massive userbase filled with all kinds of people. The toxicity and off-topic intrusions of political/culture war stuff get drowned out over there, whereas here you’ll frequently see threads where 90% of the comments are arguing about things that are completely irrelevant to the actual topic because so much of userbase has an activist mindset that is always itching for a fight.
JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 3 days ago
I’d say the big, honking difference with Reddit is that there’s a team of paid admins and staff to handle so much of the chores and unsavory occurrences that the volunteer admins & mods on the Lemmysphere have to do on their own. Also, their software is years ahead, and I strongly suspect has many more out-of-the-box tools than Lemmy has on the admin side. It’s certainly that way for the mod side, I can attest.
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Reddit was known for years to leave the moderation tasks to the volunteers admins. I’m still a mod in a quite active sub, the mod queue is around 2600 items now.
morrowind@lemm.ee 3 days ago
We hav sub mods here too. The difference is the admins
Ledericas@lemm.ee 3 days ago
reddit has admins, AI moderations, aggressive filters, and COMPLIcit mods in many subs to do the policing.
JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Yup, good point.
Ilandar@lemm.ee 3 days ago
That’s true, I guess I was commenting more on the differences between the userbases. I’m not sure much can really be done about that in the short term. Lemmy is this way because it is small and is a sort of counterculture protest against mainstream social media. Until it grows and evolves out of that framing, its userbase will continue to look very different to reddit’s.