i think OC started to increase after 45 1st term, thats when people really jumped into social media for all the drama and content, and then found more drama(like livestream, and youtube,etc)
It didn’t take a decade for OC on smaller communities. I’ve been using Reddit since 2009. There was plenty of OC since 2012.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
fujiwood@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
i would say Reddit became mainstream in 2015 with over approximately 100 million users. That’s when I started noticing the quality of comments start going down. That’s when people stopped having discussions and started bickering more. Before that it was a lot less hostile and the topic of discussions were more fun and informative.
There was also a lot of OC at the time. You just needed to join subs in order to see it. But it was there.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
thats when all the bots started, plus they were banning “QUESTIONABLE” subreddits they dint have a problem before, until the republicans started targeting social media.
bassomitron@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
And I used it since ~2007. Sure, I’ll concede that OC existed back then, but expectations/standards were far lower. Simply starting topics or a meme template that hadn’t been done before were fine, often times even hailed. Two broken arms, jollyrancher, coconut, whatever other gross ass viral thing weren’t even pictures/videos, they were comments and/or text posts. They became Reddit legends/mythos/lore, regardless.
Anyway, that type of OC isn’t going to invigorate the masses like it used to. Any of those stories nowadays would be met with heavy cynicism/skepticism (rightfully so, I might add). I guess my point is, Lemmy has only been somewhat known for a couple of years. It takes a lot of time to build momentum. Reddit continues to enshittify ever further, just like Digg did. Times are different now, there’s a fuckton of competition in this type of social media format. What will make it successful is hard to say for certainty. I think sticking to link aggregation and topical discussions is a good start.
fujiwood@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I agree that the standards were lower. That resulted in a lot of fun because things were easier. It would be harder to gain momentum that way now.
The thing about link aggregation is that it can be done on any platform. You can post links to Piefed, Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr along with all mainstream sites. So why choose Lemmy over them?
The difference will be the OC. If users don’t want to put in the work for it then people who join will get bored and move on.
I’ll read comments on Reddit talking about Lemmy. Users will say they tried Lemmy but there was no interest/posts/discussion in their niche communities so they ended up back on Reddit.
We’ll see what happens I guess.