I do hope that lemmy continues to grow into non-tech demographics. I’m somewhat into tech myself, but I also like a lot of other stuff and I miss that influence from reddit. Lemmy is VERY tech focused right now and we need some other voices in here.
Comment on For those thinking of going back to reddit. Gaze upon this comment section and reconsider.
random9@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I think the fewer number of people, compared to reddit, on Lemmy combined with the fact that it’s not nearly as well known, plays a huge advantage to the quality of the comments. Not that there aren’t people like that here either, but I feel like the more popular a platform, is, the more it gets filled, proportionally, with people trying to make witty, shitty, pointless remarks that are often clickkbaity and avoid actual discussion, all in the interest of just getting more imaginary points.
Also the process of “enshitification” (not a term I made up, look it up if you hadn’t heard of it) has already started taking place on reddit due to its popularity.
Paradachshund@lemmy.today 8 months ago
PP_BOY_@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This. So. Much. This.
Kalkaline@leminal.space 8 months ago
Yes! If I had money for goldz, I’d give it to you. Please accept this 🥈in it’s place.
Thatuserguy@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Also the process of “enshitification” has already started taking place on reddit due to its popularity.
I started using reddit in 2011. Trust me when I say this isn’t a new trend. Reddit’s has been noticeably and actively getting shittier since at least 2015
Liz@midwest.social 8 months ago
Shitty changes Reddit made that I can name off the top of my head:
- New Reddit
- Reddit Live
- Anything beyond Reddit gold (the concept of paying for Reddit gold was, by itself, not a terrible idea back when we thought Reddit was a decent company)
- Instant chat feature, when DMs already existed
- Pay for API
- Fired their only popular employee, the AMA assistant
You could argue creating a comments section was also a dick move, but that was before my time and it’s fair to say Reddit never would have caught on without it.
They also populated the site with fake accounts in the early days to make it look more popular than it really was. I would be zero percent surprised to find out that they still had fake accounts floating around for purposes I don’t feel like speculating about.
Oh, and Spez edited people’s comments.
ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Victoria was the one they fired aka /u/chooter
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
There’s also a big issue of the sheer mass of comments in a post simply drowning out any chance of discussion because only the first few most upvoted ones will usually get seen, so people generally just respond to those to get any interaction on their comments. It’s why the frontpage stuff is always so much worse than smaller subs - because by the time people see it, there’s already 1,000+ comments there.
NightAuthor@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Reddits is end stage enshitification
FMT99@lemmy.world 8 months ago
And now they’re going to train AI on that dataset. The intellectual equivalent of a diet consisting of nothing but chicken nuggets.
cooltrainer_frank@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I feel like you’re gonna be able to tell if an AI was overly trained on reddit data.
Hey Chat XYZ– write me a prompt for my essay about George Washington
“More WashingDeezNuts! Gottem.
Came here to say this.
Edit: wow thanks for the gold kind stranger”
Infynis@midwest.social 8 months ago
Most of the people that would have made good comments on Reddit moved to Lemmy as well
Flumpkin@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
I think this is a huge problem with democracy as well. The larger a country, the worse democracy works. Any apparatus of power or wealth attracts parasites only interested in exploiting it. And the larger the lever, the more profit from manipulating it. And the larger the potential gain the more investment costs can you justify.
This isn’t an argument for states rights or federation though, with “divide and conquer” strategies you can copy and paste the same strategy to multiple instances. If there is monetary gain to be had, there will always be an unrelenting force trying to exploit it.
nevemsenki@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Eh, am from a country with 9mil people, and this society simply doesn’t get democracy. So being smaller is hardly any indicator that democracy will work better.
Flumpkin@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
It’s certainly not a guarantee but I do think there is a “scalability problem” with democracy.
someguy3@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
These have to be bots.
ULS@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I’m part of the problem. 85.4% of my comments shit posts only I think are funny.
EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Hey, don’t be like that. I am sure a lot of people find your shitposts funny.
Not me. I looked.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I actually had a chuckle at this one.
random9@lemmy.world 8 months ago
lol @ the exact percent
But no, I don’t think shitposts by themselves are actually the problem. I think the problem is when when there’s so many people dedicated to making shitposts that serious communities with serious discussions start getting overwhelmed with shitposts, and when there’s so many people who are only interested in shitposts that they upvote those shitposts to the top, often downvoting anyone who might offer a contrarian non-funny opinion.
or IDK, I’m mostly speculating based on personal experience.
Beefytootz@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I think the problem is that reddit is suffering the same fate as Facebook. It’s no longer a niche Internet community, it’s been overrun by people who think it’s hip and in. It’s been taken over by people who speak some of the language, but don’t get the culture. No one knows when the narwhal baconed anymore. Lemmy is exhibiting the earlier stages of reddit. Small groups that are growing, plus a looooot of star trek fans sprinkled throughout.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
I just gagged. I get that it’s a big cultural touchstone of old reddit but I’m sorry, if a community could ever think that was
midnightsomething anyone could say out in the real world to try and find other members without sounding like they’d been dropped on the head as a child, then there’s serious arguments that it was already past the point of no return.No worries. I’ll just be over here with the real cool kids from old 4chan. Hiding our power levels, laughing at m00t wanting to be the little girl, and calling everyone [blank]f#gs. That was totally more respectable behavior by a community of well adjusted individuals.
Hell, even the whole 4chan v Reddit “rivalry” sort of shit is ancient history now.
No psuedonymous or anonymous public discussion space needs some specific “calling card” meme. Just let it be what it is.
Anyway, I believe what your describing was coined as “eternal summer” many many years ago.
Back in the earlier years of 4chan, in the summer time the site used to get flooded with a bunch of obviously new users who clearly had no familiarity with the how the existing community worked, in amounts that would often drown out discussions that would have thrived without the newcomers.
You could often trace significant downward trends in “quality” of a community to those mass influxes of new users every summer, usually assumed to be underaged children having nothing better to do with summer break.
At the time, 4chan was still insular enough (not the least due to the sheer vileness of the most popular boards) that any new users who stuck around after the summer would normally adapt to fit with the existing community when the rest of the new users from the summer left.
Eventually though, 4chan got large enough to start getting in the news more and more. Anonymous hackers were doing more shit drawing attention too. They took on fucking scientology. At some point, there was enough of a constant influx of new users who were either unable or unwilling to adapt to the existing community that the existing community started dissolving rapidly.
At that point, “summer” never ends. If you try to enforce previous “standards” then you’re fighting a neverending battle against hordes of people coming into what used to be “your space” where you knew how things worked, insisting that things work differently now (whether by repeated action or explicit statements). They’re coming in such numbers that you can’t out talk them. You can’t out pace their posting. You can’t “educate” them. Slowly everything just oozes into the same easily digestable sludge catering to the lowest common denominator of the constant onflux of new users, who don’t give a singular shit about what worked to keep the space alive in the first place.
Welcome to Eternal Summer. Cut your addiction to the space, adapt to the new normal, or suffer forever. Makes for a lot of really really salty maladjusted shut-ins, and the same sort of exclusionary behavior that a lot of nerds had when shit like Halo 2 started making gaming more mainstream or Critical Role helped make D&D more popular.
There’s a lot to be gained from new blood in a previously insular community, but it often comes with a loss of identity. For 4chan, that wasn’t a huge loss, though I’d argue that the racism at least seemed more ironic in ancient times, to a stupid teenage me. Eventually, every community has a tipping point where “the old guard” can’t hold back the tide, and without sissyphean efforts what made the original community special will probably be lost. For better or worse.
Best not to get too attached to any emphemeral space or community, and learn to find new ones as you go along your life.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Are there people who think Facebook is hip?
morrowind@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Yeah I love a good shitpost, but many redditors seem to have no sense of maturity about when to be serious vs silly. It would drive me insane to see like some news about a suicide bombing in Pakistan or something, and the only comment is some guy trying to make a pun.
Thicc_Jamez@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s not just you. There are dozens of us.
ULS@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
This.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This.
mp3@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
At least there are dedicated spaces for that and most Lemmings are respecting that, if it doesn’t spill out too much to more serious communities then at least there isn’t too much noise to have a good discussion.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Good for you … the road to recovering from being a bot is to first admit it
Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This should be a mug!