2y ago

Does anyone else hope the bulk of Reddit stays there?

I think my favorite thing about Lemmy is that it feels like Reddit used to. Less negativity, more engaged users (I think). I know it will be fun to watch Reddit die, but if I put spite aside what I’m really mad at Reddit about is more about what Reddit became and maybe part of that is when the general internet user started going to Reddit and it became less like the small community it was years ago. Feel free to disagree or share an argument 😉

77 comments

no way. this kind of elitism and gatekeeping kills communities
- Yeah, I really hope we can get past the culture of thinking lemmy is morally superior to reddit and just focus on having something nice here that no CEO can fuck with.

So call me what you will but I just want a new "Reddit". I want a place where I can come up with a niche and find a place where people are talking about it. Whether it's experts or enthusiasts but I want to shared experience of "talking about X".
- Exactly, well put. This is what reddit used to be, I hope this place can and will grow into just that in time. I see the potential. Everything starts with very little.
- Exactly, I don't need reddit to die, but I do hope long-term ill be able to interact with as many niche communities here.

i just hope that lemmy posts are indexed by search engines
- They are, I get results. My worry is they are not aggregated/unified. Some lemmy instances don't have 'lemmy' in their name, and I'm not sure if they would show up in a search "X + lemmy".

I think I disagree. I have heard this a lot on Reddit and I've heard it about Twitter, Google Plus and a bunch of other social networks and I've been on small ones and huge ones alike. Honestly, to me, when a social network is large it includes both nuanced discussion and there more casual posting. I don't see why both can't exist on the same site and I feel like it often does exist on the same site.
I also think people have a huge range of interests, some of which might be quite niche and having a large user base means these niche communities can thrive. When I've used smaller social networks, this typically has been the problem. They often have their tech communities covered and they often have other large common hobbies and interests covered, but if you take for example learning welsh or theremin music or something else, then you typically only get communities about those things on larger networks.

I've been finding Reddit quite toxic lately, I also find it annoying how much less engaged people are in the actual articles posted and more interested in getting a laugh going off topic.
- One thing I really don't miss are the posts that are like:
  I like chocolate.
  edit: okay guys, I get that some of you don't like chocolate, I was just expressing a personal preference.
  edit 2: i understand that some people have had distant relatives who have died from eating chocolate, I meant no disrespect to the chocolate-averse community and I'm deeply sorry.
  edit 3: someone reported me for suicide to the admins and someone else said I was spreading hate speech, gomna take a break from reddit for a while
- Reddit has always had the good stuff in the comments. The shitification, IMO, is the total lack of effort everywhere.

Yes! Every time I read a conversation on here, I feel like I'm back on Reddit of yore, and it's an amazing feeling. I went to Reddit last week (it had an answer to a tech question that was posted a year or so ago), and was appalled at the negativity of the comment section.

Not really. I feel like it's not healthy for any community if all the people you don't like aren't there to offer their viewpoint. The more you build an echo chamber with no dissenting opinions, the more extreme it becomes and the less it's able to deal with things that clash with it's ideals. The less it's involved with things that clash with it's ideals.
This does not include groups with completely bad faith arguments that are clearly racist bigots.
- I don't mind discussing stuff with people who have different views from me, but on Reddit I would mostly type out a comment, imagine what kind of rude retort I'd get, and trash the draft. I remember some years back having a great back and forth with someone on nuclear power and actually changing my mind! But more recently it's just "you're wrong and dumb", no discussion. Ugh.
  I'm still very new here, but it feels like Reddit used to, and I like it.
- You're right in a way, but I think you're applying a narrow definition of "opinion" when I think most people ITT are thinking about "behaviours".
  Sure, it's not great to exclude dissenting political opinions, the intolerance paradox being a notable exception. That said, I'm not here to discuss politics.
  Say for example that some users will do anything for fake internet points - post anything, say anything, there behaviour is guided by the pursuit of karma and building some kind of following. Other users will do anything for engagement, whatever it takes to get others to engage with them including trolling. I'm happy enough for these types of users to find more rewarding platforms elsewhere. Note that's different to excluding them, it's just being a part of a place that isn't fertile ground for their fixations.

Reddit is not going to die. Not atleast in foreseeable future.
- Definitely. It's going to become a mainstream platform like Instagram.

At this rate i don't see the bulk moving here because it's way less user friendly. Many others have made this point much more fluently than i can, but Lemmy just isn't friendly for non nerds or people who don't want\have the time to put into learning it. Until there's an app for lemmy as widely useable as, say, Apollo was, i doubt the masses will come here. Until then it'll be us committed fediverse dorks who really want to be here - not just any old joe with a phone and wifi who wants to pop in, hurt someone's feelings for funsies, and run away giggling.
- This sounds fantastic to me.
  It's pretty much what happened on mastodon with the twitter-storm in November.
  Huge influx of new users, about a third hung around - but it was the third who were the most like-minded.

The bulk of reddit has already gone back to reddit.
Don't get me wrong, lemmy is great just the way it is. We don't need a continued influx from reddit (although lets see what happens on 1 July).

The best part about Reddit is the sheer amount of actually useful, highly specific information about anything. The friendly community aspect has been, in my opinion, slowly crumbling for a few years now. If Lemmy starts to get as big as current Reddit, then I'm sure it will follow the same path and become shittifed. I do hope it takes a while though.

There is always going to be negative users. They are already here
- coff coff c/donald coff coff
- To heck with you for your stupid opinion, everyone is obviously always positive here

I think those who are not satisfied with the direction Reddit is going are already here and found a new home. Maybe some will come here after the thrid-party-apps cease to work (if they aren't here already).
The vast majority (the "bulk of Reddit") doesn't bother. As long as they can use Reddit the way they use to they will not leave. It possibly has to do with the fact that these users are not tech-savvy enough in general. I don't mean it in a negative way. They just don't care because they just focus on other things. And with this in mind these users probably checked out Lemmy already but because the buttons are green and their favorite subreddit is not here yet, it is not appealing to them. So they rather stay on reddit.

I definitely hope the... simply massive amount of information stored there is archived in some way. I was troubleshooting some technical issues for a very niche hardware and software application this morning and the only sources I could find were on reddit.
I feel similarly about Discord. There is so much technical knowledge and information that would be lost in the blink of an eye if Discord shut down.
- Best case scenario for reddit, I think, would be for its IPO to fail, spez and investors call it quits, and it eventually ends up maintained by a not-for-profit foundation in the way that, say, Wikipedia or Blender is.
  Either that or it dies, its database published or scraped, and ends up accessible through archive.org or something similar.
  EDIT: or a crowdfunded buy-out by John Oliver 😆
  
  I favor the latter
- I helped a lot of people with niche hardware and software troubleshoot things for years on Reddit, I'm planning to leave my comments up because of that.
  The amount of times I would search for something to only find threads of people asking about an issue followed by comments that say "deleted by [X software on github] in protest for [issue that was solved years ago]" and responses praising the deleted comment for helping them is too damn high.
  Or hell trawling the internet archive for dead sites trying to find solutions.
  I don't want people to have to go through that.
  I don't care where my answers come from, I just want to troubleshoot crap in a timely manner.
- !datahoarder@lemmy.ml did a great job archiving all of reddit and making it available on archive.org. 13.23 billion archives and counting. So personally I just grab reddit links, change them to old.reddit.com and put them in the wayback machine
- I believed this up until the blackout protests started happening, and Reddit shit the bed in responding to the protests.
  I went back and sorted through my top comments in tech support, home improvement, other troubleshooting Q&A type subreddits, across my different accounts, and started editing those answers to be short phrases summarizing what the comments used to be. I'll eventually remove them, too, but maybe the indexers will update their cached copies to be the totally unhelpful versions they are now.
- Tbh the problem with Discord is that its search and indexing functions just suck ass in the first place. I already treat anything posted in Discord as ephemeral information that stops existing once it leaves my view. In that sense i hope lemmy instances for tech support/ troubleshooting take off. Much easier to archive.
- Off topic but I like your icon :>
  Also i agree - there's lots of answers i can only get from obscure reddit posts..

Does anyone else hope the bulk of Reddit stays there?
No. I think it's better without a million American teenagers.

Lots of reddit will find themselves unwelcome in Lemmy and by various instance admins. They may make their own instances, but depending on the content that comes from them, they may even be defederated from ours.
Lemmy is community owned, community run, and community focused. There is no profit motive. There is no logic to keeping people on your instance or interacting with it who work to its detriment. Just having more people on your instance doesn't mean "one additional customer".
- They may make their own instances, but depending on the content that comes from them, they may even be defederated from ours.
  It is WEIRD how much I feel like I've been here before.
  My first days on the internet were around the time that both email lists, and IRC chat, were popular. IRC chat was a bit more centralized than this perhaps in management, but in many ways the concepts were similar: multiple servers, interlinked, and if the admin of one server had a problem with the admin of another, they could delink from each other. IRC, a protocol that was popular 30 years ago and has been largely dead for at least 10, was basically the OG fediverse of instant messaging.
  Anyways, there's a massive amount of promise with this. It's more or less what Reddit was originally meant to be: Each team fully in charge of their own subreddit, and Reddit admins only there to make sure that each subreddit played nice with each other subreddit. In a fediverse context, it's almost exactly the same, except the responsibility for cutting off subreddits that don't play nice lies with the managers of each "subreddit" (instance).
  I realize that instances are not magazines and so on, and this analogy has technologically weak comparisons, but I think the principle works.
  
  I realize that instances are not magazines and so on, and this analogy has technologically weak comparisons, but I think the principle works.
  I do think that we will start to see communities getting their own hosted instances. A light novel/manga I read has an entire instance devoted to communities about the series, and I've seen some chatter in the selfhosted community about making an instance for selfhosted/datahoarders/FOSS in general, though we'll see if that actually pans out.
  I really like the model of a community of communities being in containerized into one shared, dedicated instance.
- Lots of reddit will find themselves unwelcome in Lemmy and by various instance admins.
  Do you have some examples?
  
  It's difficult to point directly to examples as their posts tend to be deleted, and deleted posts will also hide the rest of the thread. This thread had portions of its OP chronicled before it was taken down though. Basically they were complaining about everywhere they went on Lemmy their posts were deleted or they were banned for "criticism". They never directly said what their criticisms were, but I can only assume they're the types you wouldn't elaborate on when trying to get people to side with you over "censorship".
  I've seen multiple others have a hard time when expressing homophobia, and getting their comments or accounts removed. When the owners of the instances can't profit off you like Reddit does, lending their resources to you is done out of kindness and goodwill, and if you step on that, there's little reason to hold back haha
  
  Anyone who supports human rights in lemmygrad is an example

I think Reddit will slowly bleed users as the experience gets worse but it won't collapse altogether. It's not likely that any one service will replace it but I could see a series of successors come about eventually.
- I agree. I see it as becoming like Slashdot. Making ad revenue but deserted by the core people who made the site what it was.

I think there's a loud, negative minority that WILL stay there, and it's going to become even more of the type of place that they like.
- Cf. Twitter

Yeah, I see the shitty part of reddit is moving here now, doing internet arguments again.
- Conversation about hot topics is going to happen no matter what. As long as it stays respectful I think it's ok.
  
  Many of them are not staying respectful though.
  They have a fresh start on a new place, and they just choose to be miserable and brought the reddit over here.
- Well that’s a stupid take and you are dumb.
  (Sorry, I know, not funny…) 🤦‍♂️
  More seriously, while I deleted my Reddit account, I haven’t tried to avoid landing on some Reddit threads linked from Lemmy, and for the past few days I’ve looked closer at comment sections, because I’m noticing I had forgotten how rotten they were compared to here. So much pointless aggressivity.
  I think it’s credible that if Lemmy was to keep growing, that issue will also keep growing as you have noticed. So, a bit like op, I’m hoping it only grows big enough to keep the open source projects interested and staffed; but not so much so that most of the sucky aggressivity stays on Reddit or elsewhere permanently.
  
  I repeat this a lot, but I think the most important thing to do is to stay sincere and not be a defeatist. No arguing just to win, but no hugbox mentality either.
  I have no doubt at all that the reddit admins and powermods were algorithmically pushing flame bait and hatred (especially to the political subs) to drive traffic to the site, so now that we've have a place where that isn't possible (yet, at least), I'm interested to see if that's just the nature of political discussion on the Internet.
- The comment section is for Internet arguments!
  
  Hey, whatever you do is your business, I'm just here to promote "Barbie".

I definitely get how you feel, but I think free communities stay like this one in tone, regardless of whether they get substantial growth. I think it could be a counterintuitive sign of health when Lemmy is big enough that some of its userbase is kinda annoying and you have to find the subs (is that the right term here?) with the community that you like
- The equivalent to "subreddits" are called Communities in Lemmy and Magazines in Kbin
  
  Subs=subscriptions.
  
  Harder to abbreviate

Perhaps not the bulk. As people flee Reddit, I've been already noticing a few users here behaving as they were in Reddit: assumers, irrationals, context-illiterate, "chrust me" babble, so goes on. I feel like those perhaps would do a great service for Lemmy if they stayed in Reddit.
However I also think that this is partially a result of the environment, as Reddit has been tailored for stupidity. So it's possible that those users start behaving a bit more like decent people, as time goes by.

I've been through multiple aggregator site meltdowns and migrations. Some will stay, some will go, everyone will eventually find a new home. No worries!

Not really, I miss having niche communities that were populated. I get where you're coming from, but I think more warm bodies around here will be a good thing.

Yes - very much so.
This feels like a community of actual people who can and do actually think and engage.
Reddit felt like a vast sea of idiots, trolls, shills snd bots.

I just hope the capitalist bootlickers stay there. I'm tired of bad faith arguments that try to slow down class solidarity.
- Ah it would seem it's too late lol

77 comments