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12mo ago

why are left leaning groups still using reddit?

the most egregious example I can think of is antiwork in reddit. Posters there love to rant against companies, but they also give good advice regarding laws in different states and is a good source to deal with micromanagers and toxic workplaces.

But it's like they simply don't think that reddit is making money with every post they write. It's like they're working for the enemy they so much despise, a large corporation.

It baffles me that people keep posting there. Is the fediverse alternative really that bad?

75 comments

It may be hard to believe for everyone here, since we made the jump. Most people just want to be where everyone else is. They get the most interaction there, from their point of view, so thats where they stay.
Also, we may be biased toward tech here. The average person probably loathes setting up new accounts and figuring out new websites.
- Lemmy is largely nerdy, linux loving leftist early tech adopters. In a sense, we sit in an echo chamber until the platform becomes more widely adopted, even though it doesn’t feel that way.
  
  Oh it’s definitely an echo chamber in every sense; there’s no doubt that opinions that tend to be popular on Lemmy are not really representative of true public opinion. The important thing is that we maintain awareness of that and never let ourselves think that what we agree upon, society at large will also agree upon. That awareness helps inoculate against some of the worst effects of an echo chamber.
  
  Hey! I’m a nerdy, windows hating, early tech adopter who is strongly considering switching his personal PC to Linux but has very limited time in which to do so.
  
  I do love Linux. You got me there.
- Yeah like I don’t miss Reddit at all except how much more frequently people post on truegaming there. We haven’t quite gotten our community off the ground here yet, but I’m optimistic!
  
  It will all unfold gradually. I continue to use Reddit and also enjoy Lemmy. The main issue with Reddit, particularly the old.reddit version, is the lack of a dark mode and the need to zoom in to poke around on the phone, which becomes a bit cumbersome. Back when Apollo was around, it significantly enhanced the Reddit experience.
  Over time, users will come to recognize that the experience on Reddit is less than ideal. Currently, its only advantage is its large user base which is increasing becoming run by bots.
- It is also crucial that leftists be where the masses are in order to make whatever pushes that can be made. There can't be class awakening if leftist aren't there to speak-up, otherwise it is all just reactionaries and bootlickers spreading their lies.
- Especially with the constant breakages. It's still very much beta version software (and Kbin is still alpha).

antiwork on Reddit is a joke at this point. Honestly (and I say this as a pretty staunch leftist), fox news is right about something with AntiWork, that it is for the most part a bunch of lazy people who don't want to work.
Now that being said, before you downvote me to hell, I strongly do believe in workreform, and the new workreform communities here (and I assume on Reddit but I'm not there anymore) are much better at having a clear message of not being abused and workers rights. Antiwork may have once had that message, but now it's drowned in "I don't want to work at all I should be able to have everything I want for free" garbage, and it makes the entire movement look bad.
- You have it backwards. Antiwork was always anti-work and was gradually rehabilitated into also including content about work reform.
- It’s not a secret. That sub began out of a shared communal sense by folks who literally do not want to work. They are against having jobs. They’re actually pretty clear about that in my experience but it’s been a while.
  It’s actually the work reform folks who are the newcomers in that community.
- not wanting to work isn’t “being lazy”, you can do all sort of stuff if you didn’t have to waste 8 hours a day for stupid corporate crap (so that others will not need to work)
  
  That falls under the preconception that working is only working if it's the benefit of capitalism. You can work for a better future. You can work to better yourself. You can work to spread peace and joy to the world around you. The problem is that work is tied to capitalism in social consciousness.
  
  lol. Yeah well, I'd love not to work either but I also want food, a home, and to do things I enjoy, so, hear me out, in our society I trade my skills and time for money to pay for those things.
  If you want to talk about tangible, actionable items like how much money, or how many hours, or anything that can actually be done, then we can have a conversation. If your standpoint is "We shouldn't have to work" then to me that's not an argument. Very few people want to work - but I hate to be the one to tell you this but we aren't going to tear down 1000s of years of society in a couple of years. There's a reason Star Trek is set centuries in the future.
  
  thelazy.org agrees!
- I’m going to suggest a different take. The antiworkers all work for shitty companies and hate their jobs, and they cannot imagine that anyone else out there is in a different situation. It’s unfathomable to them that some of us might work for pretty ok companies, and do work that, while it’s not as fun as recreating, brings it’s own blend of challenge and fulfillment.
- I haven’t been on Reddit in a while and I completely forgot about that community. Sad to hear it’s gone down that way, is it getting botted?
- "As a pretty staunch leftist I believe most anti work people are just lazy and the system can be reformed".. Lol, ok.
  You're either not as staunch a leftist as you like to tell yourself, and/or you don't actually understand what anti-work is about..
  
  I'm also a realist. Yes, it would be great to be post scarcity and live like they do in Star Trek. That's not going to happen any time soon. We can work that way, bit by bit, but it's not going to happen. Not this year, not in the next decade, not in the next century.
  I fought for gay marriage rights 10 years ago, attended protests, went to town halls and talked with my senators, did the whole thing, and we're still here talking about it now. States are still trying to roll it back, and if Roe v. Wade told us anything it's that it's still not done. I will be lucky if in my life I see that one single item get codified into law.
  Upending the world's entire socio-economic system? Get real, there's no way that's happening. Now, as I mentioned in other comments - if you have real, tangible, actionable items to work on - written down goals in order of priority - that can get done.
  This is my main problem as a democrat. We get too caught up in high lofty goals and then we all get scatterbrained on what we can actually do. Take the entire BLM movement with George Floyd. There was a moment we could have all collectively said "This is what we want, we want _________". But people couldn't decide on one thing. They wanted the entire system changed. If they had chosen one thing, say demilitarization of police - it probably could have happened.
  So I say again, as a grizzled, old, very tired democrat. Choose actionable realistic items to focus on. I don't care what they are. Mandatory health insurance. Retirement for all. Shortened work days. Pick one, focus on that, and you can make it happen. If you keep your message as "The entire system needs to be thrown out and redone" you won't see anything done.

"Antiwork" does not leave because that would mean additional work. It is right in the title!

antiwork is filled with people who love to bitch but hate doing anything about it. Staying on reddit because of inertia is exactly the kind of thing that represents them.

Anti-work can stay on Reddit. I'm sick of their bitching.
- Yeah, antiwork was a low effort pace to cry about having to work for a living. Workreform was where all the genuine discussion about stagnating and/or shitty workplace practices.

Do you really find it that baffling that people are choosing to provide help and advice in a setting that has millions of active users rather than a setting that has some thousands?
- It's a difference in priorities. People stay on Reddit because that's where the heat is. I hope that people go here because we understand the inherent dangers of for-profit social media. People can make their own choices.
  
  I don't think people actually dwell on that problem that much... or even understand the gravity of it... but, we'll see.

Lemmy is still small and it doesn't have the crowd sourced discussion or reach that Reddit does.
Sure some people might be after the karma or attention, but it's bad to just lump everyone together with that assumption. People have different reasons for continuing to use other platforms, and it's not productive to throw around insults. I assume lots of Reddit users are aware of the issues, but continue to use it for other reasons. Some people may be using Lemmy / fediverse on top of Reddit.
People may read content relevant to them to get discussion that doesn't exist on Lemmy yet. That might include social causes, career pages, hobbies, etc.
People might post on Reddit to reach more people. When it comes to social causes / movements, reaching people is important wherever those people might be. I extend this to other platforms too. As annoying as it might feel, a lot of regular users are primarily on Instagram, TikTok, etc. and it's worth the effort to get the message to those people. Lots of people learn about social causes that way
For what it's worth, you can't get people to move to the Fediverse if they don't learn about it

If I had to guess it would be the amount of engagement. I love Lemmy but I still use reddit for some communities that just aren't popular here.

Because some people don’t infuse their political identity into everything they do

Anyone with half a brain switched from antiwork to workreform after the moderation drama a couple of years ago. Doesn't surprise me that the remaining members are hard to displace

I'm both here and there. Both have strengths and weaknesses. Reddit, I find, is better for getting more inputs. This place lacks that (hence this question is as askable as it is) but is good for getting more engagement for one's worth. Money isn't everything.

Sometimes you just have to work within the system that exists and promote change from within.

it could be from lemmy having a much larger circlejerk problem than reddit, likely due to the lower population, and/or less diverse population (in some cases enforced, lemmy.ml being the biggest case of this)

They prefer a more polished UI? I know there are several mobile apps that improve on the default browser experience of visiting https://lemmy.world/, but you have to admit that the initial UX of Lemmy leaves room for improvement. This is the same reason many open-source projects gave up on IRC. The die-hard FOSS advocates raised the "but Slack isn't an open standard" argument only to be shouted down by a larger part of the community with "IRC's UX sucks and is a barrier to new contributors".
https://kbin.social/ has a lot of issues (like calling communities magazines and general performance/stability), but the UI/UX is so much better than Lemmy.
- What? Lemmy UI is way better than redit's
  
  Meeh, not really. A lot less clutter, but in general, not prettier. It's practical, at least for me, but pretty? No.
  Still, I don't care, I'm first and foremost a practical guy. If it does the job right, IDC how it looks.
- Meh. The mobile reddit apps and new reddit are truly trash. A lot of lemmy apps could still use work, especially kbin, and a lot of communities could use a cleaner UI, but ultimately, I think people are using Reddit due to inertia and positive network effects.
- This is the reason I changed my home instance to lemdro.id - they have multiple UIs available for the web, which I prefer over apps. Try these:
  https://p.lemdro.id for desktop
  https://m.lemdro.id for mobile
- https://kbin.social/ has a lot of issues (like calling communities magazines and general performance/stability), but the UI/UX is so much better than Lemmy.
  It's written in PHP. It's litelarly designed to have a better UX than Lemmy.
  On the other hand, I wouldn't trade that for a Rust based platform. It's not pretty to look at, but if written correctly, it's stable AF... not to mention a breeze to run resouces wise.

Specifically for antiwork:
Because they are either generally not very well informed or politically well versed and just know that work sucks,
Or they do not have very much free time to follow meta news about reddit and are unaware of what is going on,
Or they just have not heard of lemmy yet,
Or they have had some kind of technical trouble trying to sign up for or use lemmy in the way they would want to,
Or they are not very not very tech savvy and do not understand the FOSS benefits to a discussion board or why or how thats relevant to capitalism,
Or they are basically hypocrites who prefer an echo chamber that is comfortable to a somewhat less echo chambery option and are really just into the whole scene superficially and do not really actually care for having non contradictory and inconsistent views + personal actions/behaviors.
Lots of them probably fall into different categories and many probably fall into more than one.
- antiwork
  they do not have very much free time
  Doubt
  they are not very tech savvy
  Pretty sure they are terminally online
  they are basically hypocrites who prefer an echo chamber that is comfortable to a somewhat less echo chambery option and are really just into the whole scene superficially and do not really actually care for having non contradictory and inconsistent views + personal actions/behaviors
  Bingo!
  
  I would just like to point out that being terminally online has almost nothing at all to do with being technically savvy.
  Huge numbers of people who are terminally online are really only adept at using tech at a surface level, and often confuse this /skill/ for things like knowing how back end programming works, understanding what software development entails, etc.
  Actually technically competent people go to great, astounding lengths to make decent software very easy to use for the average person. UI/UX, front end devs, back end devs, database management, and I would say testing paradigms for possible bugs, but the industry seems to have largely abandoned giving a shit about that.
  Even here on lemmy I often find myself in discussions which turn into arguments which turn into me finally realizing that the person I am talking to has absolutely ludicrous ideas about tech, the tech industry or a specific software.
  Such people say and truly believe in obviously nonsensical things, or approach topics from a standpoint that makes it obvious they are really just power users of a particular kind of software, and have developed into basically superficially convincing fanboys or fangirls for it.
  They reveal that they only have knowledge from a bit of experimentation and mostly just following a whole bunch of uninformed discussion about some new tech buzz word, and lack understanding of the important basic concepts, or actually relevant dynamics at play, which they likely would /not/ believe if they had ever actually worked in the tech industry, or developed their own software, or contributed usefully to some open source project.
  A whole key thing about the tech industry is that it is dominated by reverence for impressive sounding tech buzzwords that promise some new and revolutionary feature, when in reality such things are nearly always minor, iterative improvements on something that came before.
  A high number of people are easily bamboozled by such things.
  Basically... you are not immune to propaganda?
  Then tech world has: You are not immune to marketing.
  A great example is the current craze over 'AI' generated content.
  OpenAI, Stable Diffusion, these kinds of things?
  None of them are capable of the vast majority of the kinds of processes that describe intelligence, but people will argue vehemently that they do, because they are not tech savvy, do not know anything about how the underlying tech actually works or what its capable of, or even what the word intelligence means.
  It can do cool and neat things, and its branded or marketed as AI, so it is!
  But, its not.

Some people drop-out whilst others infiltrate and take over…

No, people just don’t like change. All those fake internet points are hard to let go.

The Fediverse unfortunately still has less reach.

Some people just like debating. It’s incredibly refreshing when someone you completely disagree with raises a thoughtful, interesting point.

Inertia
People don't leave until they have a compelling reason to leave. They will stay put until something pushes them to move. Bad corporate practices are not that strong an effect—boycotting every bad company in 2024 is not a thing people are trying to do, the world doesn't work like that.
Positive Network Effects
The size and value of Reddit's network still dwarves the fediverse, and that's the primary value of any social network—the people you can interact with.
- Still, it's pretty much just computer nerds here. Sure, that does drive Lemmy development, but we do also want people like, let's say, the DIY folks or carpenters/welders onboard here... just generally creative people.
  But, I seriously doubt that will happen in the near future. They just don't really care about software freedom or corporate abuse. Reddit or any other social media is just a means to an end for them, and that is totally fine, I completely understand their POV, which basically means, they're not gonna leave corporate social media... ever (maybe not never, but definitely not in the forseable future). Why? Cuz it's stable AF, everyone's already there and there is no such thing as federation problems. People like that, especially people that just don't get what this corporate abuse hype is all about 🤷.
  
  we do also want people like, let’s say, the DIY folks or carpenters/welders onboard here… just generally creative people.
  I've been posting a lot in !malefashionadvice (I can't remember if I linked that correctly but I'm sure you can figure it out). I rarely get comments, and I'm just about the only one posting.
  People here need to make an effort to talk about non-techy non-fediverse hobbies. People need to actively post in small communities and engage positively with the posts they do see. It'll be work to get this culture going.
  People know Reddit sucks, but don't entirely understand why the fediverse should be better, or how to pick a server / service / app / website / etc. Or they haven't heard of the fediverse. Or they recognize that it straight up doesn't solve their problem.

There the here and there. Where else would you like them to go?

Because reddit is ultra soft on leftists?

The responses here so far are bizarre. Those reddit communities should absolutely be pushing their members to switch to Lemmy. None of the excuses here so far are remotely valid.
- Well that might require WORK. Lol 😂
  
  Funkin nailed it
- Well, that would require lemmy users promoting the use of lemmy to reddit users, so that many of them learn that lemmy exists to begin with. Most lemmy users avoid reddit like the plague.
  Perhaps you see part of the problem now.
  
  I have tried it, but I was usually laughed at for it, so I stopped. They see this place as an experiment, a toy, not a real alternative, that some of us just want to give a ride around the block and will eventually go back to reddit.

Why are leftists communicating and organizing in cleartext on the internet at all?
Private self-hosted fully-encrypted Matrix servers or you're doing it wrong.

75 comments