Like most other people here, I originally came here from reddit. Ive been having a blast so far, and I much prefer the forum-style of this. After about a week of using Lemmy I realized there was something intrinsic to reddit that Lemmy doesnt have. And I wont miss it. Too many people on reddit were way too horny. I was really annoying, but Lemmy seems way more chill. Plus its refreshing knowing that the people on here arent all bots.
For me it feels like the larger subs became unusable. Unless you caught a rising thread just at the right moment your comment would get drowned in a flood. Also the comments would be low effort and bad. Old reddit you’d go into the comments and someone would add more context or discussion to the link. Modern reddit it’s an endless chain of people rushing to make low effort jokes.
Also reddit’s free speech reddit lead to a very obnoxious type of troll dance around threads because “Im not breaking any rules I’m just having an intellectual debate!”. Lemmy instances are more like old school message boards though. Saw a guy on lemmy.ml get a post deleted and a warning because he tried to say something disparaging about trans people, come back and be like “IM JUST DISAGREEING” and then he made another posts with screenshots trying to drum up outrage. This isnt reddit tho so he just got quietly banned.
Lemmy isnt trying to sell you anything, and it doesnt think free speech means you have the right to be an asshole and poop all over threads. It was refreshing to see them just taken care of.
Hit the nail right on the head. Thats why I LOVE all this rn. I can make posts and comment and people reply with genuine responses (like you for example). I never wanted to comment because it would just get drowned in the sea of recycled ideas. Plus all the bots which made me paranoid about doing anything. A part of me hopes that Lemmy stays like an old school forum/message board forever, because i’m really enjoying this.
Totally agree. Notifications on lemmy genuinely excite me. On Reddit, more than half the time it was an empty comment that added nothing to the conversation. Or admin mail.
Like, even just as I scroll down this thread, everyone is writing full and proper responses. Not just one liners as far as the eye can see. It’s refreshing and exciting. How the internet aught to be.
I enjoy that both are welcome here honestly.
You can have the one liners and you can have the thought out paragraphs. What I would say differentiates it more is how honest it is. People aren’t writing massive walls of texts as a forced rant nor is there that driving memes deep into their grave… yet still posting them again and again.
It’s okay to be silly and it’s okay to have discussions.
What I think we’re feeling is how relaxed lemmy is in comparison. You don’t have to know the in-jokes and the coded vocabulary in order to participate. In order to be heard.
Honestly yeah, that’s a much more accurate and eloquent way of describing how I felt. Thank you.
I suppose it’s just… Nice to see actual conversation. If someone is trying to be funny, they’re actually trying, not pulling on some dead horse one liner.
I feel like that has meaning. Genuine meaning. It’s something I didn’t feel with the endless barrage of Reddit.
It has always been crazy to me just how unusable subreddits became when they got too big. And no one cares. Yeah, this doesn’t fit here at all, but it’s a funny meme, so it gets upvoted.
I remember some years ago reading a thread about small funny subreddits. I found me_irl, which was a tiny community back then. It was hilarious, it was just some relatable comedy. Then it blew up and it became a SpongeBob meme sub, and then it became a “i wanna kill myself lol” sub. Now it’s just: post whatever picture, no one cares.
What is even the point? It’s just Facebook
Yes!
I miss the days when I could look in the comments for more information about a post and actually learn or discover something new. The comments are worthless at this point. There is no discussion to be had.
“The troll dance” is an excellent way to explain it. One of my last comments was about a cow that was laying it’s head in a woman’s lap. It was a nice comment about the cow (which was stated to be female). Out of no where some troll popped up and started the “dId YoU jUsT aSsUmE gEnDeR?!??” line of bait. I flat out said that I was not going to “debate” the gender of a bovine. The entire conversation was so utterly pointless. What has reddit become? Why did I stay so long? Why was I commenting about a cow?
God there were certain subs that were just painful to use, even when interesting posts made it to the front page. The one I remember in particular was a mom made her kids a really cool Asian/Tokyo inspired cardboard fort, and you could tell it was really well done and probably made that kids week. Instead of the comments being about how cool the fort was, people were demeaning her saying “ah she’s probably a stay at home mom because she has all this free time”. Good lord, people on Reddit were miserable and couldn’t let other people have fun
I will miss r/happycows tho.
I live next to cows, how can i help?
It helps to descend deeper and deeper into reddit for smaller communities for talking, but that same feature that kept you on reddit instead of out of reddit is what killed off a lot of little message boards and prevented any alternatives from rising up.
Some people are mourning reddit but that medium site with a strong sense of community died more than a decade ago.