When I first found out it was an interesting concept that I was pretty neutral on but the more I engage/lurk with the community the more I enjoy it.
I generally don’t post/comment much on Reddit because I tend to be extremely sincere and that’s not always well received. Usually I don’t get much hate, but what I do get is a lot of non-interaction mixed with downvotes. And it’s just really discouraging when I’m just trying to share my thoughts.
But having no downvotes here is so nice because I’m not afraid that I’m going to get silenced into oblivion. Either people will actually engage with me (and maybe disagree, but in a meaningful way), or they’ll move on and not randomly share their disdain via downvoting.
It’s such a small change but makes a big difference. I bet a lot of people feel the same as me - it’s more comfortable to engage here.
I was on kbin for an afternoon and got downvote brigaded for calling out a highly updated post for spreading false info. I probably I could’ve worded my comment all fluffy and nice, but I was frustrated at the op for making things further confusing for everyone and the tone of my comment reflected that. I since deleted my kbin account and hoping that downvote brigade trend and hivemind stays on kbin.
off-topic but since you mentioned kbin: I’m using both platforms right now (beehive/lemmy and kbin)…from what I’m seeing so far I really prefer lemmy’s implementation of pretty much everything. Kbin itself is not any more or less complicated to sign up and start posting, but its organization is definitely more convoluted. Speaking of threads vs. microblogs etc. I read a FAQ posted there and it barely cleared things up for me.
When I looked at it briefly, I saw so many posts with no comments at all. Maybe I just didn’t know how to search it? But it felt dead, compared to here. I’ll try again though.
There are a ton of comments there, but I guess it depends where you’re looking. To me, it seems like it’s defaulting to “threads” - which are roughly equivalent to posts, as near as I can tell (they have subjects and a body). Whereas Microblog seems to be like posting to Facebook/Twitter/Mastodon. Where I see little activity are on Magazines (their version of communities or subreddits). E.g. kbin.social/m/ELI5 has 4 threads. The default home page shows many, many threads, and some have comparable comment replies to lemmy here.
For all the bad things Elon Musk did with Twitter so far, community notes has to be one of the only good things for this reason.