The lemmings are a squeaky bunch.
Turns out mindlessly scrolling through 10 000 comments isn’t actually a great experience.
I’ll take a meaningful comment from one human being over 10,000 bots any day.
It feels much more human on Lemmy. Reddit was mostly bots and training models. Do we have any statistics for Lemmy on percentage of bot users posting to the platform, who pretend to be human?
Sometimes I miss chatting with the bots on Reddit. The platform always kept you emotional and scrolling. All the gore, violence and other sensationalistic content. All the arguments arguments arguments always against you. It was a plastic experience.
Reddit gets a lot more votes and comments… but I think the number of people actually talking to each other is about the same. Most the comments are just noise.
My last year of Reddit (prior to the API purge) was very much filled with low effort comments. You get a lot of votes and comments but the votes don’t matter and the comments are largely empty one-liners. I doubt it’s gotten better since I left.
I’d say even the assholes on Lemmy put more effort into the comments than Redditors do. Except tankies who just love to flood the comments with their copy paste list of sources for “everything”.
You get a lot of votes and comments but the votes don’t matter and the comments are largely empty one-liners.
The votes matter even less here, so there’s no reason to drop empty one liners you think might get karma.
I think you are mostly right, but sometimes I am missing the high quality answers here. You know, the ones where someone really puts in thought or seems to be an expert. Or maybe I haven’t found the right communities yet.
We have a toxicity problem here. Reddit’s is far worse but it’s also a far larger platform, which compensates somewhat. Enhancing the effectiveness of moderation tools may help.
SO MANY people comment here sth like “I’d post that but people are so mean”. It’s really hard to please everyone, especially those who love and those who despise toxicity in the same space, and all the more so with tools that barely function.
I think that depends highly on the sub. I made mostly positive experiences, but the negative one was something else. There are definitely some crazy people here.
For me, the highs are higher here. The lows are lower, but also they are “labelled” i.e. if you block the big 3 tankie instances then your experiences on the Fediverse are improved >99%. That in turn affects the average person’s experience - depending on which of these have been defederated already or not yet, from a particular instance (e.g. Lemmy.World defederated from hexbear early on, but neither StarTrek.Website nor Discuss.Online that I have been on did so, until very recently).
On Reddit, my every experience was one of snarky comebacks as if attempting to talk with a(n emotional) toddler. I’m not kidding when I say that I simply gave up, and after reading this essay that put into words the thoughts I had already started thinking on my own, I made the decision to leave. Not to come to Lemmy mind you, but to leave Reddit, even if that meant not using any social media at all. I’m sure there are good, solid subs there. But browsing by r/popular and a few more niche subs like r/OnePlus and some gaming ones, I wasn’t enjoying my time.
Here I at least enjoy !TenForward@lemmy.world :-). And there are a few people who are actually nice here, who I stick around in order to converse with occasionally. I never found that happening on Reddit (earlier Reddit was different, but towards the end it had managed to chase away so very many, and/or convert most people into mere lurkers - including many of us here who have gone from lurking on Reddit to posting or at least commenting here), but the fact that that happens sometimes here is a huge bonus, IMHO.
And again, the tankie instances can be filtered, making the overall average experience much more pleasant. It does generally take some effort to curate your experience though - e.g. I can only name 3 instances that are defederated from lemmy.ml. Anyway, importantly, when I say that the average experience is better here than Reddit, I mean having excluded that one. Otherwise… the comparison is not nearly so simple (but probably involves higher highs, higher lows, and an overall similar experience to Reddit, unless you include also hexbear or Lemmygrad and then it’s MUCH worse here - e.g. they constantly make fun of Western nations, and who enjoys being made fun of?).
!bestoflemmy@lemmy.world tries to compile those
I would deny that. From my experience you’re having much more conversations on Lemmy. If I posted a meme on Reddit I regularly got like 200 Upvotes and 0 comments. On Lemmy I usually get around 100 Upvotes and around 15 comments or so. This is a comparison between the same community on Reddit/Lemmy.
!casualconversation@lemm.ee for people looking for a chat
Lemmy is a great place to BS about whatever is going on with the world at any given moment. I think the “small” size of the user base increases the quality of the discussions. You have to jump through some hoops just to get here.
But that small overall population and the barriers to entry mean we don’t have a busy community for almost any hobby or topic you’d like to discuss. And that’s fine, there are still websites and forums and search engines.
I think the fediverse should replace the corporate internet long term, of course. For what it is right now though, and especially Lemmy in particular, I’m not complaining.
One thing I really like about Lemmys small size is how posts can remain relevant for some time. It’s very laid back for a social media. You can have discussions that last for days on Lemmy, and there’s no need to constantly update or FOMO if you don’t check in for awhile.
Reddit is far too busy. There’s just a constant sea of noise. It’s practically pure luck if a post gets noticed, and if you don’t comment early then you comment is basically lost. For the most part content on reddit loses all relivence within 12-24 hours, and having any real place within the community requires constant engagement.
The fediverse doesn’t need perpetual growth. That’s VC investor bullshit. You don’t need to be posting on a platform where the whole world is present. Again more corporate bullshit. As is the “digital town square” thing. It sounds profound but it’s pompous.
What made the internet so good was variety. Which is what reddit seemed to offer in a time when the older paradigms namely message boards were becoming antiquated.
What we got with the oligopoly of social platforms is watered down to memes and politics. It’s right wing cultural imperialism quite frankly. People have been battered into fear of being who they are online because in this age of centralized internet has made it a war to remove anything unacceptable (aka “woke”). There’s no variety. There’s nobody being themselves.
The fedeverse will have arrived if it manages to achieve distinct varieties. On a technical basis it’s perfectly positioned to achieve this. Right now it’s largely just reddit clones offering little more than an extension of the cultural/political wars embroiling the handful of centralized social media platforms.
The fediverse doesn’t need perpetual growth. That’s VC investor bullshit.
I reckon this is key. So many people seem to take the view that since such-and-such site is very small compared to Facebook or Twitter or whatever, then it must be failing; As if maximising the number of users is the ultimate goal.
Maximising users might be the goal for investors, so that they can monetise and maximise profits. But for people actually using the service, it’s totally beside the point. We don’t need to be in conversation with 100,000,000 people at once. More people doesn’t always make it better. In many cases it actually makes it worse.
Having the giant userbase does make it more likely there are enough people into whatever weird niche you are to have a reasonable community though. I mean, how else are you going to get a community going for, I don’t know, hyper-realistic simulations of underwater basketweaving or w/e?
Reddit would be scared of Lemmy gaining more traction.
I really don’t mind when Lemmy isn’t mentioned in the news when the topic of users bailing on Reddit/twitter/etc comes up.
Flys under the radar and keeps Lemmy small and nonthreatening to big platforms. We’ve certainly learned that growing to Reddits size means a breakdown in quality and who the hell wants to attract the kind of users that ruined Reddit?
I feel like I’m even starting to recognize user names throughout the platform
Yup. A certain flying squid comes to mind.
There have been so many times I’m in a conversation , and then boom realize it’s FlyingSquid
They are my homie at this point
Yeah, but smaller communities mean it’s harder to keep distance from certain users, FlyingSquid being one of those that I’d rather not interact with.
Ohh yes… But it also shows how small Lemmy still I.
anyone else remember 2010/2011 reddit? Just me? Feels like that tbh back when everyone was fleeing from slashdot and digg. 31yo millenial since I’ve already dated myself lol
Same. Grew out of 4 Chan when it was about rage comics and anonymous (before the fascist takeover). This feels like vising a familiar place.
It was always incredibly racist, but it seemed like a joke.
Yes I know. But it was mostly “edgy turned to eleven” which escalated faster and faster hence me leaving (I thought I got too old for those “deep fried” low effort memes aside from the obvious stuff).
Man I feel old… like a grandpa talking about the old times.
I remember when the pool was closed. I’m ancient.
Damn i still say that to this day because of my autistic ass holding onto weird lines like that lol
Fr. I’d say a comment I leave on reddit has like a 3% chance of meaningful response that might turn into even a brief meaningful interaction.
I think that conversion rate is vastly higher on Lemmy, much closer to like 30-40%.
That’s a difference so profound so as to be nearly incomparable.
So do I wish Lemmy was a bit more active so the front page was always fresh? Sure. Is it a very small price that I am enormously willing to pay for the significantly better experience here? Yeah, abso-fucking-lutely.
When you get tired of Hot or Scaled sort, try switching to New, especially of All - it has many additional benefits like discovering new communities to join. You can find things there that you may really enjoy, yet receive barely any attention - e.g. poetry - so that you would basically have never seen it while sorting by Hot.
Nuh uh. Oh shit…
Anyway, it must be your sunny disposition!:-)
Cheers.
it’s as varied as it is big, though
because of that, naturally, people share the same communities
I see the same person everywhere, and I bet there are some that may even recognise me
Welcome Sunshine 😎
I mean, yeah but everything on here is mostly political chatter, the niche comms are not that busy.
The niche comms are more like blogs. Usually 1-2 people keep them alive, and sometimes there is discussion in the comments.
Yeah! I have almost no need for Reddit. I probably logon to it just a few times a year. Usually it is when I am trying to troubleshoot something and there is a reddit thread for it.