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.

  •  shufflerofrocks   ( @shufflerofrocks@beehaw.org ) English
    42•1 year ago

    Lol, I kinda agree, which is somewhat related to another thing I won’t miss: The teenagers.

    The lockdown + reddit’s new direction of becoming more like fb/insta has drastically increased the number of teenagers on reddit. I hate it. It’s like an eternal summer-reddit.

    The discussions get crappy and stale, they don’t follow rediquette, they are insufferably naive but aggressive with their opinions due to twitterification of their online socialisation. and so.fricking.horny. TIFU and Askreddit almost completely became horny fantasy posting, and I blame the teenagers for it.

    God I feel like a terminally-online grumpy old man for saying it, but UGH interacting with teens online is like a human rights violation.

  •  linuxpng   ( @linuxpng@lemmy.ml ) English
    36•1 year ago

    The thing I like the most is that I don’t have to scroll through lines of people making jokes to get to the actual discussion or insightful commentary on the topic. Even though there is less happening here, it is definitely more. I honestly can’t see going back to reddit.

    •  DracEULA   ( @DracEULA@beehaw.org ) English
      21•1 year ago

      I don’t mind good jokes, but Reddit has standard “inside jokes” that are posted to almost every thread. That and the endless quotes from television shows. I like Arrested Development too, but god damn can we just have a conversation without asking how much one banana costs?

        •  mobyduck648   ( @mobyduck648@beehaw.org ) English
          7•1 year ago

          I ended up sticking to UK versions of the big subreddits towards the end partially for this reason and partially because I only really follow American politics beyond the surface level when it’s geopolitically relevant to the UK so I wouldn’t have a clue what was going on in some threads. Nothing against American pop culture or anything (I’d be massive hypocrite, I’m a deadhead and that’s got to be one of the most quintessentially American bands) but it gets a bit too much when it’s 24/7 and most of the comments sometimes.

          I like to think the Fediverse ought to naturally be more internationalist since it’s not fundamentally an organ of the American ad industry but I guess we’ll see in the years to come. Either way I much prefer the vibe here in general, it’s way more chill and not an angry place like Reddit has become.

        •  JohannesOliver   ( @JohannesOliver@beehaw.org ) English
          5•1 year ago

          “Karma” and the gamification of it make it worthwhile to do whatever gets you those upvotes. I like that Lemmy votes stay attached to the specific post or comment without it giving an overall score for the user. I also really like that the scores can be hidden by the user entirely.

          I think there is potentially less reason to do the low effort stuff here.

            •  JohannesOliver   ( @JohannesOliver@beehaw.org ) English
              4•1 year ago

              Potentially. It also might just mean they post, or posted one time, things that go against the commonly held groupthink.

              I don’t think a reputation system is bad necessarily, however I think Reddit is well aware that the one they created results in many users chasing that carrot, and people take the scores very seriously. You see evidence all the time with “downvotes, really?” or “of course my most upvoted comment is”. The dopamine hit and avoidance of downvotes (or ability to punish wrong-thinkers with them) help create some of the echo chamber.

              A reputation system could easily be based on a global ratio and labels for example, but it would be less addictive. I am on an instance that doesn’t even have downvotes, and I like that, and I still hide scores, so my concern for identifying trolls through a points system versus the things they say isn’t all that high.

              •  Wistful   ( @Wistful@discuss.tchncs.de ) English
                1•1 year ago

                That’s a good point, it is a flawed system in that sense, but it definitely incentivizes people to interact and post more, which is in turn a good for the platform getting more content, I guess.
                I’m excited to see how Lemmy’s system is going to work out, and/or if it evolves, and what kind of community will it end up “creating”.

    •  Violet   ( @Violet@lemmy.world ) English
      15•1 year ago

      Oh god I got so tired of the jokes. In the beginning I liked to see them peppered in here and there, and I love a good pun, but it just became so overdone and forced. Every thread was just lines and lines and lines of jokes (many of them weren’t even good) with no actual conversation. It got boring.

  •  lemillionsocks   ( @lemillionsocks@beehaw.org ) English
    34•1 year ago

    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.

    •  StrahdVonZarovich   ( @StrahdVonZarovich@beehaw.org ) OPEnglish
      17•1 year ago

      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.

      •  PascalPistachios   ( @PascalPistachios@beehaw.org ) English
        6•1 year ago

        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.

        •  mobiuscoffee   ( @mobiuscoffee@sh.itjust.works ) English
          4•1 year ago

          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.

          •  PascalPistachios   ( @PascalPistachios@beehaw.org ) English
            7•1 year ago

            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.

    •  chaoticPuppies   ( @chaoticPuppies@beehaw.org ) English
      14•1 year ago

      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?

      •  BinaryEnthusiast   ( @BinaryEnthusiast@beehaw.org ) English
        11•1 year ago

        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

      •  lemillionsocks   ( @lemillionsocks@beehaw.org ) English
        5•1 year ago

        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.

    •  BruceTwarzen   ( @BruceTwarzen@kbin.social ) 
      14•1 year ago

      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

  •  Manticore   ( @Manticore@beehaw.org ) English
    29•1 year ago

    You’re not wrong; I’ve noticed the same. Less ‘horny’ specifically, and more… reasonable and engaged; vs impulsive and reactive.

    I think the accessibility of reddit vs Lemmy plays a feature there. Lemmy requires at least some level of tech literacy to understand well enough to use, and it also isn’t where most of the people are. So the people choosing to use Lemmy fully intend to use it; we’re not casual users.

    Because it’s so easy to use, I think Reddit has a lot of young and/or immature people (demographics that overlap, but aren’t the same). So it’s full of impulsive, heavily-opinionated, casual users who aren’t really invested in their communities, that can easily make a new account on a whim, and that create echo chambers with their votes.

    It’s not really Reddit’s fault, tbh. It’s an issue of user population, especially when 90% of the users do nothing more than upvote (so generically agreeable things rise) or downvote (anything that challenges them falls). The bigger a user platform gets, the more it homogenises.

    Reddit was only unusual in that subreddits let it homogenise on a sub-by-sub basis and create echo chambers; a savvy redditor could still find smaller subs with better discussion (r/patientgamers rather than r/gaming for example). Or subs would get bigger and start becoming hostile or tribal, losing their original mission - and somebody from the old days would make a ‘true’ version (r/childfree vs r/truechildfree).

    Lemmy is too small for groupthink to homogenise it (yet?). But particularly large instances could potentially go the same way given enough years. It’s just that Lemmy being federated means that we can make new instances, and defederate from any that we may find unpleasant. I’ve already learned of one portal that isn’t federated to my chosen one.

    •  DannySpud   ( @DannySpud@lemmy.ml ) English
      13•1 year ago

      I think the accessibility of reddit vs Lemmy plays a feature there. Lemmy requires at least some level of tech literacy to understand well enough to use

      This is a big plus for Lemmy right now. IMO the reason Reddit used to be great was its inaccessibility. Old-style Reddit was ugly as hell and difficult to use and that kept away the “impulsive, heavily-opinionated, casual users”.

    •  PascalPistachios   ( @PascalPistachios@beehaw.org ) English
      12•1 year ago

      To add onto your point. One thing that we’ll have to watch out for is that toxic clout culture built up on other websites coming here.

      It’s been something I’ve been thinking about in the context of all this. People aren’t coming from the void. They’ll have their own internet lingo and culture that they’ll bring with them to any site they go to. And while the design of a website can mitigate some of the worst parts of a culture, it can’t outright remove it.

      Without near constant vigilance (like the ask a historian subreddit) most communities will end up dying off. And even then you’re at the whims of the platform.

      I realise my point now is hardly even connected to yours, haha. Apologies.

      •  Manticore   ( @Manticore@beehaw.org ) English
        8•1 year ago

        That’s a great point, too.

        I chose beehaw has my home instance because it’s community-focused, has an application process, and the communities are premade umbrellas (so people don’t fragment into echo chambers).

        But lemmy.ml is already visibly showing the signs of Reddit migration. I think the users that are migrating are still the ‘better’ of Reddit (intend to contribute, care enough to go through the process of learning Lemmy). But lemmy.ml is rapidly filling up with the same fragmented, specialised echo chambers that Reddit’s culture developed, as they prepare to evacuate as many users from Reddit as possible - regardless of whether those users intend to contribute meaningfully to Lemmy.

        That’s not automatically bad - a person who only plays older games values a space that isn’t dominated by news of recent releases, and a person that’s child-free will struggle to find recommended doctors for sterilisation in a ‘Family’ or ‘Parenting’ umbrella sub. And I came here from Reddit, too.

        But it seems that people are coming to Lemmy with the expectation that they can turn it into Reddit, complete with the isolated communities/subreddits they’re used to. If not enough of them adapt to what makes Lemmy’s mixed-spaces different, users could play their own role in Lemmy’s ‘enshittification’ for older users, who lose the shared respectful discussion in favour of hundreds of echo chambers.

        •  PascalPistachios   ( @PascalPistachios@beehaw.org ) English
          6•1 year ago

          I absolutely agree on your point about people wanting to turn lemmy into Reddit. Everyone has some very clear problems with Reddit, so why do we just want to create it again??

          And again, some communities are going to have to migrate. And they’ll likely hold the same culture they did on Reddit, and just… Writing this, I realise that I sound like an old man who hates people. But I just find huge forums or social media groups with thousands upon thousands of people to be EXHAUSTING. The culture, the social dance of it all.

          And I want to escape that from Reddit. The main stream of Reddit felt like a secondary rat race to my actual life. No substance, just astroturfing and attention traps. I don’t want another Reddit, I don’t want another time sink for the toilet. I want genuine discussions and the good hearted fun of old forums…

          Haha, sorry, going to continue to yap off until my jaw simply falls off my face.

          Honestly, I think this is the point where we have to do our best in making a good community. The application process for beehaw is fantastic. And maybe I’m just mean but I hope to see many more application based communities. Say what you will about gatekeeping. But sometimes asking people to do more than the bare minimum is necessary to making a good community. And sometimes a good community doesn’t have to involve everyone that so much as glanced over.

          •  Enfield [he/him]   ( @nfld0001@beehaw.org ) English
            5•1 year ago

            I don’t want another Reddit, I don’t want another time sink for the toilet. I want genuine discussions and the good hearted fun of old forums…

            I think that gave me an epiphany that hadn’t occurred to me earlier somehow: I don’t think I ever really got to experience Old Forum culture? And I kinda feel like I missed the boat?

            Reddit was probably the closest I got to experiencing that kind of place. I think I knew of a couple established forums related to my interests growing up, but I learned pretty early on that I wasn’t quite ready to be in that kind of place yet. Bless my heart, I found myself being annoying in all the wrong ways 🥴. I found Reddit right around the time I started to straighten that out. I think that was around a year or a few before the Ellen Pao round of intrigue? I suppose I just never found enough of an incentive to branch out from there.

            I always found myself at least intrigued by the likes of Tumblr, Hacker News, or just general blogs and that kind of thing. I think the uniting thread behind them that interested me is an experience that has the potential to be a bit more longform compared to Twitter or Facebook. I’m used to people around me seeing Reddit as old school, different, and Off compared to whatever else, so I figured I was still getting a pretty respectable analog to the forum vibe I had a loose understanding of earlier.

            But was I really? I recall sensing changes in the vibe pretty early on, and I wouldn’t even say I was an early entry on Reddit. Things typically felt too fast for me to get my word in, and the hivemind attitude toward opinion and form was a real turnoff (not that I care to throw them around like confetti, but I’d be psyched to leave behind the rampant emoji hatred 🗿.) That’s not to say I imagine forums as invulnerable to similar kinds of pitfalls, but I suspect Reddit was in a special position to make those kinds of issues more visible.

            I think either way I end up with the Reddit migration, it’s going to be at a slower pace and a different form than Reddit was, at least for a while. That worried me at first, but the more I think about it, maybe that’s for the better. I’m starting to think I was missing out on something I didn’t know I’d prefer. Maybe if I grew up just a few years earlier I would’ve found myself more among a smattering of forums than I ended up.

            •  PascalPistachios   ( @PascalPistachios@beehaw.org ) English
              5•1 year ago

              I was only on forums as a little kid myself. Trust me, I’m Very Young, I was just good with computers young. But the notifications, small scale, it gave me a little tickle that I hadn’t felt since those silly days of logging onto Pokemon forums as a kid.

              I’ve never been super active on Reddit myself. Hell, I’ve probably written more comments on here in the past day or two than I did over a few years on Reddit. So I can’t accurately describe the culture change to you. I’m sure there’s plenty of older folk who would be able to tell you though.

              But it’s something I haven’t felt for a while, and something I had forgotten myself. Where social media is… An active choice? On Reddit, it was easy to be entirely passive. Just scroll and scroll. And really, it wasn’t even making me happy. It was just engagement for the sake of being engaged. But if I’m on a smaller forum I love talking with people! Sharing these experiences. Also, yay for having forum tools again!! I missed being able to post pictures in comments.

        •  Ko'vari   ( @Kovari@lemmy.ml ) English
          5•1 year ago

          I kinda wish I joined beehaw for this exact reason. I signed up a little before the overload and I think there was a couple hundred members at most but now I’m seeing some of the old reddit mindset trickle in and… ugh.

          Maybe I just don’t like redditors? Talk about irony. Lol

          I hope there ends up being a migration feature introduced sometime.

          •  Manticore   ( @Manticore@beehaw.org ) English
            2•1 year ago

            You could always just go to beehaw.org or lemmy.world directly and register a new acc there, and still subscribe to all the same communities. You don’t actually lose anything that matters by signing up elsewhere. Even your own post history on your lemmy.ml account can be viewed by just going to lemmy.ml to log in again, if it matters to you.

            In fact, signing up to a moderately-sized instance like lemmy.world may also be good for your usage; lemmy.ml is being slammed by incoming users, so anybody using it (even if they’re viewing other instances’ communities) feel the chug. If it goes down, all of Lemmy is inaccessible to you.

            But if you’re on a different, smaller instance, then you can continue ticking over while the behemoths are struggling by staying in shallow waters until they recover from the server load. A moderately-sized instance is more likely to get ongoing support than a small, newer one is; and less likely to time out or be hugged to death than a larger one is.

    •  SharkEatingBreakfast   ( @SharkEatingBreakfast@beehaw.org ) English
      3•1 year ago

      I’m asexual, through & through. It’s understandable that sex / sexual content is inevitable in such a wide open space, but on R×ddit, it’s become absolutely constant and inescapable! To the point where non-sexual things are being sexualized, and it’s just become genuinely unnerving and gross.

      I want to stop seeing posts commenting on everyday objects and being like “Damn, I’d fuck that!”, as if anyone truly wanted to know that. Ever. Ick.

      •  Scrumpf_Dabogy   ( @Scrumpf_Dabogy@beehaw.org ) English
        2•1 year ago

        It’s pretty eye opening to read this. As someone with a fairly high sex drive, I live every day with my body constantly demanding I have sex. It’s not a difficult urge to keep in check, but it is pretty constant.

        I think the humor you’re talking about stems from that constant battle. No one (well someone, but not most people) would actually have sex with whatever inanimate object is being posted. Its just making light of that constant urge most of us face.

        But I totally get how that could sound disgusting if you don’t share that experience. I will try to keep that in mind for the aces out there.

        •  SharkEatingBreakfast   ( @SharkEatingBreakfast@beehaw.org ) English
          3•1 year ago

          I appreciate your thoughtfulness.

          Do note, though, that there are aces who don’t mind sexual discussions or comments. The only connecting factor between the label is that we do not experience sexual attraction, nor do we desire to have sex.

          Some aces break it down further into preferences when it comes to sexual discussion: sex-neutral, sex-averse, and sex-repulsed. Sex-positive is there, too, as some aces have no issues discussing it, but that often gives the impression/misinterpretation that there are aces who desire sex, which is obviously an oxymoron.

          Lastly, the asexual community is actually very very very small. Like, ridiculously so. The chances of you running across an ace-identifying person is a fraction of a percent, so don’t worry too much about tiptoeing to cater to our subsect (although I very much appreciate the sentiment)!

    •  BeardedSingleMalt   ( @BeardedSingleMalt@beehaw.org ) English
      5•1 year ago

      Part of that came from the same 3 questions being asked every 5 hours from new people. I’m not necessarily condoning or justifying it, but it did get rather annoying in r/Deadpool when every day there were 4 new posts saying “Hey, I’m new to Deadpool, what’s a good place to start reading/catching up?” despite the first item on the sidebar and FAQ was where to start and the big bold letters on a new post screen was “READ THE FAQ”.

      Alternatively, I stayed away from other subs like 1911 because if it wasn’t a Springfield, Colt, or $1400 custom job you got berated and told to “save more money”