Been thinking of making a post like this for some time, apologies if some of this is not completely relevant: this community seems more like it’s about Reddit the platform/product than Reddit the social “thing”, but I’m sure a lot of people have similar experiences to mine. Maybe on some instances more than others.
Here’s the one of the last comments I wrote as a regular Reddit user, on the eve of the blackout (almost a year ago to the day), under a post titled “Will your participation in Reddit change”:
My comment
I will keep searching Google for Reddit help threads, but as a cultural and news aggregator I think this is the end for me. Maybe I will check it every so often. On desktop. On the old site. Until they sunset that too.
I wouldn’t be against using the first party app if it wasn’t so awful to use.
It’s a massive shame that we’ve all collectively agreed that Reddit is the de facto way to create open communities online. There were so many forums that could fill the void left by Reddit for things like tech and art and they’ve all shut down in the past decade.
I try not to be too negative about the evolution and constant growth of the userbase of the site and of the internet as a whole, but I’ve really felt like things are moving in a direction I can’t even be cautiously optimistic about lately.
I think of all the mod tools that will be defunct. The commonly cited example is that people who comment excessively on adult subs are automatically barred from commenting on the teenagers subreddit. Sure the admins can whip up functionality to do this, but this site was built on custom tools and custom CSS and all that. I think the API was one among the many secret sauces that give Reddit this staying power. These sites and forums I talked about - I used to hop from one to the next year after year. Until I found Reddit a decade ago.
I like that I choose my subs and that I don’t get algorithmically ordered sludge designed to game the algorithm on my homepage. Yes the sensibilities of the lowest common denominator redditors are gamed by people posting, but that’s (in my opinion) acceptable.
Frankly if they kept the old Reddit Gold pricing (4 bucks per month/30 annual) and gated unrestricted API access behind it I would have been inclined to finally give Reddit money. I use it a lot, I don’t mind paying now that I can afford it. But something about how it’s all going down really doesn’t fill me with confidence.
I’ve been trying to write a post about this for a while now, but I haven’t felt like it was relevant. Thanks for asking here
Reading through this is a bit funny, in retrospect, seeing how Reddit-centric my understanding of the internet had become at the time. I am happy to report that I have checked the home page maybe a half dozen times since the blackout, instead of once or twice a week like I expected. I suppose the disgusting state of the heavily astroturfed worldnews sub was a big part of it as well: for me Reddit was the one big online platform where the average visible user didn’t seem to be very misinformed about Palestine (at least not by default), and it was frankly very sad to see where it got in the past few months.
I do miss Reddit, I haven’t been able to replace it outright. I’m from Lebanon, and Lebanese Twitter is (if you can imagine it) even more of a toxic cesspool than regular Twitter. I’m not on Facebook (also cesspool here), I’m not on Instagram - my point is I don’t get anything about my country on ostensibly user-curated social media. /r/Lebanon was very far from perfect, but it was nice to get a trickle of local news with users who were more in line with my own politics. The local news outlets focus on a lot of irrelevant crap, the sub’s news feed was a bit more interesting.
One thing I loved about that subreddit was that users with more mainstream views in my country (eg. transphobia-as-default) were allowed to spout their bullshit in the subreddit with little mod pushback (if it’s just JAQing off etc, not harrassing people obviously). Then the regulars would dogpile on that user’s post - very refreshing! And very validating I would imagine for anyone who is used to hearing this shit everyday.
I was applying to be a mod to help keep the sub moving, at one point, but hey. Maybe that headache was never worth it. Still, I felt like I lost one of my online homes.
More generally, I have enjoyed my first year on Lemmy, although the experience has been lacking in many ways. For one, while Reddit has a reputation as a meme cemetery, the memes here are generally a bit moldier. But that’s okay. The fact that there’s fewer posts I think isn’t necessarily a bad thing either, I think we all preferred Reddit’s slightly slower homepage in 2013 than the one we left in 2023, that would regurgitate more and more from the bottom of the barrel if you were willing to keep scrolling.
I’ve toyed with opening a Lebanon community here on dbzer0, having opened one on FMHY that nobody used. But it wouldn’t be the same, and I wouldn’t know how to populate it. I posted maybe 2 non-question posts on Reddit in my decade+ of being a regular user, but I wrote tons of comments. It also helped keep my English sharper, I think.
I’ve reactivated my old Instagram account and it’s pretty ass out there. The ad/post ratio is just egregious, and they’ll just serve you random posts from random pages. I want to see my friends goddamn it, isn’t this what your platform is supposed to be for? For those of you who don’t know, the app will also send you a notification once or twice a day suggesting you look at “today’s top reels”. I have never watched a reel of my own will, fuck off.
Point being, the main platforms people use online haven’t been up my alley. I can only hope the zoomer dumbphone pushback keeps expanding, and that social media starts being seen as something for older generations. Wishful thinking?
This is just a post about enshittification, everyone’s favorite word, but every time I think about it for more than 2 minutes I can’t help but miss a simpler internet. Some part of me was hoping it would kickstart me “growing out” of spending this much time online per day (not everyone spends a ton of time online), but it hasn’t.
Also every time I ask something longer than 20 words on Discord some middle schooler will reply “yap”, even in the channels designated for questions. Discord has had its uses (yes I know there’s privacy concerns), but it’s hardly a replacement for Reddit, or forums. Both of which are/were searchable. But enough yapping from me.
Thoughts? How has the exodus been for you? Is this how Digg users felt?
Since the whole API fiasco and losing reddit is fun, I wiped my reddit account, downloaded my comment history and then used a bot to wipe all my comments and posts, doing so got me banned from commenting on a lot of subs, something to do with the speed that the comments were edited at or something. Either way, I don’t really care.
I still use my reddit account for lurking, there are some niche active subs that still have good information/discussion that unfortunately haven’t been picked up elsewhere, but I have those subs opened in old reddit on Firefox and I don’t venture outside of that, and I’ll never contribute or comment again.
I get that I’m contributing to their traffic still, but I was an active member for 12+ years, and I’m still pissed they fucked the entire community to profit from our fucking content. Definitely won’t be contributing to their content again.
I still get on reddit, but not often because red reader is basic, and the reddit app is trash
It’s somehow even further drifted in ideology than Reddit ever was. I was there before Digg when you could actually have a conversation and not get auto banned for a wrong think and posting in a subreddit. Full discourse was encouraged and nobody cared what you did or said outside of a single comment. It somehow feels worse here.
Yeah, it’s bad. I’m a person who has no ideology and my politics go far left to far right, depending on the issue. I’m mostly interested in how the world works, not how it should work and calling it names because it doesn’t work the way I think it should.
Here I am the embodiment of EVIL. On reddit I was a asshole to both the left and the right, and got regularly banned for challenging group think and humanizing the ‘enemy’.
I miss forums where people could talk about politics and life from various perspectives without demonizing each other, let alone ask questions. Or realized that political opinions were just opinions. Now everything is conflated. The car I drive is my political loyalty, and if I don’t want an EV I’m clearly a LGBT+ hating pro-capitalist bigot. It’s truly absurd. and the people who spout this nonsense think they are a supergenius will start nitpicking your grammar to prove it to themselves.
Yeah I know exactly what you mean. People don’t want to discuss an issue, they seem to just want to prove how much of a hardcore whateverist they are and prove you’re a part of whichever nefarious group their group is a against. “So you’re a neo-con-classical-liberal-proto-fascist because you don’t want to burn everything down and start over with a the new whateverist utopia I want! You’re too stupid to talk to me!!!”
I think it’s mostly kids in university that learned some terminology they never heard before and think everyone should be impressed by the word they learned. But when a topic they’re unfamiliar with comes up they’re out of their element and instead of just lurking and learning something they start spewing out the jargon in a desperate attempt to sound like they know something.
Yeah. I know people who talk like this IRL too. they are all under 25 and still economically dependent on their parents… while they rant and lecture about UBI is going to solve everything and you’re an evil capitalist bigot if you disagree, and once they have done that they start bragging to you about how worldly they are because they just went to India/South America/Africa and you haven’t been there so what do you know about the world you are clearly racist if you’ve done voluntourism like them.
The desperate need to feel morally superior to others is a hell of a drug. Especially when you have achieved nothing in life on your own.
Do you discuss things or attack people? Serious question.
It is hard to tell from this post. It started off well but went a bit off the rails by the end.
discussing things is interpreted as an attack by those who doesn’t want to discuss them and simply want you (and everyone) to believe what they believe.
There’s a pretty solid different between discussing things that people might disagree with in a mature, measured way, and attacking people for disagreeing with you.
Starting things off with a rant about the people against you is… probably not the best way to try and convince anyone you’re the former?
it’s not a rant. it’s my experience of this site on a daily basis. mostly because i don’t agree with leftist dogma like ACAB and I acknowledge the world is complex rather than simple and anarchsim won’t save it and turn it into Shangri-La. I also don’t think Linux is superior and all Windows/Mac users are pathetic for wanting to use command-line. And I work in tech.
but please tell me more how horrible and clearly all me, not the environment here. plenty of other comments in this thread share that same story of being attacked and harassed for not agreeing with the dogmatism that dominate most lemmy threads.
But let me be pedantic in the spirit of lemmy… I didn’t start anything off. I am only replying and sharing my experience. you’re the one interpreting my experience as an attack on people, which seems to be to be a manipulative tactic that amounts to victim blaming. maybe if i wore a skirt that covered my knees lemmy people wouldn’t assault me, right? maybe if i just agreed that ACAB, linux is the best ever, and anyone who is LGBT+ is a divine angelic being who can do no wrong, lemmy would be nice to me, right?
Unless you don’t vote political opinions do often matter, and they affect people’s lives in real physical ways, especially for oppressed minorities, like LGBTQ people or currently Palestinians, which is why you’ll probably see people speak up for groups like them the most. I’ve never seen anybody be mad at someone for driving an EV car on Lemmy, though. That feels kind of like a straw man.
Like many commenters here, I am glad that I left Reddit because of the enshittification, but I do miss some of the communities that were there that didn’t want to move. I don’t think Lemmy has completely filled that void, but it’s done a good enough job that I’m here to stay.
I’ve basically stopped using all other social media except for Mastodon (which I actually like way more than Twitter, even if there aren’t as many users) and I feel like my life is better for it. I spend less time mindlessly doom-scrolling and more time doing things I actually enjoy. Since the Reddit blackout I’ve read 60 books, played more videogames, and spent more time outside.
TL:DR touch grass sometimes, it can help
60 books!!! That’s good work. Well done. Gotta up my reading game it seems.
What do you like more about mastodon than Twitter? I always end up bouncing off microblogging sites but I still haven’t tried that one.
Sorry for the late response, I don’t check my notifications very often.
To answer your question: I like that you can follow specific hashtags instead of people. For example, my feed is a combination of #nature, #astrophotography, #hiking, and #catsofmastodon. There are hashtags for just about any interest, and that’s all you have to follow if you want.
That does sound like an improvement. Have you tried Bluesky at all? I dipped my toe into that one and was just curious how you thought it compares if you have.
I haven’t tried that one yet. Heard of it, but Mastodon has kinda stuck with me so I haven’t really moved on to something else.
I actually miss Reddit, I miss it when it was actually a useful site where you can engage with users on specific topics that barely anyone in my country gives a shit about. I left Reddit on 1 July 2023 (the day API access for third party apps got shut down), and after 11 months, I’m still not looking back. Lemmy really is my new home now, I’m called “Resol van Lemmy” for a reason. Let’s be honest, Reddit nowadays is basically some buffalo trying to take a huge dump on a birthday cake, an incredible website that ended up being ruined by a bunch of shitty business decisions. I’m gonna say it again, fuck spez. He is not was Reddit is about, we Redditors are what Reddit is about. I don’t even care anymore, fuck him. Lemmy might potentially be as good as Reddit one day, but I suspect that this day is quite far away from today, but I (and my fellow Lemminos/Lemmings/Lemurs/whatever) am working to make that day closer than ever.
I was on Reddit for almost ten years, still feels weird to leave it. But it’s like leaving a marriage or long term relationship - you are not leaving that person you were first with, you are leaving the person they became. Reddit today isn’t the Reddit it was even a year ago.
The place got infested with Boomers reporting people non-stop, the major Karma accounts that contributed so much almost all left. There are niche subs like the fountain pen subs, tipofmyjoystick, and a few others that I wish would move here. Sadly I think those places will be lost.
I miss it daily.
The discussions here always are the same, very leftist. There is only one side. Memes here are always overdone. Comics are always politicized. Everything is “eat the rich”, lhgtbq cant do anything wrong and lets not forget: fuck the police. Eating the rich has been tried before guys, several times. It didn’t work. People need leaders and these leaders will always benefit from it. Learn history before you try to make it. Or is it just jealousy?
Just because youre lhgtbq does not automatically mean you’re right or have been wronged. Surely your identity is very important. As is mine. lets find some middle ground, ok?
Police does fuck up, a lot. Do you have a solution instead of “all cops are evil” or is that just a catchy easy thing to say? And that brings me to the next one:
The depth in discussion and the amount of objective (news) subjects here is lacking. Views are often shallow and if they aren’t they are cast in stone. Lemmy is unfortunately not usable for sharing and consuming knowledge. The depth isn’t there, the communities too small and it always devolves into you’re wrong because i say so. Or, if its IT, the knowledge just isn’t there or worse: people are not willing to share it, adding a you f-ing MS simp because why not. And that brings me, again, to the next:
It’s also often a lot less cordial. Instead of discussing the “room” gets divided in friends and enemies. Name calling is normal. Its a lot darker here.
Most of the times I don’t even check responses on my comments : I know what they say. Yeah buddy, fuck you too.
Anyway, its fine. I use it daily. The use case isn’t the same though. And the experience is very different.
I wouldn’t be here without Sync by the way. Without (stuff like) Sync the hassle would just not be worth it.
Most of the times I don’t even check responses on my comments : I know what they say. Yeah buddy, fuck you too.
Admitting you don’t even engage in the debate isn’t a good look. You act as if you’ve already found the opinion that stands atop the most solid ground, but you’re openly bragging that you refuse to look down.
That’s like feeling the ground beneath you give way, and then thinking not turning to look will allow you to remain standing.
there is no point in engaging in debate with someone who is not arguing in good faith or thinks insults and harassment are ‘debate’.
Fair enough.
But you can’t know whether someone has a salient point if you don’t at least read, and even more importantly, make the effort to comprehend, what they have to say.
you can if they are spouting cliched nonsense… but also who has the time to waste listening to partisan nutbags whinge and circlejerk?
I’d rather spend my time actively learning about shit in the world by going to the source material rather than listen to idiotic hearsay from some internet nutbags comments. but sadly, I’m in the minority there. most folks get their info from social media now.
Are comprehension and disagreement mutually exclusive to you?
No part of understanding what someone is saying prevents you from then dismissing them if they are full of shit.
But it kind of has to happen in that order. People are not full of shit, because they disagree with you. You disagree with them, when and if they are full of shit.
You can’t be sure someone is wrong, until you can explain why. And yeah, sometimes that’s as easy as going, “well this person is completely insane”.
At the same time, the sane ones, are only going to disagree and engage with you, if they’ve determined that you are full of shit.
Do you have to listen to every nutcase that walks up to pick a fight? Of course not.
But if you do regularly get accosted for holding some view or other, it doesn’t hurt to take a closer look. Even if the people bringing it up with you are being dicks about it.
i could give every homeless person I meet 10 bucks.
doesn’t mean it won’t solve homelessness. and it would leave me with about $250 less each week.
Wait.
Are you suggesting that listening to every person that disagrees with you is like charity? And that while charity works, it still isn’t worth it?
Holy shit. Are you just a horrible person?
Generally, if you believe something untrue, and someone tells you otherwise, they’re the one trying to do you a favour, not the other way around.
And did you not even read what I had to say? Because it’s like you’re retorting an argument I didn’t make.
Do you have to listen to every nutcase that walks up to pick a fight? Of course not.
Uuh. Ok?
I haven’t even bothered to subscribe to many communities. I almost exclusively browse all because there just aren’t any niche interests of mine being talked about. In that sense, the gap that leaving reddit left has not yet been filled. That said, I don’t particularly miss it.
The only thing that really sucks is the loss of game communities. I no longer get updates and spoilers for games I’m interested in on a forum. I’ve had to join like 30 different discord servers and have them all send updates to my own private server, but I no longer have a community to discuss these things with because I don’t care for chatting with strangers in real time like you do on Discord. This has led me to become less interested in many games and, in some scenerios where the game is held up by an awesome community (Deep Rock Galactic for example), I’ve just completey stopped playing them.
With that in mind, I think I would consider my switch from Reddit to Lemmy somewhat negative, but at no fault of Lemmy. I realize I’m not exactly doing anything to help my problem, especially by only browsing all.
We’re rich!
Lemmy is great for general shit… News, memes, generic hobbies like cooking that most people might do, etc.
I miss being able to go to /r/Game_Name and being able to talk specifically about that one title. The generic “Gaming/Games” communities are mostly just news about the industry as a whole, which doesn’t really get discussion about the games themselves.
IDGAF though if nobody else uses it, come June 21st, I definitely will be practically spamming the only Elden Ring community on Lemmy with stuff from the DLC as I play through it. Add “Lemmy” to the online group keyword thing in-game :P
Basically reddit stole a huge amount of soul from many communities that were convinced of its good intentions. It was just gathering and still is gathering data to train AI to then use it against us later. There’s no room in my mind to ever go back to that shit hole.
I definitely will be practically spamming the only Elden Ring community on Lemmy
Please do! I try to keep !baldurs_gate_3@lemmy.world alive, not an easy task he he
just took a look at reddit, one of the top posts is some open racist shit, full of openly racist comments under post of a german police officer having died of stabbing by an extereme-islamist, good riddance of that shithole
I used reddit is fun, haven’t really been back outside the occasional Google search that links a post. It sucks and I do miss it, kind of like an old ex you look back fondly on but things just didn’t work out. I used to spend HOURS on the site and while lemmy is nice for keeping up with general world events and memes it just isn’t the same.
I like to rationalize that it helps keep me in the real world instead of spending most of my time on an app. Oh and sticking to a principle and trying to support those 3rd party app creators.
My experience on lemmy has been very similar to my experience working in a startup. I’m constantly concerned that I’ve picked a sinking ship, and concerned that the people I’m on it with are not the people I’d want to sink with. But there’s excitement around being a part of something that’s still playing out, and being able to influence the long term trajectory.
I don’t think the small community is a detractor, though. I’ve felt for a long time that large social media circles quickly fill with the worst kind of content, and normalizes the worst kind of behavior.
Anyway, I think the thing that makes this worthwhile is the decentralization and the knowledge that it’s (for now) safe from corporate capture. I’m happy to be contributing to an alternative to for-profit social media, and that makes all the worst parts of it worth enduring
I’ve been preferring it actually! There’s a sense of calm I get from scrolling through my frontpage and being out of posts at some point, usually like 20mins. I used to spend hours and hours on Reddit, just because it was so easy to keep scrolling infinitely.
At first I thought I should subscribe to more communities to have more content but it’s actually kinda nice to be limited.
I also found a great female weightlifting guide over on hexbear, so I’ve been building muscle since November. Someone must really care to post guides here, so my confidence in it has been a lot better from the start.
And I recently took the plunge and opened a community for posts about Royal Pythons. I’m still the only poster, but it will catch on eventually, and I’ll cultivate it to be better than r/ballpythons from the start. Some of the posts on that subreddit are simply scary haha
For the first half of my transition over to Lemmy, I found myself talking and commenting more, even if I got into fights with Tankies a decent bit. I thought that once I blocked enough tankies and their instances my experience would get a bit better, and for a while it did, but then as time has gone on, I have begun to see that federation kind of makes good moderation extremely hard and rare, and if I try to use general feeds instead of curated ones, the amount of rage bait articles making it to the top has steadily started to increase, and this is finally pushing me away from Lemmy, and unfortunately back to Reddit since someone suggested Dig at one point, and good god its UI looks like I am constantly being fed ad after ad. I may eventually transition back to Gaia Online since I’m not super happy about going back to Reddit after all the shit Reddit has pulled, but I’m missing having a source of random information gain, that isnt hardcore tailored to rage bait.
lemmy still is full of weirdos who get pissed off on one comment you made on one instance and community… and will follow you around to others to harass you until you block them. it’s miserable and weird.
at least they can’t get you banned site-wide like they can with reddit.
Reddit is dead and buried, what’s left are bots and teenagers. Those yappy discordians now run the show, most of us 10+ reddit veterans either came to lemmy, or gave up on “the internet”. I’m pretty sure you’re not the only one who considered reddit to be the internet at that point.
Most power users, myself included, spent 5+ hours per day there, at times more so than at their paid careers. Especially the mods (I’ve been moderating 6 subs, two of which had over 1M and 5M users).
I do miss some of those communities. I don’t miss modding. Leaving reddit showed me what ungodly amounts of time I sunk into that platform, now that I had to fill other means to close the gap. With Lemmy it’s 20-30 min a day, often spread out over 5+ sessions since there’s not much to say or see that takes me more than 5 min at a time.
I’ve stayed on some of the moderator discord channels since those are fine folks, and chat with them in the off-topic rooms. Which shows me that reddit has gone off the deep end once and for all. With many decent folks leaving, ads and bots exploding all over the place, only the die hard shitposters and radical opinion leaders stuck around. They might not have had a digg moment, but are going the way of tumblr, which is arguably worse.
What I’m trying to say is that while Lemmy isn’t the arch we wanted it to be, going back isn’t possible either since the harbor burned down.
Personally, I’ve started a PhD just about a year ago at the time I left, and it does plenty of filling the gap in my daily calendar…
Honestly I spend less time on it and that’s a good thing. I read more news, blogs, use other sites etc
If I want to see stuff from my own country I’ll read the local news
I don’t treat Lemmy like some Omni platform like reddit was, but more of a niche platform like all the others. I don’t use Twitter, Instagram kr anything either.
