As a long time Reddit user, there’s something about Lemmy and the fediverse that feels really refreshing and new. I think it has to do with a few things…
- People are more respectful of each other and interested in discussion and being social.
- Less trolls (users are probably older?)
- Due to it not being absolutely huge, I feel like people will actually see my posts and comments instead of being lost in a sea of content. I suppose once Lemmy grows this will change, however the cool thing about the fediverse are the new servers. So you can stick to the server when you want smaller community discussion and go to “all” when you want more populated threads.
- The clean UI feels refreshing and clean, almost like the early internet.
What have you noticed? Do you find it refreshing too?
It’s called the honeymoon effect. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can acknowledge that lemmy is vulnerable to all the same failings as reddit, and the sooner we can take steps to safeguard against those failings.
If we instead say “no no, lemmy is different, look at how much better things inherently are over here”, then we’re doomed to go down the same path.
I agree - what would you say those pitfalls are? Of course the decentralizing nature takes care of some problems - but the main thing that made me feel awful browsing reddit was the constant argumentative nature of every discussion. When I first discovered web forums 20 years ago it was the magical aspect of it that had me engaged. It was actually cool to be able to chat with other people online about anything - and that itself put everyone in a good mood; after all, why waste your time being really negative if you’re doing something cool and interesting? Now, it’s very common place. Added with people being more comfortable that they can remain anonymous, huge sites like Reddit are prone to a lot of…crap. That’s what I can think of so far.
I both love and hate the upvote/downvote mechanic. I like seeing quality posts bubble to the top, I also like seeing the general consensus of lurkers, but I don’t like circlejerk posts or that downvoted comments get dogpiled on, which often both result in a toxic, self-righteous flame war. And the solution is obviously not deleting the downvoted comments, because then you’re just censoring unpopular opinions.
I think something worth trying would be not visually distinguishing between posts with no votes and posts with more negative than positive votes. I think an instance could enforce this on their own communities with only positive results.
The only counter argument is that dishonest arguments can’t be “buried” by downvotes (hidden behind a “[show]” button). Another strategy would be to allow burying, but somehow throttle the responses to them; maybe limit the comment depth, or limit the number of responses per user, or allow users to flag flame war threads as “unproductive” which at some point would block further responses.
To be clear, I don’t think the lemmy “spec” should adopt any of these measures, I think these regulations should be decided by instance/community mods, and up to the users to regulate and provide feedback on.
I noticed two things, along with all the good answers in this thread:
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There is no such thing as Karma, and I hope it will never be implemented into the fediverse. The reason is that on Reddit Karma was handled like a currency, an in order to obtain Karma, the general quality of the content declined, as a result of Karma-farming. Also it was used as a threshold for posting comments in certain communities. Imagine you could join an instance only when you have a certain ammount of a Karma equivalent. That is something I don’t want to see.
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At this moment there are mostly tech savvy users (former heavy Reddit users) here, who are interested in creating content and participation. Also these folks are helping each other. It feels like a little community. I think, the threshold to join the fediverse is still too high for the average mainstream user. Maybe it will be easier to get started when there are mobile apps.
Karma is useful on things like discourse or mattermost as a spam prevention feature, you gradually expose features to people who aren’t being spammy. The same thing is true of a user joining a new community on the same site.
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It is still full of geekery: the sociopaths are not yet here. See:
Great read. I am fanatic then. 🫣
Thanks for the article.
So gatekeeping can have positive intentions.
Likely you aren’t seeing astroturfing on a massive scale by corporate fiddling and complicit mods. It’s not curated to bait you.
Ok so let me throw out some old timer wisdom. This is what the social media/forums/the Internet are like when the cream is skimmed off and the 90% of users who only browse, and the 8% who only vote are gone. Enjoy it while you can. The summer always ends.
Absolutely, my first thought was this is what internet was in the 90s and 00s. Slow, good yarns, and lame jokes.
Tbh there’s already too many memes here though. Half my front page is 196 and German me_irl sometimes.
You can block those communities if you want.
I guess I want some memes not all memes
I was a bit late one the social media train, isn’t that where the “Eternal September” thing came from?
That’s because way back in the past, every September, a bunch of students who’d never had home internet access would have access via university for the first time. It would take some time for them to pick up the culture, so there’d be a month or so of questionable posts.
I feel like people who moved to Lemmy from reddit are really incentivized to help it grow, so I am constantly seeing encouragements for people to interact / upvote / post content, which is great. I think that the community here is very motivated, and so even though there are less people, you get more engagement.
This is a huge part of it. People are in “this is my new home, I’m gonna wash the dishes just this once!”. I imagine things will calm down later.
yeah, that’s pretty much what happened with Mastodon, as far as I can tell. There are still folks there, but it is much quieter now vs when I first joined it.
i dont feel that its quiet, more that people have settled in, the users that stuck with masto use it religiously
just like how people used twitter
Aside of people probably being a few years older. Less bots and astroturfing and I bet most people who moved to Lemmy are not your average mainstream user, usually more informed than average. It’s easier to talk to calm people instead of the “whoosh I got you buddy” person. With fewer user the chance to get heard and not drowned by meme and joke replies is also much higher. But when more user join this likely changes.
I think the lack of bots makes a huge difference.
I think it all boils down to an older and more geeky user base.
Let’s enjoy it while it lasts. This feels comfortable like the internet until the late 1990s. I didn’t realize I missed that. And when it starts to be exploited for profit, trolled for whatever reason people troll things, and swamped by bots, let’s sneak off somewhere else they don’t know about and do it again.
I’m a recent reddit semi-convert (haven’t left Reddit entirely just yet) and I’m loving it so far
I’ve had more traction on my posts and comments in the month or so I’ve been on lemmy than the entire 14 years I was on reddit. I’m glad I’ve moved, couldn’t give two shits how it does from here out, I’m away.
It’s nice to be able to speak without being drowned out by cave-fascists.
I think the lack of a karma equivalent, and thus karma farming, results in much more thought out and unique posts/comments.
Torn between replying with “this!” as a meme about how generic responses like that are used to farm karma and making a joke about how “of course someone with only 1 reputation point would say there’s no karma equivalent.” Idk how reputation works and if its only internal to instances or a shared across instances. But its possible it does become a karma equivalent in the future.
Reputation seems borked at the moment, it counts downvotes but not upvotes so I’m sitting at -34 right now lol
Boosting is the only way for reputation to go up. I boosted you for science.
I’m not sure I feel comfortable taking advice from a person with -51 reputation…
Ooo everybody come look at Mr. Non-controversial over here with his +40 reputation.
Do you mind explaining what boosting is for us on Lemmy?
One key difference I found is the lack of user karma. You have no incentive to post something “just to get karma” because there is no global karma on your profile.
This encourages to post what you want to post instead of posting something that someone posted years ago because it’s easy free karma
I just noticed that thanks to your comment. I hope it stays that way on Lemmie - karma farming leads to a lot of low quality content, including bot reposts
If Lemmy accounts with a plausible history ever become valuable like Reddit accounts are, we could see the same behaviour without karma just to build up a history. But for now that seems a long way off.
I won’t lie my first reaction when I figured that out was negative (oh my god but then how will I keep track of how much people love my comments…) but the more I think about it and use Lemmy the more I like it, like a weight lifted off my shoulders.
And what you said, no point to being a karma fiend when there’s no counting, so a lot less easy karma grabs going around.
There was a time where the internet was a place for fun. Purely fun! No profit-based platforms, no mass abuse of users, no privacy violating practices, no forced ID verification, and no political correctness censorship enmass.
This age was known as The Golden Age of the Internet. It was something I saw gradually disappear like a frog being slowly boiled in water.
I’d like the hope we can one day come back to this era. The Golden Age was an escape from reality, while this corporate ran bullshit has been nothing but profit focused greed with a constant reminder of reality.
I cannot express in words how amazing the Golden Age was. We never knew we were in it until it was one day gone. Decentralization and freedom from centralized entities may allow the Internet the perhaps return to the Golden Age. An age where the Internet purely exists for everyone to have fun in and be able to express themselves freely without censorship.
That’s sort of what I feel like this is - or at least that’s what I’ve felt from browsing Lemmy. No ads and no ragebait/doomscrolling. There’s nothing requiring that I stay engaged - in a way it’s almost respectful of my interests and time.
Yeah, I loved the golden age. Back when everyone had a Geocities homepage and just linked to each other’s sites. Back when getting a link to your homepage into the Yahoo index meant something.
I remember when it died. Web 2.0
As in when the advertising apps came along, right?
It’s when YouTube and Social Media began to take off.
If I were given the opportunity, I wouldnt swtich back to the state of " the good old internet" .
It was full of popups and viruses. DL speed was 3kbps on good days. Hence without any form of streaming. Depending on operator, you had to pay for the landine communication between your PC and the provider. If a family member picked up the phone from another room while you were using the modem, you got dcded. Of course, one coulnt be joined by phone when he was using internet.
You have to weigh the pros and cons.
Just because we go back culturally, doesn’t mean we have to go back technologically as well.
i joined reddit in 2015 when the site was already heaving with content and users. good for killing time and consuming, but not for engaging in the community. right now lemmy/kbin is in the sweet spot where there’s enough people to talk to but not so many that i can’t be heard.
You don’t have your post deleted for forgetting a minor rule and there’s a chance that your post will be seen instead of hidden under countless new posts.
Even worse when you browse /r/all, find an interesting post about some topic, join the discussion, type out a long reply, hit send…
And 3 seconds later you get an automod message that your comment was removed. Because you aren’t a subscriber to that (default!!!) sub, or you aren’t verified, or you used a word they don’t like.
And even worse: You join a discussion, got some good points back and forth, everything is great. You try to reply to the latest comment in that chain to keep the conversation up and suddenly your comments get blocked. Because it was a /r/blackpeopletwitter post (you didn’t even notice as you found it on /r/all) and at some point they only locked it down for verified black users, kicking you out of the discussion.
I mean sure, have your own space on Reddit (even if it’s basically racism), that’s fine. But then subs like these shouldn’t be default subs on /r/all when they constantly lock down threads.
