I’m actually enjoying the smaller community. I joined reddit back in 2012. It was popular but not at the level it became. It was also mostly millennials back then.
I met a lot of cool people in meetups. I actually ran local monthly reddit meetups for 5 years until I moved.
Now reddit is mostly bots. But even before the level it is now, there were a lot of grifters. Rage bait. Thirsty posts. A lot of theft in art communities (not an issue anymore cause AI has stolen everything).
Fake bot accounts reposting front page stuff 2 months later and getting back on the front page. Trolls were getting out of hand.
All the companies selling reddit accounts. You could literally buy up votes. Still can.
Its just been going downhill for a while.
And then the 2025 censorship and purge of veteran users.
All of my accounts are perma banned cause I outted some extreme hostile maga trolls. (And id do it again!)
You know there was a time when a lot of reddit was actually just being funny in a slightly antagonizing way. Like every one would play along and just ham it up.
People do it here and it’s definitely a more comfortable online space to be in.
Where people asked genuine questions they wanted to know the answer to instead of just asking for people to validate their opinion. Which is most of social media.
I sound like an old fart and maybe I am. But my gen experienced the Internet for the first time in our youth. And online social spaces were king of magical. I think I still cling to the idea that they can still be places of possibility. Places to connect genuinely with like minded people.
Back in my day, You could make your own geocities websites. For free. You had chat rooms. Yahoo games where you played with strangers across the country and chatted with them.
Msn Messenger.
I’m getting all nostalgic. And off topic.
Anyway. I like the smaller community in lemmy.
It’s probably like 90% real people. For now.
And i don’t think anyone sells up-votes . For now.
I don’t mind if there is less content. The quality is decent and the comment section is more manageable and easier to be included in.
Both of these, especially together, created a chilling effect on open discussion. People would even delete their posts to preserve their karma.
Even when you’re reading someone else’s comments, it’s delightfully difficult to cyberstalk them. “Sort by controversial” or “sort by negative” were great ways to find the least popular thing anyone said and smugly quote it years later.
Sure, there’s third-party sites where you can see all that and more, but I’m not tempted to use them, and they reveal their users as losers.
I’m actually enjoying the smaller community. I joined reddit back in 2012. It was popular but not at the level it became. It was also mostly millennials back then.
I met a lot of cool people in meetups. I actually ran local monthly reddit meetups for 5 years until I moved.
Now reddit is mostly bots. But even before the level it is now, there were a lot of grifters. Rage bait. Thirsty posts. A lot of theft in art communities (not an issue anymore cause AI has stolen everything).
Fake bot accounts reposting front page stuff 2 months later and getting back on the front page. Trolls were getting out of hand.
All the companies selling reddit accounts. You could literally buy up votes. Still can.
Its just been going downhill for a while. And then the 2025 censorship and purge of veteran users.
All of my accounts are perma banned cause I outted some extreme hostile maga trolls. (And id do it again!)
You know there was a time when a lot of reddit was actually just being funny in a slightly antagonizing way. Like every one would play along and just ham it up. People do it here and it’s definitely a more comfortable online space to be in.
Where people asked genuine questions they wanted to know the answer to instead of just asking for people to validate their opinion. Which is most of social media.
I sound like an old fart and maybe I am. But my gen experienced the Internet for the first time in our youth. And online social spaces were king of magical. I think I still cling to the idea that they can still be places of possibility. Places to connect genuinely with like minded people.
Back in my day, You could make your own geocities websites. For free. You had chat rooms. Yahoo games where you played with strangers across the country and chatted with them.
Msn Messenger.
I’m getting all nostalgic. And off topic.
Anyway. I like the smaller community in lemmy.
It’s probably like 90% real people. For now.
And i don’t think anyone sells up-votes . For now.
I don’t mind if there is less content. The quality is decent and the comment section is more manageable and easier to be included in.
I hope we never change the Lemmy upvotes.
Both of these, especially together, created a chilling effect on open discussion. People would even delete their posts to preserve their karma.
Even when you’re reading someone else’s comments, it’s delightfully difficult to cyberstalk them. “Sort by controversial” or “sort by negative” were great ways to find the least popular thing anyone said and smugly quote it years later.
Sure, there’s third-party sites where you can see all that and more, but I’m not tempted to use them, and they reveal their users as losers.
Edit: to the downvoters, jk I don’t care