I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I’m curious, how it’s better?
Why did you, personally, leave Reddit?
Welcome, it’s not better.
deleted by creator
Welcome!
Less chat bots on Lemmy, and they seem to be easily identifiable and ignored/reported.
Lemmy isn’t quite at that sweet spot where there are enough daily users to get niche content and information from a group of knowledgeable people - but some communities seem to be quite active and helpful already.
I’d love to get to the point where we have a big science/history community and get some non-celebrity AMA’s that have genuine interaction.
I’m more than happy for Lemmy to stay “underground” for a good while, slowly building communities. Once things hit a critical mass and wind up on corporate radar, lemmy will get swarmed and another migration will happen with the same core groups that joined lemmy early.
I’m not a celebrity. AMA!
It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don’t know that there’s a way to get around them in this format, they’re just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn’t appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our “intellectual”, but we’ll see how that pans out in the future. I’ve just gotten used to every online service I’ve used eventually going to shit.
I like that there’s no advertising at the moment, I don’t know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don’t just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.
A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don’t know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it’s getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it’s a good discussion point even if we don’t agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don’t think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason
The problem is that you then end up with sites based on attention, leading you into the (imo even bigger) pitfall of every other social media site, where things like attention-grabbing, clickbait, and sensationalist content has a massive advantage. Look at what gets sorted to the top on platforms where that is the main metric, things like Mr. Beast’s low-brow, cacophonus videos, children’s content, scantily clad women and softcore porn, and gambling or otherwise particularly addictive conent. Even focusing on comment count alone means a focus on topics that are both broad-appeal and controversial, more like what you get out of Twitter’s trending topics: mostly politics and flamewars rather than experts sharing their research, or artists sharing their (non-pornographic) art.
Don’t get me wrong, voting isn’t a perfect system at all, but it correlates with quality far better than engagement does.
It tells you when there are new comments on a post u already saw. Getting down voted and whatnot is a reflection on the ppl doing it not the system they’re using
Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.
Loony power tripping moderators can only ban you from their little bit rather than from the whole site.
Amen!
spez has no power here.
To echo, it’s not really better, just different & smaller. Just slightly less toxic. It’s not owned by Spez, the greedy little pigboy. 3rd party apps aren’t killed for no good reason over here.
Moving to a substantially smaller community of people does have its drawbacks; there is brain drain & stagnation in small hobby communities. Be it roasting coffee, brewing beer, or weed…not nearly as many brains, let alone good brains, and less content generation. There’s less knowledge, making it objectively less useful.
I use Sync for Lemmy & idk I find it hard to navigate to, find new communities. Half of the time I stumble upon one by sheer accident.
But the memes can be really good, it’s still a news/info source, and for me being a conservative it gives me some insight into how “the other side” thinks, possibly even why.
It has good mobile apps (And multiple options, depending on what you like).
Users are kinder, discussion is better. There’s no need to drive engagement so there’s no algo pushing conflict and outrage to the fore.
Listen, I won’t dig into all the tech and philosophy of decentralization and anti-corporate ownershipa. There are other people here for that. But let me tell you why I am enjoying it: it’s small, it ends, and it feels like early internet.
I load up Lemmy, and see a series of disjointed memes, or a current ongoing meme (like pondering the orb) and absorb that for a short while. I see a couple world news articles, a couple about Trump and a couple about places that aren’t the US. I read an article about Ryzen’s new chips not performing well on Windows and see someone’s retro-gaming setup. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of scrolling, I go “oh hey, I remember this post from yesterday”, and then I close Lemmy because, and this is the important part, I’ve hit the end of new content in my feed.
I still get the news, I still take in a couple memes about the current state of politics, or a celebrity flying her plane altogether too much, but I am never stuck here. There’s no one trying to rage bait me for the sake of user engagement, and any argument I find myself in wraps up and moves on. I don’t feel disconnected, but I am also never completely absorbed, and my life is better for it. Sure, sometimes while I am waiting in a line I load Lemmy only to discover there’s nothing new for me in the hour since I’ve closed it. Sometimes I do the age old, “looking to busy myself”, close Lemmy because there’s nothing to see, immediately open Lemmy because I am looking for something to occupy my Internet poisoned brain. But being bored for a minute here and there is worth it, if it means a lot more free time because I am no longer absorbed in the rat race of infinite scrolling social media.
I think Lemmy is better in a series of ways, but the one that really matters is that it helps me put down my phone, and do things that I enjoy.
The main point is that nobody owns the whole, so nobody can fuck it whole up, not even admins - like Steve “Greedy Pigboy” Huffman did with Reddit.
Past that, it’s mostly community tendencies and software differences, not “hard” contrasts:
- Yes, you can be vote-brigaded here. There’s no global karma though, so no big consequence for being vote-brigaded.
- Disingenuous, whiny, assumptive, fallacious, “lol lmao” users (you know… like the typical Reddit user) are present here, but I feel like the ratio of those users vs. decent people is smaller here.
- Some mods are arseholes, some are decent, nothing changes in this matter. However it’s easier to get away from arsehole mods here.
- Blocking here is not a way to prevent being contacted further. It’s just a way to remove an annoyance from your sight, like it used to be in Reddit. If being harassed, contact the relevant admins.
Additionally people often say that echo chambers here are stronger, but I might not be the best person to ponder about this (as I’m left-wing in both social and economical matters, so… if there’s an echo chamber I’m part of it).
You’re on lemmy.world, which is pretty much exclusively Reddit refugees, so you probably won’t see much difference in culture there, but that’s what I consider the main advantage.
As in, I left Reddit when I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health.
Lemmy isn’t particularly great anymore in this regard either, but still magnitudes better.lemmy.world is too popular (I know, I know, I also have a lemmy.world account). But the nice thing about the greater lemmy “galaxy” is you can still subscribe to communities from any instance, no matter what your home instance is.
The biggest upside to my Lemmy experience, so far, has been that you can stay within you communities, and actually have a decent conversation about the topics being posted. On reddit, it’s consistently been the exact opposite of that.
I get that not everyone is this way, but there are a lot of really, really frustrated people. Every comment ends up being either ragebait, an argument, or is neither, but still gets downvoted into fuck all, because people cannot differentiate a different opinion, from an incorrect one
