As a little background, I didn’t actively use Reddit for months following the blackout. I still barely stop in over there and if I do I’m never logged in our contributing to the communities there (where I was previously a daily poster/commenter).

Just bringing up a point that I’m not sure I’d seen anyone discussing directly over here; the general sentiment and quality of posted information on Reddit has become tangibly worse in multiple ways (I think coinciding with this group, us, leaving).

Now don’t get me wrong, Reddit sucked in many ways and for long before the migrations to Lemmy, but there is a noticeable difference in a few key areas:

  1. Less skepticism in replies

  2. Less sourcing of information in posts and replies

  3. Less counter positions expressed generally

  4. If there is a decent reply, you have to scroll much further down to find it

  5. Less plain labeling of obvious bullshit

Many of us used to introduce counter viewpoints or clarifying information into posts, with sources. That functionally worked as a roadblock to stall the quickly building momentum of disinformation/misinformation. Those roadblocks often feel absent over there now, IMO.

Not saying we hold a responsibility to go back there or that we were saving lives before, but the difference is very apparent to me - Have you seen it? Any examples?

  • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Reddit: bots talking to bots.

    Lemmy: the socially awkward talking to the neurodivergent.

  • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    I don’t reckon Lemmy users are as great as all that, but I definitely agree on the downturn of Reddit. It’s been on a downward trend for years but we’ve past a milestone recently where I truly no longer want to interact with most of it.

    I saw a Reddit post a few weeks ago that was a 1-minute cut down clip, clearly reuploaded from a YouTube video without credit. Several thousand upvotes, fair enough as it was a good video, but I went to the comments to find a source as you always could on Reddit. One person. One person out of hundreds of comments had posted the source and they had about 10 upvotes so I only found it after scrolling multiple pages. In the old days that would have been top comment with a “why didn’t you post the source of this stolen content” attitude, now it was almost impossible to find. Made me realise the audience truly has changed. The top posts are all Facebook slop for people that want to pretend they’re better than Facebook users.

  • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I think you’re grossly overestimating

    Lemmy shaved off 0.0057% of reddit users. An actual inconsequential number.

    This would be like you losing a grand total of 1 grain of rice, from ~35,000 rice bowls.

    Even if that was the best tasting grain of rice of the whole bunch, you wouldn’t notice.

    • andxz@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      That number doesn’t really tell us anything about the amount of post/content generation that was lost. One or two persons could change the general tone of a smaller sub easily, and often did so.

      If only those two hypothetical posters left it could very well lead to a downward spiral into whatever bullshit is going on over there now.

      Some of the smaller more specialised subs I frequented simply don’t exist anymore due to what happened.

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I thought I explained that pretty well no?

        If you had a grain of rice that tasted unimaginably, unmitigably, good. The highest quality grain of rice ever seen in the world, in all of history.

        It will not change the flavor of 30k bowls of rice.

        We’re talking an absolutely tiny amount of users here. And we shouldn’t delude ourselves over it, circle jerking for being the “higher society”. Reddit didn’t change because we left, the number of users on Reddit change more on a daily basis than 5 Lemmy’s.


        That said, the smaller niche subs definitely saw some hits. I won’t deny that. However, by definition, a small number of users leaving from small subs isn’t a “gotcha” moment for what I’ve stated. That’s is, almost by definition, what would be expected.

        The discussions here are of higher quality for sure. But you’ll still notice that in many threads it’s almost indistinguishable from Reddit in many ways.

    • kralk@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      What proportion of Reddit users are “good” though? 0.0057% might be all of them

    • Devi@kbin.social
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      5 months ago

      What numbers are we using here? Reddit has roughly 70m active users, the fediverse has between 2 and 3 million, that’s quite a few people over here.

  • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I don’t know, the idea that users on Lemmy were the best part of Reddit is a bit egotistical, bordering on narcissism.

    I think what you’re looking at is simply differences in scale and variety of communities. The user migration to Lemmy was negligible, and I don’t really think content quality here is inherently better than it is there. Rather, I think Reddit has just become too big and mainstream.

    1. More Boomers are now using Reddit, which for me seems like the same downward spiral that ended up hitting Facebook.
    2. Corporations see people using Reddit for advice and so they spam it up to try to influence shopping habits and land on Google search results.

    If Lemmy ever becomes as popular as Reddit, the same thing will happen.

  • PrimeMinisterKeyes@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I noticed AMP links started popping up all over Reddit. Before Google started injecting money, posting those was discouraged. Surely it’s a total coincidence.

    • Tag365@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Strange. What happened to the discouragement of AMP links and why are they suddenly popping up now?

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I think there’s also a general age demographic shift down as the mods and people who care about moderation, third party apps, bots, etc left. Something similar happened during the digg exodus where social norms and consensus around some topics changed, just not at much with the bots at the time. People who remain may not care, or they just may be unaware. There was always some propaganda blindness too in the ‘i don’t use social media just reddit’ crowd.

  • Woozythebear@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Lemmy users acting like they are superior human being to people on reddit is the most cringe shit I’ve ever seen.

    Yall are exactly the same and people on Reddit.