this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
-17 points (36.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43757 readers
2316 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This.
It's something that I had to learn, coming from Reddit, too, and is a difficult paradigm shift to process: the fact that there is no "Lemmy" more than there are, rather, "Lemmys".
Also, as a (now former) Reddit user for the longest time (>10 years), I daresay that the diversity of opinions is honestly more similar to how Reddit used to be, in terms of there being VASTLY different communities and therefore VASTLY different sets of beliefs from community to community. Reddit may be a lot more homogenized now, but back in, say, 2010? It was way more diverse. Closer to how Lemmy is now.
Yes, I recall the content of reddit being much better around the same time you describe. There was a vast amount of actual original content produced directly by the users there at the time, and the quality of discussion was very good.
Over time as more people joined it, it seemed to become more and more of a sort of parody of itself, sort of like when you make a friend and introduce them to your group of friends, and they begin to use an inside joke that existed before they were there. Sometimes it's still funny, but it is an odd feeling that when this new friend tells the joke, you can tell they don't exactly understand why it's funny themselves.
Reddit to me felt like this to the nth degree when I left. I suppose it really is a result of some kind of "herd" behavior; people just acting a specific way or saying specific things because they saw other people doing or saying the same things, but to the point it no longer goes any deeper than that and becomes bereft of any real meaning or deeper thought or variety.
Yes, it saddens me greatly to see how far Reddit had degraded. It was an amazing place back then. Then, again, I suppose the whole Web has changed. It's much more compartmentalized now, and even worse, much more corporatized. Walled gardens, echo chambers, the whole nine yards.
Yes, there were echo chambers even back then, but it wasn't as...well, I guess the word I would choose is "sanitized". It was free-er, whatever that word may have meant. Honestly, I feel sad when I hear people say the Internet is magical. Because yes it can be from time to time, but they don't know or remember or care that it used to be so much MORE magical.
The Internet used to be Leeroy Jenkins; now's Leeroy's gone and it's just a rich executive in a suit trying to peddle the newest software as a service. :(