It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media. Reddit has many issues, but lack of women is not one of them.
Haters recently on here. Much more blocking necessary than half a year ago or so
Duplicate posts. Soooo many duplicate posts
North Korea shill. Seriously. How absolutely dumbfuck do you have to be to actually believe there is even the slightest good in that regime? It hurts me personally that I’m Korean and that I’ve seen countless people, some I’ve met in person, who lost their families in that hellhole. And yet people who can’t even spell Kim Jong Un or Juche are celebrating that prison of a kingdom.
Nothing about them are “left” or “progressive”. To me, they’re worse than MAGA shitheads.
Absolutely disgusting. Hope they all rot in North Korea.
4 times the same post in 4 different identically named communities…
I want a global feed, communities can federate with in a sort of sub-lemmy.Everyone complains about it being empty and not many want to do anything about it. I’m not sure if this is even because of the user number, because I’ve been on forums with just a few users that were very active. It often seems like too many people here are waiting for a large influx of users so that others can do the posting. Also people try waaaay too hard to copy Reddit 1:1. They have this one very specific community with certain content and try to copy it here. If there was a subreddit for a 1998 version of an obscure computer game, they want this very same community to exist here. Instead of discussing said game in a more general community.
There is a lot of computing and a lot of politics, but not very much else.
I am forced to see posts in communities I am banned from for having an anti-ai stance AKA a working brain. I didn’t block all of them soon enough.
What I am saying is that you should still be able to block communities you are banned from. Seeing them in my feed and being unable to get rid of them is like seeing cockroaches in a kitchen.
Everyone on Lemmy has a tiny penis and severe personality disorder. I blend in too much.
This is like an echo champer of tech people, hard to find non-tech aware people here.
That was reddit when it first started it just takes time the problem is reddit people want to speed run this and created a bunch of communities then abandoned them or filled them with AI Slop. Only making it harder for stuff to grow organically. I do wish Lemmy and Piefed had a network global name space for communities like how IRC does channels.
it just takes time
It takes more than just that, though. Reddit’s UI and mod tools are more powerful, and the Fediverse as both a concept and a practical entity are more demanding and trickier to understand and use.
Agree. I like tech and I’m subscribed to tech communities. But not a whole lot other than that here.
We’re here, we’re just self-aware enough not to make it too obvious. I just don’t even interact with half the content in all because I have no fucking clue what a “distro” is, is it like a mix between a disco and a bistro? Sounds fucking awesome actually, I’m in.
Skip the “all” feed. It’s not interesting to me either, even though I’m familiar with distros and such. I just read the “subscribed” where I’ll find stuff I care about.
There’s just not enough content. I come here to doom-scroll and troll trolls, it’s much harder to do that when most of the communities I’m actually interested in are nearly inactive or don’t exist at all.
Yeah, that’s a real problem. All the really interesting special communities get like 1 post a week at most.
The lack of people. We need more people on the Fediverse.
Lemmy? the politics.
the fediverse? I know I’ve said this like a billion times to the same five people who come on here, but federated platforms still ape the format of big social media platforms, and inherit many of their pitfalls. I want long-term discussion and human connection, not an endless waterfall of content that quickly gets swept away.
Not enough users.
I don’t like that it’s basically Reddit. people from Reddit came here and they act like it’s Reddit and it’s basically Reddit
- Lemmy is by and large populated with ex-Redditors, who bring with them some of the same hivemind on certain topics. Eg: Lemmy is very anti-AI or nuanced discussions thereon. Nuclear is bad, etc. Makes bad faith discussions on certain topics almost certain.
- As everywhere else - there’s too much “you’re either on my team or you’re against me” - though notably less than in other spaces
- Upvote / downvote counts: these should be yeeted into the garbage pile of history.
Things Lemmy does well
- Less performative engagement.
- Less American (but arguably that’s still too much for some).
- Despite it all, a measure of civility still exists. Rare.
- You can create your own instance and be ungovernable :)
- No algorithmic engagement bullshit (so far)
- I don’t feel like I have to walk on eggshells every time I post something.
I personally find Lemmy a great deal more pleasant to interact on, with strong pre 2010 forum vibes and I feel that’s a good thing. YMMV
TL;DR: There’s a lot less “look at me, look at me!” on Lemmy and it’s all the better for it.
I have seen no people rail against nuclear on here or reddit.
They rail against my right to own personal nuclear weapons
Bastards!
Not very Auth of you! You sound like a hedonistic libertarian to me.
Upvote / downvote counts: these should be yeeted into the garbage pile of history.
Still not exactly sure what “yeeted” means, but I like how upvotes & downvotes tend to bring quality content to the fore, and I even like them as a permanent record. They’re not very useful of course, but having the motivation to permanently increasing my totals is useful for sharing good content and communicating in good faith. At least for me.
Right - that’s me trying to hip and cool (“how do, fellow kids”).
Yeet - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yeet
I completely disagree about the upvotes / down votes thing btw. I think, platonically, that’s what they were supposed to do.
Pragmatically, they’ve end up being more a social proof / opinion suppression / brigading tool.
That - and infinite scroll - are among the worst sins introduced by social media. ICBW and YMMV.
Nah I think you’re on the money. As someone with ADHD, those worthless little updoots and infinity-scrolling are almost as bad as any algorithm!
ICBW and YMMV
YTMND. 👍
YTMND
I understood that reference.
Okay, thanks. I can never seem to remember it, maybe because it feels so unnatural. Maybe it would help if I knew where it came from, though. *shrug*
Pragmatically, they’ve end up being more a social proof / opinion suppression / brigading tool.
That seems exceptionally pessimistic to me, but maybe you have more insight in to all that than I do. Personally I think multiple things can be true about upvotes / downvotes, some useful, some harmful perhaps.
In any case, there is no debate that upvotes are useful and valuable to me when it comes to posting and commenting.
Well, I remember ye olden days of Usenet - we mostly got along without them, and without some of the issues they seem to cause.
If they’re helpful to you, thumbs up (ha). I do wish they were an optional extra instead of proxy dopamine button (based on the way some seem to use them). There’s actually a good read on why they (and reddit in general) skew toxic -
https://jacobdesforges.com/you-should-quit-reddit-distribution-wide/
Well, I remember ye olden days of Usenet - we mostly got along without them, and without some of the issues they seem to cause.
Things change, though. Upvote/downvote was one of the many things Reddit and other places trialed over the years, and based on the success, stuck with it. Me, I barely spent any time on Usenet, but it occurs to me that the userbase was probably smaller. A much, much larger userbase probably fits better with upvote/downvote, so the comparison there is likely skewed, methinks.
‘Dopamine rush’ is exactly right, and I think it’s useful and informational, similar to the way that people react to your statements and ideas in real life. I do think they can have an ‘echo chamber’ effect and help promote the problem that a popular thing or opinion can be completely wrong, but to me that just means that upvotes/downvotes aren’t perfect, not that they should be completely discarded.
https://jacobdesforges.com/you-should-quit-reddit-distribution-wide/
Not sure what you want me to do with a link to a book, but I don’t even agree with the premise of the title sentence. Reddit is still very useful to me, and I know of no other place that replicates the variety of content, there.
Ok, but I think you’re conflating two separate things; the usefulness of Reddit as a content index (which I agree is still unmatched) with whether the upvote/downvote mechanic is net positive. One doesn’t need to quit Reddit to acknowledge that the voting system consistently produces pathological outcomes at scale. “Brigading” is a literal Reddit phenomena
The Usenet comparison wasn’t really about scale. It was about the incentive structure. Upvotes/downvotes don’t just surface good content, they gamify participation in a way that systematically advantages emotionally resonant, tribally safe content over nuanced or contrarian takes. That’s not a flaw in implementation , it’s a feature of the design.
And “people react to your statements in real life” isn’t really analogous. In real life, social feedback is contextual, bidirectional, and has friction. A downvote is anonymous, effortless, and carries zero accountability. The asymmetry matters.
The link is to a book (available via Libby if you don’t want to pay for it) in case you wanted a primary source. In summary: Desforges’ core argument is that Reddit exploits operant conditioning to keep users chasing high-value posts through a flood of mediocre ones and that even people who claim not to care about karma are still shaped by it. It’s worth a read.
Justin Rosenstein - one of the engineers who actually built Facebook’s Like button - has publicly said it produces what he called “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure,” and has since restricted his own use of it. Leah Pearlman, who co-created it with him, has said the same. These aren’t outside critics; these are the people who built the thing.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/years-on-creators-of-facebook-like-button-give-idea-thumbs-down/
End of the day: if you find it personally useful, I believe you. I think the problem is in aggregate behaviour. Apes together…dumb.
Ok, but I think you’re conflating two separate things
I feel like they’re distinctly separate things, and I thought I’d communicated as much. Oh, well.
…the voting system consistently produces pathological outcomes at scale.
That seems like… a little much. I do agree that upvotes/downvotes indeed gamify the system, but on the whole would say that the end-effect on Reddit results in a big bunch of hoomons acting in typical hoomon ways, which is with deep undercurrents of fickle, ignorant, selfish, feel-good behavior.
The Usenet comparison wasn’t really about scale. It was about the incentive structure.
Yeah, I get that, but I do observe that there are advantages to upvote/downvote that indeed work better on a larger scale. I’m not sure they’re really needed on a smaller scale.
I’d say I agree with most of the things you wrote, but remain unconvinced that upvote/downvote is so absolutely toxic as to merit tossing. And of course, I don’t think it’s going to happen, anyway.
Aggregate behaviour amongst naked apes? Yeah, I would tend to agree. Now what?
Depending on the topic, I know that if I sort by top, I’ll find my people at the top, or the bottom. So, it’s useful for that reason. This was more true on Reddit, but it happens here, too.
Paying too much attention to the numbers I think will push people toward the normal take, whether we like to admit it or not. So, it’s best not to track your own stats too seriously. Just say your piece and let the chips fall where they may.
On a side-note, I think the past tense of yeet is yote. Good analysis nevertheless.
eggshells
Many, especially political and news communities ban opinions that are mainstream in the Democratic Party because they aren’t left enough. If they are powermods, they will happily ban you from dozens of communities and instances.
The total lack of concern for easy on boarding of newbies. There’s a lot of big talk about taking on social media monopolies but absolutely no interest in coordinating to actually accomplish that goal.
