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Lemmy’s far smaller than Reddit was 10 or even 15 years ago.
There are some good foundations in place, but there’s a loonnnggg way to go before we’re seeing platform maturity.
Close…but no.
Reddit was good for some fresh content, but a decade ago it was still a lot of bots and karma whoring taking over, reposts, and people falling over themselves to be the first to make the flippant quips that got all the upvotes on any topic. Reddit still did have all the nsfw/nsfl subs then, so there was still a little Wild West left in it.
That said, Reddit very much still had a community feel to it a decade ago. IMO that’s completely gone in all but the niche subs that are there specifically for the community. You don’t get to have conversations there much anymore. It’s usually someone deriding you pretty quickly when they disagree, and the downvote button is the first thing hit.
Lemmy is IMO still trying to settle on what it actually is. I think it’s better than Reddit was a decade ago because people are more inclined to converse than quip (though that very much does happen) but the low hanging fruit comment doesn’t always get the most upvotes, which is really nice. I enjoy that the fediverse is a group of connected communities rather than a bunch of communities all under one roof like Reddit - but I guess that’s the point, isn’t it?
not really. earliest days of reddit didnt even have subreddits.
lemmy cant be reddit 10 years ago, because the internet has changed in that time too
Yeah, but reddits more than 10 years old…
Here’s an article from 2013 talking about subs
Subreddits were added in 08. The great Digg migration was 2010. I feel old.
Shit, I remember Fark.
Which was basically what reddit was when it started, fark just stayed that way. I think it’s even still going…
I never had a Fark account but I remember following them religiously. I remember something about them crowdfunding an arena name for a day about an unsolicited finger in the ass.
Pfft, kids these days - I remember usenet.
Damn, skipped right over Slashdot.
Try to tell a kid about BBS boards nowadays and they start singing about something called a BBL Drizzy…
My local BBS was great, but when the provider became an ISP, the BBS became a ghost town because everyone went to IRC and Usenet.
That ISP was also the local jerky company. Dad made the Jerky, son ran the modem pool. I miss the 90s.
I was part of the great Digg migration and now the great Reddit migration…
Same. I also remember when everyone moved to Digg from Stumbleupon
I liked stumbleupon. It feels like they are less website to stumbleupon anymore
Same here, my reddit account is 15 years old
Same here. Thought you looked familiar!
remember when image macros took over the whole thing?
DAE member Digg? I member that.
The humor is way more redditty on lemmy. Which I realize sounds nonsensical, but a huge portion of lemmy users are former reddit users who both think reddit humor is funny and have like 10 years of reddit humor memes to draw on. The “early” (2012ish) reddit I’m remembering had less of that and a lot more of what current users would consider cringe, like f7u12 comics. And a lot more general weird nerd awkwardness… like the frozen soap post.
A lot of early reddit humor was 4chan/9gag humor though.
I started regularly using Reddit in 2013 and r/funny was general low quality spam from there sites, with A LOT of reposts, basically all content was the same content on loop. r/adviceanimals was huge and was basically a mashup of shower thoughts, jokes, off my chest and general opinionated statements, and it was huge. r/f7u12 was big but already seen as declining and cringe.
The humour here isn’t just Reddit style, the enormous amount of shitpost humour here is reflected in basically all “taking to chronically online strangers” community on the internet, from twitter to discord etc. I’d say shitpost humour outweighs all the other humour in this site.
What Lemmy absolutely does have in common with old Reddit is the userbase being a bunch of trekie programmers. It used to be tech support on their office computers and now it’s software developers on their home Linux machines but the way people talk and act is really similar. In old Reddit days, it was so easy to assume that whoever you spoke to was in work that it was the normal assumption, and you’d see a massive uptick in porn on r/all when evening hit in America. Summer Reddit was a name given to the school kids who’d suddenly swarm the sites in the summer holidays during office hours, and the average age and humour had a noticeable shift.
Lemmy now feels like a site of similar in their 30s but they don’t have 9-5 desk jobs where they browse Lemmy all day, so the hourly and daily trends don’t really align like they used to, now it’s all the classic trends at once as teenagers use Lemmy on their phones in school and work from home means people are shitposting and jerking off all day and night.
Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not saying that reddit was a bastion of original comedy. It just didn’t have what I would call reddit humor at that point in time because that took a decadeish to get to where it is now.
Reddit as it became mainstream turned more into 9gag where everyone is just doing the same jokes for best results. Whenever you have some sort of score, you will have people optimizing for that.
Because in Lemmy upvotes don’t matter so much, I notice that there’s less pressure from people to rehash and repost memes and jokes.
I can look at the earliest posts and comments on my account from 10 years ago and cringe at my past self. I’ll definitely be able to do the same with this account in the future haha
Reddit in 2010-2012 also had a lot of really insufferable atheists everywhere. Someone would say something like “thank god everyone’s ok” and get downvoted while a bunch of people replied stuff like “if god is responsible for them being ok, then he would also be responsible for the crash and shouldn’t be thanked at all”.
Lemmy has its own version of that with self declared “leftists”
I was probably one of those insufferable idiots for a while, as I was still new to atheism at the time. Now I don’t really waste energy on that stuff. Nobody cares. It’s just being annoying. Reminds me of another trend that’s happening today… but I’m not about to point that out.
Vagueposting is lame. Either say something or don’t. Don’t call attention ot what you’re not saying.
That sounds soooooo tiresome.
Believe or don’t. I don’t care. Just don’t get on a soapbox about it.
As a queer trans dude who grew up in a deeply southern baptist community in the rural south, nobody is ever going to be able to make me care about atheists saying mean things about Christians online ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I maybe didn’t use the best example, but it was less about people actually being religious and instead if they used any sort of popular phrasing that had any slight religious element they would try to turn it into a religion debate.
A better example is that someone might post a polish word, someone else would reply “bless you” acting like the polish word was a sneeze sound, and then the 14-year-old atheists would descend and start a debate.
I definitely remember some of that and being annoyed by it; sorry for misunderstanding your first post, I’ve run into a lot of people who are weirdly defensive of how society being more overtly Christian back then was good, when it was absolute hell for some of us.
This is the best kind of people coming to an understanding.
On one hand, it clearly showed me how much theist bullshit exists on both my culture and the internet anglicentric one.
On the other hand, it makes me see very clearly how much I don’t care about the origins of culture instead of its immediate values.
You were very clear in your comment. Look at the instance of the person you replied to…
Sorry my PTSD and instance choice inconvenienced you.
I don’t get the cynism, I never implied any of those things. My heart to you on dealing with the trauma, really.
Most people on blahaj seem to have similar problems however and it makes for strange interactions, like this one here. I’m not sure how pointing out you probably were not thinking clearly in the comment above is bothering you so much. I mean, you’re even the one talking about PTSD I reckon, not I.
Good luck with everything, hopefully you can read this before overzealous mods decide to delete it too.
Rage comics aren’t cringe. If anything, a lot of modern memes are just reskins of rage comics.
Rage comics at least took some thought to put together. I still think they’re pretty cringe but they’re way better than replacing the text on a tired meme template and calling it content
Honestly miss rage comics, most of them were pretty cringe and reskinned 4chan greentext but there was a surprising amount of creativity and humor that could be put into them when people were doing more than just following a formula for imaginary Internet points.
Thinking of things like the time someone did the entire Bohemian Rhapsody song in rage comic form.
Way smaller.
It’s probably better than old Reddit.
Just keep in mind you’re participating in a federation of communities controlled by the many. Although Lemmy.world is probably the largest by far.
There’s some people on here trying to make Lemmy like Reddit was when Reddit’s idea of communicating in 2016 and onwards.
Let’s not let that happen.
Brother what does this say.
2016 was the beginning of the end. Constant propaganda posts, hijacked subreddits, lack of admin action on hate speech and occasionally even active propagation. An absolute shit show and the acceleration toward free fall. I do not miss 2016 Reddit.
Not really, no, but it is good in it’s own way.
No, it’s better.
It does kinda feel like it… even if I am commenting from fedia.io instead.
I’ve been on Reddit for 16 years and I’d say yes it’s very similar. Like Reddit back then it was very tech focused and quite liberal.
I do think people are a bit more vicious online these days than they used to be and a bit more polarised.
From a content perspective there used to be more blog content than tech news content, but it’s fairly similar. What I like about Lemmy is it’s far less commercial and the conversation is more genuine.
However I don’t think Lemmy will become Reddit in 15 years, I think it may languish in eternal obscurity and I’m actually okay with that.
Reddit exploded when Digg crumbled and the same could happen with Reddit crumbling but idk, there seems to be some stickiness to Internet websites these days.
Regarding stickiness, perhaps it’s because the internet is ubiquitous now. Fifteen years ago, those of us on Fark and Digg and Reddit came to the internet for a lot of things. Notably, we kept in touch with friends that way (MySpace and Facebook) and in particular, we got our news that way. My parents were incredulous forever and still kinda are that I “don’t watch the evening news.” Now everyone uses it for everything. The big difference is that the early adopters are naturally more open to change because they adopted something that was a change. The rest of the population was slowly pushed into it. Now they don’t want to leave the sites that they’re used to (e.g. Reddit and Facebook) because they aren’t that open to change in the first place.
Never will be what Reddit was or is, because it’s based on federation and defederation.
yup. helps that there’s no spez and no r/jailbait too
I did miss the original dark humor of r/imgoingtohellforthis, before it turned into people just posting outright racist and homophobic garbage.
Lemmy now is in many ways already the same as reddit is today when you consider social dynamics. This is mostly due to how all of social media using traditional formulas devolved into competition in unproductive cynicism.
Check out Tildes if you want to see how reddit was back then, it’s the closest thing.
Check out Tildes
I would if it wasn’t invite-only :/
Half the reason I was on reddit was to engage in discussions, and that’s largely lost if I’m just scrolling through an unfiltered news feed with no way to participate.
I can invite you. I can’t seem to DM you, but this is the link : https://tildes.net/register?code=5BBPN-R08TJ-CEFAI
If someone uses it before you get to it, let me know and I’ll generate you a new one.
Dang coming in clutch, my friend
I was able to register, thank you so much!
I am a much different person today than I was when I started at reddit so many years ago, so that might have something to do with my assessment, but –
Federated social media today is like what reddit was maybe eight years ago. Fills a hole, bearable, occasionally really good, but still a lot of shitposting and propaganda. Ten, twelve and more years ago, reddit was a really good place. As above, maybe it’s because I was younger then, maybe it’s because the world has changed so very much in the meantime. I’m sure those play into it, but in any event, it was better then than the fediverse of today, content-wise.
No. Not even slightly. Fifteen years ago reddit was still far bigger and more active than the fediverse.
Here there’s barely any content today, back then I was regularly getting 30+ pages deep into reddit when I couldnt sleep most nights, and I wasn’t even close to the end of that days content.Yeah and here I can scroll through all the new content in less than an hour.
