I’ve been on reddit for a long, long time and i’ve seen all the changes that have happened in the past decade. I spent a lot of time on Reddit, and have seen the slow infestation of bots, karma whores, and guerilla marketing disguised as posts.
I’m genuinely excited for the fediverse - it seems like an actual improvement over reddit, and not just a clone. There’s a learning curve, but there was one when joining reddit too.
I participated in the migration to Voat, and saw how/why it failed. I’m more optimistic about the fediverse for various reasons, and I’m dedicating my time to helping this thrive.
I was a lurker on Voat, but I’m trying to be active here. I don’t like modding, but I’ve even created my own community here, which is saying a lot given how lazy I am. Hope to interact with y’all more!
And if you’re still reading this, i hope you don’t mind a shoutout to my new community, maliciouscompliance - recreated this as it was one of my favorite places to lurk on reddit!
https://lemmy.world/c/maliciouscompliance
EDIT: since a few people asked - I posted in this comment below why I think lemmy has a much better chance than voat did
I don’t use 3rd party apps, but still left. Partly it’s due to the (i) listed above, but it’s also due to the fact that I can see where this is headed. I rely on mods to keep the worst of reddit at bay, and if they either leave due to being treated like “noise” or because their unpaid job just becomes too much trouble without 3rd party tools, reddit will become an unbearable cesspool. I thought about how bad it is now and how much worse it would be if the good mods left. No thanks!
It’s so surprising that reddit didn’t learn from the past. There was another uproar over mod tools in the last few years.