Could anyone explain to my why some people are trying so incredible hard to turn lemmy/kbin into Reddit 2.0?
Reddit wasn’t exactly great before this migration wave, it hasn’t been an interesting place in quite some time and I sincerely doubt it will get better in the future.
In my opinion most content on there is pretty much trash in a variety of flavors. That and doomscrolling. Sure there is niche subs and I get that losing them to might suck, but everyone managed before we had those and everyone will manage now. There is always the option to remake them somewhere else when Reddit decides to kill them, be it by removing modding tools, drowning the content in ads or what ever malicious shit might happen.
In most cases a massive number of users has been detrimental to the quality of subs. I don’t really see the benefit trying to get as many people to switch as possible. In fact I think there is an argument to be made for smaller communities.
There is also a tendency to argue that people shouldn’t use Reddit. People also drink till they black out and shouldn’t do that either. Or drive their cars over the speed limit. Or pronounce “gif” with a “j”. Why not let everyone do what they want, why does this have to be a binary choice or a choice at all?
Maybe a few people just feel like this is some kind of battle that has to be won. It isn’t. Reddit will try to make as much money as possible at any cost, it is how most companies operate in capitalistim. You don’t have to like it. As a matter of fact I’d respect you more if you didn’t. But it is nothing you will fix by trying to “convert” people to Lemmy like you are a Jehovah’s Witness of discussion platforms.
Or maybe you are mad at spez. Good, he is an ass. Maybe other people will realize that and take it as a reason to use Reddit less or not at all. Maybe they won’t. You don’t exactly have agency when it comes to their decision.
So what exactly is it that is driving you? Do people have friends over there they want to bring over here? Do you miss the endless meme subs and can’t survive without them?
I clearly don’t get it and would very much appreciate some comments, so I might be able to understand your motivation better.
I actually think reddit was pretty great. There was a reason it was popular. There were some rough spots, sure
You need a large user base to sustain discussion, especially in smaller niche communities.
Yeah, “our” sub had almost 11K subscribers–not huge by Reddit standards–but I got the sense it was arguably the place on the web to stay up-to-date and informed on our topic. An author of a recent book used our sub for research (among other sources, of course).
I used reddit for the past 7 years. And I honestly feel like even back then discussions were barely possible. It always felt like an accumulation of popular viewpoints and everything else was just downvoted to hell.
And once you pass a certain userbase threshhold growth will happen automatically. It is just how social media works. So I don’t agree that reddit’s popularity is a good indicator for it’s quality.
I agree. Most reddit communities are too big for discussion to work. If you show up to a thread when it’s on the front page, you’re probably too late to be seen. Perhaps you can hijack the top comment, but that’s about it.
As long as Kbin/Lemmy has enough people in each community for there to be content and some discussion, I think I’ll end up preferring it this way.
I agree… BUT, i think it’s important to also remember that for-profit like Reddit will have incentives to drive engagement patterns which can sometimes (i’m being generous heh) be toxic to the social atmosphere.
Opensource implementations have a chance to change interaction that is more favorable to the user, to the community, etc. I don’t believe Lemmy or Kbin offer much here, yet, but Tildes.net talks about this and makes an effort there.
I’d like to see a federated instance that puts more effort in this space. It won’t be what Redditors want… because, well, Reddit built addictive patterns and this is the opposite of that. But nonetheless i think we can make progress on Reddit-likes when we carefully analyze what ramifications Reddit features have.
It isn’t just a Reddit thing; it just happens to be that Reddit exhibits it more than other websites.
A community will generally attract like-minded people, so it is common for a community to have a set of popular viewpoints. It will happen here too.