this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Reddit is stupid but do we really want to be as big as Reddit? The quality has tanked in the past several years in large part because of how big it is. I think we’re on a good trajectory. Looking at it as a zero sum game where Reddit has to fail for this to be successful will only leave you disappointed. Reddit doesn’t need to fail for Lemmy to be good.
I don't think the size of Reddit was, itself, responsible for the deterioration, but it did attract bad actors and those not acting in good faith – the bots, reposters, karma whores, etc. It's an unfortunate side effect that's hard to guard against when these actors see a huge platform and an opportunity to take advantage and manipulate it.
Outside of those issues, which does make it worse, the massive amount of users and karma system creates perverse incentives that make any real discussion impossible. Anyone trying to actually engage in discussion is drowned out and the top comments are just people trying to input the right combination of words to make the internet points come out. And if you dare go slightly against the hive mind, your dog piled with people trying to virtue signal harder than everyone else to collect the points. I generally agree with the hive mind and I still find it completely insufferable and uninteresting.
It’s not even just a political thing, go to the guitar subreddit and try to suggest wood makes a difference in tone and see how indignantly you get attacked.
Sure you can find niche communities that are better if you really dig but in my experience, they tend to just fizzle out or get big and succumb to the site wide problems.
Reddit was way better 10 years ago and this place is already starting to kinda feel like that. I would be very happy if we could stay that way.
What I think happened in the past several years was the rise of the mobile user.
It's somewhat hard to write well on a touchscreen and the 13+ demographic expanding as younger teens had less tech-hesitant parents means that low-effort submissions really took off. They don't write well at all, and they don't care about paragraphs, punctuation, or using any capital letters.
Oh yeah, teenagers getting smart phones is a big piece of it. We used to joke about summer Reddit when all the kids were off school and everything got dumb and horny. And then that became the normal.