No Stupid Questions

I'm a Reddit migrant, so I've been pleasantly surprised about how positive everyone is in here. I don't doubt we've gotten more Reddity as awful, terrible, jackwagons like me have joined (uhm. giggle) but you guys still have an atmosphere that's 100x better than Reddit. My only complaint are the minor details about missing features etc that I know will be resolved in time.

So... I guess that didn't answer your question directly, but indirectly while it may have gotten more Reddity, it's still a long way away from being Reddit. I hope that continues.

This isn’t a Reddit problem, it’s a human problem. The more people who join, the more trolls, edge lords, and just plain assholes will show their ugly heads. Instead of lamenting the “Reddit like” nature and jumping ship, I’d say just work on tailoring your experience. Stop browsing All, subscribe to the communities you enjoy, and block or ignore the instances and people you don’t want to see. We have the ability to tailor this experience to our liking, it just takes a bit of effort. And above all, just keep being positive and encouraging to others and that will spread around.

It's getting more peoply. Just the way people are.

Feel there's a lot more argumentative and just kind of.. angry users on here. (have you seen Sync fans biting everyone's asses over saying money should be spent funding instances and not an app?)

Just on that particular point, part of the problem is the range of quite-to-extremely hostile comments towards the dev.

Those of us who've used Sync for years know (as well can be known, at least) that the guy is solid and trustworthy - and the way some people have been talking about him and his motives is both unfair and inaccurate. It's natural that there's going to be pushback on that sort of thing.

Which isn't to say that the prices can't be queried or criticised of course, I was slightly surprised myself initially (although given how much I've used Sync over the years for very little outlay, it doesn't bother me as much).

But when it goes beyond questioning the prices, and moves into unfounded criticism of his character and integrity, that's too much IMO.

Honestly, yeah. I've been pretty disappointed in general, to be honest. Once you take away all the bot-spam, zero-effort memes, and doomerism, there isn't a while lot of actual content on here.

Which is unfortunate, because I love the concept of Lemmy, and I can't go back to Reddit. I'm still holding out hope, though.

I died a little when I read "Live laugh love lemmy". That should be illegal!

I feel like it was super reddit-y at the start of July, and then it started calming down to how it was before.

Well, have you seen FOSS fans biting everyone's asses over saying user experience is important and labor should be paid? Yeah, people getting their preferences called out and ridiculed usually causes that. It's like getting into a small subreddit and stirring shit by saying that their collective opinion is wrong.

Before the great Reddit exodus, Lemmy was just an echo chamber for a small subset of like-minded people. Now you get Reddit Lite. Enjoy it!!

(This comment, brought to you by Sync Ultra. [̲̅$̲̅(̲̅ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°̲̅)̲̅$̲̅] )

In my experience, this has always been a problem after a forum grows beyond a certain size. It’s not really a Reddit-exclusive thing. It’s also not related to karma/reputation-tracking, IMO.

Early adopters of a small, somewhat empty community are people who want to grow the community and encourage posting. Discussion is bright and careful in certain ways because it’s usually just a few commenters interacting with each other who all want the same thing.

Once a community grows big enough to support lurkers and a variety of topics, with multifaceted discussion happening naturally, you have a familiar effect happen: you know how people are disproportionately more likely to review a product or business if they had a negative experience than a positive one? Well, in a similar way, when there’s enough content to lurk (and not be one of the early enthusiasts who post in spite of a lack of content, as a duty to help the community grow), then lurkers are more likely to come out of the woodwork and join a discussion when they see something they disagree with or feel strongly about.

Honestly, though, it has a few silver linings. I grew up learning a lot from arguments online in various places. Sometimes they are handled well and sometimes they are handled poorly by the participants. Learn from both. It’s great to see two sides of an issue, even a petty one. It can teach you a ton about how to behave well, how to actually persuade someone on a topic, and how to avoid conflict in the first place. It can also teach you about a controversial topic you knew little about, and spark your curiosity to learn more (if only to refute something with citations) and sometimes change your opinion altogether.

The healthy/toxic dichotomy starts in your own mind. You can’t control others, but you can control yourself. So find those little positive nuggets where you can.

This is one of the most reddit-y posts I've seen so fae

Yes. Politically militant people are becoming more common. This time last month people seemed to have been much more agreeable even if they didn't agree with you.

I noticed it when going outside my subscribed feed shifted from being kind of nerdy tech and games topics to being more flooded with memes and a whole lot of politics and news. Not that there's anything wrong with those communities. It's just not what I'm interested in, and with that type of content starting to dominate and making it harder to find new communities I'm interested in I started blocking a bunch of communities again. Especially when communities like against____spam started popping up, since those spam the most content about ____.

I have noticed an uptick in trolling in the past few weeks, since around the same time as the attacks began. They usually delete if you call them out.

There's a lot of people saying

"Can we not do that reddit thing here?"

Like it or hate it, reddit is a monolithic cultural icon. The things you think are "reddit" things are part of one of the most popular internet cultures of all time.

Have you not heard of Barbara Streisand? As reddit fractures, it's culture will bleed into every corner of the web their users occupy.

You will not contain a culture with your opinions or words. Your options are:

Accept it. Bite your tongue. Downvote. Don't engage.

Or

Be miserable.

For the love of God, stop complaining about it and trying to control it. Barbra Streisand.

You take any topic, with passionate fans and they'll defend it. A lot of it probably from the backlash was the first thing they saw.

I'll keep it real, I paid for Sync because of the decade history with that app and plan on doing the same (a post linked a way to do it) with the instance I'm in. I see me being on Lemmy a lot and looking forward to keeping the positive vibes going.

I love the idea and spirit of Lemmy, I think decentralized and federated networks show a ton of promise…

However my experiences so far trying to engage in intelligent discussion/debate on Lemmy have been far more combative and frankly mean than I can ever recall on even the most “passionate” subreddits I participated in.

I think it’s a cross-section of the kinds of people who are enthusiastic about federated networks, and people who are knowledgeable enough to be early adopters here. But I’ll be honest, it has definitely cooled my interest in participating in discussion on Lemmy instances.

I don’t appreciate being called names or being accused of being a bad faith actor simply because I’m asking questions or challenging a viewpoint, and that seems to be the outcome of nearly every interaction here.

It doesn’t do any favors for changing the perception that Lemmy (and other federated platforms like Mastodon) are populated by terminally online keyboard warriors.

There’s a distinct feeling that if you support or even just use “traditional” (non-federated) platforms, or otherwise are not fully committed to 100% decentralization or open source, you are the enemy here.

I don’t want to go back to Reddit, and I won’t because of the absolutely abhorrent things their leadership has done and continues to do, but Lemmy users in my experience are overwhelmingly hostile and it sucks.

I've only had one thread conversation which really felt like a proper Reddit one (and it wasn't a political one, a TV related one).

It depends on your definition but for me it's roughly 'able to have civil conversation/debate without descending into attacks or points being dismissed because you don't like them and generally feeling like you're dealing with a 14 year old'

That said not every Reddit interaction is completely shit, it's just more likely to become that way

I think one of the problem is all the influx of apps and webUIs that display "karma" also known as points as a total. Now people are starting to follow some kind of mental herd of saying the right thing to not get downvoted.

Just my personal experience, but I do feel like people have been a lot quicker to be snippy and not as nice and welcoming these last two weeks or so compared to a 2 months ago when I first got here.