Title
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?
Kind of. Reddit 15+ years ago still had a larger user base than Lemmy did, but it feels kind of close to how Reddit did back then. Lemmy still needs some work, it has a long way to go, but I do like it so far.
We need a new meme style to explode and the small communities to grow, then we’d be there.
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.
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”.
That sounds soooooo tiresome.
Believe or don’t. I don’t care. Just don’t get on a soapbox about it.
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.
Lemmy has its own version of that with self declared “leftists”
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.
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.
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.
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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.
A lot of early reddit humor was 4chan/9gag humor though.
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.
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.
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.
Kinda got the same small in crowd vibe as old 2012 reddit, but less big and more jaded.
It’s big enough to binge for a few hours but you do run out and got to wait, I was in withdraw for a little. Mods, mods never change.
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!
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.
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.
I wonder how the shift from Reddit to Lemmy compares to the shift from Digg to Reddit.
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I forgot about Digg. Whatever happened to it?
They forced a UI change that everyone hated, so everyone fled to reddit, thus crowning Steve Huffman, a dirty little piss boy.
They had a site redesign to garner more monetization.
The redesign elevated paid advertisers to the front page, masquerading as real articles.
Suddenly 1/4th of the top content was fluff articles not very subtly advertising shit
They also had power users who dominated post and drove the control of conversation. (MrBabyMan?)
Lemmy has a much smaller user base
Reddit didn’t have the communism and far left propaganda that lemmy has, so it’ll be an uphill battle to clean that shit up enough to get lemmy even remotely close to where Reddit was 10 years ago.
Incredible what it looks like outside your bubble huh? Lemmy has different instances so everyone can build a community without nearly as much potential censorship like Reddit. This is the community that naturally formed, so maybe what you call “far left propaganda” the rest of the world calls “normal”
Naaah… that’s not it. Lemmy is just as susceptible to propaganda as Reddit ever was. And if you think there isn’t outside influence happening here, you’re as blind as they get, or part of it.
The rest of the world doesn’t call shouting at people to not vote during elections “normal-“ yet is all over lemmy.
So, let’s not define normal by what we want to see. Mmmkay?
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Found the Hexbear instance user.
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Cool story. Found the troll that has nothing to add to the discussion aside from snarky insults.
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That’s part of the reason I am here. You could just go to some place like Exploding-Heads but there’s a reason so many instances defederate from them
It’s so fascinating, how some people create their own narrative, in their echochamber of a head, and then project it onto everyone else.
Please go touch some grass
The crowd here is kinda weird. But I like em for their humor so far.
No. I’d say the whole internet felt different 10+ years ago. Including this, what people are on here and how they behave. And I’d day the average intellect is different. But that could also be me growing up.
It’s different but the same. We used to get hit by the conservative bury brigades. Now, we get people actually trying to steer the narrative with somewhat thoughtful bad faith arguments.
It’s far more insidious now, and takes vigilance to shut down.
I don’t remember that many political arguments. At least not this way conservative<->progressive. I remember them mostly from the comment section of news articles and YouTube videos (since YT has been a thing) and of course Twitter. But less so from dedicated discussion places like forums and such. But my perspective is probably skewed. I wasn’t really part of early Reddit. And I’m not American and we have/had different discussions here. Well… Maybe I wasn’t that interested in political discussions on the internet when I was young(er). But the places I used to frequent were more focused on specific topics, technology and not about ideology (apart from free software ideology.)
But trolling, flaming, baiting etc has been part of internet culture for a long time. I don’t remember how they called brigading before Reddit. I think that is a term I learned in the last few years.
I really enjoyed various communities on usenet. But most of my favouites moved to FB and usenet is now a cesspit of spam. I learned a hell of lot from alt.solar.pv and alt.energy.renewable, and made some great connections via aus.motorcycles. But I wouldn’t bother going there today, even in one of the few remaining feeds.
I feel like Lemmy has WAY more crazy political views, like extreme leftist and BoTh SiDeS people. That’s probably more of a symptom of Russian propoganda across the wider Internet that wasn’t as prevalent 10+ years ago.
TIL that egalitarianism and saving humanity from unrestrained capitalism is extremely left.
a symptom of Russian propogandm
There it is. All you needy to say really.
We barely talked about politics at all back when the great Digg migration happened. People were interested in far more fun things back then.
Hmmmm, I remember heaps of people being into Ron Paul because he wanted to legalise weed, and Bernie is a perennial favourite
This also depends on what instances your instance federates with though. You could go to an instance that defederates from the more politically extreme instances.
I think it also depends on what communities you interact with.
I got fed up with it in the Lemmy.world news community and unsubscribed. I’ve been much happier following that change.
There are still some leftist and both sides hot takes I run into … but it’s a much more acceptable pacing now.
Not really, no, but it is good in it’s own way.
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.
