Submitted 3 months ago by Buttflapper@lemmy.world to [deleted]
I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I’m curious, how it’s better?
Honestly? Muuuuuuuuuuuch nicer Posts. I see so many more wholesome Posts here. FFS, even the GreenText’s are more wholesome.
I could use some of that, can you recommend some communities?
No corporate control
Reddit is owned and controlled by a corporation (Condé Nast.) They disabled 3rd party Reddit apps to force people onto the official Reddit app which also broke many third party moderation tools. This disproportionately impacted power users, frequent posters, and mods-- in other words, the people who made Reddit the important community it was.
They showed an unwillingness to listen to their community or work with the unpaid volunteer moderators, instead banning the moderators who took part in the Reddit Blackout and replacing them with mods willing to cooperate with the enshittification of the site.
They’ve been mangling the web interface to be uglier and less usable (old.reddit.com is still up, but the mobile version of old.reddit.com is gone). They’ve been experimenting with ways to show more ads and subtler ads.
Lemmy is open source and federated so it can’t get bought up by a company and cored out for shareholder value. You can use different instances, or a variety of apps. You can use (or create your own) third party tools for accessibility and moderation.
Lemmy is currently a smaller universe than Reddit was, but it has a high ratio of good posters and moderators who care personally about their own communities, so hopefully it continues to grow.
Owners:
Advance Publications (30%)
Tencent (11%)
Sam Altman (9%)
Conde hasn’t owned reddit in a while. I assume the remaining percent is the parent company Reddit Inc or stock options or something. Let’s see what that’s worth:
Operating income −US$140 million
Net income −US$90.8 million
Total equity −US$413 million
Yes those are all negative numbers. Why anyone with at least two functioning brain cells who isn’t also a greedy little pigboy would touch reddit stock with a ten foot pole is baffling.
Advance Publications en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
Advance Publications, Inc. is a privately held American media company owned by the families of Donald Newhouse and Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., the sons of company founder Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. It owns publishing-relating companies including American City Business Journals, MLive Media Group, and Condé Nast, and is a major shareholder in Charter Communications (13% ownership), Reddit (42 million shares), and Warner Bros. Discovery (8% ownership.)
Potato, potato
I keep hoping to see Reddit’s stock tank. I think eventually it will. For now, it just highlights how much the stock market is perception / bullshit / glorified gambling. I know savvy experienced investors care about actual value and do careful analysis. But there are a lot of suckers out there who will just buy any cool-sounding “tech stock”.
Conde hasn’t owned reddit in a while.
That’s only technically true since Advance owns Conde
Lemmy isn’t a single website like reddit.com is. It’s rather a collection of decentralised servers (“instances”) offering the same service (one very similar to reddit). It’s often compared to e-mail - just as Gmail users can talk to Outlook users, lemmy.world users can post and comment on lemmy.ml from their home instance.
What this does is it removes the centralised aspects of Reddit - if a community has powertripping mods one can make an alternate community (like on Reddit). But this goes a step above - powertripping server admins can be reigned in by simply switching instances.
It still falls into some of the same pitfalls that Reddit had (groupthink, reflexive commenting, power-tripping mods), but some of those problems I don’t know that there’s a way to get around them in this format, they’re just a human nature sort of issue. I appreciate that Lemmy doesn’t appear to be owned by a giant mega-corp trying to harvest our “intellectual”, but we’ll see how that pans out in the future. I’ve just gotten used to every online service I’ve used eventually going to shit.
I like that there’s no advertising at the moment, I don’t know that I would mind it so much if there was advertising, as long as it was kept minimal. I know these things don’t just happen for free and if money is needed to help keep the lights on and such.
A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don’t know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it’s getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it’s a good discussion point even if we don’t agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don’t think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason
The problem is that you then end up with sites based on attention, leading you into the (imo even bigger) pitfall of every other social media site, where things like attention-grabbing, clickbait, and sensationalist content has a massive advantage. Look at what gets sorted to the top on platforms where that is the main metric, things like Mr. Beast’s low-brow, cacophonus videos, children’s content, scantily clad women and softcore porn, and gambling or otherwise particularly addictive conent. Even focusing on comment count alone means a focus on topics that are both broad-appeal and controversial, more like what you get out of Twitter’s trending topics: mostly politics and flamewars rather than experts sharing their research, or artists sharing their (non-pornographic) art.
Don’t get me wrong, voting isn’t a perfect system at all, but it better correlates with quality far better than engagement does.
You’ve gotten plenty of replies, so I’m sure this has been said. There’s nothing to make the content or behavior better. The thing that’s better is it isn’t controlled by a single entity. If 9ne of the hosts tries to use their power to restrict API calls, for example, the other instances can ignore them. Anyone can always spin up new instances as well.
That said, one instance (Lemmy.world) has far more users and communities than any other, which isn’t ideal. If they were to just cut ties with everyone else then a lot of people and communities would become lost. This doesn’t have to be the case, and hopefully it diversifies, but it is the case right now.
Reddit used to be open-source, its code still archived on GitHub… then we saw what happened. They closed the source (de facto killing every small Reddit clone) and more recently they cut ties with every developer using their APIs.
I honestly see lemmy.world as a problem. Not as big as relying on Reddit source code, but still a problem. We need to prevent centralization as much as possibile, and one instance having >50% of all users is a bad sign.
Mobile apps (such as Voyager) let you choose the instance you want to sign up. I think they should incentivize instances that are not lemmy.world, until it scales back to a smaller size. Like some kind of rubber-band roulette.
spez has no power here.
It’s a better crowd. Feels more like 2009 Reddit and forums.
Its’ best days are ahead, not behind. And being a decentralized entity - like Bit Torrent or Bitcoin - makes it an important social media experiment that is worth stoking the flames, and whose outcome will be much different than it was with reddit.
Which app do you use? I like Sync but am open to try others.
Memmy. But it’s discontinued
Jerboa
No company owns every single Lemmy instance. That’s the only guarantee you are getting; however, that’s where all of the tiny differences come from.
It’s not flogging your data, forcing you into using shitty apps or generally selling you for stock value.
No ads, no trolling bots.
We have free range human trolls!
When one instance enshittifies itself you can just block it.
Also, no greedy little pigboy Spez.
It’s not commercial. Your data isn’t being harvested to advertise to you.
It’s not, but it’s old Reddit with more attributes that prevent a transition to corporate Reddit so I’ll take it.
It depends on your values. In terms of front page content it’s pretty similar, except with more Linux. The niche communities are kind of lacking, but then you get to have entire hobbyist run niche servers like the one I’m on.
IMO that’s where lemmy really shines: as a truly community owned collection of boards.
If you have a shit opinion that noone agrees with and they downvote you to hell, that isn’t “brigading”… As for it being better…the mods alone make it 1000x better.
Just as a user, being able to block subs here is awful nice. When reddit decided I didn’t get to decide what I see anymore, I was out.
I assume that most if not all of Lemmy mods are former/current Reddit mods, same as users. If it’s largely the same people, then the improvement has to come from somewhere else.
I was practically forced to move to other platforms, including Lemmy, because Reddit’s way of dealing with things is absolute garbage. Their app is garbage, their ethics are garbage, their admins and moderators are garbage.
In short I got permabanned on the entirety of Reddit after confronting a moderator in my favorite sub violating their own (and Reddit’s) rules and content policy. Which eventually led being banned on the sub by said moderator, and later Reddit got triggered as I was “avoiding a ban” with an alternative account (which happened accidentally).
Since then it’s been impossible to get in contact with admins, and they’ve been autobanning any new accouns I tried to set up. I’ve been trying to appeal my bans dozens of times in the past year, but never get an actual response from an actual admin, I doubt they even have humans working at Reddit at this point.
Previously I got permabanned on dozens of subs for commenting in a sub that was supposedly brigading, I didn’t even have any harmful intention or said anything worthwhile of a ban, yet all those completely unrelated subs banned me for “participating” in the brigade thing.
It just shows what absolute trash moderators and admins of Reddit are. They’re all only playing their own little agendas.
I feel like actual humans read my comments here most of the time. It’s pretty small still, but it’s growing!
Plus 1!
You own your data, you can self-host your Lemmy instance and still be connect with other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)
Also you can share whatever you want, no one tells you “If you say that again I’ll ban you from the entire network”. And of course, there are no ads or algorithms showing you what their owners want you to see. It’s freedom.
You own your data
This isn’t true unless you host your day own instance. Your data is owned by your instance admin in the same way Reddit owns their user data.
But the good thing is that on the fediverse, you can choose your own admin by choosing an instance, so you still have far more choice :)
You own your data, you can self-host your own Lemmy instance and still connect to other Lemmy instances (Like what I do)
Can ya point to a series of instructions that show one how to do that? I mean, I’ll search on my own as well, but since you seem well versed, I thought you may have some unique insight on a really good set of instructions.
LEMMY HAS THE CRUMBGRABBER. THAT IS WHY REDDIT HAS NO CHANCE.
All hail the CRUMBGRABBER!
The mods and admins aren’t usually far-right radical preppers, that creates a more pleasant environment.
There are not quite as many trolls yet and at least some mods are rational.
The admins are about the same degree of terrible though, but without the fascist coddling.
If you only look on the surface- it really isn’t. Hive-mind mentality, power tripping moods….
It’s essentially the same thing but with a far-left theme.
Now… under the hood? Entirely different.
Far left? Where? I just don’t see it.
Having fewer nazis and more “enlightened” centrists is considered far left nowadays
At the end of the day, we all loved Reddit at one point, but it is clear where it is heading with all the random mtx stuff, adding some annoying standard social media features, making asshole greedy corpo decisions etc.
One big one for me is that the opinions seems a lot more varied, but I think Reddit has been flooded with bots for the past few years.
You’ll find more people who you can relate to on Reddit if you’re a fairly normal person. Lemmy is still small and mostly an echo chamber as everyone shares the same opinions. Most of us simply came here because of the API issues.
Yea, but the recent plans like monetizing some of the subreddits already broke several of the communities that I still like to lurk on reddit like r/formuladank and r/trustull where the mods clamped down on the unhinged people that made the subreddit in order to make the sub more advertiser friendly.
For me it was also the API issues. I hated the normal client and only used sync. When they shut down the API I left. Unfortunately I feel like my /all is mostly political and the niche communities I follow don’t have enough content. I’ll always be a lurker.
I was in the same boat as you. I recommend searching for new instances. There’s many now which gives your more options.
Life on Lemmy (and reddit/social media in general) becomes a lot better when you turn off vote displays
I agree that votes don’t matter at all. Now please, except my humbly casted vote for you in the upward direction :D But no, I think psychologically speaking, votes actually do kind of matter because of mob mentality. If the first thing you see is something overwhelmingly negative, you’re more likely to think negatively. This was tested and seems to be the case, if people see a bunch of negative comments on something, they are more like to join in on the mob and downvote or be negative
Which is exactly why you shouldn’t have them on. Form your own opinions, don’t just go with the mob.
Yep, and they don’t matter so who gives a shit.
They affect visibility so they still matter to an extend
Welcome to Lemmy! Enjoy your stay.
The functions are more or less supposed to be like how Reddit used to be (a link, comment, information and sometimes image aggregator). Here are some differences, though:
It’s not owned by a conglomerate that has the misaligned goal of harvesting your data for profit. The fediverse’s goals far closer match the goals of the average poster.
But don’t think this solves the human condition. As a whole we are attention seeking, validation needing, ass holes every single one. I wouldn’t expect much difference in the posters or the mods.
It’s not controlled by one single entity. Everyone can spin up their own instance and host their communities, and you can block instances that deserve it. And the software is completely open source and stuff, and it obviously works with all kinds of third-party clients and doesn’t try to monetize the API. And we don’t have spez, so that’s of course another benefit. And no ads! I could go on and on…
Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
You’re on lemmy.world, which is pretty much exclusively Reddit refugees, so you probably won’t see much difference in culture there, but that’s what I consider the main advantage.
As in, I left Reddit when I noticed the toxic culture was fucking with my mental health.
Lemmy isn’t particularly great anymore in this regard either, but still magnitudes better.
Boozilla@lemmy.world 3 months ago
lemmy.world is too popular (I know, I know, I also have a lemmy.world account). But the nice thing about the greater lemmy “galaxy” is you can still subscribe to communities from any instance, no matter what your home instance is.