People go there because they don’t care about interacting with other human beings. They just want an echo chamber and to occasionally feel like they are an Influencer.

And you can see the same at lemmy. Someone posts something someone doesn’t like? Immediate downvote (and, for the more pathetic people, downvoting on a few alts as well) with no comment or even attempt to refute things other than MAYBE an ad hominem. And plenty of “What is your favorite X” spam-engagement posts that just involve repeating whatever marketing schpiel they heard in the past.

There has been a recent tendency for people to reference social media network sites that are nothing but bots and… it is increasingly obvious that that is what most people want. They want to feel like they are the tastemakers. They want to be moistcritical without needing to focus test the most normy of center-right takes.

Yep I can confirm, I lived in my tiny reddit bubble a lot of time to care about trending shit and bots stuff.

The user volume to support niche communities is the most obvious thing missing in Lemmy. But I have a darker view of the future. Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation. It looks like a genuine human conversation, but it’s actually an advertisement. Maybe it’s mixed with some human comments, but that may only add to the realism of the fraud.

That kind of ”advertising“ could potentially command a lot of money. And it could probably eventually infect just about any text platform. Maybe Lemmy as well someday?

You could deploy it pretty effectively in sufficiently large niche communities.

This for sure. It’s something severely lacking at Lemmy, without the large user base the small communities can’t sustain the way they do on Reddit. Lemmy serves best as a replacement for the biggest subs.

Exactly. In specific communities it’s by far the best discussion platform. And I don’t go to a site first discussion second, other way around, so to reddit I go for those.