While I can relate to wanting to see some sort of vindication for my position in this issue and to see Reddit punished for their choices, I do think it would be better if Reddit stuck around and attracted a lot of the lowest common denominator traffic. Average quality seemed to go down as popularity increased (though the extremes also got more extreme, so good stuff improved while the bad stuff did get worse and some ended up banned entirely).
On subs like AITA, there were so many replies that misunderstood very basic and fundamental stuff from the main post. Also plenty of replies that just made something up entirely and ran with it, frequently highly upvoted and spawning other replies agreeing completely and also running with the baseless assumptions. It got to the point a long time ago where I realized the judgements themselves were useless and the sub’s only real value was for entertainment and seeing other perspectives, but it wasn’t very useful for its stated purpose: determining if you’re an asshole for something you did.
And the mods were so frustrating there, too. Shutting down active and interesting discussion because some arbitrary rule wasn’t followed or because the topic itself attracted a lot of dipshits.
Anyways, what I’m trying to say is that there’s benefits to having a more popular alternative. It means that lemmy has to continue competing to attract users but it mostly means that low effort users will end up just going to the more popular site until they have a reason to look for something else.
Completely agree. Back in the day I used to just scroll through /r/all and constantly stumble across cool stuff, now it’s devoid of any decent content. Whenever I read any of those millions of aita posts they’d always be clear fiction, and then full of comments as if they were absolutely true. The general quality of content on that site is at absolute rock bottom.
I am glad Lemmy has a small barrier to entry. It’s easy enough that you don’t need any sort of technical knowledge to sign up and use but it requires a little more effort than most social media, which hopefully acts as something of a filter. Reddit now kind of reminds me of usenets “eternal September”.
