this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43194 readers
1219 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Earlier this year I s/twitter/mastodon/ to good effect. I don't think s/reddit/lemmy/ will happen anytime soon; the numbers are too small for any real network effect.
For example, the subreddit I spend the most time in has >2million readers. There are enough posts daily that my niche interests come up regularly and I contribute to those discussions.
Tbh I have no idea, I stumbled across Lemmy from a random Reddit post. However, getting out of Reddit for a bit and looking around what's here now, it reminds me of the early days, and maybe I'm just old, but I think they were better. Maybe at Reddit's scale + the way the web is now just isn't something that scratches that itch for me. If not Lemmy I hope to find another alternative for that. But in order for this to work, you're right, it does need a certain number of users, we'll have to see how that pans out I guess.
It's the size of the site. Reddit has too many users and has lost what once made it special. Everyone wants this place to grow to astronomical numbers, but I guarantee it will start declining once that happens. Smaller, more tightknit communities are much better imo.
I think this is a general problem of mass media. A capitalist firm operates under the imperative of unlimited growth. It is not enough to succeed at something, it must expand. We can see this effect take place everywhere from Hollywood movies to AAA video games to news and social media. In order to optimize the marketability of a piece of media, it must be as inoffensive as possible, until you end up with the fully lobotomized outputs of the major studios which never say anything of consequence about history, politics, philosophy, or current events, lest they offend 1-2% of Nazis or landlords on the fringes. You end up with pure slop.
The same goes for social media sites. Platforms like Reddit and Twitter would rather expand then send the Nazis to the virtual gulag. They will only take action if, by their calculation, inaction will impact their ability to expand. Likewise, they dull the edges on all political and philisophical discussion, lest the Marxists make the Liberals too uncomfortable. You end up with hermetic political discussion boards like r/Politics where the topics are limited to the latest WaPo/NYT perspectives on parliamentary masturbation - where labor strikes and political rallies are categorically deemed non-political unless someone like Bret Stevens blesses them with a rambling op-ed.