Did Reddit get massive because of Digg users making a beeline towards them or were they already big before that?

  • Pratai@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Why is everyone in such a hurry to make lemmy into a Reddit clone?

    • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      For more interesting and easily discoverable content. Really that’s what people want at the end of the day.

      • decadentrebel@lemmy.worldOP
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        1 year ago

        Exactly. I hate Reddit more than most people here (I’m a mod on a sub that has more than a million subscribers and felt disrespected by spez), but the fact of the matter is they’re the gold standard of quality answers and discussions.

        I would want Lemmy to get to that level, not immediately, but that’s the dream.

      • mecha_pope@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I want lemmy to become popular just so you can be quoted in news articles. User “fist eye mouth eye fist” wrote that…

        Or just have 🤛👁️👄👁️🤜 appear in reputable news outlets.

    • Shaded Cosmos@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I would just love to see more users in the communities I care about! I loved Reddit for that reason alone. Here I can find the memes, news, and opinions that I care about, but none of my hobbies. I really miss it to be real with you.

      • Gray@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I get annoyed at the people acting like this place is perfectly fine as it is. It isn’t. It lacks content. It has repetitive posts. And as far as I’m concerned, growth will iron out those problems over time. It doesn’t need to be all at once, but I am looking forward to it. 60k active monthly users is nothing. Reddit has 450 million active users. It’s hard to overstate how much larger Reddit is. Even if you’re a hipster opposed to Lemmy growing to a Reddit size, it isn’t even remotely close to being that large yet. And as far as I’m concerned it still hasn’t reached the mass it needs to turn it into a super engaging community just yet. I’m rooting for it to become more engaging and I’m doing everything I can to increase that engagement, but we really don’t need the smug in denial “it’s perfect right now” attitude.

        • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Reddit has 450 million active users.

          Yes, but how many are bots? Trolls? Bigots? Spammers? Antivaxxers? There is some content that lemmy is better without.

          I’m wondering if it’s possible to get the same level of broad esoteric discussion without also welcoming the same toxicity that made reddit the superfund site it is today. Is toxicity a function of size, or is it a function of an environment in which toxicity is encouraged?

          • Hubi@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit and I think I can answer the bots question. There are millions. We’d get hit with multiple spam campaigns with thousands of bot accounts that were seemingly prepared for months in advance to get around our account age restrictions. Most users would never see any of it because we managed to catch most of them. It also happened under almost every post that hit /r/all.

            • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I wish more subs were run like how you described yours. In my experience, too many mods were willing to overlook obvious bot accounts (new to the sub, just older than the account age cutoff, no history, all showing up to the sub for the first time on a given thread and saying the same thing) as long as the bots were sayin’ stuff they liked.

              It’s why I was so happy when lemmy became popular enough to sustain conversation. I hope the mods here and on other instances don’t engage in the behavior I described, as I consider it principally responsible for the toxicity that ate reddit.

              • Hubi@feddit.de
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                1 year ago

                The bots we had were mostly karma-farming to appear legitimate in other subs or were spamming links to phishing sites and such. Lately we’ve had some that were trying to write actual comments but due to our subreddit language being German, it just came out as garbled english-german nonsense. It was a humor/meme-based sub, so we were an easy community to target.

          • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Is toxicity a function of size, or is it a function of an environment in which toxicity is encouraged?

            Both.

          • Pratai@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Exactly. One doesn’t happen without the other. If growth equals increase if trolls/bots- then grown equals strict moderation. Struck moderation equals power hungry mods.

            Voila! You now have Reddit.

    • ccunning@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      For me what made Reddit great was not the big wildly popular communities. It was the small niche communities that were (IMHO) only able to form in their shadow and you need a critical mass of people before you can have that.

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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      1 year ago

      I don’t want the r/funny people to invade this place, but quality middle sized to niche subreddits don’t yet have their active equivalent on Lemmy.

    • heeplr@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      if mastodon is a federated twitter clone, what else is lemmy than a federated reddit clone?

    • eldavi@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      because reddit has all of the content and ease of use while lemmy has neither and we want to see lemmy succeed.

      • Barack_Embalmer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Lemmy is succeeding just fine right now.

        Reddit’s “content” is way more rage-baiting, fake AITA stories, culture wars both-sideisms, publicfreakout schadenfreude, and basic-tier iFunny memes, re-posted by waves of bots. All reddit is “succeeding” at is being a firehose of diarrhea.

        I prefer Lemmy’s slant towards technology-related news, and polite discussion in earnest without painfully unfunny “and my axe” responses.

        • eldavi@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Both are true and there’s a difference between doing fine and excelling

          I prefer Lemmy’s slant towards technology-related news, and polite discussion in earnest without painfully unfunny “and my axe” responses.

          I used to think so also; but Red Hat’s earth shaking move to stop sharing its source w the public was a non-event in all of the fediverse instances I could find. I missed it’s since I don’t do Reddit anymore and became aware almost 2 weeks after the fact when my employer released a statement condemning it.

    • Stanwich@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Because I’m tired of reading the same stories all day long. I like the latest news and lemmy is slow.

    • TheSaneWriter@lemmy.thesanewriter.comM
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      1 year ago

      To add to what everyone else is saying, Lemmy is by definition a federated Reddit clone. It’s in the documentation and the initial commentary about this service, this place is meant to emulate Reddit to some extent so it makes sense that the two would be compared frequently.

    • TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Was Lemmy not designed as a reddit clone? Community/post/comment system with upvotes and downvotes, volunteer moderators, generally the same sorting filters, crossposting - hell, they even display your date of join as a “cake day”. The influence is obvious.

      That’s not a bad thing, take the good and leave the bad, but if anything I think Lemmy needs more unique features that Reddit never had.

      • Pratai@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        If you want lemmy to be like Reddit, you’re not getting the bad without the good. When it grows in number, it grows in trolls, bots, fascists and pedophiles.

        Take your pick.

        • TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yes, it will have those things, and in fact already does. There are trolls, bots, fascists, and even pedophiles already. This is an extremely sad and disturbing reality of online spaces. The only thing we can do about it is ensure moderators and instance admins have the tools to deal with it.

          • Pratai@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Right. However the more popular it gets, the more moderation will be needed. See what heavy moderation did to Reddit?

            You couldn’t even post on many subs without proper formatting and or your posts were removed if you didn’t put it in the megathread.

            I’d rather lemmy remain small.

            • TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              See what heavy moderation did to Reddit?

              I was a moderator on Reddit off and on for like six years, so yes I did. Heavy moderation is the only thing that kept larger communities on topic - r/Askhistorians being the shining example. The amount of effort required to keep spaces from devolving into low effort hodpodges of memes and such was notable.

              But it was worth it. Lemmy will grow, and moderation will probably have to grow as well, but I hope that the mod-user relationship here will be healthier and we can rely more on good faith interpretations of rules so we don’t need to resort to pages of detailing no one will read.

              • AA5B@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                r/Askhistorians being the shining example.

                You are so right about this! I will goto whatever service has that again

              • Pratai@lemmy.ca
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                1 year ago

                And how do you filter out the heavy handedness of mods like what was on WhitePeopleTwitter where if you didn’t fall in line with whatever agenda they followed, you were banned and reported to Reddit admin?

                With growth, you can expect this to happen here.

                • TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Well I expect that the federation model that allows multiple communities to grab the same namespace combined with instance admins that will be more active in removing openly hostile users and mods will help.

    • HiroNase@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      So that I can use site:lemmy.world instead of site:reddit.com when I’m googleing things

    • Sparky678348@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Is that a real question? Because more than half of this websites user base is people escaping from Reddit and looking for an alternative. That seems extremely self-evident