Just found this space, I’m trying to play around with this platform. Can anyone help to explain?
Reddit feels like a corporate advertising driven hellscape where fear and rage is encouraged.
Lemmy feels like 2010 when the internet world was a lot more simpler and you could actually talk to people.
Yeah Lemmy feels a lot like Reddit from 10-15 years ago. Mostly cordial conversation on a wide variety of topics, the biggest difference I see is the lack of activity in certain communities, which is a bit of a shame. But I guess that’s a trade-off.
Give it time. Better to grow organically.
Two things that come to mind:
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Lemmy’s protocol is open, so anybody can make 3rd party apps to work with it. Third party Reddit apps used to be popular when Reddit had an open API, but Reddit destroyed that on purpose.
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Because Lemmy isn’t run by a singular company, you don’t get the same restrictions. Reddit admins had a whole host of rules on what a sub could or could not contain. Many of which were heavy focused on making Reddit more advertiser friendly.
The funniest part of killing 3rd party apps is they cut off a widely used method if collecting more commenting data from the average user. I guess they figured audience style interaction on the official app is worth more.
The official app purportedly has a shit ton of interaction tracking. I can’t find the link anymore, but somebody on HN even claimed what they wanted to track was so invasive that he walked out of a job interview for Reddit.
What I can say for sure is that the new Reddit “shreddit” website is absolutely fucking full of tracking. I reverse engineered it for reasons, and every interaction with UI elements was reported back before the actual interaction was allowed to take place.
They definitely gain more value out of user data from interaction tracking than they do from their comments.
What about old.reddit; would that have tracking? If not it would explain why the new Reddit UI seems so slow on browser
Interesting, for point 2, I thought having restriction in subreddit make it harder to advertise?
Oh, there were plenty of ads. You just didn’t recognize them as such.
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It’s kinda cool to go to pretty much any post and go “hey! I know almost everyone in the comment section!”, but that’s a bit of a double edged sword
Some apps (like Boost) even let you add tags to people’s names.
I always get so confused until I remember the context
Interesting, I use boost and didn’t know about that. Like client side flairs, neat!
You can see the number of up votes and down votes.
The API is much more open to third party apps.
The people are generally nicer.
Features are not paywalled.
Code is open source, so anyone and everyone can contribute.
3rd party app support…
There are many other reasons, but let’s be real. A lot of us ditched reddit because they dropped support for third party apps. Having an interface that isn’t trying to constantly milk you for all sorts of monetization schemes matters a lot, as it so happens. Enough to say goodbye to a lot of familiar and large communities with otherwise good information.
Steve Huffman isn’t here, so that’s a huge plus.
Star Trek memes. I didn’t even come here for them, but they’re everywhere, like the Picard manoeuvre.
[email protected] for all your Trek meme needs. O’Brien must suffer!
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There’s no “algorithm” per se, so you can actually discover new things in your feed, rather than just being fed what they think will keep you scrolling.
Also, you can use whatever app you like (I like Sync personally, but that’s because it was my client of choice for Reddit) instead of using their RSS reader stapled to a Wish.com TikTok clone.
There’s no “algorithm” per se, so you can actually discover new things in your feed, rather than just being fed what they think will keep you scrolling.
Well, there is an algorithm but currently they are quite simple. Certainly not taking any kind of personal data or advertisement data into account, which is nice.
More advanced sorting algorithms could be made in the future to sort more personally, maybe based on the communities you follow or things like that. But the key point is that for Lemmy, the algorithm will always be open source and transparent, while the Reddit algorithm is a black box and you have no idea how much personal info its using.
What I’m trying to say is, algorithms aren’t bad. Opaque, closed-source, privacy-invading algorithms (or anything else) is bad.
If the goal is just better, then moderation is better. Reddit obviously has better/more content, users, etc. But the mods can and do make the whole experience. It could be zero interaction, no problem, or it could be a permanent ban of a subr or the whole ecosystem for no reason and you have zero insight or recourse.
On Lemmy the same can happen and I’m convinced many mods here are just are bad. But there is a public log. You still can’t do anything about it, but it’s something.
Which comes back to the real question. Both suck. The best thing about Lemmy is that I went from using reddit as my only social media for years, to boycotting it and coming here. And it sucks here, so now very little social media presence at all. It works great as a digital detox.
