I’m a lurker. I don’t post on facebook or reddit or anywhere. Today I randomly got a message from reddit that my account was permanently banned for apparent repeated violations of their site wide rules. I have the ReVanced app on my phone that blocks ads on reddit just so those scumbags can’t profit off me lurking, but it’s the only reason I could fathom that is why I’ve been banned. Anyway I just wanted to vent so thanks for reading this if you did. Reddit fucking sucks.
I left reddit with the API changes. Obviously, Lemmy isn’t as good as reddit in many ways. It’s still young and is much, much less popular. There’s not a super niche community for everything like there is on Reddit. But the people on Lemmy are so much better. And the people on Reddit were honestly a pretty significant reason why I left too. The people here are just so much better to interact with most of the time. Glad you’re here.
I didn’t realize how bad Reddit had gotten until I tried Lemmy. It got toxic slowly enough that it snuck up on me. I’ll never go back.
I had to look something up and the answer was in Reddit. After I found what I was looking for I scrolled through my old subscribed communities and saw so much toxicity,. Not just in the people but the things I was subscribed to, r/relationships, AITA, even some of askReddit, it made me feel gross thinking that’s what I scrolled through and interacted with every day.
It’s so much better (and easier, once you get used to it) to just give people the benefit of the doubt.
I think I read somewhere that Lemmy users are, on average, a bit older than Reddit users. To me, that just means that we’re more likely to have seen the worst that the web has to offer, and don’t want to reproduce it. Of course, we can still be trolls and idiots; it’s just less prevalent.
In my experience, people here are nicer than the people in, for example, r/politics. However, that’s not saying much. I never commented in r/politics. I only commented in those niche communities that don’t exist here and Lemmy is a big step down compared to them in terms of the quality of the discourse. (It helped that the communities I participated in would ban people for being rude.)
That’s fair. I don’t think it’s really that the discourse is lower quality on the niche subjects but rather that it just doesn’t exist most of the time. One of the consequences of being an early adopter.
For real, the userbase on Reddit was declining in quality for quite a long time, and that decline sharply increased (imo) after the Sacking of the API - largely because TONS of power users, especially in highly technical subs, were like “nah fuck this” and left (and, you know, stopped developing moderation tooling because Reddit effectively blocked non-tech-savvy users from using said tools with the API pricing change).