This is a sequel to this rant. I came to the realization that Lemmy and the broader fediverse aren’t really fun for me. The constant ragebait and politics shoehorned into everything was dragging me down, and the only communities without ragebait are also without content in general.
So I caved and made a Reddit account after 3 years and it’s gotten so, so much worse. First is probably the “gamification” of everything. Reddit already had karma, which had its own problems, but it was simple. Monkey brain like number go up. Now they show you analytics on your posts and comments, and encourage you to improve them, as though you’re meeting a metric rather than trying to connect with other people. It’s gross and cynical.
Then there’s the notifications. I get a notification every time a post is upvoted, not just for replies. It feels engineered to squeeze every drop of dopamine out of you and keep you feeding the content machine.
This one’s more subtle. The simple Reddit gold awards that existed when I first joined in 2012 had already ballooned into a myriad of different little trophies when I left in 2023, but they’ve redesigned them and now they look like assets from a free to play mobile game, with the way the awards shine when you mouse over them to that particular bright plasticky round art style. It’s not damning on its own, but combined with the above points it’s another nail in the coffin.
Sponsored posts I think were already a thing when I left, but now there are ads in the comments as well. There used to be one ad on a specific dedicated spot off to the side. It was unobtrusive without being hard to find. I felt that was fair. But it’s not about keeping the lights on anymore, now the whole things screams “You’re the product!”
But worst of all are the bots, AI masquerading as real users that make superficially genuine posts and comments. Discriminating between AI and human content is probably a skill that I could hone with time, but I shouldn’t have to go on a witch hunt every time someone compliments me. I’ve even been tricked into wasting my empathy on them, all so they can farm me for content.
So yeah, maybe I should just throw away my router and go outside.
I’m hoping for more niche instances with their own distinct identities and quirks. The threadiverse could really be the best of the old PhPBB universe and reddit.
I post this a lot, so apologies if you’ve read it before. Reddit and its clones differ from traditional forums in that the default post and comment sorting behavior favors new content rather than old but still relevant content. On phpBB, threads are sorted by last comment (aka bumping), meaning threads with lively discussions stay at the top of the list no matter how old the thread itself is. This allows discussions to continue for years under a single thread if desired.
Contrast this with Reddit and its threadiverse clones, which use a sorting algorithm based on upvotes and post age, meaning you can’t consolidate discussion under a single post because it will eventually drop off the front page, making it highly unlikely that newcomers will discover it organically and add to the discussion. This leads to the phenomenon of reposts, where the same content appears over and over because older posts on the same topic fall off with age, even if there’s stuff worth discussing still.
The reason I seem to make up half the posts on !worldbuilding@lemmy.world is because I tried consolidating work on a single project to a single post, but once the post inevitably dropped off the first page nobody would ever find it. If I wanted people to see and comment on my stuff I had to keep making whole new posts. Contrast this with the equivalent on this phpBB Forum, which is a single topic that’s been going for almost three years now.
It’s amazing to me how huge such a seemingly insignificant design choice as default sorting behavior has on an online platform’s culture, especially since Lemmy CAN replicate the old forum experience pretty faithfully by sorting posts by latest comment and selecting the “chat” sorting option for comments. But since it’s not the default nobody does that.