I’m realizing I hadn’t actually voted on posts or comments in a long time, perhaps years. Between vote fuzzing and massive vote counts, it began to feel pointless to throw an upvote or downvote into the fray. Like how is my downvote supposed to count against over 1000 upvotes?

The smaller community here on Lemmy and the Fediverse makes me feel like I actually want to be involved again. Like I have a reason to want to vote and comment.

Also, for real, being able to see actual vote counts again after so many years of reddit hiding them for whatever bullshit reason, it makes it feel so much more organic and not a bot-crazed shitshow like reddit felt like. The absolutely massive communities combined with so many bots (including ones that would repost highly upvoted comments in the same thread) made reddit feel very controlled, and not like organic community growth was happening. Here, I strongly feel organic community growth.

Also, I don’t see a ton of downvoting going on in general, and when I do, I generally see responsive comments giving a reason for the downvote. Which is great! That’s an engaging community willing to communicate about their reasons for downvoting, which was always basic reddiquette back in the day.

Does anyone else feel like this? Like they feel energized to be part of a community again? After sort of listlessly feeling like they couldn’t make an impact on reddit, so what was the point?

  • @[email protected]English
    10•1 year ago

    Totally agree, I used to only lurk back in Reddit, but here I feel more inclined to participate. Lemmy feels old school internet and I love it.

  • @imaqtpieAEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    Yeah man I’ve been kinda feeling that this whole time but I couldn’t put my finger on it. The fact that there is no vote fuzzing and no bots, combined with it being smaller as a whole, is such a breath of fresh air. It’s cool to feel like what I post matters to other people and the community as a whole.

    The userbase is definitely much more knowledgeable about internet etiquette and it makes all the difference. God, reddit has gotten so bad nowadays, it’s just low effort content pandering to the lowest common denominator.

  • @[email protected]English
    6•1 year ago

    I feel like I engaged way more in the live thread for the NBA Finals last night than most live threads on Reddit. Part of it was the smaller community, but part of it was also the actual chat feature that Lemmy has, so you don’t need to constantly refresh and scroll back down to see new comments

  • ParsleyEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Is anyone here old enough to remember SomethingAwful and communities like that from the early 2000s? Lowtax drama aside, during its hayday the community was the source of so many OG memes. Here’s hoping that Lemmy will have that nostalgic feeling.

    • Hot SaucermanOPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      I remember SomethingAwful being the spearhead for getting Anderson Cooper to do a story on reddit’s /r/jailbait! They weren’t standing for that shit over in SA and made sure the media ran with a story about reddits unsavory side.

      At least that’s my memory, I remember a lot of anti-reddit-gross-shit organizing on SA during that period.

      EDIT: Also, in the theme of early 2000’s communities, MetaFilter is still going strong! They are similar to SA in that you had to pay a small fee to even make an account. They are one of the only places on the internet to this day which treats moderation as a job and pays their moderators. Kudos to MeFites, and hope to see some here.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•1 year ago

    Also, even as communities get larger, smaller instances will still have a small-community vibe so we’ll have the best of both worlds. Plus since everything is FOSS, you’ll have tons of open source devs making improvements at a rate that the Reddit UI & mobile app could never.

    Yeah the future seems pretty bright here.