A lot of questions on here are aimed at the reddit users experiences, but I’ve been wondering what the older users thought of his move. Are there any reddit cultures you are hoping do not come with the users? Are you confident or fearful of the growth coming from the reddit community? I’m curious how the reddit influx is changing these communities either for better or for worse.
While I had this issue a whole year ago, it’s intensified a lot these last weeks: People just don’t want to lurk and understand the place. I see people calling communities “subreddits”, not reading the rules or basic purpose of the site before signing up and posting and complaining when they get banned, someone asking completely off-topic things in /c/linux, people reacting to titles and not reading the post, people commenting without reading other comments. Especially people coming from popular subreddits and streams where being perfectly redundant is acceptable. If you agree with something and have nothing valuable to add, use the voting instead of burying it! That, and the extra aggression we’ve seen, especially with people getting culture shock from the politics but just in general.
It’s a general attitude of arrogance or uncurious ignorance and it’s hard not to be offended, especially when some of us came here, in part, to get away from that culture.
Also, the normalization of pro-capitalist attitudes is a huge bummer. A non-trivial chunk of people trying to rationalize Reddit’s actions as ‘just a bad CEO’ is unfortunate to see, that narrow-sighted denial of systematic factors and of what makes this ecosystem act differently, it’s unfortunate especially on lemmy.ml which until recently was explicitly anticapitalist.
Again, this isn’t completely new, but it’s suddenly become a huge issue which may no longer be manageable without either mass action calling out inconsiderate attitudes, or harsh moderation.
This!
Just kidding. If it’s any consolation, some people from reddit, like myself, are still trying to learn Fediverse and Lemmy practices but also hated the meme-speak culture of most reddit and the Right-wing politics. I particularly came to Lemmy because it looked like a privacy-friendly place run by and with Leftists that had actual conversations and I’m really happy I could find something like that, instead of the opposite or nothing! So, thank you and everyone else that’s cultivated this place into what it is today! I’m looking forward to a place with real discussion and with people with politics close enough to my own, I also hope it doesn’t get overrun with reddit’s worst qualities.
I am a reddit migrant, but I’ve been lurking off and on for a year or so. Honestly it has a feel like it could be like reddit was a long time ago, smaller communities, more engagement with people that really care about the community, and communities that really feel niche. One of the things that’s sucked to watch on Reddit is the amount of random communities I run into on all that aren’t gaming or another animes soft core hentai subreddits has decreased significantly. So it feels like there are 10 meme subreddits that all post the same picture, 5 politics subreddits that all post the same stories and memes, and then various popular subreddits that just aren’t something I’m into like formula1. I miss finding new interests on all, for example it got me into fountain pens. Or at the very last allowing non-drawn nsfw content on all kept me scrolling long enough to find it lmao.
Absolutely, discovering something new has always been a great part of all sites where users create their own communities. One I know even had a feature where each week they randomly (in a fun game) selected a nominated community to advertise sitewide. I’ve almost completely avoided large communities for the past… eight years, give or take. The fun was always on the fringe, nowhere near as much low-quality attention seeking or dumbing down to twitter screencap reposts there.
The “pro-capitalist” thing isn’t bad IMHO
With Reddit users moving to Lemmy, attitudes on Lemmy become closer to reddit mean: Leaning mid-left due to the majority of users being young western people with many IT workers among them
I remember from the time when Mastodon was very young that many Mastodon instances were explitly far-left,anti-capitalist, queer, or all of this. This caused most other instances to be full.of users who don’t want that so even apolitical instances turned into far-right asshole circlejerks
Then both sides started to federate only among each other
Its not like Trumpists,Incelas and such are the majority. I’d rather deal with some shitty communities on a large instance rather than have to think about who to federate with again with half the instances blacklisted. Its not like we can prevent them from using Lemmy anyway. At least some of them might be positively influenced by exposure to other viewpoints
Do you think open source and free information for all mindsets can’t also believe in capitalism? If lemmy.ml was explicitly anticapitalist but they lost their identity due to the flood of new users like me then that’s regretable, but I wonder if you just don’t want capitalists on decentralized services or not.
A pro-capitalist can absolutely value OS and freedom of information! But there is inherent tension. For one part, private property is a fundamental cornerstone of capitalism, which (I assert necessarily) led to the invention of intellectual property, a direct inhibition to freedom of information. FoI is not within the best interests of any leading business under capitalism, they have an active interest in maintaining market dominance, and the most power to make that happen through harassment or legislation. So, as a result, we get laws like copyright and major government agencies enforcing it even for things like films and medicine. Piracy like LibGen happen in spite of the worldwide attempts of publishers to destroy it.
Wolfballs admin was an example of a pro-FOSS (Lemmy-contributer!) capitalist who was able to provide benefit to with the project because they shared pro-FoI values. I’m not saying pro-capitalists can’t have a place here, or can’t add value, but a huge influx and culture shock is the quickest way for Lemmy sites to forget or misdiagnose the causes of reddit’s failure and the strengths of Lemmy, and try to turn it into an ad-infested crypto-integrated hellscape or otherwise put profit above users. Even basic things like using an advertising income model creates censorship (Manufacturing Consent has a good section explaining this in detail).
Anti-capitalism is deeply rooted in lemmy.ml, and Lemmy, it’s even brought up in the software documentation. It’s not incidental or trivial, it is the cause for many effects. It’s a big part of why we didn’t do what other reddit alternatives did, and avoided their pitfalls. I don’t want to be a product here. So yes, it is sad to see that shift into conflict with the software and community’s founding values, and it’s not just because of some team sports, it’s because profit-seeking is what killed reddit and I don’t want it to kill us.
Thank you for your detailed answer. That makes sense. I also don’t like when things are commercialized and would rather have something like lemmy instances be either a co-op or funded by donations.
I think most hackers, at least in the past, were anarcho-capitalists or crypto-anarchists.
I’d say most hackers were anarchic full-stop. Most probably without any analysis of economic systems, merely a distaste for rules or authority. It’s intrinsic in the act of hacking.
There is certainly a huge influence from (socialist) anarchists, such as zine culture and other punk influence, and rejection of intellectual property (e.g. piracy). “Anarcho-capitalism”, as far as I can interpret, is founded on a respect for property and non-aggression. Hacking is possibly the opposite.
Cyberpunk culture, especially historically but even today despite recuperation, is a direct critique of capitalism-without-government, or where the corporate has become the government, depicting it as a dystopia.