Some of you who are complaining Lemmy are seeing though rose-tinted glasses about what reddit was like back in the day. The majority of the site was never good, and it had always had plenty of embarassing/messed up things on there that you had to sift through, but it's a different, sterile kind of bad now.
Here are a couple of reminders of what reddit was actually like, in no particular order.
Ron Paul
Faces of Atheism, "Euphoric"
AdviceAnimals, Rage Comics
Spacedicks
r/jailbait
The entire Boston bomber saga
This is why I would never admit to using reddit in public, and until recent years, I would imagine most people won't.
So if anyone complains about how the current content on Lemmy is driving people away, remember, Lemmy is positively TAME compared to this supposedly "Golden Era" of reddit.
honestly it's replaced reddit for me in a good way, because it has just enough new content that I can check it before bed every day and scroll for a bit, but not enough to where I spend entire lunch breaks on it. sometimes I go days without even checking it. if anything it's made my relationship with my browser / phone healthier than reddit.
Give yourself some grace, yes corporate social media is addictive and yes it is easy to get lost mindlessly scrolling but the important question to ask is why is your brain so exhausted and stressed that mindlessly scrolling is the only thing you really have the mental energy to do so much of the time?
Western society repeatedly slams through the narrative that social media addiction is the reason people are miserable and it is all a pathetic attempt to distract us from the fact that our lives suck because of actual horrible things like not being able to afford rent, being in endless debt, not being able to afford healthcare and any number of other awful stresses.
If you need to blob out and scroll after getting out of your shitty job that pays shit where you are treated like shit and sitting in shitty traffic on the way home for who knows how long that’s on society for only providing predatory options that abuse you.
For a lot of people the only thing they actually have the energy to do after work every night is mindlessly scroll, it is a grace that people at least have that to turn to even if it is predatory. It is a symptom not the core issue.
Honestly, good. The Internet was better when people were spread out across many small message board and chat rooms. The golden age of the Internet was when you'd do a search for something and 500 different forms and little websites would pop up.
Now's it's all reddit, "X," and shitty corporate owned nonsense. We turned 2020 Internet into 90's cable TV.
Total monthly posts exploded after Spez enshitified Reddit, and is still growing steadily month over month.
That suggests that the current decline in monthly active users is primarily because lurkers who only came to lemmy after initially hearing about it on Reddit, went back to lurking Reddit.
The number of users that are contributors is still growing, and that’s what’s important.
Yep, arrived during the initial digg exodus, had tens of thousands of posts at Reddit, modded two subreddits. Closed my account the day during the protests and haven’t been back.
I’m not as active here, mostly due to a busier life but found a new home anyway.
I'm close to that too, but I think mine was 13 years. The weird thing that I've noticed is that most of the time I was on Reddit, almost no one I talked to in real life used Reddit. I struggled for years to try to get people to check the site out. Now that I left, I swear I hear someone I know mention Reddit exponentially more often. The average person doesn't give a damn about how shitty the platform has become, because they weren't around to see what it used to be. The average person WANTS to see ads interspersed with their cookie cutter content with stupid ass features like chat and followers. Good riddance.
I'm still seeing so much growth in new content and communities, idk if the raw number of users is the metric we even should care about. Is it the best measure of quality?
I also think a big part of it is how active users are counted. Saw in a different thread that it only counts accounts who have commented or posted in the last month. Well.. I browse and vote on probably an average of 30-50 posts and many of their comments every single day, but the last comment I left was over a month ago.
I also wonder if the active user count is counting people who made multiple accounts across different instances and was therefore always massively overinflated to begin with. I have 5 lemmy accounts - one on lemmy.world when I first joined, one on lemmynsfw for happy fun times, and 3 more trying to find a different instance with the de federation policy and hoster that I wanted after lemmy.world was going through their ddos downtime issue.
