Reddit admins repeatedly asked mods how to make like for them better. And then repeatedly ignored almost every single answer they got, rolling out features nobody wanted and taking away things people used. It was the years and years and years of putting in hours and hours of time working against the enshittification that made me tired, and then it was the stupid fucking over-reaching AI moderation that caused me to leave after my accounts started being banned for no good reason with appeals failing.

It took far too long for them to drive me away, as I know it did for a lot of others.

I don’t know, size made it pretty bad. Subreddits with hundreds of thousands or more users create environments where no one is trying to have a discussion. People are just vying for attention. That creates an environment where comments are either all jokes, or all snark. It’s really, really hard to have anything that resembles a human experience in a place like that. People stop recognizing each other as people, and just treat everyone as an audience.

That makes for a pretty bad experience.

No, what made Reddit bad was incivility, bots, trite comments, and theme accounts (and my axe!). It was massively popular, which exacerbated this stuff, and it incentivized upvotes.

Lemmy has upvotes but people seem less interested in them.

Here, we have the ability to mute toxic groups (defederate). We are decentralized, so it’s not just one dickhead in charge. Our users are, for the most part, civil and somewhat intelligent and funny.

I was with Reddit from 2012-2015ish and then lurking on and off until the API shit storm, and we are nothing like Reddit in my opinion - not that that was the intent of the original post but still

I see the point but I don’t necessarily agree. Before the intense commercialization Reddit had definitely changed for the worse for me because of the influx of people.

I stopped talking about Linux because Winbros would brigade me. I stopped talking about politics because I would be brigaded by western/capitalist bros. The discussions also got a lot worse over time and nuanced opinion was almost always down voted and brigaded.

I fear the same would happen for lemny if we suddenly had a hundred million users. Having a good community is desirable, but having a ton of people not so much so.

We know… we were there.

Brute force moderation is what killed it IMHO. Same shit that as happening to .world

Size and commercialisation generally go hand in hand. After all, how do you keep something running with infinite users submitting infinite content for free?

This is a big issue for everyone, it’s important that the fediverse understands that size might some day increase the importance of sensible business models or proactive funding initiatives to counter the growth. This doesn’t mean harmful profit models necessarily, but it does mean keeping revenues under control for individually run nodes or for archiving services for old fediverse domains that might not exist forever.