alt Hacker NewsLess than moderation, my biggest problem with e.g. Reddit is that Reddit isn't one destination, it's a million. I go to Reddit for a specific set of sub-reddits much more than the site itself. Each one of those has its own separate network effect.
The biggest shot Lemmy has is that Reddit is taking every possible step to drive users away - just today I had to install another block rule because I started getting obtrusive overlays to drive me to the mobile app even when browsing it logged in on my desktop.
But even then, the fact that so many of us are willing to go to increasingly extreme lengths to keep using Reddit for various subreddits even as the site gets worse and worse shows just how sticky the network effect of the existing communities is.
I've been in some of them for nearly two decades, and finding a community with the same topic elsewhere won't reproduce the set of people.
Replies
> I go to Reddit for a specific set of sub-reddits
Same here. r/ProgrammingLanguages was great until about four or five years ago. Now the contributions guide is mostly about what you may not post and you almost need a lawyer to find out what is allowed, and the mods again have another opinion about this than what is written and just delete stuff. The result is that I didn't see an interesting post in month.
I am literally here now because reddit became so unbearably botted that I deleted my account in disgust.
Yeah, lemmy is alright but doesn't have a critical mass of users (and may never have that).
I suspect that Reddit is running into similar problems with a slowly dying user base. The reason I suspect this is because Reddit has slowly started to try and hijack the UX to force me into seeing and interacting with subreddits I don't want to see or interact with. The default UX is now "You might be interested in this because you viewed that".
I've noticed a number of formerly pretty active subreddits to be ghosts of their former selves. I've also noticed a ton of new subreddits pop up that appear to be just a mass of bots trying to hook in real users.
A big part of the Reddit problem is that reddit has made it as hard as possible to tell whose a bot. You end up noticing a bunch of 3 month old accounts swarming whenever certain topics come up but you can't dig into their history to see if this is what they always do.
All and all, it feels like the social internet is just dying. I feel like I'm getting more value by revisiting the old forums. (See ya'll at anandtech).