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?
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.
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.
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.
