this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023

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Reddit Migration

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Why do some people care so much about making this a new Reddit? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by catboss@feddit.de to c/RedditMigration@kbin.social

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Could anyone explain to my why some people are trying so incredible hard to turn lemmy/kbin into Reddit 2.0?

Reddit wasn't exactly great before this migration wave, it hasn't been an interesting place in quite some time and I sincerely doubt it will get better in the future.

In my opinion most content on there is pretty much trash in a variety of flavors. That and doomscrolling. Sure there is niche subs and I get that losing them to might suck, but everyone managed before we had those and everyone will manage now. There is always the option to remake them somewhere else when Reddit decides to kill them, be it by removing modding tools, drowning the content in ads or what ever malicious shit might happen.

In most cases a massive number of users has been detrimental to the quality of subs. I don't really see the benefit trying to get as many people to switch as possible. In fact I think there is an argument to be made for smaller communities.

There is also a tendency to argue that people shouldn't use Reddit. People also drink till they black out and shouldn't do that either. Or drive their cars over the speed limit. Or pronounce "gif" with a "j". Why not let everyone do what they want, why does this have to be a binary choice or a choice at all?

Maybe a few people just feel like this is some kind of battle that has to be won. It isn't. Reddit will try to make as much money as possible at any cost, it is how most companies operate in capitalistim. You don't have to like it. As a matter of fact I'd respect you more if you didn't. But it is nothing you will fix by trying to "convert" people to Lemmy like you are a Jehovah's Witness of discussion platforms.

Or maybe you are mad at spez. Good, he is an ass. Maybe other people will realize that and take it as a reason to use Reddit less or not at all. Maybe they won't. You don't exactly have agency when it comes to their decision.

So what exactly is it that is driving you? Do people have friends over there they want to bring over here? Do you miss the endless meme subs and can't survive without them?

I clearly don't get it and would very much appreciate some comments, so I might be able to understand your motivation better.

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[–] Otome-chan@kbin.social 75 points 1 year ago (4 children)

personally I just want communities full of stuff that I like and that I'm interested in. as long as it's comfy and I'm getting some good chats, news, and content, I don't really care if it's "like reddit" or not.

[–] Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This.

I think a large contingent were addicted to reddit, including the toxic parts, because they can't recall how good reddit was early on.

Its like getting dumped by a girlfriend; you want it all back, even the shitty parts.

[–] hoilst@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Heh, the growing passive-aggression the last few years definitely was Toxic Ex-Girlfriend territory.

[–] catboss@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

That's a good point I can relate with. I didn't think about it like that. Thanks for both your replies.

[–] NikkiNikkiNikki@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Addiction to the toxins seems to be a selling point for most platforms now .-.

[–] s6original@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree. I came here to find a new place but it seems like many Reddit refugees want to make Lemmy a clone. Hopefully it will all smooth out with time because I have no interest in looking back.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People aren't literally being kicked out of Reddit, Reddit still exists. So I suspect that the refugees you're seeing aren't actually wanting a Reddit clone, since they can still have the real thing if they really want that. They just want certain Reddit features.

And I see nothing wrong with that. Reddit as a whole may have become crappy over the years, but that doesn't mean the right reaction is to reject every possible detail of how it worked. There are some good bits. Reddit has threaded conversations, should Lemmy remove those just because Reddit has them? Copy the good bits.

[–] catboss@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

That is a fair point, thanks.

[–] Onii-Chan@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't care if it gets even remotely as popular either, and almost hope it doesn't. I've been having a great time here, and the userbase is a fraction of the size of reddit. I believe this is a huge reason it's so refreshing; anytime the majority flood a platform, the quality of discussion and content drastically drop. This place is small and niche enough to allow meaningful communities to form.

I haven't enjoyed the internet this much since the mid-00's.

[–] brianshatchet@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Forever September

[–] justanotherjo@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

what they said...

[–] Alexmitter@kbin.social 41 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Both Lemmy and kbin are reddit-like link aggregators. They are to a extend straight copies of what reddit is now, or what reddit was in the past.
In the same way that Mastodon is without any doubt made to be like twitter.

It is only natural that people who liked aspects of reddit would want to see the same aspects here. That does not mean that we need to copy everything, we now have the chance to do things reddit did not.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 1 points 1 year ago

And I hope that Lemmy does things that Reddit didn't, but this is a Wild West time for Lemmy.

Compared to Reddit, there is now an additional level of people "in charge", as Reddit had a united admin and developer role while Lemmy has separate admins and developers. Moreso, the admin role is now as fractured as the mod role, so a common admin policy is no longer possible.

Things are going to get complicated and change is going to be slow by the nature of the federated nature.

[–] catboss@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

That's how I see it as well and why I was wondering about the kinds of posts and topics I have been seeing pop up a lot the last week.

To me it doesn't make much sense to necessarily create a carbon copy of Reddit nor to attract the same audience. But as someone else stated, maybe my opinion of Reddit is just particularly negative.

[–] harmonea@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Reddit wasn't exactly great before this migration wave, it hasn't been an interesting place in quite some time and I sincerely doubt it will get better in the future.

In my opinion most content on there is pretty much trash in a variety of flavors. That and doomscrolling.

This is so much negativity just within the first paragraphs--and much of it presented as objective fact to boot--that I don't think you're going to get as much engagement as you hope from people who are actually enthusiastic about this transition.

How about you try to be the change you want to see? This kind of thing is what I want to leave behind. We can just have a chat without a full page of "everything about this entire opinion seems so stupid but CMV I guess lol" as the premise.

[–] catboss@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is so much negativity just within the first paragraphs--and being presented as objective fact to boot

It is my personal opinion. As stated. Personal opinions are - by their nature - not facts and generally not worth much.

My opinion of Reddit has declined a lot over the years. That is absolutely valid and okay. Nobody has to like it.

I assume your opinion about the service is different and that's why you feel the need to defend it. That's also valid and I can acknowledge it, even if I don't share these feelings.

Regardless of my negative opinion on Reddit and their management, I'd appreciate if other people could share what they think. I really don't get why a good number of people push for mass adoption of lemmy/kbin. If I am too negative for their taste and they don't feel like sharing, then that's fine too. It would be nice to hear their viewpoints, but replying to my question is not mandatory.

[–] Mintyytea@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think they want to push for it, and I'm also encouraging people to give it a try because it's not as good without the members. Most of the subs I miss are too niche so they won't really be populated here if not enough people try this fediverse thing out. I already decided I was okay with giving up the subs, but I think I still want to do my best to try to build this as a platform if it's viable. I don't think just because people are trying to advertise fediverse means they're hardcore stuck on this as a platform and desperate. It's kind of just the natural thing to do for anyone who wants to transition to a large forum. There's a lot of other small forums too besides this one

[–] catboss@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

From my point of view nobody is being stopped from using Reddit. That would be a silly undertaking anyway.

If niche communities are on Reddit and the people of those communities are on Reddit, then why shouldn't you use Reddit for those communities?

I don't get why this is has to be a decision between Lemmy/kbin and Reddit for some folks. That is what is confusing me a lot. Many posts and topics I read recently seemed (at times desperately) trying to bring users from Reddit to lemmy/kbin. Reddit will get worse, going by the current trend. It will become harder to use for many. Some subs will die due to the lack of moderation tools. But everybody is free to use the service for as long as they want to.

But I am glad you don't share my opinion in regards to whether or not people seem desperate or set on these services here. Maybe I have been imagining things.

[–] Mintyytea@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

I do think you are overreacting a little bit about people being potentially invested in the fediverse/invested in trying to find a different home to replace reddit. It's not a bad thing for people to care and be unhappy about the way their reddit forum is being run. Without any emotions at all, there can be no actions or changes done anyway. How would people have transitioned from diggs to reddit if some core users weren't upset enough to test the waters with reddit?

People want to avoid and use reddit less because they don't approve of the way the company is running their product. If you don't feel uncomfortable using reddit, that's great, and you absolutely should just use either/both the way you enjoy it. However, it seems like your argument is that no one should be unhappy to the extent they stop using reddit, and I feel like everyone can have products they don't want to buy anymore due to their internal ethics. It's just a human thing to do to.

[–] AmidFuror@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Why not use Reddit? Because some people are boycotting Reddit out of principle.

[–] Negatively_Positive@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago

Based on what you wrote, it doesn't look like you used reddit for too long. Most of the more interesting things on reddit are very niche (hobbyists), very personal (old askreddit, helpful supportive communities for minorities, big comment threads about global events, etc.), or very regional specific (food, culture, belief, etc.) There are quite a lot of people still use small subs on reddit exactly for those reasons, finding very technical or obscure knowledge is only possible thanks for small communities. That is what many wish to replicate here.

I do not get what you even mean by saying niche subs will survive as they did before. No, there are a lot of sub drama and not all sub survive drama, and this time reddit itself is trying strip contents and agency out of the users and mods. What do you even mean saying it won't effect small subs?

If you just doom scroll lookking at meme pics and comments you aren't really experiencing much other than dopamine content. Just because you do not engage in smaller communities doesn't mean that these changes aren't affecting those people.

[–] terath@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

The parts of Reddit I frequented I enjoyed and want that same sort of content somewhere more open. I don’t care about your opinions on what I like nor anyone else's.

[–] VulcanSphere@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Given that many of recent fediverse newcomers are redditors, it's inevitable that they want something similar to the Snoo Platform.

[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@vlemmy.net 2 points 1 year ago

I really don't want something similar to the Reddit platform.

What I want is for the communities I'm in to move over to the Fediverse. Obviously I subscribed to some brainrot meme communities, as I have also done on Lemmy, but I also subscribed to a lot of deeply informative and useful subs that were the frontpage for serious communities.

For example, I subscribed to /r/DSP to read about real problems in digital signal processing, /r/audioengineering to keep up with the trends in music production, and a plethora of music subs to discover new bands. I subscribed to /r/Calculus, /r/Aspergers, and /r/mathmemes and wrote extensive comments about math and its details. I did this because I wanted to talk about math and things I'm interested in for the sake of doing it. Frankly, a lot of STEM stuff happened on Reddit.

I learned a lot from hobbyists and experts who were just there to engage in their craft. I stayed at Reddit because, at the time, it was still a (relatively) safe haven for people to communicate for the sake of communication, as opposed to a convenient side effect of Reddit doing business. Although it was never a perfect platform in that regard, the human urge to connect managed to pop out of the concrete in spite of Reddit's commercialization of the platform.

I just hope that the niche Reddit communities and their members snap out of it and come over to the Fediverse. I'm not at all ready to recreate Reddit's centralized power structures, but I hope that the good people behind the screens will join us.

[–] catboss@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

I can understand that. It takes some time getting used to and neither the services nor apps are nowhere near as streamlined as they were for Reddit.

Do you think that is the main reason? I don't know, but it doesn't feel like it is enough to motivate someone to spend so much time convincing people here that they need to act now, get new people now, improve things now. Whatever these services here will look like in a year or two, maybe they will be like Reddit. Or maybe they will be different.

[–] derf82@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I actually think reddit was pretty great. There was a reason it was popular. There were some rough spots, sure

You need a large user base to sustain discussion, especially in smaller niche communities.

[–] wilberfan@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah, "our" sub had almost 11K subscribers--not huge by Reddit standards--but I got the sense it was arguably the place on the web to stay up-to-date and informed on our topic. An author of a recent book used our sub for research (among other sources, of course).

[–] Bigworsh@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I used reddit for the past 7 years. And I honestly feel like even back then discussions were barely possible. It always felt like an accumulation of popular viewpoints and everything else was just downvoted to hell.

And once you pass a certain userbase threshhold growth will happen automatically. It is just how social media works. So I don't agree that reddit's popularity is a good indicator for it's quality.

[–] exscape@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

I agree. Most reddit communities are too big for discussion to work. If you show up to a thread when it's on the front page, you're probably too late to be seen. Perhaps you can hijack the top comment, but that's about it.

As long as Kbin/Lemmy has enough people in each community for there to be content and some discussion, I think I'll end up preferring it this way.

[–] UnshavedYak@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I agree.. BUT, i think it's important to also remember that for-profit like Reddit will have incentives to drive engagement patterns which can sometimes (i'm being generous heh) be toxic to the social atmosphere.

Opensource implementations have a chance to change interaction that is more favorable to the user, to the community, etc. I don't believe Lemmy or Kbin offer much here, yet, but Tildes.net talks about this and makes an effort there.

I'd like to see a federated instance that puts more effort in this space. It won't be what Redditors want.. because, well, Reddit built addictive patterns and this is the opposite of that. But nonetheless i think we can make progress on Reddit-likes when we carefully analyze what ramifications Reddit features have.

[–] explodingkitchen@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Everything I've seen thus far is typical of the early days when a contingent of people leave a platform they were once invested in but have left because they were unhappy/dissatisfied...

there will be different perceptions of the abandoned platform, and the larger it was, the bigger the spectrum will be. Reddit was huge; where you hung out is going to shape your impressions of how good/bad it was.

there will be people eager to recreate the communities they enjoyed, and they'll be looking for something just like what they left

there will be people eager to try something totally different

there will be people hurt and angry by the event(s) that caused them to leave, and that will be expressed in different ways, and for different lengths of time. During the initial transition, the former site will be mentioned--a lot--and often with anger/bitterness. Over time, that dissipates, although there will be some people bitching about the old platform until the heat death of the universe. Basically, how you react to shitty things IRL will be echoed here, because guess what? This is another facet of RL.

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Just my thought: Change is hard.

The other reason is scale. We do not need the scale of reddit. But we need enough scale to have a wide enough range of active communities. Where that line is one can debate that. Personally I think it is about now after the reddit migration but I was not here before so do not have that perspective.

[–] AcidTwang@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I like to think, in a similar way to Mastodon, a fair proportion of users here want it to be something totally different and not a new version of Reddit. It doesn't have to be big, or popular, or make headlines, as long as it is a good community with lots of discussion and information that'll do for me.

Personally I would like to leave all the "drama" bollocks behind, that whole atmosphere around the large general-interest subs which dominated and sadly defined The Reddit Experience for casual users and people outside. That's my main desire when not wanting this to be Reddit 2.0, that and a move away from the heavily US-centric bias, in views, content and assumption it's the default lived experience of the users.

[–] eta_aquarid@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

I think the whole federation thing would do wonders on the anti-US-centric-bias end imo

[–] hoilst@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's my main desire when not wanting this to be Reddit 2.0, that and a move away from the heavily US-centric bias, in views, content and assumption it's the default lived experience of the users.

Unfortunately, American lensing isn't a function of reddit, it's a function of Americans, full stop.

[–] AcidTwang@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

True, it just seemed to be a lot more prominent on Reddit for some reason.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

What other large-scale social networks or media sources were you participating in?

I'm Canadian and the US "lensing" of media has always been present even before the Internet became a prominent source for me. It's on TV, it's in the movies, it's in books, and so forth. The reason the US is so prominent in media is simply that the US is prominent, period. Especially when you restrict yourself to the English-speaking subsection of humanity.

It's going to be prominent on Kbin/Lemmy as well. However, there are some good tools here to allow for better internationalization than Reddit had. There are whole instances that are region- or language-specific. I suspect it'll be a lot easier to create communities like "News, but Canada-focused" if you can create news@lemmy.ca or whatever.

[–] AcidTwang@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

The difference between Reddit and other large sources for media is the popular places on Reddit were where you'd encounter US bias, whereas other places were easier to tailor to your locality (I'm in the UK). Maybe it's because you're effectively interacting with a lot of random people whereas Twitter or Facebook you were more likely to be interacting with people you know or who were from the same region.

[–] overzeetop@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

good community with lots of discussion and information

and

doesn’t have to be big, or popular

have a very, very small overlap. The advantage of reddit was it's reach and community size. Do we need the 10M subscriber subs for pics and world news? Not for the core purpose of a vibrant discussion site. Instead, those are advertising (if you will) that gets people in the door to see how deep and wide the communities go. You might stop in because it's a place to see what world new stories people are talking about, and find that there's a community of a hundred others who love creating turtle harnesses from ropes made of human back hair and all of a sudden there's a hundred-and-one of you all discussing harvest methods and weave patterns, or how to identify the right anchor points on a great Mongolian terrapin.

And sometimes it's just fun to kill time on the "big" communities, and it happens to be convenient that they're all in one place. I don't want the drama of reddit, but I like the size because of the depth it implies (and delivers, in many ways, if we're being honest).

[–] sickday@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Probably familiarity. A lot of people joining kbin or Lemmy were using reddit for years prior to their move. Its easier to embrace something that's at least familiar than it is to jump right into something totally different.

[–] Cylusthevirus@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Many people liked Reddit but didn't like the way they were treated, so now they're looking to reclaim what they feel they've lost. It's not complicated.

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