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The humor is way more redditty on lemmy. Which I realize sounds nonsensical, but a huge portion of lemmy users are former reddit users who both think reddit humor is funny and have like 10 years of reddit humor memes to draw on. The “early” (2012ish) reddit I’m remembering had less of that and a lot more of what current users would consider cringe, like f7u12 comics. And a lot more general weird nerd awkwardness… like the frozen soap post.
A lot of early reddit humor was 4chan/9gag humor though.
Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not saying that reddit was a bastion of original comedy. It just didn’t have what I would call reddit humor at that point in time because that took a decadeish to get to where it is now.
I started regularly using Reddit in 2013 and r/funny was general low quality spam from there sites, with A LOT of reposts, basically all content was the same content on loop. r/adviceanimals was huge and was basically a mashup of shower thoughts, jokes, off my chest and general opinionated statements, and it was huge. r/f7u12 was big but already seen as declining and cringe.
The humour here isn’t just Reddit style, the enormous amount of shitpost humour here is reflected in basically all “taking to chronically online strangers” community on the internet, from twitter to discord etc. I’d say shitpost humour outweighs all the other humour in this site.
What Lemmy absolutely does have in common with old Reddit is the userbase being a bunch of trekie programmers. It used to be tech support on their office computers and now it’s software developers on their home Linux machines but the way people talk and act is really similar. In old Reddit days, it was so easy to assume that whoever you spoke to was in work that it was the normal assumption, and you’d see a massive uptick in porn on r/all when evening hit in America. Summer Reddit was a name given to the school kids who’d suddenly swarm the sites in the summer holidays during office hours, and the average age and humour had a noticeable shift.
Lemmy now feels like a site of similar in their 30s but they don’t have 9-5 desk jobs where they browse Lemmy all day, so the hourly and daily trends don’t really align like they used to, now it’s all the classic trends at once as teenagers use Lemmy on their phones in school and work from home means people are shitposting and jerking off all day and night.
Rage comics aren’t cringe. If anything, a lot of modern memes are just reskins of rage comics.
Honestly miss rage comics, most of them were pretty cringe and reskinned 4chan greentext but there was a surprising amount of creativity and humor that could be put into them when people were doing more than just following a formula for imaginary Internet points.
Thinking of things like the time someone did the entire Bohemian Rhapsody song in rage comic form.
Reddit in 2010-2012 also had a lot of really insufferable atheists everywhere. Someone would say something like “thank god everyone’s ok” and get downvoted while a bunch of people replied stuff like “if god is responsible for them being ok, then he would also be responsible for the crash and shouldn’t be thanked at all”.
As a queer trans dude who grew up in a deeply southern baptist community in the rural south, nobody is ever going to be able to make me care about atheists saying mean things about Christians online ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I maybe didn’t use the best example, but it was less about people actually being religious and instead if they used any sort of popular phrasing that had any slight religious element they would try to turn it into a religion debate.
A better example is that someone might post a polish word, someone else would reply “bless you” acting like the polish word was a sneeze sound, and then the 14-year-old atheists would descend and start a debate.
I definitely remember some of that and being annoyed by it; sorry for misunderstanding your first post, I’ve run into a lot of people who are weirdly defensive of how society being more overtly Christian back then was good, when it was absolute hell for some of us.
This is the best kind of people coming to an understanding.
On one hand, it clearly showed me how much theist bullshit exists on both my culture and the internet anglicentric one.
On the other hand, it makes me see very clearly how much I don’t care about the origins of culture instead of its immediate values.
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Sorry my PTSD and instance choice inconvenienced you.
I don’t get the cynism, I never implied any of those things. My heart to you on dealing with the trauma, really.
Most people on blahaj seem to have similar problems however and it makes for strange interactions, like this one here. I’m not sure how pointing out you probably were not thinking clearly in the comment above is bothering you so much. I mean, you’re even the one talking about PTSD I reckon, not I.
Good luck with everything, hopefully you can read this before overzealous mods decide to delete it too.
Lemmy has its own version of that with self declared “leftists”
That sounds soooooo tiresome.
Believe or don’t. I don’t care. Just don’t get on a soapbox about it.
I was probably one of those insufferable idiots for a while, as I was still new to atheism at the time. Now I don’t really waste energy on that stuff. Nobody cares. It’s just being annoying. Reminds me of another trend that’s happening today… but I’m not about to point that out.
Vagueposting is lame. Either say something or don’t. Don’t call attention ot what you’re not saying.
I can look at the earliest posts and comments on my account from 10 years ago and cringe at my past self. I’ll definitely be able to do the same with this account in the future haha
Reddit as it became mainstream turned more into 9gag where everyone is just doing the same jokes for best results. Whenever you have some sort of score, you will have people optimizing for that.
Because in Lemmy upvotes don’t matter so much, I notice that there’s less pressure from people to rehash and repost memes and jokes.
There’s no jailbait, no upskirts, no fatpeoplehate, so Lemmy is still better
Right why would we want to be that
Don’t forget about all the gore subreddits like /r/WatchPeopleDie
I miss those. And eyeblech. I wish Lemmy had some of those.
I used to be against those, but then it kind of shifted for me with all the cartel videos. It brought to life the horrors of what they are doing to normal people.
While it’s not for everyone, that stuff does have its place. Reddit banning all those subs when the Christchurch shooting happened was stupid.
That was banned a while ago.
To be fair, we’re talking about Reddit ten years ago.
And when that was banned, we got eyeblech and NSFL__
https://lemmy.world/c/upskirtbabes
Someone made this and apparently abandoned it.
no upskirts 🤣
you must have NSFW filtered.
There was a subreddit where people took upskirt creep pics of random women, not models. If that’s happening somewhere on Lemmy I hope our instance is
federateddefederated with it. Porn is one thing but that was awful.Edit: Goddamn spell check makes me sound like a fucking scumbag
Wow, I was there for the others but I wasn’t aware of an upskirt trend. If it’s what it sounds like, seems like a crime
“Consent” was not a popular topic on early Reddit. Or the internet writ large, I guess.
I think it got banned around the same time as the jailbait sub. Reddit was and is a cesspool
I miss fatpeoplehate.
No. Not even slightly. Fifteen years ago reddit was still far bigger and more active than the fediverse.
Here there’s barely any content today, back then I was regularly getting 30+ pages deep into reddit when I couldnt sleep most nights, and I wasn’t even close to the end of that days content.Yeah and here I can scroll through all the new content in less than an hour.
No. I’d say the whole internet felt different 10+ years ago. Including this, what people are on here and how they behave. And I’d day the average intellect is different. But that could also be me growing up.
It’s different but the same. We used to get hit by the conservative bury brigades. Now, we get people actually trying to steer the narrative with somewhat thoughtful bad faith arguments.
It’s far more insidious now, and takes vigilance to shut down.
I don’t remember that many political arguments. At least not this way conservative<->progressive. I remember them mostly from the comment section of news articles and YouTube videos (since YT has been a thing) and of course Twitter. But less so from dedicated discussion places like forums and such. But my perspective is probably skewed. I wasn’t really part of early Reddit. And I’m not American and we have/had different discussions here. Well… Maybe I wasn’t that interested in political discussions on the internet when I was young(er). But the places I used to frequent were more focused on specific topics, technology and not about ideology (apart from free software ideology.)
But trolling, flaming, baiting etc has been part of internet culture for a long time. I don’t remember how they called brigading before Reddit. I think that is a term I learned in the last few years.
I really enjoyed various communities on usenet. But most of my favouites moved to FB and usenet is now a cesspit of spam. I learned a hell of lot from alt.solar.pv and alt.energy.renewable, and made some great connections via aus.motorcycles. But I wouldn’t bother going there today, even in one of the few remaining feeds.
I feel like Lemmy has WAY more crazy political views, like extreme leftist and BoTh SiDeS people. That’s probably more of a symptom of Russian propoganda across the wider Internet that wasn’t as prevalent 10+ years ago.
a symptom of Russian propogandm
There it is. All you needy to say really.
This also depends on what instances your instance federates with though. You could go to an instance that defederates from the more politically extreme instances.
I think it also depends on what communities you interact with.
I got fed up with it in the Lemmy.world news community and unsubscribed. I’ve been much happier following that change.
There are still some leftist and both sides hot takes I run into … but it’s a much more acceptable pacing now.
TIL that egalitarianism and saving humanity from unrestrained capitalism is extremely left.
Not really, it’s way more decentralized than reddit.
And there is a lot less users.
Eh, if you go back far enough, there was a time when reddit had fewer users than the fediverse has now.
I was on reddit 10 years ago. Different vibes than old reddit for sure. Still way less users on Lemmy.
“users” is plural and countable so it should be “are” and “fewer”
Context.
Here it’s being used a singular group of things.
Like, a herd of cows is a singular thing made up of lots of individual things.
If you lost 50% of the herd, you wouldn’t say you had fewer herd
You’d say you have less of a herd.
But language is what we make it, it’s why the rules are blurry
Your argument is supporting the comment you’re replying to. “Users” is equivalent to “cows” in your example, not “herd”. If you lost 50% of the herd, you’d still have a herd of cows, but you’d have fewer cows, just like there are a lot fewer users in this instance.
Herd is closer to userbase. Lemmy has a userbase; Reddit has a userbase. Lemmy’s userbase has a lot fewer users than Reddit’s.
“users” is a singular group in this context.
It’s not, but even if it was, the original comment would be grammatically incorrect.You wouldn’t say “You have a lot less herd”. “Less of a herd” would work, “Your herd is a lot smaller” would work better, but it was written originally as though ‘users’ was a collection of individuals, not a userbase as a singular item.
“There are a lot fewer users” is the proper grammar. You wouldn’t say “There is users online”, you’d say “There are users online” because users is plural. “There is a user online” would be singular.
Both may be correct depending on the speaker. English has exceptions to everything… I learned that from a European.
Here it’s being used a singular group of things
It’s not singular, “users” is plural. “A group of users” is singular, but “users” is referring to multiple individuals. The correct verb to use with users is are.
For example, you would be incorrect to say “There is users online”, but you could say “There is a group of users online”.
You really need to be ‘that’ guy
I was doing this on Reddit 10 years ago, so…
You keep at it, buddy
And a lot less people posting “what’s something that used to be cool, but isn’t now?” posts every single day. It’s gotten to the point where I can usually guess what the top answer will be.
Mm yes, reddit started with out with tens of thousands of users over night.
I think the situation here on lemmy is pretty comparable to early reddit. People forget it started out as mostly a nerdy programmer centric site as well, and then grew from there. It’s a bit jarring to see people here insisting on artificially creating communities and pushing/guiliting people into posting more just to bring the numbers up. “the narwhal bacon’s at midnight” (although it was always cringe) started because reddit was a niche site less known than 4chan to begin with, so it was just a nonsensical dog whistle.
Do I miss the focused subreddits around specific topics? Sure, but I also think they will come naturally with time if lemmy survives just as they did with reddit. And the whole reason we’re here today to begin with is because of an unsatiable hunger for growth.
I guess I meant more of community/user feel? Whenever I browse reddit (w/o account, don’t hurt me) the popular is full of AITA, AIO and such.
What’s AIO?
I’ve always hated AITA sooooo much. Everything is so fake and the idiot comments make me want to gouge my eyes out.
I am a much different person today than I was when I started at reddit so many years ago, so that might have something to do with my assessment, but –
Federated social media today is like what reddit was maybe eight years ago. Fills a hole, bearable, occasionally really good, but still a lot of shitposting and propaganda. Ten, twelve and more years ago, reddit was a really good place. As above, maybe it’s because I was younger then, maybe it’s because the world has changed so very much in the meantime. I’m sure those play into it, but in any event, it was better then than the fediverse of today, content-wise.
Never will be what Reddit was or is, because it’s based on federation and defederation.
yup. helps that there’s no spez and no r/jailbait too
I did miss the original dark humor of r/imgoingtohellforthis, before it turned into people just posting outright racist and homophobic garbage.
I wonder how the shift from Reddit to Lemmy compares to the shift from Digg to Reddit.
Lemmy has a much smaller user base
I forgot about Digg. Whatever happened to it?
They had a site redesign to garner more monetization.
They also had power users who dominated post and drove the control of conversation. (MrBabyMan?)
The redesign elevated paid advertisers to the front page, masquerading as real articles.
Suddenly 1/4th of the top content was fluff articles not very subtly advertising shit
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I’ve been on Reddit for 16 years and I’d say yes it’s very similar. Like Reddit back then it was very tech focused and quite liberal.
I do think people are a bit more vicious online these days than they used to be and a bit more polarised.
From a content perspective there used to be more blog content than tech news content, but it’s fairly similar. What I like about Lemmy is it’s far less commercial and the conversation is more genuine.
However I don’t think Lemmy will become Reddit in 15 years, I think it may languish in eternal obscurity and I’m actually okay with that.
Reddit exploded when Digg crumbled and the same could happen with Reddit crumbling but idk, there seems to be some stickiness to Internet websites these days.
Regarding stickiness, perhaps it’s because the internet is ubiquitous now. Fifteen years ago, those of us on Fark and Digg and Reddit came to the internet for a lot of things. Notably, we kept in touch with friends that way (MySpace and Facebook) and in particular, we got our news that way. My parents were incredulous forever and still kinda are that I “don’t watch the evening news.” Now everyone uses it for everything. The big difference is that the early adopters are naturally more open to change because they adopted something that was a change. The rest of the population was slowly pushed into it. Now they don’t want to leave the sites that they’re used to (e.g. Reddit and Facebook) because they aren’t that open to change in the first place.
No, absolutely not. Lemmy is held together by “it’s not Reddit” while Reddit was “here’s this cool stuff!”
Way smaller.
Pretty much. At least Lemmy is a lot more like Reddit was when I started on Reddit (~2015), than Reddit is now.
The humor reminds me of early reddit. Very needy. Lots of Star Trek, Stargate and Linux. Of course there are a lot of differences too, but it does feel a little closer to the original techie reddit base.
Close…but no.
Reddit was good for some fresh content, but a decade ago it was still a lot of bots and karma whoring taking over, reposts, and people falling over themselves to be the first to make the flippant quips that got all the upvotes on any topic. Reddit still did have all the nsfw/nsfl subs then, so there was still a little Wild West left in it.
That said, Reddit very much still had a community feel to it a decade ago. IMO that’s completely gone in all but the niche subs that are there specifically for the community. You don’t get to have conversations there much anymore. It’s usually someone deriding you pretty quickly when they disagree, and the downvote button is the first thing hit.
Lemmy is IMO still trying to settle on what it actually is. I think it’s better than Reddit was a decade ago because people are more inclined to converse than quip (though that very much does happen) but the low hanging fruit comment doesn’t always get the most upvotes, which is really nice. I enjoy that the fediverse is a group of connected communities rather than a bunch of communities all under one roof like Reddit - but I guess that’s the point, isn’t it?
No, it’s better.
