Title
Not really, it’s way more decentralized than reddit.
And there is a lot less users.
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.
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.
“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.
Both may be correct depending on the speaker. English has exceptions to everything… I learned that from a European.
“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.
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
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.
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.
Kinda got the same small in crowd vibe as old 2012 reddit, but less big and more jaded.
It’s big enough to binge for a few hours but you do run out and got to wait, I was in withdraw for a little. Mods, mods never change.
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.
Lemmy now is like when Reddit was like slashdot
Which was when Slashdot was like BBS before the Eternal September
No, absolutely not. Lemmy is held together by “it’s not Reddit” while Reddit was “here’s this cool stuff!”
We need a new meme style to explode and the small communities to grow, then we’d be there.
Lemmy’s far smaller than Reddit was 10 or even 15 years ago.
There are some good foundations in place, but there’s a loonnnggg way to go before we’re seeing platform maturity.
Kind of. Reddit 15+ years ago still had a larger user base than Lemmy did, but it feels kind of close to how Reddit did back then. Lemmy still needs some work, it has a long way to go, but I do like it so far.
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.
No but hopefully it is something better than Reddit has ever been. It’s awesome watching the community grow and cater to more niche interests.
It definitely feels more robust and a lot more activity in recent weeks/months. It takes a lot longer to get to the infinite porn posts in All.
Not really, no, but it is good in it’s own way.
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.
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?
*15+ years ago
No, Reddit 10 years ago was the kind of place where people who knew things would correct people who didn’t.
Pretty much all social media today, including Lemmy, are now places where people who don’t know things correct people who do.
Are you sure it isn’t just a case of you having seen it a thousand time now and can spot bullshitters and couldn’t do it a decade ago?
No. I used to abuse Cunningham’s Law liberally. It’s become next to worthless these days.
Edit: Literally here’s an example of people down voting and trying to correct true information: https://lemmy.world/comment/10376712
It still works in highly technical areas.
Or if you’re a machinist someone will tell you the right way to do something as soon as they see you have the material. By the time you have it in the machine 6 other guys will have told you the right way to do it in six wildly different ways. Someone will suggest Vaseline instead of coolant. Someone will start bitching about Haas. Someone will insist that it’s only possible with thru spindle coolant, regardless of depth. None of which matters because your code won’t post to the 40 year old 3 axis mill you’re using and the engineer gave you a print with impossible geometry anyway. GEE I DON’T KNOW TERRY DO YOU THINK THIS HUNK OF STEEL LOOKS LIKE YOUR PART YET
Anyway my point is sometimes there’s more than one right answer, even if everyone says they have the one right answer.
Sometimes technical specifications limit you to a specific set of right answers, but the right answers you get are for different set ups entirely.
and sometimes, the circumstances surrounding your failure were given to you by the engineer in a state that was destined to fail, whether they knew it or not.
t. someone that doesn’t know anything that gets corrected all the time.
You couldn’t be more wrong you stupid idiot. /s
The internet as a whole was so much better for this.
Free speech and exchanging of idea and views was great. Most of my time on YouTube was spent looking at out and out discussions, back and forth, about religion. Which seeing as I went to a religious school I didn’t really have anyone to talk to that was very helpful for me.
Now people come to a conclusion and stick with it. But they also get encouraged by people doing exactly the same upvoting their view and down voting others. Evidence doesn’t matter. Reddit and redditors used to encourage upvoting alternative opinions.
People are going so far as to want certain views banned just because it isn’t their view. It’s scary how much people want to be restricted. Reddit used to be great for free speech but now its terrible. I was hoping Lemmy would, by it’s federated nature, be an exchange of different ideas and views but if anything it is a lot worse. (I actually find the mods to largely be okay. But the people are terrible, worse than reddit is at this moment it time)
So no Lemmy is nothing like reddit of old at all. I’d love to go back to reddit from 10 years ago.
Well said on all counts.
Reddit was never perfect, but in my 12+ years there, it was never as bad as Lemmy has been the entire time I’ve been here.
Basically I’m only still active here because Reddit’s mobile app is such trash and Lemmy is more convenient to browse from a phone.
I was hoping that by being such a small and growing community I could help influence it’s growth.
But watching how incorrect things about economy/business are upvoted, I’m getting sick of being down voted for having an economics degree and attempting to share some knowledge.
For me its the growing extremist stances and ragebait articles, now that its got more users, the horrendous lack of moderation is starting to show
It’s a 50/50 chance that something I post gets downvoted to hell and it doesn’t seem to matter what I actually said.
On the bright side, I’ve seen more posts calling it out lately, so maybe things can start to turn around.
Yeah, my main sub I participated in back on Reddit was /r/AcademicBiblical (also went to a religious-ish school growing up).
There’s nothing like that sub here, and honestly even the sub itself isn’t quite what it used to be when I pop back over to look in from time to time.
The web is just a different sort of place from what it used to be.