Many of us have seen it happening in the last 4-5 years. reddit subs, and reddit in general has become a bit s***. Of course there are still good subs, especially the truly niche ones can often have a small helpful crowd. But with 100s of thousands of users, some sub drown in hate and negativity.
I’ve been thinking about why. With the offical reddit app, reddit is as easy as facebook, many people even refer the the platform as an “app”. Perhaps this ease of use attracts the wrong kind of people. This place is currently very far removed from this. You applied to get in, you chose this instance on the fediverse among a selection of other instances.
Calling it a concern would overstating things, but I think maybe we shouldn’t strive to become as ubiquitous as reddit has become. A couple of 100K users on this instance and maybe a couple of million spread across the fediverse is enough users. The ‘gate’ you have to go through to register actually makes this place so much better than reddit.
What are your thought?
I am reading this and commenting from kbin.social.
I hear you and agree that reddit was peak awful in the past few years, but I do in my heart of hearts want a reddit-like experience.
What I think is intriguing about the Fediverse is that it almost doesn’t matter how many people seem to be on any on instance because they mostly talk to each other.
I commented elsewhere two weeks ago that I think reddit’s redesign attracted a bunch of users who were looking for a facebook-like experience, and at the risk of falling into the false dichotomy of normies vs redditors, I think the redesign brought too many normies who didn’t want to learn reddiquette. I think something that will help kbin immensely is how (I say this lovingly) ugly and mostly featureless it is. There aren’t bells and whistles to make it an attractive draw for any other reason besides you want to be here and engage the content and community.
I do hope that as many of these early instances who seem to be “in it” for the right reasons quickly and unequivocally defederate from instances started up by companies like Meta, though.
I fully agree with you. My only concern is that we’re missing some quality of life improvements. Like it takes two clicks to either go to the All page or my Subscribed mags, these can take one. Just put it in the header. Notifications need to be more visible, I didn’t know I had any until I was trying to switch to my Subscribed view. Images should be viewable without having to go through multiple clicks. It’s small things that make the experience a little less tedious.