I’ve never been sentimental about a social media site but it’s sad for me to see reddit so clearly killing itself. Pushshift is already banned and Apollo is soon to follow. Reddit will either pivot fully to a mainstream audience or die out. It’s just sad for me to see it doing it to itself.
I feel like reddit dying could be a positive thing for me. For years now I have felt the negative influence that its toxic environment - fueled by impersonal, discordant interactions - had on me. Not to mention the complete destruction of my ability to concentrate caused by the micro dopamine hit targeting of social media UX. I’m hoping that moving to a smaller platform will help with some of that pervasive anger I feel as a result of constant reddit usage.
Absolutely, me too.
There were good things about Reddit, but I recognized a while ago that it was having a negative impact on my mental health. I had already been trying to use it less. On the other hand for the last few days when the Reddit drama has picked up I’ve found myself scrolling through lemmy more, and not necessarily in the positive participatory way that I’d prefer.
We’ll see how it all shakes out in the medium to long term I guess.
I agree that Lemmy could end up filling the same negative voids that reddit does. I suppose my hope is that by restricting the conversation and limiting bad-faith arguments, there will be less toxicity here relative to reddit.
In the end, addicting us with anger and outrage in order to drive participation and clicks is the end-stage of all social media, and that cat is out of the bag. But perhaps there’s a little temperance that can be found if we don’t see social media foremost as an opportunity to harvest data but as a way to interact and share ideas.
At least Lemmy doesn’t employ secret proprietary algorithm pitting, ad injection, dark patterns to funnel people to the bloated battery draining mobile app, shadowbanning or session tracking techniques. Even if I disagree with the politics of this instance I do appreciate a space to actually discuss without corporate interference in a federated platform. I really really hope this kicks in.