I mean, making a post about hating on Reddit, on Lemmy, is pretty circlejerky too at this point.
There's a key difference, at least when it comes to hating Reddit.
Most [all?] users here have actual, informed reasons to hate Reddit, from past experiences with the site. They aren't simply joining some bandwagon due to social expectations to bend to the crowd.
Whenever I stumble on reddit I make sure to post disinformation or some kind of dumb shit to throw a wrench into the LLM training data they sell to google.
I hate to ruin this for you, but if you post nonsense, it will get downvoted by humans and excluded from any data set (or included as examples of what to avoid). If it's not nonsensical enough to be downvoted, it still won't do well vote wise, and will not realistically poison any data. And if it's upvoted... it just might be good data. That is why Reddit's data is valuable to Google. It basically has a built in system for identifying 'bad' data.
4chan, in part, ruined real life. So much of the initial meme buzz around Trump came directly from 4chan - god emperor, etc. /b/ and /pol/ had large coordinated campaigns to boost Trump for lulz and to fuck with people. These made the news occasionally and were sometimes quite wide-reaching. Edit: not to forget Qanon, pizzagate, etc.
Additionally, 4chan is responsible for a massive swathe of meme culture more broadly. Most people don't dredge its depths or even know "the hacker named 4chan" exists, but it has been a massively influential force.
imo redditors and 4channers think too highly of themselves if they believe they have real influence on elections. Most people aren't online (except for Facebook), and politics are much more readily explained by material causes such as the Dems fcking up the post 2008 economic recovery and going for austerity instead of investment. The biggest proximate cause (non-material/economic) is just that hilldawg ran a bad campaign that didn't focus enough on swing states (but she won the popular vote, congratulations).
There have been dark corners of the internet for several decades now. 4chan is just one. Trump didn't achieve popularity because of it. There aren't enough users, and there certainly aren't enough politically and economically influential users, for that to be true.
I was one of those. Before Lemmy, nothing was truly an alternative for Reddit. There were alternative Twitter-like sites up the ass and Facebook; but nothing similar to Reddit's layout/presentation.
Restricting search results to reddit is still a nice way to filter out corporate junk and just get honest end user opinion on things. As much as I hate the management of the platform now, you have to remember that Reddit didn't always used to be shit. Aaron Swartz was a co-founder.
I've made an active effort to bookmark any active forums I come across. Even Lemmy doesn't quite fill the niche that actual forums provide, though it is still useful.
Lemmy still has a lot of problems reddit does, just smaller and weirder. It's probably not possible to create a "perfect" social media platform, but there still seems like room for a new type of social network that's federated but isn't a clone of something else.
Civfanatics. I actually joined up long before I ever signed up for Reddit. It's probably the one site besides Youtube that I've consistently used since middle school.
I still use reddit for looking up information even after deleting my account. Yesterday i decided i wanted to compile the zen kernel for fedora. And reddit had the best guide for doing so. And what settings were worth a damn.
Gotta disagree with that. I remember the rampant elitism and tribalism, the shock-culture, isolation of communities, casual bigotry that would make modern 4chan blush, arbitrary forum rules irregularly enforced, etc etc etc.
For all the modern internet's problems, its communities are much more connected, it's much more accessible and less elitist, that shock-culture died out, the casual bigotry became contentious instead of accepted, and corporate running the show on most of these sites means that appeals and reversals are much easier than when you would rub some mod the wrong way and get permabanned from a forum you were a long-time member of. Never happened to me, but I saw it numerous times.
It's gonna die like Digg or Fark ... Which are still around, but shells of their former selves.
TBH most normal folks haven't even heard of Reddit, let alone Lemmy or Mastodon.
I disagree with you on how well known Reddit is, it's been mentioned in enough news stories over the years that most people have heard of it, even if they've never been there.
AI means Reddit will always look alive at a glance.
Like you still get some people complaining that lemmy isn’t active enough for them to leave Reddit, even though they’re just hanging out with bots all day.
They will also just casually full bore ban you because you were mass reported.
That's what someone I talked to theorized happened to me.
I was banned for posting "I think my right to punch Nazis should be protected by law".
Not kill, murder, maim, I didn't even name any groups where there was a lick of grey area, Nazis, the one group that since WWII, everyone has agreed are alright as a universal bad guy.
I had a 10+ year old account with like 1.5m karma get full stop banned for reasons behind my comprehension. I wasn't doing any overt racism, misogyny, violent rabble rousing... Nothingworse than vehemently disagreeing with somebody and calling them an idiot or a clown.
I only suspect I triggered a nerve which got me mass reported to an extent that I got caught in the dragnet. Being disagreeable was a ban worthy offensive maybe??
Overly sensitive fuckwits with brittle feelings. I am the same ol' dumbass I always was but the culture shifted towards "business casual" away from being more like "diet 4chan"
I had an account of similar magnitude banned. Why? Because on January 6th, on the very day, I wondered aloud why there weren't soldiers repelling the crowd of insurrectionists trying to overthrow our democracy with machine gun fire. I'm sorry, but if a crowd of thousands of people shows up with the intent of hanging the vice president and overthrowing the government? Well, you made your choice if you're in that group. The correct response to a group like that is to first give them plenty of warning. But if they persist, use whatever force is necessary to repel them.
Other things I've been banned for:
Telling an overt bigot posting in an LGBT sub to go kindly "go die in a fire."
Suggesting, before the ruling, that if SCOTUS ruled that the president was completely above the law that he should simply drone strike Supreme Court justices to produce a majority on the court that would repeal his new powers.
Evading bogus bans.
At this point I've got a lifetime ban from there. And you know what? I'm fine with it. The policies on reddit remind me of the blind "zero tolerance" policies that have screwed over so many in American high schools. When I was in high school years ago, the standard was "zero tolerance" for violence of any kind. If a bully attacked a victim, they would both get in trouble. Being the victim was no defense. It was zero tolerance, zero thought. And that is the standard that is now used on reddit. They'll still allow racist dogwhistles and entire subreddits run by hate groups, but as long as you don't cross a handful of explicit lines, you're fine. You can openly celebrate the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Gaza, but tell one bigot to go die in a fire, and suddenly you're banned.