Is lemmy now what reddit used to be 10+ years ago?

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.
  
  Rage comics at least took some thought to put together. I still think they're pretty cringe but they're way better than replacing the text on a tired meme template and calling it content
  
  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)/¯
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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 ~~federated~~ defederated 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, 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
- 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.
  
  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.
- You couldn't be more wrong you stupid idiot. /s
- t. someone that doesn't know anything that gets corrected all the time.

not really. earliest days of reddit didnt even have subreddits.
lemmy cant be reddit 10 years ago, because the internet has changed in that time too
- Yeah, but reddits more than 10 years old...
  Here's an article from 2013 talking about subs
  https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a9623/10-curious-facts-about-the-birth-of-reddit-16123236/
  
  Subreddits were added in 08. The great Digg migration was 2010. I feel old.

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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- We barely talked about politics at all back when the great Digg migration happened. People were interested in far more fun things back then.
  
  Hmmmm, I remember heaps of people being into Ron Paul because he wanted to legalise weed, and Bernie is a perennial favourite
- 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.
  
  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”
- 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 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 forced a UI change that everyone hated, so everyone fled to reddit, thus crowning Steve Huffman, a dirty little piss boy.
  
  They had a site redesign to garner more monetization.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

No, it's better.

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.

It's probably better than old Reddit.
Just keep in mind you're participating in a federation of communities controlled by the many. Although Lemmy.world is probably the largest by far.

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.

Lemmy now is like when Reddit was like slashdot
- Which was when Slashdot was like BBS before the Eternal September

There's some people on here trying to make Lemmy like Reddit was when Reddit's idea of communicating in 2016 and onwards.
Let's not let that happen.
- Brother what does this say.
- 2016 was the beginning of the end. Constant propaganda posts, hijacked subreddits, lack of admin action on hate speech and occasionally even active propagation. An absolute shit show and the acceleration toward free fall. I do not miss 2016 Reddit.

We need a new meme style to explode and the small communities to grow, then we'd be there.

Yes, but now with more unhinged troglodyte authoritarian moderators.
- You must not've been on reddit 10+ years ago.
  
  Qgyh2 was the OG power mod.
- Oh how history has been white washed. Lemmy isn't perfect. But reddit never was either.
- You feel like there are more power tripping moderators here?
  I feel like Lemmy has been pretty chill. Most communities are small enough they're just happy to have some kind engagement. They haven't been deleting my post because my title wasn't formatted correctly or because it didn't perfectly fit one ultra-specific niche

It does kinda feel like it… even if I am commenting from fedia.io instead.

Lemmy now is in many ways already the same as reddit is today when you consider social dynamics. This is mostly due to how all of social media using traditional formulas devolved into competition in unproductive cynicism.
Check out Tildes if you want to see how reddit was back then, it's the closest thing.
- Check out Tildes
  I would if it wasn't invite-only :/
  Half the reason I was on reddit was to engage in discussions, and that's largely lost if I'm just scrolling through an unfiltered news feed with no way to participate.
  
  I can invite you. I can't seem to DM you, but this is the link : https://tildes.net/register?code=5BBPN-R08TJ-CEFAI
  If someone uses it before you get to it, let me know and I'll generate you a new one.

*15+ years ago

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.

Reddit didn’t have the communism and far left propaganda that lemmy has, so it’ll be an uphill battle to clean that shit up enough to get lemmy even remotely close to where Reddit was 10 years ago.
- It’s so fascinating, how some people create their own narrative, in their echochamber of a head, and then project it onto everyone else.
  Please go touch some grass
- That's part of the reason I am here. You could just go to some place like Exploding-Heads but there's a reason so many instances defederate from them
- Incredible what it looks like outside your bubble huh? Lemmy has different instances so everyone can build a community without nearly as much potential censorship like Reddit. This is the community that naturally formed, so maybe what you call "far left propaganda" the rest of the world calls "normal"
  
  Naaah.. that’s not it. Lemmy is just as susceptible to propaganda as Reddit ever was. And if you think there isn’t outside influence happening here, you’re as blind as they get, or part of it.
  The rest of the world doesn’t call shouting at people to not vote during elections “normal-“ yet is all over lemmy.
  So, let’s not define normal by what we want to see. Mmmkay?
- The crowd here is kinda weird. But I like em for their humor so far.