I think it’s a boon that we’re a tiny fraction of Reddit’s size. Reddit is something like 30+ million MAUs and Lemmy dropped recently from 62k to ~50k. We’re a grain of sand compared to Reddit, and I think the community is better for it.
Lemmy isn’t really a Reddit alternative. We’re too small to have niche thriving communities, and depend 100% on sorting your feed by “all” or “local” to get new content. What’s nice is it feels like one close knit community vs closed off micro communities inside of subreddits.
I get exposed to more things this way oddly enough- viewing content I normally wouldn’t in favor of my smaller selection of subreddits. People are more polite, more informative, and far more original with their comments.
Keep on doing your thing, everyone! We’re building something different here.
I definitely enjoy my time here more than at reddit… I wish we were even less like reddit tbh, communities like mildlyinfuriating exist purely to make you get mad, and I honestly don’t see a positive side to them.
Reddit is filled with stuff like that, like videos of people fighting, or yelling at each other over petty shit, or stories in AITA of toxic people being toxic in relationships. It gets me down after a while… yeah I know I shouldn’t even go on it, but I’m still addicted fml
A lot of Reddit “sub-equivalents” are lemmy.world, I do find them humorous, even if it’s sometimes in a “haha the world is fucked up” kind of way.
If you recognize that it’s unhealthy for you, it’s likely a good idea to block those communities for yourself.
Many on Reddit simply have a subscribed list to their favourite subreddits and completely ignore the popular/all page. You can do the same by Subscribing to a bunch of communities here then limiting your feed to that, especially if you want to see things other than the memes and shitpost communities.
People have tried to copy at least some of the outrage communities over to Lemmy and Kbin and I hope they don’t take off.
I do see a point to r/mildlyinfuriating, for venting about something bad that happened that day. “Why not just vent to your friends and family?” Perhaps they all have a lot going on and you feel you’d be adding “listen to my small problems when you have huge ones” to their plate, so you go to the internet instead. I feel a lot of other outrage communities can serve that purpose too. And r/AmITheAsshole does, on the surface, legitimately seem like a spot to find out if you were the bad guy in a situation (or will be if you proceed with your intended course of action), why, and what you can do to fix what you did wrong. Unfortunately they seem to do more of making people angry and making them scroll more than letting people vent and make kinder life decisions.
I did get an unintended benefit from some of the outrage subs. When I was younger, I was unaware that some actions were unacceptable or unaware of why. In between “I can’t believe they did that, what an asshole” replies, there would also be “yeah, don’t they realize that by doing [unacceptable action] they’re [explanation of how and why it’s hurtful to others]” replies. This went a long way towards helping my young autistic self learn some social rules I was previously unaware of and that they’re not arbitrary but in place for a reason.
There are probably positive sides to the outrage subs but I agree that they’re overall a negative. I’m glad there’s no algorithm trying to recommend them to me despite hitting Not Interested repeatedly. I ignored it by never touching anything but Home and turning off home feed recommendations in settings, but before I did that it was annoying. And for people who might want home feed recommendations, it would be really bad to keep getting your “don’t show me this sub please” requests consistently ignored and to be consistently served outrage you don’t want.
Yes, being away from the judgment/advice/outrage communities has really improved my headspace.
I was fooling myself that giving advice was me helping people, and maybe sometimes it was. But it was also me getting way too emotionally invested in things that were quite likely creative writing, as well as just this relentless stream of the worst side of human nature.