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.

  • Barry Zuckerkorn@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    But I do miss having the “fucking [insert slur here]” “kill yourself” “only a basement-dwelling loser would have this opinion” comments auto-hid because the average passing user disapproved of it and decided to express their disapproval via downvote, instead of coming across it myself semi-frequently and reporting it.

    This is why I think downvotes are an important element of the UI and ranking algorithms. No matter how many members there are, or how many comments or votes there are, there are still going to be 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week. So naturally, smaller communities actually tend to have larger gaps in mod coverage in length of time between an item going onto the mod queue and being resolved by a human mod.

    So I’m in favor of mechanisms being built in for removing content from easy view, without mods. Downvotes seems like the easiest way to implement that kind of mechanism.