Just quit Reddit a few days ago and haven’t looked back. I remember when there was no viable alternative to Reddit, with all other platforms being very sparely populated, but a lot has changed since I recently got into Lemmy as there are actually people here!
After switching to Lemmy I’ve noticed I’ve been feeling a lot happier. Maybe that’s just because of how social media companies design their service to be as addicting as possible, and they do so by making you feel angry. Everything here feels much calmer and more peaceful.
I think it goes deeper than that, and that Reddit has only expanded the hidden moderation so that comments from certain users are seen over those of other users well beyond karma calculations, and that a significant part of the effort to do so is to promote the message they want or are paid for to promote. It’s not a wanton sellout, but with certain topics and in certain subreddits, it’s quite evident that they want to push and promote meme stock, crypto, and neozionist messaging, which look at that, has a close correlation to the interests of its CEO. This has pushed out comments and posts that promote it over sane discussions, which tends to erode into emotionally divisive drivel.
That’s a great point! After October 7 and Israel’s genocide, I was surprised how little attention r/Palestine got compared to r/Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. If you look at the top posts of all time on r/Palestine, the top post only has 10k upvotes and was before October 7, while the top post on r/Ukraine has nearly 200k upvotes and it was right after Russia invaded. It feels like r/Palestine is being silently censored, or I guess you could say being partially shadow-banned.
Just quit Reddit a few days ago and haven’t looked back. I remember when there was no viable alternative to Reddit, with all other platforms being very sparely populated, but a lot has changed since I recently got into Lemmy as there are actually people here!
After switching to Lemmy I’ve noticed I’ve been feeling a lot happier. Maybe that’s just because of how social media companies design their service to be as addicting as possible, and they do so by making you feel angry. Everything here feels much calmer and more peaceful.
I think it goes deeper than that, and that Reddit has only expanded the hidden moderation so that comments from certain users are seen over those of other users well beyond karma calculations, and that a significant part of the effort to do so is to promote the message they want or are paid for to promote. It’s not a wanton sellout, but with certain topics and in certain subreddits, it’s quite evident that they want to push and promote meme stock, crypto, and neozionist messaging, which look at that, has a close correlation to the interests of its CEO. This has pushed out comments and posts that promote it over sane discussions, which tends to erode into emotionally divisive drivel.
That’s a great point! After October 7 and Israel’s genocide, I was surprised how little attention r/Palestine got compared to r/Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. If you look at the top posts of all time on r/Palestine, the top post only has 10k upvotes and was before October 7, while the top post on r/Ukraine has nearly 200k upvotes and it was right after Russia invaded. It feels like r/Palestine is being silently censored, or I guess you could say being partially shadow-banned.
Welcome !
Thanks! 😀