The dumb masses always eventually follow the smart people. Reddit was full of mostly smart people in the beginning, if you can believe that.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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The decline started somewhere around 2011-2013.
I blame Digg for failing. It increased Reddit's popularity too fast, which was a bad thing bringing too many people, fucking up the culture reddit had built (which wasn't much, but it was ours).
Oh man, in 2024 I never thought I'd see some Reddit oldhead still complaining about the eternal September following Digg's fall...
It got much, much worse a few years after that. I was amazed to see my first “conservative” on reddit.
I remember that /r/all was actually pretty educational back in the day. There were specific users that you would know by their user names that always posted something insightful.
And this is why I'm perfectly happy with Lemmy being the size that it is. There certainly are trade-offs - I wish niche communities were bigger - but is it worth bringing in all the other crap that comes in, like all the shit you see on Twitter? No, in my opinion.
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I am on Mastodon for 5 years now (fuck it is really 5 years since August 2019, that the hell) and just can't get into it. It just feels lonely over there. What am I doing wrong?
Tbh, I think it is the post statistics thing. It says "1 reply", then I click at ot and it has 4 replies and it ALWAYS says "0 davorites" even when 10 people comment how great that post was.
For me it's the interface. I find it rough around the edges and not as inviting as Twitter used to be. I know it's seen as superficial but UX/UI is important to me.
Like for example, to create a post or reply it's usually on the left panel for some reason. I used to have trouble visually separating one post from the next in my head until I got used to it. Also, the way thread comments are nested could be improved. And why does it only show me the top 5 trending news stories? Why can't I browse more? Idk, overall I feel like I'm fighting the UI mentally.
I think Lemmy did a better job and has subtly improved on the details. I don't see Mastodon doing that much.
I know it's seen as superficial but UX/UI is important to me.
Most of the people telling you it's superficial are programming nerds who themselves are intimidated by UX design so use cope to justify its trivialness.
I know what you mean. I've had more than one conversation with devs who didn't understand design basics.
What platform are you on? There are lots of alternative apps for both iOS and Android, and they can be customized beyond the defaults as well. I primarily use Moshidon on Android, and it's great.
The statistics thing is a downside of how Mastodon implements ActivityPub.
Two possibilites:
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I think you can simply hide the counts if it irritates you.
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You can install Fedifetcher to pull in missing interactions to your local server: https://github.com/nanos/FediFetcher
What sort of stuff do you like? Maybe some folks can make some good recommendations to jump-start a more interesting experience.
Recommendations and boosts from other users are how I've discovered interesting people there, and at this point, my feed feels just as full as my old twitter feed.
If you like news, a lot of breaking news is happening on Mastodon much more accurately and faster than on Twitter. There are a LOT of publications on there now, here are a few off the top of my head:
- Polygon (@polygon@mastodon.social)
- The Conversation (@TheConversation@newsie.social)
- The Intercept (@theintercept@jouna.host)
- Voice of America (@VOANews@mastodon.social)
- Ars Technica (@arstechnica@mastodon.social)
- Semafor (@Semafor@flipboard.com)
- Kotaku (@Kotaku@flipboard.com)
- The Christian Science Monitor (@csmonitor@flipboard.com)
- Fast Company (@FastCompany@flipboard.com)
- The 19th (@19thnews@flipboard.com)
- Vox (@Vox@flipboard.com)
There are a lot more local news sources too, so depending on where you live, you can probably follow news for your specific area. The account @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services regularly bundles up follow suggestions for different regions, interests, and topics. If you go that account and search for a hashtag (i.e., #texas) you'll get a lot of active and high-quality local accounts to follow.
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We should as a community ensure Twitter\X lives forever..
If only as a place to keep certain social media users “entertained”
In all seriousness it does concern me how often I see such a wide variety of news agencies quote Twitter considering the amount of hate that goes on there
It's a containment site; has been for a while.
Except the majority of mainstream news outlets use it as a source for 90% of their coverage.
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It's because the news media industry as a whole has stuck with Twitter as their primary social media site. It's kinda hilarious how much they seem to like it and how much time they spend there.
That's dangerous. Look at what Fox is doing, as an entertainment company, to US politics across the country.
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The irony of climate scientists ignoring a problem and waiting until it's far to late to do something is honestly pretty funny..
At this point it's wholly on you if you're still using twitter.
You'd think smart people like science nerds would have left the Nazi bar ages ago.
That first line is so spot on. Brightened up my day
I already accepted we’re already dead because oil & gas companies figured how to use doubt and false science to create a confusion among the general public (aided by the mass conservative Murdoch /Boloré media lol)…
It’s like tobacco companies in the 50s but we can’t afford so many years to wake the fuck up.
Yeah. I've been mourning the loss of Earth's future for some time now. It's very sad.
That said, we are not in a simple binary fucked vs fine situation. It's a sliding scale. So even though things are very bad, we can always still take action to make them less bad. That is never not an option.
What do you mean? If it makes you feel any better, the Earth will be fine. Has been for a couple billion years. We did this to ourselves :(
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Smoking companies still are with vaping (vaping companies literally sell to kids over the Internet and people literally are arguing it's safe and healthy)
Which unfortunately shows that people don't learn
Aaaaah i don’t want to be right :((
Huh... "vituperative", I like it.
X needs to start getting banned by governments and official governmental channels need to be moving out.
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