I cant let this gem from yesterday go underappreciated.

anolemmi@lemmi.social to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 239 points –
i.imgur.com

Beans for president!

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I don't need Lemmy to be a replacement for Reddit anymore than I needed Reddit to be a replacement for Digg. It's a different platform and it's allowed to be different.

I need Lemmy to simply be a social link sharing and message board. And it's doing that perfectly.

Yeah, I've realized I mostly want "social media" as a place to create discussions. For that, honestly, the smaller community size is perfect.

I find massive communities have a way of devolving into hive minds. Once you reach a critical mass of people who think one thing, any comment to the contrary is just... obliterated, whether by an exhausting amount of argument, or downvotes. And then it just becomes known that that's the opinion of the community, and people stop even bringing it up. At least that's my theory on how it happens.

Over here, with a smaller community size, I'm finding a lot more genuine conversation, no matter the topic. It's awesome. And I'm still finding Lemmy large enough to bring me interesting links and memes to talk about.

Reddit has made me realise that I have an aweful sense of humor, because none of my silly joke comments would get any upvotes. On lemmy, I almost always get at least one upvote or a comment. It ain't much, but I like that my comment made someone's day second, even it's just one person.

Your sense of humour is great, I’d wager.

Reddit only upvotes the same rehashed, repeated, stupid Reddit phrases spewed ad nauseam. You’ll always be upvoted for “play stupid games, win stupid prizes!!!!111” or calling people Karens, or “equal rights, equal lefts” and all that absolute twaddle.

Damn, I just realized right now that I haven't seen a single /s or someone upset that another comment left of a /s here. At least, I don't recall any, there's probably been a few of the first at least. But it's nice being in a community where you don't have to bash some users over the head with what you're trying to say.

It wasn't that rare to see one comment heavily downvoted but that commenter upvoted in replies to replies. Sometimes it was on them for poorly presenting their thoughts in the first place, but it seemed like the majority would often put their own meaning to comments and any doubt would lead to assumptions that the commenter was evil or something. Though I have seen that phenomenon here, including today.

Once you reach a critical mass of people who think one thing, any comment to the contrary is just… obliterated, whether by an exhausting amount of argument, or downvotes.

There's also this effect where when you get further down a comment chain only people who really care about that particular argument keep reading. So past say comment 3 everyone is super duper opinionated.

I also don't need it to have a bazillion-septillion-megamillion users to consider it successful. In my mind, engagement with 10 people is worth much more than a thousand upvotes from someone mindlessly clicking my post.