A nice thing about Lemmy's lower population than Reddit
On Reddit I generally didn't read attached articles. I'd developed a pretty good intuition where the article title, website and top comments could tell me all I needed to know (And reading the source normally confirmed this)
On Lemmy the smaller numbers of comments mean we need to engage with the content being discussed more directly, which is quite a nice change of pace for us Reddit converts.
Another nice thing I noticed is that the lower influx of post allows more engagement because you don’t “arrive late” to comment on a post. Back there if you responded to a post that was 4+ hours ago nobody would respond and the post was already dead.
For sure. I was largely a lurker on Reddit not because I didn't like engaging with the content and community, but because it was practically impossible for me to engage in anything. Either the post I commented on didn't get popular enough to last long enough for engagement, of by the time I saw something that was popular enough, everyone had already moved on hours ago. It feels much different here where there's fewer posts, and that means that people will spend longer on each post and speak their own mind as well, rather than looking at the top three comments, and moving into the next post.
The trick for older, active posts is to start commenting under the top comments instead of making a top level comment yourself. That way, you're seen by most people who don't sort comments by new.
Yeah, I did this often when I used reddit. Also tried to hop on to top comments that had less comments underneath it, since then it ends up being hidden until someone clicks see more or something.
That's true. I've got a feeling that the rhythm has changed. I'm not sure if it's because there aren't as many posts per minute or because by the time I read I post it doesn't already have like 10000 comments. Suddenly I dare to engage in the conversation because people are still taking part on it, my comment is not going to get lost. I like this a lot.
Same, I never felt like participating on reddit because a lot of the content i saw was already past its moment, it seems silly to comment when no one has engaged in hours, let alone a post a week old or something.
There's a lot more engagement to be had here.
That’s a really good observation. It legit feels like when I switched to Reddit from digg back in the day lol
Another thing about the lower population is that you don’t have people trying to needlessly karma farm. All those addicts couldn’t leave behind their treasures trove of 1 million updoots, so they stayed on reddit.
Because of that, you have many more people here posting about stuff they’re passionate about. No rage-bait articles or massive amounts of doomerism posts. It’s refreshing to have more organic content being shared.
I guess that the other thing that helps is that we don’t have Karma over here, so there’s nothing of value to gain.
You're right, that's something I hadn't considered. The desire to keep gaining more karma definitely plays a factor in reddit content, people know what will get a reaction, or the type of stories youtube channels will pick up, or what will simply get an upvote and just set out to create as much of that content as possible. And then they post that one post to 38 barely relevant subs so I see it multiple times and it's just a cesspool honestly.
And I think people here post for sharing purpose. There is no karma whoring, no motivation for it!
At the begining I was missing the 10k coments on top posts, but now it feels cosy and familiar to have few coments, it gives you the oportunity to also share your opinions
I think a large part of it is that the folks who are really conscious of social media's toxic sides, the enshittification/'ennui engine' phenomenon, privacy, etc are more likely to come over here first. Makes it especially great at least for now.