Maybe it’s just because there’s less content on Lemmy as of right now, but I remember doomscrolling Reddit, but now I only briefly open Lemmy once or twice a day.
Could this be an example of the affects of addictive social media?
The thing with mostodon and lemmy is that the feed is not algorithmicly tailored to you with the goal to get you to spend as much time as possible. That’s why these experiences are usually more relaxed and fulfilling than what the big players offer.
And that’s why I’m never going back. I absolutely love it here. I scroll my feed for a few minutes here and there, drop a comment or two, and I’m done. No feeling of missing something cool. I’ve probably seen it and I’m good.
OH! That’s fucking interesting and makes so much sense. Lemmy is the only social media thing I have now and that’s 100 percent what the difference is that I couldn’t put my finger on.
Reddit wasn’t tailored to the user, the user tailored it to themselves (unless they were fool enough to use the official app).
It really is just that there’s less content here, and the content there is isn’t sorted particularly well via Hot. It’s a WIP
How the Best and Hot algorithms work on Reddit is completely up to Reddit. They 100% tailor it to the user.
Well Reddit still gets to decide which posts/subs to show over other ones based on voting and engagement metrics.
In the past months, I was getting so many “you will probably like…”
No, I don’t. Reddit, you’re showing me irrelevant subs which prevent me from browsing the feed I curated.
It was so annoying…
I’ve been a 3PA user for years, so that never really happened to me.
What does 3PA mean?
Third party app(s)
i never saw the “you’ll probably like…” messages; but i saw them in others’ screenshots and it made me wonder why reddit’s algorithm(s) didn’t show it to me; i suspect it was because 99% of my subs were porn adjacent and they didn’t want to advertise that.
i find myself missing 99% of what i used to get out of social media and i’m forcing myself to see that as a good thing so that i can find more productive uses of my time; it’s crazy to learn that all of the content i’m addicted to is completely dominated by reddit and doesn’t exist anywhere else in the entirety of the world wide web.
Is your reddit home feed governed by some algorithm (other than the standard upvotes and downvotes)
Not my Apollo feed but I remember people complaining about posts from certain subs they didn’t like in their feed, so I’m guessing the official app does that?
I’ve always assumed it was due to the size of Reddit. I don’t care about anime at all but because lots of other people do it reaches the front page. This is why I became very liberal with the block button to tailor the feed.
And that’s why I’m never going back. I absolutely love it here. I scroll my feed for a few minutes here and there, drop a comment or two, and I’m done. No feeling of missing something cool. I’ve probably seen it and I’m good.
I spend more time on a social media with chronological feeds than without algorithmic feeds
Wow you perfectly hit the nail on the head with this comment. I’ve been wondering what “feels” different, and that’s exactly it. When I’m done scrolling I just stop.
Name of the wind was great. The only reason I didn’t start the second book was the Author’s refusal of releasing the third and “final” book. I prefer cutting things on my terms rather than being forced to. it sounds stupid but at least I feel in control that way lol.
Oddly enough, people are pretty adamant about demanding that we add a lot of addictive features into lemmy, just because they exist on reddit and on other big tech platforms. I usually push back, but I’m always downvoted to oblivion. I conciously wanted to avoid putting these addictive, psychologically harmful things into lemmy-ui.
So its great to see posts like this one. Social media doesn’t have to be a negative experience, or addictive. The time we spend here should be short, and positive.
What would be an example of an addictive feature that could be added to Lemmy?
Infinite scrolling, karma, targeted content.
Karma we can definitely do without. I don’t know of anyone who actually took it seriously anyway.
Bots took Reddit karma very seriously.
The lack of karma is one of the reasons why I prefer lemmy over kbin.
Infinite scrolling is a big one. I need to get out. Help.
I hate to be the one to do this to you, but old.lemmy.world has infinite scrolling… and is designed to look exactly like old reddit
Yeah but it’s not a feature that is enabled by default.
In some sense, Lemmy has targeted content since you can subscribe to communities. It’s just less aggressive.
Short positive social media is my dream
I’m really thankful for it, so thank you for pushing back. One of the biggest reasons I chose Lemmy over Kbin was the lack of overall user score. I’m fine with posts and comments having a score — it sort of helps one determine what is and isn’t good content for a community, or what might not be good advice — but summing those up on your user profile only leads to weird score measuring contests and a sort of “number go up” addictive cycle. Thank you also for giving us the ability to hide scores if we don’t want to see them.
Thank you for that
o7
Does Lemmy even need any more features? Can we please avoid feature bloat and don’t break what doesn’t need fixing?
I think that depends on what you would call a “feature”. Most everything I can think of that could be “added” would be front end stuff, and third party devs can do those if they want.
yeah social media should be more functional and easily put away when not needed. I love the fact that I just don’t get attention consuming notifications. I love the fact that there isn’t an algorithm that promotes the most inflammatory point of view for “eNgAgEmEnT”.
I just don’t feel like a product here, it feels real compared to any platform.
Lemmy for me feels like the early days of social media. Think early 4chan and reddit. I do miss the days of simple forums though.
I’m curious, would you tell me about some of the anti-features being requested? I wonder what kind of things are flying entirely under my radar.
I feel similarly. To add to that, I don’t even like the fact that people have been pushing so hard for Lemmy apps. I get that people want something to entertain themselves with on the train or in class or wherever they might be, but phone based social media apps seem to encourage superficial engagement and doomscrolling by design. I much prefer a rich desktop experience as it encourages depth of discussion and debate. One thing I really liked on reddit, though, was something I saw a long time ago on r/TrueFilm. Comments had a hard minimum for characters. If your comment was below 250 characters, or something like that, it was automatically removed on the basis that if you had anything to say, you should have thought about it enough to warrant more than 250 character submissions. It also functionally murdered smartphone or tablet based commenting. I kinda wish you could do similar on certain lemmy communities.
That’s an interesting idea, but it would completely butcher conversations.
Or restrict them to people who have something meaningful to contribute. Low effort vs. high effort. You’d have to be explicit that that’s the purpose of the community and that’s how it works. I remember some great posts on r/TrueFilm back in the day. A lot of it was by people who were either film students or who had degrees in film studies and had the kind of academic background needed to speak at length about a topic without it becoming trite. I have to say, I do miss it. The internet has gotten way dumber and way lazier over the years, in a lot of ways.
I suppose there could be communities focused away from conversations. Like an auditorium you rent for your class of 200 to watch a movie that isn’t in print anymore and then discuss it afterwards. I imagine someone would stand up in said auditorium when they have a well formed idea or rebuttal to an idea, but refrain from standing just to add some conversational space filler like “I agree” and then sitting back down (which is kind of comical now that I think about it). Port over this idea into the internet and you get the communities you’re talking about, correct?
Hmmm, not really. Rather, the community is specifically focused around conversation. But a different type of conversation. Typical internet conversations on reddit (and a lot of other places), especially over the last several years, seem to mainly occur in short bursts and at a fairly superficial level. The kind of community I’m envisioning is one in which there’s a central topic or theme (such as film), but it focuses on fairly deep or complex conversations. If someone wants to respond to a comment made by another user, it’d typically be point by point with supporting evidence and argumentation. Or at least a well reasoned perspective. An okay, if not spectacular, example would be this post on reddit from a couple of years ago on r/TrueFilm (https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/khlrnv/a_brief_rant_about_my_cinema_students_and/). The post itself is a few hundred words and focuses on a central concept or observation made by the OP. Most top level comments are a paragraph or two. There are brief responses in the individual comment threads, but the actual discussion is fairly robust and provides new ideas and perspectives beyond just people saying “lmao same” or similarly useless comments.
That makes sense; maybe require a wordcount for the base level comments and a much lesser word count requirement for the replies?
That would be reasonable, I think. As you drill down into reply threads comments tend to become more focused on particular topics of conversation, in my experience, and so the size of any given reply might reasonably diminish.
I mean those features are addictive, so it isn’t that odd that people want their fix.
Well here’s some upvotes for you, brother/sister man/lady
I have seen the same behaviour in myself. Reddit was the only social media I used and when they pulled the plug on third-party apps, I took it as a goodbye.
I see myself sometimes opening my phone to “do something” but I have almost no apps to waste time on. I’ve reused that time to do better things, which feels nice. I read a little more here and there, I learn stuff of wikipedia when I’m on my phone, or I get up and do something else. It’s been great for me, even though I’m kind of sad to see it go. Lemmy is a great community, though I’ll try not to start using it so much, just for my own sake and not on the fault of the platform itself.
Same here, but as of now just need to find things to fill that gap. Started reading a little more this morning so hopefully that will help with that
Same, I had a birthday recently and my wife got me a kindle. I’m not great at reading and often have to look up words as I go, but that’s easy. I just finished The Name of the Wind and am on to the second book. I highly recommend it as it was easy to read and very engrossing.
I read every chance I get now.
I was already learning Spanish, but not having Reddit has upped how much time I’m spending learning. So yay I suppose. Plus, less doom scrolling is probably healthier.
Same. I find myself scrolling through my apps and can’t decide what to do. Got me to open Duolingo which I had forgotten was installed. At least doing something productive now.
I’ve found myself taking my Steam Deck into the washroom instead of using reddit in there. Play a game for 10 minutes instead of doom scrolling.
It’s like being knocked out of a trance.
It has made me more aware how often I rely on my phone for cheap entertainment. I get an impulse to take it out and then remember there’s nothing good to watch. Obviously I still make it on here, but the lesser diversity and higher repetiveness is throwing me for a loop. Annoyingly, it means more time scrolling past ads on Facebook, but I feel I’m avoiding my phone more. I have been searching out more long format YouTube videos though which is a tradeoff. I wonder if it’s temporary and if I’ll stick to doing more beyond these tiny rapid endorphin kicks
Take the win when you get the will to not listen to that brain itching. Basically fighting an addiction it seems.
This exactly what happens with drug addicts
Corporate Social Media are constructed to be addictive. Ever since I immigrated on July 1st, I stopped using SM like Reddit, twitter (only FB for old relatives sake). I noticed that I actually decreased the time I spend on Lemmy and Mastodon. I value it as the same kind of decision as the one that I quit smoking
I scroll for about 30 minutes, try to comment or post OC once, set it down and check back later in the day. I never did that on Reddit!
What are you doing with your extra time? I bought a keyboard recently with a digital screen that shows you which key to press, sort of like guitar hero. Also learning spanish and thinking about buying an entry level nice telescope.
I love this for you! Keep growing and learning
Started practicing writing instead of looking at shitposts and it’s been a great decision.
That sounds really cool! Is a keyboard like that called something in particular? I’d love to hear which one you got.
I started experimenting with home automation. I have ordered some sensors and I’m planing to use the with home assistant. Talking about a big rabbit hole.
If (and it’s a big if…) I am successful, I guess that I’ll have even more extra time :p
I’m spending way more time!
I didn’t really like the community in Reddit that much. I used it more like a news feed. So I never read ‘all’, I just read my subs for a few minutes here and there, but I didn’t post and comment much.
Since coming here I post and comment a lot more. There seems to be more proper discussion here, despite being much smaller and quieter.
Yeah I also post and comment way more. I probably have more comments here during the last month than I had there combined since 2006.
I think overall my social media time has gone down considerably, but my direct interaction (ie posting and commenting) has gone up.
For me it helps to know that somebody is actually going to read this comment and it won’t be buried under 1000 others. You usually had to get to a post pretty early on Reddit to have your comment be seen, and I mostly browsed /all.
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Less doom scrolling, more engagement in stuff you’re interested in.
Just the feeling of people actually reading your comment and not just lookibg at the upvode/downvote to tell them how to feel does a lot for my motivation to engage.
Sometimes smaller numbers is good for the community.
I feel like most of the critical news and politics makes it to the top political communities here, but without the 5000 articles of people rehashing the same stupid story over and over. If I read Lemmy world or beehaw news and politics, I have the gist of what’s going on.
Everything else is the meme trend of the week here. Not pooping, beans, vintage memes, Ohio, etc.
I’m looking for those top political communities. Where are you getting those?
The one I’m subscribed to has about one article per day.
I recommend Lemmy.world politics.
That said, it’s best to go to your instances website, tap communities, and search for “politics.” Subscribe to the communities with the most users.
I haven’t found a way to hide posts I’ve seen yet. So I find myself opening Lemmy, seeing a little new content and then putting it down. There isn’t a constant feed of new content to just consume.
It’s been nice not to be inundated with a neverending stream of bullshit.
yes, can you hide posts though? it seems not and I would like to sometimes
I think it depends on how you enter, Liftoff and Connect do
How do you hide viewed posts on liftoff?
I’m on it and havent found the option for it.
hmm cheers, I was using just the mobile site and lately Jerboa, neither of which seem to have it unfortunately 😕
Some apps do have features like that, I am pretty sure that WefWef (the app I use) added this option recently.
I feel like with Lemmy, it’s harkening back to a period of the internet where you can approach it and put it down for later. It’s not yet constructed in a way like all of the other social media platforms, that want to keep you invested, even if you know what to expect. Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter .etc all remind me of the days in the old internet, where you had web portals. These web portals were from MSN, Yahoo and AOL primarily.
They all had things there, to keep you attracted to them. They had their search engines, they had games, they had news, they had weather and many more things. All to keep you in one place and to keep you from venturing out to other places unless you used their search engines before Google became the juggernaut of that.
Social Media today, is designed now, to be like them. Except it’s worse because they’ve got algorithms in place that they extract the data from, i.e you, to pitch to you things that you may be particularly interested in just to keep you invested.
For all of the numbers those social media platforms have, they sure do say a lot of nothing.
Completely agree with the last sentence. For all the hours I’ve spent on shitty social media, I couldn’t remember a single post or comment I read there to save my life.
After decades of platforms trending towards monopolization, bring on the fragmentation.
The community here is small and I love it. Maybe I don’t spend as many hours on here but I also don’t get pissed because I read an idiotic comment, and I feel like I can post an opinion without getting downvoted to hell.
I do, too. Prefer the Fediverse to anything else.
I have the same effects. But this is probably the best thing to ever happen to me.
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Same here.
I feel that, my friends asked me how Lemmy is and I told them it’s great, but I find that I spend a lot less time because it’s harder to find new content.
I feel like I am spending less time on Lemmy but am more satisfied with my time here.
On Reddit I would scroll endlessly. I’d find a comment or sentiment that was wrong and start typing out a reply, or once in a while a topic I knew about or had a story for. Then delete it because I don’t want to argue with an idiot and no one will ever see the comment because of the flood of “jokes”.
I feel like I can actually interact with the content here.
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Me too! I’m on kbin but same effect. I’m here less than I was on reddit but it feels like I’m actually interacting.
It’s also way more positive and less toxic.
Same, I used to scroll reddit a lot, but since I switched to lemmy my lemmy usage is nowhere close to reddit.
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