• @scarabic
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      18 hours ago

      One difference though is social media. Reddit was able to gestate and grow without that massive clusterfuck sucking up all the internet’s oxygen. Nowadays with all the social media sites proper plus Facebook groups AND let’s not forget Reddit itself, there’s just massively more competition for attention online. The old 1.0 web forums are still around, many of them, but they’re small and relatively static. That could also be Lemmy’s fate.

    • @[email protected]
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      421 day ago

      I think people don’t realise how old Reddit is, it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.

      • @lordnikon
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        231 day ago

        It also took death of a platform “Digg” to jump start its growth.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 day ago

          And it’s arguably in the process of dying itself right now, in quality if not in user count yet.

        • originalucifer
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          018 hours ago

          haha this is not true… dude i was there, digg came/went and little impact on reddits user base

          • @lordnikon
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            211 hours ago

            I was there too i was one of the ones that jumped over. I know its a big internet so maybe we both had different experiences. So maybe you are right and the timing was just a correlation and not causation.

            • originalucifer
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              111 hours ago

              reddit used to release page-views and maybe user info (i forget) annually.

              there was a bunch of users that jumped over to digg, but they continued to also use reddit. when digg died there was a small bump of digg users, but i dont recall anything noticable in the big subs

              • @scarabic
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                18 hours ago

                Digg had a large viewer base and there was a lot of skullduggery going on amongst people who figured out how to game its algorithm, get on the front page, and direct traffic to some URL. But without actual data I would venture to guess that Digg and Reddit had roughly equivalent bases of actually genuinely active community posters and commenters and a lot of people were on both. Once Digg got taken over by the spam posters, it died off and Reddit remained. Reddit definitely inherited its mantle and probably many community members, but not the massive viewer audience.

              • @lordnikon
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                211 hours ago

                Ah I only used Digg and never heard of reddit till Digg died and never joined most of the big subs. But also reddit was so small back then a small bump is a good kick start. Google trends data correlates with what I saw Digg was more search for in 2008 then by 2011 Digg was dead after the 4.0 debacle in 2010 and reddit took off in 2011.

      • originalucifer
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        131 day ago

        and no subreddits! i was there too! it really started gaining traction and losing technical users when the ‘image macros’ started… memes took over

        • @Lennny
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          31 day ago

          Obligatory image macros =/= memes.

          • @[email protected]
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            223 hours ago

            I remember back when people were so pedantic over that. Happy people don’t really care anymore

      • @[email protected]
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        81 day ago

        Social media in general was also a lot smaller back then too.

        Until the iPhone got popular you had to use a computer to access it. And back then we didn’t really trust sleep mode very much so you had to wait 2 minutes for windows to boot when you wanted to go on the net. VS right now I’m standing in from of my clothes not getting ready for work for 45 seconds.

        • @AndrewZabar
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          11 day ago

          Wait to boot? Back then I had a dozen machines all running 24/7 lol. But I guess the average user on the consumer side yeah.

      • @ohwhatfollyisman
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        21 day ago

        it was smaller than Lemmy is now when I first started using it.

        so now we know whom to blame for its enshittification

    • @DrDickHandler
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      123 hours ago

      Delusional and wishful thinking. Lemmy will most likely slowly fade out of existance.