When we have a critical mass of people, we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way.
we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way
- In my experience, many of the people claiming to be experts on reddit are spreading misinformation. This goes for Twitter too, and probably most other large social media sites. People love to be seen as an authority on a topic.
- Reddit is anything but organic, and is getting worse and worse in this regard.
The eye opening moment is when one of these threads touches on a subject you know a lot about and the top upvoted comment is spouting complete bullshit. See it once and you start to doubt the credibility of every other highly upvoted comment that looks legit but could be just as wrong, you simply don’t know enough to immediately disprove it.
I have a conspiracy theory that most users who are an expert don’t post much about that.
For example I am an expert on two things most people find obscure; and for all my comments I just avoid talking about them. It’s too hard to wrap up an idea without lots of background information, there are no short posts or comments I can make about it.
Almost all the highly upvoted stuff are short. Were I to try to make an expert post it would be totally ignored. So why bother for me when I can snarky about things I know nothing about ? More fun !
I think experts who write short terse pithy comments that hit the mark, at a timely fashion, are rarer than hens teeth
The thing is that “normies”(I hate the term) weren’t on reddit when it was the size of lemmy. The only experience they have is joining it after it had 10 years of development reached critical mass of users.
So we are stuck being compared to an impossible standard. When I compare Lemmy to old reddit lemmy hands down blows it out of the water. Old reddit had cp and racism on the front page every single day for years.It was hard to use and hostile to new users.
I’ve seen lemmy pop up in search engine posts already which was cool to see. Ive also seen lots of high quality intelligent posts granted they are only tech related but we will grow.
I tried to use Reddit for years and absolutely hated it. Finally after virtually every internet search for any question i had lead need too Reddit I decided to aquire a taste for it.
Was it the format or the user base that drove you off?
Format at first, then user base. I then found you could subscribe to subs and see only that stuff. That made it tolerable.
