There have been several times I’ve wanted to post on here and haven’t because I’m worried about how people are going to treat me for a single post. It’s hard to come out of that thinking on here and actually participate.

I find myself less guarded on beehaw in some ways, and more guarded in others.

Firstly, I feel I can be more authentic. Discussions always seem to be in good faith, and I often come away learning something, reconsidering something, or just being more aware of other viewpoints. Whether I participate in the discussion or just read it.
It’s just more enjoyable overall.

Which leads me onto how I am being more guarded. I am really trying to consider other viewpoints before even engaging with posts or discussions.
And I dislike that this is an effort for me.
But I like that I have realised it, and I now get to make an effort to be better.

I think the lack of global/account karma will help this in a way. Reddit was practically full of performers, doing tricks for treats. Jokes were easy tricks. There’s no real value in posting garbage posts/comments when there’s no long-term benefit for the user. I think we’ll see a lot less cruft here, especially as people deprogram themselves from that habit.

I don’t think people debated primarily for karma, but maybe with the rest of the performative aspects gone, people will stop feeling pressured to show off to others - publicly dunking on someone is another way to perform for an audience and receive validation points.

I agree with most everything you said. My personal take: all the Karma upvoting/downvoting stuff shaped community behavior to a sort of drastic degree - you either say something pleasing/sarcastic to the community and get upvoted or you got buried with downvotes for injecting an alternative viewpoint. After a while, I found myself going along with something just because a post had a massive number of upvotes… not realizing that the majority of readers very rarely go past the top 3-5 comments on a thread. So whatever was on top was usually the highest voted, and it was most often a sarcastic response to a legitimate question someone posted.

…people came in expecting me to either agree with them or refute a point they made. And if I didn’t make “a point,” I wasn’t contributing.

Exactly this; towards the end, I was writing a comment every couple of weeks on Reddit, and most of the reason why is that I felt I didn’t have “enough” of a contribution to make.

I just wanted to bring up something I hated about reddit that no one mentioned, just to get it out of my system; ask a reasonable question? Prepare to be mass downvoted. Like why? Who is downvoting this? How did that offend you? I’d understand if they were framed weirdly or completely unrelated to the issue, but a reasonable on topic question shouldn’t get that treatment.

If lemmy gets big enough, it will be just like that. Your problem is not a Reddit problem but an Internet forum with nested threads problem. It’s much harder to hyperfocus on a comment in a flat comment structure.

You hate capitalism yet you exist in it

Yeah i hear that

I liked the “You hate capitalism yet you exist in it” … BS. Whoever said capitalism should decide policy, run the government, or our lives is nuts. It is up to us to define the rules under which capitalism runs not the other way around. Besides when essentially there is only 1 Reddit… we are talking about a monopoly not a competitive business anyway and a century ago this was decided to be bad. You do not have a true competitive market unless you have say 7 or so mostly identical players anyway… but of course we let everyone consolidate down to 3.

My experience on reddit is very similar to yours. The more niche subreddits you could get away from it a bit but… yeah. the video you shared captures it perfectly.

As for beehaw, I’m not on there so idk. I joined kbin/fedia but my experience on the fediverse sounds similar to your own. Lots of people just chatting and talking about how it feels like “the old internet” and not really any of that reddit snark/heated debate.

This is not terribly different from my experience. I was getting pretty worn down by the hive mind effect that some subs developed and how badly you could get downvoted or yelled at if you went against the grain. I think Reddit had become perhaps TOO big. There was just so many people on it that it felt like competing mobs.

I think that sites like Lemmy will start to take off, we just have to give them time. And I will need to figure out mobile with this site, cuz I’m on my phone right now and I can’t read any comments under a post 😂 I’ll get therr

I fart in your general direction, your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!

Really though, I was part of two private subs that were invite only. The smaller community and how users were “recruited” made a huge difference. I could post things there that I wouldn’t on public forums, mostly because of the increased anonymity, but also because there wouldn’t be any nastiness.

I couldn’t just go “Yeah I like Metal Gear Solid V, too,”

I would like to say to please DO post these kinds of things if you indeed like a product or service or whatever.

When I am deciding on a purchase I also liked to look at reddit threads at what the experiences are from the people who already purchased the service/product.

I would scan the threads and also look at how many people just agree with a point that is being made.

It is moronic that people see this as not “contributing”, it actually also helps me as a consumer decide on the purchases I make and not all the comments have to be eloquent about it.

I was constantly dragged into multi comment long debates on reddit where people would insult and attack me and my opinions. Like you said, Lemmy is much nicer.

There is another aspect that you didn’t get into; I am on a lot of subreddits where I attempt to help people with questions. r/zfs, r/ceph, r/homelab and r/datahoarder are ones I frequent among others where if people have questions I and others attempt to help them. This is neither a debate nor humour, and is one area where Lemmy still has a lot of catching up to do… not least of which because the specialized communities don’t yet exist.

I haven’t left Reddit yet… I’m still watching and waiting but it IS nice to have Lemmy and Tildes as alternatives (though I’m more digging Lemmy so far).