I feel like the people I interact with irl don’t even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.
I was on Reddit back from the beginning and around 2007-2010 it was a very well curated place due to this culture.
People didn’t comment unless they had something actually relevant and insightful to say. Researchers, engineers, lawyers, doctors/med students and all walks of life in between with professional or intellectual knowledge of the subject at hand.
It was great because the comments were vibrant with good discussion, links, and other ancillary information.
As all things that get popular, the quality declines in tandem.
It started out with the whole summer break periods when school kids were out and bored…then the digg exodus. Slowly, but steadily the quality declined as the user base exploded. Large subreddits were increasingly shit so you’d have to stick to the more niche subs.
The API debacle was finally enough for me to strip all my comments and delete my account.
Lemmy is not quite at the level of when Reddit first started. I find that outside of a handful of commenters per notable post, most are not very knowledgeable, insightful, or otherwise providing quality discourse. I will say that it’s not consistently the case, as sometimes (depending on the topic), it does remind me of those old times. There’s still hope lol
You reawoke memories of summers on Reddit, hard to believe that was a thing, because it’s been all year summer for the last decade it feels like.
I still post. There’s niche subs that I still think are quality. I completely understand anyone deciding to leave, though, it’s really a shell of it’s former self. The algorithm that decides what’s on top of your feed kinda ruined everything. I can sort by new, and somehow it’s not sorted chronologically. It doesn’t make any sense.