Don’t be a vote connoisseur here please. Redefine how you think about voting and participating.

Do you miss your communities from elsewhere. Well guess what, you are that core community now. If you want it back, the only thing holding you back is you. Don’t wait on someone else to start posting. You don’t need to worry about the perfect polished quality of your content or if it has been done before elsewhere. The current bar is, umm, poorly defined. No one is judging you. Call it practice. EVERY time you see something interesting, get in the habit of posting it please. Maybe go out of your way to grab a reference or two and post them.

Along these lines, think of how unsure and uncomfortable this may seem to most of us former lurker connoisseurs. You can play hard and thick skinned all you want, but you know exactly what post or comment you posted elsewhere that got the most votes or interaction. Why? Because it matters to you. So upvote everything you can. It matters to someone else too. Don’t upvote just for the value or interest you have in the content. Do it just to say “hey, thanks for making the effort to participate and make this place a few lines longer.” Please rethink how you handle voting, at least for now, think of a down vote as FU for participating, no votes as I wish you weren’t here. We are all likely accustomed to a lot more interaction and validation in our own little niches. This is really an underpinning value of social media, we are here to engage with people, so tell people who are new and unsure about a new and different place, “hey, thanks for participating.” You may not know or really appreciate their interests, but you can help us grow a core that can evolve into your favorite niches as the community grows. You are the core community. We can all make it grow if we make it a place people want to be.

  • RedMarsRepublic@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I find it hard to see how this site can ever challenge the huge user base of Reddit and how they have a relatively active community for basically every topic in existence. But maybe things will snowball.

    • God@sh.itjust.works
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      2 years ago

      It won’t. And it doesn’t need to. It just needs to grow and become self sufficient. This will never kill reddit. Reddit will not be “killed”. The purpose is not to kill but to become a place where people come to as an competitive alternative or at the very least a place where they feel good and where they feel they’re getting something out of their participation.

    • Redex@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      You never know, Reddit was once small and digg was the shit, then digg killed itself. Honestly, I kinda doubt it’s gonna happen here as well, social media has been consolidating for years now and it’s extremely hard to break into the space, but I’ll hold onto hope, this looks like a very cool conecpt.

      • RedMarsRepublic@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Yep. I guess we’ll see. I think with the rise of the bots the internet is going to become more and more unusable in general. But hey, maybe we should just all touch grass more anyway.

      • Ataraxia@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        It doesn’t matter. Even if somehow this system fails as well there will always be something else. Go back to yahoo forums lol!

    • qprimed@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      from a tech standpoint… when the core development community departs a project, that project dies - its almost always a given. reddit is such a giant that it may never die and I dont expect its core to be completely gutted. but quality content attracts more of the same and I feel that we are beginning to get quality core people here. the reddit husk can continue to shamble on, I don’t care.

    • Mane25@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      In my mind, it only needs to be a fraction of the size of Reddit to be potentially successful. I’ve been using online forums since the 90s, back in the day there were some forums with great long-lasting communities that had only a couple of dozen regular members. Sometimes a smaller forum is better than a larger one. Granted it’s different since forums generally specialised in one topic, but don’t forget the days where you didn’t need to be a huge all-encompassing platform to be successful, especially when you’re not trying to make money from it.

      • theflyingvomit@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Sometimes I miss the 90’s and early 2000’s forums. Smaller and positive communities with good moderation. Hope this inherites that spirit.

        • Mane25@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          Oh definitely. Also if you didn’t like the moderation or site policies you could just make your own forum. I’m sure it’s a bit of a rose-tinted view but those were the good-old days for me.

        • BeyonDespair@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          I’m not old enough to remember forums, but recently I was lurking around archives of some old forum and, the community around it seemed so special that I hope we can achieve something similar. Obviously, back in the day internet wasn’t so massive like it is now, so perhaps that feeling of closeness would be difficult to achieve (?)

      • Peereboominc@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Totally agree. It’s called social loafing. From Wikipedia: “In social psychology, social loafing is the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when working alone. It is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals.”

        In large communities like Reddit, users are less likely to participate than in a small community

      • Ataraxia@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        It was better that way. I in no way feel engaged in reddit comment sections. I don’t recognize anyone and don’t bother to follow or chat with anyone. I pretty much comment and move on if it’s something I care enough about. I don’t want to get obsessively invested like I used to back in high school street fighter online forums (some embarrassing discussions) but I’d like to actually be part of a community that sees each other as people and not arguments.

    • garretble@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      I agree, actually. The people upset about the 3rd party apps unfortunately don’t represent the majority of the users of Reddit. I have several friends on a friends discord I run that never used a 3rd party app at all. They just used the base reddit client like insane people; but they did/do it. For them nothing is changing, and that’s going to be most of the people.

      Unless…all the blackouts some how affect enough of them. If their favorite subreddits die out, then maybe they’ll notice. But overall, I feel like it’ll either take a while for Reddit to die out. Or it’ll just continue chugging on, except a lot of the people putting in the work to moderate and post content will maybe have moved on (which may end up eroding the platform there, too).

      But we’ll see for sure.

      • Petri@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        Using the Reddit app… like from Reddit? those animals.

        RiF for life. :-)

      • AgentGoldfish@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        But how many of them are very active?

        It’s a common rule that the vast majority of content is created by only a few members. It doesn’t matter if 90% of reddit’s userbase are happy enough and won’t leave if the 10% (or even a sizeable chunk of that 10%) of redditors who are most active and create most of the content on the site leave.