I’ve lurked on reddit for the past decade or so and just wanted to get an idea of how others like me have gotten to the point where they feel more comfortable joining the conversation. Thanks, all.
Loneliness.
Feeling the exact same way here, great conversations but I need to go back to lurking, I need to do more listening and reading than talking
on reddit if you search by new, you may be like the only commenter ever on a post, and if you go to posts with whole ass discussions, your post may not be visible unless you say something that pisses half the people off.
on lemmy more often than not people search by new, so posts and comments don’t just die instantly. conversing generally feels better when you aren’t late and others also converse
On Reddit, the conversation was usually incredibly angry and rude.
Here, some people fall back into that habit, but it’s usually calmer and more thoughtful.
So that’s what I try to do, try to be encouraging and uplifting when I can.
While i agree there is the occasional angry person on lemmy. Reddit was quite literally affecting my mental health with its 24/7cycle of angry people, boot livking mods and just generally awful people.
On lemmy I find 9/10 interactions to be great
No one was posting in communities I cared about and many posts anywhere had 0 or 1 comments, so I started posting at least 1 thing every day and looking for threads with no comments where I could start the conversation. I couldn’t wait forever for someone else to do it.
Now I have a ton of posts and comments, and I feel I have some good Lemmy pals and people tell me all the time they look forward to my posts, and it’s just become something natural for me to do now.
You are as superb as your owls!
Thank you!
I was a lurker on reddit for years. Then the Niveau of the conversations sunk so much that I had the feeling I could participate too.
After that I just lost the fear of what the responses could be to what I say.
Excellent question! I too lurked on the R-site for a decade and hardly ever contributed - maybe 100 comments in total. Twitter: same story, more or less. Zuckerbook: slightly more in its heyday, but still not much. And I was on the internet in the 90s so I’ve used all kinds of forums and even IRC. But for better or for worse I’ve probably posted more here in the last 18 months than on all other social media combined in the last 25 years.
Some theories:
- Less competition! Having less contributors on a forum is worse for or passive consumers (i.e. lurkers) but it’s better for the active participants. On a really busy forum, if you don’t post your topic at exactly the right time of day, or your comment within a few minutes of the topic dropping, then effectively it will be invisible. Completely demotivating. Here the pace is much more human.
- No ads! This one is huge. I hate hate hate having to suffer ads. Here we’re free of them.
- I like the interface! Seems a silly reason but it’s true. The guys who designed this thing did a surprisingly good job. The UX and design are both really good.
Lemmy feels more like a community garden while reddit felt more like a really packed lunchroom.
Here it feels like we have to cultivate seeds and grow our food from scratch since nothing is premade, there it felt like there was infinite food available and growing a garden was kinda pointless
I guess maybe I came out of lurking to practice my metaphors or something, apparently that skill could use some work
Lemmy feels more like a community garden while reddit felt more like a really packed lunchroom.
That’s it 100% for me. Reddit was just so busy that posting or commenting felt kinda pointless.
Anything I’d feel like saying had already been said a dozen times by the time I popped into the comments, so why bother except to reap some upvotes?
Since engagement is much lower I feel the replies are getting seen and usually leads to a conversation rather than maybe a like or two of if I am lucky but no responses.
True
I lurked pretty much everywhere except the subreddit of an app that I know a lot about to help users with support questions.
On Reddit, you don’t really have a conversation most of the time. It’s always a competition about who can out-funny the other comments with snarky one-liners and other off-topic comments that are not necessarily unfunny, but don’t add much to the thread OP started.
Next to that, you always had to be very precise with your words and take everything you can into account, or otherwise someone takes a small thing from your comment and uses that to declare you a troll, bot, or just tries to dunk on you because what you said doesn’t cover all the scenarios you could think of or be arsed to write down.
I’ve thought about this before, and I’ve always chalked it up to a lack of compatibility with other online users and perhaps just Reddit culture. The way I view it internally is this:
A lot of people see comments as the end of a conversation. To me, it’s the start of a conversation.
On Lemmy it still happens, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a higher chance of actually having a conversation, and respectfully pointing out nuance and trying to get actual humans to talk about the subject at hand.
We’re so few I quickly realized we all better be post from time to time for the communities I was interested in to feel more alive ;)
I got multiple awards on reddit for a stupid reaction to someone else’s comment. I was awarded several platinum things, multiple gold, had access to an exclusive lounge, all for a slightly drunk response to someone else’s comment, on someone’s post.
Got a little braver after that.
