I deleted Reddit from my home screen when the mods did the fake strike and I've mostly kept off of it since then, but in the past few weeks I've opened it out of boredom and holy God is it just a truly awful place. My only explanation is that it's a window into the psyche of the American middle class email job worker and they're so fucking brain rotten that it hurts to even look at.
I thought I was misremembering or that 
was just a good meme, but that site really does represent the absolute worst of American liberalism. I don't even have anything specific to say, I just need to scrape out the festering mass that a 15 minute scroll session there created in my brain.
I really do think that made a difference. Don't get me wrong, it was always shitty, but I think the people who stuck around and keep commenting are mostly the ones so addicted to arguing online they downloaded the official reddit app to keep going, while the slightly less brain broken people just said fuck it.
I gave it a chance because lemmy wasn’t quite ready yet. It’s better here now and I’m slowly spending more time here than there.
I've always preferred smaller online communities. I think you're right though, there's a sweet spot.
Even a month ago it was kinda a ghost town. Enough people have finally moved over to make it more interesting. Having just experienced yet another unexpected but adverse interaction with a toxic reddit mod I think I’m pretty much done there.
Yeah I've on Hexbear since the start which has been a bit more active. I jumped on Lemmy around the same time and there wasn't much.
I went back a couple times because no instance has really got a large MMA community at this point and reddit had an active sub on r/mma.
I don't know if it's because I've been away for a while, but it did seem like there was a lot of anger.
Yeah I pretty much only use reddit for sports stuff and I've noticed there being a lot more aggressive weird shit on there lately. People are talking about sports like it's politics. Maybe they always have and I'm just noticing it now though.
It’s all bots, angry people, and toxic mods now. All the quality contributors have long departed.
Absolutely. It's crazy astroturfed.
I got a random permanent ban from the atheism sub for mentioning that some countries in Africa are asking adult men to get circumcised for HIV control. Apparently I’m advocating for mutilation, am sick, and was threatened to never contact them again. It was very strange.
Lol to be fair the one argument I've gotten in on here was about circumcision. People are pretty wild about that online.