Ask Lemmy

32515 readers

2602 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

6) No US Politics.

Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

127

I am new to Lemmy after trying to use reddit and being scared away, since most of you are former reddit users can you explain why reddit is run the way it is ? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

69 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ok I know the title is weirdly said but I will explain more here. I tried using reddit but all of the subs and topics I wanted to speak on were gated by Karma, so I searched reddit for no karma sub so I just posted on ask reddit,nostupid questions and I made one post on r/advice which I cross posted to relationship advice after which my account glitched. Turned out I had been shadow banned and I have no clue how. My theory is I posted to much and copy and pasting a post tripped the alarm but the post was a bit different on relationship advice and I did it once, I saw reddit from like youtube videos and tiktok and people cross post to subs all the time why is that an issue ?

But to get to the main ponint of this, why is reddit run the way it is ? In the sense why do they ask so much of their users hurting both the user expirience and the site's ability to grow. The Karma system forces you into a position where to get to the content you want you have to interact with and post content you don't care about.So you have a ton of disengaged user's just punching their time card to get to what they actually care about. Imagine if other social media sites did this, imagine if you wanted to listen to sabrina carpenter on spotify but to do that you had to listen to 100 hours of Conway Twitty, what sense does that make ?

Reddit's karma and age gate systems resemble a mobile game and while annoying when it's done there you understand why it's designed to get you to pay to skip it, but reddit doesn't let you pay to skip it at east not directly.

Every other social media site wants to get users the content they want as easy as possible. TikTok is the best example the reason it's popular is because it's the best at getting you what you want with as little work required on your part as possible. The for you page fetches you videos your interested in, if your a creator the format of the app increases your chance of being seen and going viral.

Reddit on the other hand leaves so much of the user experience up to weather or not your post on ask reddt go gets upvotes or if you happen to know if a good sub with a karma limit since subs do not disclose their karma limit

Again for the last time, why ? Even from a selfish business standpoint this seemingly makes no sense so what am I missing

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 20 hours ago

I think your fundamental misunderstanding is how many people just scroll, lurk and at most comment. Let's call those passive users. They are many and therefore worth catering to. Reddit, especially the big subreddits, are engagement generators. Their point is not to answer the questions that you as an individual might have. Their point is to maximize engagement. Providing the kind of content that keeps thousands of passive users engaged in the app has more monetary value than letting you as an individual post your personal question. So it's geared towards letting users with a solid track record of creating engagement post easily, while being careful with users who don't have that track record.

You can see this in supermarkets too. Hundred different types of sweets but if I simply want nuts roasted without oil, I'm out of luck? Why? Because there's orders of magnitude more people who will buy stuff without reading the ingredients. The people who care about not having oil added to their nuts are so relatively few that they're not worth catering to by a mass-appealing supermarket.

At least those are my theories, not that I have any inside knowledge.