This is going to be a short and sweet little history of Reddit. Reddit was founded in 2005.
Take a look at what Reddit looked like in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20061206235353/http://reddit.com/
Note that it didn’t have subreddits back then because the user base was too small.
Look at Reddit in 2008 (December 31): https://web.archive.org/web/20081231080128/http://www.reddit.com/reddits/
Politics had just 72,314 subscribers. Technology had 85,678 subscribers, and the “Nicher” Food subreddit had only 4,438 subscribers.
Lemmy/Kbin follows the same path. Initially, generalist communities like Politics and Technology will have the most momentum and gain subscribers, just like Reddit did back then. As the user base grows, “niche” communities will be able to sustain themselves.
Let’s not think about the Reddit of today, let’s think about Reddit of old. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
So far on Lemmy, whenever I see someone comment this, it’s because they’re mad Reddit got “toxic towards my free speech to stupid ass MAGA nonsense”. Is that what you mean by Reddit being “toxified”?
No, but your comment immediately assuming out of nowhere that everyone is a MAGAta*d is. Just holy cow, go outside and breathe man.
I think there’s a lot of people who desire free speech outside of MAGA people.
But I even believe they should have free speech too. Free speech is the most important element of our society imo.
The problem is some people only believe in free speech for their ideas. They want to censor the other side.
I believe in free speech but disruptions should be prevented.
Reddit took a weird approach to Covid which caused a lot of misinformation to proliferate without any discussion.
People were banned if they questioned the efficacy of masks. Leading experts in the field were saying they were not effective. Yet, Reddit was trying to determine what the “truth” was.
I believe it should be discussed. Now we it resorts to just name calling or cliche such as follow the science. It needs to be put down.
Passing ideas and debate are good for society.
The government doesn’t like people questioning the narrative and I think a lot of these moves by social media platforms are an attempted method to train people to behave that way.
I don’t mind the blocking of the crazy crap like it’s muzzles. That was stupid or at least keep it in the conspiracy style forums.
The debate around if a cloth mask more or does an N95 mask work is a good discussion.
Instead of talking about the topics. It was just banning anyone who disagreed even when studies were cited.
I think educating people to identify and ignore the insane opinions should be the end goal