I've mentioned this before, but I think that behavior stems from having a downvote button. Downvotes give people the ability to dampen any signal that they don't like, anonymously and without engagement, and so it's not enough to get people agreeing with you, you have to avoid people disagreeing with you. The inevitable result is bland, repetitive, easily-consumed content. It makes sense that any given lemmy instance is going to look exactly like reddit if the system of content curation is the same. Aside from excellent moderation, I think that's what makes Hexbear work (of course, Hexbear only got rid of the downvotes in the first place because of the excellent moderation).
It's also what makes Twitter, for all its faults, a much more interesting platform than reddit, because the only thing you can do if you dislike something is either ignore it or amplify it to an audience of people who will also hate it. If twitter let the users attenuate signal for other users, it would be so goddamn boring.
The extent to which redditisms have subsumed the
vocabulary and manners of relating to one another is really bleak
I've mentioned this before, but I think that behavior stems from having a downvote button. Downvotes give people the ability to dampen any signal that they don't like, anonymously and without engagement, and so it's not enough to get people agreeing with you, you have to avoid people disagreeing with you. The inevitable result is bland, repetitive, easily-consumed content. It makes sense that any given lemmy instance is going to look exactly like reddit if the system of content curation is the same. Aside from excellent moderation, I think that's what makes Hexbear work (of course, Hexbear only got rid of the downvotes in the first place because of the excellent moderation).
It's also what makes Twitter, for all its faults, a much more interesting platform than reddit, because the only thing you can do if you dislike something is either ignore it or amplify it to an audience of people who will also hate it. If twitter let the users attenuate signal for other users, it would be so goddamn boring.