Memes

I have a potentially contentious opinion. Normies are what ruined Reddit and the crowd attracted by normie communities are why Reddit is even more toxic than it used to be.

We don't need to attract normies, we just need to attract more people like us.

I don't hate normies by any means, but I don't want to hang out with them all day either.

Also a weirdly large amount of "death to America" and whatnot.

Don't forget firefox

While I don't entirely disagree, I'm a little confused by your description of the front page of lemm.ee, which we're both on. My front page when viewing All here is mostly memes/shitposts/news/technology when set to Active sort, is yours not?

I've admittedly blocked a fair amount and have show NSFW/bot posts disabled, but the communities you mention aren't affected by that.

We need a normie.world

It's called reddit and that's why I left. Fuck the normies. They'll import fascism.

That sounds unnecessarily combative so let me expand my argument.

There's a book called The Authoritarians by a man called Bob Altermyer. Altermyer is now retired but he was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. During his career he did a lot of research into authoritarians, both followers and leaders. In the book he describes for laypeople the experiments and the findings. If you want to do a deep dive into his statistical analysis you can because the whole thing is fully referenced but for people who just want an easy to read description that is also easy to understand then this is the book for you.

After reading the book redditors behaviour became a lot more easy to understand. I was less upset by what was going on but I stopped engaging because I now understood that reddit wasn't a site for me anymore. It was a site for people that enjoyed being normal and doing normal things. And that's ok, why shouldn't they be catered for?

I use reddit and lemmy exclusively on desktop or laptop. So when the app business came up I didn't regard it as my fight, however I thought that if I expected people to stand up for my interests if they are challenged I should show a bit of solidarity with them. So I didn't visit reddit at all for the days it was blacked out. I didn't like how spez reacted. I saw that people were crossing to the fediverse and I took a look for myself. I liked it. I posted. I wasn't attacked for having a non-normie viewpoint. I liked that a lot.

The thing about normies is they don't read scientific studies for fun, they don't like long winded explanations about why the world is the way it is. They think they can see something in the street and extrapolate an entire social policy from it and there are chancers that will tell them, 'You know what? You're right. We don't need experts telling you that you're wrong, what do they know?'

So your Jordan Petersons and your Nigel Farages and Alex whatever his nameis, these people and reddit's normie audience are made for each other. I'll even go as far as to say this extends to the people that think the Democrats or the Labour Party are going to fix their problems, Team Liberal aren't doing themselves any favours but my point is that if your goal is a massive website that caters to the largest part of the reddit audience you're going to end up swimming in cryptofascist and sometimes outright fascist content. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.

humanity is slowly turning it's back on social media

Are you living in a parallel universe or something? Are we talking for the same humanity that is 24/7 on Instagram and on tiktok?

I really wish you're right but I'm afraid that the minorities you may know who just abandoned Facebook are not representing humanity

Reddit's great strength was that it was big enough that niche communities could attract enough users to have interesting conversations and a steady flow of content, and if you are a Reddit refugee looking for those sorts of communities you aren't likely to find them on Lemmy. I've more or less made my peace with that, but if you're not the kind to stand on principle, a falling user count is bad news for the hope that the Fediverse might snowball into the sort of place that can support discussions about your passions and hobbies even if they're not the sort of thing that is popular with a specific set of tech-savvy anti-capitalist leftwing activists (and I say this with love as a fellow tech-savvy leftie... but y'all got one-track minds and it shows in what communities live and die around here).