The early years of Facebook as a teenager were great for me! No advertisements, just friends and friends of friends posting updates about their thoughts, activities, and photos. Somewhere in my college years (2011-15) it definitely got worse but not to a degree I’d call ‘bad’. Not disagreeing or anything, just sharing!

Content > design

I just gotta say, I felt that switch too around that time. 2016-2019ish. Something about how Instagram moved away from encouraging posts of your life to family//friends for pushing an influencer/celebrity sphere. People stopped sharing their lives, ordinary content wasn’t ranked as high. And then the other social platforms copied it

Not official, labeled ones but eventually if it gets too popular, marketing teams will just create fake users and post ads as fake posts. Same as Reddit and any other social media platform has problems with

From what I’ve experienced, it feels toxic in a bizarre liberal, Linux-nerd white knight kindof way. Which I think almost wraps back around to not being toxic at all and just feeling friendly in a passive aggressive way? Like going to a computer convention held on a hot, sunny beach. Sure, every here mostly agrees and likes the same geeky stuff but we can easily be too cranky about it, one way or another. Lemmy seems way more likely to engage in real conversation in comments and not just one-line jokes than Reddit. People seem more passionate about their hobbies or viewpoints. More likely to help if asked directly and detailed in response. It’s a cool place!

Yes