indeed, you make a good point. most of these people didn't experience reddit when reddit had "no userbase" compared to other social media.

but reddit was unique, and that is what drew people there. sadly, lemmy does not have that much "uniqueness" to show (being a reddit clone), besides being federated and fully open source.

My guess is they're the late reddit accounts when reddit is already big and shit. They weren't around when reddit was just "small digg". Tbf I wasn't there as well.

I was on reddit back when it was just small digg, you are 100% correct.

These are a bunch of modern social media brainrotted people, for lack of a better term, who just need to get all the upvotes, need to get as much digitally mediated social validation as possible.

These people are the hivemind.

They want everything to be easy and convenient and accomdodate them, they'll yap for hours about how something should work and never do a damn actual thing to achieve it beyond 'spreading awareness'.

The fact that it took you a few attempts to figure out how to 'do' lemmy acts as a filter.

I'm not awake enough to be able to try and argue whether or not its... net better overall to have an easy, more difficult to censor and manipulate reddit alternative... or if allowing it to be easy to access just fundamentally does comprimise the system by way of the hivemind then eventually, inevitably taking over and becoming increasingly sycophantic and culty and sociopathic.

... but I can tell you that from a certain point of view, having to actually engage your brain a bit to join what is basically a network of web forums, well you can see see that as a feature, not a bug.