Endless communities yet the top ones are run by a tiny percentage of power-mods who have outsized influence (Six power mods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits [1])
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/upda...
Reddit is VASTLY more hostile to the average user than twitter. On twitter, all I have to do to stay in good standing is abide by community guidelines. You might disagree with those guidelines, but they're there and are generally easy to follow.
On reddit? Not only does each user have to pay attention to the reddit guidelines, but each subreddit is its own fiefdom with an absolute monarch (head mod) who can ban you at any time, for any reason, without repercussion and there is no appeals process. I know because I've done it. There were people causing trouble in a sister sub to one I run, and I did not hesitate to permaban them when I saw what was going on. And from all the other subs I run. They cried, complained, bitche and moaned to reddit admins, and nothing happened. Mods don't owe users platforms.
Because on reddit, you are free to start your own subreddit. You are not free to just post whatever you want, and there have been many subs that have been banned for not abiding by the rules.
1. My wife and I have been joking for a couple of years about the large number of old acquaintances & family members that follow us that haven’t posted in years. They still watch every story we post though!
2. IG just re-introduced the ability to sort your feed chronologically. When I first looked at my chronological feed, it was immediately clear that they took it away because there wasn’t enough new content anymore. I follow between 250-300 accounts and there is consistently less than 20 accounts posting a day (and those are mostly meme or ‘influencer’ accounts).
It is possible that I’m just following boring people though.
Do... you not have friends or what? I'm even too old (35) to be in the IG niche generation but my IG is active and lively... no meme accounts, no brands followed whatsoever.
I dunno, some people I’m friends with do post regularly, but a lot of them have become mostly lurkers over time.
This is just to say that I don’t think IG is different than Twitter in that way, a smaller percentage of people post the majority of content now.
It’s all garbage or gold depending on how you self curate, this is true of all platforms going back to BBS.
The irony.
Reddit users lament quite often that there are subreddits that will ban you for saying things against the viewpoints of those subs (r/(white|black)peopletwitter, r/the_donald, r/latestagecapitalism, etc). Sure, one can just make their own sub, but Twitter users can follow different people too.
Instagram users (the Gen Z ones) often have zero posts and use it mainly for its group or individual chat features, as everyone in their friend group has an IG. It's often preferred to not share photos on there as it's more private for them than having anyone who follows them to see their photos.
Twitter is not special in its toxicity, all social media is the same.
- Reddit has endless communities, and long text forum posts and comments. Most people lurk in the top subs, but almost everyone has a niche subreddit they have actively posted in, or has an alt just for that purpose
- I find it hard pressed to find someone who purposefully creates an Instagram account and does not, at the very minimum, share photos with friends and family. I use the app daily, and even the boomers that are finally coming onto the platform regularly post photos.
Most people are followers in the broad sense, but on a community level, especially with their friends, families, and communities, are sharers. That's the difference between twitter versus facebook, instagram, and reddit. You are making the fallacy of applying the influencer syndrome across the entire platform. The majority of users are not remaining on the platform because of influencers. These other platforms are primarily about individuals communities and friends. They start by joining the platform because of a friend, a family member, or to join a niche community of likeminded folk, and then they are gradually exposed to the platform-specific SEO junk food. Twitter on the other hand, is demonstrably, provably, about certain power users. It's about following the "right" people to get the most out of it. There is no community in the organic sense of the term on twitter, except by pure happenstance ("tech twitter", "black twitter", and so on, but even then it's at best, a loose association).
So before you tell someone to get off their soap box, maybe make sure you have a clearer understanding.