Some of you who are complaining Lemmy are seeing though rose-tinted glasses about what reddit was like back in the day. The majority of the site was never good, and it had always had plenty of embarassing/messed up things on there that you had to sift through, but it's a different, sterile kind of bad now.
Here are a couple of reminders of what reddit was actually like, in no particular order.
Ron Paul
Faces of Atheism, "Euphoric"
AdviceAnimals, Rage Comics
Spacedicks
r/jailbait
The entire Boston bomber saga
This is why I would never admit to using reddit in public, and until recent years, I would imagine most people won't.
So if anyone complains about how the current content on Lemmy is driving people away, remember, Lemmy is positively TAME compared to this supposedly "Golden Era" of reddit.
It sounds like you're listing bad things about reddit but what's wrong with advice animals and rage comics? I don't really know any drama around Ron Paul or Faces of Atheism either. The latter certainly sounds like the name of a cult though.
Faces of Atheism was the single most cringe shit that I've ever seen, it was a bunch of fedora-wearing neckbearded atheists posting pictures of themselves overlaid with edgy and pseudo intellectual quotes by themselves. The euphoric one was the best lmfao I'm gonna copy/paste it here from the KYM page
"Just to be clear, I'm not a professional 'quote maker'. I'm just an atheist teenager who greatly values his intelligence and scientific fact over any silly fiction book written 3,500 years ago. This being said, I am open to any and all criticism.
'In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.'"