I saw this comment on c/whitepeopletwitter, and it made me wonder if Reddit was like Lemmy in its early days as well? A lot of the communities here are more or less just Reddit but with (sometimes) different rules and mod teams. Most of the memes here are just yoinked off of Reddit (which to be fair, really is just how the internet works)

But yeah, in Reddit’s early days, were the communities there basically just clones of whatever form of communities Digg/other popular sites had at the time? Was most of the content just reposts of stuff from other sites?

  • db0
    69•8 months ago

    The original reddit was closer to hackernews than the generic site it is now. Not only that but spez has admitted that the original traffic was artificial, by which I mean, the owners themselves were creating fake engagement through various means, such as scraping and cross-posting content from sites like digg via sockpuppets to appear that the site had way more traffic than it had.

    • OtterEnglish
      45•8 months ago

      edit: I went through with it: !sockpuppetsociety@lemmy.ca , Message or reply and I’ll make you a mod

      Time to make a new original community on Lemmy, just for sock puppets.

      Purpose: Art of sock puppets reenacting real life events. The art can be doodles on napkins, AI art, or real physical sock puppets.

      I’d like to start off the community with this image

        • OtterEnglish
          3•8 months ago

          Perfect, I’ll link it in the sidebar

        • OtterEnglish
          2•8 months ago

          It felt wacky enough that it was unlikely to be another clone 😄