Yes the easiness of registering to reddit have also contributed to it's dumbing down. People who just follows the trend basically overwhelmed the culture of that site. And i hope the perceived difficulty in using Lemmy acts as an effective barrier to those kind of demographic.

It's the one the devs run and so is often treated as such, but they discourage it in order to encourage decentralization and because they don't want too much moderation overhead.

To expand on morrowind's answer, here's the long response about not being a flagship: https://lemmy.ml/post/70280

You should invite them to create a community here, or we can give them [email protected] .

I think this is a general problem of mass media. A capitalist firm operates under the imperative of unlimited growth. It is not enough to succeed at something, it must expand. We can see this effect take place everywhere from Hollywood movies to AAA video games to news and social media. In order to optimize the marketability of a piece of media, it must be as inoffensive as possible, until you end up with the fully lobotomized outputs of the major studios which never say anything of consequence about history, politics, philosophy, or current events, lest they offend 1-2% of Nazis or landlords on the fringes. You end up with pure slop.

The same goes for social media sites. Platforms like Reddit and Twitter would rather expand then send the Nazis to the virtual gulag. They will only take action if, by their calculation, inaction will impact their ability to expand. Likewise, they dull the edges on all political and philisophical discussion, lest the Marxists make the Liberals too uncomfortable. You end up with hermetic political discussion boards like r/Politics where the topics are limited to the latest WaPo/NYT perspectives on parliamentary masturbation - where labor strikes and political rallies are categorically deemed non-political unless someone like Bret Stevens blesses them with a rambling op-ed.