Yep, I was just addicted to reddit, went through my comments and posts after getting banned and realized it had been years since I really got value of interacting. Any question you want to ask has prob already been asked recently due to the sheer volume of ppl.

There also seems to be something about the echo chamber that has a weird reinforcing effect. It can become really pathological. People talk about the “reddit hivemind”, but it doesn’t really strike you until see people acting crazy.

One incident that really stuck out for me was a post with a woman holding a sign. I forget what the entire sign said, but the phrase had the word “stupider” in it. I went into the comments, and a ton of people were making fun of her for using that word. Why? Because they thought that it was grammatically incorrect. You’re supposed to say “more stupid”, they said. Well, that’s wrong, and I pointed out to them that it was a word according to any dictionary. I had people arguing with me that the dictionaries were incorrect.

Then there are the AI detectives. These people are fucking insane. It doesn’t matter if you have a statement saying that you don’t use AI. They don’t believe you! They can tell. If they were doing this to my artwork, I would be livid.

Why can’t you comment while on a VPN? I’m on a VPN right now and I’m commenting.

Also, I hate to tell you this, but reddit is the way it is because it’s so popular. If we had the amount of people necessary to make niche communities thrive, it would be just like reddit. Well, at least as far as the people posting and so on. There wouldn’t be any of the weird administrative stuff because it’s run much differently. But the fact that the system is just like reddit’s means that it attracts the same kinds of people and encourages the same kind of behavior.

Just like you can only find the specialty stores in the cities, where you’ll also find parking and traffic problems

Reddit has additionally deteriorated because it’s pushing more and more algorithmic content surfacing. The home page there is now closer to a facebook feed than the old default ‘Hot’ sorting. You also get pushed random subs and posts at the bottom of pages. Comments are also buried or surfaced depending on some algorithm not directly tied to upvotes.

Plus a ton of the users are now coming from mobile and are “app first”.

Looks like your shit just works, while it’s not like that in the whole world

Lemmy.world blocks posting from Tor and some VPNs.

How do I get around this then? I still have to disable vpn to comment.

Its Tor that blocks, try changing servers to a non tor instance.

As far as I know my VPN doesn’t use Tor but I’m still blocked. It does keep me from commenting 99% of the time, which I’ve concluded is a good thing, it means I spend less time here, although it sometimes feels bad being a lurker.

Edit: I looked into it and Tor was enabled on that specific VPN profile. Now I can comment while on VPN, which means my only limiter is my own willpower, yikes