I still read some niche subs from time to time, but I don't post or vote on anything any more. It could just be confirmation bias, but the comments do seem to be more full of assholes than before the API change.
Not that it's not confirmation bias but I can confirm what you're seeing.
They lost a lot of active, enthusiastic, altruistic friendly people. I don't think they've drawn in worse people, but there are less nice voices to balance out the vitriol. Under the circumstances there's also less downvoting toxicity.
I'm pretty sure it's a real thing but how much it's felt probably varies community by community.
I also wonder if the combination of losing modding tools and mods being treated like garbage by reddit made them less enthusiastic about doing their (unpaid) job, too.
I still check in to certain niche subreddits that don't exist on lemmy. Those feel pretty close to how they used to. The other day I took a look at /r/all and.... ooof. It's very apparent quality has completely nosedived. Lemmy /c/all is a much better representation of pre-blackout reddit /r/all right now.
All the adds look like posts and all the posts are actually just adds now.
Has anybody seen that shitty boomer comic that's been boosted to the top ad space on every YouTube video for the last two weeks.
Those have been the top post on comics for the last two days.
It is primarily bots advertising to each other at this point and liberals circlejerking each other that they're the good guys for "critically" supporting nazis.
Sometimes I'll check in to see if anyone's asking me a question and it always just ends up being some random groyped up nazi posting vitriol on a comment that's like, 3 years old. Now I don't even get that because everyone's either lost interest or jumped ship.