It's not an age thing, It's the same reason the internet generally got toxic after a time people who aren't passionate about things take over and drown out the high effort contributers

the kids are alright

Meh, lets not.

In my experience, older people have to make conscious effort to maintain critical thinking and reasoning and not start lazily regurgitating settled, memorized opinions they've come rely on as absolutes, intead of allowing those beliefs to be subject to fresh challenges from novel perspectives that may change those opinions. Many do make that effort, and many do not. To paraphrase my favorite fictional character, if you refuse to change your mind, then you will die stupid.

Individuals are individuals of course though. I'm of the opinion that, on an individual basis, beyond the age of around 12, age is an extremely poor metric to estimate someone's intellect, wisdom, and insight. I'm in my mid 30s and have a master's degree in psychology with a 3.9 GPA. I recognize that there are 18 year olds that dwarf me intellectually, and more commonly 80 year olds who've lived lives devoid of reflection, who will die defending their long dead pappy's narrative about how the world works with anger rather than reason, solely because that's what they were told to believe. I have pity for that type, but very little patience.

Maturity really isn't the same as age: plenty of legally adult people (many already so for decades) around who are anything but mature individuals.

That said, as others here I think the absence of the subtle pressures derived from commercialization and profit-seeking make most of the difference.

Also, I've been thinking about the possibiility that both those already in Lemmy before and the Reddit refugees who came in recently, are at the most principled end of the spectrum compared with those still in Reddit (whose principles on the subject of ultra-authoritarian top-down imposition as done in Reddit clearly aren't strong enough to make them try something else), possibly also more confortable with change. This might make the crowd here at the moment a self-selected bunch leaning significantly more towards a certain psychological profile than the average which in turn (or so is my theory) affects the dominant tone of discussions here.

It's so good because a lot of people have been waiting for a viable alternative to Reddit for half a decade or longer. It's non-corporate internet, the way it should be.

That not nice for non native English speaker (writer). I am guessing you are american by the american centrist view in your comment.

If you want, we can all pretend to be kids just like on /r/teenagers.

That place was so creepy.

The deep rock galactic subreddit got overrun by kids and their stupid, shit memes, long live Lemmy!

The internet as a whole was much better when websites and services were not designed to cater to kids.

I remember shortly after the death of digg rage comics being peak humor and suddenly an influx of kids not understanding how to make a rage comic killing that sub.

It reminds me of the day the internet died, when so many new AOL users overwhelmed the forums at the time and killed all the etiquette that had formed up to that point. Internet been stagnant for longer than it should have been. I’m excited to see where things go now.

I loved reddit but there were definitely times where it felt like I was in a high school cafeteria.

I’m so happy to find a new community. Looking around quickly this seem like a much better group of people to interact with than reddit.

I can’t express enough how glad I am this place exists and I can be done with reddit forever