I was their in reddit beginning. There were no initial shenanigans. It was a good place and existed at just the right time, when people wanted to leave Digg because it was turning into a dumpster fire, similar to what reddit has done.
When reddit started turning to shit there just wasn’t anything for the masses to migrate to that was available other than here. Problem is that here isn’t as simple to get into. In lemmy, the learning curve is slightly higher than “bare minimum”.
Loops really seems like it sucks. You can’t see how long any video is, there’s no way to thumb down really bad videos, and about 80% of all the videos seem like “really bad videos”. I never even used tik tok, but im sure it wasn’t content similar or it never would have gotten popular.